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Asked about this bold new potato-naming policy, a puzzled French diplomat said: "French fries did not originate in France, they came from Belgium."1 Jake has a rant about American media gone mad, and about the excessive behaviour that the current wave of jingoism seems to have inspired. Less amusing than the fries, is the story about the Florida Congresswoman who has suggested that the US government help families to bring back from France the bodies of American service men buried there after WWII.

I am enormously pessimistic of the chance of decent on-the-spot reporting, as the war occurs. GuluFuture.com This is a quote form Kate Adie, veteran war reporter who covered the first Gulf War. She goes on to claim that the Pentagon will, as policy, target any video uplink signals which they detect, and which have not been cleared. I remember some of the highly sanitized, video-game type reporting which came out of the last last Gulf War; Kate suggests that it will be even more controlled by the authorities this time around.

Agressive, but fun, marketing from Lindows.com This was previously published at http://blog.sockdrawer.org and was retrieved from the Internet Archive.

Distrust of Google is growing. A-list blogger Dave Winer says "I feel my trust was betrayed by Google,". He plans to favour other search engines when exploring the Web. GavinsBlog.com Interesting article about the darker side of Google. As a heavy, and long-time Google user, this has given me pause for thought. With thanks to Matt for highlighting this on Curiouser and Curiouser This was previously published at http://blog.

Sun's Suttor criticized the use of Internet-sniffing technology to steer users toward a specific browser that may not be of their choosing. "Imagine you went to Starbucks and you told them your name and they said, 'We don't like your last name and you get a [poor] cup of coffee.' There would be a revolt. Why [then] do we tolerate servers sniffing the user agent?" said Suttor. "In the future, the Web is going to escape the browser, and I think that's going to be a very good thing," Suttor said.

Interesting article by Steve Bowbrick in The Guardian about the state of Cable TV in the UK. In theory, cable television should be building broadband Britain. In practice, it has many problems to solve before it can1 This was previously published at http://blog.sockdrawer.org and was retrieved from the Internet Archive. http://web.archive.org/web/20030409000743/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,908007,00.html ↩︎

A work of staggering ambition, grandeur and terrible beauty. In a word: majestic. BBC Was I watching the same movie? With the exception of Daniel Day Lewis's pantomime (albeit powerfully portrayed) character, this film has little that is grand or beautiful. Leonardo DiCaprio's character seems bored by his situation for much of the film. Cameron Diaz at least looks like she cares, as she makes the best of a slight character.

"We've gone through three stages," de Souza said. "First, there was ignorance about IM use, then denial, then anger because the IT department didn't deploy it," he said. "Now we've got to move to acceptance and support." Infoworld This exactly describes the enterprise which employs me (a large British university). The generally held view of IM is that it is an unnecessary security risk....no attempt as of yet to evaluate IM's potential as a useful corporate tool.

Invisibles This was previously published at http://blog.sockdrawer.org and was retrieved from the Internet Archive.

"The best blogs are written with conversation in mind" writes Steve Bowbrick in Secret of their success This was previously published at http://blog.sockdrawer.org and was retrieved from the Internet Archive.

Just got back from the Sun 'Tech Day' in London. I thought the line up of sponsors was interesting - aside from Sun, the sponsors were: Oracle, Nokia, Motorola, Macromedia and Novell. Oracle and Novell's presence is no surprise - they bought into Java wholesale some time ago and Macromedia have made a strong foray into J2EE, describe their 'MX' product-line as 'accelerating Java development'. The interesting thing to me was that out of five sponsors, two were 'phone' manufacturers, demonstrating new wireless devices and the tools and specifications needed to write applications for them.