Updated collection of summary and best-of posts to chi-web Lots of great interaction design and usability information hidden in there.

Information Week: “Confusion over the appropriate use of the software needed to power Web applications has led many companies to bypass low-end application servers that meet most requirements and cost 10 times less than the high-end products, Gartner says.”

Paul Graham’s article, A Plan for Spam is a great read for anyone interested in ridding their inbox of unwanted messages. It also sparked a flurry of tools using Bayesian Filtering statistically filter spam. I set up Bogofilter and after only about 10 hours, it’s been catching almost everything. What it misses, Spamassassin catches and then updates the “bogosity” of the message so it gets caught next time.

Thomas Kinkade sucks! Or at least that was the basic idea behind Mary’s subtle review of his work. It seems that she and a number of her friends feel the same way. I of course called her a snob and immediately returned to our conversation about laundry detergent. She then asked why it was that certain types of people—a lot of them apparently—actually liked Kinkade’s work. I suggested that it was The McDonald’s Factor and that large groups of people are naturally drawn toward those things which are bland and generally unoffensive.

I just noticed that I didn’t have a link over there on the right to Bryan’s beautiful (but languishing) photoblog. My mistake, and it’s been fixed.

Finally, the “Do Not Call” law is, well, law. Looks like I’ll be able to start answering my phone again soon. [read the article]1

Sometimes change is gradual – slowly taking place right under our noses. Other times it’s sudden and jarring – waking us up to things which we couldn’t have imagined. And sometimes, it’s both.

This could be useful. A PHP class for communicating with a jabber server. I’ve quickly written a short script that sends me a Jabber message when some event happens on my web site. Better than email notifications in some cases.

In a page out of Jurassic Park, “living” cells from a wolly mammoth, extinct for a very long time, were discovered and are being considered in cloning experiments. discovery.com

Looks like Mary’s Hey! What’s for dinner has some competition from the idiots (like me). It’s called cooking for losers.

I couldn’t decide if the New2Flash weblog should be implemented seperately from my main weblog, or as an entirely different blog. I wanted to play with a few of the blosxom plugins, so I finally decided to implement it separately. Then I promptly changed my mind, sort of. Today it hit me that one of the best thing about blosxom and phposxom is a compatible and interchangable data format, duh. What I

Shirky: Customer-owned Networks and ZapMail Clay Shirky writes about the idea of customer-owned networks. He uses fax machines as an example. “If the economics of internet connectivity lets the user rather than the network operator capture the residual value of the network, the economics likewise suggest that the user should be the builder and owner of the network infrastructure. The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won’t be the last.