Javascript with first-class continuations and tail-call elimination. Nice work. [found via ovidiu predescu's old radio blog]

NewsMonster beta1 has been released. I'm really excited by the new features Kevin's adding to NewsMonster and at how far Kevin's taking lame ol' News Aggregators (Honestly, the rest are all quite boring). I've been using NM full time for a week or so now and am quite impressed.

For what it's worth: I completely agree with Nick Denton's advice to Google to treat all blog publishers equally and I think it'd be a magnificent blunder to do otherwise whether intentionally or not. Everybody's cat will be in Google!

Speaking about Scheme and security in same sentence got me off on a tangent where I read most of W7's source via my web browser. I read a lot of source via my browser, I've noticed. ViewCVS makes that more convenient since you can make use of enscript scripts to colorize syntax.

I wish I could do that from inside of Mozilla in a similar way you can apply style sheets to XHTML and XML documents.

From Anil Dash:

It'll be interesting to note what effect it has on Blogger's reliability and scalability.

I believe the scalibility of Blogger's upcoming release will be quite good. The rest of the gang and I have taken a lot of pains over the past year and a half to make sure that we can fit hundreds of millions of users into Blogger. The most obvious evidence of that is that we've switched to an 18 digit postID scheme. Globo's Blogger installation supports our beliefs that the new version is pretty darn solid and will be able to scale to our proposed needs. Our biggest enemy has been a lack of resources; the nemesis of all small underfunded companies. I don't think that's too much of a problem anymore.

Back when Blogger was hacked, Steve sent me an indignant refutation of my assertion that the problem was with the development of weblog tools. His defense, which is entirely valid, is that the vulnerabilities tend to be in the platform software itself, and that it was to blame for most of the problems. It seemed kind of like he was saying "blame Rudy, not me!" while being too polite to actually say that out loud.

I'm really sad Anil drew that out of my post. Blame wasn't a part of my equation at all and certainly not blame of system administrators or system tools authors. My bone to pick, and I recognize that I did a poor job of defining my target, was that security engineering is still a back-room trade and still treated as a specialization instead of being a widely understood and studied commodity. Honestly, if you can teach a college Freshman to understand the lambda calculus (or to fart around with Visual Basic, depending on the credibility of your college), you should be able to teach him some basic security concepts at the same time. That we haven't is part of why Visa and Mastercard just had 2.2 Million credit cards stolen from them and a large part of why we'll continue to see security issues crop up in every piece of software ever written until these topics do become commodity knowledge. Here are some nice resources to start with.

Dan Gillmor broke the story on Google buying Blogger. That guy is the fastest gun in the west. He knew before I did!

So yeah; stevej @ google.com.

Duane Peters has his own line of clothing now? Well, what do you know.. I hear the US Bombs are coming out with two new albums this year; 'Bomb Everything' and 'Covert Action'. Sounds great!