Nachi, the 'benevolent' worm has so far been responsible for shutting down a railroad and a hospital among other institutions. Please tell me no one is running a nuclear power plant on Windows… What? They are? [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]

yes, well, a few nuclear plants, an aircraft carrier or two; in a risk society occasional calamitous disasters are often traded amongst rich and poor, for various other values and uses. Windows is easy and common, who cares if we have a meltdown…. or don't.

August 22, 2003.

Raymond Chen has been running a series of interesting articles about the history of Windows and its API. Ever wonder why the time zone map no longer highlights the zone you're in? Or what the BEAR35, BUNNY73, and PIGLET12 functions are named after? Or why you turn off your computer by clicking “start”? I've bookmarked his site.

In particular, “The secret life of GetWindowText” should be required reading for anyone trying to understand API lockin. Describing one aspect of this simple and fundamental part of the Windows API takes a couple of pages. And then notice the kicker:

The documentation simplifies this as “GetWindowText() cannot retrieve text from a window from another application.”

As Raymond says, “the documentation tries to explain its complexity with small words, which is great if you don't understand long words, but it also means that you're not getting the full story.” (Actually, Raymond, the documentation does tell the whole story, look closer.)

[Joel on Software]

Mr. Chen's articles are well written and informative. I'm not sure why people would actually want to use windows, but if you are going to do that, then you should at least ally your thoughts with bright people like this.

Random Proposals for Communications Courses. Theory.org.uk has an interesting course description generator. Keep clicking “Next” for more. This might come in handy now that it's syllabus time! [CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism -]

this is funny, but somehow seemingly almost and surely on occasion true, take any set of things jam them together and voila.

On 13.-15. Octobre 2004 the project C2 Between Online-Religion and
Religion-Online: constellations of the transfer of rituals in the medium
internet of the collaborative research centre Dynamics of Rituals at the
University of Heidelberg (http://www.ritualdynamik.uni-hd.de/) arranges the
international research meeting Online-Religions and Rituals-Online?

The research meeting will deal with the topic of religion on the internet
with special regards on the ritual discourse on the internet from the
electronic publication of traditional ritual scripts to presentations of
innovative design of rituals. Several aspects of the dynamic change of
rituals by the use of the internet will be discussed.

The research meeting is dedicated to the exchange and discussion of
methodological questions of the analysis of religious websites. Hence,
methodological contributions as well as reports from current research,
which deal with the topic of religion on the internet, are highly appreciated.

The conference will take place at the university of Heidelberg (Germany).
The conference language is English. We do not plan to take a conference fee.

Propositions for contributions are requested to be send to Oliver Krueger
(oliver.krueger@urz.uni-heidelberg.de) till 12. Octobre 2003.

In this paper, i will argue why what many people argue are power law models of social networks on the internet are usually not really that at all. By critiquing the assumptions built into the data gathering and measurement, combined with the theoretical modeled used, it is easy to see that through considering time in different ways and by fragmenting the data set, that there are much more complex and interesting phenomena involved in these power law situations that is being masked and hidden by the generalization. In the end, separating out the individual phenomena that seem to map to power law situations usually illustrate the the phenomena as a whole is not related to the power law, and that by using the power law to describe the phenomena, we end up losing much of the unique understandings that could make or break the application of technologies in this arena for a variety of purposes.