Let’s start number 13 with two tales of the undead from Patrick Walz: Ersatz-11 PDP-11 emulator for Windows and Linux, and the Computer History Simulation Project. Now where did I put my cross and stake?

Toni Bowers wishes e-mail a happy 35th birthday. I presume Toni’s referring to Ray Tomlinson‘s invention of SNDMSG and READMAIL in 1971. Wikipedia traces the origins of e-mail to MIT in 1961, and SMTP didn’t come along until the 1980′s.

I see that Randy is now using his new MetaWeblogAPI support in R|Mail to post his link blog entries. Hey, he linked to yours truly ! Thanks, Randy.

Randy’s been working away on R|Mail features lately. Another new service, called RPost, just entered pre-alpha. This one lets you post to any blog that supports the MetaWebLogAPI. Suggestion, Randy: option to post unpublished, so you can add tags, select category, etc. before publishing.

Kerry Mann uses my tag cloud widget on MakeMoneyIdeasBlog.com. Thanks, Kerry!

Dominik uses my OPML blogroll widget, and replaced the RSS icon with one that fits the theme nicely. Danke, Dominik!

Despite the shift of image that Microsoft has managed with blogging, apparently they believe that Corporate still wants to hear corporate-speak. Following is an executive email from Steve Ballmer that I received today. These missives are supposed to communicate high-level concepts and directions — and short on details it is indeed. But does it really take 1881 words to say, “Hey, we’ve released Windows Vista along with 2007 versions of Office, Exchange Server, and SharePoint. Stick with us, we know what we’re doing and we’ll keep you moving forward”? Or did I miss something else among all the buzzwords? Calling Dave Greten!

During the last decade, technology has been the catalyst for incredible change. Ten years ago, the PC was just beginning to achieve broad acceptance. Today, the PC, the Internet, and mobile phones and mobile devices have all reached critical mass, creating fantastic opportunities for hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of thousands of companies around the globe.

In many ways, it was the launch of Windows 95 and Office 95 eleven years ago that signaled the start of this transformation. Together, these two products helped revolutionize the way people create and use information, opening the door to new forms of communication and collaboration that transcend the old limits of time and distance. The free flow of information, goods, and services that resulted has given rise to an era of unprecedented productivity and innovation that has had a profound impact on the global economy. As The Economist magazine recently noted, “the first decade of the 21st century could see the fastest growth in average world income in the whole of history.”

But while we like to think that the digital revolution has already happened, we’ve barely scratched the surface. We still rely too much on paper documents to share ideas and paper forms to conduct business. That’s about to change. During the next decade, the world’s information will be digitized. So will the world’s commerce, communications, and entertainment.

New versions of Windows and Office will play a central role in this ongoing transformation. Today, for the first time in 11 years, we are releasing our flagship products simultaneously. With the PC an everyday tool at work and at home for nearly a billion people around the globe, the joint launch of Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 will open the door to an era of even greater productivity and innovation. Because you are a subscriber to executive emails from Microsoft, I wanted to share my thoughts with you about why this wave of groundbreaking products will have a bigger impact than anything we’ve ever built before.

Transforming IT from an Expense into a Strategic Asset

Windows 95 and Office 95 were big, bold bets for Microsoft. The fruit of 20 years of innovation at Microsoft, they embodied our belief in the power of software to change the world. That’s a belief I hold more strongly than ever. In fact, I think the innovation we’ll see during the next decade-both on the desktop and as a result of the emergence of Internet-based software services-will transform the world of business more profoundly than the changes we’ve witnessed so far. Ten years from now, the barriers between organizations, systems, processes, and forms of communication will have given way to a seamless flow of information and ideas that will unlock personal creativity and productivity, and drive even greater opportunity and growth.

Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007 include sweeping changes designed to eliminate these barriers. It starts with far-reaching changes to the user experience. From the new Windows Vista Aero interface to the new Ribbon in the 2007 Office system, these products offer dramatic improvements that enable users to focus on content and tasks rather than the interface itself, making it easier to find information and access useful features with fewer clicks.

Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007 also deliver new capabilities that enhance security and performance; streamline the flow of information between people, systems, and processes; and transform the way people use information to drive informed, creative decision making.

The changes are dramatic. And with significant change comes more than a little risk. After all, these are some of the best-known and most-used products on the planet. Windows powers 845 million computers. Office is used by more than 450 million people. Any thoughtful businessperson would think twice before tinkering with the products that people use every day to manage their work and run their businesses.

So why are we making these changes? And why should you risk disrupting your business to take advantage of these new features and capabilities? Because business has changed and new tools are required. No one questions the competitive advantages that come when we can communicate and collaborate instantly with colleagues and customers around the world. No one doubts that businesses have benefited from access to nearly limitless information about customers, competitors, and markets.

At the same time, no one labors under the illusion that business is any easier as a result. In today’s global economy, where customers can find the best price without leaving their desks, competitive advantage can come and go in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile, dealing with the endless deluge of data, email, and information often threatens to overwhelm our ability to be productive and to make smart decisions. According to one leading industry analyst firm, we spend an average of 14.5 hours per week reading and answering email, while the time we spend looking for and analyzing information costs companies $28,000 per employee per year. And ongoing studies by the research firm Outsell show that the amount of time corporate information workers spend gathering information has almost doubled in the last five years.

Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007 were designed specifically to address these issues. Our goal is two-fold. First, we want to continue to advance the revolution in workplace productivity and efficiency that we started 11 years ago by delivering tools and capabilities that complete the transformation of IT from an expense into a strategic asset. More importantly, we want to provide a platform that is a catalyst for continued expansion of growth and opportunity because it enables companies to get the greatest possible value from the knowledge and expertise that their employees possess.

A Foundation for the People-Ready Business

Behind all of the changes in these new releases is a single, powerful idea: that people are the driving force behind business success. Ultimately, a company thrives or fails based on the thousands of small and large decisions that employees make every day, on how well they can answer customers’ questions, on the insight they can gain, and the product breakthroughs they can deliver based on the information they have at hand. Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007 were designed to create a people-ready business where employees are empowered to turn data into insight, ideas into action, and change into opportunity. They deliver a platform that enables employees to build profitable relationships with customers, spearhead new innovations, improve products and services, and drive the business forward.

To provide the capabilities that people need in today’s fast-changing world of work, we’ve focused on four specific areas:

Simplifying how people work together: The nature of how we work has changed dramatically since 1995. Today, people work in teams that cross divisional boundaries and span companies. Collaboration with colleagues and customers in different cities, even different continents, is the norm. The workforce is also increasingly mobile. From unified messaging enabled by Exchange Server 2007 to workflow and collaboration in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the new products revolutionize the way people work in teams.

Finding information and improving business insight: Companies of all sizes struggle with the fundamental paradox of the 21st century: while we generate more and more information every minute of every day our ability to extract useable knowledge from that information grows more and more tenuous all the time. Deep integration of new search technologies and powerful, easy-to-use business intelligence tools will enable employees to find and use information more easily, streamlining the path from idea to execution.

Helping to protect and manage content: Governmental compliance mandates and the growing recognition that simplified business processes and improved information management enable employees to respond to changing business conditions with greater speed and accuracy make organizational transparency one of today’s critical business imperatives. Advanced content management and document retention tools combined with features to enhance data confidentiality make content authoring the starting point for automated business processes and regulatory compliance.

Increasing security and reducing IT costs: Secure by design and by default, the new versions of Windows, Office, and Exchange Server deliver breakthrough security features and they streamline deployment and management, helping reduce costs and enabling IT departments to focus on providing new capabilities that deliver strategic advantage.

Pioneering Innovation and an Unprecedented Partnership

In many ways, we have been working toward this moment since the day Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft three decades ago. From Microsoft BASIC to Microsoft DOS, through the first versions of Office and Windows, and beyond, Microsoft has pioneered many of the technologies that made the digital information era and the knowledge economy a reality. Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007 continue this tradition and I believe they include the best work we have ever done. The result is groundbreaking innovations in interface design, security, networking, communications, and much more.

These new products are also the result of an unprecedented partnership between Microsoft and our customers. We worked hand-in-hand with tens of thousands of customers who allowed us to watch them use Windows, Office, and Exchange in more than 1 billion work sessions to help us understand how they use these products and how new technologies can help them work more effectively. As we moved toward launch, our customers and partners downloaded more than 5 million beta versions of the three products. Their valuable suggestions and feedback helped us assess the quality of our work and the value of the new features and capabilities we’ve built in. No software products have ever been through a more thorough software design and testing process.

No software products have ever created such broad-ranging business opportunities for the computer industry, either. Across the globe, more than 500,000 partner companies, including consulting firms, independent software developers, and systems integrators are poised to help businesses deploy and run Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007. Industry analysts expect that in 2007 alone, these products will generate more than $250 billion in revenue for our partners.

The launch of Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007 kicks off the most important 12 months in Microsoft history. During the coming year, we’ll introduce new innovations such as unified communications including voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and performance management utilizing cutting edge analytics and business intelligence that will enable businesses to achieve new levels of value from their information technology investments.

Over the course of the next decade, we expect that Windows Vista, the 2007 Office system, and Exchange Server 2007 will be used by well beyond 1 billion people. They will be used by CEOs to plan corporate strategy and by elementary school teachers to help children learn the skills they need to thrive in tomorrow’s knowledge economy. They’ll help researchers explore the far reaches of science and enable artists to explore the outer edges of creativity. Product planners at the world’s largest consumer enterprises will use them to understand market trends while craftspeople in remote villages will use them to reach out to customers in distant nations. The future of business computing begins today-we look forward to the new ideas, the new businesses, and the new innovations that will result.

Steve Ballmer

Randy exposes a Ford dealership in Toronto for posting anonymous comments favorable to the dealership on Randy’s critical blog post. Apparently they didn’t realize that Randy could look up their IP. “Anonymity” and “the web” can’t be accurately used in the same sentence without a negation.

UnSpun, a community ranking site, is the first Rails application on Amazon.com. I like a few things about this list of best programming languages:
#1 = Ruby (my fave)
#7 = Lisp (of which I am still in awe)
#22 = Synergy/DE (which I helped design/develop)

TDavid says that Firefox 2 still has memory leaks. Since upgrading to version 2, I haven’t had to close it to free up memory at all, and in version 1.5 that was a regular activity. Could be all those extensions, er I mean add-ons, TD. Although after an initial startup size of about 23MB, it does use up to between 180-200MB on my system after opening and closing a few tabs. But then it seems to level off.

Megite answers my question about the images they extract for their site.

Vaspers the Grate once again develops a comment he left here into a thought-provoking, almost poetic post. Nice to be the sketch-pad for such creativity.

Signs you spend too much time in the blogosphere (SF edition). excerpt:

You meet new people, and really resent the lack of an ‘About’ page attached to their forehead.

Happy Blogday, Kiltak! Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the plug, MP! Congrats on getting moved to mpschulze.net.

And also thanks to Cori Schlegel for linking to my FeedBurner redirection hack for WordPress.

Comment spammers are getting even more shrewd:

If either of these comments had made it past Akismet, I would have thought they were completely legit. In case you can’t make out the image above, the comments contain no links except for the URL of the commenter, and they read:

Problem with RSS Feed in WordPress.
I have a subdomain that I installed wordpress for another blog site, but the subdomain site’s rss feed points to my parent site.
Can anyone come up with any suggestions?

How did Akismet know that this was spam? I’m guessing it’s because they’ve seen a number of these same messages already marked as spam by other users.

So now we know what the primary use will be for an AI that passes the Turing Test: generating comment spam containing germane insights within each dialog. At that point, will it still be spam?

Can you say that backwards?

Another step towards radical transparency (thanks, Kiltak). I’m not only concerned for personal privacy — I wonder what health effects might result from exposure to this high frequency radiation …

Dave Winer clears up the definition of Web 2.0. It means “We be Google, too. Oh shit.”

TDavid’s been clearing up the snow today. Joshua Allen’s been having fun with the white stuff, too. The kids were out of school again today here. Freezing again tonight, and with another storm coming tomorrow night we may just have the kids in our hair all week.

I’m trying to decide whether to link to this (via Armchair Anarchist). Would you?

Hope you have good backups. But maybe you won’t need them. After all, the world is going to end soon (thanks, AA), isn’t it?

I wonder when humpback whales think the world will end? (via AA, again)

More to the point, when will e-mail as we know it end? It’s now 90% spam. (Thanks, Randy) Can-Spam is helping … not!

Megite has garnered my attention recently. Two reasons: (1) they’ve been including me in more discussions than does Techmeme (yeah, that’s hard) and (2) Matthew Chen of Megite has eagerly worked with me via e-mail to make the most of my Megite experience. That kind of service always gets my attention.

After noticing Megite popping up in my referrer logs and blog vanity searches, I wanted to set up some sort of monitor for when my posts made it onto Megite. I thought maybe I could use the “personal Megite” feature to monitor just my sites, and Matthew patiently set that up for me. But that didn’t fly, because I didn’t fully understand the feature. Instead, I was able to achieve my goal by sending the Megite technology feed through FeedRinse, and subscribing to the result of this filter:

As you can see, the same approach also works for Techmeme (or should, Gabe hasn’t given me a chance to find out yet).

Thinking about my Megite misconception, I realized just how useful the personal Megite could be as a feed reader. Here’s how it works. You send Matthew an OPML file of your usual reads (or better yet, a link to it so you can update it dynamically). Matthew constructs a Megite section based on that reading list. You read that section or subscribe to its feed.

What does that give you more than Bloglines? Related content. The Megite engine lists other posts (that may or may not be on your list) that discuss the same topics.

My only gripe: the section has a partial feed. That means you don’t see the related items unless you’re reading it on megite.com. Even there, the posts themselves are abbreviated — but that works well for quick scanning and filtering.

As you can see, Megite also includes some images. Not sure how the image selection works. They aren’t always from the post, and yet not all images are included. Perhaps Matthew will explain that algorithm to satisfy my curiosity.

Here’s the result for my reading list, which I affectionately call “Chip’s Blips“. Here’s the OPML it’s based on. When I first signed up, the personal Megite was an “as available” feature, but it looks like now Matthew has removed that verbiage from the page. Give it a try and report back.

Truth is stranger than fiction, because with truth we are unaware of the invention.

Fiction is not a lie unless it pretends to be truth. Fiction often reveals truth via a virtual set of perceptions.

Beauty is truth. All our truths are aesthetics, arrangements of concepts to suit our taste.

Truth attempts to include and synthesize all perceptions; lies seek to circumscribe and limit them.

Lies are like walls. You must choose wisely the locations to fortify.

The strongest lies are built on the most solid truths.

Lies, like walls, eventually all fall. The question is when, and how much it matters by then.

In vino veritas, because the walls come a tumblin’ down.

Moishe Lettvin, former Microsoftie who worked on Vista’s controversial Shutdown Menu, explains just how tightly screwed Vista development became.

Looks to me like C# 3.0 takes the language farther from its Java roots and closer to more modern scripting languages. The examples shown have problems with omitted white space, but if you already know the language you should be able to overlook them.

Vaspers the Grate left a comment here that intrigued me to the point of subscribing. Now he has expanded that idea into a post on the Mouth as Weapon: 9 Signs of Psycho Blabbers, dedicated to yours truly (not, I hope, as an example). Numbers 6 and 9 seem the most penetrating, IMHO.

Kathy Sierra on the merits of jargon. When not gratuitous, specialized vocabulary can improve conversation, although it may leave everyone else in the dark. But I wonder how “Web 2.0″ really fits in this discussion. So does Shelley, who quotes Dare (who is more harsh). I wonder what Dave Greten would say. Regarding professional jargon, I’m reminded of conversations back in the 1990′s between Ken Lidster and myself about enhancements to Synergy/DE. As our intense dialog continued into the elevator that was shared with unrelated businesses, the looks on the faces of the other passengers often indicated that we were speaking a completely different language. After they exited, shaking their heads, Ken and I would turn to each other and suddenly laugh. Good times.

The Top 20 replies by Programmers to Testers when their programs don’t work (thanks, GMSV). Next time you’re confronted by QA, just try to avoid using one of these. Betcha can’t. Number 1 is most definitely my number 1 response.

ImageChef, a handy online utility for generating images with embedded text. Lots of images to choose from. Too bad you can’t provide your own.

Supreme Court to examine ‘obviousness’ of patents. You mean combining text with images isn’t patentable? What about how to make a sandwich (thanks, Armchair Anarchist)?

Black-out Friday at Walmart.com. Not so smiley when along with the prices, down came the servers.

I’m all over this new holiday. In fact, I’ll start celebrating today. Never mind, I’ve been celebrating for months. Thanks, Shelley.

And BTW, Shelley, bravo. Regardless of what terms are used, we need a distinction between those who assert that there is no divinity and those of us who do not pretend to certainty. All human language evolves with usage, and regardless of scientific definitions, in common usage atheist refers to the former, and agnostic to the latter. The browbeating Shelley received in these comments because she refused to be labeled and neatly categorized only confirms why I shun the designation of atheist myself.

Pietro Paschino uses my tag cloud widget for WordPress. Grazie, Pietro!

Last but definitely not least, The Sayings of Phil Factor. Hilarious. I guess I just disproved the penultimate one, though, at least in Phil’s case.

The first snow of the year here started yesterday morning and didn’t stop until sometime last night.

Schools closed. Snowman in progress.

I’d better sweep those steps before we feature Chip’s Slips. Followed by Chip’s Flips. And the shattering of Chip’s Hips.

UPDATE: it started snowing again this afternoon. Really coming down. Probably have the kids at home again tomorrow. Save me!

The nonagility of biotech (Thanks, Assaf). Most people are so afraid of risk that they eschew rewards.

A timeline of blog history from Vaspers the Grate (via Doc, who corrects his own).

And Vaspers pointed me to Rebecca Blood’s essay weblogs, a history and perspective. Especially the perspective. Even though this ancient document was written way back in 2000, Rebecca had me saying “wow” and reading to the end. Subscribed.

Rebecca and every other woman on my blogroll should have made this list ahead of a cartoon character. And I question whether Daryl Hannah or Paris Hilton have ever written a line of code, even if you include HTML in the broad sense of the term. It’s plain to me that CRAVE believes that the store of female geeks is so small that it requires stretching with filler. A quick Google of “girl geek” would have dispelled that notion. For shame. (via Mike Arrington)

AbbreviationZ, the A to Z of Acronyms and Abbreviations on the Net. Via TDavid, who was surprised to find that WTF has 61 uses beyond the presumed definition.

Animated map of the spread of the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl. Sickening. Thanks, Armchair Anarchist.

What’s the difference between Microsoft Windows and a light bulb? You can unscrew the light bulb.