Over on the Well we’re having a discussion with Salon.com co-founder (and longtime Well member) Scott Rosenberg about his new book, Dreaming in Code. The book follows the Chandler project – conceived as a radical reinvention of the personal information manager – from its inception in 2002 through… well, through multiple stalls and restarts that lead not to a triumphal “Rocky of software” finish but to our embedded journalist moving on after deciding he just can’t wait any longer. Oddly, this a more satisfying ending; more honest, more interesting, and, for most programmers, more painfully familiar. It’s a postmortem on a project that hasn’t actually died.

When I’m doing Django development work I sometimes find my way to the #django channel on freenode.net to exchange advice. As has been the case on the Interweb since ancient days, certain Questions are Frequently Asked there, so I decided to try the experiment of making a FAQ specifically addressing those questions. Hopefully it won’t be too redundant of other material in the wiki – but if it is, I’m sure the group refactoring intelligence will take care of it.

I was working on a sharp little post about the bewildering array of available Javascript libraries and how I had almost become resigned to collecting lists-of-lists-of-libraries for future analysis. Then, while I was mulling this over, a neato Javascript library demo I was running crashed Safari, taking my post with it.

Lesson 1: I will remember to always use “Edit in TextMate” in the future.

Lesson 2: I won’t get too excited about cramming my pages full of Javascript.

It a rather astounding open letter entitled “Thoughts on Music” posted to the Apple website today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that Apple “would embrace… wholeheartedly” a music marketplace free of of Digital Rights Management schemes.

The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

I posted one simple example of this a while back, but this one’s much better. (I’ve removed some uninteresting stuff like the actual routing.)

From ...
Received: ...
Date: ...
Received: from 192.168.0.%RND_DIGIT (203-219-%DIGSTAT2-%STATDIG.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN
[203.219.%DIGSTAT2.%STATDIG]) by mail%SINGSTAT.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN (envelope-from
%FROM_EMAIL) (8.13.6/8.13.6) with SMTP id %STATWORD for <%TO_EMAIL>;
%CURRENT_DATE_TIME
Message-Id: <%RND_DIGIT[10].%STATWORD@mail%SINGSTAT.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN>
From: "%FROM_NAME" <@FROM_EMAIL>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER
Subject: %SUBJECT
Sender: "%FROM_NAME" <%FROM_EMAIL>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME

%MESSAGE_BODY

That Received: line looks like a nice template for a SpamAssassin rule, if you use SpamAssassin.