The Nation’s Doug Ireland writes about Bush’s war on condoms.

Says George R.R. Martin in Infinty’s interview: “Jack Vance is the greatest living SF writer, in my opinion, and one of the few who is also a master of Fantasy. His The Dying Earth (1950) was one of the seminal books in the history of modern Fantasy, and I would rank him right up there with Tolkien, Dunsany, Leiber, and T.H. White as one of the fathers of the genre.”

Reading this other, better, interview, you can really see how interviews are written. An how similar they always are.

Amazon’s interview with Robert Jordan also has quite a few recommendations. All nicely linked to their own pages.

I need to get curtains. When the evening sun shines through my bedroom window, the light reflects off white wall behind me making the colors of my monitor melt into shades of grey. Plus, I can see all the spots and smears covering the screen.

MMBase is the CMS that Mika said Mediumi is going to use. One nice feature is that it can automatically relate items to each other.

Wow. Freemovie is a SWF generator written in PHP.

Top Ten New Copyright Crimes.

From Communitech’s forums: MySQL optimization, WAP/WML.

Dreamriver PHP software.

PHP: Session handling functions.

CNET.com: My blog, my self.

New Suodatin weblog links: Leslie Harpold’s The Historical Present, Cory Doctorow’s Boingboing, Scott Andrew’s Scottandrew.com and Mark Pilgrim’s Diveintomark.

After some words on the syntax of cron jobs, one might look further into the matter here.

When running a PHP script through a cron job, does it have to be executed as a CGI script? It can help. Just make #! /usr/bin/php as the first line of your PHP script and tack a .cgi extension on the end of the file name.

Don’t like the email your cron is sending you after every execution? Don’t worry, that’s just the standard output (directed to your account email address specified in the .profile file). You can get rid of the output emails by redirecting it into the black holes of the Unixverse, /dev/null. To do this, append your crontab file with the incantation > /dev/null 2>&1.

How about a nice trip around Google to finish this lesson off?

I still can’t figure how to implement concurrent versioning in a database-backed web site CMS.

Do you have to create a new story record every time the story is “opened” for editing? How, then, are the two (or more) merged?

Leads to follow up include two magic words: diff and patch. Unix commands always did sound like spells to me.

Majordomo and MajorCool HOWTO: “MajorCool is a utility for managing Majordomo lists via a CGI script.”

From Pekka comes the recommendation to use Zoom Player 2.50 for DVDs. With all the problems I had finding a software decoder I’m a little too discouraged to even look into this right now.