There was life-saving, home-protecting, husband-replacing Newton, running on an XT-equivalent PC with a massive 20-Megabyte hard drive and a convenient 729k floppy disk:

From 1989. Via Ed Symkus.

Instant Rimshot.

Not against hackers, but against somebody walking into your data center and physically removing them? Musician Peter Gabriel is the latest victim of server theft.

Trendy Tokyo salarymen can now get "nutrients" in an IV drip for just $20 a, um, shot.

Yesterday, I put a note in one of our daily newsletters that we'll be experimenting with Twitter-based coverage of Interop - "follow" me at www.twitter.com/compendium if you're at the show. Haven't heard from anybody actually attending the event, but I did get a flurry of "follow" e-mail messages from sweet young thangs intent on building up giant follow lists - most with their own updates set to private. Such teases. And, I bet, such spammers, no doubt heavy-set guys with mustaches in Kazakhstan or Moldavia.

RSS Awareness Day. It's May 1, so if you're not too busy expressing solidarity with workers around the world, take a moment out to praise the lowly yet important format.

This is kind of funny and sad at the same time: Google, which has been busy photographing every last inch of major cities across the U.S., is trying to prevent people from photographing its booth at the Web 2.0. conference.

As annoying as Twitter spam is, at least the spammers there are still pretending to be real people. On Twitter's annoying little cousin, Pownce, they're not even bothering anymore; I'm now getting all sorts of e-mail along the lines of

Homebased Business wants to be your friend on Pownce. Adding Homebased as a friend will allow you to exchange files, events, links and more.

I'm on the verge of bouncing Pownce.

Somebody wrote a Twitter module for Drupal (which we use here); when you post something on your blog, it gets auto-linked on Twitter. I'm posting this mainly to see if it's still working.

Chris Carrara thought it was interesting that Ticketmaster set up a Facebook site and almost overnight gained more than 150,000 "fans." So he started looking at page after page of Ticketmaster "fan" pages and discovered most had no "friends" at all. Given that the whole point of Facebook is to connect to people you know, he found that odd and began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Ticketmaster was just making up "friends" to show how popular it is:

There's no telling just how many of these there are, but either Ticketmaster has a lot of very lonely fans, or they’re exactly as evil as we already thought they were

Via Abnormality Arises.

Come on, nobody needs to subscribe to 60,781 Twitter feeds.

Maybe it's just me and my great yawning unappreciation for Twitterdom, but it seems like over the past week, I've gotten a bunch of "followers" who really just seem to be spammers, who have no real interest in what I actually post.

Mitch Denny makes the case that corporate application developers could do worse than think about themselves like the Q Branch that is forever coming up with useful gadgets for James Bond:

Since last year Q Branch has successfully shipped about eleven applications. Some of them are tools to support development, others are tools that support the business (a big part of our business is software development). I'm now convinced that this is the way to incrementally deliver business value.

At least, according to Tom Fulry's elderly neighbor, who knocked on his door to let him know about how the local electric company was planning to disconnect the power later that night for some repair work:

... I pulled out my blackberry to set an alarm.

"Don't point that device at me! I don't want to catch the death rays!"

I thought she was joking. I pointed it at my crotch, laughing that I can feel the waves penetrating me.

"Stop! You'll kill all your swimmers. You should not carry that radioactive brick anywhere near your down there," she said. ...

So far, just one tiny part of one neighborhood has been hooked up.

One is that you should never let an amateur attempt scripting.

Having failed completely at my efforts yesterday to build a database-driven templating system for our bloggers (I got to the point where I could grab the required info for the blog index pages, but not for the individual items), I'm falling back on Plan B: Create a directory of variable files, one for each blogger. I'll then "include" those onto template pages.

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This Stuff Sucks uses Drupal's RSS aggregator to give you a constantly updated read on what sucks, based on posts from aggravated bloggers around the world.

Of course, as a blogger who sometimes posts about stuff that sucks (at least, in my off hours), I have to say what kinda sucks about the site is how the linked headline goes to the site's abstract of the original post, rather than to the original post (for that, you have to look for the much smaller "original post" link). You can fix that with some Drupal tinkering, but if you don't know what you're doing, that might suck.

Drupal, which we use here, has tons of great features - and tons of people coming up with new ones all the time. And since it's open source, you can tinker with it to your heart's content (they even have a nice plug-in/hook architecture so you can mess around without touching the core modules; handy at upgrade time).

Which is good because one thing Drupal doesn't do well is let you easily customize the templates for individual blogs.

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Alex Iskold provides a handy overview of seven key Semantic Web concepts.

Ned Batchelder notices that OmniTI, a Web-development concern, is now expressing itself through its URLs a bit more than most companies. Instead of, oh, omniti.com/hiring, for example, it's put up omniti.com/is/hiring. Which is kind of cool if you're a URL geek.