This evening we’ll be taking things off line for a few hours –starting at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central– for some maintenance. Everything should be back up by 1am Eastern/Midnight Central. We’ve got a few last things to clean up after the office move. Joy. Once this is done, we’ll try to catch up on a backlog of news we’ve wanted to post. Cross your fingers.

Computer writer Don Crabb –just 44– died Saturday. He was a major figure in the computer world since the early '80s; important enough that Roger Ebert slipped out of movie review mode to write Crabb’s obituary.

Our servers were moved and back on line Friday evening like we planned. Unfortunately, it took till today to get our DNS entries straightened out. DNS entries are used by the browser to find out where a domain –such as datawranglers.com or yahoo.com– is actually located. The outfit maintaining most of our DNS entries dropped the ball on this one, but things have been sorted out now.

The U.S. Naval Research Lab is testing a new approach to mine detection that sniffs for chemicals instead of detecting metal cases. Because it doesn’t get thrown by shell casings and other battle debris it’s been about 30 times faster in testing. More coverage: BBC, Operation Landmine.

Our prison situation has been a mounting problem for quite some time. It’s finally hitting the radar with the national press. Newsweek’s Ellis Cose has an article in their 28 February issue that covers the basics. Our prison population will pass 2,000,000 later this year; we’re about to overtake Russia. That also means that half a million prisoners are being released back into society each year. In any practical sense the vast majority will never be what some people call "productive members of society". Who’s going to hire an ex-con? You have to step back from the numbers and ask why do we incarcerate so many people compared to almost every other country on the planet. And can we afford to pay the tab we’re imposing on ourselves; especially when many of those in jail are there for drug-related crimes at a time when Europe is decriminalizing drugs. Even the police are reconsidering the current approach with efforts like community policing.