You may have heard through the grapevine that there’s a Lord of the Rings movie in the works. Well, a preview is available. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

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. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

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 … Continue reading death and disaster →

Just a reminder, we’ll be off the air starting sometime late this afternoon to move our servers to our new offices. We should be back on line where you can see us sometime tomorrow. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Poet Charles Bernstein has been a major figure in poetry for the last thirty years. On March 11, he'll "talk, read and challenge the whole world of poetry" at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary here in Dallas. You can read more over at the Writers Garret. On the first, artsDFW will have a profile and interview. Yesterday John McCain took all the cookies in Michigan and Arizona. George the Second is starting to feel the heat. Now if something interesting would happen in the Reform party race. Wouldn’t that be a heck of a presidential race? McCain versus Gore versus a strong Reform party candidate? And what about Ventura in 2004? Will he build up a fourth party to make it happen? Will we get to see body slams and politicians flying from the ring? Wait, what’s this… will American politics actually get interesting? Are those a few new ideas drifting into the discussion? We’ll we run out of question marks? Our updates will be continue to be sporadic till next week. But, we’re working with artsDFW to publish some of the essays that they receive that are more political than artistic. We hope to post one soon by Dallas poet and critic Gordon Hilgers. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Three years ago we posted our first weblog entry, at least the first one we’ve archived… Our move is continuing and should be finished with our server move on Friday. The move should happen Friday evening and service may be spotty Friday and early Saturday. We’re having problems with the digest version of the Slam! list. We’ll post a note here when we get the problem isolated and fixed. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Updates will be scarce for the next week. We’re beginning a move to a new location. We’ll begin more regular updates new week and should be back up to full speed on our news by the end of the month. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

In the cheesy but you knew it had to happen eventually category, the army has developed a very primitive holodeck. Corel is merging with the company formerly known as Borland. This strengthens Corel’s position in the Linux market, with products including WordPerfect and Interbase. Other products in the stable: Corel Draw and a range of development tools. Additional Coverage: ZDNet. Christie’s Auction House has gone state’s evidence and admitted to the US Department of Justice that they’ve worked with rival Sotheby’s to fix commissions and limit competition. Scientists are working on an antibody that eats cocaine in the bloodstream. Now if we could just reform our laws to encourage alternative sentencing so that something like this gets put to use where it’s needed. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

IBM doesn’t want to stay off our minds apparently. Their scientists have built a prototype nano-scale computer —San Jose Mercury or original in Nature (free sign-in required). The device is primitive, but extremely small. If the technology can be made practical, the scale of computers will shrink radically. The vast majority of the computer is the case and the goodies –keyboard, mouse, display, removable drives– we use to get stuff in and out of the computer. If you remove all of that from the laptop I’m using, you would have something that could be rearranged to the size of a paperback and would consume a lot less power. That’s why most handheld computers don’t use keyboards, harddrives or full-size displays. The companies that can find a better, smaller way to communicate with a computer are going to clean up. Once again it’s time for the Hopelessly Complete Waste of Time with a page full of stuff labels warn you against, including the one-of-a-kind Spud Gun. You ever wonder what happens when a half-pound of spud travelling 550 mph hits a watermelon? Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

IBM has become almost frighteningly hip. The Lotus TV campaigns and the IBM print campaigns display a marketing savvy and an understanding of the public that’s incredible for any computer, let alone an "old school bluechip" giant. You can also see it in their heavy investment in open standard; especially in Linux. released their Journalling File System under the GPL which means it should make its way into regular Linux distributions later in the year. Don’t know a Journalling whatzit is? A much hardier way to format harddrives that hardly bats an eye at crashes. This is the third or fourth Journalling File System released under the GPL recently, so it shoould make for interesting developments later in the year. According to Mac OS Rumors, the next powerbooks will "likely be announced… at an Apple Event later this month". Take that with a grain of salt. The more interesting note on the same site is that Apple is in talks about porting the Mac OS X’s Darwin core to SGI and Transmeta’s processors. It mostly seems to be bet-hedging move, but Transmeta’s processors would be a natural, given their ability to code morph to –theoretically– model any processor. More hints that Transmeta may radically change the face of computing over the next two years. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook