That's right, hang up the damn phone! You're hurtling in 2 tons of machine down the street, weaving in and out of your lane, slowing down, speeding up, cutting people off. And you, backing out of your driveway, cutting me off (and fortunately not running over a child): I'm sorry, but I just don't get what is so damned important than you have to be yakking on the phone right after you got into your car. Couldn't you make the call, then drive? Oh, you weren't talking, you were texting? What are you, stupid? You're a hazard. A menace!

The news had Twitter abuzz yesterday. The official White House site has migrated from a proprietary software to open source Drupal. "We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site," White House new media director Macon Phillips told The Associated Press hours before the new site went live on Saturday. "This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it....

One of the wisdoms in web application development is "Release early and often." Google and Twitter have both released software "tests" to select hundreds of thousands of users, both with the idea that there will be problems, but let people try them out, and then improve the software iteratively, based upon real-life user experience. This is my first blush impression of these previews I've been privileged to explore this week. Get on my Wave!

It's pretty safe to say I spend 12 hours or so a day on my Mac — or a Mac. So I thought I'd document, if not the what of the check I'm doing, then the how. Here they are. I tried to break them down by category, because nobody can really use a laundry list of 20 or 50 or 100 things presented in a blog post, just laid out there as if it were helpful. Excuse me for a side rant:

This past week, Microsoft threw some of its weight into the Open Source software economy. Mary-Jo Foley reports on ZDNet: A new, non-profit open-source foundation — one dedicated to increasing the participation of commercial-source vendors in the open-source world — is being unveiled on September 10. Microsoft is providing the initial funding and is a founding member of the new group, known as the CodePlex Foundation....