Thanks to everyone who sent messages of condolence and support last week. My family and I were overwhelmed with the outpouring of support.
I’m looking forward to getting back to a normal routine this week! Expect some new posts and some very exciting announcements shortly.
My father passed away this afternoon, unexpectedly.
I’ll be traveling this week to be with my mother and the rest of my family and won’t be posting any updates.
A new document from the National Security Agency is getting a lot of link love, thanks to a recent mention by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.
Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF, which has a publication date of December 13, 2005, covers an important topic, and the authors do a good job of getting across their primary message: If you plan to publish a document originally created in Word, you have to look very carefully for sensitive information that you don’t want to reveal. When you find it, you have to delete it, permanently, not just hide it or cover it up.
So far, so good. But I was taken aback by this statement:
The following steps were tested with MS Word 2000 and Acrobat 5.0 and 6.0. Other recent versions should work similarly.
“Should work similarly”? That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence. If you’re going to go to the trouble of producing a definitive set of guidelines for such a crucial subject, why use only one seven-year-old version of Word? How long could it have taken to test these procedures with Word 2002 (from Office XP) and Word 2003 (from Office 2003)? And why not give it a run-through with Acrobat 7.0, the current version?
Somewhere in Arnold, Missouri, a Charter Cable subscriber clicked on a link to this site from Memeorandum.com and became visitor #600,000.
Thanks!
Sometime in the next, oh, 12 hours or so, someone is going to be Visitor number 600,000 to this site since I started keeping track back in May 2004.
It hasn’t been a linear curve. In fact, at current traffic rates visitor number 1 million will show up in the next five or six months. And that doesn’t count the 1800+ people who regularly read this site in an RSS aggregator.
This world map (Flash required) offers a fascinating view of where folks are visiting from. I thought it was pretty cool to see a visitor from Mauritius.
As a blond, I suppose I should be offended by this blond joke, but it’s so damn funny I just can’t get mad.
And of course, as Professor Froomkin notes, a lot depends on how you tell it.
While I was flying back from CES this past weekend, my publisher alerted me that the page proofs for my latest book are ready for final review. Oh, and can we have them by 8:00 AM Thursday?
Until I work my way through the whole stack, posting will be light.
Marc Orchant is now a Tablet PC MVP. Congratulations, Marc!
I’ll be posting as much as I can from CES between now and Saturday.
Ten years ago, I started a tradition of turning off all my work computers early in the evening of December 31 and enjoying New Year’s Eve unplugged.
The time has come to shut down for this year. See you in 2006!
Ed Bott 