Tis the Season: Walmart sale of $30 DVD players causes stampede

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Ok, so $30 is a really good price for a DVD/VCR combination player, but is it worth nearly crushing another human being to death just to get one? Apparently so:A stampede of shoppers left a woman seriously hurt this morning. She was trampled by a crowd of bargain hunters at a Central Florida Walmart. 41-year-old Patricia Vanlester is at Halifax Medical Center tonight. Family members say she came to Walmart to buy an advertised DVD, but what she got was a trip to the hospital...When the store finally opened, shoppers grabbed for the item. People started fighting for the DVD player and pushed Vanlester to the ground. "I screamed and said stop don't step on her," Ellzey says. "My sister is on the ground but no one would listen." Walmart employees rushed to Vanlester. She was knocked unconscious. She was airlifted to Halifax Medical Center.Read... [Gizmodo]

Moveable Type Spam Vulnerability

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movabletype.org: News

The "Email this to a friend" functionality in the mt-send-entry.cgi script is vulnerable to being used by spammers to send spam messages. In principle, all "email this to a friend" programs are vulnerable to being used by spammers, because they allow the user to specify a To: address and a message body. But in practice, MT's implementation of this is not as robust as it should be, and a new version is available below.

This fix is already included in all versions of MT 2.64 downloaded from today on.

Schools as a safety net...

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School Is Haven When Children Have No Home

With unemployment and spiraling housing costs pushing a growing number of families into homelessness, school systems across the country are seeing more and more children like Mariah living in shelters, cars or motels. Some states are reporting a nearly 50 percent increase in homeless students over the last year.

An article from the New York Times on how schools are increasing becoming a resource of last resort for students of families facing homelessness and poverty.

Moveable Type due for an upgrade...

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SixApart Announcements...The great news is that we've got a new version of Movable Type planned for release in the next couple months that is a response to the sort of features and requests we've been hearing from our current users and other webloggers. Because of the success of TypePad and our ability to staff up, we're working on releasing more features in the basic Movable Type package and concentrating the features needed for businesses, organizations and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro. [Six Log]

It looks like there will be an upgrade to Moveable Type in the near future. Am hoping that a lot of the features that they have put into Typepad show up in Moveable Type. I'm also looking for tools such as those available in add on plug-ins such as MTMedic. These allow for an administrator to do global administration tasks on a MovableType installation.

Cyprien Lomas...

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Cyprien Lomas Discover SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra)One of the folks I met this weekend at edBlogger was Cyprien Lomas. He a Research Associate with Skylight: The Science Centre for Learning and Teaching at the Faculty of Science at University of British Columbia. Cyprien was one of the folks using SubEthaEdit to take collaborative notes during the sessions. It was kind of fun to be sitting up on the panel talking and at the same time watch as people take notes on what was being said.

What Pat Delaney learned at edBlogger SF 2003...

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Pat lists some of the things he learned at edBlogger "03. Pat did an excellent job organizing and staging this event. As he mentions, using his school really helped to keep costs down, and the generous support of other organizations helped to make the whole thing very enjoyable and worthwhile.

Thor Prichard and Paul Bradley created a weblog that helped capture the sessions and conversations, and also has some great pictures.

It was great to be able to have an opportunity to come together and share our experiences. Thanks to all that made this possible.