A good roundup lately via Nonprofit Online News:

Hackers and Painters is as useful an article as any I've seen lately:

Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They're going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they're not going to read the manual. The best system I've ever seen in this respect was the original Macintosh, in 1985. It did what software almost never does: it just worked.

This article names the 12 most powerful conservative foundations, which fund the think tanks that influence the current administration's foreign and domestic policy. Media mavens may be familiar with the names of the think tanks as their spokespeople are often quoted on a variety of issues. The extent of the organization is a fearsome thing, the author notes:

The philanthropic funding of an ideology--its articulation and dissemination--is rare, perhaps unprecedented in American politics. To have sustained the effort over decades must be unique. It was a brilliant strategy brilliantly executed, but it begs to be counteracted if a decent, civil, compassionate public life is not to become a stunted thing.

Over on the left, E and C and I talked over the weekend about the current Democratic presidential wanna-bes and we couldn't name all of them. (This happened after a guy walked by wearing a Howard Dean shirt, which can get you beat up in some sectors of Indiana.) Here's a tidbit about a candidate we could name: Dennis Kucinich (whom Slate today calls an "angry little socialist elf").