Michael and I tried to give blood, but the hospital had loud announcements on the PA saying "keep away from the hospital, please do not mill around outside." Volunteers told us that the blood donation centers were overloaded anyway and we should come back tonight or tomorrow.

Up here on the Upper West Side, about 5 miles north of Ground Zero, I saw streams of people in business clothes walking home. I saw people planning to walk all the way up to the George Washington bridge and then across to New Jersey where they lived.

All mass transit was stopped completely. The streets were very quiet around here, there was very little traffic. Many streets were completely closed to traffic.

Friends in Brooklyn reported watching the buildings burn. Many people who lived in Brooklyn were stuck in Manhattan. We heard a few subways are running now. My friend Lisa had some business downtown today. When she got out of the subway, she saw all the chaos and went back down to the subway. She came to visit me uptown and is now trying to work her way home to Park Slope. (She made it. About half of the city's subway lines are running.)

Jared (my boyfriend) is stuck in Connecticut for the night. He works there, in Old Greenwich, and all bridges into the city are closed, so he's spending the night with a friend from work. I'm going out to dinner now with some friends. It looks like tomorrow the city will be completely shut down, too.

8:00pm I spoke to a policeman in a restaurant. He said that 400 policemen and firemen were killed when the buildings collapsed. They were in there rescuing people. He said he will always remember the screams he heard from trapped police over the radio.

(He also said that Israel was attacking Afghanistan. Police think the weirdest things.)

Quiet day. The weather is perfect. The southern sky is still filled with white dust.

I saw an old couple on the corner holding hands. They weren't going anywhere, just standing outside looking at the sky, happy to be here.

News.com reports:

"Gartner remains concerned that viruses and worms will continue to attack IIS until Microsoft has released a completely rewritten release of [IIS] that is thoroughly and publicly tested....Gartner believes that this rewriting will probably not occur before the end of 2002."

Gartner seems to suffer the common but moronic fallacy that new or "completely rewritten" code is somehow less buggy than old code. IIS has been publically tested, for about six years now, on millions of web servers and with thousands of hackers trying to find bugs. Completely rewriting it would just introduce another set of bugs that would take another few years to find. Chances are that nobody on the current IIS team even remembers the bugs they fixed five years ago, even if they were on the team that long ago (unlikely), like the $DATA$ one and adding an extra period to the end of an ASP URL.

Completely rewriting code is a big-time mistake common of immature developers with no real software experience. I would say that "Gartner should know better" but I don't have very high expectations of them.

My new book is here! Apress has just published a new collection of 36 essays from Joel on Software, aptly named More Joel on Software. Get yours today! Available from Amazon.com or wherever fine cheese is sold.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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