There is a Dark Side to web development, Derek Featherstone of Further Ahead argued this morning, and that is poor accessibility. He points to the moment in Star Wars Episode VI when Han and Chewie are trying to get the stolen shuttle past the Imperials, and Chewie can barely fit in the flight seat. Why? Because the Empire didn't make shuttles to fit people, they made people (well, Stormtroopers) to fit their machine. Real world designers don't get to do that. Well, except the really creepy ones.

Like a jedi master to a conference room full of padawans, he had some lessons to pass on. Tab-index is the Jar-Jar Binks of programming (it seemed like a universally appealing idea at the time); When your bosses see that people like Wookies (or whatever part of your system works), you end up with the The Star Wars Holiday Special; And don't be so proud of that technological terror you've constructed, 'cos that two-meter thermal vent will take you down every time.

This is where all the action is. Day one at SXSW Interactive was simply a teaser to the events that happened today. The panels were more mentally engaging, the speakers seemed more alert and prepared, but most of all, the ScreenBurn Arcade 2008 ignited.

What is a bad website?

Sometimes it's just abut bad timing, like Kozmo.com burning through $283 million to try home-delivery too early. Or it's wasted resources, like pets.com, who frittered away $130 million on Superbowl ads)

Nah, the Worst Website Ever panel was looking for really bad ideas, like 3D-mail, where a bouncer throws your spam off Miami Beach. Which is real. Seriously. Less real, but brilliantly conceived, was PuppiesAndBabiesForRent.com (freelance developer Jeffery Bennett explained that it failed because "the majority of people who want to rent children aren't legally allowed near them. Plus, puppies think babies are delicious.") Then there was image search for the blind, downloadable scents, and hosting a mirror of the entire Internet on your servers. There was one point of consensus. If anyone uses the word "monetized', run for the hills.

When it comes to international development, the road to IT hell is paved with good intentions. Steve Howard of AMD mentioned a village he visited in Uganda that had been given an uplink dish for an internet connection: the kind donors had never told the locals they had to reposition it if it ever got knocked out of alignment. So when he visited, it was pointing uselessly at the ground.

He thinks the problem is that developers don't think about everything that surrounds their machine in the field. He calls this the ecosystem approach. This means ensuring energy reliability, proper finance, and proper support and training. He noted the One Laptop Per Child project, where it's not just a machine, but an integrated project: and, he added, it cannot and should not be the sole solution to getting helpful tech into developing nations.

And don't forget means what limited equipment is in the field when you start writing code. "We're talking about Web2.0 " he said. "Emphasis needs to be put on Web.02."

Series creator of The Wire, Homicide, and The Corner will be in Austin March 18, speaking at the College of Communication March 18 at 6pm at the Austin City Limits Studio at the University of Texas at Austin campus. [See map at www.utexas.edu/maps/main.]

The event is free and open to the public but rsvps are requested: Wade Lee at (512) 232-5466 or wade.lee@austin.utexas.edu.

No website administrator wants the police (or FBI, or Homeland Security) to come tapping on their door because of what someone has said on their site.

Panelist Mohammed Suleiman Khan of blog aggregator Hadithuna.com had some pretty sensible advice to when to say 'enough is enough' without compromising free speech. He had some pretty simple advice: keep clear until it's really a problem. When does it become a problem? He uses that great jargon term that has become a fave amongst campaign managers and marketing people: the tipping point, which he says he can gauge against four easy criteria:

Is it unprotected speech?
Is it a non-constructive opinion?
Do they run contrary to the point of the website?
Are they driving users away?

Look for Tim McCanlies to shoot his long-awaited low-budget film The Two Bobs, in Austin next month, thanks in large part to the Writers Guild strike. The strike gave him time to concentrate on the long-gestating film, which he described as in the tone of The Big Lebowski and Trainspotting. It follows two guys who are in legends in the gaming business whose new, much-anticipated game is stolen right as they finish it.

It seems like anytime someone talks about Muslims on the Web, everyone is bundled together as one radical mass. According to the panelists this afternoon at Online Extremism – and the Muslims Who Fight It, people need to get smarter not just about who is radical and not, but what kind of radical.

So what should people really look for? "Violent radicalization, and that violent part is important," said Shaarik Zafar, senior policy adviser with the Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Since so many people (including policy makers) have so little grasp of Islamic scholarship and its myriad, complicated theological strands, they miss the big difference between the ascetics of Sufism and a bomb-building terrorist, like there is between a Quaker and a white supremacist.

"You can't kill and capture a website," said Frank Cilluffo, director of Homeland Security Policy Institute. He called Al-Qaeda a brand more than an organization, and a brand name can be damaged like any other brand, by tackling and discrediting them. That meant not attacking Muslim religiosity on the web, but encouraging (without co-opting) Islamic scholars to highlight the intellectual bankruptcy and un-Islamic nature of some radicals: to find "a Tookie Williams of terrorism." They exist, he said: several former spiritual advisers to Osama bin-Laden have now renounced him.

Here's an easy prediction: The showing of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay tonight at the Paramount Theatre will turn people away. A full house counting in the hundreds listened this afternoon as stars John Cho, Kal Penn and Neil Patrick Harris and writer/directing tag team Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg discussed the political ramifications of the sequel.

"I felt like it was a device to amp up the stakes," Cho said of any fun the film will have with the Bush administration's treatment of foreign prisoners. "I don't think the movie has anything to say politically. It just uses the current political climate to make vagina jokes.'