Doh: Garret Collins on the IE-rant mailing list points out a notable 'oops' moment in Sky News Ireland's new promo:
(Original here.)
Category: Uncategorized
Funny: Here's the
Daily Show
segment with Scott Richter (WMV, 9.8MB).
Just ignore the lame subtitles added by whoever encoded the file... the rest of it's seriously funny! 'Clitorious', indeed.
Update! 2004-04-13: thanks to Lisa Rein, there's now a 10MB Quicktime .mov version, sans unfunny subtitles. I'd strongly suggest downloading that instead.
Patents: There's a good discussion over at Joi Ito's weblog on software patents.
Unfortunately, there's a persistent, and popular, fallacy that crops up quite frequently in these discussions, and does so here in the comments:
'much of the processing of patents has been, to use understatement, deficient. An invention that is 'silly or obvious' will likely not pass the approrpiate legal test - if this test is applied by people who understand the inventive technology .... while I agree with most of your observations about deficiencies, I fail to see the logic in your solution (to simply outlaw these kinds of inventions).'
So, what the commenter is saying is that the patenting of software and business methods would be acceptable, if only the 'inventive bar' was raised so that trivial patents were not granted.
The problem with this is that:
- it ignores the fundamental problem with these kinds of patents, which is
that they patent ideas instead of physical inventions.
A parallel would be to allow the patenting of plot-lines in fiction, meter in poetry, or combinations of ingredients and cooking methods in recipes. These are all ideas, transformed into output 'products' by performing them as input on a set of hardware (books, cooking equipment), in the same way as software patents and business method patents are abstract ideas that operate on input, generating output, when implemented on a CPU. So, should they be patentable, too?
Patenting of physical designs is fundamentally different from patenting of abstract ideas in one key way. Physical designs must function correctly under real-world physics, and this requires extensive up-front design and prototyping, before they can be turned into mass-produced products.
Abstract ideas can be developed mentally, and the up-front work required before the idea can be put down on paper is trivial by comparison.
Consider these EPO patents: EP0807891 (Sun's 'shopping cart' patent) or EP0689133 (Adobe's 'tabbed palette window' patent). The up-front work required to devise these applications is trivial to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of UI design; the hard part appears to be writing the legalese, and I understand the patent lawyers take care of that part. ;)
Compare with US patent D0450164, a design patent for a Dyson washing machine. The level of detail, and extensive specifications, is massive, and it's clear a lot of work had gone into the process before the patent application was filed.
In addition, the commenter assumes that extensive prior art searches really do take place. From what I've heard from patent applicants, and from what I've observed in the range of granted software patents, this is cursory at best, and generally performed by the patent lawyer and the examiner, not the applicant themselves.
I've even observed a few patents where prior art, cited in the patent, implemented exactly what was claimed!
Toys:
![My Breedster profile](http://breedster.drunkmenworkhere.org/members/24872.png"
width="64)
Argh, I've been infected by the Breedster STD!
Apparently, though, there's a way around it through reincarnation, or -- rumour has it -- through touching Asriel, the bug with the power to heal.
In the meantime, paranoia reigns, and this time of crisis has brought out the worst in some bugs:
It's an interesting piece of emergent net-art, if you ask me, but the STD is pissing me off. (it's itchy!)
Literature: Ulysses:
The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
-- Mkgnao!
-- O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
-- Milk for the pussens, he said.
-- Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
-- Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
-- Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.
mrkrgnao.com is available ;)
EVoting: I didn't realise it, but the Open Voting Consortium's 'EVM2003' e-voting system looks excellent. Here's the key point: it produces printed ballots, unlike the DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) systems. Those are what's counted, and those are what the voter verifies. And it's open-source, too, so the source is available.
Here's a good intro from the Baltimore Sun:
Although it's far from a finished product, the system retains what's good about current electronic voting systems. It's voter-friendly, easier than older systems to administer, and accessible to blind voters without assistance.
It also addresses the concerns of today's critics. First, it uses open-source software that's available for public inspection - eliminating the secrecy that outrages critics of today's proprietary "black box" systems.
Second, the software is free and can run on a variety of computer platforms, which makes the system cheaper to acquire and maintain. Third, it creates a paper trail of printed ballots that can be counted by hand or machine in case of disputed elections - without compromising privacy for the blind.
Instead of printing a "receipt" that confirms a ballot cast electronically, it's based on the quaint notion that the best ballot is still a paper ballot. "We didn't see any reason to reinvent the wheel," said Fred McLain, the project's lead software developer.
Iraq: OK, I've been keeping quiet on the whole Iraq thing -- so far, it's pretty much turned into what I was suspecting would happen once GWB declared 'Mission Accomplished', and now there's lots more people saying what I previously felt wasn't being said. However, I've just heard something that really winds me up.
Richard Perle was being interviewed on BBC Radio 4's PM show about the torture at Abu Ghraib. He made a comment to the effect that 'at least the Abu Ghraib incidents weren't as bad as Saddam's use of the human shredder'.
First off, two wrongs do not make a right, and the neocons needs to stop assuming that this is an excuse.
Secondly, the human shredder story is uncorroborated rumour from a single person in Northern Iraq, and no evidence has ever found to support it. All evidence points to the opposite.
But if we let it pass without debunking, this one's going to go down as 'history', alongside the 'babies thrown out of incubators' story from Gulf War I, and the 'bayoneted babies' story from 1914.
Patents: The Irish EU Presidency keeps on rolling.
FFII notes that 'this Wednesday, the Irish Presidency managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents directive, with only a few countries - including Belgium and Germany - showing resistance. (This 'compromise' is the most pro-patent text yet,) discarding all the amendments from the European which would limit patentability. Instead the lax language of the original Commission proposal is to be reinstated in its entirety, with direct patentability of program text fragments added as icing on the cake.'
'The proposal is now scheduled to be confirmed without discussion at a meeting of ministers on 17-18 May, unless one of the Member States changes its vote. In a remarkable sign of unity in times of imminent elections, members of the European Parliament from all groups across the political spectrum are condemning this blatant disrespect for democracy in Europe.'
Some quotes from MEPs about this behaviour:
- Daniel Cohn-Bendit, chairman of the Greens/EFA Group: 'The national patent officials in the Council do not want "harmonisation" or "clarification". They merely want to secure the interests of the patent establishment. If they don't get what they want, they simply bury the directive project and try to find other ways to get around the existing law.'
- Anne Van Lancker, a Belgian MEP of the Socialist group: 'the current Council proposal was written behind closed doors by patent office administrators.'
- Piia-Noora Kauppi, Finnish MEP of the European People's Party: 'the Council is not taking the will of Europe's elected legislators into account.'
- Pernille Frahm, Danish member and Vice-Chairwoman of the GUE/NGL group: 'The patent administrators in the Commission and Council are abusing the legislative process of the EU.'
- Bent Hindrup Andersen (MEP, DK, EDD): 'The approach of the Commission and Council in this directive is shocking. They are making full use of all the possibilities of evading democracy that the current Community Law provides.'
- Johanna Boogerd-Quaak (MEP, NL, ELDR): 'the Irish Presidency has buckled under the interests of American Companies. A handful of big American Companies may actually profit from software patents, but it is a very bad deal for innovation in European SMEs. Additionally, the Council is showing contempt for parliamentary democracy. We must make sure that after the elections there will again be a majority in the European Parliament that is willing to show its teeth.'
Amazingly, the Council proposal documents aren't even being released to the public, 'due to the sensitive nature of the negotiations and the absence of an overriding public interest'; the FFII got hold of them via a leak.
There's still a chance that this can be reversed; this still needs to be confirmed at the Competitiveness Council of Ministers on 17-18 May. This isn't a dead cert just yet. As a result, FFII are proposing more demonstrations and another 'net strike'.
It's unclear whether writing to anyone will make a difference, at least for people in Ireland, however; everything I've read seems to indicate that our representatives on the EU Competitivity Council are not on our side.
Specifically, the only names I can find regarding this Council are Mary Harney, pro-business, anti-regulation right-wing leader of the Progressive Democrats and 'President-in-Office' of this committee; and the staff of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment's Intellectual Property Unit.
(Of course, Harney at least can always be voted out at the next elections, and I'd strongly suggest anyone working in the field bear that in mind if this gets passed!)
News:
Newseum: Today's Front Pages (Flash map view). A great site;
the best thing about it is, a double-click on each newspaper's
'dot' will pop up their front page as a larger image in a new
window, and give you a URL for a full-page PDF file.
Best of all, those full-page PDF links update every day with that day's front page... for example, these are eminently bookmarkable:
Excellent!
A bit like The Guardian's Digital Edition, but a whole lot cheaper and simpler.
EVoting: No ducking the f*ing question . . . did he say it? (Irish Independent) (reg req'd, see bugmenot):
A direct transcription of Mr (Michael) Smith's comments reads: "Let them, f* it, we'll say no more - we'll say no more."
Given the barrage of taunts he was facing in the Dail at the time, it is quite plausible - and in context - if the 'eff it' is replaced in the sentence by 'duck it'.
The Opposition was continually interrupting Mr Smith when he was trying to put a brave face on the Government's squandering of EUR 52m on e-voting. Ill at ease and clearly keen to avoid the onslaught from the Opposition, the minister seemed to know he was on a hiding to nothing.
Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, who has made baiting Michael Smith a career work-in-progress, was pursuing his quarry with noticeable effect. Mr Smith's eyes narrowed as his mouth tightened in frustration, he turned to address his frontbench colleagues, and uttered the sentence that has turned him from Tipperary choirboy to bad-boy rapper.
It seems that the F-word isn't specifically prohibited in the Dail -- "the 'Salient Rulings of the Chair, Second Edition', the book which governs behaviour in the Dail, doesn't specifically forbid the use" of the word. It does, however, apparently prohibit the words "brat, buffoon, chancer, communist, corner boy, fascist, gurrier, guttersnipe, hypocrite, rat, (and) scumbag." ('corner boy'?)
Patents: I've just come across Tim Oren's page on the Unisys GIF patent furore of 1994-5. Tim used to be VP of 'Future Technology' at CompuServe.
The GIF furore, in case you missed it, was one of the most far-ranging software patent debacles to date. Here's what happened...
Compuserve was one of the biggest online services at the time. In 1987 they'd created GIF, an efficient image file format, for public use, with a very liberal license. As a result, everyone and their dog wrote software to read and write GIF files (including myself ;).
GIF, like many other tools of the time, used the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) file compression scheme, which had been widely published without any indication that it was considered proprietary. LZW was pretty much the de-facto standard for file compression in the early 90s, in the same way that 'gzip' is nowadays.
However -- 7 years later, in 1994, Unisys suddenly announced that they had filed for, and eventually received, a patent on the LZW algorithm. As Tim wrote at the time, this was a 'submarine' patent. (Unisys had owned that patent since 1985, and pursued hardware licenses -- but all and sundry believed that the patent didn't cover software-only implementations.)
Unisys shook downbrought an infringement suit against
Compuserve, who had published the GIF standard and implemented it widely
in their software. Compuserve had 'no recourse but to settle'.
(Interestingly, it appears that at the time, Unisys seemed to think that GIF decoders needed licenses as well -- popular thinking nowadays is that only GIF encoders need licensing, but Unisys didn't think so at that stage at least.)
There is a happy ending -- thankfully, free software saved the day. ;)
As Tim writes, Thomas Boutell, Jean-loup Gailly and others came up with PNG; Jean-loup and Mark Adler wrote GZIP; and LZW was consigned to the dustbin of unusable technology for most new projects. Old projects, of course, had to go through some redesign pains to achieve the same goal.
BTW, it's worth noting that, even though the Unisys patent has expired, it's still not safe to dust off LZW. GNU (and others) believe that there's another patent filed on the same algorithm independently by -- guess who -- IBM, which doesn't expire until 11 August
- The thoroughly-competent USPTO strikes again ;)
The lesson: be careful when implementing published standards. Nowadays, the IETF requires that contributors disclose 'the existence of any proprietary or intellectual property rights in the contribution that are reasonably and personally known to the contributor'. But in this case, the patent was owned by another body, Unisys, and the contributor (CIS) didn't know that, so that wouldn't have helped.
So, the real lesson: Just Say No to software patents ;)
Television: Tony Bowden: BBCtorrent? 'Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet.' I have my fingers firmly crossed here. This could be really excellent news. Of course, not being located in the UK could make it not-so-easy to actually watch them from here, but the underlying thinking is really cool.
Tech: LayerOne. Weekend conf in LA, with Danny O'Brien -- think I might just tag along!
Patents: Posting this here so I can find it in future. Here's a /. comment saying 'if it becomes impossible to safely develop software in the US and EU due to patents, innovation will move to India and China'. This isn't quite true anymore -- my response, noting the Brazil/Glaxo/AZT case.
Europe: Given the Irish EU Presidency's recent passing of the IP Enforcement Directive and the second attempt to get the Software Patents directive through using the EU Council of Ministers, is it really appropriate for Microsoft to "contribute" to the Irish EU Presidency?
MS reportedly see software patents as a very important part of their strategy to deal with open source, as they noted way back in 1998 in the leaked Halloween I document.
MS is reportedly applying for 10 new patents a day (or is it per week? eWeek can't decide. anyway.)
It's pretty clear that MS want to 'de-commoditize' open standards, using software patents; they said so in the Halloween doc. Their XML Word-processing patent, which claims to patent the use of two open standards (XML and XSD) in a word-processing file format, is a great example of locking up an open standard as a patented, proprietary format.
As a result, they'd have a vested interest in helping the EU Presidency to decide that software patents should be legalised in the EU. A more conspiracy-minded type than myself might read something into their 'contributions' accordingly ;)
Now, it could be all touchy-feely niceness from MS. This eWeek article quotes David Kaefer, Microsoft's director of business development for intellectual property:
According to ... Kaefer, "We'll make our IP available to all comers, open-source or not." Kaefer added that Microsoft isn't focused on what garage-shop developers are doing ...
Sounds lovely, except it didn't happen in this case, where MS threatened an open-source developer with patent litigation:
Today I received a polite phone call from a fellow at Microsoft who works in the Windows Media group. He informed me that Microsoft has intellectual property rights on the ASF format and told me that, although I had reverse engineered it, the implementation was still illegal since it infringed on Microsoft patents. ... At his request, and much to my own sadness, I have removed support for ASF in VirtualDub 1.3d, since I cannot risk a legal confrontation.
eVoting: Success! The use of e-voting systems for the June elections in Ireland has been abandoned, after a severely critical report from the Commission on Electronic Voting. Take a look at the report here. Some bits:
- They particularly do not like the continual revision of the software, noting the 'large number of new versions of the software since the original ... review' and 'the fact that new versions of the software continue to be issued in the run-up to the June elections'.
- 'as the software version proposed for use at the forthcoming elections is not as yet finalised, it is impossible for anyone to certify its accuracy'. (my emphasis)
- They were not given access to 'the full source code'.
- They found a bug! 'certain of the tests performed at the request of the Commission identified an error in the count software which could lead to incorrect distributions of surpluses'.
- 'experts retained by the Commission found it very easy to bypass electronic security measures and gain complete control of the hardened PC, overwrite the software, and thereby in theory to gain complete control over the count in a given constituency'.
- And they raised the pre-arranged-transfer-pattern hack: 'publication of ballot results in full is a valuable aid in checking the accuracy of the results but this can in theory reveal deliberate voter signatures of low-preference votes which could allow voters to identify themselves in a context of corruption or intimidation'.
The use of VVAT, and changes to the counting procedures to remove randomisation, was outside the terms of reference, unfortunately, so it's not totally over yet. But I can't see the government getting away with re-introducing e-voting without VVAT now.
Finally, the opposition political parties are calling on the Minister to resign.
I've got to say -- nice work to all the concerned citizens who've achieved this, despite the government's continual stonewalling and secrecy.
Spam:
CNN: First four charged under 'can spam' law:
Court documents in the landmark case in Detroit describe a nearly inscrutable puzzle of corporate identities, bank accounts and electronic storefronts in one alleged spam operation.
At one point, investigators said, packages were sometimes delivered to a restaurant, where a greeter accepted them and passed them along to one defendant.
Detroit Free Press: 4 Oakland men cited in 1st U.S. spam case:
The four are accused of secretly commandeering computers that forward e-mail for some of the nation's biggest corporations -- including Ford Motor Co. -- to send millions of junk messages advertising herbal supplements, diet patches and sexual enhancement pills and products.
Other unwitting companies and agencies whose computers were used include Unisys Corp., Amoco Corp., the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and the U.S. Army Information Center, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit on Wednesday. .....
Unraveling the trail of spam took four months. Berg said that because of the use of proxy servers, trying to trace the spam back to the original sender was difficult. .....
In Karlsruhe, Germany, an Internet security expert and activist named Anders Henke runs what he calls a "proxy pot," a system that simulates a mail proxy but doesn't actually forward mail. It sits on the Internet, looking vulnerable to the sophisticated scanning software used by spammers to sniff out open proxies.
Starting in early January, the complaint says, Henke's proxy pot intercepted 5 million attempts from computer accounts linked to the Michigan men.
Mail: I've been playing around with GMail a bit more recently. They've fixed the issues they had with Firefox and keyboard control, and it is nice.
Threading: since I plan to bother a few open-source MUA developers ;), I've written up a thorough analysis of their 'conversation' model, with its 'collapsable history', archive-not-delete approach, etc. Take a look, if you're curious.
HTML: one feature that no-one's commented on, is that GMail does not create HTML mail -- all mail composed through their composer is sent as text/plain only.
This is very interesting, because it suits me just fine. HTML mail causes so many more problems than it solves, especially when full-featured web browser components are used to display it, IMO. I get to see the security exploits this enables, every day in my anti-spam work.
But it's also very significant that nobody else has commented on it -- nobody misses it!
Phantom Labels: another interesting thing I've noted: sometimes a mail will appear in your Inbox with a 'spam' label, even though you've never defined one. It's not in the 'Spam' folder; it's in your inbox.
Aaron has a good theory on what this is, and I think he's right -- he suggests it's when ' the two emails are in a conversation (same subject); one is marked as spam, one isn't. So the conversation (which is what appears in your inbox) gets two tags: Spam, and Inbox. So when viewing the list it looks like it gets the Spam tag.'
Also, while I'm here -- details on LiveJournal's distributed filesystem, MogileFS, which apparently 'will be open source'. Link via acme.
Politics: FFII reports that the 'IPR Enforcement Directive', the law proposed to deal with 'IPR infringement' by the wife of the CEO of Vivendi Universal, has just been approved by the EU Council.
Another glorious moment of digital cluelessness by the Irish presidency. But then, it had already been passed by the parliament. Reminder: that page lists the Irish MEPs and how they voted on a key amendment, which would have inserted safeguards so that 'surprise raids ... in the middle of the night by private security firms, on the flimsiest evidence' would not be possible.
It's now done in Europe. Next step is to deal with it when the member state governments implement it (which has to happen by June 2006).
Language: So, here's a word worth noting -- 'Neverendum'. This Guardian article notes:
(Quebecois politician Mario Dumont's) meteoric ascent is a sign of how weary voters in the French-speaking province have become about what has been dubbed the 'neverendum referendum', the debate over whether Quebec should become a country. It has dominated Quebec politics for three decades.
It looks like Ireland's ever-recurring referenda (motto: 'if at first the Government fails to get their desired result, try, try again') have driven the word into usage over there too, judging by this Irish Family Planning Association press release:
'The idea of holding another pro-life neverendum is clearly ludicrous and serves only to distract from the daily reality of Irish Abortion.'
And there's even a song, referring to the Nice referendum:
'The Government should not patronise us but should respect the views of the people,' he said. Or, as he puts it in verse, 'What part of our No don?t they understand?'
Ireland: So on Saturday last, Pat Kenny, the host of the Late Late Show (Ireland's longest-running chat show) had Aileen O'Carroll on to talk about the Dublin Grassroots Network's planned May Day march.
The Gardai have been doing their damnedest to block the march, gaining power to deploy armed police, and in turn, the PR big guns have been deployed in force to get scare stories printed, with the tabloid journos utilizing their considerable wiles in the process.
So, it's culminated in an appearance on the Late Late for Aileen. By all accounts, it went very well.
Apparently, another great moment of reported hilarity was a lengthy discussion between Pat Kenny, the tabloid journalist, and a 'security expert' as to whether there would be 'agent provocateurs' present. It seems all agreed there might just be. One wonders if they thought to look up the word beforehand:
Agents provocateurs are also used in the investigation of political crimes. Here, it has been claimed that the provocateurs deliberately seek to incite ineffective radical acts, in order to foster public disdain for the political group being investigated; and to worsen the punishments its members are liable for. Within the United States the COINTELPRO program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had FBI agents posing as political radicals in order to disrupt the activities of political groups the U.S. government found unacceptably radical. The activities of agents provocateurs against political dissidents in Imperial Russia was one of the grievances that led to the Russian Revolution.
Patents: The pro-software-patent lobby has frequently stated that TRIPS -- the Treaty on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), signed on 1993-12-15 as a constituting document of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) -- requires that software be patentable. For example, here's one from the International Chamber of Commerce:
ICC believes that the directive should follow current practice in the EPO and a number of EU member states and make it clear that computer program products can be claimed. To disallow such claims in the directive would create great legal uncertainty for holders of such patents already granted. Prohibiting product claims would also render enforcement of patents difficult and raise questions with respect to TRIPS compliance. TRIPS requires patents not only to be available, but also to be 'enjoyable' in all areas of technology.
Well, it actually appears that the treaty may state exactly the opposite! Christian Beauprez, a UK-based consultant, has taken a closer look at the details, and come up with this:
TRIPS Article 10.1, 'Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).'
WIPO Copyright Treaty Article 4, 'Computer programs are protected as literary works within the meaning of Article 2 of the Berne Convention. Such protection applies to computer programs, whatever may be the mode or form of their expression'.
This includes the execution or processing of a program, as demonstrated in the EEC software copyright Directive 1991, 'the permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program by any means and in any form, in part or in whole. Insofar as loading, displaying, running, transmission or storage'
They also stipulate that exceptions to exclusive rights of authors are to be limited to 'special cases' which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and cannot be prejudicial to the author's rights. (e.g. the rights to sell,rent,broadcast,give away,translate, and generally enjoy.).
... Authors cannot own underlying ideas, but inventors can as part of their 'invention'. When the field of software (aka data processing) is opened up to 'inventors', they can block authors from exploiting their works on the grounds that they own the 'underlying ideas'. Therefore this is prejudicial to the rights of authors and illegal under all these Treaties.
There's lots more at Christian's site. FFII, one of the main anti-software-patenting players in Europe, have agreed that this is a key point in their TRIPS analysis:
In summary it can be said that the European patent establishment is 1. refusing to clarify and concretise the meaning of the TRIPs treaty; 2. wrongly equating the TRIPs treaty with 'US practise', using threats of alleged TRIPs-incompatibility for purposes of fostering Fear, Uncertainty and Distrust (FUD); 3. trying to impose a sui generis software patent regime on Europe which is incompatible with the TRIPs treaty.
Spam: Anne Mitchell on GMail's spam filtering -- sounds like her results are actually worse than mine were. But the ads worked well:
... just today, in an email from Mrs. Nwakama Ani, the wife of the late James Ani, a farmer in ZImbabwe, asking me to please help her to export $50million dollars which her late husband amassed, Gmail's Adsense very thoughtfully offered me 'Cheap airline tickets from the USA to Zimbabwe'. You know, just in case I want to go over there and help her personally.
Anne's spam weblog looks like good stuff -- I've added it to the blogroll...
Art: Machine Molle bill themselves as 'post-production', but I suspect that's understating their work -- their site has Flash-playable copies of their videos for Royksopp's 'Remind Me', Air's 'Electronic Performers', and a recent ad for Areva, a Canadian power company. All are simply amazing. Go take a look. (link via Joe)
Code: A very good intro to Bloom Filters at perl.com by Maciej Ceglowski.
Strikes me as something that might be very applicable to the SpamAssassin auto-whitelist...
Net: So, it looks like closed-group filesharing will be appearing in several more implementations soon. NTK writes this week, 'the big new (yet old) killer app this year is going to be a some dinky little program that lets you easily and selectively share individual files with groups and sub-groups of your friends.'
It's interesting to see this -- it's been several years in the offing. So far, there seems to be two main angles: secure collaboration in a private workgroup, and private filesharing in a closed group, defined socially (I've taken to calling this the 'playgroup' ;).
Groove is an example of the 'workgroup' idea. However, to my mind it's been crippled by a strict one-platform policy, and possibly because it's proprietary, commercial software. Still, nice idea.
Several MS researchers helped kickstart the 'playgroup' idea with this
paper: The Darknet and
the Future of Content Distribution. Clay Shirky's
thoughts.
WASTE is the classic implementation of a 'playgroup' darknet, sadly killed off due to ownership issues. NTK state that it 'was too crypto-tastic to succeed', but I don't see that -- it was actually excellent software; in particular, its entirely-decentralised and public-key-crypto-based architecture worked surprisingly well in practice, even with NAT, firewalls and all that problematic stuff.
More of the up-and-coming projects -- at least the ones that intend to take heed of 'playgroup' needs -- need to take cues from this app. The only negative in their approach is that the 'gating' of new members is too relaxed; all it takes is for one existing member to accept them into the group, their public key is flooded out to all, and pretty much everyone is set to accept the new key by default.
Robert Kaye has written about his thoughts on how this all should work in this ETCON presentation and this O'Reilly Network article. I'm not sure that a loosely-coupled SSH-based system is easily deployable, though; IMO an 'all-in-one' app is easier to get installed and deployed.
iFolder is Novell's new tool in development. This sounds pretty interesting, although it seems very strongly workgroup-oriented, as does Foldershare, a new Windows-only app from some 'ex-AudioGalaxy staffers', apparently.
Both operate by using some kind of file-sync algorithm, along the lines of rsync or Unison, to synchronise multiple copies of a dir across a network. (Here's hoping it's up to the standard of Unison.) So very large collections will be duplicated throughout the net -- which may actually be quite cool for backups, but strikes me as bad news for users on slow links.
And finally, there's Clevercactus Share -- this sounds interesting, is cross-platform, and is now in beta, apparently. Haven't seen it, though ;)
So far, techie details on the internals of the latter three systems are scant; it'll be interesting to see how heavily they tilt towards the 'workgroup', how well they deal with firewalls and NAT, the extent of crypto use, etc. But nice to see more software entering the field...
Web: doing my bit for PageRank: jew.
Mail: I've dusted off my old e-mail usability wishlist, made a couple of changes to reflect the current situation now that GMail has implemented some of them, and Wikified the page.
There's still a couple that I think would be valuable, so anyone looking at new usability ideas for email is welcome to take a look ;)
Update: greetings, visitors from 2006! Please pay no attention to these figures, they're from 2004, and both GMail and SpamAssassin have undergone major changes since those days. Historical interests only.
So, I set up a .forward to forward all my personal mail to GMail to see how it coped with my spam load, and compared it against the personal SpamAssassin install I'm running these days. Here's the results:
- test start: Mon Apr 12 15:50:39 PDT 2004
- test end: Tue Apr 13 18:26:45 PDT 2004
- total spam messages received by both during the test: 210
- total ham messages received by both during the test: 528
The SpamAssassin results:
- true positives: 189
- false positives: 0
- false negatives: 21
- true negatives: 528
- FP%: 0.00%
- FN%: 10.00%
The GMail results:
- true positives: 144
- false positives: 7
- false negatives: 66
- true negatives: 521
- FP%: 1.32%
- FN%: 31.42%
So, not too hot. But there are extenuating circumstances! ;)
- The GMail false positives were not 'typical' mail, whatever that is -- all of them were Mailman 'administration required' messages regarding spam in Mailman mailing list queues. I'd only be annoyed if I was a GMail user administrating Mailman lists. And it turns out there's a bug in current dev SpamAssassin that now does the same thing...
- presumably, GMail allows some element of per-user probabilistic classifier training -- if so, some 'move to Inbox' might also sort those out quite quickly, I'd guess.
- GMail seems to be a four-phase classification system. Messages can either go into: 1. the inbox, 2. the spam box, 3. the inbox with a little green 'Spam' indicator, or 4. the spam box with a little green 'Inbox' indicator. Not sure what the latter two do, but they may indicate some level of 'unsure' as per spambayes; worth noting that most of the FNs in the Inbox did not get the green 'Spam' indicator beside them, though.
- I used a .forward to bounce the traffic over. So if GMail includes spam-evasion at the SMTP level, along with whatever content-filtering and probabilistic classification they're using, they wouldn't get the benefits of that.
- SpamAssassin has the benefit of some user configuration; I'd got a couple of my spamtrap addresses blacklisted in the SpamAssassin config, and my Bayes databases have been trained using SpamAssassin's autolearning.
- this is all really unscientific, and it's a really small sample ;)
Surprisingly, all the SpamAssassin mailing list traffic discussing spam, throwing around spammy URLs and phrases, didn't get caught, however; probably because the volume of spammy phrases in those is less than in the Mailman admin stuff.
Web: Following Anil Dash's lead, here's a few non-me Justins found via images.google.com:
Spam: Bram shares a spam-filtering tip -- 'most of the viruses I get have a Message-Id tacked on by the local mailserver. A little bit of messing with procmail and suddenly my junk mail level is under control.'
This is what the SpamAssassin rule MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT does. It gets:
4.432 6.7680 0.0560 0.992 0.94 3.67 MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT
6.7680% of spam is hit, but so is 0.0560% of ham mail -- which makes it 99.2% accurate. By default in 2.6x, it gets a score of 3.67 points.
There's a lot of divergence between people's corpora -- for instance, I currently have no ham mails that hit this, so it's 100% accurate for my current mail collection; but some other people have an 80% hit-rate.
This is because some large-scale legitimate mass-mailers -- for no apparent reason -- also omit the Message-ID when they send the message across the internet. This isn't quite a contravention of RFC 2822, but that RFC strongly recommends using the header:
Though optional, every message SHOULD have a 'Message-ID:' field.
(see RFC 2119 for what 'SHOULD' means -- it's a strong recommendation.)
The moral for legit senders: make sure you read the RFCs before you start sending SMTP; otherwise you'll look like a spammer.
The moral for spamfilter developers: watch out for the legit bulk mail senders; some of them do really bizarre things with SMTP. ;)
Spam: Lisa Rein has captured the Daily Show's segment on spam -- 'Email Trouble' -- Rob Courddry interviewing Scott Richter. (direct link to the 10MB Quicktime movie).
This vidcap leaves out the unfunny subtitles -- and it's on archive.org, so at least you'll be chewing up non-profit bandwidth instead of someone's personal-site bandwidth ;) If you haven't seen it yet, go ahead and download it; it's well funny.
(link found via Spamblogging.)
TV: from the #tvtorrents FAQ: 'Wildfeeds' are 'a transmission by the network to distribute the episode before it airs around to the tv relay stations. You need to be in the correct location and have a large satellite dish in order to receive them.'
Word for the day!
Spam:
Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O'Brien. A great article from the
'Spam and the Law' conference. 'This is why people such as Richter are
appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an
increasingly criminal lifestyle.'
Also spam-related: Code Fish Spam Watch, which lists and dissects phishing attacks, in great detail. Some of those trojans are exceptionally sophisticated -- such as this trojan targetting Barclays online banking, which actually takes screenshots of a CAPTCHA-style login protocol. Scary!
Patents: Disastrous for European software developers, that is.
It looks like Ireland's EU Council Presidency is pushing through some nasty stuff on behalf of the European Patent Office. FFII says:
On all points where substantial controversy exists, the Council Working Party has taken the most hardline pro-patent view of all parties. They make patentability hinge on the word 'technical' and yet refuse to explain what that word means. They have refused the interoperability exemption which even the Legal Affairs Committee had accepted. They have rejected the freedom of publication. They are insisting on making programs directly claimable, something which even Arlene McCarthy and the Commission did not advocate.
Nokia's Patent Department is leading the PR push:
The (Nokia call-for-support) letter calls on ministers to drop their objections, and to support a draft text issued by the Irish Presidency on March 17th: 'All of Europe's innovators, including individual inventors, small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), as well as large multinational companies, require patents to protect their inventions, provide incentives to undertake research and development in Europe, and to promote licensing and technology transfer', claims the letter.
'Nokia doesn't seem to be counting Opera among the European innovators', comments Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software Inc, an innovation leader in the web browser market and producer of much of the software used in Nokia's mobile phones.
Note that it's the Patent Department of Nokia, not necessarily Nokia's top brass, pushing this -- here's a relevant anecdote from FFII:
The patent officials never see the CEOs themselves, and when they appear in public, their thinking on patent matters may surprise the audience. Last week Airbus CEO Peter Kleinschmidt was invited as a pro-patent speaker to a panel in Paris but then, during his speech, congratulated his co-panelist Michel Rocard for his important contributions to containing the expansion of the patent system, which, as he described in detail, was slowing down innovation at Airbus.
(The economic studies and the US' Federal Trade Commission both concur, incidentally. But it's pretty unlikely a patent lawyer will say the same thing in public ;)
On the other side, 15 MEPs have signed their own Call For Action which points out that 'patent professionals in various governments and organisations are now trying to use the EU Council of Ministers in order to sidestep parliamentary democracy in the European Union' and urges the Council to 'refrain from any counter-proposals to the European Parliament's version of the draft, unless such counter-proposals have been explicitely endorsed by a majority decision of the member's national parliament'.
Let's see if Ireland's presidency will do it the democratic way, or in a back-room deal, over all our heads...
Travel: I'm just back from a great road trip around Nevada and Arizona -- lots of fun was had, and I even came out $100 up on the blackjack!
In other travels, my mate Eoin recently visited Muff, Co. Donegal, and made sure to get a picture of the event.
Muff is well-reknowned as one of those towns with a silly name; the story goes that they even have a SCUBA diving club, called -- guess what -- "Muff Diving Club". Sadly, the reports are apparently greatly exagerrated. Eoin writes:
I have been hearing the story of the 'muff diving club' for the last 10 years, and now i can categorically state that its an urban legend. No such thing. There was a 'top muff' petrol station though where we picked up a few keyrings. The girl behind the counter was trying to give us all 200 keyrings left in the bag as she was so sick of muppets like us coming in for a laugh.
Pics: 
After nearly 2 years of
peripateticism, I've finally managed to track down my CD-ROMs of scans of
a select few of the pictures I took on the
round-the-world trip I took back in 2001-2002 (well, it wasn't quite
round-the-world, just Down Under and Asia, but who's counting).
Here they are:
And some highlights:
- A Thai guard dog in Chiang Mai
- Annapurna Base Camp
- a picturesque break on the ABC trail
- a buddhist stupa in Kathmandu
- Watching wild rhinos in Royal Chitwan National Park
- A Guinness sign towering over a square in Kathmandu
- The Taj Mahal
- A nice night shot of a busy Indian street
- A slightly bizarre drawing of the events of 9-11 on a ghat in Varanasi
- and Rambutans!
Politics: The massive opposition to e-voting without a VVAT by Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting and others, has clearly got Minister Martin Cullen thoroughly needled.
As John Lambe points out here, in the Dail on Wednesday he stated that ICTE are 'not experts in this field', 'have no expertise or international accreditation', and best of all, he has resorted to the 21st-century equivalent of calling ICTE 'reds under the bed' -- they are apparently 'linked to the anti-globalisation movement'. Here's a cut and paste from the online transcripts:
Mr. Bernard Allen, FG: Electronic voting is a good idea but this system has been badly thought through and public confidence has been badly shaken by a Government unwilling to listen to anyone but its own so-called experts. The Government has called the introduction of this system a step forward, a point reiterated by the Minister. I submit that it is a retrograde step based on insufficient knowledge on the use of technology. The Minister has a new toy and thought everyone would like it. They do not. The Irish Computer Society said: 'Any electronic voting system must include a paper-based voter-verified audit trail.' The Minister in his arrogance recently said these people were cranks and Luddites.
Mr. Bernard Durkan, FG: Are they cranks?
Mr. Martin Cullen, FF: They are linked to the anti-globalisation movement. The Deputy should check them out. They are all the same.
Mr. Allen: It is all a--
Mr. Cullen: If Fine Gael bases its policies on such people, it is no wonder it is in decline.
Mr. Durkan: The people concerned are computer experts.
Mr. Allen: We do not know what the Minister's policies are and where he stands on any matter.
Mr. Paul Kehoe, FG: The Minister should know more about policy having been a member of more than one party.
Mr. Allen: Irish technology experts have told the Government its system must include a paper-based voter-verified audit trail.
Mr. Cullen: They are not experts in this field.
Mr. Allen: The Minister has made a serious allegation about genuine people--
Mr. Cullen: They are not accredited to anything. They have no expertise or international accreditation.
(Interruptions).
Mr. Michael Ring, FG: Fianna Fáil are experts on everything. They have filled every tribunal in the country.
Mr. Allen: The Minister has come to this House and--
Acting Chairman (Jerry Cowley, Ind): Deputy Allen should direct his comments through the Chair.
Mr. Allen: The Chair should ask the Minister to cease interrupting.
Mr. Cullen: Such comments are pathetic. It is no wonder Fine Gael is in such a disorderly state.
Mr. Ring: Fianna Fáil are the experts.
Acting Chairman: I remind Members that this is not a Committee Stage debate. We are dealing with Second Stage and I ask Deputies to allow Deputy Allen to continue without interruption, please.
Mr. Allen: The Minister has vilified people who cannot protect themselves.
Mr. Durkan: Outside the House.
Mr. Allen: The Minister should withdraw the allegation against--
Mr. Cullen: I have not vilified them. I said they are not accredited--
Mr. Allen: The Minister said they are linked to the anti-globalisation movement and suggested we should check them out.
Mr. Cullen: Yes, they are.
Acting Chairman: Deputy Allen, please continue.
Mr. Allen: The Minister should withdraw that allegation against people who cannot protect themselves.
Mr. Cullen: I will not.
Acting Chairman: Deputy Allen, please continue.
Mr. Durkan: The Minister has cast aspersions on people outside this House. In accordance with Standing Orders--
Mr. Cullen: I think they are proud of their links.
Mr. Durkan: On a point of order, the making of such an allegation is not in accordance with the Standing Orders of this House. Perhaps the Minister would like to comment.
Acting Chairman: The Chair has ruled on that matter.
Mr. Durkan: With respect, the Chair has no authority to rule on this matter. Standing Orders apply.
Acting Chairman: That Chair has ruled on the matter.
Mr. Durkan: No, I am sorry, I do not agree. On a point of order, the Minister has cast aspersions--
Mr. Cullen: I paid them a compliment.
Mr. Durkan: The Minister has cast aspersions on people outside this House.
Mr. Cullen: They will regard my remarks as a compliment, a badge of honour.
Spam: Don't miss this account of the capture of a 419 scammer in mid-spam. Nice work, Steffen! (PS: I don't think eating a USB memory stick would do any good ;)
Antarctica: I'm obsessed with the wierd collision of out-of-control bureaucracy, strategic-interests-disguised-as-science, and normal life in a way off-normal place, that is the US Antarctic program. It's fundamentally a microcosm of what future space exploration bases will be like -- lots of high-faluting science talk, quite a bit of 'making sure we have a strategic foothold' reality, and people getting on with life in one of the most amazing places they can.
Via MeFi, Sandwichgirl.com is a great journal site describing her life way down under -- full of great little tidbits like describing Antarctica as 'the island', ie. 'we are all taking bets to see how long it will be before he's kicked off the island'.
It's great, although thoroughly overloaded from all the attention right now.
File alongside Big Dead Place and The Symmes Antarctic Intelligencer -- highlight:
'Once you shelter one magic elf, you gotta shelter 'em all', says NSF Representative Jack Hjorth. 'I've seen it before. Pretty soon all science comes to a standstill and you're runnin' a magic elf halfway house.'
Patents: The FFII are suggesting a 10-day online 'net strike' to protest against the ongoing attempts to legalise software patenting in Europe.
The Commission and the Irish EU Council Presidency are pushing for unlimited patentability of software, heavily lobbied by multinationals and patent lawyers. They are ignoring the democratically voted decision of the European Parliament from 24 September 2003, which has the support of more than 300,000 citizens, 2,000,000 SMEs and dozens of economists and scientists.
As a result, I'm putting up a protest front page on these sites:
- this weblog
- my personal home page
- My software sites: EtText, WebMake, Sitescooper, Sitescooper Daily Scoops
If you support the actions of FFII, please join in, or even attend the in-person demonstration in Brussels! We need to make it clear that the small software developers of Europe do not support these undemocratic actions.
And finally, shame on the Irish EU Council presidency for supporting the EPO hook, line and sinker. Thanks, and I know who I'll be voting for in future...
Funny: EFFector Vol. 17, No. 11a April 1, 2004. Some pretty funny gems in this one: USPTO to Start Granting Indulgences, Microsoft Wins Patent for Software Industry Monopolization, and SCO to Sue Over Unauthorized Use of Earth's Resources:
Lindon, UT - On the heels of its campaign against users of the Free Software program Linux, the SCO Group today announced that it will begin a new round of lawsuits against users of other free resources, including fire, water, air and land.
'People think they can just use free things without paying for them,' said SCO CEO Daryl McBribe. 'This kind of 'socialism' is anti-American and a violation of the Constitution. It's up to corporations like SCO to crush that kind of idealism.'
Music: Ever wondered what the lyrics to Plastic Bertrand's classic belgopunk tune really said? (Apart from 'I am the king of the divan', that is.) Wonder no more. (...ok, maybe these are a bit more likely. 'Ey up!', indeed.)
Mail: Google Mail front page. It has MXes -- but they don't answer yet. No SPF record yet, either ;)
Funny: XCP - the XML Control Protocol 'is a drop in replacement for traditional Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. With the advent of XCP/IP, connection-oriented networking will finally move from the legacy environment of inscrutable bits and bytes to a structured, human-readable world relying upon XML. XCP is the first 4th Generation Protocol, or 4GP. It is designed for a networking environment that is very fast and very reliable - the Internet of today!'
Games: Katamari Damacy (roughly translated as 'Clumpsoul')
is a game where you roll around various landscapes, making a giant
ball of 'stuff'.
Here's a review. It looks like sheer genius; here's hoping
it gets a US/Euro release!
Mail: Google announces new mail service. This is not an April Fool's Day joke -- just terrible timing. ;) It's for real.
My thoughts:
- Privacy: 'we do not disclose your personally identifying information to third parties unless we believe we are required to do so by law or have a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to ... (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including, without limitation, the filtering of spam)'. They're going to build one hell of a spam-filtering corpus this way ;)
- A nice ToS clause: 'Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service.'
Perl: Maypole
- BeerDB. Maypole is a Struts-style web application framework by
Simon Cozens, and looks very nice. The number 1 attractive feature (compared to any Java MVC framework ;) is encapsulated in this tagline:
Maypole: if you're writing code, YOU'RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG.
If/when I wind up writing a web app sometime soon, I may just give this a try...
One thing I'd like to see is a CGI::Application-based Maypole module, for prototyping (and for low-overhead installs, where mod_perl is too much to install). Looks like it's well on the way.
Funny: Feds Cancel Flight on 'Psychic' Bomb Tip: an American Airlines flight was cancelled because of a tip-off from a self-reported psychic.
The purported psychic's call was 'unusual,' conceded Doug Perkins, local administrator for the federal Transportation Security Administration director.
'But in these times, we can't ignore anything. We want to take the appropriate measures,' he said.
Suuuuuuure.
Web: Slurpie - (another) distributed peer-to-peer downloading protocol (via HtP).
This looks pretty interesting; no special server is required, Slurpie can be used to download files from a HTTP/FTP server in a 'swarming' fashion similar to BitTorrent.
However, Slurpie does require a central server of its own, which it needs to 'know about' somehow in advance, and that server will then know who's downloading what. Not sure how you'd do that effectively; in this case, a .torrent-type file format that contains the 'main' file URL and a URL for the Slurpie server, might be more effective.
Funny: The Daily Show last night did an absolutely fantastic Rob Corddry segment with Scott Richter; sheer genius. Apparently, Scott is a 'high-volume email deployer', and spam is all the fault of the USPS, or something.
Don't miss it... here's hoping Lisa Rein digitizes it!
Patents: The pro-swpat lobby like to claim that software patenting will benefit EU-based SMEs and the economy, instead of benefitting large, US-based companies.
It's pretty trivial to show this up, however. Here's the figures, based on FFII's stats on EPO software patent applications by country of applicant (current as of 2003/11/15):
|
Country of applicant
|
Patents applied with EPO
|
|
| US | 22778 | 46.84% |
| (All EU countries combined) | 11855 | 24.38% |
| JP | 10580 | 21.76% |
| CA | 1074 | 2.21% |
| IL | 724 | 1.49% |
| AU | 525 | 1.08% |
| KR | 500 | 1.03% |
| SG | 95 | 0.20% |
| NZ | 73 | 0.15% |
| RU | 66 | 0.14% |
| (all remaining countries) | 357 | 0.73% |
So, a whopping 46.84% of the patent applications on file with the European Patent Office were registered by US companies, not local inventors; and only 24.38% of the patent applications were from EU-based companies.
Linux: Doc Searls will be speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2004 in Dublin. Apparently, he'll be discussing DIY-IT -- the 'real' Linux story ('how the demand side supplies itself'). That presentation is great -- strongly recommended.
(If you're in a hurry, just skip to the funny part.)
Patents: op-ed article in the Sydney Morning Herald about patents and US-Australia 'free trade' talks.
... The cost of fighting a patent litigation battle in the US has dropped considerably. "Claims are now actually decided by a judge and only about 3 per cent of cases go to trial," he says. "Therefore, costs have been limited dramatically. In most cases, costs are less than $US2 million." (jm: my emphasis)
The question remains as to how many small Australian technology companies can afford to put up that sort of money if they believe their patent has been infringed or, worse still, if they have been accused of infringing a patent. (jm: exactly! the playing field is tilted dramatically.)
...
Local software developer Jeremy Howard believes that the US-Australia free trade agreement legislation has the potential to stifle local development. Howard has created two software systems with global potential, a portable email product called Fastmail (jm: hooray Fastmail!) and an insurance-industry package called Profit Optimising System. He believes two particular provisions of the FTA could be devastating to local software development. One is the requirement for Australia to have legislation similar to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the other is the stringent enforcement of software patents.
"The (DMCA) legislation removes the ability to use reverse engineering to make products compatible with existing products," Howard says. "There are two negative effects of this. It reduces competition: effectively no one who writes software can be compatible with existing proprietary software. It's also bad for security and privacy: people won't be allowed to analyse protocols to see whether they're secure because that's considered reverse engineering. Thus, we see that this legislation will protect vendors from bad publicity as well as competition."
Howard considers DMCA as a serious threat to the local software industry, but he believes a potentially even greater threat from the FTA will be a requirement for Australia to stringently enforce software patents.
"Many US software companies have huge portfolios of patents," he says. "It costs millions to fight a (disputed) patent suit, so small companies will be forced to pay licence fees to patent holders or be shut down. This means that it will clearly not be practical for small software businesses to try to become established on the world stage. We'll be spending more time worrying about patents instead of innovating."
A very, very clueful article. Here's hoping EU-based journalists are taking notes! The data about software patents being of much greater benefit to US companies than local exporters is a big deal, so I'll write about that in the next posting.
Funny: The Guardian's got a new agony aunt -- Buck up! Ann Widdecombe's no-nonsense solutions to life's knotty problems.
My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn't be depriving them of anything. Am I right? (Name and address withheld)
(Ann's response -- best read in a shrill schoolmarmish tone...)
He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn't be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.
Also, overheard: '(European companies) employing US-based contractors these days is a shrewd business move due to the strength of the Euro -- America is like the India of Europe.'
Funny: Hooray for the International Jewish Conspiracy! They've come up with The De-Bapper -- de-baptize a fundamentalist Christian of your choice now, without their consent!
What brought this on? It seems the Mormons started it:
The Church of Latter-day Saints, a religious sect founded by a man who claimed to learn the word of God by putting his face in a hat, has been baptizing the dead, including up to several hundred thousand Jews. ... Jews to have been baptized include Menachem Begin, a former prime minister of Israel, diarist Anne Frank, and the Baal Shem Tov, the spiritual leader whose teachings form the basis for the Hasidic movement. ...
"Mormons baptize the dead using a practice known as proxy baptism, which allows a living person to stand in for the deceased," explains Yosef Shmidt, counter-Mormon intelligence specialist. "The process is slow, and requires a ceremony that includes complete immersion of the proxy in water. 'De-bapping' is done on a specially consecrated Macintosh G-4 computer, known as the Mac A/B. It's faster, and since you use fewer towels, better for the environment."
Top ten De-Baptism choices include Mel Gibson, 'S&M Film Director', and GWB, 'IJC Puppet'. Also worth a read over at the IJC:
IJC Yet to Choose US President: "The International Jewish Conspiracy's Government Oversight Committee have still not decided who they will install as America's next president ... The Keeper of the Silver Spoon, who has overseen George W. Bush's meteoric rise from AA reject to International Jewish Conspiracy puppet, fears his protege may be a one-hit wonder ... 'It's not that he said all Jews are going to hell. ... It's that every time he tries to think for himself, he gets it wrong. When we told him to screw the economy, we meant with his stupid tax cuts, where the rich would get the extra. Instead he pours it all into the desert."
And: href="https://web.archive.org/web/20040602215943/https%3A//www.internationaljewishconspiracy.com/articles/ijc_031208_lizard.html"> Are You a Giant Lizard? You'd Be Surprised!: "Conspiracy theorist David Icke has claimed that most members of the Illuminati (including some of the world's premier Cognoscenti here at the International Jewish Conspiracy) are, in fact, giant shape-shifting lizards called Draconians. Although Icke has singled out two Jewish families, the Rothschilds and the Bronfmans, the International Jewish Conspiracy's Medical Corps fears that other INJEWCON Members may be at risk." Read the article for some easy ways to tell ('when angry, do you hiss and climb the drapes?')
Software:
sourcefrog: arch rocks: mirroring. This is incredibly cool:
Finally, GNU Arch lets you do this. Anyone can mirror a public archive. In fact, several sites such as sourcecontrol.net have set up to just mirror all the open source software they can find. Others mirror just intermittently, as a backup in case a primary archive is lost.
What's more, because changesets are strongly GPG-signed, people using the archive can feel sure that they're getting the changes as the original author wrote them, without any accidental or intentional modifications.
BTW, that 'archive' -- in Arch-land, an archive is a source-code version control repository. In other words, if you want to track development work on a project, you take a private copy of the repository and sync up to every change as it is made remotely, in essence duplicating the central archive (although changes only go one way, obviously).
Then, if you have the privileges -- you can merge any changes you make on that archive back up to the central one.
Very cool. I really need to take some time to get into Arch.
Tools: a handy OpenOffice.org tip: when typing, you often want to emphasise a word with italics, bold, or underlining. Interestingly, OOo adds a nifty text-markup-influenced AutoFormat feature -- if you surround the word with asterisks, e.g.
I really *really* think you should foo
it'll convert on-the-fly to bold:
I really really think you should foo
I like it! It's much more natural than CTRL-B, CTRL-U etc. Only pity is that _underlines_ don't turn into italics -- I know that seems more logical, but nowadays, an underline means a hyperlink, and IMO the italic is more widely used for emphasis as a result.
Food: For some damn reason, it's impossible to get pork sausages here in southern CA. The only good ones I've had were at the Cat and Fiddle, an english pub in LA, who do really kick-ass all-day UK-style breakfasts.
However, it's been a while since I've been up there, and I've got a fierce hankering for a dacent brekkie -- one featuring sossies, rashers, and black pudding. However, some asking around has pointed me to FoodIreland.com, which has a fine range of proper food -- including what is recognisably a Full Irish Breakfast! (some readers may note the similarities to breakfasts in parts of the UK, but I'll insist on calling it a 'Full Irish', thank you very much.)
It also does Proper Tea (heavy on the Assam tips), Marmite, crisps and Jammie Dodgers. Quality!
But there are a couple of minor nits -- first off, it's excruciatingly expensive. But money's no object where a dacent brekkie is involved. Secondly, Lynx deodorant -- WTF? People are willing to pay extra for that stuff? And most importantly of all -- where are the King Crisps!?
Funny: According to a 'top Austrian doctor', picking your nose and eating it is good for you:
'Medically it makes great sense and is a perfectly natural thing to do. In terms of the immune system the nose is a filter in which a great deal of bacteria are collected, and when this mixture arrives in the intestines it works just like a medicine.
'Modern medicine is constantly trying to do the same thing through far more complicated methods, people who pick their nose and eat it get a natural boost to their immune system for free.'
Tech: ... nearly. The Sony Reader EBR-1000EP. 170 pixels-per-inch is a nice resolution, and in general it looks very cool, esp. considering the E-Paper aspects (ie. looks like paper, back-lighting not required, easier to read). However -- never mind that it's only available in Japan so far, even once it becomes available in the US, its pricing structure is moronic:
All three of the Impress Watch articles say it will cost around 40,000 yen - approximately $400 USD. And this is just for the reader, subscribing to the e-book service costs $5-10/month. They do, however, have the option of just purchasing single books for 350 yen, about $3.25.
Dammit -- I don't want e-books and their DRM and lock-in -- I just want a HTML viewer like Plucker or iSilo, so I can use Sitescooper!
Also, it's not yet foldable. Once I can fold up the reader into a little ball in my pocket, then fold it out again into an A4-sized 'page', I'll be a happy man.
Still, getting there -- let's hope they get a clue and kill off that DRM. Otherwise, I can't see myself buying one, even once the price comes down.
Funny: (in a geeky way): mentioned on LWN -- 'granted, drawing circles w/ GIMP is a bit like finding 2 + 2 by evaluating the integral of 2dx over the range 0..2.'
(jm: worth noting that the same applies for Photoshop, for that matter -- in this respect GIMP has emulated Adobe's 'you need to buy Illustrator to do that' attitude. That's really quite bizarre when you think about it. Wonder if GIMP 2.0 fixes that?)
Censorship: This is pretty funny -- a friend writes that SonicWall's 'Content Filter' has judged my home page and FOUND IT WANTING:
The URL http://jmason.org/ is currently rated as: category 4 - Pornography
w00t! It's true, I have some pretty hot pics up there -- the accuracy of their content filtering product amazes me!
Funny: Big Dead Place: 'This site is dedicated to Antarctica and to thinking about Antarctica.' It's also pretty funny, and full of meat for an Antarctic obsessive like me.
'The Thing' review: 'Common icons of Antarctic life are repeated throughout the movie with uncanny precision: spilled fuel; ubiquitous barrels; plentiful whisky; anti-intellectualism; resentment toward Norwegians being the first at Pole; general madness; obsession with generators; and black flags planted in the snow .... the most noteworthy deviation from actual USAP practices is that in the film everyone has a flamethrower. In the movie, fire is a tool against insidious dangers and is employed as an agent for the community against the threat of a larger hostile organism. In the actual USAP, employees are forbidden flamethrowers.'
Also -- 'The Finn's Tooth' -- looks like they took cocktail advice from Eric Rescorla! (link via MeFi.)
Tech: Excellent post from Colin Charles here:
Which brings us to an interesting point. Computers today are largely based on metaphors that the average urban bloke understands. Like we have a desktop, to represent our workspace. How do we transpose such an idea to someone in a rural area? What about a blinking cursor, in a language like Urdu that has no translation? They've resulted in calling it a 'firefly'!
That's taking Danny's 'eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm' comment even further...
Spam: Jon Udell: How to forge an S/MIME signature, and Liudvikas Bukys' take on the results: 'Jon Udell tries his hand at S/MIME signature forgery, revealing that PKI is not a panacea. A digital signature proves something. The proof is strong but the something is weak (if it just demonstrates that you clicked a few things to get a persona certificate).'
He then suggests two ways to use this info in useful ways:
The first is 'higher-class certificates (where certificate authorities demand more proof, and encode that fact in the certificate). But higher quality means harder to get and less actual deployment. And higher quality means more attractive target for theft of keys.'
In the anti-spam case, it also means that you trust the certificate provider to both (a) accept money from their customers to issue them certs, and (b) take away those certs from their own customers if they infringe by sending spam messages. This is the hard part. There's an active financial disincentive for a company to do this; the people who benefit (the end-users) are not their paying customers, whereas the people who get hurt (the infringers) are. Economics dictates that they water down the requirements, in order to maximise their profits -- making the system useless.
On the other hand we have: 'reputation systems. Of course, building robust reputation systems is not easy. Users may wish to have multiple sources of reputation information to fit their own definitions of good and bad behavior and how fast those judgments are made. It replays the whole DNS blacklist deployment. Some reputation systems may seem arbitrary and capricious. Others may be too slow or too tolerant. They are all lawsuit targets. Will there be too many to choose from?'
'zackly. An excellent illustration of how S/MIME or other PKI will not solve the spam problem, and we'll still have the same DNSBL situation as we have now (although hopefully working a lot better).
S/MIME may solve the forged-email problem, like SPF does -- however, like SPF it will still need to work with reputation systems to be usable as an anti-spam scheme.
Patents:
FFII: Conferences and 'Patent Riots' in Brussels 2004-04-14
: 'The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) calls
on its 50.000 European supporters and on 300.000 petition signatories,
including more than 2000 CEOs of European software companies, to take to
the streets in Brussels on April 14 and in national capitals around 1st
of May, and to temporarily block access to their websites, in protest
against new moves by the EU Council and Commission to legalise patents
on computerised calculation rules and business methods'.
Last year, the European Parliament voted to exclude software and business methods from patentability. Now, it appears the EU Council is secretly planning to push that through regardless -- so FFII are planning another round of protest for 2004-04-14.
In other news -- the European Patent Office and other pro-patent bodies have always insisted that the WTO Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) treaty required that software be patentable. However, this poster thinks not:
Article 10 of said treaty clearly states: a.. 'Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).'
This is the strange thing you see, the statement doesn't seem to mean that much on first glance. It is only when reading it closely that one realises that it does not simply say that 'computer programs are automatically copyrighted under the Berne Convention', it specifies they 'shall be protected as literary works'.
Literary works cannot be patented because they are not inventions. Indeed if literary works could be patented one would have to concede that books, screenplays, and music could be patented as well although according to my research there is no provision for this in law. We would also have to apply patent laws to these areas since we are not allowed, apparently under article 5 to restrict on the basis of the field of technology.
On reflection, it's actually a very interesting comparison. Like literary works, it's not the idea of what software does (the plot summary) that makes it valuable, it's all the fiddly details of its implementation (the full story). Hmm! Maybe TRIPS got that right after all...
Politics: 
Ed
Vielmetti has spotted these stencils around Ann Arbor -- I've seen 'em
around Irvine. The meme is spreading (and it's a great one): 'One-Term President' Stencils.
Social: 
LOAF
is 'a way to share your address book without abandoning your privacy.'
A nifty use of Bloom filters to share your address book in a one-way manner -- when you receive a mail, you can query your LOAF db to see if any of your correspondents previously corresponded with the sender; but they cannot look up the LOAF file to determine your correspondents, unless they know that correspondent's email address in advance.
This, BTW, would be a very good way to implement a 'Do-Not-Email' list -- although the other two problems with those still apply.
Interesting stuff -- although I wonder how acceptable the 4-8Kb MIME part overhead per message will be...
Computer: Argh. When I bought my laptop, I had no option but to buy it with Windows XP -- IBM doesn't seem to sell them any other way. (you can pay extra to buy it that way from EmperorLinux, but really, the main reason I wouldn't want it is to save money, I'm afraid.)
Anyway, so I kept the XP partition safe, and jumped through various hoops to keep it in one piece; after all, it had cost me money to pay for that Windows license, and you never know when I might need it to upgrade some firmware or whatever.
Well, after trying (twice) to upgrade some firmware -- the BIOS, namely, to get APM hibernation working -- and having XP crash on me both times, I left it for a bit.
That was a couple of weeks ago. I just tried to check some files on the /windows partition -- and something has scribbled all over the FAT32 sectors. Rien de Windows plus. :(
(Prime suspect right now is the Phoenix BIOS 'suspend-to-disk' tool -- I just looks flakey, and I know it goes in and tweaks with some kind of undocumented BIOS wierdness. I bet anything it's told the BIOS that the first FAT32 partition was a suspend partition, and one of the failed susp-to-disk attempts scribbled all over it.)
I suppose I'll probably reinstall at some stage... if only to get this bloody BIOS upgraded and suspend-to-disk working!
Names: Popbitch sez 'Microsoft are just about to launch their new Windows Server 2003. The project manager who oversaw its development? Todd Wanke.'
Sure enough, it's true. But that's not all he did -- he was also involved with the Windows 2000 Customer Love Team. No smutty jokes please, I'm being perfectly serious here...
Spam: DNS blocklists are a well-established, low-latency way to query a database of IP addresses for info. If you need to query a database over the internet quickly and in a connectionless manner, they're ideal.
Declude have a page called how ip4r (DNSBL-style) DNS lookups work, which describes the general method:
- input: the DNS zone for the DNSBL (e.g. 'sbl.spamhaus.org')
- input: IP address to query about (e.g. '1.2.3.4')
- perform A, or TXT query to retrieve data: 'dig
4.3.2.1.sbl.spamhaus.org. TXT' - output: data (waves hands... not important right now)
All well and good, if all you have is a single IP address as input. But what if you want to attach more query parameters -- such as your user ID, or some numeric value to set a 'sensitivity' level, like the SpamAssassin threshold system?
Easy-peasy: encode it in the looked-up hostname. Assuming you want to pass
a user ID number of '9583495' and a threshold value of '7' along with
the query above, here's one way to do it:
- 'dig threshold.7.uid.9583495.4.3.2.1.sbl.spamhaus.org. TXT'
Note that to avoid charset issues, marshalling into an '-a-z0-9.' namespace is probably safest. Of course, a dynamic DNS server is required to process these. But the protocol itself, at least, will support it.
(Just brain-dumping here so I have an URL to point to in future, and to get it into archive.org etc...)
History: 
Megalithomania is an incredible
website 'originally dedicated to Irish megaliths, but now expanded to
include all sorts of antiquities that are of importance/interest.'
The author visits sites each week, writes up brief reports, takes photos, and logs the log on this excellent website; every site is added to a map, and there's a whole load of ways to find sites by location, by clicking on a flash map, by date of visit etc.
It's a triumph of usability, very pretty, and who knew there was a kist in Dublin Zoo's tapir enclosure?
Hope everyone had a good Paddy's Day! (PS: note: most definitely not 'Patty's Day'.)
UIs: Apple planning 'Spoken Interface' for 10.4. Damn! This was one of the main reasons I chose Linux over MacOS X for my new laptop!
You see, Linux has xvoice, which combined with a scriptable window manager and the now-samizdata version of IBM's ViaVoice for Linux, means that a whole lot of UI navigation can be performed via voice.
Well, now it seems Apple are into the idea too -- and they'll probably do the job right and without the samizdata. ;) (Found via WorldChanging).
Politics: The full Bruce Sterling 'State of the World 2004' speech.
Politics: Bruce Sterling's speech at SXSW '04. It's excellent. He covers climate change, globalization, the Bush administration's Lysenkoism, the spam problem, WMDs, and the Spanish election. Now I want to move to Austin ;)
Tech: GPRS roaming works... technically. Joi Ito gets a $3,500 bill for checking his mail around the world. Yowch.
FWIW, I've never met anyone who's used GPRS for anything other than the odd demo, or emergency use only, except for employees of the mobile carriers -- and they get it for free.
My bet is that the basic failure was a disconnect between the real world and the specification stages -- someone somewhere picked up one of those massively-inflated analyst reports a few years ago, said 'I'd like a piece of that road-warrior market which will be worth $5 billion by 2005, it says here!' and set prices (to stun) accordingly.
Spam:
WSJ: For Orlando Soto, No Day Is Complete Without Some Spam.
Mr. Soto routinely comes home to some 150 e-mail pitches, and he loves getting them all ... he buys stuff pitched in spam e-mail -- again and again. He buys spam-pitched aromatherapy oils for his wife and pharmaceuticals for himself. ... He buys stuff via spam for himself and to resell on Web sites he sets up -- a business idea he got from a spam pitch. ...
It's mind-blowing -- leaves you wondering how one man could be so gullible, and hand over so much money to some of the world's dodgiest vendors, without even any concept of comparison shopping (and without falling victim to identity theft and a cleared-out bank account). Until you get to this line:
In the past, Mr. Soto says he has sent out spam himself,
Aha.
but he doesn't any more for fear of the increasing multitude of federal and state spam regulations now on the books.
Of course. (link via Craig)
Funny:
AP: SoCal city falls victim to Internet hoax, considers banning items made
with water. It's the old 'dihydrogen monoxide' hoax again:
'It's embarrassing,' said City Manager David J. Norman. 'We had a paralegal who did bad research.'
The paralegal apparently fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as 'an odorless, tasteless chemical' that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.
So -- ha ha, stupid Aliso Viejo city officials. But seriously -- why is a paralegal making decisions on scientific issues? Isn't that what the EPA and their environmental scientists are there for? Tail wagging the dog, I think.
Spam: In a /. comment, someone says 'CAPTCHA images are rilly rilly hard to beat, it's all just rumours'. This is the CAPTCHA he's talking about. 8 hours later, it's been broken. Oops!
Mac: Rien de Moof plus.
Open Source: A good entry at sourcefrog.net describing some reasons people are driven to use open source -- the closed-source component library one, in particular, drives me nuts.
I've run into this in the past --
here's an example I can point to. That's a fixed version of Java
1.0's java.util.StreamTokenizer class, to fix a bug where space cannot
be treated as a special character. (Hopefully it's now obsolete, seeing
as I wrote that 9 years ago!)
Note that I probably do not have permission to use and redistribute
that class. Also note that the bug fix I submitted to Java 1.0 probably
never made it into the code, because I was an individual user and not a
major corporate client. The bug may have been fixed independently,
however, given that StreamTokenizer
still exists, but I doubt my fix ever got near the dev team.
(However it still means I can say I fixed a bug in James Gosling's code ;)
Invariably, getting access to source, and being allowed to fix bugs in it, is a key issue -- and one that continually drives developers to open source/free software libraries. RMS has been saying this for years, of course.
Music: A massive selection of links to mp3 blogs. gabba > Pod looks very interesting... they even had a copy of Egyptian Empire's Horn Track recently, one of my favourites.
Web: Plain text, transparently turned into nice markup, is an idea that's clearly never going to go away.
Setext has been around for over a decade, I wrote EtText myself for use in WebMake and elsewhere (including this very weblog!), Zope came up with StructuredText, and more recently, there's been Textile and reStructuredText. Now welcome the newest arrival: Markdown.
First impressions: looks an awful lot like EtText, TBH, but I'd presume that's the shared heritage from Setext. ;)
My feedback: I'd recommend supporting '-' (dash) for list bullets -- it turns out that's a whole lot more widely supported than '*' (asterisk), including in Vim. Also, automatic link inference is very handy; picking up http: URIs and turning email addrs into mailto: links may not look super-pretty, but saves a lot of typing, and EtText Auto links are pretty handy for stuff that's never going to be anything other than a link (take uncommon nouns like 'SlashDot', for example).
eVoting: Craig passes on this link: apparently thousands of Orange County voters were given the wrong ballots in last week's election. The result is that in 21 precincts, there were more ballots cast than registered voters. It gets better -- apparently the voting machine vendor has said it will be impossible to figure out how many ballots are invalid as a result. It'd be funny if it wasn't such a big deal...
Ireland: Now that the IP Enforcement directive has passed, Irish readers might be interested to find out how their MEPs voted on it.
First off, the good ones:
- PATRICIA MCKENNA - GREEN PARTY MEP (DUBLIN) since 1994
- NUALA AHERN - GREEN PARTY MEP (LEINSTER) since 1994
Both of the Green MEPs voted along party lines on a key amendment, amendment 54, which would have limited enforcement to commercial-scale counterfeiting rather than individual infringement.
But on the other side, we have these, who voted for applicability of the directive to all 'IPR', according to FFII. The hall of shame:
- JOE McCARTIN - FINE GAEL MEP (CONNACHT/ULSTER) since 1979
- JOHN CUSHNAHAN - FINE GAEL MEP (MUNSTER) since 1989
- DANA ROSEMARY SCALLON - INDEPENDENT MEP (CONNACHT/ULSTER) since 1999
- NIALL ANDREWS - FIANNA FAIL MEP (DUBLIN) since 1984
- GERARD COLLINS - FIANNA FAIL MEP (MUNSTER) since 1994
- JIM FITZSIMONS - FIANNA FAIL MEP (LEINSTER) since 1984
- LIAM HYLAND - FIANNA FAIL MEP (LEINSTER) since 1994
Unsurprising to see the conservative FFers (and Dana!) in there -- but what do FG think they're doing?
Considering that FFII read this as permitting 'surprise raids on teenagers in the middle of the night by private security firms on the flimsiest of evidence', as passed, this is a 'hall of shame' issue.
The moral: vote Green!
EU: EU Reporter (PDF) thoroughly trashes the new law:
The legislation as structured is opposed by lawyers and judges, who have said that large corporations will be able to slap pre-emptive injunctions on small manufacturers and put them out of business without any fear of having to pay compensation if their action proves to be no more than to gain commercial advantage.
Music companies will get the right to demand raids merely on suspicion of a breach including on private homes.
WITHOUT PROOF factories could be closed, assets and bank accounts frozen by opportunist actions based on patents claims, Greg Perry, Director General of the Brussels-based European Generic Medicines Association told EU Reporter. ...
Pressure from the current 15 Member States is being blamed by a large swathe of industry for rushing bad legislation into law. Surprisingly, one of Britain's largest corporations has slammed both parliament and Council saying: 'It will take many years to undo the damage that this legislation has the potential to do.' Unsurprisingly the corporation, normally close to the British Government, refused to be named.
Security: Educated Guesswork forwards a great illustration of real-world security-measure subversion.
Public places with relatively unattended and un-secured toilet facilities, like train stations, have historically had a problem with intravenous drug users using the cubicles to inject. So about 10 years ago, some bright spark came up with the idea of lighting these places with ultraviolet lights, under which the blue blood in someone's veins cannot be seen.
Apparently, this works -- or at least worked until recently, when the IV drug users figured out an ingenious circumvention technique -- highlight your veins beforehand using a UV marker. In normal lighting, the ink is invisible -- but once in the UV-lit area, it shows up, apparently better than the veins show up under normal lighting anyway!
As EKR says: 'remember, folks, your opponent will change his behavior to oppose you. That's why he's called your opponent.'
Health: An oldie from 1998. City Limits: 7 1/2 Days. An undercover investigative reporter gets incarcerated as a mental patient in Brooklyn -- for a lot longer than he planned. Horrific.
Life: yesterday, I saw Mohammed Ali in the flesh. I was totally star-struck.
Ireland: Latest from the o2 Retail Kennedy Rd foneblog: the staff's tattoos!
Architecture: For reasons which I won't go into here, I wound up doing a Google Image Search for 'toilet' which turned up a link to this page: Toilets of the World. However, he's missing one very important variety: the world-famous Goan 'Hog Bog'.
Here's a tasteful pic of an expectant pig waiting for lunch (local mirror) -- and then, if your stomach can take it, a rather more graphic account here. (warning: not safe for lunch)
Ireland: Pledge to take a trip to Iceland. Daev says 'pledge to visit Iceland as a tourist if they stop whaling' -- if he gets enough clicks on this campaign, he'll get a trip on one of Greenpeace's ships!
Security: SCO accidentally leaked their previous lawsuit plans -- to sue Bank of America -- through MS Word's ability to retain prior changes in a Word document.
This seems as good a time as any to re-plug
find-hidden-word-text, a quick perl hack to use 'antiword'
to extract hidden text from MS Word documents in an automated
fashion, based on
Simon Byers' paper Scalable Exploitation of, and Responses to Information
Leakage Through Hidden Data in Published Documents. It works
well ;)
Safety: Great Malcolm Gladwell article on S.U.V.'s. My favourite bit:
when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. .... what consumers said was 'If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it.'
Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, 'Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that.' According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.
... Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles 'an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills.'
Social: Ted Leung: Google requires that its employees spend 20% of their working hours on 'personal projects'. Wow.
Hardware: So IBM Thinkpads come with a predesktop area -- a hidden 4GB partition of recovery files, Windows XP install disks, windows drivers, etc. taking up space on the hard disk.
I haven't used Windows much at all on this machine, given that I don't use Windows when I can avoid it, but I did pay several hundred dollars for it -- since it's now impossible once again to buy an IBM laptop without doing so (or without paying quite a lot extra). So I want to keep it around, and I want to make sure I can reinstall if things go wrong.
Having a hidden partition just isn't quite safe enough for me -- because I've had hard disks go belly-up before, or scribble on the partition table, or so on -- these things happen. Thankfully it's easy enough to get CD-ROMs shipped from IBM support if you ask nicely, so I did so yesterday afternoon at about 3pm.
This morning at 9am, there was a knock at the door, and I received a package shipped from Durham, NC containing the reinstall CDs.
It's great dealing with professional hardware companies again ;)
Linux: wmctrl and Devil's Pie -- two nifty tools for window control. Both are command-line tools that use NetWM, a standard for X11 window managers, to hook into window manager policy and apply scriptable control to windows as they appear (in the Devil's Pie case) or to pre-existing windows (in the wmctrl case).
I've just reverted back to sawfish from KWin recently, in order to get this control back; I probably wouldn't have if I'd found these in time.
(In case you're wondering why I reverted: specifically, sawfish allows the user to control window position very efficiently from the keyboard using corner.jl, and the KWin folks weren't interested in a patch to do the same there. In addition, sawfish has wclass.jl , which allows windows to be controlled by name; it's very handy to say 'Show Mail', and have xvoice de-iconify your mailreader in response. Both are killer features for rodent-free use of a UNIX desktop.)
Funny: Dr. Evil's monologue about his childhood from the first Austin Powers movie. Sheer genius. 'Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament.'
Open Source: Tim Bray goes through a couple of open-source studies; first is the clueless 'Where do you want to go, Aiden?' essay I mentioned here a couple of days ago, but the second is a study from a couple of French economists I hadn't heard of. I'll just reproduce the translation:
Choosing software is not a neutral act. It must be done consciously; the debate over free and proprietary software can't be limited to the differences in the applications' features and ergonomics. To choose an operating system, or software, or network architecture is to choose a kind of society. We can no longer pretend that free and commercial software, or Internet standards and protocols, are just tools. We have to admit at least that they are political tools. After all, fire and the printing press are 'just tools.'
Ireland: Some new Irish weblogs:
- The Invisible Acrobat -- who is this mysterious acrobat? hmm! A Goon Show fan, I'd reckon.
- Eirepreneur
Spam: Kottke passes on news of the second coming -- in spam:
It is now that blacklisting and filtering and blocking and Blocking of Port 25 and Blocking SMTP connections and filtering out email and anything related that does not allow any person in the United States of America to send email to anybody and then have opt-out or opt-in and that COMPLY with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 are doing something that is ILLEGAL and you are a CRIMINAL for doing this you have CRIMINAL LIABILITY and CIVIL LIABILITY and your company CANNOT protect you in the slightest. If your company asked you to murder somebody would you do this? Of course not for most. Then do NOT do illegal and criminal things now that are out side of the law and outside of Federal Law now with the passing of the CAN-SPAM Act of
- The corporate veil can be pierced and board members of the corporation and officers of the corporation and executives of the corporation and managers of the corporation and employees of the corporation that are involved in the slightest in the writing of or approval of or enforcement of Terms of Service or Policies or Procedures or Business Decisions or Business Practices or Zero Tolerance Policies that would or does interrupt or cancel or block or filter or blacklist or harass or defame the character of or slander Ted Jesus Christ GOD in the slightest from sending legal email now and into the future are COMMITTING A CRIME and have CIVIL LIABILITY also and can be pursued by the US Attorney and State Attorneys and District Attorneys and the FTC and also if doing certain things also the ATF and the FBI and more. If calling TJCG a SPAMMER and then BLACKLISTING or BLOCKING or FILTERING or putting into list or putting into any Product or Service anything related to stopping the emails of TJCG you are also committing DEFAMATION OF CHARACTER and LIBEL and SLANDER and damaging the good reputation of TJCG.
What, no divine retribution?
Networking: FOAF is really building steam now.
- LiveJournal is doing it
- Tribe.net itself is working on it
- Flickr also plan to support FOAF 'once they're stable'.
In the meantime, Tribe.net plans to announce RSS feeds and Jabber support this Friday.
It's good to see some open-standards based stuff being used to compete. Given this, I think we might see more useful possibilities emerging as these sites become true web services.
eVoting: Are you an academic, or do you know any academics, working in the field
of computer science in Ireland? If so, you should consider signing, or
collecting signatures, on
this ICTE statement.
It's eminently reasonable -- 'since computers are inherently subject to
programming and design error, equipment malfunction, and malicious
tampering, we join with (the ACM) in recommending that a voter-verified
audit trail be one of the essential requirements for deployment of new
voting systems.' (thx for the pointer, Simon!)
Open Source: Clemens
Vasters: Where do you want to go, Aiden? Sadly, Clemens misses the
point dramatically.
Point one: I've worked on open-source and proprietary software. I still do. I work on them both simultaneously (or, at least, proprietary 9-5 and open-source outside work hours ;). I have a good few of the things you're supposed to have 'by the time you're 30'.
It's not an all-or-nothing thing; working on open source doesn't mean retreating into a garrett and staying up all night. Nothing is black-and-white like that, and surely Clemens should be able to recognise that aspect of the real world by now. ;)
Point two: Open source work does found a career. It acts as a fantastic testament to your ability -- especially if you've written good code or organised a team. I'd be much more happy to hire someone who had demonstrated that ability, over people who had no OS dev experience, if I was interviewing candidates in the day job. (In fact, I have in the past. ;)
For one thing, a tar.gz from Sourceforge is a lot easier to verify than some assertion that when you worked for some big company, you were Very Important and did Amazing Things, but sorry, they were all secret and proprietary so you have no proof.
Point three: 'It doesn't matter whether you love what you are doing and consider this the hobby you want to spend 110% of your time on: It's exploitation by companies who are not at all interested in creating stuff. They want to use your stuff for free. That's why they trick you into doing it.'
This is total FUD -- pretty much just shouting 'it's an IBM conspiracy!'
For the record, I've never even talked to anyone from IBM about open source, as far as I know -- aside from when I stood up once at a conference and attempt to ask an IBM manager about their crappy software patent policy and how it conflicted with their avowed support of open-source. (Obviously their payoff cheque was late that month ;)
More good comments on slashdot, believe it or not (with the threshold at 3, that is).
(finally, an aside: I suspect the guy's name was 'Aidan' BTW.)
Linux: I'm really getting into KDE 3.2. I've been looking for a music player that is better at handling large collections of MP3s better than the venerable XMMS, without much luck:
iTunes is, of course, the 'gold standard', but is Mac/Windows only, so that's not going to work on my Linux machine.
Rhythmbox is getting there as an iTunes clone, but right now is woefully incomplete. It fails to play lots of my music, has serious interface shortcomings -- you can rate songs, but then there's no way to use those ratings, and you cannot edit any of the tag metadata in the released version.
JuK is the new KDE music player app. Initially, I wrote it off -- it uses the clunky interface of 'one big list', at first glance.
But after Rhythmbox managed to confuse itself sufficiently so that it would only open as a 3-pixel-high window (seriously!), I gave JuK another try. Summary: it kicks ass.
It turns out that the multi-pane 'artists, albums, and tracks' mode of iTunes and Rhythmbox isn't actually necessary, since JuK improves on it using a very nifty dynamic 'Tree View' mode.
Another nice feature is the MusicBrainz integration; it has built-in support for querying MB's servers to get correct tag data for your music. In fact, its tagging support is fantastic -- this is unsurprising, as it looks like it started off as a tagging app.
Being a well-written KDE app, it exposes some nifty scripting support via DCOP, and a quick look-over with KDCOP reveals a nice set of APIs -- for example, running dcop juk Player playingString tells me the name of the track and artist playing right now. I'm not sure if there's a way to register for callbacks on events like 'track change' just yet, here's hoping...
No sign of rating support just yet, though; my dream player would allow me to rate my tracks, and then make a dynamic playlist which selects tracks by rating, playing the top-rated ones more often and never playing the bottom-rated ones. Here's hoping it's in the pipeline ;)
All in all, though, it looks like I'll be giving JuK a try.
Spam: filster: Linking reputations networks to email whitelists. Very interesting -- a tool to use the social network data from Orkut, FOAFweb, Reputation Research Network, and CPAN to whitelist email senders in SpamAssassin. Only problems I can see:
- needs an anti-forging mechanism like SPF to avoid spammers forging their way through your whitelist -- but the author does cover that.
- some of the site terms of service may prohibit scraping -- Orkut's, for example, is very strict.
Still, a very nifty idea, and one worth more investigation... the combination of FOAF and SPF in particular, given that tribe.net (if I recall correctly?) will be generating FOAF data, is quite cool.