News: Oops — I’ve just realised, that Newseum site I linked to a few days ago actually does change the URLs frequently for those front-page PDFs. However, the changing is limited to using the day of the month in part of the URL, as far as I can see.
Category: Uncategorized
Funny: Here’s the
Daily Show
segment with Scott Richter (WMV, 9.8MB).
Patents: There’s a good discussion over at Joi Ito’s weblog on software patents.
Toys:
Argh, I’ve been infected by the Breedster STD!
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.
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.
Patents: The Irish EU Presidency keeps on rolling.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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.
Language: So, here’s a word worth noting — ‘Neverendum’. This Guardian article notes:
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.
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:
Spam: Anne Mitchell on GMail’s spam filtering — sounds like her results are actually worse than mine were. But the ads worked well:
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.
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.’
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.
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:
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.’
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).
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.’
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.’
Patents: Disastrous for European software developers, that is.
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!
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).
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.
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 ;)