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.
Category: Uncategorized
Patents: The FFII are suggesting a 10-day online ‘net strike’ to protest against the ongoing attempts to legalise software patenting in Europe.
As a result, I’m putting up a protest front page on these sites:
- this weblog
- my personal home page
- My software sites: EtText, <a href="http://webmake.taint.org/”>WebMake, <a href="http://sitescooper.org"> Sitescooper, <a href="http://scoops.sitescooper.org/”>Sitescooper Daily Scoops
If you support the actions of FFII, <a href="http://demo.ffii.org/online.php"> please join in, or even <a href="http://demo.ffii.org/brussels.php”>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 <a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/europarl0309/cons0401/index.en.html”>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:
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.)
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.
Funny: Feds Cancel Flight on ‘Psychic’ Bomb Tip: an American Airlines flight was cancelled because of a tip-off from a self-reported psychic.
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.
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.
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.
Funny: The Guardian’s got a new agony aunt — Buck up! Ann Widdecombe’s no-nonsense solutions to life’s knotty problems.
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!
Software:
sourcefrog: arch rocks: mirroring. This is incredibly cool:
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.
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.
Funny: According to a ‘top Austrian doctor’, picking your nose and eating it is good for you:
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:
Censorship: This is pretty funny — a friend writes that SonicWall‘s ‘Content Filter’ has judged my home page and FOUND IT WANTING:
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.
Tech: Excellent post from Colin Charles here:
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).’
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’.
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.
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.)
Names: Popbitch sez ‘Microsoft are just about to launch their new Windows Server 2003. The project manager who oversaw its development? Todd Wanke.’
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.
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.’
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!
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.
Funny:
AP: SoCal city falls victim to Internet hoax, considers banning items made
with water. It’s the old ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ hoax again:
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!