Mac: Rien de Moof plus.
Category: Uncategorized
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.
Web: Plain text, transparently turned into nice markup, is an idea that’s clearly never going to go away.
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.
EU: EU Reporter (PDF) thoroughly trashes the new law:
Security: Educated Guesswork forwards a great illustration of real-world security-measure subversion.
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’.
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.
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.
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).
Spam: Kottke passes on news of the second coming — in spam:
Networking: FOAF is really building steam now.
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.
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:
Radio: Community Projects at Moertel Consulting: My new Radio VCR. That is so cool.
Insults: Tom takes issue with my assumption that ‘anyone not living in a hole would know that SpamAssassin includes a probabilistic classifier’. Hmm. OK, I should have made it clear I meant anyone following anti-spam filter development. Henceforth I’ll over-qualify every statement on this weblog accordingly.
Green: There’s been a bit of chat on the intarweb recently about a new high-tech fuel source that avoids the fossil-fuel trap, namely thermal depolymerization. Here’s a couple of links that are relevant:
Spam: the Caller-ID specs are now up on www.microsoft.com. Note patent license.
Funny:
Craigslist: wanted: web designer (why this phrase may get your ass beat)
. ‘sneakily trying to advertise for a web designer to make you a
porn site is weak. just say in your ad that you want to show naked
pictures of women fucking dogs so i can decide, before i apply, if i want
to see that sort of thing, and not AFTER you’ve sent me a mentally and
emotionally scarring photo of a maybe-blonde (it was hard to tell, at that
angle) and a great dane, and THEN ask me if i am comfortable with that
kind of content.’ (via swhackit!)
Spam:
Slashdot: This will fail because… Tick the boxes to produce
a generic slashdot comment on a new anti-spam proposal. Very funny.
Code: Berkeley DB, the de-facto std for open-source high-performance database files on UNIX, is displaying some odd behaviour — it appears to be sleeping for 1 second inside the database library code, under load, for some versions of libdb. If you’re curious, there’s More info here.
eVoting: Lore Brand Comics on e-voting. (thanks, Ben!)
eVoting: Highly recommended — Adrian Colley’s Lies, Damn Lies, and Six Independent Consultancies. Adrian debunks in a very clear, step-by-step fashion, the spin being produced by Ireland’s government on the e-voting furore. If you’re following the issue, don’t miss this page.
Work: Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks, Danny O’Brien’s ETech talk.
Net: Great NYTimes article interviewing Bram Cohen about BitTorrent (u: sitescooper p: sitescooper). Good to see that it landed him a job with Valve, but let’s hope that’s not the last piece of free software from Bram…
Web: More on the Firefox crappy-movie-now-web-browser thing, from Chris Blizzard:
Linux: 
Doing my backups — it’s a good feeling to know your data
will (probably) be safe if your computer suddenly carks it.
Web: Donncha notes that Mozilla Firebird has been renamed ‘Firefox’. Retro cruddy 80’s Cold War movie reference? check!
eVoting: One of the desired features for new voting mechanisms is that they will increase voter ‘turnout’, encouraging people to vote who are too busy (or too unmotivated) to visit a polling station.
Web: I watched a hilarious Rob Corddry segment from The Daily Show last night, repeated from earlier in the week. Having not seen The Daily Show in a while, since dropping everything but basic cable, I went looking through The Daily Show video archives to see if I could find a few more good ones — with no luck.
Funny: The Beeb reports that ‘Baywatch star David Hasselhoff is griping that his role in reuniting East and West Germany has been overlooked.’