Software: OK, one of my current UNIX pet peeves, perfectly illustrated by the new RPMs for KDE 3.2.
Category: Uncategorized
Spam: Gary Schrock on the SpamAssassin-talk notes:
eVoting: ‘Spoiling your vote’, e.g. writing in ‘none of the above’ on a ballot paper, is a legally-permitted response to a ballot in Ireland and many other countries. Secrecy in how you vote is constitutionally required.
Media: ever wondered why SCO is being targetted by the MyDoom virus?
Travel: Maciej writes up a few reasons why he likes Poland. Aside from the hilarious description of day-to-day formality in speech, there’s this snippet:
Iraq: Iraqi who gave MI6 45-minute claim says it was a ‘crock of shit’. Gotta love that no-holds-barred style…
Spam: Ever seen this in referrer logs, and wondered if the International Atomic Energy Agency really had linked to your site? Sourcefrog has.
Law: Darius Whelan at UCC writes, ‘my colleague Louise Crowley and I are involved in drafting an Irish version of the Creative Commons licence‘.
Admin: Well, it worked — twice ;)
Admin: taint.org has moved to a new server. Let’s see if it works!
Culture: Five killed in separate road crashes. Donncha notes ‘There were 2 terrible road accidents this morning. One of them was just outside Cahir, in Co. Tipperary. I drove past there dozens of times in the past and I was shocked to hear the news.’
Linux: If you use Fedora Core 1, here’s a yum stanza to download and install Subversion.
Bizarre: OK, OK, Google, I’m planning to! Geesh, all I wanted was a search engine, not health advice. They’re not even my ads!
Funny: The IKEA Walkthrough: ‘IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized. … with practice (and this IKEA Walkthrough!) you will soon be able to muster the sense of numb resignation necessary for victory.’ (defectiveyeti)
Software: Nelson Minar: Primitive Debugging. Nelson quotes Kernighan, ‘The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements’, and assents from a viewpoint a quarter of a century later. Strange but true; I find this also. Why is that?
Ireland: So, Sarah Carey got called up to testify at the Moriarty Tribunal, since she was involved with ESAT. In the process she notes that she ‘was slightly freaked out when the Chairman, in the process of reprimanding me for leaking information, made reference to my media activities AND my website! So are they reading my blog?’
Spam: Andrew ‘tridge’ Tridgell’s junkcode directory really does contain some useful snippets, like he said. Here’s spamsum, a checksum algorithm for hashing spam text:
Web: Google Labs has a nifty toy called Google Sets; name a few items, and it’ll tell you what other items have been seen in conjunction with it.
Open Source: Edd Dumbill on the Planets. It seems the latest thing for open source development communities is to syndicate their weblogs together on one site, viz. PlanetGnome, Planet Debian, Monologue, and PlanetApache.
Politics: G2: Tales of Tel Aviv.
Sport:
Observer: Football, blood and war: an insane article about the
crossover between Serbian nationalist paramilitaries and football
hooliganism:
Spam: The new hash-busting, Bayes-avoiding, spam evasion trick: inserting random dictionary words into the middle of another word. Like so:
Tech: Great. More on the ‘prevention of banknote scanning’ thread; Ed Felten notes that the European Central Bank is
Security: Chennai businessman ‘transformed’ into Al-Qaeda suspect (The Hindu):
Spam: OK, I just noticed that I have a few hits for the SpamAssassin rule HTTP_ENTITIES_HOST in my corpus. This searches for obfuscated hostnames in the URL links in mail messages, and is generally a very reliable sign of spam — because who would want to hide a hostname apart from spammers?
Tech: PDF file: how do photocopiers decide not to photocopy modern banknotes? ‘a geometric pattern … of five 1 mm large circles’. Fascinating stuff from Markus Kuhn, as usual! (via HackThePlanet)
Games: Anti-Monopoly: ‘A professor and a freelance writer are determined to set history straight on the origin and theft of a favorite American pastime’.
Spam: So, next Friday I’ll be in Cambridge, MA for the Spam Conference 2004, a one-day extravaganza of probabilistic classifiers, spam-bashing, and hopefully, some socializing too.
Funny: The staff of O2 Retail, Kennedy Road, Navan have set them up the foneblog, it appears, and are messing about… Why not give ’em a call? Looks like their number is +353 46 21803!
Funny: Getting Even With Nicorettes (NYTimes): a very funny article about giving up smoking by taking up a full-time nicotine gum habit.
GNU: Let’s all be very nice and friendly for our latest convert to the GPL club, Microsoft. Hi, MS!
Games: The DEGENATRON Archive and Gaming Page — amazing. The Degenatron is the games console advertised, and occasionally featuring in radio phone-ins as to the violent behaviour of ‘kids these days’ and the like, on the in-game radio stations in GTA:VC. This faked ‘homage’ page is perfect; right down to the animated rainbow horizontal-rule divider.