Open Source: Clemens
Vasters: Where do you want to go, Aiden? Sadly, Clemens misses the
point dramatically.
Category: Uncategorized
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.’
Software: OK, one of my current UNIX pet peeves, perfectly illustrated by the new RPMs for KDE 3.2.
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)