Code: Ugo Cei: Building Interactive Web Programs with Continuations quoting Phil Windley:
Justin's Linklog Posts
Tech: Bit of a long essay, this one.
Spam: recently, I’ve been getting a lot of spam bounces; that is, messages sent by people’s autoresponders, in response to forged spam claiming to come from my domain. (I have an SPF record, but these autoresponders naturally don’t bother to check that before replying.)
Spam: Should ISPs Be Profiting From Knowingly Hosting Spam Gangs? — a new article up on Spamhaus.org, well worth a read. Some snippets:
Antarctic: It seems that Ernest Shackleton, during his exploration of Antarctica, relied heavily on ‘Forced March’ tablets:
Patents: FFII are reporting that ‘the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (JURI) has decided with a large majority to ask the Commission for a renewed referral of the software patents directive. With only two or three votes against and one abstention, the resolution had overwhelming support from the committee, and all-party backing.’
Networking: Donal Cunningham, president of SAGE-IE, mails to note an interesting talk on in Dublin next week:
Tech: January 24th, besides being the date the first Apple Macintosh went on sale, is supposedly the day of maximal post-xmas misery. Well, it certainly was for me today.
Spam: Before xmas, I received a copy of Brian McWilliams‘ new book, Spam Kings.
Blogs: Just to expand on a linkblog
posting I made yesterday, Google’s search team have announced support
for a new piece of Google functionality; they’ll fix their crawlers to
ignore links with a rel="nofollow" attribute, for PageRank
calculations, the idea being that spammers will stop blog-spamming
once they can’t get PageRank out of it.
Spam: I was just looking back through the archives here on taint.org, and noticed this entry from December 2 last year:
Spam: eWeek recently published an article entitled ‘Spammers’ New Tactic Upends DNS’ , which notes that:
Code: Here’s something I came up with recently — it’s actually
an evolution of the idea of pushd and popd, as included
in BASH.
To quote the POD docs:
Politics: This moronic comic from Pat Oliphant came up in my comics page the other day, and, after a few days of hearing this particular talking point through the usual propaganda channels, I just saw it again. It pissed me off enough that I took a look at the stats.
Web: Urgh, I still have this damn cold I picked up in Ireland… sniffle cough etc. More vitamin C needed!
Patents: here’s an interesting technique I heard recently. (credit: I’m not sure who told me about it, but I think it may have come from or via John Levine.)
Spam: I’m still catching up, but this is just plain hilarious. Pure, solid-gold, insanity. Verizon.net, the ISP branch of the US telco, has decided that the easiest way to fix their spam problems (uh, spam-receiving problems, that is), is now blocking inbound email from non-U.S. IP ranges:
Linux: after about 3 months of tweaking and twisting, performed by someone who’s been using UNIX for over a decade, I’ve finally got sound working the way I want it on my Linux desktop. In other words, I can hear sounds made by Flash applets, and I don’t have to shut down the best music player on the platform every time another app wants to make a sound.
Spam: The Business Software Alliance, a UK anti-piracy body representing many of the major software vendors, recently issued a spam-related press release which got a lot of attention in the UK press (they have great press contacts!).
Patents: This is really absurd — according to this ZDNet UK article, it now looks like the EU Council is considering railroading the EU software patent directive through, by hiding it as an ‘A-item’ in a Fisheries Council Meeting the week before xmas:
Patents: oh, this is painfully ironic.
Spam: some good crazy spam recently — firstly, some Seventh Day Adventist lunacy:
Life: I’m moving house — I’ve just filled about 20 boxes, now to get moving them! Sadly, there’s no wifi in range of my new house, so the upshot is I may be offline for a few days. Boo.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
Spam: The EFF are a great organisation — damn, I even helped set up an organisation based on its goals in Ireland, back in the day! But this white paper is shockingly clueless.
Trips: So I’m just back from ApacheCon 2004, which took place in the lovely Alexis Park building site ;)
Patents: Patents4Innovation is a new site set up by several European multinational companies to lobby for the legalisation of software patenting in Europe.
Web: The lovely C sent me a link of note — it’s the eglu, ‘the world’s most stylish and innovative chicken house and is the perfect way to keep chickens as pets’. (She has a thing about keeping chickens.)
Usability: So, I’ve just found out about a useless feature of my microwave oven the hard way. The microwave’s manual notes:
Politics: Global Guerrillas: ‘Networked organizations, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging marketplace of violence. An open notebook on the epochal war of the 21st Century.’