Voting: None Dare Call It Stolen – Ohio, the Election, and America’s Servile Press, by Mark Crispin Miller.
Justin's Linklog Posts
Friends: the ex-Iona readers, and those with an interest in urban design, might like to go take a look at citynoise.blogspot.com — Lean Doody’s new urban design weblog.
Open Source: so I was just looking at OSCON 2005‘s website, and I noticed that it listed Kim Polese, of SpikeSource, as a presenter.
Patents: This has come up twice recently in discussions of software patenting, so it’s worth posting a blog entry as a note.
Spam: back from CEAS. The schedule with links to full papers is up, so anyone can go along and check ’em out, if you’re curious.
Politics: EDRI-gram notes that the Firenze Linux User Group’s server was tampered with last month at its ISP colo:
Hardware: After a few weeks running OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT54G, here’s a status report.
Patents: I’m just back from a fantastic holiday weekend, totally offline, hiking through Catalina Island. I’m a little bit sunburnt, my nose is peeling, but it was great fun. I got a fantastic picture of the sun setting over hundreds of boats bobbing at their moorings in Two Harbors, which I must upload at some stage.
Spam: if you work in anti-spam, especially in filtering, or even just in working with email in general, it’s well worth going to CEAS 2005, the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, on Thursday July 21st and Friday 22nd in Stanford:
Hardware: On my home network, I recently replaced my NetGear MR814 with a brand new Linksys WRT54G.
Work: I took a look over at Edd Dumbill‘s weblog recently, and came across this posting on planning programming projects. He links to another article and mentions:
Patents: yes, I keep rattling on about this — the vote is coming up on July 6th. I promise I’ll shut up after that ;)
Antarctic: Happy Midwinter’s Day!
Patents: One of the key arguments in favour of the new EU software patenting directive as it’s currently worded, from the ‘pro’ side, is that it doesn’t ‘allow software patents as such’, since it requires a ‘technical’ inventive step for a patent to be considered valid.
Perl: double-encoding is a frequent problem when dealing with UTF-8 text, where a UTF-8 string is treated as (typically) ISO Latin-1, and is re-encoded.
Patents: An anonymous contributor writes:
Science: in April and May, the New Yorker printed an amazing series of articles on climate change by Elizabeth Kolbert, full of outstanding research and interviews with the key players.
Spam: via John Graham-Cumming‘s excellent anti-spam newsletter this month, comes a very cool animation of the dbacl Bayesian anti-spam filter being trained to classify a mail corpus. Here’s the animation:
Web: a while back, I posted some musings about a web service to help authenticate users as members of a private group, similarly to how TypeKey authenticates users in general.
Hardware: I’ve been needing a decent backup solution, since I’ve got 60GB of crud on my hard disk that isn’t being rsynced offsite yet. So I bought myself a nifty DVD writer from woot.com a week ago, supporting DVD+RW, DVD+R, DVD-RW, and DVD-R, and a spindle of 20 DVD+Rs from Target. Little did I realise the world of pain I was entering.
Linux: the MythTV hacking continues (infrequently). Here’s the latest — a way to play music from my laptop, with sound output via the Mythbox.
Web: i caught sight of (8 June 2005, Interconnected), on the geographical insularity of the dot-com boom. A good read:
Web: I link-blogged this, but it’s generated some email already, so it deserves a proper posting.
Linux: Linux sound is
still a mess. Due to the ever-changing ‘sound server of the week’
system used to decide how an app should output sound, it’s perfectly
possible to have 3 apps on your desktop happily making noise at the same
time, while another app complains about requiring exclusive access to
/dev/dsp — or worse, hangs silently while it attempts to grab
an exclusive lock on the device.
Patents: in a recent discussion about games and patents, it emerged that these common elements are patented:
Life: seeing as yesterday was World No Tobacco Day, it’s worth noting that I gave up smoking last Thursday.
Net: Fergus Cassidy reports that ‘bandwidth-starved TDs and Senators’ in the Oireachtas will be taking a shortcut around Ireland’s woeful consumer broadband situation, especially in terms of deployment outside of the main urban areas.
Security: the use of backscatter x-ray scanners has hit the US press now that the TSA are taking an interest.
Apache: It seems I’ve been elected as a member of the Apache Software Foundation! That’s a nice surprise ;)
Security: Adam Shostack has been tracking the immense volume of recent bank disclosures of compromised customer data. Bruce Schneier has also commented, and an interesting question arose in his posting’s comments — why are there seemingly no similar problems with European banks?
Hardware: Slashdot: Nokia’s Linux Handheld. It’s to be called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, and runs on an open source development platform called Maemo.
Clothing: I love Threadless. Unfortunately, they don’t have an RSS feed for new T-shirts. So I wrote a quick scraper:
Here’s a preview of what the feed looks like:
Weblogs: there’s been a few attempts to mine ‘trend’ data from del.icio.us:
Mr. Justice Bradley, discussing US patent law in 1882:
Computing: mentioned in a Slashdot thread about green server farms — a page extolling the OpenVPS virtual-server software’s environmental benefits:
Spam: About this time last year, German neo-nazis launched a massive worldwide spam run with the aid of the Sober.H worm.