Dublin: Sorry to the non-Dublin readership, I’m sure you all are getting quite bored of this by now. But anyway…
Justin's Linklog Posts
TV: I’ve taken a little time to throw up my PVR build log.
UNIX: a quick recap of a good tip combo picked up from ILUG recently. To paraphrase Conor Wynne’s original question:
UNIX: another useful tip. Bash supports a wide variety of command line editing tricks; you have the usual GUIish editing (backspace, insert new characters, delete, blah blah) through the GNU Readline library, and in addition to that you have the traditional csh-style history expansion (like ‘!!’ to refer to the previous command typed).
Ireland: Worth watching for european software-patent watchers, Forfás, Ireland’s ‘national policy advisory board on enterprise, trade, science, technology and innovation’ are running a series of monthly seminars on ‘Intellectual Property’ in association with Licensing Executives Society Britain and Ireland.
Patents: It seems the Irish Software Association has a new chairperson, namely Bernadette Cullinane. Whether this has anything to do with Cathal Friel’s ‘out of line’ statements, who knows…
Privacy: after reading Adam Shostack’s weblog posting about private/anonymous blogging, I’ve been driven to think about that, and would up writing up a case study of Cogair, which was an influential anonymously-published proto-weblog in Ireland in the ’90s.
TV: here’s a quick update on my PVR box progress. I have a very extensive /etc/LOG which I should probably just publish as-is, really, rather than trying to make it legible ;)
Malware: spotted on NANOG — Six PCs caused BigPond problems:
Spam: Matthew Wilson at Boomer Consulting has been having a field day — it looks like some smart google hacking has thrown up some doozies of places that should have fixed this by now:
Open Source: on the 18th March the Irish Times published a commercial supplement for Microsoft. Naturally, given that it was paid advertising, there were lots of MS plugs — but in the mix there was also a couple of more worrying articles: one by Tom Kitt, government ‘Minister for the Information Society’, noting
Health: On a lighter note, I’ve been getting through my last two weeks mail and RSS data, and came across this beauty.
Life: Alec Muffett quotes an Economist opening line:
Security: Hey user auth systems! If you’re going to require me to sign in, and publish my login as a signature to prove that I’m ‘me’, please do me a favour — don’t delete the account if it’s been ‘inactive’, and allow anyone to re-register that name without my knowledge!
Mapping: NASA’s Earth Observatory has put up a 4 MB high-res topographical image of Ireland. A rough calculation indicates that each pixel is under 0.1 of a mile on a side. It’s fantastic. ;)
Web: I’ve been doing a little thinking about group-based networking and services.
Patents: DCC (Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse) is a venerable, and widely-used anti-spam system created by Vernon Schryver; we’ve supported it in SpamAssassin for yonks.
Web: Now this is very cool stuff: ‘Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any webpage to change it’s behavior.’
Tax: Following on from the previous entry, I’ve had a stroke of luck. It turns out that I did indeed quality as a US resident for tax purposes, and therefore could use Turbotax.
Taxes: it’s that time of year again, when every inhabitant of the US, resident and ‘non-resident’, gets The Fear. Yep, it’s tax time. (Warning: this is a long and protracted vent.)
Misc: So I was travelling last week — a very productive trip to the UK visiting the main work dev office, and getting a little socialising in too while I was at it. A pretty good trip overall, especially since I seem to have figured out how to use my frequent flyer miles effectively to get great seats! ;)
Patents: So the Conference of Presidents has ratified the JURI decision to throw out the flawed software patents directive text. Phew! That’s a lot more pressure on the European Commission. Charlie McCreevy could still carry on his attempt to steamroller European democracy on this one, but it looks likely that he wouldn’t get away with it now — possibly facing sanctions as a result.
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:
Using sound as a dead man’s switch
Software: a nifty trick in this Slashdot comment: