Web: Almost every project and organisation has, at some stage, bemoaned having stale data on their website, and wished there was a better way to keep it up to date; or wished their FAQ was more complete; or wished they had the time to HTML-ize all their know-how and get it up there.
Justin's Linklog Posts
Politics: Indymedia’s hard drives in Rackspace UK seized by FBI order, seemingly as a ‘courtesy’ to Swiss police. There’s several morals to be learned:
Health: A few hours after ( ;) I link-blogged this New Scientist article about a case of the H5N1 avian flu transmitting itself between humans, Boing Boing put up this entry titled ‘Bird Flu risk extremely low’, which concludes that the risk is effectively not worth worrying about.
Patents: Sun files for patents on per-employee software pricing plans (/.). ‘Method for licensing software to an entity, including determining a per-employee cost for the software, determining a number of employees of the entity, and determining a total licensing cost using the number of employees and the per-employee cost, wherein the total licensing cost comprises a software license for all employees of the entity and all customers of the entity.’
Security: Given the current prevalence of phishing attacks and spyware infestations, designing a good user interface that protects naive users against malware is now more urgent than ever.
Spam: my slides from the presentation I gave at Toorcon 2004, ‘Spam Forensics: Reverse-Engineering Spammer Tactics’, are now up. Hope they prove enlightening ;)
Travel: Toorcon was great fun! Lots of interesting conversations.
Spam: SpamAssassin 3.0.0 is now released! w00t! Only 4 months late this time ;) Announcement, techie details, Slashdot. New logo too:
Politics: So I was listening to that this morning. Did I hear correctly? Did Bush really say that one of the good side-effects of Iraq’s invasion, was that there were now hopefully less attacks inside other countries? sure looks like it:
Conferences: Hey — I’m talking at ToorCon 2004 down in San Diego this weekend! Come along and check it out, if you can.
Patents: Now that the summer break is over, software patents are back on the EU’s agenda. The FFII (via EDRI-gram) reports
Web: Flickr‘s latest trend — using just an eye (or similar minimalist face part) as your avatar pic:
Life: Luke writes:
Funny: The Daily Show’s GWB reelection film: ‘George W. Bush — Because He Says So’ (Quicktime MOV, 6MB). This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages.
Web: My Nearly-Live Planetary Desktop Backgrounds site is now using NYU’s Coral Content Distribution Network instead of FreeCache.org. (FreeCache wasn’t caching the files, because they were too small. drat.)
Linux: Everyone who’s used a non-MS system will have learned — typically the hard way — that not all hardware is equal. Not just in terms of specs, flexibility and power, but also in terms of whether or not it can be used at all.
Linux: Here’s a patch that adds support for ALSA/Artsd/ESD output from kgst, the KDE gstreamer middleware used by JuK.
Tech: This is the second entry talking about ‘Life Hacks’. Possibly the best tip I came away from the talk with, is this one:
Tech: So Danny O’Brien’s ‘Life Hacks’ talk is one of the most worthwhile reflections on productivity (and productivity technology) I’ve heard. (Cory Doctorow’s transcript from NotCon 2004, video from ETCon.)
Spam: I’m quoted in
New
Scientist! w00t!
TV: A choice quote from NBC’s Olympics coverage: ‘This girl (one of the US beach volleyball team) reads a book a week!’ (delivered in shocked tones.)
Web: 
My Dad runs a couple of
websites — his architectural
photography business, and Andalucia Photo Gallery, a
side project selling
some lovely photos from the Andalusia region of Spain.
Security: It looks like the security people are starting to take a look at RFID, and it’s not pretty.
Spam: oh man, Spamusement started off well, and has just been getting better and better; * HEATH WARNING * had me laughing out loud, and the idea of linking the entries since August 8 as a series is genius.
Perl: So, I wrote a new CPAN module recently — IPC::DirQueue. It implements a nifty design pattern for slightly larger systems, ones where multiple processes, possibly on multiple machines, must collaborate to deal with incoming task submissions. To quote the POD:
Spam: So, CEAS was great fun, and very educational:
Reading: Both jim winstead and Nelson Minar have praised Earth Abides , a 1949 post-apocalyptic novel where ‘all but a handful of people die from a mystery disease’, and the ensuing narrative ‘follows one man’s attempt to rebuild something like a society.’ It seems a tip from original happy mutant Mark Frauenfelder was the pointer for both of ’em.
Web: in passing — here’s a bookmarklet for the current day’s Doonesbury comic strip: Today’s Doonesbury.
;var%20y=t.getYear();var%20sy=y;if(y<1000)%7By+=1900;%7Dsy%=100;if(sy<10)%7Bsy='0'+sy;%7Dvar%20m=t.getMonth()+1;if(m<10)%7Bm='0'+m;%7Dvar%20d=t.getDate();if(d<10)%7Bd='0'+d;%7D;location.href='http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/'+y+'/db'+sy+m+d+'.gif'){kind=link}
Apache: Not content with distributing GPL’d software, Microsoft are now taking another step into the open-source world by shipping Apache-licensed code.
Funny: Some of the taint.org readership (that’s you, Nishad) may be familiar with BEST SONG EVER.mp3 — it’s an insane, 10-minute workout: one guy ranting at a high pitch in some east-asian language at an incredible speed over some cheesy Casio, hardly taking a breath, punctuated by bizarre 7-Zark-7-style ribbits and squawks. By the end of it, he’s nearly hoarse. It is incredibly bizarre. Turkopop has nothing on this.
Spam: ever wondered what this weblog would look like if it was spam? wonder no more. (via crummy.com)
Patents in an open source world
Patents: Newsforge: Patents in an open source world, by Lawrence Rosen (founding partner of Rosenlaw and Einschlag).