Hacking: Amazing — the Action Replay cartridge is still around!
Justin's Linklog Posts
Patents: lyranthe.org notes that the EU elections are coming up this Thursday, 11th June. Accordingly, here’s a single-issue roundup of the candidates, from what I’ve heard:
Perl: I’ve been writing a few convenience web-scrapers recently using WWW::Mechanize, with great success.
Spam: Kasia raises a very interesting question. Here it is, in a nutshell:
Health: USDA orders silence on mad cow in Texas: ‘The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued an order instructing its inspectors in Texas, where federal mad cow disease testing policies recently were violated, not to talk about the cattle disorder with outside parties … The order … was issued in the wake of the April 27 case at Lone Star Beef in San Angelo, in which a cow displaying signs of a brain disorder was not tested for mad cow disease despite a federal policy to screen all such animals.’
Spam: The Spamometer; a
1997-vintage spamfilter along the lines of filter.plx. Interestingly,
I hadn’t seen this before — who knows, if I had, SpamAssassin could have
used a (0.0, 1.0) scoring system instead of the ‘5 point threshold’. ;)
(Thanks, Gary!)
Conferences: I’m going to LayerOne; it looks interesting, and I’ve been hoping to bump into Danny O’Brien (who’s there doing his Life Hacks talk) for a couple of drinks and a blather for quite a while. Other speakers look similarly interesting, in an ‘offbeat hacker conference’ way, so I think it’ll be fun.
Life: I’ve learned one thing this weekend — humans are not designed to function in the desert. I went bush-camping in the Anza-Borrego Desert state park with a few mates, and we quite simply baked in the 45C/113F degree heat. Walking 3 miles in that heat was easily equivalent to 15 miles in normal temperatures.
Photos: the view out to sea from Seal Beach, just south of LA. (duh. thanks Ben, I’d b0rked the link earlier.)
Weblogs: Greenpeace: Mysteries of the Deep — ‘the SV Rainbow Warrior left Auckland, New Zealand, on a voyage around the surrounding waters. Our mission: To highlight the irreversible damage caused to deep sea life by bottom trawling.’ Official weblog maintainer for the voyage: one Daev Walsh. Nice one Daev!
Literature: So, more on this entry — believe it or not, there’s a Japanese Sourceforge project implementing a Wiki called ‘mrkrgnao’. Japanese Joyce fans!
Funny: 
Who knew there was a Commodore 64 gang sign? PRESS PLAY ON TAPE, that’s who!
Marketing: It appears that MATRIX (the Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information EXchange) at one stage did — and may still — include a ‘terrorism quotient’ field, representing ‘a statistical likelihood of (people) being terrorists’.
Tech: I should note this here just in case anyone finds it useful. A handy tip for anyone visiting Caesar’s Palace; their ‘Business Center’ doesn’t have wifi yet, but (cough) one of their neighbours certainly does ;)
Travel: I’ve just spent a week in the UK; much culture was imbibed, I got to see Michael Landy’s Semi-detached at the Tate, met up with some good mates including the pregnant Lean, and was a happy camper overall.
Patents: According to Ciaran O’Riordan of IFSO, one key aspect of the EU Council’s meeting on the software patent legalisation proposal hinged on the use of the phrase ‘as such’, to effectively sneak a loophole past the Council members:
Spam: Yahoo!’s DomainKeys proposal for sender auth.
Ireland: Update update! The Stallman talk is now free (-as-in-beer), apparently. No more updates, any further news will just be on their site. ;)
Ireland: So I forgot to mention who’s running the Richard Stallman talk in TCD next week.
Compare this recent statement from Minister Mary Hanafin, Minister of State with Responsibility for the Information Society, and this extract from ‘Why Microsoft Wins’ advertorial written by a Microsoft product manager, Sunday Business Post, 2004-05-02:
Circularity: My long-distance provider, Primus, is using SpamAssassin for spam-filtering at their ISP end!
GNU: Hey, Dublin-based people! Richard Stallman will be giving a talk titled ‘The Dangers of Software Patents’ in Dublin on May 24, at 19:30. It’ll be in the TCD Hamilton building, right beside Pearse St. DART station. I’ve never seen him speak, but I hear it’s definitely worth attending, and his message needs to get out there, further into the Irish software industry and political circles.
Funny: Here’s the
Daily Show
segment with Scott Richter (WMV, 9.8MB).
Patents: There’s a good discussion over at Joi Ito’s weblog on software patents.
Toys:
Argh, I’ve been infected by the Breedster STD!
EVoting: I didn’t realise it, but the Open Voting Consortium‘s ‘EVM2003’ e-voting system looks excellent. Here’s the key point: it produces printed ballots, unlike the DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) systems. Those are what’s counted, and those are what the voter verifies. And it’s open-source, too, so the source is available.
Iraq: OK, I’ve been keeping quiet on the whole Iraq thing — so far, it’s pretty much turned into what I was suspecting would happen once GWB declared ‘Mission Accomplished’, and now there’s lots more people saying what I previously felt wasn’t being said. However, I’ve just heard something that really winds me up.
Patents: The Irish EU Presidency keeps on rolling.
News:
Newseum: Today’s Front Pages (Flash map view). A great site;
the best thing about it is, a double-click on each newspaper’s
‘dot’ will pop up their front page as a larger image in a new
window, and give you a URL for a full-page PDF file.
Patents: I’ve just come across Tim Oren’s page on the Unisys GIF patent furore of 1994-5. Tim used to be VP of ‘Future Technology’ at CompuServe.
Television: Tony Bowden: BBCtorrent? ‘Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet.’ I have my fingers firmly crossed here. This could be really excellent news. Of course, not being located in the UK could make it not-so-easy to actually watch them from here, but the underlying thinking is really cool.
Europe: Given the Irish EU Presidency’s recent passing of the IP Enforcement Directive and the second attempt to get the Software Patents directive through using the EU Council of Ministers, is it really appropriate for Microsoft to “contribute” to the Irish EU Presidency?
eVoting: Success! The use of e-voting systems for the June elections in Ireland has been abandoned, after a severely critical report from the Commission on Electronic Voting. Take a look at the report here. Some bits: