Politics: FFII reports that the ‘IPR Enforcement Directive’, the law proposed to deal with ‘IPR infringement’ by the wife of the CEO of Vivendi Universal, has just been approved by the EU Council.
Justin's Linklog Posts
Language: So, here’s a word worth noting — ‘Neverendum’. This Guardian article notes:
Ireland: So on Saturday last, Pat Kenny, the host of the Late Late Show (Ireland’s longest-running chat show) had Aileen O’Carroll on to talk about the Dublin Grassroots Network’s planned May Day march.
Patents: The pro-software-patent lobby has frequently stated that TRIPS — the Treaty on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), signed on 1993-12-15 as a constituting document of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) — requires that software be patentable. For example, here’s one from the International Chamber of Commerce:
Spam: Anne Mitchell on GMail’s spam filtering — sounds like her results are actually worse than mine were. But the ads worked well:
Art: Machine Molle bill themselves as ‘post-production’, but I suspect that’s understating their work — their site has Flash-playable copies of their videos for Royksopp’s ‘Remind Me’, Air’s ‘Electronic Performers’, and a recent ad for Areva, a Canadian power company. All are simply amazing. Go take a look. (link via Joe)
Code: A very good intro to Bloom Filters at perl.com by Maciej Ceglowski.
Net: So, it looks like closed-group filesharing will be appearing in several more implementations soon. NTK writes this week, ‘the big new (yet old) killer app this year is going to be a some dinky little program that lets you easily and selectively share individual files with groups and sub-groups of your friends.’
Web: doing my bit for PageRank: jew.
Mail: I’ve dusted off my old e-mail usability wishlist, made a couple of changes to reflect the current situation now that GMail has implemented some of them, and Wikified the page.
Update: greetings, visitors from 2006! Please pay no attention to these figures, they’re from 2004, and both GMail and SpamAssassin have undergone major changes since those days. Historical interests only.
So, I set up a .forward to forward all my personal mail to GMail to see how it coped with my spam load, and compared it against the personal SpamAssassin install I’m running these days. Here’s the results:
Web: Following Anil Dash’s lead, here’s a few non-me Justins found via images.google.com:
Spam: Bram shares a spam-filtering tip — ‘most of the viruses I get have a Message-Id tacked on by the local mailserver. A little bit of messing with procmail and suddenly my junk mail level is under control.’
Spam: Lisa Rein has captured the Daily Show’s segment on spam — ‘Email Trouble’ — Rob Courddry interviewing Scott Richter. (direct link to the 10MB Quicktime movie).
TV: from the #tvtorrents FAQ: ‘Wildfeeds’ are ‘a transmission by the network to distribute the episode before it airs around to the tv relay stations. You need to be in the correct location and have a large satellite dish in order to receive them.’
Spam:
Guardian: Incredible Bulk, by Danny O’Brien. A great article from the
‘Spam and the Law’ conference. ‘This is why people such as Richter are
appearing from the shadows. They have a choice: turn legit, or risk an
increasingly criminal lifestyle.’
Patents: Disastrous for European software developers, that is.
Travel: I’m just back from a great road trip around Nevada and Arizona — lots of fun was had, and I even came out $100 up on the blackjack!
Pics: 
After nearly 2 years of
peripateticism, I’ve finally managed to track down my CD-ROMs of scans of
a select few of the pictures I took on the
round-the-world trip I took back in 2001-2002 (well, it wasn’t quite
round-the-world, just Down Under and Asia, but who’s counting).
Politics: The massive opposition to e-voting without a VVAT by Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting and others, has clearly got Minister Martin Cullen thoroughly needled.
Spam: Don’t miss this account of the capture of a 419 scammer in mid-spam. Nice work, Steffen! (PS: I don’t think eating a USB memory stick would do any good ;)
Antarctica: I’m obsessed with the wierd collision of out-of-control bureaucracy, strategic-interests-disguised-as-science, and normal life in a way off-normal place, that is the US Antarctic program. It’s fundamentally a microcosm of what future space exploration bases will be like — lots of high-faluting science talk, quite a bit of ‘making sure we have a strategic foothold’ reality, and people getting on with life in one of the most amazing places they can.
Patents: The FFII are suggesting a 10-day online ‘net strike’ to protest against the ongoing attempts to legalise software patenting in Europe.
As a result, I’m putting up a protest front page on these sites:
- this weblog
- my personal home page
- My software sites: EtText, <a href="http://webmake.taint.org/”>WebMake, <a href="http://sitescooper.org"> Sitescooper, <a href="http://scoops.sitescooper.org/”>Sitescooper Daily Scoops
If you support the actions of FFII, <a href="http://demo.ffii.org/online.php"> please join in, or even <a href="http://demo.ffii.org/brussels.php”>attend the in-person demonstration in Brussels! We need to make it clear that the small software developers of Europe do not support these undemocratic actions.
And finally, shame on the <a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/europarl0309/cons0401/index.en.html”>Irish EU Council presidency for supporting the EPO hook, line and sinker. Thanks, and I know who I’ll be voting for in future…
Funny: EFFector Vol. 17, No. 11a April 1, 2004. Some pretty funny gems in this one: USPTO to Start Granting Indulgences, Microsoft Wins Patent for Software Industry Monopolization, and SCO to Sue Over Unauthorized Use of Earth’s Resources:
Music: Ever wondered what the lyrics to Plastic Bertrand’s classic belgopunk tune really said? (Apart from ‘I am the king of the divan’, that is.) Wonder no more. (…ok, maybe these are a bit more likely. ‘Ey up!’, indeed.)
Games: Katamari Damacy (roughly translated as ‘Clumpsoul’)
is a game where you roll around various landscapes, making a giant
ball of ‘stuff’.
Here’s a review. It looks like sheer genius; here’s hoping
it gets a US/Euro release!
Mail: Google announces new mail service. This is not an April Fool’s Day joke — just terrible timing. ;) It’s for real.
Funny: Feds Cancel Flight on ‘Psychic’ Bomb Tip: an American Airlines flight was cancelled because of a tip-off from a self-reported psychic.
Funny: The Daily Show last night did an absolutely fantastic Rob Corddry segment with Scott Richter; sheer genius. Apparently, Scott is a ‘high-volume email deployer’, and spam is all the fault of the USPS, or something.
Patents: The pro-swpat lobby like to claim that software patenting will benefit EU-based SMEs and the economy, instead of benefitting large, US-based companies.
Linux: Doc Searls will be speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2004 in Dublin. Apparently, he’ll be discussing DIY-IT — the ‘real’ Linux story (‘how the demand side supplies itself’). That presentation is great — strongly recommended.
Funny: The Guardian’s got a new agony aunt — Buck up! Ann Widdecombe’s no-nonsense solutions to life’s knotty problems.
Funny: Hooray for the International Jewish Conspiracy! They’ve come up with The De-Bapper — de-baptize a fundamentalist Christian of your choice now, without their consent!
Software:
sourcefrog: arch rocks: mirroring. This is incredibly cool:
Tools: a handy OpenOffice.org tip: when typing, you often want to emphasise a word with italics, bold, or underlining. Interestingly, OOo adds a nifty text-markup-influenced AutoFormat feature — if you surround the word with asterisks, e.g.