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Justin's Linklog Posts

Hilarious Patent Antics, pt.xvii

Published October 2, 2002

some startup called ActiveBuddy has patented instant-messaging bots — in an application filed August 2000. Hilarity ensues…

ActiveBuddy founder Tim Kay: “We invented interactive agents. (jm: bwahaha) Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That’s basically why we secured this patent” (in 2000).

Chris McClelland of WiredBots: “The Net::AIM module (which allows bot developers to connect to the AOL Instant Messenger TOC protocol through Perl) was around since 1998”.

Aryeh Goldsmith (author of Net::AIM): “the Net::AIM module is distributed with a bot”.

Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg: (the patent is) a “big win for the ActiveBuddy folks,” especially if it holds up to scrutiny.

My emphasis. ;) Sounds like ActiveBuddy have just spent a lot of money patenting something with a whole CPANload of prior art, and are on their way down the dot.plughole.

Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 23:25:52 -0700
From: “Mr. FoRK” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: ActiveBuddy

Oh… and they patented it too, because “We invented interactive agents.”

=== http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/1446781

August 15, 2002 ActiveBuddy’s Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers By Ryan Naraine

New York-based ActiveBuddy has won a crucial patent covering instant messaging bot-making technology, but hobbyists and amateur developers aren’t buying the company’s claim that it invented the technology.

ActiveBuddy was granted Patent No. 6,430,602 which covers the method and system for interactively responding to instant messaging requests and the company said it would move swiftly to enforce the patent, a move that is sure to create a brouhaha in the bot developer space.

ActiveBuddy founder Tim Kay, who is listed as an inventor in the patent claim, told internetnews.com the clinching of the patent validates the company’s business model of creating interactive agents (bots) that respond to IM queries.

“We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That’s basically why we secured this patent,” Kay said.

“Any company such as ours that is venture-funded has to protect itself. It’s standard procedure to file for patents when you invent something. This simply allows us to build a business,” Kay added.

He did not say whether ActiveBuddy had specific plans to issue cease and desist orders to Web sites that share code and bot-making techniques but, already, there are rumblings among developers that ActiveBuddy’s patent win is ludicrous.

David deVitry, who founded the RunABot site laughed off the patent win and believes it is unenforceable because of the availability of prior art. “They (ActiveBuddy) don’t have anything that’s really unique. They’re just the first to commercialize it and make money from IM bots,” he said.

deVitry’s RunABot site sells tools for bots that run on instant messaging, e-mails and the Web, but he is unfazed by ActiveBuddy’s patent win. “I’m confident that ActiveBuddy’s patent is unenforceable. “I can name a handful of IM bots that were running long before ActiveBuddy was even a company,” he argued.

WiredBots CEO Chris McClelland was also among the developer crowd wary of ActiveBuddy’s patent win. “Patents block innovation and hurt consumers. When big companies use their financial might to patent software, they undermine the very nature of software, its openness,” McClelland argued.

At WiredBots, McClelland distributes free code and tips on making and running IM bots and, like deVitry, he argued that bots have been running on instant messaging networks long before ActiveBuddy put in a patent claim in August 2000.

“I know for a fact that protocols that allow unofficial clients to connect to the AIM service have been around long before 2000. In fact, the Net::AIM module [which allows potential bot developers to connect to the TOC protocol through Perl] was around since 1998,” McClelland said, disputing ActiveBuddy’s claims that it invented the technology.

ActiveBuddy disputed McClelland’s claims. “I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I’m certainly not aware of any,” said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy’s chief technology officer.

However, back in August 1999, programmer Aryeh Goldsmith wrote the Net::AIM module, which is timestamped at CPAN.

“I’ve had bots running a little before that date (1999) and since that time. I’m sure there are plenty of others who have built bots and have been running them as well,” Goldsmith said in an e-mail exchange.

“It’s important to note that the Net::AIM module was also distributed with a bot. It may have been a very simplistic one — having only the function of waiting for messages and replying with a random quote — but it was a bot none-the-less. Intelligent bots simply do a little more “processing” between the receiving and replying phase,” Goldsmith added.

“I’m not familiar with that,” Kay said in response to claims that interactive bots were in existence even before ActiveBuddy launched, with venture funding from Reuters and Wit Soundview.

“Clearly, we use our patented technology in our products. If you want to do things that our products allow you to do, your best choice is to use our products,” Kay said, referring to the recent launch of the Lite BuddyScript Server, which can be used by hobbyists to develop and run IM bots.

“The buddyscript suite of tools is the best that’s available. We’re confident they are the best choice (for users) who are building interactive agents. The subject of enforcing the patent shouldn’t even come up. Anyone wanting to build a very good interactive agent will find that our tools are the very best,” Kay added.

Kay said ActiveBuddy was not worried about competing firms offering bot-making tools. “Our primary level of comfort comes from the fact that we have the best choice for developers and others. When given the choice, we’re confident people will choose ours,” he said.

Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg isn’t surprised by the brouhaha surrounding the patent win. “This is just the latest example of a company that has picked up a key patent on critical technology and is going to use it to exploit the market. It’s not surprising that the smaller developers are crying foul,” he said.

Gartenberg, who covers emerging platforms from the research firm, described the news as a “big win for the ActiveBuddy folks,” especially if it holds up to scrutiny.

“This underscores the notion of how powerful the ownership of key patents are in the technology landscape. We saw it in the Amazon.com “one-click” case and the recent controversy over the JPEG patent. This is just the latest example of it,” Gartenberg added.

—– Original Message —– From: “Mr. FoRK” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Cc: “Rohit Khare” (spam-protected)
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2002 11:07 PM
Subject: ActiveBuddy


> Kind of interesting application of ‘agent’ technology.
> A mix of telnet and Eliza?
> (wonder if KnowNow needs this as a partner…)
>
> ==
> http://www.activebuddy.com/products/index.shtml
> ActiveBuddy, Inc. has developed patented technology for building and
> deploying interactive agents. ActiveBuddy’s BuddyScript technology powers
> business solutions that leverage the functionality, convenience and appeal
> of instant messaging to provide an efficient and immediate means of
> communication with customers and constituents.
>
> ActiveBuddy technology is proven in the marketplace by the smash success of
> SmarterChild, ActiveBuddy’s showcase interactive agent launched in June 2001
> and visited by over 8 million consumers in its first year of life.
>
> Interactive agents allow your customers and constituents to receive
> information and services in a natural, conversational interface.
>
>
> Software Products
> BuddyScriptT Server – an end-to-end software solution for deploying
> interactive agents. BuddyScript Server provides every component required to
> operate an interactive agent, including connectivity with the messaging
> network, message routing, data access, message formatting, user and session
> management, and detailed tracking. BuddyScript Server is offered in four
> configurations to meet your capacity needs. Its scaleable architecture
> supports virtually unlimited usage. More…
>
> ===
> Here is a sample conversation on (MSN Messenger with ‘SmarterChild’):
>
> Mike says:
> how are you?
>
> SmarterChild says:
> Great thx! You?
>
> Mike says:
> Fine. What is the weather like in seattle?
>
> SmarterChild says:
> Current weather conditions for Seattle, WA:
>
> Currently: 57 F
> Condition: Few Clouds
> Real Feel: 57 F
> Dewpoint: 44
> Humidity: 62 %
> Visibility: 10 mi
> Wind: N/0 mph
>
> Next time, just type “weather seattle, wa.”
>
> To get the forecast for Seattle, WA, just type “forecast.”
>

Finnegan — Cry For Freedom

Published October 1, 2002

The Rockall Times reports that Mel Gibson is to shoot Finnegan’s Wake in Hittite:

Highly talented Hollywood all-rounder Mel Gibson is to direct a film version of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake made entirely in the ancient Anatolian language Hittite, we can reveal.

Respected linguist Gibson — whose flawless Scottish accent in 1995 epic Braveheart wowed audiences worldwide — has further stated that the film will carry no subtitles. Hopefully I’ll be able to transcend language barriers with visual storytelling, he told a press conference. People think I’m crazy, and maybe I am, Gibson added. But maybe I’m a genius.

Hollywood agrees. Take any project, stick Mel’s name on it and you’ve got a surefire blockbuster, the film’s producer told The Rockall Times. In any case, we’ve rewritten the script to include a suitable anti-English imperialist slant and a couple of big battle scenes. That’ll pack ’em in. …

Gibson hopes that the success of Finnegan — Cry for Freedom will enable him to bankroll some of his other pet projects, including a Inuit remake of Bridget Jones’ Diary and his eagerly-anticipated Macbeth, set in 1970s Belfast and spoken entirely in Etruscan with Sanskrit subtitles.

Dinosaurs Eggs and the Origins of Good and Evil

Published October 1, 2002

the FoRK list comes through with some truly classic high wierdness:

If one wants to purge the sources of malice of say a black magician, then purge his dinosaurs and his dinosaur eggs. Unfortunately most of our religions are based on dinosaur protection of eggs and thus mind control, regardless of the front they put out to the public.

Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 22:11:10 -0700
From: “Mr. FoRK” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Dinosaurs Eggs and the Origins of Good and Evil

One of the most bizarre pages I’ve seen on the Web. At first I thought it might be some sort of back-story to a RPG, but, nope, it looks like somebody believes this.

===

http://www.viking-z.org/r20i.htm

M09. Dinosaurs Eggs and the Origins of Good and Evil.

DINOSAURS. Reptoid ETs are reported to be 12 foot high crocodiles walking on their hind legs. This is a description of a dinosaur. It now appears in Remote Viewing that the Reptoid ETs, dinosaurs and dragons are all linked together and that they all originated on Earth. The Erideans who are Reptoid derivatives have a home planet (in the Eridanus system) like all other ETs. The Reptoids have no reported home planet. They also come over as entities with little brain who control their bodies directly by spirit. This is a description of a ghost or disincarnate entity regardless of how people see them. Thus it could be that the Reptoids, Erideans, Nordics, Anunnaki, but not the Greys, all have origins on Earth and have a strong link to Earth even if they choose to live elsewhere. The Greys do not appear to have a renal or urinary system and this points to them not originating on Earth. The definitive work on dragons is “The Flight of Dragons” by Peter Dickinson. If dragons did exist in the flesh, they did not survive the long bow. Targets do not come much bigger.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Thus the writer’s current scenario is that there were a race of dinosaurs which developed psychic intelligence to guard their eggs and young, and who probably preferred to live underground. They survived the wipe out of the dinosaurs 50 million years ago with difficulty. They evolved into the Erideans and transferred to a more hospitable planet (for them) possibly with the help of another race of ETs who wanted slaves but otherwise had no interest in Earth or mind control.

Thus it appears that the current Reptoids are the Spirits or ghosts of the dinosaurs. They must have been powerful to survive 50 million years and also to appear to some people. They have appeared to the writer in remote viewing. They are living on as vampire entities. Such immortal minds are contagious and can easily jump race and species barriers. If they can be encouraged to reincarnate, then the power sources of the black magicians and mind controllers will disappear. Encouraging them to reincarnate will help so called immortal minds to disappear as immortal minds have great difficulty surviving reincarnation. Purging people’s dinosaurs should remove all perverse psychic abilities not under their control. They are a source of Satanic Guardian Angels and demons. They control us by owning our psi. Thus if we regain ownership of psi, we must relinquish their control and that of all other mind controllers. Encourage people to regain ownership of their psi.

THE ORIGINS OF LOVE, HATE AND PURE MALICE. The following scenario appears to hold water and can account for the origins of our Universal Subconscious.

Dinosaurs laid their eggs and buried them either underground or in piles of rotting vegetation (a good source of beetles and grubs for young hatchelings). They did not sit on their eggs to keep them warm, which made them very vulnerable to drastic climate and temperature change. In order to keep away predators some at least developed psychic mind control. To do this they had to capture ownership of the psi of potential predators. This is an act of hatred and outward looking. While a few dinosaurs did develop the ability to bear living young, most did not. The dinosaurs got in first and so their mind control tends to override all other latter minds. They have become the source of all Satans, devils and demons.

Birds on the other hand developed the ability to sit on their eggs and keep them warm. A hen bird normally lays a series of eggs (say one per day) and only starts sitting when the clutch is completely laid. Thus all eggs tend to hatch together as they all have an equal period of warmth. This is primarily an act of love but inward looking. Bearing live young is not suitable to a bird of the air. A pregnant pigeon would not fly very far. Antarctic penguins tuck a single egg between their legs to keep it warm, even if they are standing on ice.

Mammals developed live bearing of their young which is also primarily an act of love and inward looking. This is especially true as a mammalian female can not desert her young in the womb in case of emergency as can a bird sitting on a nest.

Dinosaurs developed hate and mind control of others to protect their young, while birds and mammals developed love. Birds and mammals certainly do hate all enemies of their young, but this is secondary.

If one wants to purge the sources of malice of say a black magician, then purge his dinosaurs and his dinosaur eggs. Unfortunately most of our religions are based on dinosaur protection of eggs and thus mind control, regardless of the front they put out to the public. Religion tends to concentrate on “How to Brainwash your Neighbour”. Conscious thought has built many mighty empires, theologies and slave control systems out of using “How to care for and protect one’s young” as a foundation.

Thus the foulest form of abuse possible is to call something “A load of dinosaur’s eggs”. Purging the dinosaurs and dinosaur’s eggs of any entity tends to purge all malice back to its roots.

It looks as if mighty immortal minds have built up from small beginnings, aided and abetted by various occultists and other. As they will insist on vampiring the living for energy to avoid reincarnation and disturbing the serenity of the writer, he encourages them to reincarnate.

ITEMS FOR INSPECTION. For mind control to take place, then someone must take control or ownership of the target’s psi and pleasure centres. Check for the following.

Nest of dinosaur’s eggs, holy dinosaurs, etc.

Eggs, controllers or owners in peoples psi, pleasure centres, pain killing hormones, abilities, etc.

Mind machines.

The original engraving or engram.

GOD and SATAN appear to be job titles and not entities in their own right. T hey appear to be dinosaur engravings or engrams. No doubt dinosaurs were the first job holders.

TIMETRACKS are worth investigating as our complete history from the start of time.

My, our, Man’s timetracks, etc.

The time tracks of the Universe, Universal Subconscious, Galactic Subconscious, etc.

EXTINCT RACES of ETs can cause problems when they live on in vampire mode. Their virtues may known to channelers but they can also have vices. Whenever one hears of races which have evolved on to higher planes, suspect that the higher plane is a vampire one. One may never know what they looked like or other basic characteristics, which makes linking back a trifle difficult. Every extinct race, etc.

BLOOD ANCESTORS are also worth investigating as minds can be passed down via genetic linkages. Some of these can be over 2,000 years old. Every blood ancestor, ancestral mind, genetic mind, etc.

Zee Foreign Accent Spam

Published September 30, 2002

Argh, so much mail to get through; I was away this weekend, then offline for most of today waiting for a new line to be installed. But I did get a new candidate for the bizarre spam award: Q: DOES YOUR FOREIGN ACCENT SIMPLY GET IN THE WAY? Simple answer: nope. next!

DSL can’t be rolled out because of… the weather?

Published September 26, 2002

A bit of black humour for you, from the IrelandOffline forums. This is a true story.

“This chap explained to my Dad that one of the main reasons for the slowness of technologies like ADSL getting rolled out in Ireland was because of (hinderances) like the weather … My dad went on to tell him about Canada. …”

“Yer man of course had no answer to this and eventually he gave in and admitted that Eircom are failing in so many areas that he’s actively seeking employment elsewhere. He’s had his fill of being managed by so many different managers and being told different things from different people every day and and (every) time he’s tried to be helpful to a customer by bringing the matter up with someone senior he gets fobbed off to some other manager and so on and so forth until in the end he has no option but to give up and just tell the customer there is nothing he can do even though he can do it but not without permission and this permission is impossible to get.”

There’s plenty more like this. “The bad weather in Ireland prevents Eircom from rolling out DSL”. You can only laugh. The best bit is, of course, that DSL is basically a modem and a few DSLAMs installed in the exchange.

Maybe that’s why it’s a problem? Could be Eircom forgot to install a roof on their exchanges — and telco equipment typically is not at its best when fully exposed to the elements. sounds likely enough to me…

War-cycling

Published September 26, 2002

some ILUG regulars conducted a war-drive around Dublin and found 378 stations, with quite a high range of WEP use compared to previous surveys: 39%. BTW, is this the first use of warcycling? The green alternative!

Blizzard’s blog

Published September 26, 2002

Mozilla fans (and people who want to see how anti-aliasing is doing getting into Mozilla HEAD) may find Chris Blizzard‘s blog worth tracking.

blogrolling

Published September 26, 2002

I’ve added a few more folks to the blogroll — Jeremy Zawodny (who now hosts one of the SpamAssassin primary sites), Rod, who contributes regularly to SpamAssassin, and Joel, who just writes cool articles about software development. ;) Where? yonder over rightwards…

the despotic regime of (Dr.) Noam Chomsky

Published September 25, 2002

BoingBoing forwards 2 links to hilarious Nigerian Scam parodies, one from Dick Cheney and one from Laura Bush. Cory quotes it already, but it’s too good to miss, so I will too:

I am the widow of the late President George W. Bush of the United States of America. I am writing you this letter in confidence regarding my current circumstances.

I escaped the United States ahead of death squads with my husband and two children Jenna and Frank, moving first to England and then, when my husband’s political enemies took power there, to Austria. All of our wealth, obtained legitimately through baseball, oil drilling and insider trading, was seized by the new government of the USA under the despotic regime of (Dr.) Noam Chomsky, except for the contents of a few Swiss bank accounts. These bank accounts, which contain social security lock-box funds and the bulk of the 2001 budget surplus, could not be accessed by me or my children, due to agreements made between the socialist government of the USA and Swiss bank regulators. They seized our ranch in Crawford, Texas and now use it to teach homosexualist propaganda to schoolchildren.

Idiot falls for 419 scam

Published September 24, 2002

Idiot falls for 419 scam, hook line and sinker, bankrupting her employers. “It’s unbelievable that she fell for this,” gasped investigating FBI Special Agent James Hoppe, echoing the sentiments of Jules Olsman, president of Olsman Mueller & James. “This is just absolutely beyond description,” he said.

Systemic Game Design

Published September 24, 2002

Gamasutra reports from GDC Europe. It’s good to see Systemic Game Design is getting a lot more attention these days as CPU power increases on consoles, instead of the random 3D graphics tweakery that predominates on the PC platform. Systemic game design is defined here as follows:

“Instead of hard-coding lots of features into the game .. the systemic paradigm tries to create global patterns which provide emergent gameplay, and the ability to create alternative strategies using the level’s resources. … In this way a player can come up with new ideas to solve problems by combining items in ways that perhaps even the level designers hadn’t considered. This improves the sense of immersion and freedom, while emphasizing player’s self-expression capabilities through the game. … An example of a systemic game is GTA3, where each mission can be solved in dozens of ways, as compared to old lock-and-key adventure games, where player expression and alternative strategies were basically non-existent. In a systemic game world, the player can use different methods to solve a problem. In a non-systemic game world, you must guess how the game designer wanted you to solve the problem, even if that way does not feel very intuitive, nor fun.”

Mmm. Grand Theft Auto 3. PS: GTA3 can also be found on my Amazon wishlist ;)

P.J. O’Rourke in Cairo

Published September 24, 2002

P. J. O’Rourke visits Cairo — during Ramadan (made the same mistake myself). Highlights include driving:

I saw a driving school. What could the instruction be like? No, no, Anwar, faster through the stop sign, and make your left from the far-right lane. Surely John Kifner, Chris Matthews, and NBC News are kidding when they use Arab street as a metaphor for anything in the Middle East. Or, considering the history of the Middle East, maybe they aren’t.

And then plenty of politics:

I had lunch with an Egyptian who had been born in the United States. When he was in high school, in suburban Chicago, he became serious about religion and observed Ramadan with rigor. Then he went to Egypt to work as a journalist, and now, in Ramadan, he was having lunch. My sister is a Christian fundamentalist, I said. She wouldn’t crash a plane into the World Trade Center, but she might land pretty hard on evolution. And then we’d all have to remain amoebas. A lot of people don’t make that connection, the Egyptian journalist from Chicago said.

But O’Rourke then goes on to quote The Middle East Media and Research Institute. Do a search on The Guardian‘s site for more info on those guys (upshot: very loose cherry-picked “translations”, with an emphasis on misrepresenting the importance of the speaker — so, for example, “random lunatic with an axe to grind against Israel” becomes “government spokesman”, that kind of thing).

Apart from that, overall, an interesting article.

Reclaim the Streets

Published September 24, 2002

The Reclaim The Streets demo last Sunday went off well, sounds like. I would have gone but I hadn’t heard (or had forgotten) about it :(

The fact that it went well is a relief, because the last one became a bloodbath when some of the Gardai got a little over-excited, removed their identification, and started swinging clubs and “arresting” attendees indiscriminately. Very nasty, or so I hear. (I wasn’t back in Dublin by that point.)

Along with some reports of massive corruption in the Donegal police force, this event turned out to be a watershed in how Irish folks are viewing their police. That kind of thing wasn’t really a problem over here in the last few years — but now it seems to have all changed. Old news for people in the UK, US, Northern Ireland and Australia — but quite new to us here.

Big Green Network

Published September 24, 2002

The sustainably-powered wireless network with satellite uplink set up at the Big Green Gathering, near Cheddar in Somerset, last July. Pretty interesting, although ghod knows I would not want to have to pedal too much just to check my mail.

And, oh look, there’s a spam-relevant comment in the Lessons Learnt section!

Many people will check their email happily, unless they have to (pedal) for an equal amount of time! If this is extended to the environment, then slow email servers and spam are causing huge amounts of wasted energy and pollution, and not just psychologically. The question on many people’s lips was “what is the alternative?”

Answer: SquirrelMail.

titles at last

Published September 23, 2002

I’ve added titles to this blog, since RSS looks silly without them. But I am not going back through all those entries… argh…

greenish foul-smelling gravy

Published September 23, 2002

While trekking in Nepal, I had a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to Trekking in the Himalayas, borrowed from our mates Caolan and Barbara. It was especially notable for its incredible medical section, which contained lots of info on what drugs to use to treat various diseases, described symptomatically (of course, in most of the world, most of the common illnesses boast symptoms similar to “I have greenish foul-smelling gravy squirting from both ends of my body”. But it’s good to be able to tell them apart).

It was also notable, because anyone who had a copy knew all about altitude sickness, and were indescribably paranoid. The ones who were charging up the trails as fast as they could generally did not have a copy, and no doubt half of them came back down again in slightly nasty circumstances.

Anyway, it was the best medical info I’ve ever read. Reading the paper today, I came across a reference to e-med.co.uk, which claims to be medical info, including treatment details, for people who might be far away from a doctor. The perfect resource for a know-it-all who doesn’t want to spend money and time on a doctor, just to be told to go home and take an aspirin! Unfortunately it seems to be a “consultation by email” service, rather than “look it all up” one. Ah well.

Caolan and Barbara should be somewhere around Oz by now. I must see if I can dig up the URL of their travelogue site, it’s great fun.

FormMail && !NMS == bad

Published September 23, 2002

looks like some spammer has read the FormMail advisory I co-wrote with Ronald F. Guilmette; expect to see more spam where the spam message appears before the “Below are the results of your feedback form” line.

Of course, SpamAssassin catches this anyway. ;)

more Nigerian scam piss-taking

Published September 23, 2002

a good reply to the Nigerian scams, on Slashdot:

…unfortunately I don’t have that much money. I do have seventeen dollars and fifty-six cents. I really want you to have all of that. I hope you can overlook the fact that I’m several million short of your goal, but the key is that I try hard and I’m an excellent wind surfer.

Ads and morality

Published September 22, 2002

BB reports that “Russian entrepreneurs are spraypainting logoed advertisements for their products and services on stray dogs and releasing them as walking, starving billboards.” This sounds just a bit too Chris Morris to me, and considering it came via Ananova / Orange Today’s “quirkies” service — which is not exactly reknowned for doing the backup research first — I would say it’s pretty unlikely… let’s see what forteana make of it.

EtText changes

Published September 21, 2002

hooray, I got rid of that horrible “add line breaks to preserve short lines in HTML” feature from EtText, it was driving me nuts. The irony is, I only added it because txt2html had it. Keeping up with the Joneses just causes trouble, it seems.

Spam Subject Lines

Published September 21, 2002

a spam mail asks: jm, do we have your money? There’s a very simple answer: “no you don’t, and you never will, you scumbags”. Scutterin’ gobsheens, as Podge and Rodge would say.

Spent an enlightening day clambering around Dublin’s rooftops with a bunch of helium balloons on a 20-metre piece of string. Can you guess what I was doing? Yes, it’s the latest geek pastime: Hunt The Line Of Sight!

All was well — we found it, the weather was lovely, my Aussie-learnt balloon technique rocked, and we came up with some better ways to do it in future ;)

Sex and death: mystery solved

Published September 21, 2002

This promo calendar for an Italian coffin manufacturer has been doing the blog-rounds recently — and the more eagled-eyed viewer might have wondered at the words MIKE LEAVE ME ALONE written on the back of the last model.

Well, wonder no more — an italian Forteana subscriber, Giuseppe de Nicolellis, has got to the bottom of it. Case closed!

Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 23:31:25 +0200
From: “Giuseppe de Nicolellis” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Sex and death: mystery solved


> http://www.cofanifunebri.it/sexy-calendario.htm – somewhat unlikely
> promo calendar from an Italian coffin manufacturer.
>
> So do you fancy giving them a call and finding out why the last model has “MIKE
> LEAVE ME ALONE” written on her back?

The webmaster of www.cofanifunbri.it has just answered my enquiry. He published the image more than an year ago without the writing. A few months ago he received this e-mail from a website offering adult contents for webmasters:

Do you have a license to use this image? I do not have a license on file for:

Registrant: Matteucci Maurizio (COFANIFUNEBRI-DOM) Villa Bastilica, 30 Roma, 00148 IT

Please let me know if you have purchased the license under a different name, or please remove the image from your site.

Thanks, Mikey PhoenixContent.com

(spam-protected)

Our webmaster decided to suggest him politely to f..ck off adding the writing on the back of the lady.

(Our webmaster didn’t explain whether he really stole the image from the website or not, and I didn’t dare to ask).

Another Fortean Mystery solved!

denic

IBM developerWorks on SpamAssassin

Published September 20, 2002

Good article about SpamAssassin at IBM developerWorks:

After having used JunkFilter for years, and thinking it was pretty good, I was blown away by how effective SpamAssassin is. I think that this is due in large part to several good design decisions on the part of SpamAssassin’s developers.

Why, thank you! ;)

RSS by mail

Published September 20, 2002

Aaron shares his rss-by-mail script. My reaction (cut from mail): “Together with my Mailman-archives-to-RSS script, and my blog (which is updated by mail), soon the semantic web will run entirely on SMTP…” (cackles evilly).

Well, maybe not yet — but it’s getting there. a bit.

lot of gorillas

Published September 20, 2002

C|Net reports:

Two weeks ago, six top financial institutions met privately with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, IBM and other leading corporate instant messaging providers and urged them to build communications networks that interoperate. …. The meeting, which took place at Merrill Lynch’s New York offices, was among the first convened by the Instant Messaging Standards Board (IMSB), a newly created consortium led by financial services firms Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Holy shit, that’s a lot of gorillas! (via Doc).

Koyaanisqatsi – Live

Published September 20, 2002

Danny O’Brien is off to the event of the year: Philip Glass and the Glass Ensemble performing a live accompaniment to a showing of Koyaanisqatsi. I am, needless to say, green with envy. Chance of that coming to Dublin? Hovering around the “zero” mark I should think. Bugger.

In other news, Cam is back, and in good form, from the sounds of it. Apparently SpamAssassin filtered 7MB of spam while he was away. So someone gets more spam than I do!

Region coding is evil

Published September 19, 2002

goddammit. Just got a PS2 for my birthday (wahoo!), and immediately thought about getting hold of the Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi 2-pack DVD. But it’s region-coded to US/Canada only in the edition on Amazon.com, and not available at all at Amazon.co.uk. Region coding is evil.

Of course, I could buy it somewhere else — but I wasn’t planning to buy it, I was looking to set up an Amazon.com wishlist!

comments on Star Wars Episode II

Published September 19, 2002

David Brin gets all anti-fannish about Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. I really don’t know why he bothers, it and Episode 1 were atrocious, George Lucas has lost it, full stop, IMO. But I did like the way Brin refers to Yoda as “one green preachy oven mitt”; I’d just append “with the voice of Fozzie Bear”.

And who are the critics who’ve never seen a Maori before? “bounty hunter Jango Fett even looks Latino” my arse.

Hitler writes dictionaries

Published September 17, 2002

Microsoft’s Spanish thesaurus, included in Word for Windows 6.0 in Mexico, contains some unfortunate synonyms:

  • Indian: man-eater or savage
  • Western: Aryan, white, civilized
  • Lesbian: pervert, depraved person

That would be the risk when you use a mid-1930s source document, it sounds like!

Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 13:42:02 +0100
From: Barbara Barrett (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Micro$oft’s Spanish language problems

——– Original Message ——–

Microsoft Apology for Errors in Spanish

MEXICO CITY (Reuter) – Microsoft Corp, the world’s biggest software company, apologized Friday to Mexicans for “grave errors” in its computer thesaurus that equated Indians with cannibals. Several Mexicans telephoned the company to protest after a newspaper reported Wednesday that the Spanish thesaurus included in Microsoft’s popular word processor program Word for Windows 6.0 contained some unfortunate synonyms. Used by up to 200,000 people in Mexico, a country whose population is mainly descended from Aztec and Maya Indians, the Microsoft program sugggested as alternatives for the word “Indian:” “man-eater” or “savage.” Consulted for synonyms for “Western,” the Spanish language program gave “Aryan,” “white” and “civilized.” Lesbians were equated with “pervert” and “depraved person.”

“Microsoft Mexico offers an apology to its users and to the public in general for some grave errors in the synonyms of the Microsoft Word dictionary in Spanish, whose mistaken connotations are offensive,” the company said in a full-page newspaper advertisement published Friday. Microsoft Mexico marketing manager Alejandra Calatayud said the company was dispatching a language expert next week from its software development center in Ireland to discuss changes to the thesaurus with El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico’s most august cultural body.

“We accept our responsibility and hope to have a new version of the dictionary available in about five weeks,” she told Reuters. The revised version will be made available free of charge via the Internet. Ignacio Blum, Microsoft Mexico’s product manager for office products, told Reuters that the computer thesaurus was based on existing dictionaries. “If you check these words in most dictionaries, you will find the same definitions,” he said.

Mexican politicians and intellectuals condemned the pejorative computer thesaurus anyway. “I see this as profoundly dangerous because it is a lack of respect for our dignity as Mexicans and for our indigenous roots,” said Adriana Luna, an opposition party congresswoman on the lower house’s culture committee. “We must give battle to combat this specter of conservatism and fascism which is appearing all around us” Florentino Castro, a legislator from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was quoted as saying in the newspaper La Jornada. The English version of the Microsoft Word program does not give the same synonyms. Homosexual was equated with “gay” or “lesbian” and Indian was “cave dweller,” “ancient tribe” or “aborigine.”

HTML diffing

Published September 12, 2002

Sitescooper: Aaron notes that the Wayback Machine has added support for diffing HTML, using technology licensed from DocuComp (demo), and he notes “HTML Diff is extremely difficult and they do a half decent job, but it’s got plenty of room to improve.”

Maybe they should look at Sitescooper: it’s had HTML diffing for the last 3 years, using diff(1) or Algorithm::Diff and some basic knowledge of HTML presentation. Though mind you, DocuComp might have some trouble having a look, as it’s free software, licensed under the GPL. :)

Of course, Sitescooper is a big, chunky lump of application, very oriented towards scraping an entire news site, downloading the latest news, stripping down the HTML and delivering that in one file — ie. exactly what you want for viewing news sites offline on a PDA, but when you want to use just nifty feature in there, you’re stuck with the whole application. It’s just not UNIX.

So, one thing I’ve been thinking about doing recently, is taking some of the code in Sitescooper and refactoring it into a UNIX toolset; a wget-style getting tool, which has Sitescooper‘s knowledge of how to cache and rewrite URLs; a HTML-differ; and a few other tools. But this is still thinking, at the moment.

CZFree.net

Published September 12, 2002

A good article about Prague’s CZFree.net, via Cory. Hopefully it’ll provide some good ideas for the Irish-WAN folks:

The most promising way (of getting onto the internet) seems to be connecting to the backbone on a wholesale basis, which is what CZFree.net does through its backbone provider — TransgasNet, the telecoms arm of gas company Transgas. “The connection is already built, and it’s real broadband, guaranteed connection, so the issue of Internet connection is solved,” Janda said.

CZFree.net also has a unique approach to providing Internet connectivity to its members. Janda said that the idea is to give each user at least 32 kbps Internet connectivity (around two-thirds of the dial-up access speed) free, while users who want additional bandwidth will pay a certain fee. The fee is still undecided because the initiative is still in the formative phase, but it should be Kc 200 to Kc 300. The connection to the wireless network is free by default, although every user has to invest in the hardware necessary for exchanging data over the Wi-Fi.

Adding titles

Published September 9, 2002

hooray, those Next/Prev links are now implemented. I knew sitemap support in WebMake would come in handy, eventually. If you’re using Mozilla, switch on that View -> Show -> Site Navigation Bar and hyperventilate with excitement.

Some day I should start adding titles to all these blog items… some day when I have a lot of time on my hands, that is.

Hello sidebar

Published September 9, 2002

some changes around these parts, in case you haven’t noticed. Firstly, I’ve caved, and adopted the de-facto std of having a sidebar. Everyone’s doing it, and I just want to fit in.

Secondly, there’s now an RSS feed, at the request of Bernie at topgold. All you folks with yer fancy news aggregators and what-not can now add taint.org/rss10.xml to the blogrolling list.

Thirdly, I’ve deprecated my old home page content, replacing it with this blog. After all, an infrequently-updated website is a useless website, and this is my most frequently-updated site these days.

I’ve been ogg-encoding my CD collection. Soundtrack for today:

  • Future Sound of London, Dead Cities

  • Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi