Hi folks -- this is the new singular comments forum for taint.org; having comments pages for each story just didn't work for a small-scale blog -- and it was impossible to see if there was any new posts for all those individual forums.

So here's the All-New System. If you wanna comment, just comment here, but please list the title/URL of the post you're replying to, so folks can follow the discussion...

So the trick on noticing comment submissions is hooking the comment-submit form in with Net::AIM so that you automatically get an IM whenever someone submits a comment on your blog.

> So the trick on noticing comment submissions is hooking the
> comment-submit form in with Net::AIM so that you automatically
> get an IM whenever someone submits a comment on your blog.

Hey, that's why I'm using QT -- it lets me subscribe to the forum as a mailing list, and even reply by mail ;)

--j.

  Hey peeps amanda perez is down to ass singer I know people who know her personally so stay 5



                     Chrissi Chrissi Diaz

In http://taint.org/2003/05/12/184457a.html, you mention the NSS API changing incompatibly.

It keeps doing it and it'll keep on doing it, too; the glibc maintainers' policy on static binaries is `upgrade your glibc and they may break'. (A similar policy applies to .a files.)

In practice, though, if the binary is statically linked then nss will tend to keep working as long as you keep the old NSS shared libraries around. This can involve epic battles with distro packaging systems that want to remove them :)

What's the point of blocking hosts without PTR records?

re: PTR records: there's a small correlation between the absence of a PTR record, and spam. (the theory: if an admin can't be arsed to set up a PTR, it's a machine that should not be sending mail -- like a desktop machine with a misconfigured MTA, or running an open proxy).

The correlation was not good enough in our opinion for SpamAssassin; something like 21% of spam got hit, but 8% of our nonspam collection also hit that rule.

Plus I was on an ISP which used a mail relay that didn't have a PTR for a while. That's a whole ISP whose mail would be bounced by AOL...

FYI, that PS2 to VGA thing sucks. Just because your VGA monitor is capable of higher-res doesn't mean the PS2 is suddenly going to output the higher res (unlike the older Dreamcast which actually had a VGA mode output for games to use).

You'll get excellently drawn scanlines and all that other nonsense using that PS2/VGA adapter.

From personal experience.

yep, I think 625 scanlines is as good as I'll get, I don't mind that. all I want is a way to *see* what's going on
on the screen, without it rolling and in black-and-white ;)

The product in question claims to have reasonably good display quality. I'll update on how well it works when it arrives.

I really wouldn't be surprised at the 42% piracy rate. Small business've popped down to the compustore and compared the price of an Office license to the price of their new Dell which had it bundled. Even a mention of licensing a $50 shareware package can trigger questions of "can we get a cracked one?" around a meeting table.

Although they could be comparing high software usage to negligible software sales in Ireland. Anyone with a half decent purchasing dept will buy from the UK or US to avoid ridiculous euro pricing. Compare prices on the Macromedia Store's shop, Studio MX in International English for $899 in the international store, $1133 in the UK store, or $1180 in the Euro store (all prices ex-taxes)

hmm... good point -- they may not be buying from over-the-counter retailers in Ireland. that would result in a discrepancy between the 2 sources used for the BSA's report (they used a market research co to find out which software is used, then correlated to sales data IIRC).

PS: international store? don't you mean US store? ;)

PPS: I hope there aren't really discussions of "can we get a cracked one" around the meeting tables, that sucks ;)

The fancier the hardware, the more likely the software's been nicked is my rule of thumb. It could be a hangover from design colleges with no funding/academic computer store (so pilfering photoshop/quark is a necessity for students). The same person who'd just asked me what sort of powerbook they could get for 3 grand said "oh, you must be doing well" when I told him I'd just bought a new license for Dreamweaver (for $150).

Perhaps I'm being naïve, but SCO's case seems to me so obviously
absurd that I can't help wondering why so many people are so
concerned about it. And taking on IBM? They are going to be
squashed like a bug. And even if they weren't, I'd carry on using
free software anyway -- they can pry my Slackware CD from my cold
dead fingers ... ;-)

Re: SCO v. everybody: yes, it's totally absurd. But as Linus said, it's like watching 'Jerry Springer'. ;) And throwing peanuts from the gallery is quite enjoyable!

--j.

BTW, regarding the "Clue By Four" trademark case -- I had a smile when I saw the whois details for cluebyfour.com

Yeah, he just mailed noting that, too ;) He says he hasn't heard anything (yet).

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=...&btnG=Google+Search

There's a "Mitchell Wolf" affiliated with the West Chicago Chamber of Commerce: http://www.wegochamber.org/4members/memberlist1.html

Wanna phone him up and ask how Jody is? ;)

rOD.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/35/31683.html

I mean, is it just me, or is this McCarron guy a hapless scratch monkey ?

Edited by author 07-16-2003 19:23
He's Irish too -- the Irish Linux Users' Group is quaking in their boots at the prospect of a visit.

Worth noting that spam isn't the only thing he plans to fix.
He has designed NGWeb -- a much improved version of the web -- and a new linux variant called 'Linux Dimensions':

'I think you will be highly impressed with this vision of the future Internet based around upwards of 2000 petaflops of supercomputer processing power that we hope to have in place over the next 2 decades. NGWeb is a long-term goal.'

He hasn't mentioned perl yet, but it's only a matter of time. Me, I plan to down tools and take up goat-herding, my work is now obsolete ;)

re: referer logs. yep, more than likely via unbeknownst hosts via file sharing apps .. .hence the win98 machines etc.

I've noticed something quite similar for maths.tcd.ie where I get an
amount of spam delivered through our MX terciary. I tried adding the
primary as a fourth, low priority, MX server, in case they go for the last
MX record. In this case it doesn't seem to have encouraged the mail to
go directly to maths where it can be directed without my getting
hundreds of bounces for expired accounts or otherwise
undeliverable/unbouncable mail.

interesting -- so they must resolve all the MX records, and then drop repeated occurrences of the IPs -- ie. they run an equivalent of "uniq" on it.

Have you seen msnbc's meet the spammer bit?
See : http://blog.iloaf.com/archives/000054.html

Lensman,

God you have been busy, posting on every forum that will have you. All the 'hapless scratch monkey' comments in the world still only amount to rants.

Have you nothing of substance to say, perhaps anything technical?

"Where it underwent a slight change in formula" is a bit of an understatement. Someone in work brought me back "The Thai Red Bull". It was like liquid speed. A couple of teaspoonfuls of it kept you going through an allnighter and most of the next day. One of the programming team claimed that after a half a bottle, he had an erection that lasted two days.

yes, they do like their speed, the Thais -- liquid or otherwise. It makes a really great cocktail mixer too, in the form of 'buckets': http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied/log/archives/00000116.htm

That's just not funny you know! Think of the damage they could have caused! I could get a serious head injury or something!

HE HE HE HE HEE! (Chris)

:D

The microtution.org website is legitimate and they used an opt in mailing service which turned out not to be as opt in as they were told.

But they are for real and they are trying to help change the political scene for the better.

http://www.microtution.org deserves consideration.

that's a pity -- they need to get that "opt-in mailing service" to stop mailing on their behalf then. I've received
several more, the most recent at Tue, 9 Sep 2003 03:00:28 +0100.

Sent with forged headers, via a compromised machine in Spain. That's *really* not good company to keep.

I like the message on http://microtution.org. Too bad they got screwed by that sleazy mailer claiming to do opt in. Give the guy (Jeff Aldridge who seems to run the site) a break. He's a novice at blogging and seems to be sincerely appealing for help. His heart seems to be in the right place.

Re:GameCube
Excellent!
So what games have you picked up for your Cube?

Mark.

Zelda: The Wind Waker, and Metroid Prime -- planning to pick up Animal Crossing pretty soon, it sounds like great quirky fun, along the lines of Parappa The Rapper.

Zelda's a bit of a disappointment -- seems very similar to the last two, not much innovation. But I've only been playing it for a few hours so I'd better give it a chance first.

Metroid Prime -- haven't really played this at all yet ;)

Problem is, the memory card doesn't arrive 'til next week! damn.

I'm thinking of signing up for http://www.gamefly.com/gamecube/ -- NetFlix for games, for $22 a month! cool.

I went through the same emotions with WW when I bought it at US launch too, but it does have enough to keep you interested. If you're expecting Ocarina of Time, or Majora's Mask you can forget it, I didn't find it to be as expansive as OoT or as dark as MM, but there are more than a couple of jaw dropping set pieces for you to explore and interact with.

I still haven't finished Metroid Prime, I've been playing it only sporadically but am still only half ways through. The game is massive, great to look at and hear and it really is a First Person Adventure like no other.

Bought Animal Crossing, found that I'm not one for such games myself, but you can loose yourself in the game very easily. Animal Crossing+ which can use the GameBoy Advance e-Card Reader was released in Japan months ago and should be on it's way to the US when they can get all the text translated.

Gamefly might not be a bad thing to sign up for, it'll give you a chance to try out Viewtiful Joe without buying the whole thing, and I can only imagine the memory card pain, you start over every time you switch on.

Ouch! :-)

hello people!can you be my friend?i want to talk to all you lovely people.jesus said that we shud love our neighbour as our selves.i love the bible it is the way of life.don't you agree?

no.

Re: Happiness Measured

The last point, about consumerism, has seemed to me to be so terribly obvious. The point of marketing is to make you dissatisfied with your current situation, and to hold out the promise that if you simply will buy product or service X, you will be happier.

So they manage to make you dissatisfied, but buying the product or service fails to make you happier. That is, if you buy it at all; it seems that my garage will not hold all of the different kinds of automobile that the TV ads tell me that I MUST have in order to be happy.

Most of us could be reasonably happy with what we already have, if it weren't for the almost continuous barrage of commercial messages bent on convincing us that we are unhappy.

Hi Doug --

yep, I agree -- both of us have the same point of view -- subjectively! -- on this issue. But the advantage here is that these are scientific studies, which (assuming those psychologists are *real* scientists ;) have a much greater objectivity. So now we can say we're right ;)

Some "bring centres" have been popping up that take pretty much all waste. We've been recycling clothes, paper, plastics, glass, and now even those tetra pack is it paper? or metal? or plastic? things. But yeah, Caroline's off to India for a month, and I still can't drive, so the recycling's piling up.

I noticed our local "bring centre" in Grangegorman -- now the scene of anarchist direct action, exciting! -- could take pretty much anything.

I didn't realise they were all over the place though -- I thought this one was there just because it's the overall bin depot for the D7 area. That's cool.

Edited by author 10-17-2003 17:08
Well it's not only iTunes, you need to run the bundled version of QuickTime 6.4 under Wine as well.

Give it 14 months and I'm guessing that there will be three legit sources of music on the net, everything else will just be a rebranded version of those.

With the record companies eating between 60 & 70% of the cost of a song, the service providers can only hope that at the very least that they'll break even and at best they'll make a slight profit.

To this end the top three services probably won't be very profitable, but they will be strategic and only people who have a large cash horde can afford to run ventures in such a fashion.

In Apple's case they can charge the store and iTunes development as a form of advertising against their robust iPod profits, I can't think of another company in the market right or due soon who is in the same position.
Mark

More Bin Tax protest photos

http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=61663

http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=61586

http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=61512

other photos:
http://redjade.alturl.com/

More re: Happiness Measured

I just came across http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story.jsp?story=455650 about "memory morphing" advertisements.

Advertisers not only strive to make us unhappy, they are learning how to change our memories so that we think that we WERE happier in the past.

"...participants were served an unpleasant-tasting orange drink spiked with salt and vinegar. They were then shown adverts suggesting the drink was refreshing. Sure enough, many of the participants later reported that they had found the drink refreshing."

DVDRentals.ie is what you're looking for Justin!

Aha, but Skin lasted a massive, three (3) (III) episodes before Fox canned it. People think that these days that we are surrounded by more sex and porn, the reality is that the level of smut hasn't changed all that much we've just got better and quicker at getting it to more people. As a result the shock value has started to dissipate.
Mark

Agreed that it's not getting smuttier -- it's just become more mainstream. The volume has increased, basically...

The Spammer:
-Petards Q. Blinkers
-Foobar Economides
-Hillock H. Fossilized
-Hotel K. Primate
-Networked T. Crowley
-Jitterbug I. Catastrophes
-Pragmatism O. Playhouses

Groucho Marx:
-Lionel Q. Deveraux
-Wolf J. Flywheel
-S. Quentin Quale
-J. Cheever Loophole
-Hugo Z. Hackenbush
-Otis B. Driftwood
-Rufus T. Firefly
-Quincy Adams Wagstaff

I bet that the spammer is a Marx Brothers fan.
Mark

Hey Irish boy, re your unix/windows biculturalism post:

It's not unix/windows, really -- that's no contest,
because MS cannot get things right. The real problem
here is unix/rest of modern world.

See this brief exchange for a perfect example:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=group:co...g.google.com&rnum=1

(mind the wrap)

For many unix programmer, finding variables named 'x' by grepping for all lines containing the letter x is considered
perfectly healthy. If one protests, they say, "Oh, but
no real programmer would call a variable 'x', so it's not
really that absurd".

In essence, "Most GUIs I've used have had problems,
so GUIs should not be used as development tools (or indeed
at all, if possible)" seems to be the attitude.

But then most of this lot also program in C and Perl, so
to think of them as "real" programmers in any sense is a
bit of stretch, no? ;-)

Nishad

Hi Nishad --

He uses "more" -- what do you expect?! Although I do use grep for that purpose myself. (I think \< and \> can be used to look for "word boundaries" around the letter, which is good enough for me.)

I'm ignoring the perl comment. ;)

Dammit, I do my best to start a flamefest on your blog
and you respond with intelligence, restraint, and
decency? What's the world coming to?!?

Nishad

Awful movie, but the Times article reminds me of Bounce.
Paltrow's non-smoking character started chewing the gum with her friend who was trying to quit smoking. Her friend quit smoking, but Paltrow got hooked, and takes up smoking in an attempt to quit the gum.

It just goes to show that addictive personality's can reason themselves into anything if they think hard enough.

Mark

Good grief, who is this guy giving out about
indie music? One of your mates?

Have you seen _Spider_ yet?

No, it's some guy from SomethingAwful -- who are usually funny (although less so in this case). I liked his pointing out of 'Ian Curtis’s Elaine-from-Seinfeld style dancing', though ;)

No, I haven't seen Spider yet, but that reminds me -- I'm hoving Netflix-wards!

Well, there are _many_, _many_ more people in California, so, even with a comparable accident rate, horrendous death on the road is going to be much more of an everyday occurrance.

I remember living with a South African who was bemused at the commotion about the four-hundred-and-something yearly road fatality figure; he commented that would be the a normal toll from a bank holiday weekend where he came from.

Aidan -- as far as I can see, those figures are per 100K of population, though, so normalized against pop size. Or am I missing something there?

Also, if anything I'd expect *more* deaths due to the faster driving, higher densities on the freeways, and pervasive drink-driving (which in my experience is more common in the US than Ireland); but maybe that's balanced by Ireland's crappier roads and need to overtake constantly. ;)

...PS: Nishad, Spider suxxx. Well, not entirely -- it's got some good stuff in it -- but it's far too slowly paced, and the music sucks!

Edited by author 01-24-2004 15:02
... as far as I can see, those figures are per 100K of population, though, so normalized against pop size. Or am I missing something there?

They don't take into account news media outlets per head of population, though. If say, a TV channel has a target audience of thirty million, a single six-person accident will be relevant to a much smaller proportion of that than would be the case if the target audience were four million. You would need, supposing that they were not really atypical, a forty-two person accident to merit the same newsworthiness.

Strictly speaking, you should try to determine the number of accidents per thousand miles travelled and make comparisons on the basis of that.

There is no question but that lots of countries have road accidents just as bad as Ireland. But that doesn't mean any road accident deaths (at least not ones caused by carelessness, which is most of them) should be acceptable.

That's wierd. The only flights I've ever been on that featured applause on landing were on American airlines (AA, Delta, Continental). More on landings in the US than the return leg to Europe, but they were definitely a feature of internal trips (Newark/SF, Jacksonville/Atlanta) as well as internationals (Dublin/NY, Dublin/Boston, Atlanta/Brussels, multiple/Heathrow).

I've been on flights to Barcelona where the Spanish contingent did the clapping. I think it's inversely proportional to the reserved poise of the predominant culture on the plane. Or something.

I've seen the clapping in a Lufthansa landing at Munich. I assumed it was because it was very smooth -- you almost
couldn't tell when the tyres actually hit the ground.
I thought it was quite sweet -- I can't imagine why it
would drive anyone up the wall.

_Spider_ does *not* suck. You haven't heard the last of
me, Mason. I will continue my Irish uplift project to
introduce you to fine movies, food, and real programming
environments ;-)

ps> Say no to printf debugging!

I note with some alarm that there are no less than FOUR
google adverts exhorting me to quit smoking when I post
on your blog!

Edited by author 02-03-2004 01:09
'_Spider_ does *not* suck. You haven't heard the last of
me, Mason. I will continue my Irish uplift project to
introduce you to fine movies, food, and real programming
environments ;-)'

!

movies and food I have no problem with, but hands off my vim!
PS: Google is now trying to flog herbal remedies.

Hey Justin,

I heard that Morning Ireland interview live. The BUA 'expert' made out that the open source movement were attacking SCO. Also, I read on a BBC report that SCO are the owners of the Unix OS. Mainstream reporting of tech stories is generally poor but the Morning Ireland interview set a new standard. N.B. The following morning, Hanley did announce that the story was poorly reported and that they needed a new tech expert before interviewing some chap from Micosoft.

Mozilla Java Plug-in:

Useful reference page: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/java.html

For Linux, the recent Mozilla builds require a Java plug-in compiled with GCC 3.x, available only in the 1.4.2 version of Java (okay, later versions too, except there aren't any later versions yet). That plugin's located at $JAVA_HOME/plugin/i386/ns610/libjava.oji.so
(see also http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux.html#Java).

On Windows, Mozilla Firebird has a special quirk. If you haven't previously installed plain Mozilla, your system registry is missing a crucial entry. You can add it with a simple registry update file http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/resources/firebird-jre142-fix.reg

I use MozFirebird 0.6 on Windows and Mozilla 1.6 on Linux, and my Java 1.4.2 plugins are working fine.

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>N.B. The following
>morning, Hanley did announce that the story was poorly reported
>and that they needed a new tech expert before interviewing some
>chap from Micosoft.

Probably Tom Farrell... he's working there now (and collecting
names of linux users for 'assimilation', no doubt.)

- --j.
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you so *are* an alpha-geek, Justin... :)

Unrelated to any articles... I stumbled across this Irish joke:

http://jroller.com/page/Sandymountster/200...the_irish_go_to_war

Re Microsoft's "Caller ID" for e-mail:

I don't get it. What does this accomplish?

Okay, I didn't even TRY to read the whole thing. But it looks to me to be basically a reverse-DNS feature. AOL has, for some time, silently discarded e-mail arriving from servers that do not have a reverse-DNS entry. This cuts down on a lot of the crud coming in from non-ISP SMTP servers, both intentional and virus-planted. Is this a significant improvement over that simple approach?

Also, does Microsoft have some way to determine that the header has not been spoofed to show a fake originator with the true originating server posing as just a forwarder?

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Hash: SHA1


>I don't get it. What does this accomplish?

It's basically SPF, translated into XML for no good
reason, with a few bonus hacks that'll work well with their own
MTA and MUA products. (There's a bit of "NIH" going on, as
best I can tell.)

SPF/Caller-ID/the other LMAP proposals all share one basic idea:
allow organisations and domains to codify their email-origination policy in DNS, so that receivers can check to see what the sending domain *should* be using, and block if it doesn't match up.

It's slightly different from rDNS, in that rDNS doesn't indicate
mail policy. Pretty much every host on the 'net now has an rDNS
entry. However, not every host on the 'net should be originating SMTP connections directly to your organization's MX; most are
supposed to relay through "smarthost" SMTP relays.

Subverted desktop machines (the spam-spewing zombie army) will
thus be forced into a position where their spam is a lot easier to tell apart from real email. The current situation in SMTP, where there's no auth and I can claim to be DougP with impunity, and
get my mail delivered everywhere, is avoided.

>Also, does Microsoft have some way to determine that the header
>has not been spoofed to show a fake originator with the true
>originating server posing as just a forwarder?

To a degree -- the envelope-sender (which is verified) should
match up with the most recent Received header. This is where
I think SPF/Caller-ID/LMAP will still require something like
SpamAssassin, which can ensure these *do* match.

PS: liked the Irish Go To War joke -- although I'd heard it before ;)
- --j.
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Minter is a funny old bird in his own way.
I've been following his progress on Unity for GameCube with interest, but lets face it, his obsession with Virtual Light Machine development means it's going to play exactly like Tempest..again. Tempest was ideally suited to be wrapped in a VLM and that's why he's remade it so often.

I'll still probably buy it though.

Who is this Aid[ae]n and why haven't I ever come across him before?

Aidan -- very mysterious! Your "Mr. Hyde" perhaps? ;)

Hi Justin - I just noticed your thing about spoiled votes. Seemingly in practice most spoiled votes are not deliberately spoiled but are spoiled because people cannot write 1, 4 and 7 digits in a way that can be clearly distinguished by the ballot counters. Naturally the various party faithful who watch the count are quite happy to exploit this if it means improving the lot of their candidates by bringing potentially ambigious votes to the attention of the returning officer (or not, if that suits them).

This sort of messing is why I think that even flawed electronic voting might not be that much worse than what we have now, because at least the big parties wouldn't be able to infulence the count in this way. There might be other evil ways to infulence the count, but at least most people would be concious of them...

Hi Dave!

Yeah, I've heard of those sorts of shenanigans. At least e-voting with a VVAT is a lot less susceptible to this, since the voter doesn't write the receipt themselves; it's printed instead. And, regardless, the parties have plenty of other ways to influence the vote -- I
don't know if you've ever heard the one about one particular party raiding the rest homes, loading everyone onto a bus and making sure they knew which way they were going to vote once they got to the polling station ;)

Also, don't discount the danger of an _uncertain_ result. In certain circumstances, this can be enough for a losing side to cause serious trouble -- not necessarily in current Ireland, but consider what might happen somewhere like Bosnia, where peace is a lot more fragile.

GPRS

I use GPRS occasionally with my powerbook. It's slow and not all that reliable. I'm not sure it's really worth $20/month, but being flat rate at least I don't have to worry about the charges adding up... Unless of course I went somewhere I have to roam.

 - ask

Austin is a very nice place, given esp. that it is in Texas.
They have excellent indie music too (and other kinds as well).

Edited by author 03-17-2004 22:20
And from my email exchanges last night with some developers, it appears that the cool thing is that a whole lot of apps written in Cocoa will get Spoken Interface support right out of the box. There will be no need to qualify your code against competing screen reader products like they have to do in the Windows world (Not sure about Linux), just write to Cocoa and you're almost done.
Mark

well, on UNIX, you can do all window mgr tasks through voice; e.g. "open web browser" pops up your mozilla window etc.

But navigation around a single window's UI isn't yet possible.

Well that's nothing really new, you can do the same thing in OS X.
If I turn on Speech Recognition in the Speech pane of System Preferences, asking something like 'What time is it?' will have the system respond with the current time, and "Open my browser" & "Quit this application" will do what you expect them to do.

It'll be interesting to see how far they get with Spoken Interface 1.0 in OS X 10.4. I'm expecting a lot of system infrastructure goodies in the next reference build of OS X.

Haha, the porno police have finally caught up with you.
Must be the infamous "Justin & Donkey" pic ;-)

Actually, I wonder whether it just thought, "A website
with zillions of jpegs, with generic file names,
organised into galleries -- must be obscene!"

Oh, there's also some sad news:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...moking_ireland_dc_1

(mind the wrap)

That's how we know you haven't gone native.
I actually considered writing to my TD to propose that the country should adopt the Full Irish as the citizenship test. Take all the applicants out drinking, get them hammered and give them less than four hours of kip. Then haul them out of bed, Full Metal Jacket style, and quickly herd them towards a fully stocked breakfast buffet.

Those hung over souls who put together their own Full Irish without thinking about it, black pudding and all, get to stay. We then send all the wannabe's packing.

LOL -- that's spot on! Including the black pudding would be a true test of irishness, for sure.

If you're after King crisps, a quick google threw up http://tayto.4gifts.ie/ (via http://www.taytocrisps.ie/ ). Black pudding is a pretty good test of irishness, none of the TCD jewish mafia seemed to keep kosher enough to avoid it, and I only just remembered what it was made from before stopping a visiting New Yorker from trying it. I haven't seen as intense a nauseous reaction to listing ingredients outside of reality endurance tv.

Ha! what's wrong with a bit of congealed blood, mixed with breadcrumbs and seasonings, fried? yummy!

Yeah, but I hadn't stopped to think what type of blood it most likely was before. As they said, it doesn't matter what you are, Jew, German, Hindu, Muslim, Irish, English... aren't we all Christians here.

btw. that scary autoformat thing is apparently in MS Office as well!

Edited by author 04-05-2004 06:09
That's the best comment I've seen on a blog to date. Do you think he knows you smoke a couple of pouches of Drum a day?

couple of pouches a day?! that's a full-time job!

I wonder what the other "different blogs" he "checked out" were. Maybe he was led astray by the google ads that were showing up here a while back, telling me to quit smoking. (of course, nowadays they seem to be advertising tropical fish, for some bizarre reason).

Just noticed Aaron Swartz was
working lately of something
similar to *bold* in openoffice
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/dingus

Muff

I am responsible for the diving story of Muff. It isn't a scuba diving centre - it's a boat builders or some such - and the proprietor is called C Diver. It's on the sign and everything. Ho ho.

My husband has probably prettied up the story (lied) for maximum impact.

I have also visited Twatt on Orkney.

hey Padraig -- yeah, markdown looks cool; it uses a plaintext markup format, very much like my own EtText -- http://ettext.taint.org/ . (I was like, so totally doing *bold* stuff totally before those guys. ;)

And Kitty -- got any pictures? Pictures maketh the story...

Thanks Justin for googlebombing for a good cause.

Edited by author 04-17-2004 14:57
If like like Royksopp, check out Proem's negativ reinforcements. Here's an MP3 stream of it:

http://www.m3rck.net/html/discog/merck6-11.m3u

Another good one, more laid back:

Proem - deep like airline failure -
http://www.m3rck.net/html/discog/merck23-11.m3u

Waste has found a new home on Sourceforge: http://waste.sourceforge.net/

"Fine Gael and the Labour Party have both called for Environment Minister Martin Cullen to resign his position due to the fiasco surrounding the introduction of electronic voting.

The Government abandoned plans to introduce the system today after the independent Electronic Voting Commission said it was open to interference and its accuracy could not be guaranteed."

http://breaking.examiner.ie

So much for that idea. ;-)

"Abstract ideas can be developed mentally, and the up-front work required before the idea can be put down on paper is trivial by comparison. "

If the idea is trivial, it is obvious. Incredibly difficult, hard-to-invent things can exist in software. Those are non-obvious. I personally spent several years on a software invention leading up to patenting it. And there is no reason why those should be less patentable than a many physical inventions which have been patented and which are far more obvious than many software inventions.

Hi Gary --

I agree, of course, that incredibly difficult, hard-to-invent things can exist in software.

But the question then is, will patenting provide protection over and above what copyright and trade secrets provide? In other words, does the invention require key implementation details to function? If so, and you determine that someone has taken parts of your code, then there would be a case where copyright infringement may have taken place, and that has its own penalties -- regardless of whether the abstract idea was patented.

I'm saying that complex software systems and algorithms can remain proprietary, and can be defended, without patents.

(There's also another case, which is the duration of a patent -- 20 years IIRC. 20 years is a *very* long time in software; witness how the LZW patent still hasn't expired everywhere.)

No, copyright isn't enough. It just isn't.

It took years to figure it out the invention I mentioned in my previous note. But once it is known, there are an infinite number of ways to write code that carries it out.

I agree that 20 years is way too long for software patents unless they are grossly more selective in what they give patents to. Jeff Bezos has suggested 3. That really wouldn't be enough for protecting the work described above because it involve much more actual work (and forfeited salary along the way in order to make the time to work on it) than (I am pretty sure) most non-software patents. But if, say, one-click-shopping was a 3-year patent, then it would be a lot more workable.

As a matter of general principle, I agree that 3 years would be a lot better for software patents in lieu of greatly raising the bar to getting them in the first place.

But that is unlikely to happen because it is felt that trying to coordinate internationally to have different terms for different types of patents would be impossible.

But, unless the PTO becomes able to distinguish between the blatantly obvious and the truly inventive, even 3 years is really too long. 10 minutes is more like it.

Frankly, in my interactions with the PTO in the last couple of years, I am seeing signs that they are being better at it, which I assume is due to the criticism they've been rightfully receiving.

They really need a lot more money to pay for the heavy work of doing the research to figure out what has real prior art and what doesn't. And they need to be able to afford to hire lawyers with real software experience who have the choice of being top notch software professionals but prefer to be patent examiners. Without that, there is little hope. It takes a lot of money. Patents should cost a lot more to get, and Congress should let the PTO keep the money. (as it is, I believe they've actually been siphoning off some PTO income for other purposes. Congress has been incredibly blind to the importance of this issue and what patents are all about and what the issues are.)

I thought it might possibly be useful to say the following:

To group software with things like novels and say that software and novels are in the idea category while legitimate patents are in some other category really isn't correct in the eyes of the law (or in my eyes) for the following reason:

When you have an arrangement of electrons in silicon chips that, as part of a computer, carries out a particular activity that generates a "useful result", you are talking about a machine, no different from any other machine. Historically, any machine that involved electricity also was dependend on an arrangement of electrons. And even if that wasn't true, I can't see any philosophical basis for putting machines that make use of electron-arrangements on one side of a line and a machine that doesn't on another. Either way we are talking about physical objects that produce physical results (even if it's only output on a screen).

That is how the law sees it. It's how the courts have ruled, and the courts that have ruled on these things have spent a lot of time thinking about them and they are certainly not stupid or ignorant.

On the other hand, a story that appears in a novel really does do something useful even when not built into a machine. So there really is a very clear distinction between a story and software.

In a sense there really isn't such a thing as a software patent now. When we say "software patent" we mean "a machine (the computer) that depends on a particular arrangement of electrons for doing what it does". The term "software patent" is really shorthand for that.

Hi Gary --

some good points there.

>To group software with things like novels and say that software and novels are
>in the idea category while legitimate patents are in some other category
>really isn't correct in the eyes of the law (or in my eyes)

To be honest, I'm not quite sure myself about the "code as speech" argument; it's not been established in law everywhere, there's still quite a few places where it's not treated as such. I'll have to leave that one to the FFII folks hashing it out on their lists ;)

> No, copyright isn't enough. It just isn't. It took years to figure it out the
> invention I mentioned in my previous note. But once it is known, there are an
> infinite number of ways to write code that carries it out.

I feel your pain! ;)

My position is that there's good software patents in there, too, that really are innovative, and should be protected.

But there's a sizeable quantity of bad ones; and I can't see a good way to specify in legal, enforceable terms what the level of "inventiveness" should be, or otherwise deal with the current abuses. IMO, given the level of abuse, I think it'd be better not to have that option open at all.

Either that or rebuild the patent system radically in the software- and business-method patent case.

Here's another question. If one person has invented something in secret, and I in parallel invent a similar technique, and the first guy gets the patent in before I've published; what, strictly speaking, gives him the right to take away *my right* to use my invention, given that no "stealing", or infringement, or even taking inspiration ;), took place?

Would anyone know who is organising the Stallman talk in Dublin on May 24th?

Bernie -- it's the Irish Free Software Organisation: http://ifso.info .

The talk will be free gratis - http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/events/0304/stallman.php

The parallels you draw are a bit misleading. These ideas (plot lines/meters/cooking) are long since in the public domain, and therefore unpatentable. Only the most radical concepts and practices would be viable for patenting these days. You can also put a trivial physical idea on paper and patent it, whether or not it works in the real-world.

There is also an unfair comparison of patent literature. These Sun and Adobe documents are misleading and would bever get beyond a patent attorneys in-tray. The patent applications and original documents for these can be found at http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP0807891 and http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP0689133 respectively. They are both detailed and comprehensive applications.

I agree with Gary Robinson. Patents should be far more expensive to get. The most oppressing situations is people applying for patents that they have no desire to act on commercially but simply want to protect and gain out of an idea. This destroys genuine innovation and competition.

Patents, and not copyright or anything else, protect research investment and innovation. Consider the humble 'Post It' which is often held up as a leading example of product innovation and why patenting is so important. The concept is both simple and obvious, yet 3M spent millions of dollars and a substantial amount of time devloping this as a product - specifically in the area of adhesives. Once developed, it is extremely cheap to mass product. Is it reasonable therefore that just about anyone, with very little investment, can produce exactly the same thing in practically no time at all. In my opinion absolutely not. There needs to be a period of protection for genuine innovation and product investment.

Software products, no matter how simple and obvious that product may appear to be, is not necessarily any different. The answer is not 'No to patents' but a review of the laws is required, even those of the last 20/30 years. I agree 20 years is far too long for anyone to hold a patent.

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Hi James --

>The parallels you draw are a bit misleading. These ideas (plot
>lines/meters/cooking) are long since in the public domain, and
>therefore unpatentable. Only the most radical concepts and
>practices would be viable for patenting these days.

Yes, it's true that most of those ideas are long since established as public domain. However, it's not beyond the bounds of reason that someone could invent a new form of meter, or a new combination of ingredients.
>You can also put a trivial physical idea on paper and patent it, whether
>or not it works in the real-world.

Sure. But patenting a physical idea that won't work, would be an obvious waste of money, since nobody else would ever bother reimplementing it ;) I'm not sure what your point is here.

>There is also an unfair comparison of patent literature. These
>Sun and Adobe documents are misleading and would bever get
>beyond a patent attorneys in-tray. The patent applications and
>original documents for these can be found at
>http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP0807891 and
>http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP0689133
>respectively. They are both detailed and comprehensive
>applications.

Of course they're detailed and comprehensive -- they're patent
applications! One thing patents certainly are, is detailed. However, what they *claim* is, as far as I know, what governs what qualifies as infringement. So let's look at the first claim from the Sun patent:
'1. A computer-executable process, embedded in a computer-useable medium, for supplying items on a network (46), the network having at least one computer-server (20) for communicating with users employing a browser program on a terminal/computer (35) at a location remote from said computer-server, said embedded process comprising the steps of: receiving (152), at the computer-server, a transmitted command from said browser program for a shopping page (40); in response to said transmitted command, generating (154) a shopping page file and transmitting (156) the shopping page file to said browser program; receiving (168), at the computer-server, at least one user selected item from the shopping page received (158) by the browser program; creating (174) a list at the computer server;
at the computer server, adding (178) to the list each user selected item received by said receiving step; returning (184) from the computer server the list of items in an entry of a shopping page file to said browser program; and continuing user selection (200), receiving (168) data strings, adding (178) items to said list and returning (184) said list until termination by the user.'
Sorry. That's just not innovative in any way; when applied to HTTP and HTML forms, it's a standard CGI programming technique that has been in use since Amazon.com opened its virtual doors. (Reminder: Amazon.com opened in 1994; Sun's patent was applied for in 1997.)

>I agree with Gary Robinson. Patents should be far more expensive to get.
>The most oppressing situations is people applying for patents that they
>have no desire to act on commercially but simply want to protect and gain
>out of an idea. This destroys genuine innovation and competition.

OK, I agree with you there.

>Patents, and not copyright or anything else, protect research investment
>and innovation. Consider the humble 'Post It' which is often held up as a
>leading example of product innovation and why patenting is so important.
>The concept is both simple and obvious, yet 3M spent millions of dollars
>and a substantial amount of time devloping this as a product -
>specifically in the area of adhesives. Once developed, it is extremely
>cheap to mass product. Is it reasonable therefore that just about anyone,
>with very little investment, can produce exactly the same thing in
>practically no time at all. In my opinion absolutely not. There needs to
>be a period of protection for genuine innovation and product investment.

Patent on a physical process -- I have no problem with those
whatsoever. I'm talking about software patents.

- --j.
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Justin,

I agree that a the patenting of a radical concept could be a thorny issue. I don't claim to know the law deep enough to understand how viable it is to do it. But we are talking ground-breakingly radical at the same time - so maybe there is a value to protect.

My point on the triviality of patenting a physical patent was probably badly phrased. A complicated physical process is obviously a lot more difficult and complex to implement in the real world than a complicated software process. But the development of the idea behind the process may not be, and often is less so. The fact is, that the patent process is not necessarily fundamentally different. You do not have to model or prototype the physical process - just assume it works and apply for the patent.

Yes the individual claims of the Adobe & Sun applications are not necessarily innovative. You can also be sure that they would not be granted patent rights on any of these individual claims. (Maybe they strike gold on one or two) This type of application is common - I've done it myself many a time. The combination of the claims may result in a patent. They are also easily challenged by citing prior art or minor differentiation/improvement hence every online site has a shopping cart and every drawing package a palette tool. I though that the references you posted for the Sun & Adobe links were a bit unfair as these were not the full applications and gave a misleading message about what needs to be documented to have a reasonable patent application.

I was drawing a final conclusion that the for the same reasons someone wants to protect their investment in the Post It, someone else might want to protect their investment in a software process that they have designed.

The law certainly isn't perfect and while the likes of the Madrid Protocol were developed to address the horrendously complex historical issues of patent application, it has also resulted in any punter being able to patent throwaway ideas. This is definitely room for improvement. IMO I am stunned that this has only recently become a hot topic for the open source community. By its very nature, patent issues were going to be a problem from day 1.

James

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Hi James --

I get your point regarding ground-breakingly radical concepts. But my point in this regard, is that no matter how radical a new concept may be, IMO it's not valid to give its inventor a monopoly on the *idea* for 20 years, and thereby allow them to keep all competitors out of that "idea space" entirely if they so wish.

And regarding the Adobe/Sun patents; I get your point, that you
were thinking I was trivialising the patent process itself. That wasn't my intention. I was intending to point out that, no matter how detailed the patent is in terms of detailing the implementation, the key point for competitors or other people who may be accused
of infringing, is how broad the *claims* are, not how detailed
the impl details are. Infringement cases are judged by the claims, not by the implementation details, from what I've been told.

Oh, BTW, it's long been a hot topic for certain parts of the open source community; GNU had the League for Programming Freedom way back in the 1980s. However, until recent years, nobody really took any notice -- most people considered it a type of abstract, paranoid danger, and effectively said "cheer up, it'll never happen!" ;) It's only recently that patent cases have really started hitting open source projects.

Also, it's got its own set of technical complexities, in the legal field as well as the software field. It's a pretty complex issue, and takes a lot of explaining for most people to see the danger. That takes time, too ;)

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Danny O'Brien?
Ugh!
I always wanted to know if his pieces in his now thankfully defunct Sunday Times column were supposed to be ironic or just plain moronic?

Mark.

also of NTK.net, http://www.oblomovka.com/ and several other good spots. I think he's a good bit more clueful than you're giving him credit for, there ;)

Edited by author 06-03-2004 16:41
Ooooh, so he has a newsletter --and-- a blog, well aren't you the starfucker. ;-)

These people are to be despised & destroyed not revered. I mean look at John C. "Eddie Munster*" Dvorak, the man's an abomination!

Mark.

*Yes, John Dvorak does look like Eddie Munster.

starfucker! lol!

Tell, you what, I'll meet up and let you know if he looks like any member of the Munster family ;)

shit on a stick! 45degrees. All I can think of is the cautionary tale on our trip from Alice Springs to Uluru about the woman who decided to meditate near the Olgas in 45 degree heat and was found dead of a slowly cooked brain.

I was at Richard Stallman's talk on Software patents last week

Ivana Bacik missed it all, and came in when people were
starting to leave, talked for 10 seconds saying
"I'm for free software". Not very impressive.

Eoin Dubsky was most impressive:
http://votedubsky.com/blog/
http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~slack/

Also the Green Party candidate and existing MEP
Patricia McKenna, was good and gave some interesting
insite into the existing debates about SW patents in Europe.

Action Replay never left, and has been available for any system worth buying going back to the NES days. Quality can be a bit spotty though, the PS2 and Cube versions are pretty good, but the PAL XBox version stinks to high heaven as the XBox 's metaphorical fig leaf of a security scheme forces them to hack together a saved game file, not just allow them to modify running code. If they don't provide a save file, and in Europe they don't appear to bother providing new saves, there's much the ordinary punter can do.

Mark

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hey Padraig,

thanks for pointing out Eoin Dubsky! oops. I agree, McKenna
was very good BTW.
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That psycho bulldozer bloke should join the Israeli army; he's got the skills they're looking for.

How to get a gmail account for person like me who are not blogging ?

Sorry P -- I've already given away my 3.

but some advice: find someone who knows someone (who knows someone) in google -- they filtered out via personal connections.

More on oil from the BBC.

William pointed out this priceless bit:

Asking other delegates - admittedly supporters of the peak oil theory -
whether such a steep increase was feasible, the answers were unambiguous:
"absolutely out of the question," "completely impossible," and "3 million
barrels - never, not even 300,000."

One delegate laughed so hard he had to support himself on a table.

P.S. What are the implications of Network Associate's recent anti-spam patent

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>P.S. What are the implications of Network Associate's recent anti-spam
>patent?

as an employee of NAI, I can't really comment, unfortunately...

- --j.
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The starfucking went so well, that you're willing to whore yourself out at another con then?

Right now I'm not sure if that's good to know. ;-P

Mark

yeesh, I do a bit of networking and get called a groupie. ;)

seriously, it was cool. I mean, voice over DNS? that's cool.

Did I already send you this?

http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/

Also, somewhere off this site, you can find a link to a
petition to google asking them to stop gmail, signed by,
amongst others, Simson Garfinkel. Huh? I thought he
was supposed a bright lad?

What's with this "Oh my god, 'delete' doesn't actually
delete your mail!" crap? That's always been true.
My local mom-and-pop ISP, when I had them, did the same
thing.

At any rate, take a look at the people behind that creepy
site: http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/staffgm.html
They look like a bunch of total nutters to me. They're
from the CIA. Oh my.

http://taint.org/2004/05/07/204322a.html


>>Specifically, the only names I can find regarding this Council are Mary Harney, pro-business, anti-regulation right-wing leader of the Progressive Democrats<<

"Anti-regulation" she may claim to be but have you noticed the irony in such a self-proclaimed free-marketeer supporting a highly *interventionist* position wrt software patents? Patents exist only because of government fiat, the whole patent system is a state bureaucracy, and enforcement of all types of "intellectual property" require extensive government regulation. The true free-market position is to have a minimialist IP system.

Funny how so many supposed free-marketeers go all statist when it's in the interests of their business paymasters...

Alex

yep, it's a lot more "pro-business" than "anti-regulation" in any way ;)

Ulysses was never banned in the Irish Free State, though the British ban
did of course apply to the six counties.

Edited by author 06-28-2004 00:08
the two line bash prompt is fantastic when you combine it with the /etc/LOG setup that jwz uses -- a list of all the commands you've used to configure your machine over time...

d.

Why would anyone link to google?

There's a threshold at which a site's popularity
would cause it to get linked to less.

but by that measure -- why would anyone link to Altavista?

You're all hardcore geeks, so I'm sure you know
this backwards already, but here is an article
on the US email privacy decision:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/opinion/02FRI2.html

And hey, do you really think you can improve on a
small army of charging Ninjas? Your current logo
(like the Navy Seals) ROCKS!

Very nice desktop background tip! thank you.
Some points though.

certain variables in .exports cause trouble when
rereading. All the readonly variables (readonly
command will list them) for obvious reasons.
Also the GROUPS variable also causes the script
to exit. I had to remove these from my .exports
for the script to run.

Also for gnome users, nautilus controls the desktop
background. Personally I don't run nautilus (or
if I do I keep it away from the desktop). Anyway
to stop nautilus (and stop it from restarting)
one uses the `gnome-session-properties` applet.

Another couple of notes.

You can automatically determine the correct
geometry so the user doesn't have to edit the
script (after changing resolutions), like:
geometry=`xwininfo -root | grep -E "geometry" | sed 's/.* \([0-9]*x[0-9]*\).*/\1/`

Another cool slightly related hack I noticed lately
was gmapper. It's a quite simple pygtk app that interacts
with expedia.com to give a zoomable map of the globe.
http://www.worksintheory.org/archives/2004/june/gmapper

http://blogs.linux.ie/stuff/archives/m/200407#384

Comments?

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well, I'll be checking out that talk over the next two days,
as I'm at CEAS now ;) Chung-Kwei in particular looks interesting, and that'll be covered in another paper -- looking forward to
taking a look.

- --j.
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Excellent stuff.
I await your CEAS roundup. [No linkblogging you lazy bastard. ;-p ]

"but a Google search for "pattern discovery algorithm" looks like a promising source"

Apple/Genentech BLAST is up on Apple.com under their public domain license, I know >_< this much about bioinfomatics but the program is used to find similarities between nucleotide sequences, and there's source code available.

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/blast/

Might be useful, might not.
Mark.

" This, and the patent claims, perfectly describe the operation of sudo, fundamentally as it's operated since running on a 4.1BSD VAX-11/750 in 1980.

20 years head start on a patent application -- surely that must qualify as prior art ;) "

Please, for the love of god, send off a letter or email or whatever to the guys at your american patent office and shoot this BS patent attempt down. Until recently I have viewed the lunacy that goes on in this office in your country with bemusement, but with the Free Trade Agreement set to 'normalize' intellectual property laws between our two countries, and cause us to consider US patents valid over here, I'm really getting worried.

So please take care of your house, guys. If your patent office is stupid enough to grant a patent for the double-click, it's got to be obvious that they'll rubber-stamp this one too, unless the tech-savvy portion of the general public does the office's work for it. Sad, but true.

Sorry, ds, but they're not "my" patent office -- I'm Irish, not American. ;)

I share your concerns entirely -- the recent efforts to "normalize" the EU's patent system fills me with the same dread.

(A big part of our problem, BTW, is that there's a large lobby in our countries that makes a nice livelihood from patenting. Software's a boom industry, so extending patentability into software will net them some nice additional income; whether or not it makes sense from a software-development point of view, or in terms of ensuring the viability of the industry in future, is immaterial to them. It's not *their* industry to worry about.)

Hi, JM.

I used to do JWZ's thing with the /etc/LOG, but it didn't work well enough for me, since most of the time I was following someone else's magic incantation, and there was no way I could describe it well enough in English to recreate it if needed. My solution? Stick /etc files into CVS. I suppose it sounds like overkill but it works quite well in practice. Well...it would work even better if CVS weren't such a pile of user-friendly garbage, but it's better than nothing.

As for the todo.txt, well...I started mine at this job about 5 years ago and it is now 1.5M--that's just plain text, of course. What that says about my state of mind is left for the reader to determine ;-)

uhm, previous post refers to CVS as "user-friendly garbage". I meant UN! UN!! UN!!!!

(Surely there is one fucking switch out there that says "ignore whitespace-only changes"? Surely?? Anyone know what it is?)

That coral thing is cool, but it doesn't support wget -N
(405 error). One needs to instead rm the file before invoking wget.
Here is the script I call from crontab

#!/bin/sh
#
# Save this script to somewhere like "~/bin", "chmod a+x" it,
# then run "crontab -e" and add a line like this:
#
# 5 * * * * /home/pbrady/bin/xplanet-display-root
                                                  
#Justin uses http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/ for distribution
MIRROR=http://taint.org.nyud.net:8090/xplanet/
                                                  
###########################################################################
                                                  
[ -f $HOME/.exports ] && . $HOME/.exports
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin
export DISPLAY PATH HOME LANG XAUTHORITY SESSION_MANAGER
                                                  
geometry=`xwininfo -root | grep -E "geometry" | sed 's/.* \([0-9]*x[0-9]*\).*/\1/'`
IMAGEFILE=day_clouds_${geometry}.png
                                                  
tmpdir=$HOME/.xplanetroot
[ -d $tmpdir ] || mkdir $tmpdir
cd $tmpdir
                                                  
rm -f $IMAGEFILE #coral doesn't support wget -N
if wget $MIRROR/$IMAGEFILE ; then
  display -window root $IMAGEFILE
fi

yeah, looks like they don't support HEAD yet -- but they're planning to, so that shouldn't last too long.

Cool thanks.

BTW, there's a missing -q option to wget
in the script below.

update: they support HEAD now, so the -N argument no longer needs to be removed. great ;)

Congrats on the new release!

thanks, Aidan!

Optical media for backup and recovery?
Unless you have fixed content legal compliance issues, ugh!

Personally I backup my system to a portable Hard Drive. Not only is it faster to create full/incremental backups but I can also boot my system direct from the backup drive if required.
Mark

I never trusted DVD/CD for backup. I've had too many that turned out to be duds 18months later when it came time to try and recover stuff.

Important stuff goes into subversion now, synched to another machine on the local network.

Apple finally handed me an answer even my lazy ass could understand. Their .Mac backup software, scheduled daily backup to my iPod. Painless (as long as you remember not to fill it up with music :)

Yeah, but what do you do with those 50 gigs of data? svn or rsync is seriously hard to do for that :(

I like the portable hard drive option. I met a guy who has 8 250GB firewire drives daisy-chained off his machine, and just uses a couple of those for backups of the important stuff. (yes, that's 2 terabytes for personal use. he explained that he's got serious pack-rat tendencies.)

Neh.
A terrabyte isn't all that much these days, you can get 1TB in a single enclosure from LaCie for just under $1K. Give it 12 months more and it'll be around $500.

I had planned to touch on all this crap in an entry at some stage, but Apple have yet to deliver my new PowerMac, so I haven't. Yet.
Mark

As far as I understand it, then you really want to use DVD-R rather than DVD+R.

I have almost 1TB disk space, but that doesn't help on the backup need -- it just means that I have almost 1TB to backup! :-)


ask

wierdly, I then managed to burn a DVD+R (using exactly the same commandlines) which *can* be read in the DVD-ROM drive! haven't quite figured out what the difference is.

But I'll definitely get hold of some DVD-Rs.

I watched "The Power of Nightmares"; it was great. Thanks for the pointer.

Rats, in Sumatra I was told that field rats are a different species not like european rats at all. they were fine.

Recent Firefox on NetBSD, from an IP address that is actually in Dublin, but which all the geo location thingies think is in Britain; the New Scientist page loads, and redirects to http://nomoresocks.newscientist.com/Home/Home.aspx, which displays perfectly. The currency preselects to the pound (£) sign. Let me check with SSH forwarding and a US IP ...

Port forwarded from a US IP somewhere in the midwest, displayed and loaded fine. Perhaps it's a local routing issue? Though it's mad crazy that MSIE does the right thing.

it's very wierd. I was thinking it might be my NAT firewall, but if C's browser does the same thing, I'm stumped!

OK, it works using my Irish host as a SOCKS server. bizarro.

Yep, J, it is Rounstone, and your relatives (A. Sue and Claire) were present when it happened. Maybe they are in the photos?!

That JFK thing looks remarkable similar to the 3D reconstruction that some TV show did recently to debunk the JFK conspiracy theories and show that it was almost certainly a single bullet. Either Sky One or BBC2 I think. They generated the models frame by frame from the Zapruder footage. Haven't downloaded the game yet to a PC, but all the news footage looks like it.

HP Labs Email Prioritization project
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-5R1.html

(Uses SpamAssassin & Sophos)

Mark

Re Interesting/bizarre recent spam:

That second spam is amusing in that the height of the wave is measured in feet, but the speed is measured in km/h.

I'm also not clear on how this is possible: "you may live far away from your city."

the km/h and "you may live far away from your city" may be explainable, if what I heard on another list is true -- it seems to be based on data for west-coast Australia. Oz does have some seriously large distances between urban areas ;)

Dude, forget about spam, check out the dirty words you can and cannot use:

http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/001509.html#more

Has anyone ever managed to find a DVD player that works on Solaris 8+? Please? The best I've been able to do is get it to put up the DVD main menu screen one second before crashing.

Bonjour tout le monde, je voudrais attirer votre attention sur la lutte anti spm,
pour votre information, il existe un logiciel libre (un freeware) comme dirait les informaticiens ;0) qui permait de lutter contre ce fléau qu'est le spam.
le nom de ce logiciel est le "CANSpam" ou essayez d'autre orthographe car je ne me souviens plus bien du nom exact de freeware
Bonne année à tous et n'oublier pas de verser un petit qqch pour les organismes non=gouvernementaux qui s'occupent du séisme en Asie.
Si chacun fait un petit qqqch , les choses pourront bouger n'oublier pas, l'UNION fait Notre Force

The site you link to has many errors. For example it says the US is larger in land mass than Canada, wrong. Also it dosen't take into account that the US is providing military support (i.e. helicopters, transportation, manpower, etc.) also the total amount that the US is giving does not include private donations. Lastly, the US is rushing in to help other countries, about time other wealthy countries stepped up to their plate. Lastly, why should the US even bother when the Arab press is claiming that the US is responsible for the earthquake by nuclear testing an "ecoweapon".

Re rel="nofollow"

Since my weblogging tool of choice has a separate page for comments, I could already accomplish the same thing by putting in the Meta tag. Or to be a bit more heavy-handed, by blocking the entire page via robots.txt.

I think that people are deluding themselves if they think that comment-spammers will stop just because some percentage of sites will no longer have any effect. Email spammers seem to proliferate despite quite poor response ratios. Spamming is virtually free... especially when using zombie computers (which is what I see attacking my own site). [insert image of attack by horde of zombies here]

Hi Doug --

yeah, the typical spammer response seems to be "just send more". In this case, I can see there'll be hundreds of old, unmaintained MT installations out there, so this technique will probably work just fine.

Interestingly, I wonder if this indicates that google aren't already discounting links found in blog comments, based on the page layout for common blog packages like MT... I would have thought they'd be doing that already...

I think the reason noone adopted your JS technique is as you noted: it's JS. I know that for me, that's a show stopper, FWTW.

Hi Aristotle --

I can see the JS nature of it being a show-stopper under some circumstances.

However, as far as I can tell, pretty much nobody noticed the technique even *exists*, which is strange -- given that for many situations where nofollow would work, this works equally well, and was already working. I find that disappointing.

Re: GeoImaging

Care to start a paypal fund to collect the funds? It'd be great if we could get such a high def map of the city in the public domain.

--
Cliph/ff
http://chicks-dig-unix.net/

I was considering it, but since it requires a bit more work, I wouldn't be interested in coordinating that myself until I had a bit more spare time -- and probably was back in Dublin myself ;)

(the bit more work involved, btw, is the step of using the map images to determine vector data like roadways, paths, boundaries etc. -- the latter derived data is what will be not covered by their copyright.)

I'm hoping someone might run with it in the meantime, and I can just be a donator ;) (if anyone does, btw, Dropcash, www.dropcash.com, is the natural way to fundraise for this.)

I'm in for $100 at least, i allready have a large database of dublin roads (i've been carrying my gps constantly for nearly a year now and have been thinking about putting the full records online publically creativecommons) http://cathcart.netsoc.com/pics/walkabout/

David C.

I was thinking that the http://www.elgato.com/index_fr.php?file=sh...ineshop_eyetvwonder would go nicely with the mac mini, or my PB.

might do -- but the overhead of real-time MPEG encoding makes it useless for PVR use ;).

you really need either a fast, fast, fast CPU that can do real-time encoding *and* decoding simultaneously without dropping frames, or (more realistically) go for a card that can do it in hardware.

dont bother going down the minimac route.

once you add wireless and enough ram/hd space to do it justice it becomes WAY over priced.

Freevo doesn't do real-time TV watching. Go with MythTV for the moment.

IMHO.

Titus -- good tip, thanks.

Hey JM,

The Scheme kids have known about continuation-based web apps for *years*. Get with it already ;-)

Mmm, continuation-based web apps seem like a good idea until you start thinking about the back button. After all is said and done, continuation-based web apps really aren't very "webbish." It's a bit of a pity, really. :-( But they're not the answer, after all.

Yes? What happens when you start to think about the back button?

(Hint: the back button with continuations is a Good Thing. Think multiple paths through your app.)

I do see the problem -- if you do that, you get into snapshotting and taking deltas of application state.

To be honest, I'd *love* that, anyway -- it'd be fantastic for debugging. ;) But I guess the overhead of storing and tracking all those state changes could be tricky...

Justin, I know this guy who hacked a web-based "shell" for gdb in a handful of scheme code. He could then use the back button and new browser windows to traverse multiple paths through the program. Wicked cool, I think. I can try to find you more info on this if you like.

[deleted spam in message 187]

Re GreaseMonkey:

That Mark Pilgrim... what a troublemaker. Creating GreaseMonkey wasn't bad enough. Now he's used GreaseMonkey to create Butler (http://diveintomark.org/projects/butler/), his response to Google's AutoLink.

nah, Mark Pilgrim didn't write Greasemonkey. However the new convention of calling ad-removal scripts "Butlers" certainly seems to have been coined by that script...

Sounds to me like JSF (JavaServerFaces) maybe another example of a continuation-based web application framework.

really? Did java get continuations?
(I haven't been keeping up to date with java at all)

Not at the language level, but then neither has Perl (yet),
but the JSF serves much the same function as the Continuity library.

The main difference is it's a gui-component model (much like say swing) but all the saving state matching requests to responses and having to know which URL etc etc is all handled for you. Just drop component x on page and away you go.

I rescued Peter from the hinternet - he's now firefoxed, gmailed and firewalled. Usual quote: "You know since firefox I haven't had a single problem".

The Stagshead is for sale!!! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!! My brithday can't get any worse! Is there any reason to visit Dublin at all now?

I think you need some quotes in that rsync command; should be something like

rsync -e 'ssh foo.com -i identity'

true -- thanks Martin. my weblog software had eaten them ;)

sold for 5.8 million to Louis Fitzgerald..
Hope he does half a good as job as the Shafferys and the bicycles are left outside rather than on the ceiling,

> the government has dictated since 1980 that
> government-funded research should not produce open-source
> or public-domain solutions, necessarily

That's not the way the law has been interpreted. They are encouraged and have the right to closed-source releases for commercial gain, but not an obligation. My PI developed a GNU-licenced bioinformatics application using government funds. He did have to fight his university's TLO to release it under the GNU licence, but since the NIH was funding him and not the university, he was able to simply tell them to piss off.

'That's not the way the law has been interpreted. They are encouraged and have the right to closed-source releases for commercial gain, but not an obligation.'

yep, hence why the 'necessarily' qualification... that comment pretty much is exactly what I'm talking about. why should he have to fight the TLO?

OK, locking this forum for new posts. New discussion should move to the replacement forum, http://www.quicktopic.com/31/H/MijbJS7PjaNL . cheers!

--j.