taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Code: Rod writes: ‘I have had a bunch of fun today, gleefully playing with a new source-control package. I truly lead a sad life.’

I’d guess that was our fault, moving SpamAssassin CVS to subversion at apache.org ;) Happy to oblige, Rod!

If I wasn’t so jet-lagged (still!), suffering from a cold, and busy with the day job, I’d be having that fun myself; SVN is very, very, very nice from what little I can tell so far. Only time will tell if it can beat the lovely Perforce, though, the virtues of which I have extolled on many occasions (earning myself a freebie T-shirt in the process, payola!).

But yeah, SVN looks really cool.

Tags: bunch, code, cvs, fault, fun, life, package, spamassassin, subversion, svn, today

Funny: C sends along a few classic album covers taken from this site. Here’s my favourites:

• John
  • Bult - Julie’s Sixteenth Birthday
  : Certainly the most disturbing of the bunch…

• Big Jake Calls the Waders: Big Jake? It’s _Badly Drawn Boy_!
• Millie Jackson - E.S.P. (Extra Sexual Pursuasion) : That damn refraction gets you every time…
• Joyce - Joyce : File under ‘dowdy’.
• Devastatin’ Dave: The Turntable Slave - Zip Zap Rap : I’m speechless. He hasn’t gone away either — nowadays he’s known as Devastatin Dave the Cyberslave.

There’s plenty more…

Tags: album, big, birthday, boy, bunch, devastatin, drawn, funny, site, sixteenth, waders

C sends along a few classic album covers taken from this site. Here’s my favourites:

• John
  • Bult - Julie’s Sixteenth Birthday
  : Certainly the most disturbing of the bunch…

• Big Jake Calls the Waders: Big Jake? It’s _Badly Drawn Boy_!
• Millie Jackson - E.S.P. (Extra Sexual Pursuasion) : That damn refraction gets you every time…
• Joyce - Joyce : File under ‘dowdy’.
• Devastatin’ Dave: The Turntable Slave - Zip Zap Rap : I’m speechless. He hasn’t gone away either — nowadays he’s known as Devastatin Dave the Cyberslave.

There’s plenty more…

Tags: album, big, birthday, boy, bunch, devastatin, drawn, site, sixteenth, waders

Music: All good things must come to an end. EMusic has been bought out by some bunch called ‘Dimensional Associates’, and will no longer offer its excellent download service; instead you’re limited to a measly 40 MP3s per month. (For context — last time I downloaded some listening material was on Monday, and I picked up about 80 MP3s in a single sitting.)

They’ve shut down their message boards; third-party discussion groups are filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth; and worst of all, I can’t even download the remaining stuff on ‘My Stash’ (the downloads-to-do list) because they’re overrun with rats deserting the sinking ship. (no reflection on the rats — I’m one myself.) Either that, or they’ve just turned them off; which is annoying as I had lots of music lined up to download when I got a chance.

This is very bad news — Apple’s iTunes is full of crappy music, Mac-only, and DRM-crippled; Rhapsody is Windows-only and DRM-crippled; there’s really no other legal MP3-download option.

I guess I’ll just have to go back to buying 1 or 2 CDs every few months when I’m buying stuff from Amazon (which I do nowadays anyway, in addition to EMusic) and just listening to the radio in general instead.

Thanks anyway, EMusic, for introducing me, helping me get into, or helping me rebuild my collection of such great music as:

• Ladytron
• Lemon Jelly
• Belle and Sebastian
• TRS-80
• Yo La Tengo
• Pepe Deluxe
• Layo And Bushwacka
• Asian Dub Foundation
• The Pixies
• Stereolab
• Johnny Cash
• Future Sound of London
• Freq Nasty
• Matmos
• Cornershop
• Thievery Corporation
• Cocteau Twins

It was great while it lasted.

Ah well, I guess I’ll save a tenner a month, which I can put towards the GameFly subscription…

Tags: bunch, dimensional, download, drm-crippled, emusic, end, month, music, offer, stuff

Just received a mail from a bunch called ‘microtution’, looking to write a collaborative political weblog. More details here.

But hold on there — this was an out-and-out spam, sent via an open proxy, using a spam tool, with faked headers, to a spamtrap address they scraped from one of my sites. Anyone considering helping out on this collaborative weblog might like to consider who they’re helping.

The mail was sent from 213.176.81.230, direct to my MX, from ‘Fredericka’ <promiseman@promiseman.com>, Subject ‘need help with political blog’.

Tags: address, bunch, mail, microtution, promiseman, proxy, spam, spamtrap, tool, weblog

Forbes: A Patent On Porn. It seems Acacia Research, an intellectual-property ’shell’ company, has a bunch of crappy software patents on streaming media (to go with their patent on the ‘V-Chip’, remember that?).

Things haven’t been going too good recently. Apparently, they decided to ‘monetize’ these streaming-media patents — in other words get all Sopranos on a bunch of small players, namely 700 porn site operators, sending some legal threats to ‘pay up — 1-2% of gross — or get sued’ their way.

What happened? Did the pr0nsters roll over and cough up? Not a hope.

Eight firms (of 700) agreed to Acacia’s terms. But 40 didn’t, and Acacia promptly slapped them with lawsuits. Rather than buckling, though, several of the porno sites joined together and stood their ground. Now Acacia is in the fight of its life and may even face a shareholder revolt as a result.

Read on for the rest…

Tags: bunch, company, crappy, forbes, patent, porn, research, shell, software, the

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 ;)

Tags: answer, bunch, day, helium, mail, money, podge, scutterin, spam, spent