taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Security: Ross Anderson, crypto and security guru extraordinaire, moonlights as – wait for it — a street bagpipe player:

I play the pipes (the Great Highland Bagpipe and the Scottish smallpipes). I played competitively as a teenager, and thereafter paid my way through university by working as a street musician in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark.

NOOOOOO! ANYTHING BUT THE BAGPIPES!!!

Only joking. But yes, he really does play the bagpipes. And that submission to the EU’s consultation on the management of copyright and related rights is worth a read, to get an idea of how the new increased enforcement of music copyright has had chilling effects on the viability of the UK’s folk music scene. (found via Karl-Friedrich Lenz.)

Tags: bagpipe, copyright, crypto, extraordinaire, great, guru, music, player, security, street

History of www.maths.tcd.ie. Thanks to Dave Malone for sending me the URL, while chatting about the timeline — and about how Peter Flynn beat all of us to the coveted “first in Ireland” spot.

But then, being an SGML guru, and marking up a huge quantity of ancient gaelic texts, I don’t think anyone could possibly hold it against him ;) Check this out from the Annals Of The Four Masters:

Every plain in Ireland abounded with flowers and shamrocks in the time of Fiacha. These flowers, moreover, were found full of wine, so that the wine was squeezed into bright vessels. Wherefore, the cognomen, Fiacha Fin Scothach, continued to be applied to him.

Tags: fiacha, guru, history, sgml, spot, tcd, timeline, url, wine, www