Perl: at last, a perl-related posting! I’ve released IPC::DirQueue 0.04; details of what’s changed (summary, a couple of bugs fixed) are at that link.
BTW, thanks to Ask and Robert at perl.org, who are providing free SVN repository and list hosting for CPAN modules! And don’t overlook the fact that the mailing list/newsgroups each have their own RSS feed, woot!)
Tags: btw, couple, dirqueue, ipc, link, list, org, perl, summary, svn
Spam: some good crazy spam recently — firstly, some Seventh Day Adventist lunacy:
THE PAPACY IS THE ANTICHRIST THAT IS TRYING TO CHANGE THE LAW OF GOD. DANIEL 7:25
THIS IS THE LAST WARNING.
THE LAW OF GOD IS ETERNAL BECAUSE GOD IS ETERNAL 14:12. MT. 5:17 SATURDAY SEVENTH DAY IS THE TRUE LORD’S DAY. EXO. 20.8-11 SUNDAY IS A FALSE PAGAN DAY. IT IS NOT IN THE BIBLE. IT WAS USED TO WORSHIP SATAN
It runs on in that vein for quite a while. Interestingly, most of the text from there on in is ‘gappy’ — in other words, the spammer has inserted spaces between each character of a word — even inside link addresses. As a result, they no longer work. oops!
And a new one to me — natural-disaster spam (via Mark Pilkington):
THIS IS AN OFFICIAL WARNING!
fngva uvtt chloezA huge 300 ft. high ocean wave is moving towards your continent. Your and many other cities are in a real danger.
Approximate wave moving speed is 700 km/h.
cmoym eaaa yypbzzPlease read more about this catastrophe here: (link)
We are strongly urging you to evacuate yourself and your family as soon as possible,
even though you may live far away from your city. The tsunami will reach the continent in approximately FOUR hours.venbz nwvw exepmi
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
I’ve removed the link, btw — the site it links to contains a bunch of nasty malware-installing IE-bug exploits. In case you were wondering: you can tell it’s genuine because it says IT’S AN OFFICIAL WARNING at the top.
(ObSpamComment: note — this here’s a good example of why spam is unsolicited bulk email, not unsolicited commercial email; neither are selling anything. one’s religious craziness, the other one’s trying to r00t your machine.)
Tags: continent, day, eternal, god, law, link, seventh, spam, this, warning
Web: The lovely C sent me a link of note — it’s the eglu, ‘the world’s most stylish and innovative chicken house and is the perfect way to keep chickens as pets’. (She has a thing about keeping chickens.)
So I was all set to link to that on NoMoreSocks.newscientist.com, New Scientist’s nifty new xmas-pressies site; but — get this: it will not load in Firefox 1.0PR, 1.0, or Konqueror at all — in fact, using telnet, the site doesn’t actually respond to requests on port 80 from my linux desktop.
The only browser it seems to work with is MS Internet Explorer in VMWare, presumably using MSIE’s psychic powers to contact it without going through TCP/IP.
Mysteriously, it can be lynxed from my server in Ireland, but similarly doesn’t work for C’s Firefox installation on her desktop. How wierd!
Tags: chicken, desktop, eglu, firefox, house, link, note, site, way, web, world
IP: A funny IPR-enforcement-related story from New Scientist (sorry, subscriber-only link):
Just before delegates (to the 28 May ‘Global Congress on Combating Counterfeiting’) left Brussels to ponder their future anti-counterfeiting measures, a salutary tale started doing the rounds.
The WCO (World Customs Organization) produces a CD database of the codes needed to identify goods by type so that local customs authorities can collect the appropriate duties. The discs sell for EUR 1000 apiece, but WCO investigators have found that staff at some border posts, which are supposedly the front line in counterfeit detection, are not using the official CDs. Instead - you’ve guessed it - they are buying cut-price pirated copies, complete with crudely photocopied, plainly fake covers and sleeve notes.
Physician, heal thyself!
Tags: combating, congress, counterfeiting, global, ip, ipr-enforcement-related, link, may, new, scientist, story
Spam: or, ‘SlashDot spam drama’. So, a few days ago, I forwarded a link to a paper I’d been sent — it’s a great paper, and I’m not just saying that because SpamAssassin did well — it really tests some of the popular open-source spam filters comprehensively, and correctly. (The authors have 24 years of information retrieval research between them.)
The results have been pretty incendiary. ;) Here’s a timeline with links, in case you were wondering where we are right now:
Tags: detection, drama, information, link, paper, response, slashdot, spam, spamassassin, study
Web: the June part of the contest is over, but given that there’s a July part still to go — here’s a ‘Nigritude Ultramarine‘ link to Anil Dash.
I wasn’t really bothered at all about this, until I came across this guy, whose technique involved spamming third-party Wiki sandboxes with backlinks. His excuse? ‘A Sandbox (is) a part of a system in which everybody is urged to play around freely. Usually for testing purposes. You can post headings, paragraphs, lists and links here. The content in return will be indexed by Google.’
As
this forum thread points out — ‘The SandBox page is there for a
purpose: to allow users of the wiki to learn to use the software. It is
not meant to be “a place where anyone can create backlinks.”‘
Sorry, that’s spam in my book.
Tags: anil, contest, july, june, link, nigritude, part, sandbox, ultramarine, web, wiki
Photos: the view out to sea from Seal Beach, just south of LA. (duh. thanks Ben, I’d b0rked the link earlier.)
Patents: via the FFII Kwiki, here’s 2087 Microsoft USPTO software patents viewed roughly by subject matter. The ‘Web’ selection is particularly interesting.
Terror: The Atlantic: All you need is love — how the terrorists stopped terrorism. Amazing — marry them off!
Tourism: Pictures from Bangkok’s new ‘Sky Bar’ — open-air dining, 63 floors up, with no walls apart from 1.5-metre-high glass.
Tags: ben, duh, ffii, kwiki, link, microsoft, patents, photos, sea, uspto, view
Spam: Lisa Rein has captured the Daily Show’s segment on spam — ‘Email Trouble’ — Rob Courddry interviewing Scott Richter. (direct link to the 10MB Quicktime movie).
This vidcap leaves out the unfunny subtitles — and it’s on archive.org, so at least you’ll be chewing up non-profit bandwidth instead of someone’s personal-site bandwidth ;) If you haven’t seen it yet, go ahead and download it; it’s well funny.
(link found via Spamblogging.)
Tags: bandwidth, daily, email, link, movie, quicktime, segment, show, spam, trouble
Web: Plain text, transparently turned into nice markup, is an idea that’s clearly never going to go away.
Setext has been around for over a decade, I wrote EtText myself for use in WebMake and elsewhere (including this very weblog!), Zope came up with StructuredText, and more recently, there’s been Textile and reStructuredText. Now welcome the newest arrival: Markdown.
First impressions: looks an awful lot like EtText, TBH, but I’d presume that’s the shared heritage from Setext. ;)
My feedback: I’d recommend supporting ‘-’ (dash) for list bullets — it turns out that’s a whole lot more widely supported than ‘*’ (asterisk), including in Vim. Also, automatic link inference is very handy; picking up http: URIs and turning email addrs into mailto: links may not look super-pretty, but saves a lot of typing, and EtText Auto links are pretty handy for stuff that’s never going to be anything other than a link (take uncommon nouns like ‘SlashDot‘, for example).
Tags: decade, ettext, idea, link, lot, markup, plain, setext, text, use, web
eVoting: Craig passes on this link: apparently thousands of Orange County voters were given the wrong ballots in last week’s election. The result is that in 21 precincts, there were more ballots cast than registered voters. It gets better — apparently the voting machine vendor has said it will be impossible to figure out how many ballots are invalid as a result. It’d be funny if it wasn’t such a big deal…
Tags: cast, deal, election, evoting, link, machine, result, vendor, voting, week
Architecture: For reasons which I won’t go into here, I wound up doing a Google Image Search for ‘toilet’ which turned up a link to this page: Toilets of the World. However, he’s missing one very important variety: the world-famous Goan ‘Hog Bog’.
Here’s a tasteful pic of an expectant pig waiting for lunch (local mirror) — and then, if your stomach can take it, a rather more graphic account here. (warning: not safe for lunch)
Tags: architecture, google, image, link, lunch, page, search, toilet, toilets, variety, world
Web: I watched a hilarious Rob Corddry segment from The Daily Show last night, repeated from earlier in the week. Having not seen The Daily Show in a while, since dropping everything but basic cable, I went looking through The Daily Show video archives to see if I could find a few more good ones — with no luck.
Every link on the Video page links to something like this:
javascript:openMediaPop(’/multimedia/tds/cord/cord_8065.html’,”,’SRM’,'high’);
Which opens a popup with this page. Now, the
interesting thing is that I do have Real Player installed — but for
some reason, Firebird hasn’t figured this out. If I could just get
through the twisty-turny maze of Javascript ‘detection’ code, I could get
the URL for the .ram file directly from the server and play it.
So this is where my idea for a new extension comes in. It should do this:
navigator.userAgent,
navigator.plugins et al, and allow the user to select what plugins
to report;
data attributes of object tags, and allow those to be cut and
pasted — or launched in any helper apps registered for that filename
extension. Alternatively, it could just replace the object with a
link to open that file in the helper app.
The first allows the user to choose what plugins to report are installed, and navigate their way past broken ‘detection’ scripts like Comedy Central’s and The BBC Radio Player’s.
The second then allows the user to get hold of the URL for future use, or pop it up in an external viewer.
Tags: cord, daily, javascript, link, navigator, page, show, url, user, video, web
Software: OK, one of my current UNIX pet peeves, perfectly illustrated by the new RPMs for KDE 3.2.
: jm 1015...; sudo rpm -Uvh *.rpm
Password:
error: Failed dependencies:
libiw.so.26 is needed by kdenetwork-3.2.0-0.1
I don’t have a wireless card in this machine.
WHY does kdenetwork, a network configuration applet, link with
a shared library component of the wireless-tools package? Why is this
not simply a shell script, or even an optional binary command? Have the
UNIX desktop environments forgotten all about the UNIX way in their rush
to implement ‘components’? To quote Doug McIlroy
:
This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
(my emphasis added.)
Hint: if you don’t intend to call some third-party code over and over
again several times a second — in other words, so that performance is
essential — you do not need to link against it as a shared library.
Calling it as a command, with fork and exec, will work just fine and
avoids this kind of ‘DLL hell’.
A related issue is how this emphasis on binary or component ABIs impacts scriptability and plugins. Ever since Netscape came up with their plugins, we’ve had this new model that third-party application extensibility meant linking shared libraries into the app (with ABI issues), or calling out to components over distributed-object transports like CORBA or MCOP (with API issues), instead of the traditional ‘helper app’ model.
As a result, generally, when I install a new version of Mozilla, I have to try and remember what plugins I had in the last one, track them down, download the latest version to work around ABI changes, and hope they work in this version of the browser.
Inevitably, they don’t — I haven’t found a working Java plugin in over a
year. On the other hand, I can always click on a .ram link to
listen to a RealAudio stream, because it doesn’t really matter if
the browser and realplayer were built with different compilers in
the ‘helper app’ case.
In addition, and paradoxically, scriptability is becoming less of an option in the modern UNIX GUI apps. Let’s say I want to be able to do the kind of thing Windows has had for years with it’s ‘Send To’ menu; put a simple shell script into an ‘actions’ directory, and it’ll appear in the right-click context menu, so that I can right-click on a file and select ‘Run frobnicator’ to frobnicate it. (Similar is possible from MS Internet Explorer.)
Is it possible in Firebird? Not a hope. But you can write an extension – 100KB of undocumented Javascript. Great.
In fairness, the file managers have the right idea — GNOME’s Nautilus does support this nicely, and so does Konqueror. But there’s an ongoing tendency to adopt the ABI dynamic-linking model, or the distributed-object model, in places where it’s just not necessary, and a simple UNIX pipe or command API — the ‘helper app’ model — would work beautifully.
hmm. </rant> ;)
Tags: command, component, emphasis, kdenetwork, library, link, rpm, software, unix, version, write
Web: What’s the link between Debian Linux and Dueling Banjos? Any ideas? No? Well, according to Debian Weekly News of September 16th, 2003, it’s become what’s called a Google-flop:
No Dueling Banjos from Debian. Some of the most bizarre mails on debian-devel over the years have been repeated requests by various people for the sheet music for dueling banjos. Several list subscribers have been eager to assist the posters in their search. Jim Penny called this the Dueling Banjo Effect and explained that this has become a self-perpetuating Google-flop. People use Google which points them to Debian to get this sheet music, and the act of asking reinforces Google’s notion that Debian is a good place to get the music.
(thanks to Rick Moen for pointing this out on the ILUG list.)
Tags: banjos, debian, dueling, google, google-flop, link, linux, list, music, sheet, web
Tech: ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center. Great panel weblog, with some of the big names in the research field, dealing with several security issues quite nicely.
Found from a link to Simon Byers’ 2003 roundup of information leakage, which notes an interesting case I hadn’t heard of – a TechTV presenter accidentally posting topless photos of herself, due to a bug in Photoshop!
(link via Liudvikas Bukys)
Tags: abusable, atac, awareness, center, field, link, panel, research, security, tech, weblog
Funny: he’s commanding Captain America to do what?
(via Memepool.)
Tags: clone, discussion, google, javascript, link, pagerank, site, spam, spammer, trick, use
Funny: some Linux graffiti from Norway — a bit more accomplished than IBM’s efforts, but still — Linux?! (link via the ArcterJournal)
Red Bull was made in Thailand — I never realise it went from Thailand to Europe instead of vice-versa. (link via the great 2bangkok.)
Also, via Ben — an amazing account of what recovering your vision feels like after 43 years of blindness…
Tags: account, bangkok, blindness, bull, link, realise, red, vision
Mozilla Firebird has this feature that obviously seemed like a good idea, but unfortunately isn’t really — automatic image resizing.
Well, while surfing about looking at the next-gen Bluecurve screenshots, I came across a screenshot with a link to linuxart.com, which had a top tip:
Hey presto!
Tags: bluecurve, com, feature, firebird, idea, image, link, linuxart, mozilla, screenshot
Ben mails on this Yahoo! link: ‘U.S. Central Command released these digitally enhanced photographs of what former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein might look like’. As he notes, let’s face it, it’s crying out for the SomethingAwful Photoshop Phriday treatment. However, I’m too cheap to have an SA forum account. Anyone got one and care to suggest it?
Tags: central, command, dictator, face, hussein, link, photoshop, saddam, somethingawful, yahoo
In case you’re trying to reconcile Arlene McCarthy’s public words, about how the proposed EU legislation helps block software and bizmeth patents, and the FFII’s public words saying the opposite, here’s a helpful email thread cross-posted between the Patents list at AFUL.org and the free-sklyarov-uk list.
The letter asking for clarification on some key points;
Also, Hartmut Pilch notes a prior letter which as yet remains unanswered; ‘All she has until now ever done is to send out standard answers to unspecific letters from concerned (and possibly naive-sounding) software developpers. Whenever someone tries to ask her more specific questions, there is no response at all. However documenting the fact that there is no response may also help. So please remember the public letter and point demand a response at every opportunity.’
The Financial Times has an article (paying subscribers only, but that link excerpts a part) which makes clear the difficulties. ‘oftware protection regulations across EU member states should be harmonized while also allowing software developers to carry on without the threat of patent searches and litigation hanging over their heads. He argues that the EU directive’s wording is opaque: The proposal lists computer implemented inventions as patentable, but this definition fails to establish whether it refers to software algorithms or inventions whose usability is dependent on software. Cane also notes that it is harder to see parallels in software invention and physical invention, and argues that there are few truly novel software inventions because most software is based upon prior work carried out by other people.’ (thanks to Gary Robinson for the link)
Tags: bizmeth, case, ffii, invention, legislation, letter, link, list, response, software
Astor Cube: ‘One of the most prominent landmarks in the East Village in Manhattan is a statue of a giant steel cube. The cube was built at Astor Place in 1968, and has stood there ever since. (jm: apparently it’s called ‘The Alamo’ by Tony Rosenthal.) …. in true All Too Flat style, we decided the plain black cube would look nicer as the world’s largest Rubik’s Cube!’ (link via MemeFirst)
Tags: alamo, cube, link, memefirst, rubik, statue, steel, style, world
JA forwards a link to Veronica Guerin, the new movie by Joel Schumacher, based on the life of the eponymous Irish journo. It boasts this beaut on their official ad website:
In the mid-1990s, Dublin was nothing short of a war zone, with a few powerful drug lords battling for control. … Based on a true story, this powerful, emotional film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (jm: oh no) … and producer Joel Schumacher … gives unique insight into a fascinating and complex aspect of the Irish conflict …
My emphasis. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Somehow or other I must have missed all the warzone stuff… I wonder if they’re confusing it with Bogota?
Tags: beaut, journo, life, link, mid, movie, nothing, producer, war, website
wow, this is wierd.
So I did a quick blog-hop, as you do. First, I visited Bernie’s interim weblogs.com blog (thanks for the link B! BTW, this looks cool).
From there, I hopped to Micheal O’Foghlu’s site, and finally settled the question – yes, he is related to Cormac O’Foghlu, who I used to work with ;)
On to Sean McGrath’s blog, where I came across an interesting link to DemoTelco — a nifty site where anyone can set up a blog and write entries via SMS messages. Set up by a Dublin company, Newbay.
Cool. To check it out, I took a look at one of the blogs on the ‘most popular’ sidebar, and what do you know — it’s Caelen King’s foneblog!
Lots of (er, frankly bizarre) pics of Caelen and Barbara. Given the shots of Euro coins and crappy Dublin weather, I guess they’re back from their round-the-world trip, then…
Sure enough, it notes:
We are back in Ireland and back at work - Our Really Big Adventure is over
Know that feeling. :( Still, at least they went to the bother of finishing up their travelogue. I think I’ll take a read over that in full when I get a chance…
Tags: blog, btw, caelen, com, cool, link, micheal, question, site, wierd
I’ve been reading an article in Edge Magazine, How To Get Rich, by Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel). He investigates more deeply into the differences between cultures, and the effect this has had on their history and dominance, as he did in GG+S; this time with economic might in mind.
For example, he notes that the Chinese, in the middle ages, were a sea-faring nation of astounding skill, exploring most of the coasts of Asia and Africa for trade. They were on the verge of rounding the Cape of Good Hope (and, in the words of Diamond, “colonising Europe” ;) when a new emperor with an anti-Navy bias took power, and recalled them. Since the entirety of China’s empire was ruled solely by one power, the emperor, that was that. (Compare with Columbus, who could “shop around” the many superpowers of Europe until his trip across the Atlantic was funded.)
Then, this morning, a pertinent link arrived via Kyle Moffat of forteana: an ancient Chinese map of Africa is now on show in Cape Town (BBC).
The Chinese map, covering more than 17 square metres, was produced in silk. It is thought to be a copy of a map sculpted into rock 20 or 30 years earlier. …
The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, or Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire, is a unique snapshot of history. Created in China in 1389, and clearly showing the shape of Africa, more than 100 years before Western explorers and map-makers reached the continent.
BTW, worth noting that I came across the Diamond article from a link in Clay Shirky’s guest-blog at Boing Boing. Clay, as usual, is throwing up lots of reading material, which I just don’t have time to read ;) so I’m syncing it all to my Palm with Sitescooper. Come on Xerox, where’s that electronic paper!?
Tags: article, boing, edge, emperor, history, link, magazine, map, power, time
Wikipedia: Edit wars in progress. Fascinating stuff! (thanks to Crummy.com for the link).
Tags: com, crummy, edit, fascinating, link, progress, stuff, wikipedia
ESAT-BT’s website. See the ‘Go On-Line for 1 cent a minute’ ad? It’s not actually a link ;)
Looking at whump.com’s moreLikeThis weblog, I found a link to a static web CMS using DocBook and XSLT: XM (XSLT Make), and the concept of site maps as a design pattern for websites. Both are similar to what I’m trying to do with WebMake, but unfortunately there’s no links to WebMake anywhere there. Gotta do more hyping, I reckon ;)
Tags: cms, com, docbook, link, make, web, weblog, webmake, whump, xslt
The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
The opinions expressed on this web site are my personal opinions, and do not in any way represent those of my employer.
