2001-07-28»
Sun Jul 29 06:45:00 2001»
I spent all yesterday coding WAT, my textfile todo handler with Palm synchronisation. This is why I’m not a programmer.
Excellent commentary by John “Catweazel” Gilmore on the DMCA.
EFF won’t be able to take every case that comes along. The community’s donations to EFF have been gratifying, useful, indeed essential. But there is far more money going into rabid company lawyers than is going into EFF or anywhere else for DMCA legal defense. It’s classic public choice economics — the benefit of the DMCA is concentrated in big profits to small numbers of companies, while the harm of the DMCA is spread widely through society. The companies will spend a lot to get those profits, while relatively few people will want to spend much to defend against them. EFF will have to pick which cases to focus on: ones where we can set precedents and get good leverage that will ultimately help the most people. But some people — I predict many people — are going to twist in the wind or in prison for years, before the courts or Congress are pushed into fixing the havoc caused by rabid copyright maximalists. So what if it decimates our profession? We’re a tiny minority of society, and we don’t bribe any legislators. They’ll only notice that we matter after we’re gone, when their security infrastructures fall to bits.
Hailstorm explained:
c/o slashdot
Comments Off on Sun Jul 29 06:45:00 2001
2001-07-26»
»
Back from Africa. Feeling fitter, somewhat lighter headed. Caught up in Dmitry-saving, Co-located server mechanics, and reignited local friend-making.
But first, as ever: it’s the Call of the Know!
I think I’d be more annoyed about being 7,000 miles away if it wasn’t for Cook’d and Bomb’d‘s rip of the new Brass Eye
Her Brittanic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests And Requires that you give Paul Ford a temporary home.
How long has it been since I was supposed to improve my Crash Into My House Flash file?
Got a UNIX system? Receiving dozens of SirCam e-mails? Join in the fun, and decode those private documents with these commands:
In mutt, select the second attachment, then hit pipe (|), and enter:
dd bs=512 skip=268 > ~/tmp/filenamehere.ext
You might need to use skip=280 if that doesn’t work. More suggestions in this USENET posting by Ronan Keryell.
They didn’t Free Dimitry. Which is, horribly, a slight relief for me, because I have a column about the situation coming out on Sunday.
Another EFF Project, hosted at Harvard Law school: Chilling Effects Clearing House:
We will be gathering cease and desist notices sent to Internet users, and will analyze those letters in issue-spotting FAQs (informal memos) to be posted on the site.
I have a very crude spam filter: I send anything that isn’t from a known mailing list, and doesn’t have my name in the From: header, into a suspected spam mailbox which I rarely visit. This works very well, except for mailing lists that I’ve forgotten to add to the master list. I’ve just realised that including a
|
|
:0: * ^Precedence:.*bulk misclist.mbx/ |
entry into my procmailrc should take care of that. It works because spam is the only bulk mail that doesn’t admit that it is bulkmail. D’oh!
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2001-05-17»
Thu May 17 17:00:00 2001»
A Silicon Valley morality play, with puppets
Comments Off on Thu May 17 17:00:00 2001
2001-05-10»
Thu May 10 14:13:00 2001»
Mozilla is now my default browser. Actually, it has been for a while, but it’s only since Build 2001042608 that it hasn’t been a test of faith, rather than an invisible pleasure.
It’s nice to have the Virtual Richard Stallman congratulate me every month about this. I still miss RealPlayer though: and nobody tell it about the Windows installation I’ve got on the other partition. Or the Flash plugin. Or the BIOS.
Comments Off on Thu May 10 14:13:00 2001
2001-05-09»
Wed May 9 07:37:00 2001»
Ordered three tickets back to the US (one for me, one for my mother and one for my nephew). Spent a good few hours at it; servers fell over, flight availability changed from minute to minute, and I was bloody-minded enough to persist until I’d got exactly what I wanted. It’d been much quicker using the phone, but I don’t think I would have ended with precisely my choice. I’m more comfortable being assertive with Web interfaces than bullying call center slaves.
All the same, I still made some big errors on each order – nothing fatal, but I had to follow up each with e-mails begging the support staff to correct the mistake. This isn’t unusual; in the past I’ve even had to pay out to reschedule flights that I’d misbooked. In most cases, it’s been a sucky UI that led me into the trap. (This time, it was a default “Mr” entry for a name on Travel Select, and a really confusing Expedia oversight. If you need a separate billing and delivery address on Expedia, it makes you abandon your current order, and fill in a brand new form – without changing the “I’d like a separate billing and delivery address” option. You dutifully enter a new address, which Expedia blithely ignores by default. Separate billing and delivery addresses are a UI nightmare, I remember Jared Spool saying.)
I’d kill for a desktop-based flight availibiity bot. Autonomy never understood – the only time you need a bot on your own machine is when no-one else has a vested interest in performing that service for you.
Comments Off on Wed May 9 07:37:00 2001
2001-04-28»
Sat Apr 28 17:57:00 2001»
Not much to see yet. Perhaps you would like some oblomovitis?
Comments Off on Sat Apr 28 17:57:00 2001
