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We are glad to announce that, effective today, every single work by Adorno and Benjamin that you claim as your "intellectual property" has become part of the very public domain that had granted you these copyrights in the first place. Of course they will not be available instantly, and of course we will not publish them ourselves - but you can take our word that they will be out, in countless locations and formats, and that not even a legion of lawyers will manage to get them back. Maybe it helps if you think of your "intellectual property" as a genie, and of your foundation as a bottling business.

I like that. Time to fire up GNUnet.

Link to textz.com

Now I'm very unhappy with ICANN's way of (not) doing things, but this is so disgustingly Bad that I've got to be on their side (for a little while at least): Verislime, the guys who can't even check the identifies of customers they're signing for now sue ICANN over their SiteFinder "service". Stupidity and greed are indeed boundless.

The weekend in Hobart was fun (especially as SAGE-AU came up with the airfare, so all I had to pay was the one extra night at the hotel), but today's flights back with a lecture half an hour later was pretty heavy.

Got up at 0420, left the hotel at 0500, flight to melbourne at 0625, then two hours to kill there and finally the flight back to the Gold Coast arriving at 1030 local time. The luggage unloading didn't work out properly, apparently they lost a loader during ops so we had to wait around for another extra 20 minutes. Then a 2hr lecture, a bit of sifting through my email (the private stack is at 1100 now, work about 60...no joke), and then home-sweet-home. Hobart, while cold was at least sunny, but the weather on the Gold Coast has been and is lousy: strong rains, warm and wet.

Got my first dvd today, a used 2 disc set of final fantasy. Great film, took a while to convince ogle or mplayer to display it but then it was marvellous. A pity that my lapdog with its lousy mach mobility graphics card can't really keep up with full screen movie display...

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Life is going by, way too fast.
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Whenever I've got to do anything with XML (and that's a fair lot with a couple of research efforts re topicmaps and james I feel like I'm in the nearest Crazy Clark's "hardware" aisle: lotsa tools, most overlapping in intended use but all subtly broken and at best fit to round off boltheads or screwheads after keeping you fuming for way too long.

And in the real world those bloody tools aren't even as cheap as Crazy Clark stuff, they require way too much effort.

So rant away like those at XMLsucks.org, go back to XML 2.0alpha? Maybe YAML is the answer to the questions XPath, XPointer, XSLT, XQuery, XUpdate and all the other lousy languages don't answer properly?

...airconditioners would be setup properly. You'd be amazed. The Rainbow trip over the weekend didn't happen, because I had caught a nice little cold in the freezing lecture theatres and labs last week; spent friday and half of saturday sick in bed. Bummer. Saturday arvo I had at least a flight, 45min, but I bombed out and the walk up the hill with the heavy gear was worse than usual. Anyway, a flight's a flight.

Worked most of the day on XSLT and Xpath nastinesses, and, oh boy, XML sucks; people should use m4 again and life would be better. What a selection of kludges, one more expensive and complex than the other...

Tried the linux bootable business card today, but my lapdog hangs during boot; the usual framebuffer video gotchas?

A fun to read article on how he fails to see piracy as the evilevilterrorismbadness other blokes try to present it.
Link to an ad-infested version
Linkto the textz variant

Mr. Moore seems to be one of the way-too-few murkins with a bit of common sense, a backbone and a loud voice.

I liked his Letter to George W. Bush on the Eve of War.

A nice article about weblogs and why they are no good in general; I mostly agree with the author.

Why this blog-like site, then? because I want to share things I develop/experience, and because I'm trying to keep my Austrian relatives and friends somewhat informed of my whereabouts - but not to the extent of "What did I eat yesterday"...

i haven't set up clamav to run as a milter on my servers - yet. yes, i know about mailscanner, amavis and friends...they're all too fat for what i want, and clamav's mail parsing facilities (at least in the versions i could get onto my Debian/stable servers) are nonexistant. so i've got dual queues, between which some kind of filter is moving stuff after scanning.

my small script is a simple wrapper around MIME::Parser (see libmime-perl in debian) that reads sendmail queue files, extracts the content into a tempdir, runs clamscan on that and depending on the result, moves the stuff into the quarantine or the real mail queue. Feel free to (ab|re|per)use.

These guys run an anonymous blog publishing service fed via MixMaster remailers.

This voting system is unproven, high-tech and known insecure. That voting system is proven, low-tech and fairly secure. The Conslutant Price Question: which system are the murkins going to choose?

(a tip: forget common sense. The report? What report? Oh, that report. Well, that report is the work of defaitists, communists and open sourcers. We can't trust them, because of securrrity and terrror <badum-tish>)

Link to abusabletech

The pentagon recently canned SERVE because of the report.

This tool mixes layout from one site with content from another. Hilarious effects ensue.

hmm, slashdotted or what? It's gone. Bummer.

Couple of days ago I realised that there was suspiciously little email reaching my desktop, while the server was properly logging things. Turns out that an dpkg -P clamav-milter had cleared the clamav cron file, which on my system was responsible to move the goodies from an inbound queue to the real mailqueue (post-clamav of course)....grrr. 700 mails, the input of two days...

The week, how was the week? not especially pleasant; work went along so-so, but the prep of the upcoming talk at the tas04 conference is to be done urgently and the usual xml and xslt kludges for james took up too much time already. I'm suffering from a bit of a cold (damn airconditioning) and am constantly tired. Also my car just came back from service but somehow that doesn't seem to have bettered the minor and major annoyances much.

At least, if nothing major happens, I'll get out a bit: tomorrow I'll drive up to Rainbow Beach for the weekend (couple of hundred km in the north), flying on the beach (hopefully). So let's hope for a nice refreshing weekend.

This past month has gone by way too fast, and the last three days were lousy.
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