Mike Rowe is a 17-year-old Canadian who started a web design company called mikerowesoft.com. His cheekiness got him a lengthy legal letter from the other, slightly larger, Microsoft, who were less than amused at his idea of humour via Darren Barefoot
The next release of the Linux kernel will be named after an Australian animal following a frenzied bidding war at Linux.conf.au 2004 in Adelaide
Virus writers are going beyond click to infect
programs by merging a trio of techniques to bypass security and compromise computers with malicious code
The US Military wants to be excused from duty. That is, it’s duty to obey the environmental laws of the United States of America. Last year the Defence Department won exemptions from three major environmental laws — the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty. Now, the military wants to ignore the Clean Air Act and toxic waste laws. To its credit, Congress has already refused to allow these additional exemptions, but the Defence Department is preparing to join the battle once more
What does the Star Wars geek do when thought turn to modifying his four wheeled conveyance? Turn it into an X-Wing, of course
One of Australia’s key beef customers, South Korea, has confirmed that some United States beef is being illegally labelled and sold as Australian product. South Korea banned imports of US beef when a case of mad cow disease was discovered in Washington State before Christmas, leaving Korean wholesalers with product still to sell. Mike Heywood from Meat and Livestock Australia says as a result Australian beef is in high demand, leading to the labelling scam
More than three years after launching consumer-grade ADSL, Telstra will extend the reach of the broadband service from 3.5 to more than four kilometres from enabled telephone exchanges. The move will extend ADSL coverage to an additional 400,000 homes, increasing from about 75% to 90% of households
The head of the Prison Service the number of inmates serving short-term prison sentences had soared and called for minor offenders to be given non-custodial punishment
Gee it’s certainly taken me some time to blog about the whole Apple licensing their iPod hardware to HP thing. I could crap on about how this is a good thing for Mac users, PC users, HP, Apple and every one who wants an iPod, but Mr. Gruber says it far more eloquently than I so here: The H-Bomb. Todd Dominey also says it betterer than I: The HP / Apple Dance.
Like Gruber, I think the fact that the HP iPod will not support/play WMA files is a complete non issue. I also find this article Hewlett-Packard: No WMA for IPod, just some more indirect Apple bashing. Oooooo! You can’t play WMA files! Why the fuck would you when mp3 and AAC are both superior and platform independant? Maybe I just think this as I don’t buy music from the iTunes store or other such stores. If I like something I buy the cd and let iTunes turn it into a cd quality mp3 or AAC playlist and whack it on my iPod. Just a thought, why don’t Napster and other such people offer mp3’s as well or instead of WMA? Why are these people jumping on the proprietry band wagon? Maybe I’m just out of the loop…
Any way, you can checkout the HP branded iPod in HP grey in this video on Cnet.
WMA – HA!
Straight outta the Outré Gallery‘s newsletter:
Outré will be publishing a full-colour 48 page book on the work of Nathan entitled “Scarygirl: Art by Nathan”. This will be one of the very first monographs in the world focussing on vinyl as a new artistic medium. It will include reproductions of Nathan’s working sketches, illustrations and beautiful, detailed photographs of his vinyl work.
I want this fucking book. I want this exhibition to come to Sydney but alas it appears that this is not the case. Nathan J will only be available for Melbournians viewing pleasure, damn it!
HEROES AND MONSTERS: NEW WORKS BY SHAG, Sydney Opera House: 30 January – 24 February 2004.
Meet Shag in Sydney:
- Saturday 21 February at The Studio for Official Book signing, 2-4pm
- Sunday 22 February at The Studio for Closing Celebration, 6:30-8:30pm, and then following for DJs and dancing at The Opera bar until late (free admission)
Of course many Shaggy related items will be available for all your impulsive Shag needs. If you want to buy original paintings you are too late. There was a list, you could’ve joined the list, but it’s closed and the paintings are spoken for. Sigh!
The countdown is on!
More than five million aerial photographs of World War II are to be made publicly available on the internet at Evidence in Camera. The pictures will go online on Monday. Taken by the RAF, they were used by Allied commanders to help devise their strategy during the six-year conflict
Oracle is ready to extend its Linux Everywhere
campaign to client systems. At next week’s LinuxWorld in New York, Oracle will announce that it will enable the Mozilla browser to run Oracle applications in the coming year
The Israeli soldier accused of killing Tom Hurndall, the British peace activist who died last week, tried to cover up his crime by asking for his commander’s permission to shoot an armed man
moments after he had already fired the fatal shot
There’s pretty cool interactive site to the xBox game Fable. It works like the old choose your own adventure stories. Shame about the annoying Flash reloads for each page
Nice Mazda Flash animation showing one of their cars turning into an Autobot
In an event that most Doctor Who fans thought couldn’t happen, another lost episode of Doctor Who has turned up. It’s Episode Two of the 1965 William Hartnell serial, The Daleks’ Master Plan
. No word yet as to how it will be released, this news is just breaking today apparently. This is great news for fans, as the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999, and most folks had given up hope there were any others left to be discovered. For those who don’t know, in the ’70s the BBC routinely junked old stories. Not just Dr Who, but all their shows. Repeats and sales weren’t an issue then. There’s something like 115 or so lost Doctor Who episodes total
Troy Javaher and Frank Weyer, operating under the newly formed company Nizza Group, are suing Network Solutions and Register.com for infringing on its e-mail and domain naming patent, which covers assigning each member of a group an URL of the form name.subdomain.domain and an e-mail address of the form name@subdomain.domain
David Cogswell has an interesting article at Online Journal following the dodgy policies of BushCo’s anything goes attitude to holding absolute power and ponders that they are not above assassinating political rivals when smear tactics and legal battles fail
Warp Records, an independent label for electronic music (featuring artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada), has made their entire back catalog available thru Bleep, a new digital download service. To quote from the FAQ: We are at present the only store to offer very high quality MP3 files
and Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals
Just looking through the logs, always interesting reading to see what weird search terms people use on the site, when I ran across an MT-Blacklist comment denial from IP 68.173.7.113 — which is one of the New York based Road Runner servers.
On 10 January, over a period of six minutes, this particular comment spammer — pushing sex, drugs, weight loss, baldness cures and, would you believe, online privacy — tried to spam the site 93 times. A handful snuck through, bringing the hit up to a hundred, and all were promptly added to my blacklist and submitted to Jay Allen’s Comment Spam Clearinghouse. After the initial assault, the spammer must have decided to test the waters and sent a single spam two and half hours later, with a follow up an hour after that. Both were denied.
And on other site related matters, we’ve just updated MovableType to version 2.661, which has added a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can be limited over a set time period, an automatic IP address ban based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time and the format of links in comments has been changed to redirects to stop spammers trying to boost their PageRank.
Unfortunately, there’s an XHTML bug in the MT update that was only partially fixed by the 2.661 release. Jacques Distler has a patch available to fix the problem.
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