iTunes Plus
iTunes 7.2 is out. iTunes Plus (DRM free downloads) is available. So I’ve made a purchase: Placebo: Covers.
Wow, it’s easy isn’t it? So nice to be able to enjoy the integrated iTunes experience without worrying about infesting my computer with DRM crippled media.
As Kirk McElhearn points out the files do contain identifying information that can be traced (trivially) back to you. That’s fine by me.
Captcha::reCAPTCHA
I’ve just released a Perl interface to reCAPTCHA. You should be able to find it here:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Captcha-reCAPTCHA
At the time of writing the US mirror of search.cpan.org doesn’t seem to have updated for a few days so if you need it in a hurry you can also get it here:
http://cpan.hexten.net/modules/by-authors/id/A/AN/ANDYA/
Citizen Journalism
I’d like to make it possible for local people to set up blog space on the Nenthead community site. They’d post local news stories and interesting ones would be promoted to a unified news front page. Kind of like Advogato but for non-geeks.
Is anyone doing this kind of community focused citizen journalism? I see Wikinews but that’s more top down than what I have in mind.
Drugs house shut after complaints
Blimey, the complaints must have been annoying if they had to resort to drugs.
Bastard Linux Patent FUD
And then this:
“The point of the study was actually to eliminate the FUD about Linux’s alleged legal problems by attaching a quantifiable measure versus the speculation,” he said. “And the number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so average as to be boring; almost any piece of software potentially infringes at least that many patents.”
Who said that? Dan Ravicher of OSRM - also known as the guy who wrote the report Balmer is quoting.
Via The Inquirer
Update: This dates from November 2004 (eWeek). As far as I know Ballmer’s still quoting the same report.
Robber Barons
James Turner is pissed off about Microsoft’s patent sabre rattling - as we all should be.
At the end, there’s only one thing left to say. For shame Microsoft, for shame. You’ve twisted competition into a thuggish debacle that ranks right up there with the worst of the great robber barons. How ironic that Bill Gates is trying to reinvent himself as the great philanthropist. Andrew Carnegie took much the same route late in his life, as if it could wash away his sins. We can only hope that in a few years, Steve Ballmer will look as much a fool as Daryl McBride does today.
More here.
I've been having trouble focussing my eyes for the past week. Turns out I have some kind of macular dystrophy. My right eye has a blurred and displaced area (about the size of my thumbnail at a range of 30cm) which makes bits of text bend and blur when I try to look directly at them. My left eye is fine but seems unwilling to help my right eye out - presumably after years of laziness.
Apparently I'm too young for it to be conventional macular degeneration. I think that's supposed to be a consolation of some sort. It's all a bit freaky given that I spend about 80% of my waking time staring at a screen. Can't do that right now for more than about half an hour without getting a headache.
The good news is that it happened once before about five years ago and either went away or my brain got used to processing the distorted image. This in spite of having been told it was both incurable and degenerative. Of course right now I'm using the eye-power I have reading whatever I can find about the condition.
So I guess I might be a little less always-on than usual. The effect is much less pronounced when I focus near infinity. That's an excuse to get out more if ever I heard one.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
