evening out

As mentioned in passing elsewhere, the nearest thing I made to a resolution was to get out more. So advised by local listings from The Event Guide that The Tycho Brahe (wisn: "good thing it's not just any tycho brahe.") were playing in the International Bar, I took myself into town to see them. In a somewhat typically Irish fashion, the gig was listed as starting at 8:30pm; the barman said it'd start at 9; the doors opened at 9:15, and some guy did a fairly rough and mostly unpleasant dj job until some time after 10 when the band took the stage. I'd not heard anything by the band before, but I'd heard great recommendations from Dave Fanning who in my opinion is the only DJ worth listening to these days. And Tycho Brahe didn't change that opinion. The singer's voice is in the almost traditional Irish rock style, but the music had hints of everything from jazz to Kate Bush to The Mission to Elevator Suite to... well, I ran out of comparisons. Given that Sunday's early closing, they only played for an hour, but I picked up both their CDs on the way out (released on their own, thus non-evil, label Konstantin Records) and will most definitely be going to see them again.

now /that's/ shopping

I've just signed off on about $150,000 of equipment, which is probably the most spending I've been involved with since I worked for Stepstone back in 1999/2000. EEP!

found customer complaint

Evidently I need to stop dealing with telcos. This is the final paragraph from a lengthy and exasperated email to my domain registrar (currently Esat BT, although they've had several name changes since I first signed up with them) after they'd been sending me screwed up bills several years in a row:

Finally, I'd also appreciate if you could explain how my address changed from Cabinteely (correct at the time of last billing, but no longer so) to Youghal (my parents address, but not somewhere I've lived for some 12 years now). My current address for correspondance, billing, and explanations of same is [redacted]. If you wish to discuss these intriguing issues with me by phone, you may do so on [redacted] - a number which probably went missing with my Cabinteely address.

For the record, they did ultimately sort out the billing issue and explain it, kinda, but they had no light to shed on what the hell happened with my address.

in which I get needlessly picky with some online journo again.

Charles Arthur suggests that the spread of the web was caused by the fact that it wasn't patented. Well, if that's so, then how come the existing protocols:

"[it] wasn't just that it let you click about from place to place; that had always been possible using protocols such as "gopher" and plain old file transfer ("ftp")."

didn't spawn such a spread? Perhaps because what launched the web, really and truly threw it in your face like nothing before, was the client? Specifically, Mosaic, which was under such legal wraps that Netscape Communications Corporation changed their name from Mosaic Communications Corporation when UIUC "expressed concern" about the choice of name? The same Mosaic which was subsequently licensed to the likes of Quarterdeck, Spry, and Microsoft?

On top of that, as soon as Netscape had a lead in the market, they made huge efforts to retain that leadership through driving HTML - perhaps the unfettered part of the web that Arthur is really referring to, although he's not exactly clear about that - in directions that suited them. <BLINK>, anyone? Microsoft did likewise, and continue to do so, using non-standard tags and the like in an attempt to provide a suitably tempting piece of added value that will persuade customers to give up on the competition. And yet through that driving towards some semblance of proprietary code - which the W3C implicitly endorsed several times by updating the official standards to match the de facto ones - we got Java, Flash, plugins in general (admittedly now under threat from the Eolas lawsuit) and, by and large, more powerful HTML features.

That aside, the quote above is itself largely incorrect in that gopher and ftp were, at the time, more manual affairs without the clicky goodness of HTML; the first browser (available for public use by telnetting to a CERN machine) used a page trailer list of footnotes to link other documents (no clicking here, m'lud); and the whole argument about which platform your software patent is based on is a complete straw man which has no useful relevance to the argument. Even the bit about basing your work on the work of others, well, jeez. Every second patent does that; even the much-vaunted Segway required someone to invent - and patent - gyroscopes, stepper motors, low-density high-power batteries, and so on. Few if any patents stand on their own

Software Patents are indeed bad, but it doesn't help to pick examples that don't properly support your hypothesis.

PS this is largely a top-of-head rant. feel free to criticise and nitpick, since that's exactly what I'm doing myself.

unexpected means of rating rarity

So a friend's daughter has Gillian Barre Syndrome, essentially an autoimmune disease of the brain that causes problems with coordination. Consult your local doctor for a better definition, I guess. Anyway, being the curious sort, I plugged "Gillian Barre" Syndrome into Google. From the resulting list of hits, I've determined that this must be a fairly common disease, since it's being used to bait sites in the same way as, say, Brittney Spears or Hot/Live/Wet/Young/Nude/Whatever Teens.

Update: Actually, I'm seeing several names for this. The friend in question told me it was Gillian Bere. Gillian Barre turns up a lot of hits, and it's what google suggests. Somewhere else says Gillian Barré. And I've now seen one that says Guillain-Barre, which seems to be the correct spelling as it's turning up some far more useful hits. Google, spell-checker of the masses.

comic recommend

Hax0r Economist roxx0rs..

I'm not sure they meant that.

Continuity announcer on E4: "There's a double dose of highly infections Sex And The City coming up next."