Slef Did it ever occur to you that the comma rather than period in the email address might possibly have been a genuine mistake rather than an attempt to target you. Your excessively and increasingly paranoid and biased blog postings are starting to piss me off. You managed to suggest that Madduck thought that cookies should never be used. Reading his post you see he referenced Sesse who only said that people shouldn't use cookies if they didn't need to. As for your assertion that wikipeda has a "extreme right-wing viewpoint", I sat and read both the blog entry you posted to and the discussion page in question. You conviently failed to mention that wikipedia's problem with the FAQ is that it is the collective work of anonymous contributors and edited by a person that google ranks below the profile of some games player. (Oh sorry, forgot google is in on the anti-mjray conspiracy). Wikipedia's policy on sources clearly states that primary sources should be "made available by a credible publication". When you've finished complaining, you might want to fix the link element in your rdf to not point to itself.

Whew! Wow! Yay! It’s been just a couple of days since the Bicol Open Source Forum was held at the Aquinas University, but I can’t just seem to forget it. It’s been a rocking experience, and I wished it were a bit longer:

• I met Irvin (at last) who also gave my a copy of Dapper Flight 3. \o/ Together with Rick, we gave away lots of Ubuntu CDs at the event (I practically went back home to Daet with an empty box
• I also got to chat with fellow speakers Rick Bahague Jr. of CP-Union who presented the state of FOSS and Rage Callao of ASTI-DOST who is working on the Philippines’ very own Bayanihan Linux. Both are really cool guys in their own right, and they also are Debian/Ubuntu users too! Rage was also kind enough to give me his own 16-CD Debian Sarge collection (plus Bayanihan 3.1 and Thin Client Manager); Thanks a lot!!!
• I was surprised at the number of people who attended the forum, as well as their attention to detail during the presentations, and most of all, in their line of questioning: these were mostly non-technical management people, and they all seem to use GNU/Linux in its various incarnations for quite some time now. I hope that these people would continue their adventure into FOSS; especially with (both) regional and local government support, I’m quite excited to see what holds for FOSS in Bicol in the future
• I got involved in the founding of the Bicol Open Source Society that would serve as the overseer and motivator for FOSS projects and events here in Bicol. Included in the org are folks from academe and local govenrment units, and we’re set to have an online meeting sometime next week. Of course, we’re composed of a small number of people for now, but I expect that with some additional visibility (starting with making a new mailing list) I think a lot of Bicolanos in the region and elsewhere will be very interested in joining. Hopefully there would be provincial LUGs soon, and I think this would be a very good prospect for a PLUG roadshow.
• I got to see Bulkang Mayon and the Cagsawa Ruins too with Rick and the DOST folks at the day after the event (too bad Rage had to go ahead.) A couple of van-rides later and I’m back home, trying out a Dapper upgrade, and quite tired but happy.

Thanks a lot to Joseph Cadag and Josephina Abilay of DOST/RITECC for organizing the event and bringing FOSS to the attention of many Bicolanos I look forward for another event like this soon: from what I hear there would be an even bigger one set for July. I guess I should be pinging Marilize of Ubuntu now to reserve some flyers and CDs… …but right now, on the the Dapper upgrade! Break my Breezy and lemme have my jigsaw puzzle

Okay, something bugs me, and it's somewhat irrational, and somewhat rational. I totally hate really long URLs needed to "verify" that the sign-up is valid. There are more than one type of these, sometimes they are required to continue into the site, sometime just for extra features, but they are more often that not, very long. Now, I don't like long URLs in general in emails, because there are many services which allow you to shorten them for public use. Recently I signed up for 30 boxes and they sent me this monstrosity:

http://30boxes.com/signup.php?action=finishSignup&d=aSDFJKLa43da
safjdAL5RLKj4afjrafa45J5kljtyTGJrALKJgFKLsaj5klJ4jkljakljdkalflk
fASJKjdfa4r23890fdfjskl342390fakjlei309dk390ujkal39032kd03j9djd9

Okay, so lets look at this rationally for a bit. How many unique strings can they have from that huge behemoth of an identifier. There are 145 characters. They are using the entire uppercase (26), lowercase (26) and numbers (10), so there are a total of 62 unique symbols for each spot. That gives us a total of 62¹⁴⁵ different strings. That's

78848779858160540639233408124436328679807474352650645474403652978
77812230999983634922053904324829205441837830921209410767866820350
39259149646534571887966722870103317751633817974743087029882020930
78213775489032524047364643001443429901072761743321026356976812032

different combinations. In scientific notation, thats 7.8 × 10²⁵⁹. Just for comparison, the entire number of atoms in the universe is high-balled at 6 × 10⁷⁹ (on this page). That's more than a googol of identifiers for EACH ATOM, EVERYWHERE. Isn't naming each atom once enough? Then you would only need 45 characters, which would nicely fit in one line of my email client if you just shortened your "finishSignup" to "fS" and action to "a". As a bonus, it also saves you approximately 117 bytes of bandwidth per email. UPDATE: Apparently it has ALL the information, in addition to being completely too long. I replaced it with random crap.

Last week, some friends and I played a very exciting and long (6 hours) game of Risk. At the end, I thought: Too bad we can’t rewind the game and play it fast forward, just see how the tides of colors are waging.Well, on Sunday, I though, why not, and started writing “RiskRecorder”. It is my first larger project with python and gtk+, and I am quite content with both of them. The map is stolen from JRisk, and with that the idea of a gif file that maps pixels to countries. The RiskRecorder is meant to be used during a game of regular risk, to - well - record the moves. As a side benefit, you don’t have to calcuate the number of units you get anymore, as the RiskRecorder can tell you that. You can then save the whole game for later review.It should be in a usable state by now, but I plan to add more features sometime, like better animations and graphs showing development of the game.To try it yourself, you need the program itself (one file so far), then get at least the board.map, board_map.gif and board_pic.jpg from the jrisk CVS repository (you can open any other JRisk map in RiskRecorder, too). You might need to download the python bindings for gtk and cairo, too. On debian, I assume that apt-get install python-gtk2 python-cairo will get you what you need.As always, comments, bugreports and patches are welcome. To follow development, have a look at my svn repository.

MJ Ray, I think you're distorting what is going on. Google are, rightly, protective of their search results and work actively against people that try to manipulate the search results. This is what BMW.de had done by giving a spam page to google and using javascript to redirect users to the right page. As an aside, this would have broken for text browsers or anyone without javascript. It's not the pinicle of accessibility is it? Google were protecting their index, not using it as a vendetta against people it doesn't like as you were suggesting. Stop being so paranoid and stop distorting the story, or you're no better than the devil you're trying to paint Google as.