So, for some reason, I was using
advogato
and, for some reason, I was looking at
jono
and, for some reason, I clicked on the link
to the JonoCam.
What I saw was unpleasant and not what I
was expecting.
Someone's squatting on the JonoCam address,
hiding behind eNom's privacy service.
In fact, it looks like all of
kdedevelopers.net is spam now, including
jono.kdedevelopers.net.
Not only that, but
http://www.jonobacon.co.uk/
is squatted too, by futuregate aka Mindcom Internet Limited of 20 Meridian Way,
Meridian Business Park,
Norwich
NR7 0TA.
If you're reading this from
near Norwich,
would you post some pictures of the home of
these serial domain-squatters, please?
So I hopped onto the lugradio IRC
and asked jono.
Apparently he lost it ages ago(!)
nominet
says the domain was registered in 2004 and
last updated April 2007, so I didn't know if
that means it's been a while, or just a few
months. Does the registration date change
if an owner loses control?
astinus told me that it does.
Anyway, I wonder how many advogato users have
disused person pages with spam/squatted links.
Is there a nice way we could spot them all
and tag them somehow?
Is there some common "about me" format which
advogato (and social networking sites?) could
use to keep up-to-date on our movements?
List three locations in case we lose our
primary domain?
Also,
I had another email yesterday from someone
apologising for losing control of their
domain, asking me to change my links
and
I've removed a couple more from my
friends bookmarks category recently.
Are people still losing
personal domains to squatters?
If so, is there a new reason for this,
or is it the same old problems of
registrar-lock-in and it being cheaper to
register a new domain than to go to dispute
resolution?
(2007-09-09: 4 comments)
A group of Debianites is currently working on machine-readable copyright files for Debian packages. Since I have to do this work anyway, whether the result is structured or not, I thought I could make uclibc a guinea pig for that too (it already is for xcontrol).
That is harder than it sounds, though. The package consists of about 2,000 files, and each of them has multiple copyright holders who each imposed their own licence terms.
A fun year lies ahead.
* Arjun (tuxjr14, where are you??), Jaldhar and that Pizza 
The latest version of d2x-xl works quite well, so I've started packaging it. Since it needs the data from the commercial game to work, it will probably end up in contrib.
The interesting thing is that there is another project, Into Cerberon, working on a Doom 3 mod with free game data -- it would be interesting to see whether both projects could be combined in order to get a completely free game. Difficulty: Into Cerberon is planning for a triangle based engine while d2x-xl thinks in cubes.
Update: Into Cerberon use the Doom 3, not the Quake 3 engine. Thanks "zulu9" for noticing. Also, Josh alerts me of some interesting (cough) licensing issues around this code. As I'm still busy wading through the uclibc source compiling a proper list of attributions and licenses (ftp-master thinks a blanket statement "If you link against this, the LGPL applies to you, if you look at the files, please see each individual file" is not enough -- I can somehow see their point, but it takes ages to do that) that will have somewhat lower priority. I know why I rewrite things from scratch rather than fix them these days...
Time to revisit this topic.
I asked debian perl for advice on