I wasn’t able to get to OSCON this year, but this photo is definitely a winner in the category of impromptu geek performance art:

Ruby on Rael

I’ve yanked out my own crude anti-comment-spam tests and replaced them with a nice tidy call to the Akismet API. If this works out I’ll most certainly incorporate it into the Django version of the blog – there’s a nice Python interface as well.

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seanrox commented on Thu Aug 24 14:58:33 2006:

Akismet is nice and works wonders on comment spam as you’ll see on your site.

The guys over at automattic.com really know their stuff.

Yesterday, the OpenDarwin project announced it is shutting down:

OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative…. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.

I’m disappointed that no strong movement emerged in support of a Darwin-based open source operating system, but perhaps it’s just a testament to the growing power and polish of other available OSs, e.g. Ubuntu.

During the same period that I thought I’d be playing a lot with an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux (but haven’t), several notable Apple fans have made, or are seriously and publicly considering making, the jump from OS X to open-source operating systems like Ubuntu.

Mark Pilgrim led the way. (He does work for IBM, though he’s gotten remarkably few snide remarks about that in the comments.)

Cory Doctorow is talking like he’s about to do it as well. Cory has a Mac tattooed on his bicep, but that might not last either.

A story on Slashdot notes that Yahoo is now selling one (yes, one) MP3 without digital rights management shackles. The best comment I saw:

This isn’t a marketing ploy to pretend to be anti-DRM when they are not, and this is not being done because they “want to work on other stuff”. This is being done because DRM free music is the only way Yahoo and company can break into the monopoly iTunes has over the iPod, which itself has a near monopoly on MP3 players.

Somehow I don’t think this is worth making a filtering rule for, but it’s amusing. How many characters of this header to you need to scan before you know it’s forged?

Reveived: from web.de
    by fmmailgate04.web.de (Postfix) with SMTP id 94F36A25FF;
    Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:03:27 +0200 (CEST)

My last post was about a server migration at work; this one’s about moving my own stuff, an operation completed late last night. It was easier in that it’s less critical (nobody’s likely to freak out if my blog disappears for a day) but harder in that it also involved mail. I hate dealing with mail; though I did manage the switch without losing any, as far as I know. My thanks to the JohnCompanies.com staff for helping this go smoothly.