(By the way: Linode, my VPS host, seems to be awesome.)

My chat client Irssi combined with OpenSSH, GNU Screen and Bitlbee provides me with hugely powerful social infrastructure in the form of continuous conversations that can be reached with any SSH client. Add logging and basic Unix tools to the mix and you have a silly fast and simple way of finding stuff you’ve discussed. In other words: my IRC/Live/Jabber logs are important works of reference and must be kept up to date with the system locale.

I failed to find any directly suitable or functional shell one-liners for this operation, until Thomas handed me something that worked for me.

The conversion command later on this page converts all files in Irssi’s default log location, ~/irclogs, and its subdirectories from ISO-8859-15 to UTF-8.  The conversion is performed on the files themselves using recode in their current location. Don’t run with scissors, please do yourself a favor by making a backup copy of your precious logs. The most obvious tool for that is perhaps:

"cp -r ~/irclogs ~/backup_irclogs"

This is Thomas‘ conversion command:

"find ~/irclogs/* | while read i; do echo "Converting $i"; recode ISO-8859-15..UTF-8 "$i"; done"

Stig later informed me about find having exec capablities, but since I’m lazy and all that, you’ll have to optimze the above version yourself.

I’ve always found Twitter to be a very interesting concept, but I don’t use the service myself. I find its minimalism compelling, but its terrible at representing conversations or replies. Jaiku on the other hand has a few very appealing mobile location centric features.

As with any blogging systems, it’s the content that makes the whole thing worth looking at. Some really entertaining writers are currently using Twitter to post hilarious one-liners – I follow these with RSS like I’d do with any blog, without being a registered user.

I use Facebook’s status feature in an almost Twitter-like fashion, mainly because almost everyone I know already is into Facebook. I’m very disappointed in FB’s walled garden-approach: status messages or replies to these, along with other potentially useful things, like posted links, don’t have obvious unique urls or archive views you can browse back to after some time, and are pretty much not reachable from the outside. It is, however possible to get RSS feeds both of your own and your friend’s status messages.

As my FB status messages really are something I consider a semi-daily writing exercise, I do want them archived. I save my status messages in a WordPress install I set up together with Feedwordpress and Feedburner, but this doesn’t of course save any comments someone may post on FB.

What I’m trying to get at is that microblogging, as a concept, needs to become more mature and standardized, or it will lag behind like instant messaging has done for a decade or so. OpenMicroBlogging and it’s reference implementation, Laconica have the potential to revolutionize public discourse on the internet beyond what’s possible with today’s already interesting services. Proprietary platforms such as Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook have the advantages of large user bases and cell phone connectivity but they really need to use something like OpenMicroBlogging protocol for cross-service communication to become really useful.

This probably means that HP does a lot of business with Linux, and that there really is a real demand for a GPL’d modern file system with features comparable to those of ZFS.

Carlin, who died at the age of 71, was an American author, comedian and actor known for his dislike of taboos and defence of Free Speech.

A recording of his Seven Dirty Words monologue, which after being aired by a radio broadcaster caused a 1978 American Supreme Court ruling establishing that the F.C.C. can regulate what words one (still!) mustn’t use on regulated broadcast media in the US.

This is a good time for anyone who’s unfamiliar with the US broadcast decency requirements to take a look at the silliness that shapes the popular culture we all consume.

[image source]

See also:

Carlin performs The Seven Dirty Words Sketch

Carlin performs a rant on religion

Carlin’s monologue on the “American Dream”

I like writing longer texts, but length leads to a number of problems. Most importantly: the editing process of making a long text readable is a timesink in itself. To make things more difficult, I’m usually blogging in a language I don’t speak natively, which makes it hard to live up to the ideal of posting nothing but well structured divine words of wisdom, unless I choose to give writing indecent amounts of time I’d rather spend procrastinating in a different fashion. Also: no one reads long texts on the web, at least I know I hardly do so.

In other words, by writing only longer texts, fewer individual works get written and I’m giving any readers I might have less useful information. Choosing to focus on longer texts of a certain level of depth causes the the exclusion of stuff that really should be posted somewhere.

I think I’ve now solved this dilemma. No, I didn’t discover Delicious/SU or the for ‘merican Internet celebrity and presidential candidate types so popular combination of Twitter and Tinyurl – the whole point here is to be self hosted, and besides I already use IRC and Facebook for real world contacts.

What I did do was to open a WP site at omglog.com. Beginning with the Prologue based design, it feels like a combination of a microblog and a tumblelog. Keeping omglog.com within the bounds of being a simple diary of notable links is a high priority, as I believe that all the five to eight people who read my posts regularly don’t need another source of lengthy rants written in dysfunctional English.

Hoping to activate a few potential contributors, I chose to include the author’s name in the “permalink structure”, the way URLs look on the blog. To illustrate this: my entries can be reached at omglog.com/thomas. All authors obviously have individual feeds with their own posts; my first use for this was to automatically import my posts as “notes” on Facebook and similar places.

I invite all readers of this to subsribe to the main omglog feed. Anyone I know is also welcome to join omglog.com as a contributor, consider contacting me if you need a place for storing interesting links in mainly English, Finnish and Scandinavian languages. The goal is to be very free-form, all contributors are asked to kindly define “interesting” by themselves, I’m already busy being interested on my own.

If you don’t want to post yourself, feel free to send me links (hello [at] omglog [dot] com).

The IRC gods delivered me this shall we say, updated version of one of those silly (60′s?) easy reading books published by Ladybird.

I was drinking some water when I began reading this and immediately almost drowned myself laughing.

[via:1,2 (dunno where this originates)]

Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party discusses a wiretapping bill called “better adapted military intelligence gathering” that soon may hit hard on the privacy of anyone relying on any electronic communication routed through Sweden. A few quotes from the post:

“At about 20 points in the national information infrastructure network, all traffic is spliced off and fed into the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) agency. These points are placed as to catch all traffic entering and leaving the Swedish borders, but will catch much – if not most – domestic traffic too, for technical routing reasons. Electronic traffic, in particular, always takes the scenic route.”

The insanity of the bill has been widely commented on by authorities:

“How did the bureaucrats respond [to the bill]? In unusually plain language, actually.”

“The Police Board said that the bill “indicates a frightening lack of understanding for the requirements regarding the protection of citizens’ privacy that follow from our Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights”.”

“The National Registry Authority replied that this bill “is compatible with neither the Swedish Constitution nor the European Convention on Human Rights. Such an immense expansion of wiretapping of telephony and other forms of communication cannot be legislated under any circumstance.””

Congratulations, Sweden, you’ve got The AIDS of Right-Wing Government.

[via:Piraattiliitto (In Finnish)]

I hope manbabies.com proves to be too unhealthy for the human mind to become a longstanding mainstream webtard meme. Image borrowed from post #43.

[via:kung fu grippe]

(Image borrowed from Google Blogoscoped)

I quote a part of a translation of the text made by the third commenter on the original post’s page:

“When you’re running a site like TPB you often get tips from different people about what’s happening in those questions of interest to you. Yesterday we got two independent tips from very reliable sources (insiders, as it is called) that the 31 year old man who was convicted to inconditional sentence have got his fines and court costs paid by the copyright lobby – this to get a precedent. In other words, the copyright lobby have more or less bought it.”

The eleventh commenter provides what seems like a reasonable explanation:

“Actually, in Sweden, the verdict of the lower courts (Tingsrätten) is not considered a precedent. Only a few cases from the Supreme Courts (Högsta Domstolen and Regeringsrätten), the Court of Appeal (Hovrätten) and some special purpose courts ( Migrationsöverdomstolen, Miljööverdomstolen, Marknadsdomstolen and Arbetsdomstolen) is considered precedents. This is one of the differences between a Civil Law system (ie. Sweden) and a Common Law system (ie. England and USA).

So, if these accusations are true, then the copyright lobby has rather ensured that this case does NOT become a precedent (which could turn out catastrophically for them, if the appeal had gone against them). However, what they have succeeded in doing is proving that (suspended) prison time is a possible sentencing for file sharing, which is what they need to get search warrants, even though they can’t point to this case in future court cases..”

If this is true, the copyright Mafia hasn’t exactly made a very surprising choice of tactics.