Are you going to this fair ?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Remember me to one who lives there
he once was a true love of mine.

I have often heard criticism of "negative campaigning" in the free software movement. "Negative" campaigns speak out against proprietary software as opposed to "positive" campaigns which instead speak of the benefits of software freedom. This essays unpacks some of the arguments against negativity and makes the argument that negative campaigns, in some forms, can play an critical and important role in free software advocacy.

Two days ago, gesslein announced his retirement, provisionally at least, from Advogato, saying No one can comment on my posts, and it doesn't seem to be reaching anyone.

This article is written in response to the Question and Answer phase
of the NHS Scotland Open Desktop Initiative.
From the initiative's abstract:

NHSScotland is currently in the process of developing a set of standards to
support the development and building of the NHS Scotland Open Desktop.

read about the sad news that Jeff Fox, Forth advocate, passed away on Chuck Moore's blog.

Spam is really a problem in many Wiki communities, often forcing at least temporary to restrict editing rights. Most of the recent attempts to find a solution focus around captchas and spam lists. Captchas may be efficient to some extent; the problem is that to make them unreadable for bots, they must be twisted enough to become also difficult for humans to read. Lists seem less and less efficient, often accumulating thousands of entries and still leaving enough gaps for spammers. Spammers frequently use the Wiki search box to check if there is already some spam on the site - this shows that Wiki may be purely maintained and they can add more. Hence it may make sense to implement the delayed indexing but it also delays indexing of legitimate content. Blocking IP addresses is also no longer useful due DHCP.

One of the solutions may be to use combined protection rather than relying on some single "killer" approach. The rationale is to make spammer to invest more and more work into building the spam bot. Requiring a complex bot does not make the attack impossible but may statistically eliminate significant percent of spammers that are not willing to invest enough resources.

I came up with this triolet to add my two cents to a Chinese physicist and poet's view on Oxford debate 'Poetry is beautiful but Science is what matters' :

Verse and song gave birth to thee
fearful mechanical and scientific device
Love's but a dance
of verse and song sublime to thee
A whisper, a glance, this little death --
"Shall we twirl down in Elysian Fields ?"
Verse and song gave birth to thee
fearful mechanical and scientific device