salmoni - I think the biggest intersection between software and content is in the area of DRM - and there have been some interesting developments in the last 24 hours (Steve Jobs calling on record companies to remove "anti-piracy" measures, including DRM, from their music - otherwise, iTunes will be banned in Norway, because Apple's DRM prevents iTunes songs being used on anything but an iPod). Not sure that I want to write an article on it yet, because there are people more qualified than myself who could do so.

I find you lack of free content disturbing

Advogato is "the free software developer's advocate". I'm not a free software developer, but I'm a free content producer. Are these two things compatible? I'd really like to know why "free software" people aren't always "free content" people too! Why is it that most of the photos on Flickr or personal websites that are linked from Advogato are not under free licenses? Am I missing something here? Please, help me out. Free software and free content are supposed to be about the same thing, aren't they?

boto : Google does fun things with cookies and algorithms.

1. Person types "mandrake linux"
2. Person remembers the name change and types "mandriva linux"
3. Google's algorithms go through all your search results (yes, that's what the cookie is for - lets them associate searches with "the same person") and decides that "mandrake", "mandriva" and "linux" are connected (but it knows enough about "linux" to know they're not the same)
4. Down the track, someone will type "mandrake linux" and be asked "perhaps you want 'mandriva' instead"
5. Person clicks "mandriva", Google associates "mandrake linux" with "mandriva"

Same way a person learns, really. However, it's still a good idea to delete your Google cookie(s) every once in a while...

Job

I got a job for the summer, working on a DLX simulator and toolset written in Java. Should be fun...

Wikimedia Foundation fundraising drive

Yes, it's happening again. If you're a fan of Wikipedia (the big fat instant-reference to everything), or Wikimedia Commons (1 million Free media and counting), or any of the other projects, you can donate to help pay for hardware, hosting costs and bandwidth - depending on where you live, your donation may also be tax deductable. Here's how much money they've raised so far:

You can give the gift of knowledge today! Or if you're strapped for cash, you can just hop over and contribute...

WikiWomenWhatNot

In response to hypatia's recent post: Unlike other lists/groups ("Apache Women...This list is open to anyone", "Debian Women...We welcome the involvement of all people", GNOME Women's position is slightly verbose, Fedora Women don't say), WikiChix is female-only. Of course, suggestions on how to improve the ratio of female contributors on Wikipedia are welcome from anyone, but posting them to a closed list with limited membership probably isn't the most constructive way of going about things.

{K|X}Ubuntu

With any luck, I'll have a shiny (burnt? does that make it still shiny?) new 6.10 LiveCD or two kicking around the place in the next 24 hours; maybe I'll also be able to sort out my partitioning mess. I somehow (stupid SUSE 10.1) managed to put about 2MB of "free" space between hda1 (Redmond) and hda2 (swap or something); possibly there's some Thinkpad stuff in it. Why in the next 24 hours and not, say, 15 minutes? Because my fat pipe is about 20km away, and they don't open for another 9 hours.

GPG troubles

So, after upgrading to the "official" build of GPG 1.4.6 for Redmond (instead of my own, old, homebrewed version), I go to see if I can get the keyserver handlers to work with my proxy, which uses bog-standard Basic authentication (well, I think it does; telnet wouldn't lie to me, would it?); and behold, I can't make the stupid thing work. Help in the form of an email pointing me to some sort of lightweight non-caching transparent proxy (I know that GPG works with non-authenticating Squid, I've done it, but Squid is too troublesome) or other fix would be appreciated; contact details are in my profile.