captsolo weblog

Eng: These are in Russian, not subject to translation. If you know cool jokes in English, welcome to add those in comments.

#1:

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#2:

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Update - April 25, 2007 - IPRED2 Slips Through, Fight to Continue [eff.org]

The European Parliament has just voted to pass the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED2) without substantive amendment, despite growing public opposition from across the European Union. The final vote of 374 to 278 with 17 abstentions points to a margin of Parliamentary support that has been narrowing ever since the Directive left subcommittee.

Take Action Now: Tell Your MEP to Amend IPRED2

A coalition of groups representing librarians, consumers' and innovators have come together to support of a series of amendments that would fix the worst parts of the proposed Directive on Criminal Measures aimed at ensuring the enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRED2).

If you live in the EU, contact your MEPs and ask them to support these amendments at the plenary vote in European Parliament on April 25, 2007.

http://www.copycrime.eu/action - go there to sign a petition and see what else you can do. Contact your MEP (Members of European Parliament) before April 25, 2007 and tell to support the series of amendments by the Librarians', Consumers' and Innovators' Coalition, or reject IPRED2 entirely if its flaws are not fixed!

Lat: Spriežot pēc tā, ka starp visiem šo petīciju parakstījušajiem ir tikai 3 cilvēki no Latvijas, nevienu šeit tas īpaši neuztrauc. Ja tas tā nav, tad ir laiks kautko darīt. Tiesa, ar petīciju vien nekas nebūs panākts. Rakstiet vai zvaniet un izsakiet savu nostāju Latvijas pārstāvjiem EP.

Context: Situation with a tap water in Galway is a mess - there is some bug (Cryptosporidium) in the water that makes people sick. Only solution the authorities offer is - "boil the water" - and it's unclear how long it will last. People in Ennis have had a similar problem for a while and "water boiling notice" is in effect there since 2004.

Not everyone is happy with this situation and there's a protest organised at 6pm today:

There will be a protest outside City Hall (College Road) at 6pm about the water crisis in Galway. If you are affected by the water contamination in Galway I would urge you to go. The Irish government and the Galway people have been very complacent about the water problem, but if you are annoyed at the reaction (or lack thereof) of the Irish government then please come along to the protest today. (If you can bring empty water bottles!!) The protest is organized by the ordinary citizens of Galway.

Just a quick list of things the government hasnt done:
- No information leaflets given out to the people of Galway telling them that the water is contaminated and how to get rid of the parasite (apparently you are meant to boil your water for a full minute)
- No VAT free water (we really shouldn't be paying VAT on water)
- No tankers of free water into the city

This is a human health hazard which should be taken very seriously

For more information see Galway Water Crisis website [at myspace.com]. Apologies for a short notice, found this information just now (also note that TZ of this blog is 2 hours ahead of Irish time, so there's still almost 3 hours until the event). Thanks to Cathal for sending information about the event.

Also related: Galway Wants Water.
[ John, thanks for the info. ]

We are going up to BarCamp Ireland 3 in Dublin tomorrow. Looking forward to see interesting presentations and meet people active in startups, technology and social media.

But that brings up a question - where to stay? If traveling from Galway to Dublin for an event like this it makes sense to stay overnight in Dublin. But all the places are either booked out or insanely priced (for student budget at least).

This reminds me about a very cool project - "Can I Crash?".

Quote: ... is a project of toothless tiger initiated by Henriette Weber Andersen - who basically is a young female who is tired of busting her entrepreneurial budget when there is things ( dinners, conferences, vacations) in other countries ( or cities) she wants to attend.

So this young female is thinking that if she opens her house to fellow bloggers ( after following the guidelines) when they are looking for a place to stay in Copenhagen or Denmark - maybe some other bloggers will open their house to her ( or other bloggers again) in other countries - that's the idea. This is how we are going to try out if it works in practice.

A quick look of the site shows that fellow bloggers may help you out if you are going to San Francisco and other places in the US. Europe is much less represented, e.g., in France it's only Lyon and in Ireland - in Limerick and Wicklow. Dublin's not on the list, though.

Can someone in Dublin offer a place to stay overnight this Saturday night? Actually, this post probably came to be too late to help us but this initiative is good to spread a word about anyway. We should put Galway on its list, too. What do you think?

Update: Now Joost invitations are widely available and you should not have a problem to get one. Requests in comments are growing too fast and I can't keep up w. them, therefore commenting is disabled now.

I'll try to send invitations to those who asked. Visit the front page (or follow the RSS feed) for more hot and interesting stuff.

Joost - TV, the way you want it

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

Thanks to Libby Miller for sending the invitation in the first place.

Keep in mind that this is a part of beta-testing - please report any suggestions and bugs found. And while there are quite a few TV channels available now this list will probably get larger when Joost is out of beta and becomes available for everyone.

Update: Me and Liga (Marketing Garden) sent all the invites we had, so we are out of them now.

Update2: If you have Joost invitations to spare - there are more people in the comments to this post who would be happy to get an invitation.

Twitter Toolbox is a new Firefox and Flock browser extension I just wrote that "lives" in browser's sidebar and will show you:

• Fr[iends] - Vi[ewers] = you are following them, but they don't see you;
• Fr[iends] & Vi[ewers] = you both follow each other and can talk via Twitter @replies
• Vi[ewers] - Fr[iends] = they've added you as a friends, you have not [yet].

Download / Install Twitter Toolbox

"Viewers" is another name for Followers and allows to abbreviate these terms. "Fr - Fo" or "F - F" looks more confusing to me.

Important: this tool does not duplicate a simple friends or followers list. Many tools already do that, as does Twitter's home page.

Instead - Twitter Toolbox shows what's different and what's common to these two lists. See a quote below for a use case. If you know how to explain this in 140 chars or less, please tell me.

Twitter: let me see a differential list of those I follow and those who follow me, both ways.

I need to know who is following me that I’m not following (maybe I missed somebody out) and who I’m following but they’re not (to keep in mind they won’t see stuff I twitter).

-- Stephanie Booth in "Geeky Frustrations"

Instructions:

Activate it via a menu "View -> Sidebar -> Twitter Toolbox" or via a keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-T (Cmd-Shift-T). Once you see the list, click any of the names to display their Twitter page in a new tab.

First time the sidebar panel is opened Firefox may ask for your Twitter username and password. This information is managed by Firefox.

There's one thing that would be nice if Twitter added - a way to tell who in the list of last updates on your Twitter homepage is following you and who is not. Sure, you can use Twitter Toolbox to look it up, but I'd like to see it instantly if it makes sense to @reply to a person or not.

P.S. This is an early development, it does the job and that's it. Plus I tried to make user lists look good.

Please leave suggestions and bug reports in comments to this post.

Technorati Tags: firefox | flock | twitter | xul

Have you also noticed "cyclic" referers in the stats of your blog? When the current page URL is also the referer? In other words: someone is visiting a blog page and then follows a link leading to the same page.

That is what I notice in referer logs, and there's quite many of them. You may not always notice this even if this takes place - a blog engine may hide referers coming from the same site.

Why would someone do that? What does she want to see by following the same link? If you happen to follow a link from a blog page to the same page again, please leave a comment and tell how to improve the user experience.

P.S. Another possibility - this happens when someone comments on a blog post. No reason why it should be so, but still there's a slim possibility.

Best Easter wishes to everyone!

on deviantArt: larger photo + more notes

This is a nice example of how nature + some work can yield beautiful Easter eggs and nice photos.

No paints or brushes are used in this traditional process of egg "painting". It's all down to wrapping an egg in natural things - leaves, flowers, onion peels - and then boiling them in water with more onion peels. Even the bright orange color was achieved this way. And you never fully know what you're gonna get - every egg is unique.

This is a crop of a larger photo. I saw a Flickr group once where you can post a photo and people try different ways to crop it. Can't find it any more - there're too many groups. Can anyone remind what is this group called?

Like the eyes in this shot. Maybe crop more and leave just the eyes?

Recently I did some changes to improve your experience when visiting this site.

First of them was getting rid of comment spam. Now the site is reasonably spam-free and it is safe to subscribe to comments feeds and have a more dynamic way to follow conversations:

- comments in RSS - comments in Atom

You may have been wondering why the number of post comments in a recent posts list was often much higher than the number of comments a post has. No, I was not inflating it to make those posts more interesting. That number also included a number of comments rejected by the spam filter. Fixed - now shows only a number of published comments.

That's all for the comments.

Power-user's tip: subscribe to a category-specific posts feed.

First you need to find out the category id (see below). Go to any invidual post page on the blog and find a list of categories in the right-hand sidebar (it's hidden on the front page, for simplicity). Look at the category link URL and find the category number at the end of it: "?cat=number".

Once found, add it to the URL of the main posts feed. E.g. Semantic Web is category #3 and its feed URL is: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=3

There are some more interesting things you can do with per-category feeds:

- Combine multiple categories together = "Social Software" + "Semantic Web" would be: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=3,82

- Aggregate sub-categories (automatically done by b2evolution). A category feed will contain posts that appear in the main category or in any of its sub-categories. E.g., a feed for "My Folder" also contains "Art", "Presentations", ...: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=41

This is quite powerful (and been in b2evolution for years). Main downside is that you can't easily guess that these feeds are available or find out what category identifiers to use. That's where we would benefit from a structured category hierarchy made available in RDF using SKOS (and integrated into the SIOC profile of the blog).

Can anyone tell what has happened to this book? Information about it was widely available, it was supposed to be published this year, yet its page has simply disappeared from Amazon.com.

Pro Firefox Extension and Application Development, by Kurt Cagle and Mark David Peterson, "is the first book to show how to extend Firefox's capabilities using JavaScript, the eXtensible User-Interface Language, XForms, CSS, XUL, and XBL.", according to amazon's Editorial Review. Kurt Cagle, "is an author and developer specializing in XML-based technologies". The 600-page book will be available on February 26, 2007.

via: http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2006/09/upcoming-mozilla-books/

Does anyone know what's the fate of this book and if it is published? It sounds like an interesting book and it'd make me sad if it has just vanished in plain sight.