Lately, I’ve only been blogging about what’s going on in my
world. Time to go through the last few days of blog postings that I
found interesting for one reason or another:
- pHatidic writes
about the fact that Wikipedia does work, despite all the
theoretical arguments detailing why it cannot. It’s like the
bumblebee, which by the law of physics cannot fly (well, actually
of
course they can), but since the bumblebees have never taken even
remedial physics, they are blissfully unaware of this fact. - At first, I thought Microsoft was patenting
su. After further examination, it’s not as bad as it
looks. Still, if you subscribe to the newly
granted Microsoft patents RSS feed, you’ll get several examples each week
of why software patentability is not a good idea. - Spamamusment continues
to churn out brilliant
spam-inspired comics. - A new beta of the next-generation
windows shell (Monad) is out. I no longer have MSDN beta access,
but I’m really looking forward to trying this out when it becomes more
widely available. I just hope they focus as much on the accompanying
programs as the core shell technology. If one has do download
Monad-compliant utilities from all over the place, much of the value
of the shell will be lost. I’m looking forward to see how the
functionality of tools like sed and awk could be expressed in a .Net
object environment. - Raymond is shocked to find out that Swedes are mis-using the right
to sick leave. ”Everyone” has known that the sick-leave system is
widely abused, but this is the maybe the first time that the
politicans in charge admit it. But I’m mainly linking to this since
I, like most Swedes, am deeply curious about how this country looks
through the eyes of someone outside of it. - Scoble continues
to act as the Kibo of the
blogosphere. This post is yet another cheap attempt to get mentioned
on his blog. - This story about scientific experiments with swimming in syrup has
been seen everywhere today, but I first read it in jwz’s
livejournal, as usual. - Cedric’s talking about his
experiences after 6+ months of working with JDK 5.0. Interesting
stuff. - Edward W. Felten has an interesting
take on the recent story about online-poker-playing
bots. ”There’s a sucker at every poker table, and if you can’t see
him, it’s probably you”
And some links to interesting swedish blog posts. If you’re not a
swedish speaker, take a page from Raymond
Chen’s book 
- My friend and colleguage Erik has published his report on
the state
of the web security of swedish political parties. It has sparked
some
debate, and Erik has also published a follow-up
article detailing why it’s important to fix security problems,
even if they can’t be exploited right away. - Karl Jonsson writes about
the latest controversy involving swedish bittorent site The Pirate Bay. The TPB guys
come off more immature than ever in their email exchange with
Uppsala Universitet. Those advocating stronger copyright protection
must love TPB, since they provide so many examples of how
irresponsible the filesharing community can behave. - Niklas Lundblad is holding a lecture about information security
and philosophy, and has put up his slides with
comments. Certainly a unique perspective on security, I would have
loved to attend the lectures.