Not above the law

Uncivil Servants helps ordinary citizens highlight the abuse of parking permits in New York.

Yell shares plunge as US phone book earnings drop

Software wars

More fun from Wikiality (via Wikia). (copyright & kudos to: Steven Hilton)

Identity 1.0

Who needs biometrics?

Perl Poetry

EGOogling Batan City I stumbled upon Sebastian Mary’s friends at the Future of the Book where just above a nice blog post about Batan City and other literary experiments I found the winner of the The Perl Poetry Contest 2000 by Angie Winterbottom:

if ((light eq dark) && (dark eq light)
&& ($blaze_of_night{moon} == black_hole)
&& ($ravens_wing{bright} == $tin{bright})){
my $love = $you = $sin{darkness} + 1;
};

It’s derived from a verse from the Pandora’s Box album ‘Original Sin’:

If light were dark and dark were light
The moon a black hole in the blaze of night
A raven’s wing as bright as tin
Then you, my love, would be darker than sin.

It made me want to learn Perl. Got a book about it somewhere… also must go back and read more about Future of the Book.

Sebasian Mary Harrington always seems to know such interesting people and do such interesting things.

The French have a word for it:

Doing some thinking about the School of Everything…

This led me to: Trampoline Systems. Who’s founder Charles Armstrong was presenting at the same CityZone event as me last year.

I also took a look at the WYSIWYG interface for MediaWiki being shown off at Wikia.

…a number of random links and clicks led me to this French site about education. Which made me laugh.

Wiki Wednesday

Last night was Wiki Wednesday in London.

Organised by the charming David Terrar and hosted in the Swimming Pool at Microsoft’s Soho office (that is the part of London, not Bill Gate’s den).

The ?What If!lers Julie and Anne-Fay and her partner Darrell were there – Anne-Fay and Darrell write a blog called BigShinyThing – it is so perfectly Zeitgeisty that I realise why I don’t really read newspapers or watch much TV anymore.  

But they also make me feel quite depressed about my own erratic blogging efforts. (N.B. my highlight of a funny TagCloud juxtaposition)

Why open source

Was just reading the OpenGeoData blog and found this:

They have a link to an interview with Linus Torvalds (the guy who started linux) where he says:

“Me, I just don’t care about proprietary software. It’s not “evil” or “immoral,” it just doesn’t matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it’s not a crusade — it’s just a superior way of working together and generating code.”

The OGD blogger reworks Torvald’s words:

“Me, I just don’t care about the Ordnance Survey. It’s not “evil” or “immoral,” it just doesn’t matter. I think that Open Maps can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Maps, but it’s not a crusade — it’s just a superior way of working together and generating maps.”

I would like to do the same:

“Me, I just don’t care about the Yellow Pages or Yell. Thet are not “evil” or “immoral,” it just doesn’t matter. I think that Yellowikis can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Yellowikis, but it’s not a crusade — it’s just a superior way of working together and generating business listings.”