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And, earlier there was ESR’s attempt to build community spirit by providing us mere mortals with a logo. I’m wary of people suggesting we all should rejoyce behind a logo or a slogan. Maybe that suspicion is part of the history and the suffering in the last years, century: or maybe it’s just because the right education makes you question these actions: Alfons sums it up perfectly:

   Be sceptic. Don’t allow people to put a label on you, or even suggest you might need it. Look suspicious when someone claims “It’s my job to think of these things”.

I still respect ESR for the things he has done for programmers generally speaking. But for some kind of reason, I think he’s going in the same direction as the other guy. If you’re a programmer you use your brains. If you want to build a community, go start helping in your neighbourhood.

The world officially came to its end when I heard the first tunes of Big Mouth strikes again, the Smiths’ most remarkable song. Well, one of their remarkable songs. All their songs have something so cynical and surreal that nobody actually knows what the songs are about. In case of Big Mouth, I always thought the song had to do with loudmouthed people whose loudmouthed rants end on pile of burning wood.

   “Now I Know how Joan of Arc felt, As the Flames rose to her Roman nose and her Walkman started to melt.”

Who knows what this song is about. Like every mere mortal, I’m entitled to have my own personal interpretation.

Everytime a Windows ‘virus’ breaks out I have to laugh. And guess what: the latest variant of Melissa urges you to open that attachment once again but this time with more funny subject lines like ‘I am not a virus!‘.

‘Virus’ writers should start contests in writing the best ‘subject line to urge users to click that attachment’. Imagine a ‘virus’ writer with a ‘writer’s block’. Luckily there are plenty of resources to deal with a writer’s block:

   “Cluster – Choose key words and ideas; then write associated ideas and words in clusters around them. This process often forms new ideas.”

Or in case of our beloved ‘virus’ writers: go get a life and try do something more original. If you want to be a real programmer, you should join an Open Source project.

Just when I was planning to start off a rant about searchengines and bots, an article (item?) from one of the Gillmor brothers caught my eye. He noticed the extraordinary number of directories that have been excluded for searchbots: most of the directories have something to do with Iraq.

   “Perhaps the White House doesn’t want to make it easy for people to compare its older statements about Iraq with current realities — though that doesn’t explain why the pages are searchable on the White House site itself. Maybe, then, the White House wants to know who’s looking for these things (e.g. by tracking IP addresses of people who query the government site).”

Naturally, his comments aren’t really appreciated by all of the readers. Should technologists stay far away from making these remarks, I wonder?

The first topic I read today was about Open Source. Over at Cleverhack two good links and discussions about Open Source and Microsoft. Lindows CEO’s take on Microsoft. Wall Street Journal’s.

Also, Slashdot links to a perfect article describing the workings of Open Source.

Google apparantly has silently introduced a new feature for their search engine: search through glossaries for words and definitions of those words. Apparently you start this kind of search by adding the ‘define’ keyword to the searchterms (like in ‘define Google‘).

This was a feature that was (and is) normally around here (Labs at Google). That page links to a newsgroup where this feature can be discussed, however, there is hardly any traffic there.

(via BlogsCanada)