Thoughts on FLOSS Weekly Episode 91: Boycott Novell

Last week I listened to the most recent episode of the TWiT podcast, FLOSS Weekly and their guest was the current person behind the Boycott Novell group Roy Schestowitz. Now beyond the name I have no real idea what the purpose of the site is and during the interview, Roy's responses made it seem like it was just "Microsoft is evil." with plenty of talk about him being personally insulted and slandered. At no point did he come out and say, "This is what our issues are: A, B, C. And this is what we want to happen: A, B, C."

Jono's focus on the issue of spammers being something that Roy should be dealing with all the time confused me and detracted from the interview. Really all Roy should have to do is have a disclaimer page and when he finds out a community is being infested by one of these spammers then he can contact those that run it and ask them to publicise the disclaimer that these people are not to be listened to. However it seems that

I spent the next couple of days browsing the site and sitting in the chat room. Within a couple of hours of loggin in Jono appears to this welcome.

twitter	Hi, jono.
twitter	I saw where you called me a spammer.
twitter	Fuck you.

http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/irc-log-19102009.html

When Roy came on an hour and a half later there was no rebuke but instead complaints about people pretending to be him and general apologistic I can't control what other people do stuff. He should have kicked him and told him off, even better would be an apology but not required.

So from someone who started off as pretty apathatic to the BoycottNovell idea I've moved to they're a bunch of muppets point of view due to their actions as a community.

Earthquakes

Well that was cool. I'm sitting at my computer looking at some stuff and feel this tiny ground tremor. I thought it was a small earthquake until three secs later when we got a good jolt. Always fun, earthquakes. Especially the thought of "THE GROUND SHOULD NOT DO THAT!" turns out it was a 4.8 only about 20km NW of us.

http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/quakes/3165869g-shaking.html

So that's what happend to the Macroers

Another DevBlog from CCP came out today and it answers one of the biggest questions I've been hearing recently. What happend to the macroers? A little back story for those that don't know. A couple of months ago the systems that were infested with macroers suddenly emptied and no atter the number of threads and questions aimed at CCP no answer was forthcoming. Which lead to much guessing. Eventually the consensus seemed to land on they were banned. Now we know for sure. On June 22nd during DT CCP banned 6200 accounts of RMT's and their macroers. There are some interesting graphs in the DevBlog covering both an example system Ingunn and the server load.

It's nice to see that CCP is willing to take on this issue even when it means they're going to be seeing less income.

I Can Has Flu Vaccine?

Well today I let myself be fooled by big pharma and government and got the Flu vaccine for this year. It's the first time I've got a Flu vaccine and to be honest it was less work than even doing a blood donation. The needle was smaller that's for certain.

Now I know that it isn't going to protect me from Swine Flu which to be honest no one was expecting so how could they have made a vaccine for it. But it will protect me from the expected three major flu strains expected for this year. Also the NZ government had made this year's Flu vaccine free to everyone as opposed to the at risk groups.

Big Media Getting Tech Right for Once

I was just browsing through the New Zealand Herald's website and on the front page at the top is a link to a story, with a big picture, about web browsers. Not only that but they actually included Opera as well as the usual four suspects. The story contained a fair look at each browser and got everything factually correct as far as I could tell. So tie this up with some terminology the less tech savvy of us could understand and props to the New Zealand Herald for doing a decent tech article.