No Such Weblog

When trying to log into Orkut today, I was prompted to link Orkut to my Google account. In practical terms, this means that Google moves even closer to linking search history, e-mail, chat, and social networking information to each other. Reading their privacy policy and FAQ, I'm irritated by not seeing a straight answer about whether or not that linkage is actually done. I'm also irritated by the "this is good for you, so we won't give you a choice about it" attitude of the change.

I'm tempted to delete my Orkut and Gmail accounts.

The takeover of Skype by Ebay is all the hype in the local Luxembourg press -- after all, Skype's corporate umbrella and payment processing sit in Luxembourg. Local press (e.g., the "Wort") boasts about the commitment of the company to the Luxembourg business place. Further down the same contribution, we learn what this commitment really means: 200 people total work for Skype. 12 of these work in Luxembourg. All the development is done in Estonia, and the firm is actually lead from London.

But, of course, all this speaks well of Luxembourg as a place for advanced technology, and makes us expect that Ebay will also be interested in doing more of its future busines from here.

I decided that I, finally, can't avoid learning a bit about JavaScript, and hence got myself a copy of The O'Reilly Book -- this time, JavaScript. The Definitive Guide.. The book -- at 916 pages and 1.3kg, and it's a paperback! -- begins with the words:

JavaScript is a lightweight, interpreted programming language

Makes me long for the times of Kernighan and Ritchie -- 272 pages, and 650g, in the bound version.

Seems like the definition of "lighweight" has changed quite a bit.

In the mail today: The national telephone and Internet directories. The directories are updated annually.

... required a FreeDOS boot in between: I had that Thinkpad R40 sitting in a corner, with Windows XP installation media hidden in that protected IBM recovery partition, and with no particular reason to preserve the Linux installation that sits on that machine. So I decided to push the blue "Access IBM" button and tell the machine to re-install itself to factory settings.

Interestingly, that left me with a system that still had remains of GRUB sitting in its MBR, and wouldn't boot. Amazingly, the IBM startup menu seems to offer no way to do a simple FDISK /MBR. (It also doesn't seem to offer the option to erase any existing data partitions -- such as my Linux installation.) I ended up typing that command into a FreeDOS command line interpreter; after that, Windows would boot like a charm.

Yes, the recovery mechanism is nice. But it wouldn't have been very useful in, say, a hotel room without Internet connectivity and another machine to burn that boot CD.