Decided to register for facebook today to see what it's all about. Did not get off to a good start as it would not accept my name as "legitimate". Ended up registering as "John Smith".

Entertaining. Wake up people. Lots of people have lots of different names. Blacklisting on words does not make sense.

I've just been engaged in an enormous rant about the Access Grid. This is video conferencing software that I've been using for over 5 years now. It's dreadful. I live for the day that we can dump it, especially now that skype and teamspeak have outdated it. We shall see...

Google calendar — or rather google mail — seems to have broken for me. Instead of giving me an "add to calendar" button when an event comes in, it blithely tells me "sign up for calendar". Well, I already am! And events gets shown randomly translated into a US timezone.

This is really, really bad! I've come to rely on an electronic calendar, and without it I am in real trouble.

Noticed today that azureus, also called zudeo has now become Vuze. I noticed this because a new version has appeared. After an hour or so, I worked out how to switch of the silly interface.

One of the ironies of the situation is that the BBC content is currently not available in the UK, just in the US. Strange. I could have sworn that I paid for this stuff first time around.

I was a little bit saddened to find the kerfuffle over an encryption key for HD-DVD being reported as a 21st Century Rebellion.

Don't get me wrong, here, I find the idea that industry should have the right to control how we watch films distasteful; I think it will limit what we can do with the digital content that we choose to buy; I think that it will result in horrible user interfaces, with limited choices; I think it will result in far more control being placed in the hands of a few people than is healthy.

But in the past, rebellion meant slaves struggling for the freedom, workers struggling for the profit of their own work, minorities struggling for civil liberties. It's a bit sad when this it becomes posting a number on a website like digg.com. Lets face it, if anyone gets sued, it will be the admins of digg, not the people posting. This is hardly standing up to be counted, now is it?

At least some of my chums had the guts to put it up on their own websites. Still not exactly Tom Paine but at least it's a start.