An optical illusion worth playing with

In this image. The squares marked A and B do indeed have the same RBG values. My trusty Paintshop Pro reports RGB = (107,107,107).
A good way to see that you are not crazy is to cut away bits of the image bit by bit until you are just left with a vertical band running from A to B. As you strip stuff away, you will see that your brain registers B as darker and darker. By the time all remenants of the gray square south of A and North of B is gone, B will have faded (untouched!) in your brain to the same shade as A. Amazing.

Proposed SPAM legislation in Ireland

The Fine Gael party has a proposal on SPAM. Its great to see legislators taking this probem seriously but forcing the intermediaries like the ISPs to filter it is *not* the way to do it.
Lawrence Lessig's ideas on this subject deserve close examination in my opinion.
On a geek note, I'm worried that putting such smarts into the arteries of the internet are deeply at odds with the edge principle so beautifully illustrated to date by the Internet.

Calls returning documents

Bill de hOra on how to build things that don't break when stuff changes. Or, put another way, how to build anything at all really.

And now for something, completely different

Cleese - an OS in Python. Some names I recognise - James Tauber, Gavin Nichol. Interesting.

Putters, programs and prarie dogs

An ITWorld article on the subject of optimization (sort of).

There is something odd about the concept of an EAI 'adapter'

The integration adapter game. An ITWorld article.

More link knowledge for blogs?

Lots of blogs have web-traffic monitors such as those provided by stats.blogger.com.
These stats are normally private to the blog owner.
What if users made their stats public the same way they make their RSS public?
Wouldn't the information therein add an extra dimension to blog searching?
Let me see, each item would be a link into the blog with a date and a description being the referer that got you there.
A collection of items that have dates, titles and descriptions...where have I come across that before?

What does a CTO do?

Following on from the last post, it has also come to my attention that this blog is the number one hit on ask.com for the phrase what does a CTO do.

Spitting in the eye of logical positivism

It has come to my attention that this blog is the number 1 Google hit for the phrase There is no such thing as truth. Bizarre.

Shining a light on open source in government

governmentforge.org looks interesting. Watch that space.
<Quibble>the P in "LAMP" does not stand for "PHP".</Quibble>