Making the news today: QLD coppers have arrested a journalist - for attending the AusCERT conference and publishing articles about the conference. Hello, WTF?!?

Right now it seems the coppers are backpedalling quite furiously, but they certainly deprived him of his freedom (temporarily) and seized his ipad (not so temporarily).

Well, if I was a letter I'd also feel like being abandoned after having those two parasitic muppets pasted on me.

(for my few colonial readers, Karl Kraus said "In Austria, sending a letter means to abandon it". He was obviously not enamoured with the ÖPTV's services, and used the nuances of German to the limit: "Aufgeben" means both posting a letter and abandoning something (as in: all hope), and "heissen" is good for both expressing "is called" and "has the meaning of"...)

It's a good day in my world when my favourite game, Sturmovik, fully works on Linux under Wine, and better, more reliably and at least as fast as on Windoof.

That also includes the TrackIR, thanks to these guys and their Linux-Track project - which is still a bit rough in places but generally works fine with a variety of hardware (from webcams to TrackIRs).

In addition to the Linux-track stuff you'll also want the Linux-Track WINE plugin which presents Windoof apps with a TrackIR-compatible API. That thing was a pain to get running, and you might want to check out this patch by me to make it work properly with recent Linux-Track revisions.

Apart from those: no real problems after some initial conf.ini tinkering; no more inexplicable stuttering under Windoof, no more dualbooting and smooth performance with graphics options close to the top levels.

From the Faroe Islands to Tahiti and the Tierra del Fuego, there's snafu readers all over the place. Amazing :-)

I've just cooked up a quick visualization setup for my machines' logs (think: let's see where the spammers and scammers and port scanners come from) and couldn't resist running the last 52 weeks of webserver logs for this site through it.

Dim red is few hits, bright yellow is lots of hits. I didn't filter out search engines, so there are definitely some spurious robotic yellow yanks in there.

(But things must be /really/ boring in Coober Pedy...)

Technically it's all very simple; the free (in the beer-sense) GeoIP city database tells me where you fellows are (lat+lon from your ip address), the map comes from NASA's beautiful "Blue Marble" data sets and the glue code is mine.