Disabled comments for unregistered users

Grr, well it appears that spammers were leaving spam comments on here as anonymous users so I’ve now disabled that ability for non-registered users. Apologies to everyone, you must now register to leave comments. Blame those scummy spammers for this. 🙁

This highlights the only thing I’m missing from PostNuke, and that’s the ability to have a box that shows the latest comments, the only reason I spotted these was trawling through the MySQL database backend on a whim to see what (if any) comments had been left recently.

Microsoft up to its old tricks – checks for Wine and fails if it finds it

It appears that Microsoft is up to its old tricks again, this time checking for Wine, the open source implementation of the Win32 API, and failing under certain conditions.

It’s not even like they pretend that this is a check for pirate software, they specifically look for the registry key:


SOFTWARE\Wine\Wine\Config

which only Wine has, it doesn’t exist in MS Windows at all!

Patent Stupidity – "Help" Icon Patent (1998) Used to Kill Japanese Word Processor

ComputerWorld NZ has a story about how a Japanese company has been forced to withdraw its word processor (the only significant rival to MS Word in Japan) from the market because another company holds patent number JP,2803236,B granted in 1998 for the “Help” icon.

To see the patent in question, go to the Japanese Patent & Utility Model Gazette DB and enter a "kind code" of B and a number of 2803236.

I’ve taken the liberty of extracting the English translation from their database for easy reference, read on for it.
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Gentoo Linux

Andrew Cowie has written an interesting article about Gentoo Linux over at Linux Journal.

Now, I too have a confession to make. Ladies and Gentlemen, I use Gentoo. Thank you.

Actually, that’s not the complete truth, I currently use Gentoo (my workstation at work), Mandrake (my workstation at home, at least until I get some time to upgrade it to Gentoo), Redhat 7.3 and Fedora Core 3 (the clusters at work) and soon, SuSE (the latest cluster due to arrive shortly). I’ve also played with Ubuntu which was pretty nice, but they’re a GNOME based distribution and I’m a die-hard KDE user.

They’re all good for various tasks, and I’ve found that for what *I* want, which is to have the latest KDE, the minimum of cruft and a large selection of packages, it is the best. Oh, and there are no new releases as there are with distros like Redhat, Mandrake, etc, you do rolling updates in the same way as Debian.