Reading about plans to create private email by various companies to combat so-called phishing scams has piqued my interest: surely there must be a better way to do this than to have an email account for each service that you use? Especially if you have to visit a website to read this email; it’s as if we had to go to the local bank to collect our mail from it!

I have a feeling that the girl who lives in the room below me uses her music as an alarm clock; it seems to come on at nine o’clock each morning. I may have to go downstairs to request that she turns it down a little — so it stops also being my alarm clock.

I knocked out a quick Bluefunk webpage: http://bluefunk.sf.net. It’s quite nice, though the background blue colour is a little funky.

The main problem that is preventing a 0.1 release is that the Gst-sharp bindings as of current SVN appear to be broken and not compiling. This is rather a major problem for a music player. It might be something to do with gtk-sharp 1.9.1 as the compilation dies with a GLib bindings error. The bindings appear not to have been updated for a while, at least on the tree I’m pulling from.

I’ve been playing with GNU Autotools tonight; the stuff that makes it easy to compile software by allowing you to follow the./configure, make, make install routine.

Playing is perhaps not the right word. Struggling would be a better one. The tools are not exactly what one would call intuitive. They do some very clever stuff, however, so the difficulty in using them can be forgiven. I have a feeling that once you’ve done a couple of programs, whilst you won’t understand what is going on, you at least know how to get the thing working without too much trouble.

No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist.

— Bill Gates via C|Net.

Communists?! Since when have communists had anything to do with IP? Does Bill really have much idea what he is saying here?