This year is very full of abroad: I’m off to Japan for two weeks!

I have to get up very early, take a bus, plane and then a train. It will be worth it, however.

I watched a video of the talk given by President Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, at Columbia university earlier this week.

As one would expect for a talk to an audience of academics by a politician, the talk was full of talk about Science leading the quest for knowledge and civilisation. One interesting point which I was unaware of, however, which makes the talk less pandering is that Ahmadinejad is himself a lecturing scientist, and he stated he was still teaching even whilst being president.

The Software Freedom Law Centre are bringing a case against a manufacturer of multimedia boxes, Monsoon Multimedia, on behalf of the BusyBox developers. Monsoon are distributing BusyBox in their firmware without providing source code, which is required by the GPL v2 license which BusyBox is released under.

This case is significant because it’s the first of its kind, from what I understand. That is, it is the first time a party has been the subject of a law suit for violation of the GPL. This makes it significant because the GPL is one of the corner stones of Free Software and Open Source, but one which has not yet had serious testing in court.

I’ve spent an hour or two today watching fascinating talks on a site I found called TED. I’m not sure what TED stands for, but it is a conference held each year where interesting people speak about their ideas. It is in a similar vein to Edge Magazine, which I mentioned earlier this year.

The TED website hosts many videos of talks given at their conferences over the last few years, from such people as Daniel Dennet, Stephen Pinker and a number of other people who I respect greatly as thinkers. Each week they post new talks to the website, and there is a feed for these talks.

I’ve tried taking pictures of food several times. It is much harder than I imagined, the pictures often making it look like I ate a garish yet limp concoction. So it was to my surprise when, looking back through my iPhoto collection today, I spotted these two. The meat looks succulent and the salad crispy. I’m pleased, they came out surprisingly well.

The food is a simple steak sandwich. Marinade the steak for a few minutes to half an hour in some oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Whilst the steak is marinading, heat up a griddle pan, one of the heavy cast iron ones works a treat. When the pan is very hot, let the steak sizzle for a few minutes a side.