Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Friday, September 23, 2005

# Standing up for open formats : Tim Bray has posted notes from a recent meeting in Massachusetts where government and industry people discussed the state's recent decision to standardize on the Open Document Format. There is a lot of interesting reading here. A few things that I particularly liked:

Eric Kriss (Secretary for Administration and Finance for the state of MA), made the following statement in his opening comments:

The business that the state conducts lies in the public domain... electronic forms must not be restricted by proprietary impediments

Here's another good part, where Microsoft's representative makes his position clear, and is quickly rebuffed by the state:

MSFT: This appears to be an assault on the intellectual property of the private sector.

Kriss: Sovereignty trumps intellectual property. Companies certainly have the right to own their own intellectual property. We're all for IP in implementations, just not in interchange formats.

In other words, you can have your intellectual property, but you can't force us to use it.

Note: The quotes above are from Tim Bray's note, and are probably not verbatim.

Ed Bilodeau

Friday, September 23, 2005

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