Interesting story from the BBC:

Businessman wins e-mail spam caseA businessman has won what is believed to be the first victory of its kind by claiming damages from a company which sent him e-mail spam.

Nigel Roberts, who lives in Alderney in the Channel Islands, took action against Media Logistics UK over junk e-mails in his personal account.

Under new European laws, companies can be sued for sending unwanted e-mails.

The Stirlingshire-based firm has agreed to pay £270 compensation to Mr Roberts, who runs an internet business.

‘Tiny victory’

Three years ago the EU passed an anti-spam law, the directive on privacy and telecommunications, which gave individuals the right to fight the growing tide of unwanted e-mail by allowing them to claim damages.

Mr Roberts received unwanted e-mail adverts for a contract car firm and a fax broadcasting business and decided to take action against the company.

The company filed an acknowledgement of the claim at Colchester County Court but did not defend it and a judge ruled in favour of Mr Roberts.

In an out-of-court agreement Media Logistics agreed to pay Mr Roberts damages of £270 plus his £30 filing fee.

Mr Roberts said he had limited his claim to a maximum of £300 in order to qualify to file it as a small claim.

He said: “This may be a tiny victory but perhaps now spammers will begin to realise that people don’t have to put up with their e-mail inboxes being filled with unwanted junk.”

No-one from Media Logistics UK was available for comment.

A spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s Office, the watchdog who oversees the Data Protection Act, said it was the first case of its kind he had heard of.

He said: “What I can say is that I haven’t heard of anyone doing so and we haven’t taken a case under that legislation.”

• Office Weblog: Meme of the day: Outlook 12 and RSS
• OH MY GOD…! – Trent End Talk on Boxing Day’s game: Forest 4 Donny 0!
• Festivus has been mentioned to me a few times over the last few days…
• Terminated – “early yesterday the piqued Austrian city of Graz removed the words “Arnold
  Schwarzenegger” from the city’s football stadium”. Hehe.

God, I am a sad git doing this today. Still, here goes:

• Martin Rowson retells Tristam Shandy in the Guardian
• The Google blog post about the AOL deal
• …and the Guardian‘s view of the deal

That’s it. Have a good Christmas.

A poem from today’s Guardian Review by Rowan Williams:

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

WordPress and the Performancing Extension is a great tutorial for setting up Performancing to work with a custom WordPress install.

Currently my only real gripe is with the insertion of images, where to add an ‘alt’ tag one has to go into the raw HTML editor to add them in.

Have finally got round to installing the Performancing extension to FireFox, and it works a treat! Here’s a snapshot of me using it to write this post. It even drags in your categories and previous entries for you! I did at first find it a little irritating that the editor appears on every tab in your FireFox window, and not just the one you are commenting on, but it is simple enough to drag the editor down to a smaller size.

greasemonkey is another extension, one that allows you to add all sorts of scripts to make life easier. I’m sure most people are well aware of it already. However, the script I really wanted, the inline wikipedia viewer, doesn’t seem to work and just sticks on the loading messages. The page on the UserScripts site says it is broken too. Anyone have any ideas?

Due to a total cock-up on the theme for this blog, I have had to revert it back to the original Beeblebrox one.

Will have my changes back in place sometime tomorrow, hopefully!

• Google Modules – add functionality to your personalised Google home page
• Steve Rubel writes about the Performancing FireFox extension – which from “any page in your browser, just right click and special blog publishing frame opens. Fill it out, add your categories and post.”
• Internet cafe bans baseball caps
• Meebo: Instant Messenging through a browser. Cool.

From BBC News:

A Japanese man has died after being tackled by fellow train passengers who believed he had molested a woman during the morning rush hour.
The man fled the train at a station in the city of Osaka after a 20-year-old student accused him of groping her.

The 40-year-old was brought to the ground by four male passengers, who included at least one off-duty police officer. He died later in hospital.

Women-only carriages run on some trains in Japan because of groping complaints.

The college student accused the man of groping her on Tuesday, shortly after the train they were travelling in stopped at JR Tennoji Station in Osaka, Mainichi newspaper reported.

He ran away but was chased by four other passengers, who tackled him on the platform. “We are looking into the cause of death and details about how he was overpowered by the passengers,” a police spokesman told the French news agency AFP.

Despite the introduction of penalties and women-only carriages, Tokyo police reported more than 2,000 groping incidents on the city’s trains last year.

Delightful!

Exciting (well, for the likes of me it is…) announcent on the WordPress development blog:

The next release of WordPress is drawing near. Please help us shake out any last remaining bugs by downloading and testing the 2.0 Release Candidate. If all goes well, the Release Candidate will become 2.0 final. We’re almost there. Download, test, and head over to the Beta Forum to let us know if the Release Candidate is ready for prime time.

I installed it as a new blog just to have a look around, and it is pretty good. The main change really is a nice wysiwyg editor for posting:

I’ll certainly be upgrading as soon as the final version is released!