No geek
is an island

Eve Myles, who played Gwyneth in The Unquiet Dead, seems to have been cast as Gwen, the female lead in Doctor Who spin-off series Torchwood. The story briefly appeared at the BBC site, but the whole thing is on Torchwood.TV.

Update: The story is now on the BBC News site.

Still off work. Woke up spluttering after a half-hour nap so fired up LibDem Blogs in my phone and found an interesting post on Tristan’s blog pointing to this article from The Times:

I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

The whole article is worth a read. Trading Standards (or this particular officer at least) have an interesting take on free software:

“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”

The same argument could be applied to paid-for software. Make it all open source and freely distributable and the advice would be much easier.

The first thing I noticed about this article, though, was that it was written by my old friend Gervase Markham who, I’m impressed to see, is now working for Mozilla and writing this column for The Times. I’ve added his (techy) blog, Hacking for Christ, to the sidebar.

I am phelgmatic. I have got myself what feels like a mild viral infection. Lethargic, slightly feverish, sore throat and a wheezy cough. None of which anyone else needs to know, but sharing makes me feel better

And, no, I haven’t been around any sneezing poultry.

I’ve managed to reinstate Wordpress pages (e.g., my gig list) by creating new pages and pasting the text into them. This didn’t work before I upgraded to Wordpress 2 so something there must have fixed the problem.

Doctorvee expressed concern last week that Owen Barder’s satire has become the future. First, there was the abolition of democracy. Then, on Thursday he spoofed the Government’s “respect agenda” by suggesting they would ban swearing.

Today, The Mirror reports that:

Teenager Kurt Walker was given an £80 fine for saying “F*** all”.
[…]
Kurt was walking to the youth centre where he works as a volunteer when he stopped to talk to three friends. One asked what he had been doing. He replied: “F*** all, mate.”

The policewoman, who had been telling off another teenager for riding his bike in a skateboarding area, overheard the remark and fined him for using “threatening, abusive or, insulting words”.

Went to Scottish bloggers blogmeet in Edinburgh. Met people. Drank alcohol. Took photos. Came home. Good time had. Thanks to Gordon for organising.

Tomorrow: back to Edinburgh for the leadership hustings.