incredible as it is, GNU turns 25! unless you’ve been hibernating behind a big rock in a remote area almost off our world you must have heard about GNU — in fact, i think it’s fair to say that without GNU, without richard stallman and his vision we’d not have the internet as we know it today! not by far! software like linux, apache would not have been possible without GNU tools. even more — even if you are not aware of it, you might already be using GNU/linux in your mobile phone, your internet router, your set-top box, and so forth.

stephen fry, the “english humorist, writer, wit, actor, novelist, filmmaker and television presenter”, made a rather nice video for the occassion, entitled Freedom Fry — “Happy birthday to GNU” — see for yourself:

aside from mind-blowing software such as the GNU compiler tool chain, emacs, and lots and lots of other tools and programs, i personally think the GNU public license (GPL) is one of the most remarkable ideas that happened in software: basically it says

here is the software, here is the code, you can do with it what you want, but if you distribute it further you have to make the source available for free and if you make changes to the code you have to distribute those changes as source code for free as well

brilliant. as stephen fry puts it: that is the good science equivalent of software. we can use it, we can build on it, but so can you and you even have the right under the GPL to demand that we give you the source to our code if we distribute it ourselves.

happy birthday GNU!

while reading through the newsletter from ship of fools this morning — current chance of rapture is at 70.7% you’ll be, no doubt, interested to learn — i had to take a look at the 12 days of kitschmas section and came not only across the thongs of praise (available at cafepress.com in case you are really really interested) but also across the intriguing jerusalem compass:

An amazing, attractive, compass that appears to defy nature as it spins… and stops in the direction of our prayers and dreams… Jerusalem! No computer chips, no circuitry, this non-electric, patent-pending device, appears to defy the laws of nature to point directly toward Jerusalem from any place you are in the world. [jewishsoftware.com]

interesting…fraud or real? the review at jewishsoftware.com mentions the term magnetic polarity recalibrator, googling for that really doesn’t turn up any further information — but, a search for MPR yields among other results a link to the failedmessiah blog containing the name of the inventor, moshe ashin. using the family name as search input on the google patent search page brings back a link to US patent 7134213:¹

A magic compass that gives the illusion it defies the laws of nature, providing usage as an aid for locating the direction of prayer as well as a novel promotional device for companies, [...]

taking a closer look at US patent 7134213, it quickly transpires that this is after all just a normal compass needle to which a fake compass needle has been attached and a fake compass disc is hiding the real compass needle from the fake one. the fake needle can be rotated relative to the real one, giving the illusion that this compass is not pointing north–south but instead to jerusalem. and, yes,

…when travelling from one country to another, the compass needs to be re-set or re-calibrated…

which will only work “kind of” if you are sufficiently far away from jerusalem, get too close and the margin of error becomes too large and you end up facing away from jerusalem — but, as observed on the failedmessiah blog, that’s also not a problem, as

the earth is round (I think most charedim accept it) so in any direction it will point to Jerusalem as well as to Mecca and the Church of Nativity

lol. interesting what you can patent these days