The Wedding: The Engagement Party

Alan and Geni were kind enough to host The Engagement Party at their place. This is at the start of the night.

The Wedding: The Reception Venue

Federal Golf Club reception view. This was taken on 19th Feb 2005, and was actually the first venue we checked out. We took a look at a few others, but with the nice view of the 18th green, we couldn't go past Federal.

Picasa 2

I was looking for some software to organise some of my photos into folders and to resize and possibly manipulate some of them. I remembered hearing about some software that Google released for doing just that, so I went and downloaded Picasa 2.

It scanned all files on my hard drive and organised them by date, ready for me to sort out into the correct folders and to rename. Best of all, Picasa is free!

EFF: Dangerous Terms: A User's Guide to EULAs

We've all seen an End User License Agreement (EULA) when installing software at some point, but have we actually read every single line of every EULA we've agreed to?

The website "EFF: Dangerous Terms: A User's Guide to EULAs" shows some of the crazy things we have been agreeing to. A brief list:

1. "Do not criticize this product publicly."
2. "Using this product means you will be monitored."
3. "Do not reverse-engineer this product."
4. "Do not use this product with other vendor's products."
5. "By signing this contract, you also agree to every change in future versions of it. Oh yes, and EULAs are subject to change without notice."
6. "We are not responsible if this product messes up your computer."

The legality of EULAs is something that has often been debated. For example the process of opening a shrink-wrapped CD of one product was said to constitute agreement to the EULA. Of course, the only way to find out what you'd agreed to was to open the shrink wrap in the first place.

The terms of the EULA should be related to protecting the legal rights of the copyright owner and should not attempt to impose conditions like 'not criticising this product publicly'. Seriously, how many fashion designers would attempt to put a label like that on their clothing? Why should we have to accept such a clause just to use a piece of software?

I think that EULAs do have a legitimate purpose in software products, but some of the clauses listed above seem to be pretty draconian. Why can't EULAs be like any other contract? You should have a clear chance to read what you are agreeing to before you actually buy the product. Most times with software you only get the chance to read the EULA once you have already bought it, opened it and started to load it. Just accepting any strange EULA terms you encounter in the install process, if you are one of the few to read all the EULA terms, is clearly much easier than that of trying to take the software back to the place of purchase (already opened) and trying to explain why you want a refund.

Top 15 Firefox Extensions

A summary of this guy's Top 15 Firefox Extensions

I've used ForecastFox but there is one missing that I think is useful - BlogThis is something that I often use to write blog entries like this one.