Salocin

This photo is part of the BBC photographer of the year series, and it's great.

Russian astrologer sues NASA for changing orbit of celestial body by crashing a probe into it, thus ruining her predictions.

I had not heard of the Mint Leaf restaurant, although apparently that puts me in the minority. In case you should be equally in the dark, it is situated below ground near the southern end of Haymarket near Trafalgar Square, and is currently regarded as the cream of the "Posh Indian" restaurants of London.

The decor certainly lets you know that the place takes itself seriously, with dark wooden furnishings, leather seats, atmospheric lighting and the almost forced classiness that immediately made me worry that the only accepted form of payment would be cut diamonds, and I didn't have any on me.

As it was a Monday night, we had little trouble getting a reservation, but I'm told that Thursday to Saturday, reservations are extremely hard to come by.

As you walk down the stairs that lead to the restaurant, the first thing you notice is the smell of incense, perhaps a joss-stick burning invisibly in a nearby alcove. After having one's reservation checked in the reception room at the bottom of the stairs, it is only a short walk to the Mint Leaf Bar - a very long, dark room with gentle spotlights on each table and an equally long bar with enough bottles of alcohol on display to satisfy even the most demanding of coctail fanatics.

A short spell in the bar and you're shown to your table in the restaurant - a very large room subdivided by stylish wooden partitions. The tables are all a discreet distance apart and the service was both prompt and friendly. As there were four of us, we asked the waiter to give us a selection of starters, all of which were delicious, after which we each ordered a main (I opted for the Lamb with Fenugreek leaves). We ended up sharing most of the mains, as they were mostly excellent, and quite varied, ranging from duck to prawns.

The staff make every effort not to rush you (perhaps to encourage you to drink more), but they also don't keep you waiting (the food arrives very fast). We found the service to be excellent (although the place was barely a quarter full on a monday night) and I picked up a card as I left, as I have every intention of returning.

I have read another review of the Mint Leaf, by Toby Young, and can't imagine why he took such a sudden and violent dislike to the place, he fairly sneers at it through his entire review. Given the title of his book, "How to lose friends and alienate people", he probably did it on purpose...

Slashdot reports that Google's email service is being challenged in two separate cases regarding it's use of the GMail name. The companies in question are seeking some sort of compensation or negotiated arrangement from Google to compensate them for the fact that Google's using their trademarked name.

This is a bit disingenuous. These companies are unlikely to be suffering any form of economic loss as a consequence of Google's use of the GMail name, and you could make a pretty safe bet that, were GMail not the successful trading name of a multi-billion dollar business, they wouldn't be making such a meal of their claim on the brand. This is a prime example of the law used as a business tool to extract value from another party. An unfortunate side effect of living in a society whose rules are enforced in the courts.

Had you heard of GMail before Google launched it? Unlikely, unless you worked for one of these two companies. The value of that little collection of 5 characters has gone from nothing to something as a consequence of the ground-breaking email service.

You might wonder why these companies are so up-in-arms about the 'infringement' upon their 'intellectual property'. But the reality is that these court cases are mischevous in nature and aim not to protect intellectual property (for which there is no real argument in this case) but to pressure Google into settling the court cases, paying off these individuals to put an end to the harassment.

The law is used more and more as a business tool, and this sort of predatory behaviour is now embarked upon almost every time any major company launches a successful product or brand. "It was mine first" shout numerous unknown entities, point towards obscure, mothballed and little-known elements of their product portfolios. The trick is then to draw attention to the value of the service they are challenging, rather than the worthlessness of their own offering that happens to bear a similar name. This is clear from the reasoning they use in their arguments, they want Google to pay them between £25 and £34 million, which (they helpfully point out) equates to an estimateed 0.5% royalty fee. Of course, what they don't point out is that it's in excess of a million percent of the value of their own assets, that they did nothing to build the service, that the value of the service comes from it's nature and functionality, not its name, and that they have nothing to lose by trying their luck.

Surely the value of the claim should be based on what has been lost, rather than what the other party has gained, as a consequence of their use of the name. The burden of proof for this should also be on the plaintiff.

In truth, neither of these companies can claim that Google's creation of the GMail service damages their products, since there was no real value there to damage. The problem is that Google now has a protracted and distracting legal case on its hands, in two separate geographies, and that in Germany, their aggressor has even managed to secure an injunction to prevent them from extending their use of the name there.

Were Google somehow building on some form of brand equity that these companies had created through their efforts, then I would be more sympathetic to the claims. The reality, however, is that these companies are acting in the spirit of ambulance-chasing: trying to make a claim not because it's justified, but because it might work, and even if it won't, someone might pay them to go away.

The redeeming thing about this story is that Google's attitude to such things - at least historically - has been admirable. I think it more likely that they will take the claim to court if need be, and punish these people for trying, even if it costs them, than capitulate to any unreasonable demands. Let's hope my faith is not misplaced.

Belgian couple spotted 'struggling' in the sea were not in need of help.

This weblog receives a lot of spam. On average, I get about 5 spam per minute during the US waking hours. That's a fair amount of hits, and the problem is often that even if the hit is averted by a blacklist-style program (most of them are prevented from becoming a part of the live website), it still creates a 'hit', causes a perl program to run and a page to be transmitted to the offending webserver.

Yesterday, the number of hits to my website by automated spam-bots spiralled out of all proportion, and my hosting provider disabled the mt-comment script, sending me an email to let me know what had been done.

I don't know how many hits it takes before a hosting company stands up and takes notice, but I imagine it's a fair few. I have now upgraded Movable Type, and am in the process of installing all sorts of plugins that will assist in the avoidance of spam. It is particularly frustrating that this has had to happen, and I don't know if it will be enough.

It's also particularly annoying that the spammers are too crude in their methods to realise that 99% of their spams are not getting through, and that those that do make it are deleted within a couple of hours, because I do keep my website graffiti free. I get very annoyed at people using what it essentially my personal internet real-estate as a billboard for their (often unpleasant) products, and often wish that there were some way to return the unpleasantness that they have visited upon me.

I therefore apologise for the additional difficulties you may experience in posting comments to the website, but assure you that they are necessary. Should you have any problems, please let me know. Going forward, you will need to have javascript enabled in order to post to the website, and you will need to type in a code on the comments submission page for your comment to be accepted.

I flew to Belgium this weekend, and went through the usual checks and measures that we have come to expect since 9/11 where people and aircraft come together. Security checks, x-ray machines, extra passport controls and a vast number of security staff. All ostensibly to increase our safety.

The process for getting to the aircraft at Heathrow is now much more involved than it used to be.

• Check in, involving a passport check, ticket check and security questions regarding my luggage.
• Entry to departure lounge, involving a ticket check, passport check, luggage through an x-ray machine, me walking through a metal detector and me getting a pat-down search.
• Walk to departure gate, halfway down the corridor there's another security check where they put my luggage through an x-ray machine and make me walk through another metal detector - no pat-down search this time.
• Get to the gate where they check my ticket and my passport one more time.

That's a lot of checks, so you can imagine my surprise when, upon arriving at home in Belgium, I opened my computer bag and found my penknife on top of all the cabling in the side-pocket. My penknife is a very large model that has lots of built in screwdrivers and the like which I generally use for fixing computers, but also has 2 knives, 2 saws and various other sharp metal pointy things.

It's hard not to ask questions. What is all the security for if they can't pick up on a utility knife in a computer bag? Is the 40-minute delay as they ineffectually frisk through and irradiate your private belongings merely a deterrent?

On my return, I was passing through Brussels airport, where the queue for the x-ray machines was very long. This meant that I spent most of my time in the airport queueing rather than shopping, eating or otherwise spending money in the expensive concessions of the departure lounge - no doubt an unfortunate side-effect of the post-9/11 paranoia for those concession-holders. Luckily, this time I had remembered to put the offending implement in my hold luggage. Not that it would have mattered, because while the technicolor image of my bag's innards passed by on the screen, the security agent manning the machine was facing the other way, chatting to a colleague.