Much as BookFinder searches many book sites to obtain useful price comparisons, Mobissimo (and a few others mentioned in a recent Associated Press article) search many travel sites to obtain useful price comparisons. I tried it and was pretty impressed, especially for international travel (which has a completely chaotic and non-transparent price structure at the moment, so that searching multiple travel sites can really make a big difference). For example, a trip to Germany in January which I had just purchased for about $800 roundtrip turned up on Mobissimo for about $650. Mobissimo and other travel meta-searches also apparently search JetBlue and Southwest and perhaps other discount airlines that are usually not searched by other travel sites.
I wonder if they're scraping with or without permission, or perhaps with some mixture of the two. Why would JetBlue, for example, want Mobissimo to scrape its site, but not want Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc., to do the same?
Slashdot reports that a Groklaw reader has found and published the 1994 BSD settlement, whose terms were previously known only to a few lawyers and BSD insiders. Let's hear it for public records!
Keely has posted something on the occasion of the 11th anniversary of Jonas Klein's death. Jonas meant a lot to me, too. I think of him many Novembers (and many other times) even though I never met him in person.
I got to do some maintenance work on the graduation cap Keely mentions, which was a great honor despite the humiliation of damaging one of the transistors by overloading it, and it inspired me to decorate two other graduation caps with technology (mine from my high school graduation, which had spinning spokes on top, and my friend Michelle's from her first university graduation, which enhanced her papel picado dragon with glowing blue and gold eyes). If I should ever graduate from a university, I'm sure I'll take up the soldering iron once again and think of Jonas.
I've been planning for over six years to dedicate a book to Jonas, and, now that I have a contract with No Starch Press, I'll finally get that opportunity.
