Need To Know 2003-07-25

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>> HARD NEWS << summertime blues And the long summer days continue to drag by. What shall we waste our copious and collective free time on, especially now that none of us have any jobs? NTK's old business manager, TERRY SHUTTLEWORTH writes in to suggest we should all enter the free "International Star Trek Guru of the Year" contest, but then he would, being connected in some Ferengi fashion with the Paramount Franchise Collective. But what about the other, negligible non-Trek parts of our brains? Looking over last week's memepool, we're still inspired by MATTHEW SOMERVILLE's dynamic recoding of the godawful Odeon site into something that's usable (and accessible) by people wanting to actually give Odeon money. Long time NTK curmudgeon STEF "up yours, street" MAGDALINSKI senses in his bones that there might be one or two other sites that could be successfully recoded in this way. And it's about time we had another legally-dubious competition. We're still thinking about how to do this, but the first step's easy: send us the sites that you hate to use, but you think could be given a working makeover. We'll collect a list of the worst/potentially most useful, and go on from there. We sense a great deal of interstitial Flash in our future. http://www.startrekguru.com/ - good for reassuring that you're *not* the biggest trek saddo out there http://www.odeon.co.uk/ - fuxx0red sites... http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/ - fixed In other competition news: the (already arbitrary) closing date for our contest to come up with a "Japlish" slogan for NTK has now been extended, as most entrants so far have taken it as an invitation to auto-translate one of our existing slogans into Korean or something and then back again. Not that we didn't enjoy PAUL DOODY's "They're steel iron is in our transposition. Our steel iron is now that back", or JOHN12's "*The* English with weekly high technology because of NTK sarcasm renewal" - it's just we were hoping for more like ADRIAN FURBY's "Heat up auto battle is exciting scene. Fight!" or WILL HARRIS's haiku "Friday refreshness? / Let's heartful communicate!/ ntk.net". So, please keep them coming until you get bored of them (or we do) - don't forget that you could win one of five copies of the official UNNOVATIONS spinoff book, a filth-packed adventure into techno-despair in any language you care to name. http://www.engrish.com/clothing/ - *Ground* is storongest technic; there is exciting scene >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious at last, a company spokesman who corrects himself in brackets afterwards: http://www.ntk.net/2003/07/25/dohlge.gif ... why C4 seem to be repeating the same episodes over and over again: http://www.ntk.net/2003/07/25/doh10th.gif ... self-defeating user interfaces: http://www.lian-li.com/proclass.php vs http://www.ntk.net/2003/07/25/dohbad.gif ... glaringly obvious (right side of): http://www.3m.com/ergonomics/ ... seeing popularity on Amazon, DOOYOO attracting prank reviewers too: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/electronics/camcorders/sony_dcr_trv_33 ... and while you're at it, could you remove his phone number? http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2003Jul/0108.html ... a pinch and a punch - puerile GOOGLE GOOFS of the month: http://www.google.com/search?q=vaginia+state , "honk kong", "carless driving", "anti natal", "unclear weapons", "defecto standard", depratment - and "I'm Feeling *Very* Lucky" on "lager"... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Never mind all these-newfangled Games, Fringe, Jazz, Book, TV, Film and Erotica Edinburgh festivals - doing their best to provide wholesome working-class entertainment for the locals this year will be the 4-day UK UNIX USER GROUP LINUX FESTIVAL 2003 (from next Thu 2003-07-31, George Watson's College, Edinburgh, UKP12.50 concessions, commercial UKP100+VAT). Last- minute bookings are still available for Stephen Tweedie's off-Broadway hit "Inside the Linux Kernel", while the other attractions include the usual flown-in Hollywood stars (Andy Fenselau of SGI presents his acclaimed one-man show "New Breakthroughs in Linux Supercomputing") - plus student stand- up from Cambridge Footlight Matthew Garrett, whose multimedia odyssey "Dasher: An Information Efficient Text Entry and Control System" is said to conclude with the audience throwing him Alphabetti Spaghetti for him to catch in his mouth. http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2003/ vs http://www.eigf.co.uk/siteContent/intro/welcome.jsp http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html - we're joking of course; it's actually very good http://www.iainaitch.com/ - reader Iain Aitch gigs at Vox 'N' Roll on Thu in London http://www.ccc.de/camp/2003/index.en.html - Thursday after: Berlin Chaos Communication Camp! >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering A while back we asked if anyone had any IDEs that worked on PDAs or smartphones. Most of you assumed we were asking in much the same tone as that spammer who wants spare parts for his Dimensional Warp Generator time-machine, but we had some replies. We'd hoped to scare off the Symbianites by unfairly disparaging their newly open-sourced OPL, but unfortunately we misspelt it as "OML", so they got a look in. Zooko gets points for mentioning NTK's favourite time-waster, the smalltalk environment SQUEAK, which has Zaurus and Ipaq ports. Squeak's enduring some major refactoring work right now though, so perhaps you'll want to leave it for a little while. In the end, we settled on Paul's suggestion of Onboard C, which combines one of nature's finickety but trusty languages with Graffiti, one of nature's finickiest but trusty data-entry systems. It's an ANSIish C IDE for your Palm. http://opl.symbiandiaries.com/ - the Amiga of PDAs http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~ohshima/squeak/squeak-zaurus-e.html - squeak on a zaurus. but then you can get anything on a zaurus http://onboardc.sourceforge.net/ - "others enjoy being able to code during their daily commute" http://www.anexium.com/stuff/star-trek-spam.txt - don't reply of course, it could be a trap >> MEMEPOOL << contains a source of www.snackspot.org sniff the POP3 passwords of entire Guardian G2 section staff, win prize: http://www.theisociety.net/archives/000789.html ... after "Masturbation cuts cancer risk", another great week for geek health: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/3086013.stm ... plump, slightly spotty baby required for demographically-confused photo shoot: http://www.snackspot.org/images/frenchfries.jpg ... "Pipkins" diet: only eat hare, pork, monkeys, chiming clocks... and we thought our "doh" collections were boring: http://www.scorpioncity.com/mscrash.shtml ... yodel view controller: http://0x2a.no-ip.org/mt/archives/000008.html ... EMAP "looking into" weekly email newsletter ... oh, these'll get you into university: http://www.personalstatement.info/ ... http://lnk.to/ - raising (or lowering) the stakes in the competitive URL-shortening market: http://notlong.com/links/ ... DRM reclaimed: http://www.drm.org/whydigital/globwhats.htm ... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> wonder if Endemol will reuse the BIG BROTHER (9pm, Fri, C4) web data for FAME ACADEMY (6.30pm, Sat, BBC1) again this year? http://www.ntk.net/2002/10/11/dohfame1.gif ... Saturday night is Bill Paxton night, making heavy weather of CGI chaser TWISTER (6.25pm, Sat, ITV), which then segues into APOLLO 13 (8.30pm, Sat, BBC1)... and look out for more NHS spectacle frames than at a Morrissey gig in Philip Larkin recreation LOVE AGAIN (9.15pm, Sat, BBC2)... THE HEAVEN AND EARTH SHOW (10am, Sun, BBC1) features Danny Wallace's made-up "random acts of kindness" cult http://www.dannywallace.com/joinme.html - apparently that's not all he has in common with Dave Gorman nowadays... James Cameron weekend begins with his writer credit for RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (11pm, Sat, BBC1), then explodes all over C5's TERMINATOR NIGHT, beginning 5.45pm on Sun with LAST ACTION HERO... as AMERICA BEYOND THE COLOUR LINE (7.10pm, Sun, BBC2) delivers a more careful deconstruction of "Black Hollywood"... Sarah Michelle Gellar turns out to be the opposite of SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE (11.15pm, Sun, BBC1)... "The Real George Orwell" is the subject of an all-Newspeak THE SOUTH BANK SHOW (10.45pm, Sun, ITV)... Asperger's spectrum docu MY FAMILY AND AUTISM (9pm, Wed, BBC2) not to be confused with Jo Brand celeb quiz NOBODY LIKES A SMARTASS (6pm, Mon- Fri, BBC2)... and expect face-pulling and overacting - and that's just the interviewer - in RUBY WAX WITH JIM CARREY (10.35pm, Mon, BBC1)... the "Japanese woman who thought it was real" http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/fargo.htm follows FARGO (10.40pm, Mon, C4)... GENERATION TERROR (11.20pm, Tue, BBC2) profiles 1970s Red Army lightweights Baader-Meinhof... and you don't have to seen the "My Wrongs" prequels 1-116 and 118-8244 to understand what's happening in Chris Morris short MY WRONGS #8245-8249 & 117 (11.10pm, Wed, C4)... FILM>> must be the school holidays already, as "Distributor chose to cut sight of a dangerous imitable combat technique (double ear clap) to obtain a 12A" rating for this week's "Malcolm In The Middle" adolescent spy spoof AGENT CODY BANKS ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/agent_cody_banks.html : [Angie "Law And Order" Harmon] wears tight and cleavage- revealing outfits throughout most of the film)... but rendering on Linux http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59452,00.html (like the average cinemagoer can spot the difference) somehow hasn't prevented goddess of chaos and discord Eris from being portrayed as the *villain* of SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : Cut required for U to remove head butt in accordance with BBFC Guidelines and Policy. 12A uncut was available)... >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent. Registered at the Post Office as "ahh, the 'switching protocols' HTTP status code. Clever" http://unpythonic.net/jeff/ntk101.jpg NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe or subscribe at http://lists.ntk.net/ NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntkmart.com/ (K) 2003 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Full license at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0 Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com All communication is for publication, unless you beg. Press releases from naive PR people to pr@spesh.com Remember: Your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.