Need To Know 2003-10-31

archive

"I feel quite upset by [blog comment spam], and angrier with the spammers and their lack of respect for the principles of online co-operation than I have been for years..." - Bill Thompson ponders predictable side-effect of bloggers all using the same off-the-shelf content management systems http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3210623.stm ...aye, you knew where you were with the "gentleman spammers" of Usenet: they "only went after their own", you know >> HARD NEWS << tu-whit tu-whoos Ah, here's the third shoe falling: after PUBLICWHIP and ICAN, comes MYSOCIETY, a little venture philanthropy .org intending to scout out worthy politics-hacking projects, and then actually give them some real money. To be honest there appears to be quite a glut of society software already in production right now - admittedly much of it being hacked upon by folk linked with this scheme. And there seems to be a potential chicken-inside-egg problem regarding educating high-powered people sufficiently to get them to fund stuff that's languishing because they don't understand it. But, hey, free money! Send your proposals to the estimable Tom Steinberg, and he'll do the heavy-lifting of touting the best proposals around potential funders. Or browse through the admissions so far, and maybe see if you can't implement/ open source them before anyone gets their chequebook out. http://www.mysociety.org/mysoc_me.php3 - and none of your "pave the earth" BOFH projects, neither http://www.lazyweb.org/ - or fill with personal hobby-horses, whichever's easier We're great believers in retrospective sympathetic magic here. So thanks, then, to everyone who is about to think good thoughts about LARRY WALL and DAMIAN CONWAY, chief canaries of the PERL 6 process, who are both recovering after some rather nasty bug reports. Damian's been down with some "light pneumonia", which led to him producing all the wrong kinds of Conway hacks and wheezes for a month. Mr Wall, true to form, posted a message to Usenet, which, after several pages of comments on continuations, exceptions, scoping, and making Perl6 better for beginners, noted that he's out of hospital and down one benign tumor ("with complications"), but still on a drip and unable to eat. "Full recovery is expected any month now", he says. Your thoughts will go back in time and help them to recover at exactly the fast rate we're seeing now. http://perlfoundation.org/index.cgi?page=contrib - and all those future payments to the Perl Foundation help http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20031016003050.GA7845%40wall.org - not the POD extraction anyone wanted http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3F9DA3BB.9080106%40conway.org - yet another poorly hacker A couple of quick followups on previous stories: we were reassured that we weren't the only people to cover DEREK WYATT MP's ingenious "postcode lottery" approach to beating spam, as it also made the front page of VNU's respected IT Week, where his additional brainwave of sticking "a country code suffix at the end of each domain name" was repeated without a hint of wondering whether this was either feasible or indeed remotely desirable. And if you thought they'd save that kind of editorialising for their leader column, that's where you'll find Wyatt damned by the faint praise that he seems "happy to suggest innovative strategies whenever they occur to him". On a cheerier note, Marks and Spencer's Channel Development Manager STEVE WIND-MOZLEY wrote to update us with the news that Safari, Opera and a whole host of "indie" clients are now welcome at "the UK's best loved retailer's web site" (his words, not ours), with a Mozilla-compatible code release also coming "soon". "In the meantime", he concludes, "should any of your readers be in urgent need of fresh underwear, please remind them that we have more than 320 stores that do not run 'sniffing' technologies on the way in". http://www.marksandspencer.com/ - Steve's subject line: "Mozilla users don't go commando?" http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohwy1.jpg http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohwy2.jpg - tastefully highlighted in light blue and grey >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious old thrill - return of the inadvertently appropriate banner ad: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohcheryl.gif ... Benatar unveils new look for "Love Is A Battlefield, Possums" comeback tour: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohpat.gif ... romance not dead: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohrom.gif ... "please do not post the password [in the previous sentence] on the Web": http://www.minitex.umn.edu/cpers/elm/kit.asp#galepassword ... hoping that's a deliberately ironic use of "Go home" in the nav: http://www.blackinbritain.co.uk/ ... double-URLtendres of the week - filthy rich pigs: http://www.champagneswines.com/ , http://www.barf1.com/ , http://www.letshitit.com/ ... mind the gap: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/24/dohref.gif ... right lads - Diet Coke break: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohpost.gif ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful The Alec Bussey Scout Centre (formerly Norwich 2nd Boy Scouts Hut) is hinted to be one of Norfolk's few venues capable of containing tomorrow's NORWICH SPECTRUM AND SAM SHOW 2003 (10am-4pm, Sat 2003-11-01, Rowington Road, Norwich, free from the looks of things), featuring an "official opening from Councillor Steve Land", a "SAM talk and Q & A" *plus* a "Spectrum talk and Q & A" - and probably someone from NTK selling off the last of those "Born to Run" t-shirts, among other bargains. That's assuming we don't stay too late at tonight's B3TA HALLOWEEN PARTY (from 7.30pm, Fri 2003-10-31, Babushka, behind King's Cross, London N1, also free), where you can nod and say "Yeah, you photoshopped that polar bear, did you? Nice one!" and take part in a raffle that is rumoured to have Mr NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown's very personal supply of new HobNobs Flapjacks among the prizes. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/speccyverse/orsam.htm - Ah-haaaaaaaaa! http://www.b3ta.com/party/halloween2003.gif - Ah-helllllllo? http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/news/ - A-munch-munch-munch-munch-(gulp) http://www.internetworldnorth.co.uk/ - also next Wed/Thu (apparently "badly broken in Mozilla") >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Got a bunch of old laptops hanging around? Want to use them for something, but have *slightly* better things to do than fiddling with an openMOSIX cluster or playing "laptop Jenga"? If one of those slightly better things is compiling C, C++ and Objective C programs, DISTCC is the package for you. Distcc is Martin Pool's system for distributing gcc compilations across multiple machines. It runs in userland; it just does gcc; it gives compilations broadly linear improvements (double the PCs = half the time). Your nodes don't need to have synchronised watches or to drop everything else to run it. Kernel versions don't matter, *operating systems* don't matter (distcc's the basis of Panther's Xcode distributed build feature). And if you're running GNOME, you get a nice stripy graphic to stare at during what little time you didn't save. http://distcc.samba.org/ - imagine a Beowulf cluster of ... oh wait >> MEMEPOOL << contains a source of http://snackspot.org/ corporate anthem reprise - "making love (all night)" by the light of our BenQ 1000 ANSI Lumen digital projection system: http://www.benq-eu.com/news/?year=2003&id=435 ... UseCrime in progress - "Wednesday media is... a web usability consultancy" http://www.wednesdaymedia.com/ [view source]... portable radar http://www.plextek.com/news70.htm imitates "Creatures may be beneath the floor": http://www.iseran.com/Steve/alien.html ... inside DJ Shadow's head: http://www.io.com/~dork/records/ ... this week's "one of these pics is not like the others" #32: http://images.google.com/images?q=%22the+seventh+seal%22 ... was www.wannafight.com taken?: http://www.textbanter.com/ ... http://www.freestateproject.org/ sending 20,000 libertarians to New Hampshire - why can't they send them all there?... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> b3ta.com raid their back-catalogue for the official site to novelty Jimmy Carr quiz show DISTRACTION (10.40pm, Fri, C4) http://www.channel4.com/distraction/ ... while Rutger Hauer - who else? - heralds another week of scary movies, including his own THE HITCHER (12.45am, Fri, C4), Pamela Anderson/ David "MCP" Warner VR-sex nonsense NAKED SOULS (12.15am, Fri, C5), Mark Kermode's precious THE EXORCIST (10pm, Sat, C4), and the ever-excellent FINAL DESTINATION (9pm, Sun, C4)... the latter hopefully also commemorated in HEATH ROBINSON: SUBURBAN SUBVERSIVE (10pm, Thu, BBC4) - an effective UK translation of "Rube Goldberg", for any American readers who make it this far... Channel 5 gets a full 65 minutes out of lists like http://hal9000.inetstrat.com/parodies.html - in a parody-title pron roundup entitled SHAVING RYAN'S PRIVATES (11.15pm, Mon, C5)... the undercover Money Programme considers whether a diet consisting exclusively of meat and lard might have any adverse health effects in ATKINS - A FAT PROFIT (7.30pm, Wed, BBC2)... then FIVE THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (8pm, Wed, BBC2) sees a man "proving" his girlfriend can't read a map... WHAT NOT TO WEAR - THE TRIBES OF MAN (8.30pm, Wed, BBC2) starts another run of the makeover series predicated on the radical notion that anyone can look better if they spend 2000 quid on newer, more fashionable clothes... as yet another schadenfreude-relocation show NO GOING BACK (9pm, Wed, C4) this week features its most unprepared ex-pats yet: an Extropian couple "determined" to fulfil their dream of moving to a platform mining metallic hydrogen on Jupiter, even though the technology doesn't yet exist to get them there, the husband has yet to master the most basic nanotech control languages, and the local climate is so different to what they're used to in Surrey that they'd simultaneously freeze, suffocate, *and* be instantly crushed to death... FILM>> now featuring the "nest" scene immortalised in Alan Dean Foster's movie novelisation, there's a surprisingly nationwide release for pre-DVD promo ALIEN - THE "DIRECTOR'S CUT" ( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=Alien+%281979%29 : Sigourney Weaver strips down to a very little white panties and see-through shirt; There is not much nudity on display in this scene - upper rear only. But the scene is extremely erotic, nonetheless)... a similar conclusion is the highlight of the all-too-glossy nasty remake THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/texaschainsawmassacre.htm : wet T-shirt ghosting of [Jessica "7th Heaven" Biel] female anatomy; three-year cohabitation; terrorizing with a chainsaw, many)... while Meg Ryan's idea of playing "against type" appears to be impersonating Nicole Kidman in the gritty, somewhat average serial killer character study IN THE CUT ( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=In+The+Cut+%282003%29 : The major sex scene has Meg taking off her dress to reveal absolutely perfect beautiful breasts. I mean, they're worth the price of admission [alone])... >> 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 "inappropriate" http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohgest.gif 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. 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.