>> HARD NEWS <<
cheerily obtuse
The new year at Grange Hill starts, as ever, with induction
day: induction into the Big School of Fansites Taken Down By
Evil Corporate Bullies, that is. After a fractious few years
fending off sporadic legal threats, GRANGEHILL.NET's US hosting
was successfully DMCA-d last week by the owners of the BBC's
freshly privatised "Grange Hill" series, Mersey TV. Quite
why the company suddenly got all hardcore now is hard to tell.
Perhaps it was the new series; perhaps it was the rumoured
preparations by Mersey TV to sell out to a new owner; perhaps
(they maintain) it was the recent admission by Mersey TV's
legal advisor that the site was "driving traffic away" from
their own new website. If that's the reason, it might not be
enough that the site has gutted its collection of fair-use
(and perhaps less clearcut) images, and moved to another
server. Or maybe they're in with a chance: few websites can
call upon a terrifying 25-year-long span of net users
overobsessed with the trivia of their childhood's TV. And
Phil Redmond, that loveable rogue, faced with thousands of
young protestors, will surely cave in like so many
fair-minded headmasters, faced with school uniform pickets,
before him.
http://www.grangehillfans.co.uk/ghonline.html
- you know what they really need is a pro-fair use novelty single
http://www.brandrepublic.com/mediabulletin/news_story.cfm?articleID=231955
- insert dinner money joke here
http://www.jubileeaction.co.uk/justright/autumn2002_article2.html
- if 80s TV didn't matter, why is Paxman presenting Newsround?
Drink! Feck! Falcoo! MIT's Dublin-based Media Lab Europe is
closing due to lack of funding, fulfilling founder Nicholas
Negroponte's vision of "Being Digital" by doing an on/off
transition itself. After all, "bits are bits", but money is
money, it would appear. Meanwhile, http://www.hackthebid.org/
is a new site aiming to prevent perhaps similar white elephant
wastes of public money, giving everyone the opportunity to
voice why they might not want London to host the 2012
Olympics, and so to provide some balance to the current,
dubiously-representational "Text LONDON to 802012" poster
campaign. It's hoped that the site will also become a hub for
anti-Olympic campaigning of all kinds, possibly discussing
the appropriate typeface and font size for printing stickers
that could transform the first two letters of "Back The Bid"
posters to "Ha" or "Fu" - that sort of thing.
http://www.hackthebid.org/more.html
- Parisians, New Yorkers invited to set up sister sites too
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/15/euro.risks.idg/
- Europeans: oddly unconvinced by upstart Negroponte
http://indianink.net/forums/General/posts/2895.html
http://www.medialabasia.org/mlaList.php?typeId=6
- MIT parted ways with Media Lab Asia 18 months ago
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1393816,00.html
- Guardian asks: where's Kevin Warwick when you need him?
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
GOTOs considered non-harmful
Just in case you haven't given all of your disposable income
to deserving charities already this year, London's geowanking
fraternity have come up with an intriguing proposition. With a
grand's worth of Russian 1-meter resolution satellite pics,
they believe they can stitch together an entirely free,
redistributable vector database of the capital, freed from
the shackles of the Ordnance Survey's restrictive copyrights,
and thus open to all manner of GPL-style repurposing. LONDON
FREE MAP's Jo Walsh and Schuyler Erle should hopefully be
touching on this topic at the FIRST WORKSHOP OF THE PERVASIVE
AND LOCATIVE ARTS NETWORK (Tue and Wed 2005-02-01/02, The ICA,
The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH, 51.5066N -0.1306E, tickets UKP1.50
per day, apparently), in the company of geo-taggers Urban
Tapestries, location-based gamers Blast Theory, and
investigative journalist (yes, the) Duncan "Zircon" Campbell,
who we believe might know a thing about satellite surveillance
- or two.
http://open-plan.org/index.php?plan-ica-announce
- yes, it does seem cheap for the ICA. Could be a trap?
http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2004-December/000132.html
- today London, tomorrow... ze (Ordnance Surveyed) world!
http://openstreetmap.org/
- or get on your GPS-enabled bike and start uploading tracks
http://www.no2id.net/news/events.php
- next Tue: Ross Anderson vs ID cards, in Cambridge
http://www.netimperative.com/awards
- and 1 week left to get entries in for Netimperative Awards
>> ANTI-MEMES <<
there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/
browser security masterclass - just put SSL padlock *at the
bottom of the popup window*: http://ipextreme.us/order.html
... historic NASA mission marked by *worst infographic ever*:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/images/sc-components-litho.jpg
... always end your last blog post on a enigmatic high note:
http://www.nepanewsletter.com/polar.html - "Daytime sightings
have now been reported, as have motherships"... new(-ish)
thrill - vaguely CV-related puerile Google goofs of the month:
http://google.com/search?q=%22can+program+in+html%22+resume
http://google.com/search?q=%22irrelevant+sense+of+humour%22
http://www.google.com/search?q=webmater+CV - and, just for old
time's sake: http://google.com/search?q=%22singed+copy%22 ,
http://google.com/search?q=%22Common+Object+Request+Borker%22
... UseCrime in progress - "Concordia is the only product
available that supports both printed and online distribution",
muses http://symbolics.com/Concordia-1.htm - apart from bloody
enormous jpegs, of course...
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
CPUs aren't getting faster! Multi-core is the future! Which
means we'll all need to learn concurrent, multi-threaded
programming, or else our software is never going to get
faster again! That's what Herb Sutter's future shock article
in Dr. Dobbs says (below). But before you start re-learning
APL, here's a daring thought: maybe programmers are just too
*stupid* to write multi-threaded software (not you of
course: that guy behind you). And maybe instead we'll see
more *background* processes springing up - filling our spare
CPUs with their own weird, low i/o calculations. Guessing
wildly, we think background - or remote - processes are
going to be the new foreground. Oh yeah, and increasingly
we're going to need some consistent way to display quiet,
passive user notifications from these processes that won't
interfere with the main flow of our single-threaded human
masters. What we're trying to say here is that, primitive
though they may be now, apps like GROWL (on the Mac) and
XOSD on Linux are going to be the new squishy UI innovation
area, and you should check them out, futz with them, and
work out your own solutions. You're already curious about
your background tasks, and soon the whole world will be.
CRISWELL PREDICTS!
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
- lock your daughter threads! here comes multiple futures!
http://growl.info/
- more interesting than the website implies
http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2004-09-26
- more interesting python, rendezvous and remote unix hacking
http://www.ignavus.net/software.html
- xosd for your tail-piping pleasure
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
TV>> reassuringly, THE GADGET SHOW'S (7.30pm) god-awful bid
http://www.7digital.com/downloads/gadget/ to "get a coveted no.
1 in the download chart" appears yet to trouble even the Top
20: http://bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart/top40/download.shtml - maybe
the bloke who sounds like Donald Sinden could have done some
slightly less flat vocals?... speaking of online audio, Stuart
Maconie devotes his 3-hour 6Music FREAK ZONE to TV theme tunes
(5pm, Sun, http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/freakzone/ ) ...
though you might want to exercise the "Listen Again" option on
that one http://dave.org.uk/streams/ , as it risks running
into the world premier of the new Chemical Brothers album
getting the http://prodigyremixed.com/ treatment on XFM's THE
REMIX (6pm, Sun, http://xfm.co.uk/theremix )... you wait all
year for an offbeat look back at current events, then THAT'S
SO LAST WEEK (11.05pm, Mon, C5), Tyler "Wallpaper" Brule's THE
DESK (10.30pm, Tue, BBC4), THE COMIC SIDE OF 7 DAYS (8.30pm,
Thu, BBC3) and DON'T WATCH THAT, WATCH THIS! (10.30pm, Thu,
BBC4) all come along at the same time - what's up with *that*,
eh?... THE FLY (11.50pm, Mon, C4) was succesfully remarketed
to the insect community as the story of a brave Drosophila
melanogaster - who finds himself gradually transforming into a
human being!... Wednesday is "lethal killing machines" night
with the Frank Miller-ish ROBOCOP 2 (10pm, Wed, C5), WESTWORLD
(11.35pm, Wed, BBC1) and AMERICAN PSYCHO (11.50pm, Wed, C4)...
plus, even if you agree with what he's saying, feel free to
get enraged by Michael Moore's trademark scattershot approach
and patronisingly sounds-like-mock-whining-but-is-apparently-
genuine voiceover in FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (9pm, Thu, C4)...
FILM>> a busy week for superhero spinoffs, with that blind old
guy from "The Blues Brothers" getting his own feature-length
adventure in RAY ( http://capalert.com/capreports/ray.htm :
unseen intercourse, twice; long series of drug addition
withdrawals - graphic; smoking, with no consequences,
frequently)... oh and Jennifer Garner is back as the eponymous
undead ninja gymnast in the not-very-Bill-Sienkiewicz-ish
ELEKTRA ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/elektra.htm :
unholy control of objects; unnatural rapid movement by
mortals; bodies evaporating into yellow-green gas; lesbian
kiss)... good to see the BBFC "Contains Strong Bloody
Violence" advisory being used as part of the marketing for
next week's Franka Potente/ Ken Campbell unwitting-urban-
exploration London Underground horror CREEP (only loosely
based on the Radiohead song of the same name)... yet they
appear to have - shockingly - not used the Bomb The Bass
"Xenon 2 (It's A Megablast)" remix of the theme tune for the
largely unnecessary new remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398712/keywords : convict/
detroit-michigan/ police/ siege/ lasersight/ molotov-
cocktail/ person-on-fire)...
>> 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
"it'll be ready - when it's ready!"
http://www.freecherrypy.org/asbradbury/archive/0434600
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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