>> HARD NEWS <<
more They-Build-For-You's
Understandably overlooked in the recent furore over John
Prescott's "grace and favour" extravagances: the near-250K
dropped by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2004 to
help fund MySociety, the UK's premier purchaser of web domains
consisting of combinations of the words "Them/ They", "Write",
"Work", "For", "To" and "You". Apparently, they've got "a
little bit" of that (among other) cash left over, and are
therefore once again calling for proposals for projects that
are "Founded on electronic networks", have a "Real world
impact on democratic and community aspects of people's lives",
and "Low or zero cost scalability", which ought to narrow it
down from your usual late-night rambles about "LazyWebs".
There isn't actually a disclaimer to this effect, but we
suspect that, by entering, you're kind of waiving any personal
ownership of your idea - and we don't think the "winner"
actually gets any of the money themselves (unless they
subsequently persuade MySociety to employ them as some sort of
specialist contractor, which - by our limited understanding -
is sometimes what spending public money is all about).
http://www.mysociety.org/proposals2006/about
- view "other people's proposals" for a decent starting point
http://www.mysociety.org/?p=217
- deadline extended to midnight June 16, especially for you
http://iawiki.net/LazyWeb
- you'll run out of stack space if you recurse too far
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
GOTOs considered non-harmful
Reasons We Like The World Cup #1: pubs which aren't showing
the matches will be temporarily transformed into temperate
sanctuaries of calm and contemplation, where one can sit in a
quiet corner with a cold glass of "Turbo Shandy", thoughtfully
inscribing pencil notes in the margins of an O'Reilly manual
or two. Or, if you like things a little livelier, there's also
next Sat's @MEDIA SOCIAL (from 1pm, Sat 2006-06-17, The Livery
Bar, 130 Wood Street, nr St Paul's, London EC2V 6DL, free but
buy your own drinks and food) - a fringe event to this week's
@Media web design conference, and featuring a "best of" lineup
from this year's London Geek Dinners, including Molly "Web
Standards Project" Holzschlag and Dave "CSS Zen Garden" Shea.
Specific get-togethers are scheduled for particular fields
(2pm CSS, 3pm Accessibility, 4pm JavaScript etc) during the
afternoon, a thoroughly civilised arrangement which bodes
somewhat better than some "fringe" events we've been to
recently, not least because they've relaxed that usual daft
"Geek Dinner" criterion of having to pay in advance for a
variable-quality pub buffet.
http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2006/social
- warning: page contains embedded Google map
http://spy.typepad.com/reporting/2006/05/wemediafringe.html
- "Alan Connor [...] was very engaging"; others not so
http://www.wnc.co.uk/tg/turboshandy.html
- or a Vodka Mule or Lemon Bacardi Breezer, if available
http://www.andfinally.com/geek.html
- this June 18: Bill T still promising "6 [punts] per person"
Something else on which we and cheeky Nico Macdonald (however
reluctantly) agree: we wouldn't put money on the "ad-hoc un-
conference" concept of BARCAMP LONDON actually happening
"sometime in June/July" now - unless they're referring to the
"June/July" of a different year. Perversely picking one of the
less summery months for *their* annual "off-site", however, is
the BURNING-DORK DORKING-BURN DORKBOT-LONDON CAMP (Bentley
Copse Scout Camp, nr Dorking, Sep 2006-09-01/04, probably some
sort of small accommodation charge), the ideal opportunity to
finally get your badge for GPS Open-Mapping, Self-Sufficient
Electric Animal Constructing, or other traditional "People
Doing Strange Things Without Mains Electricity" activities.
http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/camp06/
- vs http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=15015
http://barcamp.org/BarCampLondon
- Brit bloggers : un-conference :: piss-up : brewery
>> ANTI-MEMES <<
there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/
BBC News Online: where science fiction becomes... science
captions - "The circuits in existing iPods will not work with
nano-transistors": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/4768323.stm , vs
"Cloaking devices are a staple of science fiction stories":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/5016068.stm ... good-enough-to-eat
Google goofs: http://google.com/search?q=%22web-basted%22 ,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22diary%20farmers%22 ,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22investment+baking%22 ,
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22please+beer+with+me%22 ,
http://google.com/search?q=%22kentucky+friend+chicken%22 ,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22lime+manager%22 , plus
http://google.com/search?q=%22cafe+rogue%22 - favoured eating
place of http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-03-07&l=99#l 's
"Rouge Trooper"... go to http://google.co.uk/search?q=SOCKS ,
click top-left Sponsored Link, weary-sounding lxdirect.com
announces "Your search for 'cocks' was spell-corrected to
'socks' and produced 31 results"...
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
If you want to be truly loved, write a data recovery utility.
We can't imagine there's a day when Christophe Grenier isn't
swathed by offers of beers, steak dinners and marriage for
TESTDISK and PHOTOREC, his two open source disk and file
recovery utilities. The test TestDisk gives is sort of a final
exam for your futzed partition block, quizzing your unreadable
drive for tell-tale NTFS, HFS+, Ext3 or what-have-you data,
and cribbing the lost partition data from what it finds.
PHOTOREC gives up on such fripperies as a filing system and
instead grubs directly on the drive for file data, spotting
beginnings for popular file formats and having a stab at where
their ends might be hanging. PHOTOREC, as the name suggests,
started as a utility for clawing back pictures from bit-rotten
flash cards, but can now sniff out files from Ogg Vorbis to
Microsoft Powerpoint. Both utilities will run on Mac, DOs,
Windows, Linux, and probably vegetable oil for that matter.
Forget about them for now - when you need them, you'll find
them.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
- though you'll waste an hour searching NTK for "olive oil"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/manuelidades/113461346/
- voila! c'est un web deux point zero shot de screen
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
TV FEEBDACK>> Reasons We Like The World Cup #2: eventually the
BBC will stop showing that appallingly contrived "stupid
foreigners taken commentating metaphors literally" promo
http://www.duncans.tv/2006/bbc-fifa-world-cup - "The stadium
has come to life!" (you see what they've done there?). Still,
you're relatively safe on ITV4 - even though they've run out
of "Larry Sanders", there's still another 40 or so episodes of
DREAM ON (0.25am, Tue, ITV), they're re-repeating UFO (6pm and
1.55am, Tue, ITV4 - the "Mindbender" one where Straker
hallucinates he's on a film set being a particular highlight),
plus they're just coming up to the acclaimed "Sniper" story in
HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET (9pm, Fri and Sun, ITV)...
Elsewhere, the Radio Times anticipates interviews with "bands
who made it big on the back on rave culture" in SUMMER OF -
RAVE, 1989 (9.10pm, Sat, BBC2) - likely to include The Shamen,
who were releasing "remix it yourself" CDs as far back as
1991: http://discogs.com/release/58164 . Noel Edmonds takes on
the football with prime-time bouts of DEAL OR NO DEAL (around
8pm, Mon-Fri, C4), but this week's Freeview finds remain
skateboarding docu DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS (9pm, Tue, More4), and
the imminent second season of Robbie Coltrane psycho-profiling
classic CRACKER (11pm, Thu, ITV3)...
Which just leaves, in the wake of last month's comments on the
overuse of "H128" in Irwin Allen's "City Beneath The Sea"
(almost every minute at around 0:45, peaking at once every 10-
15 seconds), ANDY TRIBBLE's allegation as follows: "When Jon
Pertwee was the Doctor he was stranded on a planet along with
some Daleks and humans [...] in search of some magic element
that could stop a plague", an element which Terry Nation had
mischievously named "Perineum". So, "Jon had to run about
saying things like 'If only we could get our hands on the
Perineum' etc etc". In fact it was spelled "Parrinium", Andy
http://google.com/search?q=daleks+parrinium - a fact we record
here primarily to preserve any other readers from the eye-
opening results of Googling for perineum + "doctor who"...
>> SMALL PRINT <<
Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that
happened last month or might happen next month. 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
"hospitable, but music-free"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/07/another_effing_own_goal/
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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