>> HARD NEWS <<
reluctant adieus
The lack of drugs and casual sex is surely beginning to
take its toll on the indy coders of CODECON. The only
open source conference that takes place "in a
nightclub"(TM) does indeed still looks like the inside of a
JWZ fanboy's head. But its sensibility is slowly changing.
The core contributors are getting older: some of them -
including the co-founder, Bram "BitTorrent" Cohen, have scored
decent incomes; toddlers run at the feet of the attendants.
Still, age has not withered most, nor made the code less
gnarly. Perennial NTK favourite DAN KAMINSKY is now
streaming *video* over thousands of DNS servers; WHEAT is a
sort of Zope-you-write-with-a-Wiki; Leonard Richardson's
ULTRA GLEEPER is a link recommendation engine with an "Indy
Pete" algorithm to eliminate *too* popular sites. All are
alt enough: so why so much grown-up worry at the after-con
parties? "This will be the last year we can explore without
worry", says one maudlin attendant. "The Grokster case will
come, the Supreme Court will abandon Betamax; innovation
will die." Is that why so many of the codeconners now
commute between America and Canada? Is that why one
attendee vacationed with his 9-months pregnant wife to
Brazil, so that his child would inherit another country's
citizenship? Organiser Len Sassaman was shouted down when
he suggested moving the conference over the border; but if
the copyfights and patent wars break out in earnest, where
else is there to go?
http://www.codecon.org/2005/
- actually, everyone said
http://www.omgaudio.com/incoherence/
- was the most fascinating of the talks
But don't forget - many of the web's more "out of the box"
solutions come not from lone mavericks, but from the lateral-
thinking employees of some of our most familiar high-street
brands. Sharp-eyed shoppers at WWW.MARKSANDSPENCER.COM have
recently noticed that every single "Enlarge picture" popup
proudly announces "Microsoft Internet Explorer by Marks &
Spencer" in the title bar, even - and this is the clever bit -
*if you're not actually using IE*, because said phrase has
actually been hard-coded into the title tag by someone
presumbaly under the impression that that's how all popup
windows should "normally" behave. Following the site's browser
compatibility issues examined by NTK just over a year ago, if
this doesn't submliminally persusade M&S visitors to exchange
their home-knitted Firefox and Opera browsers for Microsoft's
sensible 100% polyester alternative, what will?
http://www.xcom2002.com/doh/images/0502181602dohmarks.gif
- NB: put browser detection code *above* mention in title tag
http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-10-17&l=78#l
- would-be haberdashers to NTK readers since October 2003
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
GOTOs considered non-harmful
Calamity - avoided! As briefly mentioned last issue, next
week's UKUUG LISA/WINTER CONFERENCE ON SECURITY AND NETWORKS
(Thu & Fri 2005-02-24/25, Paragon Hotel, Birmingham B12 0PJ,
as little as UKP20/ session student rate, preceded by the
first International Exim Conference, with sessions on perl 6,
ntpd, bgpd, LDAP and SPADE) should finish just in time for
dedicated scenesters to hop on the Eurostar and get down to
Free And Open Source Developers' European Meeting FOSDEM in
Brussels (Sat and Sun 2005-02-26/27, Universite Libre de
Bruxelles, B-1050, apparently free), and featuring Alan Cox,
Richard Stallman, and Wikipedia's "The Outlaw" Jimmy Wales.
http://www.ukuug.org/events/winter2005/booking.shtml
- doh, booking closed on Wed, mail for late booking enquiries
http://www.fosdem.org/
- are you going to produce an online encyclopedia of reliable,
authenticated information, or are you just "whistling Dixie"?
You know, our "Blink"-style instinctual snap judgement is that
MALCOLM GLADWELL IN CONVERSATION (7pm, next Tue 2005-02-22,
the ICA, London SW1Y 5AH, UKP8) will probably sell out as
quickly as his "stating the obvious" popular-pseudoscience
books appear to. But even more exotic hairstyles should be on
show the following Tuesday at the launch of REMIX READING (Tue
2005-03-01, South Street Arts Centre, Reading RG1 4QU, UKP2 on
the door), a celebration of Creative Commons-licensed music,
art and poetry in the company of "veteran contemporary
guitarist" Roland Chadwick, ambient electronica artists Yimino
and the magnificently-named "David Meme". And for anyone
wondering whether Reading has the artistic community to keep
this ticking over - to paraphrase "The Office", Reading's a
big place. And when they're finished with Reading, there's
Slough, Aldershot, Bracknell, Didcot, Yateley...
http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=13907
- vs http://www.worldatwork.org/boston2004/photos/photo6.html
http://www.remixreading.org/
- "Future Sound Of Didcot" best name for a club night *ever*
www.lse.ac.uk/collections/alumniRelations/events/20050118t1723z001.htm
- and Mon 28th: UKP8 to see the amazing blogging Bunder at LSE
>> ANTI-MEMES <<
there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/
"better than 6ft-long pic of the Enterprise on fanfold paper":
http://www.romanm.ch/index.php?var1=text/ascii-movies-text ...
back up again - and for your bonus round: guess which well-
known e-commerce site are all the music clips coming from?
http://www.scenta.co.uk/whatthatsong/ ... Widdy of the week:
http://payontime.co.uk/whypay/certificate.html?name=Enron ...
"Worst population animation in British history?" (top link):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/games/population/population.html
..."Yours faithfully, PWC" (please excuse wobbly handwriting):
www.bluesq.com/static_bsq/audit/Review_LuckySquaresBallSelection07_03.html
... you keep sending in puerile Google goofs, so we'll keep
running: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22drug+addition%22 ,
http://www.google.com/search?q=penisoner , semi-neologistic
usage of http://www.google.com/search?q=%22rest+bite%22 , and
using http://www.google.com/search?q=%22semi-skilled+milk%22
leads to http://www.google.com/search?q=%22butter+overflow%22
... plus some surprising (and not-so-surprising) results for:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=satan,%20cupertino,%20california
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
There's a rich vein of irony to be ploughed in the current
stand-offishness of collaborative editors: apps like the
Mac's SubEthaEdit that let multiple users edit the same
document simultaneously. Collaboration in SubEthaEdit's case
seems somewhat limited: its protocol is closed, and creators
the Coding Monkeys aren't that open to porting the app.
MOONEDIT is a two-year old equivalent for Linux, FreeBSD and
Windows. In the ongoing spirit of collaboration, though,
it's closed source too - and there's no Mac version. Perhaps
the only hope for true co-operation in this area lies in the
fledgling DocSynch project, an IRC-based open protocol which
has the barest beginnings of a cross-platform jEdit
implementation. Oh God, but that's *Java*. How bad can this get?
http://me.sphere.pl/indexen.htm
- Moonedit: a compressed, static binary no less
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/faq.html
- protocol "based on open standards"
http://chalks.berlios.de/dokuwiki/doku.php
- and there's the networked version of old tracking python fave, Leo
http://docsynch.sourceforge.net/
- can't we all just get along?
>> 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
"not as good as Amateur Parapsychologist Monthly"
http://mildlydiverting.blogspot.com/2005/01/supper-with-stars.html
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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