I’ve been maintaining a blog called Gimboland on a server at work for about three months now, but it’s only visible to my colleagues… Since it contains work-related stuff that’s probably just as well, but there’s other stuff going in there which I’d like to make public.
So thank you, Tasty Bits From The Technology Front, for telling me about Blogger. :-)
Love it… /dev/bollocks, a kernel module for producing middle-management bollockspeak.
Mr David Dickinson has the pleasure of being the first member of the public to view gimboland. Go go Dave!
What I want to know is, whose stupid idea was it to use depleted uranium in weapons? I mean, come on, how is that not a crime against humanity?
I love this picture – so geeky. I’m not sure which guy has the more amusing face… Comedy goatee & bandana is good, but oooh, comedy Hunter S. Thompson/Simon Hopper impersonation is a winner too. Such a tough choice.
In case you’re interested, here’s the page it came from… :-)
My eldest brother, Mike, is going to be on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”!!! They’re filming tomorrow, and it’ll be shown near the end of month, about the 24th. Go Mikie!
To get from the last 100 into the last 10 for the show, he had to answer, in ten seconds, the following question: “How many days into a leap year is bonfire night?”. The answer’s about 311 (depending on how you define your fenceposts), and he said 320. This was, apparently, the second best answer. Mental. :-)
So good luck Mike, 7pm to 10pm tomorrow night (Wednesday)!
Thinking (already) about transferring this blog to my space on Frontier’s web servers (http://www.ftech.net/~gimbo/). Of course, that’s not a very snappy URL, but OTOH I have gimbo.co.uk registered, so I could just hook that up to it. It’s about time, really…
Ho hum, hurdy ho, etc.
Ack, Mikie didn’t make it… Apparently he was about a second behind on one of the “fastest finger first” rounds. :-(
Don’t know any more than that right now, except that they had a fun day anyway. I think he’s determined to try again too, and I suppose I’ll have to have a go now too. Sigh… :-)
I think my favourite part of this article is the following:
The Iranians had a clear motive for an attack on an American airliner, following the destruction of an Iranian airbus over the Persian Gulf carrying 290 passengers, including 66 children, on July 3, 1988. The U.S. Navy missile cruiser Vincennes had casually blown it out of the sky despite clear indications that it was a civilian plane. Afterward, the U.S. Navy concealed the fact that the Vincennes had been in Iranian territorial waters at the time, refused to admit error or pay compensation, and handed out medals to the ship’s officers for heroism in combat.
God bless America.
Today’s Counterpunch has some interesting things to say about Ariel Sharon…
Let’s hear it for Reefer Girl, Swamp Women, LSD Lusters, and of course, the unforgettable Forgotten Women…
Much kudos to Bifurcated Rivets for the link…
Another great one from Bifurcated Rivets: the Slashdot Story Generator.
Dilbert quote:
Since when did ignorance become a point of view?
Fantastic! A Crash Course In The Mathematics Of Infinite Sets.
I love this stuff. It’s so barmy.
Idea for a B-movie, 2050: Attack Of The Mutant Spidergoats.
OK, so I haven’t posted to Gimboland for days now. What can I say? I’m SORRY!
Now, on with the show…
The entity marked B-15A in this picture is, as you can probably guess, an iceberg.
A 90-by-20 mile iceberg, in fact.
Bloody hell.
(Thank you, tbtf).
Updated 2004/12/15 as the picture link was dead. Now replaced with one showing B-15 splitting into B-15A and B-15B. See also here.
And yea, I thought I asked you to mow the heavens..
It seems that most of my Gimboland entries lately are comic strips… What does this say about the great uses to which I am applying my vast intellect?
Zope article.
And another (very enthusiastic).
Here’s the FAQ.
Here’s some notes on RDF support, for later reading.
Spotted on the Zope mailing list:
It’s easy to stop making mistakes: just stop having ideas.
From The Zope Book:
Zope has grown and is now a very popular open source application server. At the time of this writing there are 10,500 Zope.org members, 2,700 Zope mailing list subscribers with 2,500 messages a month, 2.5 million Zope.org page views a month, and 87,000 Zope downloads so far this year. Zope has emerged as Python’s killer application.
Groovy.
Latin pun from Frasier:
Semper ubi sub ubi
(Always wear underwear). Excuse the spelling! :-)
This page says: “At the time of this writing, Scripts are not a standard part of Zope and you must download them from Zope.org and install them.”, which isn’t true… Maybe I should tell someone (tomorrow).
Things for me to do at work tomorrow:
Check out this, this, and this.
Point Michelle at this to allay her DTML-deprecation concerns. Point her at some of ensane’s sites too.
I can’t believe how bloody amazingly cool this Zope thing is. Fantastic… I’m ascending the learning curve and at no point have I stopped and said “that’s shit”. It’s been more like a constant stream of “wow, very impressive”, or “nice”, or “good design…”, etc., etc., etc.
Love it.
Botan Clan: Had a well wicked weekend in the company of Ben & Gail in Newbury… Checked out the British Museum and the Imax, and ate the best pizza I’ve ever tasted. Also discovered the secret to enjoying London. :-)
The meaning of the word “hallmark” is changing. Historically the word has referred to a stamp in a metal object used to identify it or its origin. (At least, this is the meaning I picked up from watching The Antiques Roadshow back when I didn’t have a choice whether to watch it or not). For some people, this is still the primary meaning of the word.
However, another meaning has evolved over the last few years, and I expect to see it grow. It’s the usage of the word “hallmark” to describe a certain kind of “day”, not a public holiday but a “celebration” day of some sort which, when you look into it, turns out to be completely artificial.
“Father’s Day” is perhaps the canonical example. “Mother’s Day” grew out of the traditional “Mothering Sunday”, which was (apparently) the one day of the year when servants of English households could go home to see their mothers (at Christmas, of course, they’d be required in the household). Once again, I’m making this up from memory and may not be entirely accurate, but you get the idea. But “Father’s Day” is entirely artifical, introduced not for laudable reasons of equality, but in order to allow greetings card companies to sell more greetings card. Introduced, in fact, by the greetings card companies – of which the prime example is the “Hallmark” company.
Hence, a “hallmark” holiday is a completely artifical event for the purpose of generating revenue, and we all fall for it like cattle, bless us.
And that’s what I mean by the meaning of hallmark changing. :-)
For web development, Python looks harder than ASP, but that’s because it’s deeper than ASP (at least on Linux). ASP does let you do some things very easily, but if you want to do something it doesn’t give you for free, you may not be able to at all. This situation is ameliorated in the win32 world by COM components, which are what actually make ASP a viable development platform. Sure, you could write your own on Linux if you needed, but it’s loads of effort on Linux and you’ll probably fuck it up anyway (COM is complex).
On the other hand, Python: It’s a well-designed language, not broken, it comes with an excellent library which probably makes your task easy anyway, and if it doesn’t, it’s easy to write your own, and the tool is right… If the choice is between writing an MD5-hashing module in Python, VBScript, or a COM component, believe me, that’s a no brainer.
Gimbo: make your bookmarks available to your self through Zope, with a better interface. :-)
The fantastic Moaning Goat Meter.
You don’t want to miss Multibabel – or indeed, “They would not wish the elasticity of MultiBabel of disturbarli”.
A couple of cool Zope products: Security Audit, Value Handler, and a management interface hack.
And here’s a howto on setting up an SQL-backended page hit counter.
I haven’t visited the ever-excellent mr pants for a while, but it’s good to get back there… Here are just a few nuggets I picked up tonight:
Some excellent pie charts.
Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution!
BloodHag! – “The faster you go deaf, the more time you have to read!”
The KLF’s What The Fuck’s Going On? – the whole thing!
But really, check it out for yourself. It’s the blog that made me want to blog. :-)
I’ve made a few subtle changes to Gimboland:
The logo’s back (link was broken, easy to fix but I just hadn’t bothered).
The sidebar colour’s changed a little (slightly darker, less salmony, hopefully easier to read).
Metacrawler box has moved (‘cos I never use it).
A couple of other extremely subtle changes that no-one but a lunatic could notice but of course had to be done. :-)
As I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s infinitely better for it…
Penny Arcade is kinda hit and miss, imho. A couple of goodies: goody, goody, cthulu goody, goody…
I was off sick yesterday, and I’m off sick today. This “flu” thing (read unidentified generic virus inducing colds and sore throats) finally caught up with me… I knew it would when, on Sunday, two seperate people told me how amazing it was that I hadn’t had it yet. Gits. :-)
Must check out Dieter Maurer’s book, Building Dynamic WebSites with Zope – it’s supposed to complement The Zope Book pretty well…
There’s lots of Chris Morris stuff at cookdandbomd, including some Brass Eye and Blue Jam downloads – fantastic!
I’m currently reading the “Geefe Columns”, and they’re pretty cool, in a very Chris Morris kinda way. Which makes sense, I guess.
If Angel doesn’t have breath, how can he smoke so moodily?
Bloody hell… It seems that for every call made to Comic Relief, BT collects 36 pence. More here.
Here’s a nice story… A sand pendulum in Port Townsend, Washington created a remarkable image during the recent earthquake. Check it out.
There’s a Real Audio clip of Goldfrapp covering Olivia Newton John’s “Pysical” here. Unfortunately I have no capability to listen to this at work, so I’ll have to wait until I get home.
Come on people, haven’t you heard of mp3? (Or better still ogg vorbis. No, too much to hope, I know).
Hmmmm… Once again, the Gimboland archives (on the left hand side of this page) seem to be diminished… There should be February stuff in there too. Must look into this. But I think I’ll wait until this page moves to gimbo.co.uk, which it should do soon…
One for Ben:
perl -le '$_="6110>374086;2064208213:90<307;55";tr[0->][LEOR\!AUBGNSTY];print'Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to Take That And Party.
Fractal coffee.
“You want nano’s with that?”
Yellow is the colour of knowledge. And this is a knowledge smartie.
Time is the wave and space is the particle.
This week’s Need To Know selection: www.slub.org – generative music, Accurate Future Predictors, T-Bone’s Stress Relief Aquarium 3, Swedish Chef Web Search!
Here’s what happens when you use a web application development system which doesn’t give you named variables.
If you don’t get it, here’s a clue: “If I had a pound for everyone who vists this site – wait a minute, I do!” :-)
(From NTK 2001-02-02).
Boing Boing Selection: Postmodern Essay Generator, Martin Amis on pornography, Ulysses For Dummies.
I know it’s passe, but what the heck. I like these: Only 52 Days, Gravestone, Freebase, Zits, Wassup?, etc.
Iiiiiiiinccccrrrrereeeeeeeedibly busy at the moment, so not much time for blogging…
Had my first aikido lesson yesterday – fantastic fun. Four of us went along (Rich & Emma, Jala & me) and all agreed that it was marvellously friendly & welcoming, interesting, and just brill. :-) So expect more tales of joint locks from now on…
Don’t know what aikido is? Check out Cardiff Ki Society, Ki Society US, and AikiWeb.
Spotted on Slashdot:
Not to nitpick or anything, but…
I hear this all the time. OS X is NOT “just BSD with some apple stuff slapped on top.” It’s not even truly BSD. It’s a Mach Microkernel with a BSD Compatibility layer on top. That means it replicates the BSD system calls but is not truly a BSD Kernel. It’s kinda like saying WINE is windows. It’s just an implementation of an API. Granted, the OS X implementation is a lot truer to correctly pretending to be BSD than wine is for windows, but it is NOT BSD. It just incorporates a lot of the BSD stuff that apple found useful
Oy, Gimbo! Check this out…
Friendly beezies for the blind and the deaf. Dogs are just great.
Time for another Need To Know roundup: Debian Rulez, Fart Burning, WAP Elite.
Turning an SGI powerhouse into a fridge, Mechanical Hit Counter, Find The Apricot.
Well, it’s been a quiet month so far in Gimboland. I seem to be getting busier and busier. Currently working on RADIUS stuff in python, which is nice and hairy. Once that’s done I need to get back to Zope and figure out why LoginManager isn’t working for us. Urgh… It never stops.
On a lighter note, aikido last night was a blast. Definitely starting to remember stuff now. Since I can’t allow myself to write a Gimboland entry without linking somewhere, and since I’m in an aikido mood, here’s a link to some Ki Exercises on the excellent Body, Mind, and Modem site.
Horseriding tonight, so achy thighs tomorrow…
How are the drums on Badly Drawn Boy’s “Another Pearl” so damn funky?
Here’s an interview with Guido van Rossum, creator of Python… Fairly disappointing in terms of content, I thought, but a couple of interesting comments. He mentions a Python catalog a la CPAN, which would definitely be a good thing.
A comment from a Slashdot reader (in the discussion attached to the article) which I wholeheartedly agree with:
Unless your code is for you and only you, readability is perhaps the single most important feature of your code.
That’s just so true… A counterargument which immediately springs to mind is that correctness is the most important feature, but thinking about it, I think readability really is more important. I mean, you are, inevitably, at some point, going to write code which is not correct. When that happens, you or someone else has to correct it – and if it’s easy to discern what’s going on, that’s bound to happen quicker, and which a greater chance of success.
Another take: Knuth has said (eg here) that computer programming is not (or should not be) just about communicating your intentions to the computer – it’s also about communicating your intentions to other human beings (including yourself). If you subscribe to that, then readability is king.
From Need To Know:
Typically, the first thing anyone noticed about this research on ukcrypto was the site sets cookies, leading to just the kind of petty factional in-fighting that lost us the Spanish Civil War, people. Stay on target, cookie and anti-cookie-ists.
I love the “lost us the Spanish Civil War, part. :-)
I’ve just noticed that Orbital can still do good techno, they just save it for the singles. This is why Orbital albums aren’t very techno any more: they’re albums. ;-)
Can’t wait ’til the first time I hear Orbital on Radio Two.
Also can’t wait to hear them playing live on Radio One tomorrow night, which reminds me: I must install RealAudio today!
Haven’t been keeping up with Zope news… Here’s some of the new stuff since the last time I looked: DocBrowser (potentially very cool), ZUnit unit testing for Zope (woo hoo – getting well into unit testing lately), WidgetTag (definitely handy), Zope News Tag (maybe good, have to see how it does its thing), ZWeather (probably won’t ever use it), File System Counter (not sure what this is, but might be cool), RSS Channel Management (could be great), a ZDG preview (jolly good), a How-To on defining extra product directories (useful for setting up a shared products directory), Example Form Validator (don’t know what this is, but want to check it out), TestMaster (same comment).
Cool. Also 2.3.2 is underway, as is planning for 2.4, the most salient feature of which (right now) seems to be that it will require python 2.1.
Hey Andy, things to do tomorrow:
Read about xml-rpc and Zope.
Read this xml-rpc discussion.
Read these notes on xml-rpc in Python.
Tell Michelle about free Zope hosting.
Try to use that DocBrowser get your RADIUS code online for that demo… :-)
Text processing in Python with mxTextTools: Advanced Tips.
Python’s a great language for text processing. Apparently the mxTextTools module makes it even better/faster. Here’s an article about it, which I’ll try to read myself later on in the week. :-)
Wow, I was right… That DocBrowser product is indeed very cool: I used it this morning to take a tree of Python code and create browsable, searchable copies of the files online in, er, about a minute. Which was handy as I was about to give a presentation at which I wished to refer to my code, and my alternative was – yick – printing.
Zope rocks. It’s as simple as that.
Have applied this howto to create a shared Zope product directory, and have one of my Zope instances using it. Tomorrow I’ll point the other (more importnant) instance at it too, and pay close attention. Looks cool though, and should make my life easier. ;-)
Nothing to do with me: www.gimbo.net, Labradorblanding Gimbo, Nikum and Gimbo For Sale, The Babe TGP, I IS GIMBO GIMBO THE HUMAN
Sod it, just search google for gimbo – unfortunately the link to “Gimbo The Circus Freak” is dead. Shame.
Malc! Check out these pages on www.photo.net: light, tripods.
Something to ask someone you’ve just met at a party: Would you go off with the aliens in their Mothership at the end of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, like Richard Dreyfuss did?
Scary Bunny, courtesy of the ever-fabulous mr pants, who wants us all to say “whooo!” a bit more.
Here are some amusing/interesting aikido anecdotes.
I recently approached my employer about the possibility of obtaining a “reading dynamics” course which promises to include both speed and comprehension, which I feel I could do with improving: I’m definitely a slow reader, but I have to read a lot so it seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately the application was turned down, but adversity being the mother of surfing I went out and looked on the web. Found a few interesting pages…
Suggestions For Improving Reading Speed is a page at Virginia Tech which looks pretty good (though I’ve only read the first fifth or so so far – see, I’m slow!). Particularly interested by their assertion that reading slowly actually causes worse comprehension. Will definitely be checking this puppy out further.
Speed Reading Strategies at Memphis University (?) looks similar – very in depth, free, practical advice with motivation.
www.mindtools.com has a similar page. Whole site looks interesting, in fact… :-)
www.roadtoreading.org offers a free 6-cassette set of lessons for free, but only to Americans, alas. Still, interesting, especially as the course I was applying for cost more like 170 UK pounds. Makes you think…
OK, that’s enough for now I think – enough for me to come back to and think about.
Recent Zope stuff I need to check out: best practice for advanced site setup, a quick and dirty search engine, and an article on Zope for the Perl/CGI programmer (which might be nice for other programmers to look at).
Bought a couple of aikido books at the weekend. Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere, and Angry White Pyjamas.
“Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere” is an introduction and guide to the martial art, covering its philosophy, history, theory of defence and attack, development exercises, and actual techniques. Very well written, and oodles of lovely illustrations – definitely pleased with this one. Aikiweb has two reviews, both glowing: one, two.
“Angry White Pyjamas” is one man’s account of his time on the year-long Tokyo Riot Police course in Yoshinkan Aikido – reputedly the toughest martial arts course in the world. I’m about a third of the way in, and it’s been a bit bemusing. I mean, it’s entertaining and very interesting, but his characterisation of aikido and its practitioners differs from everything else I’ve seen so far – basically everyone comes across as a psycho. ;-) Ahhh… interestingly, Aikiweb has four reviews of this book (more than any other), and they’re not particularly glowing: one, two, three, four. Anyway, glad I got it, ‘cos it’s interesting. :-)
A whole page devoted to chicks in headphones – Fantastic! Check out the Sennheisers on her…
In case you missed it, there’s been a bit of a furore this week about a newly-discovered hole in Microsoft’s web server, IIS, which can be easily exploited to acquire complete control of the machine running the server. Nice!
But even better, Need To Know say:
Tempting to end with this *corker* of a story about the BBC’s IIS5 servers getting hacked using that new Microsoft Printer ‘xploit, and a false Hear’Say story put in its place. Of course, before we lift it wholesale from the Reg, maybe we should corroborate it a bit. Hmm. Doesn’t the BBC use a bastard hybrid of Apache on Solaris, with a smit of IIS4 on NT4? That’s odd – it appears to have disappeared from the Register’s easy-to-understand frontpage. Well, it must be true, because look, here’s the reputable Industry Standard running the same story almost verbatim. Surely they must have checked the details? Or even looked closely at the URL that got sent around from the “anonymous tipsters”: complete with peculiar at-symbol-followed by large number in the middle. Doh!
BBC Story – other recent obits: Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy
Register Story – or, just in case: NTK Copy
Standard Story – so who’s still at the Standard Europe anyway?
Love it!
I’ve taken to listening to Radio 4 in the car on the way to work. It’s the only thing on at that time in the morning that I can bear to listen to…
Help. I’m 26 years old and I prefer Radio 4 to Radio 1. Must… Retain… Youth…
Here’s a cool site… Image Of The Day – funky images and discussions thereof. Check it out…
How-To: Extend Zope Dynamically with Hotfixes – nice.
ZShell, the Zope Shell – nice.
ZExternalNews Product – nice.
Zope’s nice.
Notes on SSL and Zope: Apache, ZServer, and SSL, Managing http/https URL Links (and SSLAbsoluteURL product), apache+mod_ssl+PCGI Virtual Serving, Run your Zope server with SSL support, Virtual Site Root product.
I just spotted some sweets in the local corner shop called “Fruity Nads”.
The sweets, not the shop.
Zope ZODB corruption-recovery: Tranalyzer and usage notes.
The marvellous Julie took me to see the marvellous Goldfrapp at the marvellous Union Chapel in Islington last Friday – for which I love her dearly.
The venue’s incredible – it’s a working chapel so the seating is all pews, and stained glass windows for the lights to bounce off (Rich pointed out that it probably looked pretty cool from outside too).
As for the gig itself, well, definitely the best thing I’ve seen in a long while… Two encores, two standing ovations, a cover of Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical”… What more could you ask for?
Oh yeah, but we nearly didn’t make it to this country’s fantastic rail system. Thanks, Thatcher.
Utopia single is out on June 4th (the day before my birthday!). Be there or be a 4-dimensional hypercube.
Pictures from a Goldfrapp concert in Stockholm here.
Towel Day – a tribute to Douglas Adams. Carry a towel with you on May 25th to commemorate the liff and work of a great man.
pornolize is fairly cool. It’d be a hell of a lot cooler if it generated pages with URLs that you could actually bookmark, put in weblogs, etc. but hey, cluelessness abounds on the internet, innit?
I think it’s about time I put this picture up here again, it’s so fantastic:
It’s from this Railgun Contruction Project site, which is pretty cool, in a geeky kinda way. :-)
I’ve been reading Arthur C Clarke‘s The Deep Range for the past few days, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s made me want to read Moby Dick, so…
Moby Dick, Moby Dick, Moby Dick, Moby Dick Search
Also: Moby, moby, Moby Duck, Assassinations foretold in Moby Dick (but don’t miss the “note to the credulous” in the latter).
Cool notes on acquisition, which is heavily used by Zope. Well, “cool” if it’s possible for an object-oriented concept to be cool, anyway. Cool like mp3s, not cool like The Fonz, I guess. :-)
Gimbo’s Gadgets: “There is a fine line between madness and genius and Dr. Gimbo trips over it every day!”
How true, how true…
Big up thanks to the bass-matic Mr Gareth Evans, who took me and two other lucky fanboys to the filming of top Welsh TV pop-zine “The Pop Factory” (yowzers, kids!) at Porth last night. As promised, lots of standing around waiting for something to happen, interspersed with “spontaneous” applause orchestrated by some woman in headphones, and the occasional bit of music.
Which is, of course, why we went… Goldfrapp were there! Excuse me while I jump up and down excitedly at the memory that yes, there they were, not ten feet from my actual physical presence, performing Lovely Head and Utopia (twice each). Mmmmm…
The other bands were called Alfie and King Adora. Alfie were nice enough but only did one song, and King Adora are just formulaic guitar rockers dressed as Nicky Wire in his heyday – but the kids seemed to lap it up, bless them. My companions, being gentlemen of discernment and taste, all agreed that Goldfrapp ruled the roost.
The first thing they filmed was a link from Goldfrapp to Alfie. At that point we were still off guard, so Malc & me got hauled up to stand next to the presenters while they tried to remember their lines. We were told to look cool. Yeah, right… Anyway, should be interesting to see – big fame at last. I asked the girl I was stood next to how long she’d been presenting the show and she said this was her first time, she’d done some presenting on Disney and was really an actress. So imagine my surprise when I found out later on that she’s in “The Allstars” (cue universal cries of “who?”), who are on the show, co-presenting and promoting their video (heaven forbid that they actually perform live – if they could). They’re a Hear’Say-alike, basically – pretty young things being eaten up by the pop machine. Like, wow.
If anyone (ahem, Malcolm, ahem) wants to go see Goldfrapp perform in Birmingham on the 19th of June, you can order them from here.
Here’s a link to the Pop Factory website – but be warned, it is a famous victory of style over content, and if you’re using IE under Windows (you poor things) it’ll take over your entire screen – respect! Er, not.
Oh yeah, and the show airs next Wednesday night at 11:30 on S4C, apparently, repeated next Friday at 6:20pm.
Snowball Earth – interesting because a) Julie told me about this theory a few weeks ago and it blew my mind, and b) I’m currently reading James Lovelock’s Gaia, and in the very first chapter he’s banging on about the impossibility of this having happened. :-)
I was drunk last night, crawled home across the lawn. By accident I put the car key in the door lock. The house started up. So I figured what the hell, and drove it around the block a few times. I thought I should go park it in the middle of the freeway and yell at everyone to get off my driveway.
Steven Wright
Demon Internet have a Webwatch-like finger daemon: but is that a good thing?
The Stereo MPs – absolutely fantastic.
Bloody hell – what have I been doing for the last 10 days? It’s been a bit madcap to be honest… Had a well wicked birthday party at Pete’s place in Bristol, went to the Amnesty International Benefit, We Know Where You Live, Live (fantastic – don’t miss it when it’s on TV, this Saturday I believe), went shopping in London and on the London Eye, nearly made it to King Lear at The Globe, actually made it to The Mummy Returns at the Guildford Odeon, came back to Cardiff, Julie had her second interview at the RSPCA, went to aikido (yay!), had a curry, went to the Frontier company meeting, got smashed, went to Sam’s Bar, got more smashed, had a hangover, had a Thai, did a car boot sale in aid of my trek (38 quid – not bad), went for a walk in the Brecon Beacons with Malc The Guide, and watched Grosse Pointe Blank & Ike’s Wee-Wee.
Today I went to work. :-)
Really, it’s been mad… Oh yeah, and I failed to record either of the transmissions of that Pop Factory episode… Argle!
Love it.
Yo Mike & Claire! Welcome to the internet!
Check it out: Jessie licking my head – eewww…
Don’t miss paragraph 126 of this affadavit containing some mental, mental, mental scientology stuff, and nice juicy Tom Cruise mentions.
Freddie Mercury and his cats – what a guy.
Reasonable explanation of byte order here.
What looks like a very deep article on multi-threading, probably so deep I’ll never read it. ;-)
Tired of continually typing in your SSH passphrase? Sure you are! Well, never fear, help is at hand:
Using ssh-agent for SSH1 and OpenSSH, and Using ssh-agent with ssh1
Also, a nice introduction to ssh, and a ssh-agent tutorial. :-)
Red Hat/Gnome users: edit /etc/gdm/Sessions/Gnome, and replace: exec /usr/bin/gnome-session --choose-session Nautilus with: exec ssh-agent /usr/bin/gnome-session --choose-session Nautilus
then at the start of your session, use ssh-add to add keys to the agent, and hey presto. Of course, you have to do it each time you start a new X session, but that’s only fair, innit?
New Zope stuff to check out:
Zope Shortcut Product looks pretty cool. An mxDateTime-based implementaiton of Zope DateTime has gotta be a good thing. And I’d better show Iain this Zope helpdesk product? :-)
I don’t really grok Megatokyo, but I like it nonetheless..
Everyone get on over to Mr Pants right now and read the story of how the fennec fox got to be so cute.
Classic pants.
theory.org.uk action figures – including Michel Foucalt!
Keenly aware of the fluidity of social identities, this 6.5″ Michel Foucault waves his baton in poststructuralist style at all challenges. Shrouded in a special removeable French cloak and with a built-in thoughtful head movement, this superb action figure is essential for both professional philosophers and junior postmodernists.
More zope grooviness: ZODB for Python Programmers
Here’s a round-up of reviews of Spielberg’s new movie, A.I.. Most of them contain spoilers, and most of them are highly negative:
Moriarty at Aint-It-Cool pans it.
Shen at Aint-It-Cool really pans it.
David Ansen at Newsweek quite likes it.
David Denby at the New Yorker fairly pans it. (This link will be out of date soon, I’ll try to remember to find a more permanent one).
Is the CIA lying about its effectiveness against Islamic terrorists?
I expect so. :-)
I thougt this was in the archives, but as it isn’t, I’m reposting it…
The Hacker Tourist – a long (and to my mind, really great) article by Cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson whose centrepiece is a fibre-optic cable from Cornwall to Japan, but which takes in loads and loads of other interesting stuff along the way. If you want to learn something about how international telecoms really works, check this out…
(Oh, and if, like me, you didn’t know what a backhoe was, here’s one).
images.google.com – search for images on the web. Very nice indeed!
Karl Popper, Hunter S Thompson, Helen Hunt, The Deep Field Image, and of course, Geri Halliwell Nude.
Great utility, think I’ll point a direct link to it over on the left…
Mad About Aikido, an aikido site built and maintained by Mark Hutchinson, who’s thrown me around a few times… :-)
Functional Programming In Python, parts one, two, and three.
Here’s a Zope Page Templates Tutorial for me to work through some time soon… (2001-07-09: The same thing on a single page).
Something I just found lying around my hard drive: the original screenplay of Being John Malkovich – complete with utterly mental alternative ending.
This is quite a bit darker than the movie, a bit more bizarre (as if that were possible), and some of the cut scenes are great (especially the “I’m a puppeteer” stuff near the start). Cool.
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, the short story upon which A.I. is based.
I have four tickets for the Beta Band’s Manchester Uni gig on the 21st July for sale. If anyone wants them, or if anyone has any suggestions for good places/ways to sell them, I’d love to hear it.
Champagne: Posh cider or what?
Let’s hear it for Psyllium husk!
Everybody go and see Shrek as soon as possible… Funniest thing I’ve seen in ages, with some fantastic Disney piss-taking, which is always a good thing. :-)
“Bad News” – The Noam Chomsky Archive.
The whole monkeyfist site looks pretty interesting, in fact…
Today’s Need To Know selection:
mod_msff.c – Microsoft Free Friday – an Apache module which rejects connections from Internet Explorer if it’s a Friday. Nice!
Google Zeitgeist – pretty cool, although the O/S pie chart is rather depressing…
EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH — DAY
With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his exercises — grepping, installing new packages, logging in as root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts in Python.
YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer’s strength flows from code maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax… more than one way to do it… default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?
YODA: No… no… no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.
LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?
YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from now.
Directing the strokes of Ockham’s razor – current thinking on quantum reality. Note that I have no idea what any of this means. :-)
Python Imaging Library – very cool. A bit too corporate for my liking, but very cool none the less.
Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It.
I especially like:
Microsoft generally charged about $30 for an upgrade to their $500 software packages until somebody noticed that the growth from new users was running out, and too many copies were being bought as upgrades to justify the low price. Which got us to where we are today, with upgrades generally costing 50%-60% of the price of the full version and making up the majority of the sales. Now the trouble comes when you can’t think of any new features, so you put in the paperclip, and then you take out the paperclip, and you try to charge people both times, and they aren’t falling for it.”
Visual Elements – “a visual interpretation of the periodic table of elements”.
Definitely teetering on the “style over content” razor edge, I feel.
A workman who was extremely fond of garlic boarded a bus, and sat himself down next to a haughty, sour-faced woman. She immediately became aware of the garlic fragrance, and observed icily, “It’s a wonder they don’t run a special bus for persons who insist on eating garlic.”
The workman cheerfully answered, “They do lady, you’re on the wrong bus.”
Idioms and anti-idioms in Python – every home should have one.
Some Python resources:
Dr Dobb’s Python-URL, which I’ve definitely had trouble accessing in the past, seems to be working at the moment.
Active State Python Cookbook – quite a few interesting bits to check out here. Examples… Handy threading idiom, A ring class (“circular list”), A “bunch” class (not sure what I think of this), capturing stdout & stderr properly, network monitoring using heartbeats (urgh – use SNMP instead, that’s what it’s for).
Truce Or Dare, interesting article about the BSA (Business Software Alliance) in America using scare tactics and paranoia to boost software sales. Slashdot discussion here. Nice quote from there:
Did anyone else see the irony of an anti-piracy campaign going around and scaring people and threating them with surprise raids unless given money? We live in a strange world, methinks.
:-)
Well, this whole Brass Eye fuss is depressingly typical, isn’t it? Think it might be time fax my MP in fact.
In case you missed the show, Cook’d & Bomb’d has it in DivX and Quicktime. And here’s some DivX software to play it with.
Apocalypse Now Redux – an extra 49 minutes. Sounds good to me.
I hadn’t heard of Heart Of Darkness (the book by Joseph Conrad, not the film), but that sounds good too…
I’ve been “thinking camera” a bit lately with regard to my China trek. Bought a nice lightweight tripod (at a car boot sale, of course), now it’s time to think about camera/lens/film…
I could probably spend from now to November reading www.photo.net, an utterly fantastic site… Die-hard photographic myths.
The Canon FD series, which includes my camera, the venerable A1.
The Canon FD Documentation Project has lots of manuals, including the A1 manual, and – yes! – the A1 manual in PDF format.
Another A1 page, with some interesting bits and the manual (again), in a very readable layout.
The Right To Read – more scary dystopian futures from the good people at GNU.
Well, did the banquet for my trek on Saturday night, and a great night was had by all, by all accounts. Being in charge I couldn’t really relax and enjoy it, but I guess I enjoyed it in my own way – and as time passes, I’m enjoying the evening more and more. :-)
The best bit of all, however, was when I asked Julie to marry me and she said yes – which was nice.
“Elite” was, of course, the greatest computer game ever created. So how about a reverse engineered version written in C? Fully operational, based on the original BBC assembley source, download the source, browse it, compile it – fantastic.
Better yet – browse the original BBC basic source. Hardcore!
Northern Ireland politicians agree to language decomissioning – as, sadly, do the BBC.
I’ll be referring to these lots over the next few days so I’m linking to them here: the ZPatterns wiki – if anyone can figure this shit out, let me know – and the CoreSessionTracking wiki.
For example the aikido technique Ikkyo was developed from a common kenjutsu technique dealing with two opponents, one attacking from the front and one from the rear, to avoid a downward cut from the front you would step into the attack slightly and simultaneously wheel to the side with a sharp hip movement throwing your arms into the crossing attack at the opponent behind you, letting the blade strike flesh and the original attacker miss you completely with their strike, from this position a second wheel and step back and a cut from the top right to the bottom left will cause the first attacker to drop into two neat seperate segments.
Nice piece on affordable architecture. Quote:
It takes years to accumulate the necessary abilities to produce a piece of architecture. You can do small work at a young age, but the technical aspects, the business aspects, the aesthetic aspects — all of this you’re juggling throughout your career, and trying to improve and mature. I tell my students: You may be able to start practicing two or three years after you graduate, but you’re not really going to be an architect until you’re 45. It’s just the nature of the beast. That’s probably true in medicine, law and all the professions – except the oldest one, of course.
I thought I’d put these notes on The Satanic Verses up here already, but apparently not.
Well, I have now. :-)
Transcript of recent IRC chat with Jim Fulton on Zope’s component architecture (loooong).
Now this is entertaining: an argument about whether or not Jesus Christ actually existed as an historical figure or whether he was just a composite constructed in the second century AD.
Revelation: I’ve just realised that “roast chicken” flavoured crisps aren’t chicken flavoured at all – they’re stuffing flavoured. Wow.
The secret connections between “Calvin & Hobbes” and “Fight Club” REVEALED!
Don’t miss this.
Check it out: the fabled LINUX number plate for sale on ebay UK (story).
Shame it’s done with a 7 not a 1, but on the other hand, everyone round here knows who owns L1NUX… :-)
Other peoples’ weblogs: Bruce Sterling, Rebecca Blood, Megnut.
OK, so Rebecca’s Pocket, which I discovered yesterday, is full of great stuff. I think this is definitely going to have to go in the sidebar. Here’s a quick sampling produced by a quick trawl this morning:
Your Kung-Fu is weak!; The Visible Barbie Project; The Quick-Fit Programme ; The Surveillance Camera Players (inc. 1984) ; Reading with Rover ; Gothic babe of the week.
Gimboland is currently maintained using Blogger, which is a great tool. However, I feel like I’m starting to outgrow its capabilities, so I’m starting to think about creating a zope-based site (perhaps at gimbo.org.uk initially)… That’s not going to happen immediately, mind… :-)
For now, I think I should play with the Blogger API and indeed PyBlogger
diveintopython.org – a free Python book “for experienced programmers”.
Hah – cool. Further to my post below, I’ve written a short python script to upload a template to a blog. Now I can maintain the Gimboland template using emacs on my local disk, rather than using Opera (which, whilst a great browser, sucks as a text editor). Expect a much more fluid look from now on. :-)
A couple of groovy bits from slashdot: What is Ockham’s Razor?, and some interesting comments comparing the internet boom with the age of steam – short piece though, not enough to satisfy me personally.
The band Locust (which is essentially a bloke called Mark van Hoen) have a new offical website, www.locustsound.com. Unfortunately it seems to be lacking active content at the moment (eg the discography is just a page of album/single cover pictures), so this unoffical site is still the best resource.
I have only one Locust album, Morning Light, but is does happen to be possibly my most favouritest album of all time ever, so I’ll be looking forward to the new one in November.
One of my favourite books is Brian Eno‘s A Year With Swollen Appendices, which is basically his diary for the year 1995 along with some essays from that time (the “swollen appendices”). I think I love this book so much because he’s living a kind of life I’d quite like to lead, but probably never will: this is my equivalent of reading “Hello” magazine or something. :-)
Anyway, I mention the book now because I’ve just come across the website of a great idea which I first came across in one of the appendices: The Long Now Foundation, whose aim is to promote long-term thinking in this age of increasingly short timeframes. Quote:
I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.
Fancy that.
Notes on dual booting linux and win2k: boot.ini (1), boot.ini (2), anandtech, large disks.
Also Linux on 1024 cylinder, and Removing the lilo boot manager (boo, hiss).
Gimboland now has a hit counter. Rejoice!
Programmer-philosophical question: Is well-documented “bad” code better than poorly-documented “good” code?
I guess it depends on what the code’s used for, how long it’s going to live for, is it ever going to be modified or maintained, who’s going to be doing that, and just what do you mean by good and bad anyway? :-)
If “bad” means incorrect but it’s well-documented, at least you’ve got a chance of fixing it. If “bad” means badly-designed, it might be another matter – great documentation doesn’t help much with a totally overblown or just muddleheaded design.
If “good” means “it seems to work” then it might not actually be working properly anyway, and lack of documentation might bely a lock of thought/design leading to such a situation. If “good” means “does exactly what we want, no question”, then it really depends on if it’s ever going to need to be changed, and how complex it is.
Hmmm… Also depends on the language being used, I bet. ;-)
Just rambling.
Well, that’s interesting… I’ve just read on popbitch that before exporting the cartoon to Japan, Bob The Builder‘s creators had to give him a fifth finger, so he would not be confused with the Yakuza – who chop one of their fingers off during initiation rites. :-)
It is with regret that I note that britannica.com is now virtually useless without a paid subscription (and yet still fires adverts at you), so I guess it’s time to remove it from the sidebar. Pity. Still, these days the web itself is a pretty good encyclopaedia for most purposes, and there’s always wikipedia for the adventurous. :-)
Apologies for neglect of Gimboland recently, I’ve been rather busy rebuilding my computer – getting it to boot Windows 2000 (spit spit spit) and Debian GNU/Linux (hurrah and huzzah). Getting sorted now (in fact I’m writing this entry from my spangly new desktop), so should be back. :-)
These books suck and these films suck – apparently. :-)
Frequently updated snippets of WTC news.
Given the choice between jumping into a river to save a drowning man, or taking a Pulitzer-prize winning photograph, what exposure and aperture would you use?.
As we prepare for 3 minutes’ silence in reaction to Tuesday’s events, here is a thought-provoking article. Some snippets:
Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British and American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a word appeared in the mainstream media in Britain.
In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not for US backing.
Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims – principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth. This fact is censored from the Western media, whose “coverage” at best minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, put it this way: “Western foreign policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence.”
That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken seriously when he now speaks about the “shame” of the “new evil of mass terrorism” says much about the censorship of our collective sense of how the world is managed.
I’d better stop now before I quote the whole article. Read it.
Did CNN use 1991 footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets?
Cool – looks like the “Nostradamus prophecy” of Tuesday’s events was in fact made up by somebody seeking to debunk Nostradamus, some time ago. Search for “abstract” on this page.
I keep reading/hearing assertions that the WTC attack was “not an attack on America, but an attack on freedom, truth, democracy, etc. etc.”. I’d just like to state for the record that I don’t believe that, ie I think it was an attack primarily directed at America, and while we’re at it I’d like to say I don’t believe that America particularly stands for truth, freedom, or even democracy. Particularly truth. So I think I’m going to be finding the news singularly depressing over the next year or so, drenched as it will be in what seems to me to be absurd rhetoric. And that, as Forrest Gump would say, is all I’ve got to say about that – at least for now.
We’re in the minority, but we’re out there.
Very interesting reading: a 1999 interview with Osama bin Laden. And here’s a map to accompany it.
There’s loads of good stuff at Rebecca’s Pocket today, so I’m just gonna link through to there. :-)
OK, so this is lifted straight off of slashdot, but I found this interview (regarding security) quite interesting.
Ever wondered why the music industry sucks so much? Why on any given day, Radio One plays the same six records over and over again? Well, Salon has feature on the situation in America, which of course influences us over here – check it out.
LaTeX notes: Getting started with LaTeX, a LaTeX tutorial, simple usage notes and another tutorial, beginning LaTeX, etc.
Just got back from seeing Moulin Rouge!. Absolutely fantastic – do not miss this movie! It’ll make you laugh! It’ll make you cry! It’ll make you groove! It’s got Kylie playing an absinthe-induced hallucination, it’s got Nicole Kidman in some incredible outfits, and it’s got more tunes than you could shake a stick at, lovingly crafted together into a gorgeous, fun, entrancing, and just all round thoroughly wonderful movie. I haven’t enjoyed a movie anywhere near this much since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – and I think I enjoyed this more. It’s such a rare film that makes me want to just sit there through the credits and soak up its last moments, and not miss anything, and this one did it. I’d recommend doing so, in fact, ‘cos there’s a nice little bit at the end of the credits and anyway the music’s cool. :-)
OK., enough raving. Time I went to bed. Night!
Don’t miss: Explaining Arab anger (BBC news).
The man standing beside me in the crowd was sobbing his heart out. Along with dozens of other people, his wife and children lay crushed beneath the rubble of the collapsed building we were looking at.
It had been brought down quite scientifically by two big explosions. The multi-storey apartment block was demolished because somebody thought Yasser Arafat was there. He wasn’t.
It was destroyed by two Israeli jets which flashed out of the sky on that Friday summer morning in Beirut during the Israeli siege of 1982.
A letter from the Dalai Lama to the American President.
Time for some showbiz gossip, courtesy of The Friday Thing:
It’s been an expensive seven days for Albarn-fronted-hairy-cartoon-chart-toppers The Gorillaz who this week spent £20,000 on producing an acceptance speech for The MTV Awards. Damon Albarn (from Blur) and Jamie Hewlett (from Sussex) flew to New York with their high-budget animated epic after being tipped off that their single, ‘Clint Eastwood’ was due to scoop the MTV2 viewers choice award. However, much to their surprise – and everyone else’s amusement – the gong actually went to rivals Mudvayne, leaving the hairy onez red-faced and significantly out of pocket. Of course the whole incident is made even funnier by the fact that the very same Gorillaz turned down their Mercury Music Award nomination last month saying that winning would be like “carrying a dead albatross round your neck for eternity”. Still, the £20,000 prize money would have come in handy.
Introducing the excellent wikipedia!
I was planning on being in London on Thursday October 18th, so this (and this) is just what I wanted to hear about. Typical! :-)
I’m loving wikipedia… It’s great! Semi-random sample of stuff I’ve been reading: horse breaking, hyperreal numbers, Simon Magus – and here are some I’ve contributed to: aikido, Moeihei Ueshiba, grue. This thing is insane: anyone can edit anything, completely freely. Mental. Hope it works out…
Nonstandard Analysis – The Study of the Infinitely Small – cool little article on the background of calculus, which you don’t have to be a mathematician to understand, provided you’re open to the idea of your head being flipped open and your brains stirred up a bit. Ultrafilters… Mmmmm…
Donate online to the Red Cross Afghan Crisis appeal.
The algebra of infinite justice – excellent piece.
SNMP in python: pysnmp, and yapsnmp. Haven’t worked out which is best yet…
A lovely word I must use more often: intertwingled.
Grandiloquent dictionary. Good to see defenestrate in there, alas no intertwingled. :-)
Pawsense, software for detecting when a cat is walking on your keyboard. Windows only, alas.
Some NSS (Name Service Switch) bookmarks which I need for work: page in glibc manual, nsswitch.conf(4) man page, random mailing-list post.
(Hmmm, think it’s probably worth remembering about the glibc manual in its own right).
Gaah, it’s just too quotable:
Twenty years ago the United States launched a war against Nicaragua. That was a terrible war. Tens of thousands of people died. The country was practically destroyed. Nicaragua did not respond by setting off bombs in Washington. They went to the World Court with a case, the World Court ruled in their favor and ordered the United States to stop its “unlawful use of force” (that means international terrorism) and pay substantial reparations. Well, the United States responded by dismissing the court with contempt and immediately escalated the attack. At that point Niagara went to the UN Security council which voted a resolution calling on all states to obey international law. They didn’t mention anyone, but everyone knew they meant the United States. Well, the United States vetoed it. Nicaragua then went to the General Assembly which, two years in a row passed a similar resolution with only the United States and Israel opposed. But of course, the United States is a very powerful country.
We should look very carefully at this anti-terrorism coalition and who is joining it and why. Russia is happily joining the international coalition because it is delighted to have U.S. support for the horrendous atrocities it is carrying out in its war against Chechnya. It describes that as an anti-terrorist war. In fact it is a murderous terrorist war itself. They’d love to have the United States support it. China is very happy to join because it wants U.S. support for its wars in western China against Muslim groups who, in fact, were part of the coalition in Afghanistan 20 years ago and are now fighting for their rights in China, and China wants to suppress them brutally and would love to have the United States supporting that. Indonesia is very happy to join because it wants continued U.S. support in crushing internal uprisings as in for example Aceh, as it has been doing very brutally for many years. Unfortunately they already have U.S. support, but they would like to have much more support. Algeria, which is one of the most murderous states in the world, would love to have U.S. support for it’s torture and massacres for people in Algeria. And if you look around the world, those who are happily joining the coalition are doing it for reasons that should send shivers up their spine. There’s a lot of applause for the coalition, but it will disappear very quickly if you look at the reasons why countries are joining. If that’s the new internationalism, we should not want to be part of it, we should be strongly opposed to it.
The best thing to do is read widely and always skeptically. Remember everyone, including me, has their opinions and their goals and you have to think them through for yourself.
Cool, now using fetchmail, exim, and (oh yes!) mutt for email. Fantastic to leave Microsoft rubbish behind and use some decent email software at last… Now for procmail…
petert.likes.to.shag.loads.of.biteengirls.com – nothing to do with me, I hasten to add! :-)
I heard on the BBC this morning that the food being dropped into Afghanistan along with the bombs is merely a symbolic gesture, in that it would take six months of food-drops at that rate in order to feed the population of the country for, er, one day. Go America!
Here’s a nice little Aphex Twin interview which I can’t quite take seriously because it refers to Limp Bizkit and Slipknot as “Extreme Noise Terrorists”. Oh, pur-lease…
Cor, so that’s what Mark van Hoen looks like.
mrpants selection: the lameness of life through the eyes of advertisers, Pugshots, The Liposuctionator!, Go Nads!
Charming Python : pydoc and distutils modules (August 2001). Mentioned therein: PEPs 256, 257, and 258.
Spotted on a .sig:
The trouble with doing anything right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.
I hate broccoli, and yet, in a certain sense, I am broccoli.
More developerWorks python articles to check out: My first Web-based filtering proxy, Curses programming, Reloading on the fly, Using state machines.
pabber – “an attempt to replace Microsoft Exchange on my desktop with Pine and other Linux utilities, without sacrificing all of the features of Exchange in the process”.
Malkovich! Or indeed, gimbo!
Saw Amelie last night – another goregous gorgeous movie. Incredibly feelgood, but not in a cheesy shmultzy Hollywood way. Lovely movie. Here’s the official site, and a page (in French) about Audrey Tautou.
Strange that there are two films you must not miss, both set in Montmatre, out at the same time. :-)
Good Onion piece: Freedoms Curtailed In Defense Of Liberty.
Less topical, but more amusing (from here):
Screaming Japanese Schoolgirls Overturn Greenspan’s Bus
TOKYO — Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan described himself as “shaken but all right” Monday following an incident in which several thousand excited young Japanese fans mobbed and tipped over his tour bus after a speech at the Tokyo Dome. “Mr. Greenspan is at the height of his popularity in Japan right now,” said Martine Engers, a publicist for the chairman, who is currently in the midst of a 41-city world tour. “And I guess we simply weren’t prepared for this level of fan hysteria.” Before military police restored order, thousands of frantically speculating youths drove the Nikkei average past 16,000.
Got the new Locust album, Wrong on Saturday. It’s very different from the last album, Morning Light, which was very pastoral – the only instruments on Wrong are vocals and analogue synthesisers, and it’s got an almost claustrophobic feel to it – but it’s really growing on me, a couple of tracks in particular. Groovy.
www.touristofdeath.com – this week’s All Your Base, I guess…
Now this is just sick: www.unixsex.com
Gopher No. 2 has received the “hot pepper cable”, which Shumake has smeared with a jelly-like coating spiked with capsaicin — the chemical that puts the pow in chile peppers. Not realizing that he is chewing on the high-tech equivalent of an eye-watering habanero pepper, the gopher chews for a while before it stops and begins to gnash its teeth. It pauses, as if pondering the scenario, then drops the cable to move on to easier eats.
Some Linux audio stuff: www.linuxsound.at (loadsa links), www.demudi.org (multimedia distribution based on debian), GDAM (DJ tool), pd (audio programming environment), Linux Music & Sound (book).
LINX mrtg graphs – a very pleasing bumpy line, I feel…
The way Dave Thomas describes it, he and his staff were trying to track down a series of unusual bugs in Windows, when they stumbled across something that really worried them. There, on their screens along with the code they were debugging, was the name and password they’d just used for Microsoft’s Passport service. Worse, it was in plain text, and readily accessible. As he looked more deeply, he realized that creating a worm that could recover that information would be, in his words, “trivial.”
xtradius, a free radius server.
I’ve decided I must use the word avec more often.
Afghans give surprise to US-led coalition – interesting article on what’s really happening, militarily, in Afghanistan.
…the military resilience showed by Taliban in defending the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan has surprised both Pakistani and US military officials who were particularly impressed by the Taliban military skills in repulsing attacks from Northern Alliance and in re-capturing the area…
Some nicely cynical accounts of recent charity concerts in America, courtesy of salon: Paul McCartney’s gig in New York, which sounds bad, and Michael Jackson’s gig in Washington, which sounds much much worse (although may have looked good at least once).
Hey Brits! Think you’re living in a democracy? Then you might be interested in this little peek into our corridors of power.
Damn it, python just keeps on getting better and better. Here’s an article about a whole new concept, and its accompanying keyword in python2.2: Iterators and simple generators. Really funky – I mean, I realise it’s incredibly sad and geeky of me, but this is actually exciting stuff from where I’m sitting. I’d say “kill me now”, but I’m enjoying it too much…
What, that’s not enough great python stuff for you? Tish! OK then, how about this groovy article with some cool things to do in python’s aleady marvellous interactive mode. Possibly most intruigingly, it brings us to deep_reload.py, “an import hook for Python versions 1.5.2 and above that causes the reload() command to act recursively, reloading all of the modules that a given module imports”. Ooooooh, nice…
Still hungry for more? Alright, try this: the final draft of a complete online book called, oh yes, it’s GUI Programming with Python: QT Edition.
Annoyances with the latter:
Fixed font size for the text, which is a pain while using IE (though Opera will be fine).
Some of the images are broken – presumably they’ll fix that.
It assumes you’re going to use an IDE called Blackadder, although thankfully you don’t have to.
Whaaat? That’s still not enough crunchy python goodness to satisfy? Fine! Sift through this: Pyro, “a basic Distributed Object Technology system written entirely in Python”; diveintopython.org, another online book; a command line filter for processing MIME messages; pSQL, which wraps a MySQL table up in objects that feel like standard python constructs; and finally, Developing Games with Python using the Simple Direct Media Layer. I don’t know, kids today…
misterpants says it best: Twin Civil War buffs make tiny clay cats and dress them in civil war uniforms, hey you… buy emu, and this is the best: Land of Lincolns.
Thrown into this weird mix at the convention was a Col. Sanders look-alike who showed up unannounced among the Abes. The Colonel fended off inquiries initially by saying he’d come because, ‘Somebody’s got to feed all these Lincolns.’
zmag.org – looks like lots of good stuff here, will look further later (‘cos I’ve spent all day today staring at a screen). Cheers, Ed. And Hi, Alex! :-)
America’s Air Force Public Affairs Office released this report on how they kept the National Military Command Center running during the Sept 11th crisis. It’s quite interesting, if a little cheesy towards the end.
Finished reading Are You Dave Gorman? by Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace last night. Very funny book, I really enjoyed it. The Gorgeous Heather, who lent it to me, said she got tired with them relentlessly taking the piss out of the Dave Gormans they met, but I have to say, I didn’t feel the same. Definitely a laugh-out-loud book.
Some websites I found from the Dave Gorman site above:
Danny Wallace, Dave’s faithful flatmate, whose website could really do with more content…
Bill Bailey – gotta love Billy Boy – but again, little actual content here.
What Should I Put On The Fence? – they won’t let him chain a bike to the fence, so now he’s going to chain other stuff to it instead. Amusing and depressing at the same time, kinda like Seinfeld.
Dean & Nigel, experts on blending in.
Apparently this page has someone who sounds uncannily like Madonna singing The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round over the backing track of Ray Of Light. Haven’t been able to check it out yet though…
Noam Chomsky on The War On Terrorism. As ever, Chomsky’s got loads of insightful stuff to say, with plenty of interesting background.
Which tells us that Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that. On the same day, the leader of Western civilization dismissed with contempt, once again, offers of negotiation for delivery of the alleged target, Osama bin Laden, and a request for some evidence to substantiate the demand for total capitulation. It was dismissed. On the same day the Special Rapporteur of the UN in charge of food pleaded with the United States to stop the bombing to try to save millions of victims. As far as I’m aware that was unreported. That was Monday. Yesterday the major aid agencies OXFAM and Christian Aid and others joined in that plea. You can’t find a report in the New York Times. There was a line in the Boston Globe, hidden in a story about another topic, Kashmir.
The world looks very different depending on whether you are holding the lash or whether you are being whipped by it for hundreds of years, very different.
The war against terrorism has been described in high places as a struggle against a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by “depraved opponents of civilization itself.” That’s a feeling that I share. The words I’m quoting, however, happen to be from 20 years ago. Those are…that’s President Reagan and his Secretary of State. The Reagan administration came into office 20 years ago declaring that the war against international terrorism would be the core of our foreign policy….describing it in terms of the kind I just mentioned and others. And it was the core of our foreign policy. The Reagan administration responded to this plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself by creating an extraordinary international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world, primarily….well, partly nearby, but not only there.
That is the culture in which we live and it reveals several facts. One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn’t fail. It works. Violence usually works. That’s world history. Secondly, it’s a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it’s primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror. Now that’s close to universal. I can’t think of a historical exception, even the worst mass murderers view the world that way. So pick the Nazis. They weren’t carrying out terror in occupied Europe. They were protecting the local population from the terrorisms of the partisans. And like other resistance movements, there was terrorism. The Nazis were carrying out counter terror. Furthermore, the United States essentially agreed with that. After the war, the US army did extensive studies of Nazi counter terror operations in Europe. First I should say that the US picked them up and began carrying them out itself, often against the same targets, the former resistance.
The Christian Science Monitor, which I’m reliably told is one of the best-informed, most balanced, newspapers in the world.
We’ve just got back from the Glee Club, a comedy club in Cardiff Bay… Tonight is Julie’s last night in Cardiff before she departs for a six-month training course, so this was the send-off. None of us have been to the Glee Club before, but the bay has a bit of a reputation as being overpriced trendy shite, so we weren’t quite sure what to expect… I have to say, fitst and foremost, the comedy itself, was pretty good. We had three acts (all pretty straight stand-up, although the last guy did some musical stuff too), plus compere, who was also pretty good, so definitely no complaints there.
However, the place itself absolutely blew chunks of crap everywhere… I mean, we paid £12.50 to get in, so we expected good stuff – we were expecting the full “comedy club” treatment, a smokey room full of round tables and jocular punters – whereas what we actually got was a bright room full of school-style desks all pointing the same way (mmmm, really great for conversation between acts) and, oh yes, those overinflated bay prices (£12.00 for a bottle of Blossom Hill? Er, that’s £3.99 at our local. Jeee-zus). As I say, the comedy was good, which almost made up for it – but the icing on the cake was being told that Julie “had to leave” because she was falling asleep on my shoulder. What? Bunch of nazis… I tell you, the whole place was (as usual) a machine for raking in money, and to hell with any concept of doing things right/well/etc. Oh yeah, and it’s impossible to get a taxi in the bay on a Saturday night.
Verdict: avoid, unless you like shopping at Gap, in which case it’ll probably be right up your street and you’ll be happy to bend over and take whatever the management want to give you for your £12.50 plus excessive bar prices.
gnu-radius – yikes! It even does snmp…
Five lines of C++ which will crash Windows XP. Five pretty innocuous lines too, I note…
The full text of Adison-Wesley’s 1994 book Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker – excellent!
Electromagnetic bombs – they’re going to wipe out civilisation!
I’ve been quite enjoying Goats recently – the idea of aliens trying to sell meat on tap over the phone has a strange appeal to it, and this is just classic. Yahtzee!
Oh, man… I love this one – that punchline is beautiful…
Well, I think this is the best piece of journalism I’ve seen in a long time… Especially the bit about the chisel. Also from our correspondent: Placards and peace missions.
Tonight, I’m catching a train to Haslemere, in Surrey. On Sunday, I’m catching a plane to Beijing. When I get there, I’m going to spend five days walking fifty miles of the Great Wall of China, then spend a couple of days in Beijing, then catch a place back to Heathrow, a coach to Cheltenham, and a train back to Cardiff.
There’s a website all about it here.
Why on Earth do people use Google to search for CNN, when they could just type www.cnn.com into their browser??? I mean, come on, it’s a fairly obvious one to guess.
The Nostradamus query graph is pretty depressing too. Follow the herd, people.
I’m back. The trek was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life – an incredible experience. Still totally knackered though, so that’s all I’ve got to say right now.
Depressed to be home…
The Last Time I Saw bin Laden – very funny, provided you feel we should be able to joke about these matters (I do, btw).
Lego goodies: a lego robot which solves the Rubik cube, and – oh yes! – The Brick Testament. Humans, eh?
The Selling of ‘Free Trade’: Nafta, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy. Grumble, grumble, grumble…
Advanced filesystem implementor’s guide – all about the exciting topic that is journalling filesystems.
I’m currently reading John Simpson‘s A Mad World, My Masters, which a good friend lent me on the plane back from Beijing, and which helped make an otherwise depressing flight enjoyable. It’s an incredible book, one of those you just can’t put down. The tales this man has to tell are incredible. It’s a whole big scary world out there, people.
I’ve also picked up a copy of The River at the Centre of the World, by Simon Winchester, simply because it looked ace. I’ll let you know how if it’s any good or not…
At last, a PDA which I want.
More depressing news from the promised land: Pork Feeds Religious-Secular Tension in Israel.
Wow. Windows XP user accounts are, by default, administrator with no password. Once again, cluelessness abounds in the Micro$oft camp…
How foot and mouth is fuelled by computers and cluelessness.
The epidemiologist Professor Roy Anderson, of Imperial College London, told the Commons Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee last week that he had asked Maff-Defra recently for the database of farm locations by which the spread of foot and mouth disease had been monitored. Immensely helpful, they sent him the data, but the co-ordinates they provided left him perplexed. Half the farms he tried to look up, as Prof Anderson told the committee, “were out in the North Sea”.
Some vaguely amusing celeb-spotting tales which I don’t have time to read on this page. This one caught my eye:
My friend Billy was in a hotel in the states and he walked into a lift and Bill Murray walked in after him.
*doors close*
Billy: Hey, aren’t you Bill Murray!?
Bill Murray: Yes, yes I am.
Then Bill Murray gets my friend in a headlock and starts giving him a noogie and says “And nobody in the world is going to believe this happened!!!”
Well worth waiting for it to download and sitting through the into: The Cow Bondage Song – very funny, and very disturbing. Definitely not for the faint-of-heart. :-)
I read this book (Wittgenstein’s Poker) back in the summer, and greatly enjoyed it. No idea why the Guardian’s only just got round to reviewing it.
Heard Philip Glass‘s violin concerto on Classic FM on Tuesday night while I was cooking, and really loved it. I’ve heard a few of his pieces before, eg Koyaanasqatsi, Einstein On The Beach, and Dracula – but this was the most “classically” classical music of his I’d heard, if that makes sense, whilst still being readily identifiable as Glass. Must pick up a copy…
Hmmm… The Borg design pattern – an interesting alternative to singleton. I must consider this further.
Freedom or Power? by Bradley M. Kuhn and Richard M. Stallman.
Even when there is no monopoly, proprietary software harms society. A choice of masters is not freedom.
I’ve just been handed this remarkable picture of myself, Rich, and Jon at last year’s company Christmas party. No recollection whatsoever, no idea what’s going on at all.
Caption ideas to gimbo@ftech.net, please.
bookbrain.co.uk – groovy site. Tell it the book you want to buy, it’ll tell you which online retailer provides it the cheapest.
Oh dear… Remember the reports about instructions for making a nuclear weapon found in Afghanistan a week or so ago? Remember it making the front pages of some of the tabloids? Well, you can bet those same tabloids (and indeed the BBC, shame on you John Simpson), won’t be admitting that the document is in fact a parody dating from 1979.
I got my trek photos back from the lab yesterday – all twelve films – and have so far managed to go through one film and put the good ones online. Here they are, and here is my favourite.
First person account of Taliban prison rebellion.
Who wants to go horseriding in Mongolia?
That’s right – I do. :-)
Some interesting comments about mobile phone jamming, and mobile phones in hospitals, from the RISKS Digest.
The no-cellphone policies in hospitals are today mostly based on the fear that clueless phone users might operate phones in the immediate vicinity (with a couple of centimeters) of critical equipment. As soon as the mobile phone is a few meters away, field strength will drop well bejond the 3 V/m levels against which medical equipment has to be EMC immunity tested by the manufacturers (EN 50082, IEC 601-1-2).
A couple of short Chomsky articles, via Robot Wisdom: the US is a terrorist state, more fundamentalist than Iran and “Globalisation is a conspiracy of the Western elite to establish private tyrannies across the world”.
Better yet, here’s a transcript of the presentation discussed in that last article.
So in August 1998, Clinton bombed the Sudan, destroyed half of its pharmaceutical supplies and the factory that produced them. The consequences there are unknown. The few attempts to estimate the toll, the death toll, are in the neighbourhood of tens of thousands of people — by the German Embassy in Sudan, by a few independent investigators, who have looked. Actually nobody really looked carefully because nobody cares! It’s not important, it’s normal, it’s ordinary for a couple of bombs to have the effect of leaving tens of thousands of corpses in a poor African country.
Something comparable, though probably on a considerably greater scale, is unfolding right in front of us at this moment. What the consequences will be we do not know and probably never will know in any detail. But what we know is that these are the expectations on which Western civilisation is relying as it lays its plans.
Chomsky then goes on to discuss space-based missile defence systems, and explains that they’re actually intended not merely to defend the US, but to aid it towards complete (and malevolent) dominance of the world.
China’s top arms control official simply reflected common understanding when he observed that “Once the United States believes it has both a strong spear and a strong shield, it could lead them to conclude that nobody can harm the United States and they can harm anyone they like anywhere in the world.”
This is scary, scary stuff… If you thought the cold war years were bad, just you wait until 2020. :-(
Well, I’ll be watching either this or this on Friday night. :-)
Lightweight languages – a report on last weekend’s Lightweight Languages Workshop, LL1, at the AI Lab at MIT. Interesting stuff.
I liked:
He countered criticisms that Scheme is just lots of insane silly parentheses by demonstrating how XML was just lots of insane silly angle brackets. A fair point well made.
I’ve put some medieval costume tips online. These were originally part of the banquet pages on my trek site but I’ve now removed those banquet pages, and having received a request for these costume tips I thought this was probably the best thing to do.
Question: What’s 110 feet tall, filled with Helium, and was crucified on the cross at Calvary so that the sins of the world would be forgiven?
Answer: Jesus The Hot Air Balloon!
(Thank you, Mr Pants).
www.engrish.com – compendium of Japanese Engrish. Fantastic.
Ouch…
A recently rediscovered drawing by Leonardo da Vinci has been destroyed by restorers attempting to clean it. Leonardo’s delicate inkwork was erased when restorers submerged the drawing in a solution of alcohol and distilled water, a common restoration intervention.
There’s this Irish band called Blink who I’m a bit of a fan of… Saw them live at Cardiff back in my student days (supporting someone – er, Echobelly? – whom they outshone), and their 1994 album, “A map of the Universe by Blink” subsequently became one of my favourites. Alas I lost the CD about four years ago and since they’re fairly obscure, hadn’t picked up a replacement copy though I kept telling myself to do so.
So imagine my surprise and pleasure when my girlfriend told me she’d found the disk in amongst her musicals (which I’m sure I checked)… Had a very happy evening on Friday reacquanting myself with such greats as “Fundamentally Loveable Creature”, “Going to Nepal”, “There’s Something Wrong with Norman’s Mom”, “Is God Really Groovy?” and the incomparable “Separation”. Bloody fantastic.
Here’s another Blink fansite, and the official site, which unfortunately seems very broken.
Don’t miss this story about New Orleans and the trouble it’s in. [rw]
In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water.
… despite the damage [hurricane] Allison wrought upon Houston, dropping more than 3 feet of water in some areas, a few days later much of the city returned to normal as bloated bayous drained into the Gulf of Mexico. The same storm dumped a mere 5 inches on New Orleans, nearly overwhelming the city’s pump system. If an Allison-type storm were to strike New Orleans, or a Category 3 storm or greater with at least 111 mph winds, the results would be cataclysmic, New Orleans planners said.
Some python goodies: Infrequently Answered Questions, notes on the import statement, WeakLists are handy for the publisher/subscriber pattern.
Slightly over-literal interpretation of the word “crisp” in the BBC’s graphics department, methinks (search for “crisp, clear signals”)… [ntk]
Naughty children to be registered as potential criminals. [ntk]
Andy, in case you ever need them again (I hope you don’t), here’s where to get Mandrake 8.1 RPMs.
Does Isreal want Arafat out in order to precipitate a Palestinian civil war? [rw]
Two new weblogs for me to check out, courtesy of Si: Virulent Memes, and The Null Device – http://dev.null.org/ – excellent!
Oh wow, here’s a blast from the past… Something I found in my early surfing days and haven’t seen for ages: The Story of Eit [original version]. Classic.
What job gives you irresistible sexual magnetism, optional anonymity and a comprehensive nervous and physical breakdown? Executioner. [null]
Review of The Complete Sagas of Icelanders – sounds tasty. Now I know what to get my Old-Norse-reading, Egil’s-Saga-enthusing friend Dave for Christmas. :-) [rw]
During the Gulf war, Britain and the USA pounded southern Iraq with 96,000 shells containing depleted-uranium. This has resulted in an alarming increase in the incidence of leukemia and of congenital defects (read: “horrendous deformities”) amongst newborns in the area. Best of all, depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.1 million years, so that’s basically it for that part of the world. [rw]
Excuse me, but surely that’s a crime against humanity?
Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools for Linux, Linux Project Management Tools
If you sit in Madonna’s seat, don’t pretend to be Madonna.
… intended solely for organisms high enough in the food chain to appreciate the beauty of wanton marine life and hardcore crustacea.
Some cool medium format photos of Tibet.
I especially like this one, but then I’m a sucker for portraits.
Apparently someone in Hollywood is making a movie about Harold Shipman, starring Robert de Niro… It’s called The Old Dear Hunter. :-)
