It was a real pleasure to see Back to the Future on BBC1 this afternoon. I don't think I've seen it since it first showed up on TV, which would probably have been somewhere around 1989 or so.

Although there were elements which looked and sounded a little out of place nowadays – the gibbering, cartoonish Libyan terrorists were plain embarrassing, and the soundtrack for 1985 scenes sounds horribly out of its time – the core of the storyline still stands up remarkably well, aided by nicely judged performances all round. Michael J Fox was born to play Marty McFly, Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover were fun in their respective dual roles (especially Thompson's rather forward 1955 version of Lorraine) and Christopher Lloyd was great value as 'Doc' Brown.

I've been off work today thanks to a stinking cold and feeling sorry for myself, so a little trip back to the 80s was just what I needed to raise my spirits.

Who needs lawyers when you have the internet? Michael Lewis writes about Marcus Arnold, a fifteen year-old who earned a reputation as a legal expert based mostly on knowledge gleaned from Court TV.

(NB/- New York Times article – free registration required.)

What astounds me is that the various lawyers whose ire young Marcus Arnold earned when he stepped onto their turf couldn't find some legal pretext for getting AskMe Corporation to bar him from their legal message boards. I can only assume the writers who drafted the AskMe Terms of Service were very careful to build in a bulletproof clause limiting the liability of the service in general and the posters.

The real question the lawyers who attacked Marcus Arnold should be asking is why people continued to prefer his advice even once his true age and lack of legal qualifications was revealed. Was he especially good at explaining legal problems in layman's terms? Did he just come across as being so confident that they trusted him implicitly? Did they give more weight to the ratings assigned by people he'd advised previously than to his lack of formal legal qualifications?

It's going to be fascinating to see how this sort of thing develops in various professional fields as people get more used to turning to the internet to get advice and information. Given access to decent reference material, a reasonable level of literacy and decent communication skills there are a lot of areas where a motivated, intelligent and conscientious individual can act as the first port of call for members of the public wanting basic advice about some areas of the law, or social security benefit eligibility, or the rules and procedures governing, say, access to local authority services.

The trick, of course, is to recognise what sort of question you're really being asked and to know your limits.

The current series of Channel 4's Faking It came to an end this evening with the story of Chris Sweeney, punk rocker turned classical conductor.

[For readers outside the UK, the premise of the show is that the production team take someone with no relevant skills or experience in a particular competitive field and hand them over to a couple of mentors for four weeks. The aim is that they'll learn enough to enter some sort of competitive event in the field in question and fool the judges - who aren't affiliated with the show - into believing that they've been doing it for years.]

Sometimes the fun of the show lies in seeing someone who isn't at all sure they have what it takes grow in confidence, but occasionally they get someone who ends up being so arrogant that you want them to fail miserably. (I'm thinking of a certain computer game tester turned racing driver.) Tonight's season closer was one of the former, and was perhaps the best of the series. My favourite moment came towards the end, after the performance, when one of the judges who had correctly identified Chris as the fake was asked why exactly he'd awarded Chris the highest score of the four conductors in that night's competition. Embarrassed wasn't the word… (We were told that the judge later claimed, off-camera, that he'd been "confused." Yeah, right.)

More generally, I liked the way that punk rocker Chris – who doesn't play an instrument or read music – threw himself into the task of learning how to conduct an entire classical piece from memory rather than try to teach himself to read music and learn to conduct. Just to make life a bit more complicated, halfway through his four weeks of intensive training Chris' girlfriend for the past six years dumped him. I thought that he might give up, but he focussed and threw himself into his conducting and did really well.

I think this was the second series of Faking It. Somehow I never picked up on the first, but I'll certainly be watching for the third.

Help! I find myself in complete agreement with Ann Widdecombe.

Scary…

Taking the term "streaming media" a bit too literally, artist Jonah Brucker-Cohen has created H2O/IP, a computer network which uses water as the physical layer.

I have just two (not remotely serious) observations to make. First of all, I dread to think about the sort of volume and pressure that would be required to sustain a broadband H2O/IP connection. Secondly, with this network protocol you'd better hope your system doesn't start dropping bits on the floor.

Some genius has come up with a way round the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: The First Church Of Digital Grepping.

The Sacred Readme is a tad vague, but the church's High Priest believes that "The Meaning Of Life" is encoded in either a popular song, or a Hollywood movie, or an Adobe e-book.

"If only we could figure out which 'work of art' the Sacred Readme refers to, and then grep through the binary representation to extract the divine message," the High Priest explains.

The mission of the church is to make digital copies of every music CD, every movie DVD, and every printed book and then grep the digital version for any tell-tale signs of 'The Meaning Of Life'."

Hey, it's no sillier than Scientology. (OK, so that's not exactly setting the bar high…)

A wonderful site devoted to the art of W Heath Robinson. I first came across Heath Robinson's work in the wonderfully batty Professor Branestawm books, way back in the late 1960s or early 70s. The site contains a tremendous selection of Heath Robinson's artwork. I was familiar with his bizarre inventions, but I until now I hadn't seen much of his other work.

It's hard to choose a favourite from the likes of Multi-Tennis, The screw-stopperer for plugging the muzzles of the enemy's rifles, Some occasions when a gentleman is not expected to give up his seat to a lady and How they cope with the new year's demand for Shredded Wheat. If pressed, I'd probably have to go for Multi-Tennis, just because it looks like fun to watch – from a distance, that is.

Who said the BBC was neglecting Doctor Who fans?

It's the one with… is a search engine which allows you to pick a monster or event and it'll suggest which episode(s) you're thinking of. Though why you'd want to remember some of them is beyond me…

It's the one with A Big Sweet:

The story you remember is probably…
The Happiness Patrol (1988). The question is Why?

Trapped in the Kandy Kitchen, the Doctor encounters the evil Kandyman, who makes sweets that kill.

The Kandyman was killed by his own fondant.

I'd long since stopped watching the show by then, fortunately. "My" Doctors were Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. I lost interest once Peter Davison arrived.

I watched Brotherhood of the Wolf on DVD last night. I'd heard good things about it, but I didn't get round to taking a trip to the cinema so the other week when I was in a foul mood after a bad week at work I picked up the DVD as retail therapy. Then, being my usual disorganised self, I didn't quite get round to watching it for a while.

I suspect that as someone who doesn't know all that much pre-revolutionary French history I missed some subtleties and ironies in the script's treatment of the aristocracy and the priesthood. However, ultimately this wasn't so much a political thriller as a martial arts/horror movie in a historical setting, and on that level it worked well. Samuel Le Bihan's lead character was appropriately cocky and charming and (eventually) pissed-off, Mark Dacascos kicked ass very effectively as Le Bihan's Native American blood brother, and Monica Bellucci was lovely and deadly as a prostitute with an agenda of her own.

The origins of the monster which Le Bihan was hunting turned out to be much less interesting than they might have been, but that slight letdown didn't detract too badly from the preceding two hours or so of mayhem and intrigue. Some of the Matrix-style editing of the fight scenes seemed oddly out of place among the period costumes, but for the most part the fight choreography worked well enough. Once you accept the convention that the bad guys will politely take turns to attack the heroes rather than pile in and overpower him, you can concentrate on how impressively the good guys set about breaking legs, arms and necks as they work their way through the next crowd of baddies.

Not a classic of modern French cinema, to be sure, but a perfectly decent action film.

A while ago I had to stop using Ad-Aware to scan my PC for spyware and the like, because Lavasoft updated Ad-Aware to a version that required Windows 98 or later to run and stopped issuing updated reference files compatible with earlier versions of the program.

I've been thinking about finding a replacement for a while, so I was interested to read in this MetaFilter thread about an alternative program called Spybot. I installed and ran Spybot just before posting this entry, and it found and fixed a couple of nasty registry settings and lots of cookies left over from the odd occasions when I've used Internet Explorer. I'll spend a bit of time over the weekend checking out how far I can automate the scanning and updating process, but for now Spybot looks like a decent product.

Incidentally, it turns out that despite the question posed in the MetaFilter thread Ad-Aware isn't dead at all, just being neglected while the authors rewrite it from scratch for a major update to version 6. Trouble is, anti-spyware software requires frequent updates to keep up with new risks, just like anti-viral software. I'm by no means unhappy with Ad-Aware – I sent Lavasoft a donation in support of their work, and if they hadn't effectively dropped support for my current operating system then I'd still be using their software. But given that it's fairly unlikely that they'll reintroduce support for Windows 95 in their next major upgrade, they've left me no choice but to go elsewhere.

Just a quick note to say that I've made a few changes to my mail server's settings in an attempt to cut out some of the spam I've been receiving of late. All mail sent via mailto: links on this site should still work just fine, and in any case I'll be watching the mail my system rejects very carefully for the next week or so to make sure that I don't reject mail I want to receive. (The main aim of the change is to bar email sent to fictitious addresses within my domains, like hyGu7QA666@thebeard.org or hotsexychix@soreeyes.org. None of the configuration changes I've made should stop legitimate email.)

If anyone emails me and gets a message back saying your message couldn't be delivered/was refused I'd be grateful if you could let me know by adding a comment to this message, or indeed to any post on this site. I'm certainly not looking to bar email from my readers, as long as they're not trying to send me mail about hotsexychix!

The great Linux experiment suffered a bit of a setback today.

I'd planned to install a nice new Linux distribution and spend the next four to six weeks using it as my standard desktop system, so as to establish whether a nice, shiny KDE 3-based system was for me. The problem is, I've now tried two different distributions (Mandrake 8.1 and SuSE 8.1 Personal) and they've both suffered an identical problem. I can get a graphical login and the KDE desktop will appear – albeit slowly, since I'm running on a P-166 with just 64MB of RAM, but that's to be expected. Then I open a window to look at some files, and that works OK: I can go up and down through the directory tree as normal. I can open up the KDE Control Centre, and that works OK too.

Then I try to move or resize a window, and the entire desktop freezes solid, with the image of the window in its original posting and the position I dragged it to. I can still move the mouse, but even the clock in the taskbar-equivalent has stopped ticking, and I could dance on the keyboard for all the good it does for me to get a reaction from the system. I can leave the system alone for ten minutes, but although there's occasional hard disk activity there's no sign of any actual movement. The system will stay up quite happily if I don't start X at login and stay in console mode, but whilst that's going to be handy for debugging purposes it's not much of a solution. Neat and uncluttered as Lynx is, it's not the web browser I want to use every day.

If the system sprang into life after a bit of hard disk activity, I'd put it down to the lack of RAM causing the system to hammer the swap file. If the mouse was frozen along with the desktop, I'd assume that the problem was with the display drivers (which, according to the installation routine, are the correct ones for my rather old Matrox MGA card). When I last had a serious play with Linux a good eighteen months ago (SuSE 7 point something) I didn't suffer this sort of problem, and I haven't changed the hardware since. I need to do a bit more research, but it strikes me that the biggest change that's likely to be relevant to a problem like this is the move from XFree86 3 to XFree 4 as the X Window implementation for current Linux distributions. As XFree86 4 added all sorts of desirable extras, this is rather worrying. Of course, it could turn out that the problem lies elsewhere. But I did try booting into Windowmaker rather than KDE and hit the same problem, which bodes ill for using any graphical environment under Linux on this hardware.

Ultimately I'm only trying to get Linux running on my current, reasonably well-sorted, Windows 95 (OSR2)-based PC in order to experiment for a bit before moving to new hardware, so not being able to get Linux to run isn't a show-stopper. It does however emphasise the extent to which installing Linux on a PC can be a lottery. Given time and patience I'll identify the source of the problem, and I'll figure out what has to be done to fix it. Given enough time and research. The real question is, do I really want to risk hitting a similar problem with my next PC? Is it going to be simpler to buy an iMac and get a complete hardware/software package rather than take a path which may require a lot more work on my part?

I'm not giving up on the Linux installation yet, but I could do without this sort of hassle.

Just a quick note to point out a couple of minor changes to the site's sidebar. Now that content is rapidly scrolling off the bottom of the main page, I've added two ways for you to find old entries if you didn't make a note of the permanent link at the time.

First, there's now a rudimentary site search function. Second, there's now an Archives list which takes you to a page containing each month's posts.

I'm still thinking about whether to add links to a category-based archive. I do assign one or more categories to each post, but they're purely for my own use in administering the site and I don't display the categories on each post. Since moving to the new site I've been adding categories as I realise an entry doesn't fit the existing categories, so they're not terribly well organised. After another couple of months I may revamp the categories into something more usable, and that's probably when I'll decide whether to add a By Category archive. (Unless, that is, you all tell me that you desperately need to be able to look at posts by category.)

The Diary of Samuel Pepys – text courtesy of The Gutenberg Project – as a weblog.

This is either a completely barmy idea or sheer genius, and I'm really not quite sure which. For what it's worth, a similar project can be found at Bloggus Caesari, a weblog by Julius Caesar. The difference being, of course, that Caesar's weblog isn't using pre-existing content.

What I'd really like to see is someone take up a suggestion Tom Coates made a couple of years ago: putting together a weblog ostensibly written by a character from a current TV show. I know that something of that sort has been done for a one-off character from an episode of Buffy which hasn't been seen on the BBC yet, but as far as I know nobody's tried it with a series regular. (Unless, of course, you know differently.)

What with Thunderball being on TV this afternoon, it seems appropriate to mention the CD I'm listening to as I type this. A few years ago David Arnold put together Shaken and Stirred, a collection of cover versions of music from the James Bond films. At the time I remember hearing the opening track, a terrific rendering of Diamonds Are Forever by David McAlmont, and thinking that the album might be worth a look. However, I was unemployed at the time so I didn't follow up and it was only a few weeks ago that I saw a mention of the album somewhere online and thought to look up the track listing to see who else was involved. An album featuring, among others, Chrissie Hynde, LTJ Bukem, Iggy Pop, Leftfield and Pulp could easily have been a total mess, but I decided to treat myself.

The album is as mixed a bag as you'd expect, but overall I'm glad I finally tracked it down. Pulp's All Time High took a few listens to grow on me, whereas Iggy Pop's take on We Have All The Time In The World was obviously a great idea from the first raspy line. Martin Fry's voice suited Thunderball surprisingly well. I liked Chrissie Hynde's Live and Let Die almost as much as the original. (Yes, I know that's rather faint praise for some, but I liked the original quite a bit.) Propellerheads did a nice job of updating On Her Majesty's Secret Service, helped by the fact that the original might just be John Barry's finest Bond theme.

There are a few out and out disappointments, but in fairness to the artists concerned I think my reaction may be in part because I'm just not a fan of their chosen musical sub-genre. I simply don't get what LTJ Bukem did to The James Bond Theme, and Leftfield's Space March took a minor piece of music from what's probably the weakest Bond film of them all (Moonraker – c'mon, did I really need to spell it out?) and wasted five minutes of CD which could better have been given to David McAlmont.

All in all, the album is warmly recommended to Bond fans everywhere.

Sometimes I can go an entire week without seeing any worthwhile new submissions to deviantART, and then in the space of a couple of days all sorts of neat pictures show up one after another.

Following on from Portrait of Sveta 2 on Sunday, today brought two striking photographs. Faceless Notes by ckythomyorke is another exercise in symmetry, whereas Cold Stare Photograph by goteki is a very nice portrait cum winter landscape.

The Infinite Matrix has a rather neat little seasonal short story by John Varley: Beyond Bedford Falls.

In a just universe, there would indeed be a "John Varley Library and Institute for Science Fiction and Screenwriting Studies."

<geek level="high">

Merry Christmas!

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus <north pole >town
[...]

</geek>

More seriously, Merry Xmas to all my readers, I hope the day brings you everything you're hoping for and more.

Yes, you really are a a beautiful and unique snowflake.

I'm always up for a good analogy for bits of the internet. Steven Johnson suggests that weblogs are like short blocks in a large city.

The power of short blocks is ultimately that they create a more even density in the city fabric: because short blocks offer more potential routes from x to y, they diversify the flow of pedestrian traffic through the city. In the long blocks model, pedestrians are funneled onto a few primary pathways, which quickly become over-crowded. With short blocks, they spread out through the entire street system. So you get some people on every street, unlike the long blocks model, which puts all the people on some streets, and no people on other streets. In the long blocks model, you get Times Square interspersed with desolate stretches; in the short blocks model you get the West Village: a bar or restaurant on every corner, a few interesting boutiques or bookstores in between, an interesting mix on the sidewalk, but never so much that you feel crowded out.

If you translate all this over to the Web, it seems to me that the blogosphere is the closest thing going to the short blocks neighborhood: the population density is not nearly as oppressive as what you find on the major sites (much less old media networks.) But it's not as atomized as the world of IM. Short blocks is 50 people on the sidewalk at any given time, instead of 5 or 500. The blogosphere is 50 people on the site at any given time, instead of 5 or 5 million. (Which reminds me of Dave Weinberger's line: "On the internet, everyone is famous to 15 people.") That's a very human scale, I think — it opens you up to new perspectives, but doesn't overwhelm you at the same time.

I see where he's coming from, but I think he's making too much of the idea of "population density." Sharing a city street with 500 people will feel much more cramped than sharing one with 50, but on a web site I don't really know how many other people there are "around me."

I think what's happening here is that it's being assumed (again) that "weblogs"="sites where a group of people gather to interact" (i.e. leave comments.) I've explained before why I think this is a misguided notion of what a weblog is about.