If you tried to access the site over the last couple of hours the chances are you saw all sorts of bizarre error messages or half-formatted versions of the page you requested.

I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.1 about three hours ago, only to discover to my horror once I'd already deleted a whole bunch of files that my chosen Secure FTP client couldn't cope with uploading non-empty subdirectories. (At that point I could have just restored from the last full backup without losing any content, but I'm stubborn about these things: once I'd started, I was going to finish the damned upgrade no matter how long it took.) I ended up having to upgrade my installation one empty subdirectory at a time, then fill every subdirectory with the correct files and folders, so the process took a while.

Anyway, everything has been reactivated now and at first glance I can't seen anything acting broken. If you come across anything that's not working please either post a comment or (if the problem is stopping you from posting a comment) email me and I'll get right on it tomorrow morning.

Dahlia Lithwick takes a break from explaining the ways of the US Supreme Court to Slate's readers to lay claim to the invention of the wiki:

With all due respect to Ward Cunningham, I'd like to take issue, for a moment, with the claim that he is the originator of the wiki. Because anyone who's had a child can assure you that collective public authorship, collaborative editing, and anonymous generative correction—those wiki hallmarks—have been around since Mrs. Cain first brought Baby Cain over to Uncle Abel's house dressed only in a too-thin fig-leaf onesie.

I took my small sons to visit family over the holidays. As invariably happens when one wants to show off one's young, the smaller one's face exploded into great green ropes of snot only seconds after deplaning. The consumptive Victorian wheeze followed mere hours later. And suddenly, he was no longer my baby. He was a server-side wiki. [...]

Marjane Satrapi talked to the New York Times about making a film of Persepolis:

Ms. Satrapi's poignant coming-of-age story is drawn in a simple yet evocative style, which conveys maximum feeling with deceptively naïve images in minimalist black and white. It was first published in 2000 in France, where she has lived in self-imposed exile for 12 years. When the book was released in the United States in 2003, she said, Hollywood executives offered to buy the rights for adaptations that included a "Beverly Hills, 90210"-esque series set in Tehran. An ardent filmgoer who has served as a juror at the Cannes Film Festival, she concluded that making a filmed version of her own story was a bad idea.

For more stills from the film, see my post from last year.

Courtesy of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, some hands on time with the iPhone. (No, not really.)

[Via The Tao of Mac]

Tim Bray ponders the pros and cons of linking to Wikipedia:

In a recent ongoing piece, I mentioned the "Canada Line", a huge construction project currently disrupting Vancouver. Motivated in part by the 2010 Winter Olympics, it's a subway/elevated train connecting the city core, the airport, and everything on the path between them, including a big strip of central Vancouver and Richmond, the suburb with the airport. (It's called the "Canada Line" because the biggest chunk of funding is from the Federal, as opposed to provincial or city government). Since I'm writing for the Net, I wanted to link to it. I did a quick search for its Web site, which also turned up a pretty good Wikipedia entry on the subject. The question is, which to link to? The answer isn't obvious.

[Excellent discussion of the notion that even Wikipedia links are 'fragile' - i.e. vulnerable to decay in the long-term - snipped.]

If we really care about links being useful in the long term (and we should), maybe we need to abandon the notion that a single pointer is the right way to make one that matters. If I want to link to Accenture or Bob Dylan or Chartres Cathedral, I can think of three plausible ways: via the "official" sites, the Wikipedia entries, and Google searches for the names. [More generally, I should say: direct links, online reference-resource links, and search-based links. I'll come back to that. [...]

I've thought about this issue a fair bit lately, though not so much with reference to Wikipedia links as with regards to links to the Internet Movie Database.

I almost never link to a film's official site, unless it's because I'm pointing to a trailer that's only viewable at that site.¹ With TV shows, even though many of those I'm interested in are serviced by active fan communities, I tend to link to the IMDB entry rather than a fan site, and again I rarely link to an official site for a TV show. I do this on the assumption that the IMDB (which I've been using since it was called the 'Cardiff Internet Movie Database'²) is the richest, most stable source of information and links about any particular film or show. If the IMDB went away, or committed suicide by turning into a subscriber-only site, I'd have a serious problem remaking all the TV and film-related links on this site, but I don't see a good alternative right now. I've toyed with the idea of making that sort of link a Google search, so that you'd be pointed to whatever the collective wisdom of web users thought was the most useful site about a particular film or show, but somehow it doesn't feel right to point you to a bunch of search results. I suppose I could always follow the example of finance-related web sites, and follow each link with something like [Official site] [Google] [IMDB] with appropriate links for the title in question, but that seems awfully inelegant. The sooner the likes of Tim Bray and some of the clever people commenting on his post engineer some sort of robust, browser-independent standard for offering multiple destinations from a single link the better.

In the meantime, does anyone reading this have any strong feelings on the subject of my habit of linking to the IMDB (or to Wikipedia)? Would you rather I link to the most directly relevant site and risk the link breaking when a studio doesn't maintain a domain, or are you happy with my sending you to a site that may be one step removed from the best source of information on the subject I'm talking about and may force you to click a second time to get to where you really want to go? How would you feel about my linking to a Google search query so you can pick the site you want to go to for yourself, guided by the blessed PageRank?

¹ Another factor is that the domain name purist in me has always disliked the idea of studios buying up domains incorporating a film's title when they have perfectly good domains of their own to hang a site off. I think they'd do much better to have sites for films in the form www.universal.com/insertmovietitlehere rather than hogging www.insertmovietitlehere.com or www.insertmovietitleherethemovie.com.³

² Yes, that was a Wikipedia link. Did you see what I did there?

³ The last option is the most palatable if studios simply must have a free-standing domain name for their film, but it's very much still a bad option. I know the marketers would argue that they're marketing a film not a studio so they don't want to force potential viewers to remember which studio is making their film, but I can't imagine that many casual filmgoers memorise URLs on posters or ads anyway: surely much of the time they use Google or the IMDB to find an official site anyway?

Tom Coates posted photographs of a neat bit of art he had a hand in that'll apparently be showing up in Google Earth and Google Maps any week now.

What really happens when you burn a candle at both ends? Not what you'd expect, I'll wager…

[Via GromBlog]

Prank or crime?

Police in a Wiltshire village have been trying to get to the bottom of an underwear mystery.

Around 30 pairs of knickers have been draped over road signs and gravestones in Purton, near Swindon.

No-one has reported the items as stolen and they all appear to be new and of quite good quality.

Phil Elliott from Purton Police said: "If it's a practical joke and someone could just let us in on it, then that would be great."

He said police had been recovering various pieces of women's underwear since November.

He added: "We don't know if it's a criminal offence or a prank. If it's a prank, please tell us."

What do you think? (I'm thinking 'prank.' Or 'inept viral marketing campaign.')

[Via Progressive Gold]

The Longest Train takes more than two minutes to pass by.

Imagine the length of the platform you need to adequately service the damned thing.

[Via Videosift]

I think this story speaks for itself:

In a fit of rage, a Romanian doctor cut off a patient's penis during surgery and then proceeded to mutilate it.

The 36-year-old Romanian man had gone into Bucharest hospital to have corrective surgery on one of his testicles. During the operation, surgeon Naum Ciomu lost his temper, picked up a scalpel and hacked off the man's penis.

To the shock of the nursing staff, he then placed the penis on the operating table and proceeded to chop it into small pieces before storming out of the theatre, the Metro.co.uk website reported this week.

Afterwards, Ciomu claimed he had been under stress and lost his temper after he accidentally cut the man's urinary channel and 'overreacted'. [...]

'Overreacted?' I do believe that may be the understatement of the century.

What's worse is that Doctor Ciomu could be practising again within three years. Imagine the reference someone's going to have to write for him some day when he applies for a new post…

[Via MetaFilter]

This video of an octopus in a perspex maze is hypnotic and deeply creepy, well worth watching despite the irritating commentary track and the advert you're forced to watch before you get to see the cephalopod in action.

[Via Pharyngula]

I didn't know that the storm we've been enduring lately had a name: Kyril. And I had no idea how it was named:

The name Kyrill stems from a German practice of naming weather systems. Anyone may name one, for a fee. Naming a high-pressure system costs $385, while low-pressure systems, which are more common, go for $256. Three siblings paid to name this system as a 65th birthday gift for their father, not knowing that it would grow into a fierce storm.

"We hope ourselves that we'll get out of it lightly," Rumen Genow, one of the three, told a northern German newspaper on Thursday.

Who knew?

[Via collision detection]

The trailer for Black Sheep makes the film look like good, nasty fun. I especially like the tagline:

There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand … and they're pissed off!

[Via GromBlog]

Remember folks, any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Having seen Revenge of the Sith, Keith Martin sat down a couple of years ago and thought through the implications of the backstory George Lucas had revealed:

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope
Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III

If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.

Consider: at the end of RotS, Bail Organa orders 3PO's memory wiped but not R2's. He wouldn't make the distinction casually. Both droids know that Yoda and Obi-Wan are alive and are plotting sedition with the Senator from Alderaan. They know that Amidala survived long enough to have twins and could easily deduce where they went. However, R2 must make an impassioned speech to the effect that he is far more use to them with his mind intact: he has observed Palpatine and Anakin at close quarters for many years, knows much that is useful and is one of the galaxy's top experts at hacking into other people's systems. Also he can lie through his teeth with a straight face. Organa, in immediate need of espionage resources, agrees.

For the next 20 years, as far as 3PO knows, he is the property of Captain Antilles, doing protocol duties on a diplomatic transport. He is vaguely aware of the existence of the princess but doesn't know much about her. Wherever 3PO goes, being as loud and obvious as he always is, his unobtrusive little counterpart goes with him. 3PO is R2's front man. Wherever they land, R2 is passing messages between rebel sympathisers and sizing up governments as potential rebel recruits – both by personal contact and by hacking into their networks. He passes his recommendations on to Organa. [...]

It'd be nice to think that one day – probably after George Lucas has passed away¹ – someone will get to tell this story and give R2 and Chewie the credit they deserve.

The question of whether it's worth devoting any more effort to the Star Wars universe is a whole different question. I think efforts like the Clone Wars animations make it clear that there's plenty of scope for other filmmakers to have fun with Lucas' toys, and if only for sentimental reasons I'd like to see that happen. I know there's a whole expanded universe of books exploring the nooks and crannies of the Lucasverse, but I like to get my fix on-screen.

¹ I'm not wishing an early death on Mr Lucas: it's just that I can't imagine him tolerating anyone but him messing with the story that made him all those millions of dollars. Sadly, I think George Lucas no longer being around is a necessary precondition for anyone fixing the mess he made.

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]

Matthew Baldwin falls foul of the generation gap.

Let's see someone come up with an action figure for this film:

[...] Teeth, a horror movie that follows the leader of the abstinence movement at a small-town Christian high school. When she's raped, she discovers that she has a Carrie-like power for revenge: a real vagina dentata. "It's a coming-of-age story about a young woman who has a particularly painful coming-of-age," says Mitchell Lichtenstein, a son of the late Pop artist Roy. "Across cultures, these myths are always about a male animal having to conquer the woman possessing this, um, dentata. I wanted to make it a good thing, so that the dentata was her protector. She's like a superhero, and it's her power."

[Via Screengrab]

This is a definite improvement on this. (I knew it.)

The Sci Fi channel in the US has announced a miniseries adaptation of The Diamond Age:

Based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, this six-hour miniseries is executive produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions. A prominent member of a conservative futuristic society grows concerned that the culture stifles creativity, and commissions a controversial interactive book for his daughter, which serves as her guide through a surreal alternate world. When the primer's provocative technology, which adapts to the reader's responses, falls into the hands of a young innocent, the girl's life is accidentally reprogrammed with dangerous results. Neal Stephenson will adapt his own novel for this project, the first time the Hugo and Nebula winning author has written for the small screen.

The fact that a classic novel is being adapted is no guarantee of quality – remember the sorry tale of Sci Fi's 2004 Earthsea adaptation – but I'd like to think that with Neal Stephenson adapting his own work this might just turn out well.

[Via Fimoculous]

Last Sunday's New York Times caught up with David Byrne, aka "Indie Rock's Patron Saint":

These days this 54-year-old polymath has been particularly busy. He is the curator of the 2007 Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, which next month will feature a program of experimental folk music (including Vashti Bunyan, Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Adem, Cibelle and CocoRosie) and a multi-artist concert based on the conceit of a single drone note. It will also include two nights of Mr. Byrne's work: a performance of music from "The Knee Plays," his 1985 theatrical collaboration with Robert Wilson, and a preview of "Here Lies Love," his new multimedia song cycle based on the life and reign of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.

If that seems an unlikely subject, well, consider the fact that Mr. Byrne, like Ms. Marcos, clearly appreciates a good pair of shoes. "Hush Puppies came out with all these wild colors like seven, eight years ago," he said after his opening, referring to his turquoise footwear. "I thought: 'Who the hell is going to buy these? They look like they're for some Vegas singer.' I figured they wouldn't be around long, so I got those and a yellow pair and a lime-green pair."

[...]

Once the archetypal nerve-racked data-age persona (his famously uncomfortable 1983 Letterman interview is on YouTube, if you need a reminder), Mr. Byrne is today much more mellow. He seems comfortable in his skin, chatty and quick to laugh; his conversation ranges energetically from computerized embroidery machines to a recent visit to a neuroscience lab in Canada with his pals from the Arcade Fire. ("We didn't get a chance to get into the M.R.I. machines," he said, "but we had a lot of fun.")