Sore Eyes

« November 2002 | Main | January 2003 »

December 31, 2002

1.21 gigawatts?! 1.21 gigawatts?!

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.

Posted by John at 06:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Who Ya Gonna Call?

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.

Posted by John at 12:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 30, 2002

Faking It

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.

Posted by John at 10:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Eating babies is wrong

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

Scary...

Posted by John at 08:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

H2O/IP

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.

Posted by John at 05:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 29, 2002

On the first day, the Great Programmer created a new text file and the Universe was born.

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...)

Posted by John at 10:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"I really have a secret satisfaction in being considered rather mad."

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.

Posted by John at 09:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 28, 2002

It's the one with...

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.

Posted by John at 09:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 27, 2002

Brotherhood of the Wolf

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.

Posted by John at 11:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Spybot

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.

Posted by John at 10:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Email changes

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!

Posted by John at 07:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 26, 2002

Linux setback

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.

Posted by John at 08:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Don't Look Back In Anger

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.)

Posted by John at 08:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Pepys Online

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.)

Posted by John at 07:19 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

December 25, 2002

Shaken And Stirred

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.

Posted by John at 10:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More deviantART

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.

Posted by John at 09:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Beyond Bedford Falls

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."

Posted by John at 09:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 24, 2002

Merry Xmas

<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.

Posted by John at 11:59 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Snowflakes

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

Posted by John at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blogs and blocks

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.

Posted by John at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 23, 2002

Alternative 'LOTR's

Today seems to be the day for literary parodies of The Lord of the Rings. First of all, Anita pointed out Jane Austen's Lord of the Rings:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Dark Lord in possession of a desire to rule the world must be in want of a ring.

"My dear Frodo," said Gandalf to him one day, "are you aware that the One Ring has been found at last?"

Frodo replied that he was not.

"But it has," returned Gandalf, "for I've just been to Minas Tirith to read the old records, and they told me all its history."

Frodo made no answer.

"Do you not want to know who possesses it?" Gandalf cried impatiently.

"You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."

This was invitation enough.

But that was just the start. Later in the day, various sites hit paydirt, namely a thread on the Straight Dope message board where various posters piled in with versions by:

H P Lovecraft:
If I were to tell you the true story behind the unmaking of that ring...that ring!...you would think me mad. Horrors such as are scribed in ancient tomes of eldritch evil cannot compare to the terror...the cruel, cold, braincrushing terror!...that we felt in the lair of that foul spirit which raimed itself in arachnid form, that vile scavenger, that horrid arcane leech lingering at the border's of Sauron's Black Land...

Dr. Suess:
"Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!
I am too small to carry this thing!"
"I can not, will not hold the One.
You have a slim chance, but I have none.
I will not take it on a boat,
I will not take it across a moat.
I cannot take it under Moria,
that's one thing I can't do for ya.
I would not bring it into Mordor,
I would not make it to the border."

Neal Stephenson:
Frodo, the Deliverator, belongs to an elite order, a Fellowship of nine members only. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his only mission that matters. His armor is silver like the light of the full moon, jangling only slightly with its decorative gems. An arrow will bounce off its dwarvenmesh weave like a hammer off an anvil, but excess perspiration wafts through it like the winds over the charred plains of Gorgoroth. All the arrows of all the hunters in the world couldn't cut it against this one.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a sword. The Deliverator never looks for trouble, but some Orc might come after him anyway---might want his armor, or his cargo. The sword is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of sword a Hobbit would carry; it cuts quickly into load-bearing beams without visible effort, and when you get done using it around evil, you have to sheathe it, because it glows in the dark.

Frank Herbert:
"I am no longer Gandalf the Grey," the wizard intoned, his white stillrobes glistening in the day's heat. "Through the Trial of the Balrog I came close to death, but now the sleeper has awakened! I shall now be called ... Gandalf-Muad'Dib, the Mithrandir, the Lisan Al'Maia!"

And that's just on the first page of seven (so far). Subsequent pages include such delights as a musical version based on Bohemian Rhapsody, and a truly terrifying version in "lawyerese":

COMES NOW, plaintiff, Sauron, to file this original Complaint, and would show this honorable court the following:

1. Plaintiff and party of the first part, Sauron ("Sauron") is a(n) (un)natural person, and resident and domiciliary of Mordor.

2. Defendant and party of the second part, Frodo Baggins ("Frodo") is a natural person and resident of Hobbiton. Co-Defendant and party of the third part Samwise Gamgee ("Sam") is likewise same.

3. All parties being properly diverse, jurisdiction is proper pursuant to 28 M.E.C. 1332. Damages far exceed the minimum jurisdiction of the court.

4. Defendant has converted and trespassed against the chattel and personalty of the plaintiff, namely, the One Ring ("Ring") and is liable to plaintiff for same.

5. Plaintiff would further show on or about the final day of the Third Age, defendants did intentionally cause the destruction of Ring while plaintiff was engaged in defending his business from hostile takeover. In the alternative, plaintiff pleads that the actions of the defendants toward ring amount to recklessness, gross negligence, and negligence.

6. As a direct result of destruction of Ring, plaintiff has suffered actual damages in the form of irreparable harm to his business and personal reputation, as well as direct and indirect loss of income. Plaintiff has further suffered from mental anguish, humiliation, and loss of consortium.

7. Insofar as actions of defendants were intentional, plaintiff further requests punitive damages in the amount of treble his actual damages.

WHEREFORE, PLAINTIFF, SAURON, PRAYS FOR: all reasonable damages above named; FURTHER, plaintiff prays for all additional relief in law or equity deemed necessary and proper by this honorable court.

Respectfully submitted,
Mouth of Sauron
Attorney for Plaintiff
Middle Earth Bar No. 734925639

Unfortunately I can't see an easy way to figure out permalinks to my favourites, hence the lengthy quotations above. I urge you to go and read the entire thread: it's simply amazing, and a testament to the creativity of literature geeks everywhere.

Posted by John at 10:15 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Hey! It's That Guy!

Fametracker pays tribute to the one, the only, Brian Thompson:

There are times when a casting director is trying to fill a role that calls for more than just another walking column of muscle or barely human tower of intimidation. There are times when nothing but an indestructible killing machine will do. Those are the times when that casting director will call Brian Thompson.

You may not know the name, but I can almost guarantee that you've seen him in action. My favourite Thompson moment involved the question, "What's that do?" (Award yourself 500 geek points if you can name the programme and the situation, and describe what happened next, without googling for the answers.)

Posted by John at 01:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Too cute for words

This may be the cutest Flash-based Xmas card I've seen this year.

Posted by John at 01:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 22, 2002

Seasonal stuff

Dutchbint brings us Crappy Christmas Cards. Some of these I might think about sending to the right person - except the one at bottom right, anyway. (NB/- not entirely safe for work.)

Meanwhile, over at defective yeti, we have one of those unfortunate postal errors which must happen every Xmas.

Posted by John at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Portrait of Sveta 2

Catching up this afternoon with recent submissions at deviantART, I found Portrait of Sveta 2 especially striking.

Call me easily pleased, but I really liked the way the walls of the tunnel lined up so beautifully with the model, both framing her head and shoulders and providing a clear but not-quite-symmetrical vertical axis for the image as a whole.

Posted by John at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How to give a parent a heart attack

Michele got a very nasty shock when her daughter brought a note home from school the other day.

All things considered, the teacher responsible should be very glad that Michele noticed the name of the letter's signatory. If she'd got as far as actually speaking to someone in authority at the school the phone would probably have melted...

Posted by John at 08:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 21, 2002

Excuses, excuses...

And tonight's excuse for not posting is ... The Two Towers.

I enjoyed it a great deal, every bit as much as the first instalment. Viggo Mortensen's quietly assured performance as Aragorn was the highlight of the film for me, slightly ahead of Miranda Otto's Eowyn. Which is not to say that the other performances were anything other than superb: all the regulars from the last film lived up to their earlier work, and newcomers like Bernard Hill, Karl Urban, David Wenham and Brad Dourif were well up to snuff.

Which brings me to Smeagol, a.k.a. Gollum. The CGI work on Andy Serkis' character was far and away the SFX highlight of the film, surpassing even the Orcish army storming Helm's Deep and the Ents at Isengard, but it wouldn't have worked as well without a good performance "underneath." Smeagol felt completely real, as much a part of the cast as anyone. The scenes where Smeagol argued with himself about whether to steal his Precious back made it clear that if you're willing to take the time and trouble you really can make a credible CGI central character - George Lucas take note. It does help that this particular CGI character had a meaty role and some good lines, rather than being employed as comic relief.

Talking of comic relief, I can understand that not everyone would appreciate the use of Gimli in this film. I thought it worked nicely to a) build camaraderie between Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli and b) provide some nice contrasting moments during the fight scenes. ("Don't tell the Elf!" indeed.) Gimli didn't come off as an idiot or a clown, just as a warrior of a somewhat different temperament to the more heroic Aragorn and the eerily effective Legolas.

The last hour of the film, most of which took place in and around Helm's Deep, was quite astounding. The only slightly false note came when Gandalf led a cavalry charge down a rather too steep incline, but that was a tiny blemish on an otherwise exemplary battle scene.

Peter Jackson probably won't get a Best Director or Best Picture Oscar for his work on any of the three films, if only because the three films don't stand alone as well as a traditional trilogy written for the screen and he'll be seen as having got his rewards at the box office. It's a real shame, because he's demonstrated a grasp of epic storytelling that sets him apart from just about every director working today.

The only problem is that I'm going to have to wait a year to see The Return of the King. Does anybody have the keys to a time machine?

Posted by John at 11:56 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Uncut OMWF - yay!

At the last minute, the BBC have come through and bought rights to show the uncut, extended version of Once More With Feeling in the repeat slot in the wee small hours of Saturday morning (i.e. in about twenty-five minutes from now.)

I'm just glad that I did a little late-night Usenet reading after my last weblog post, or I wouldn't have known in time to set my VCR accordingly.

Posted by John at 12:33 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 20, 2002

Bright lights in the sky

In 1953 an amateur astronomer by the name of Leon Stuart was observing the Moon when he saw a bright flash. Now researchers have examined photographs taken by a satellite in lunar orbit in and found a fresh crater in exactly the right spot on the lunar surface.

The resulting explosion would have released 35 times the energy of the Hiroshima atom bomb. On the Moon, that just adds one more crater to the moonscape. If it had hit the Earth, the consequences don't bear thinking about.

Posted by John at 11:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Permanent paperwork

Danny O'Brien is applying for permanent residency in the United States. He's posted a picture showing the astonishing quantity of paperwork he's had to complete in support of his application.

Having slogged his way through that little lot, he's come up with a little treat for himself to compensate:

Anyway, I'm buying myself a Christmas present. I'm joining the ACLU. It only costs $20, which is certainly less than the $600 or so my immigration application costs. There's only one form to fill in - and I can do it online. And nobody is going to round me up and throw me in jail because I decided to come forward and hand in this paperwork. Or at least, that's the general idea.

Posted by John at 11:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Catching up

I didn't mean to take a day off from this site yesterday, it just worked out that way. First of all I had a really, really bad day at work, starting with my twisting my ankle rushing to catch my bus to work, and getting worse by the hour afterwards - if this were a different sort of weblog I'd launch into an extremely long rant, but I'll spare you. The upshot of all this was that when I got home I wasn't in a mood to do anything very constructive.

Consequently, my evening was eaten up by not one but two distractions. First of all, after work I stopped off at Waterstone's and noticed they had a "2 for £10" deal on their paperback Pratchetts. I read the first dozen or so Discworld novels as they came out, but by Pyramids and Small Gods I felt Pratchett was getting stale and stopped buying them. Since then he's written another dozen Discworld novels, and I've heard enough good things about the recent ones that I'd been thinking about picking one up again, so this seemed an ideal opportunity. I started Men at Arms last night, and so far the signs are promising: two full-on laughing fits which led to me forgetting to breathe, and numerous hearty chuckles, and I'm only some thirty pages in. After Men at Arms, it's Carpe Jugulum. I'm looking forward to meeting up with Granny Weatherwax again, and I definitely want to read Pratchett's take on vampires.

While I was in catch-up mode at the bookshop I also picked up Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I held off when it was published, since a) I wasn't in the mood to tackle another long novel right then, as I'd just finished Peter F Hamilton's mammoth Night's Dawn trilogy, and b) I'd bounced off The Diamond Age at the first attempt and wasn't inclined to wade through an even longer Stephenson novel only to find that he still couldn't pull of a decent ending. Since then I've read a couple of Stephenson's earlier novels, The Big U and Zodiac, and decided to give him another chance. With a nice long break from work coming up over Xmas, this seemed like the right book at the right time.

Finally, once I got home I spent a good part of my evening playing with the Windows version of slrn, a feature-packed online newsreader. I've used Forté's excellent Agent offline newsreader for some time now, but a recent thread on rec.arts.sf.written convinced me that I really need a newsreader with a scorefile. A major rewrite of Agent is coming Real Soon Now which may or may not include a scorefile, but slrn is here right now and is tried and tested. Furthermore, slrn is available for Mac OS X and Linux, so whatever my decision as regards my next PC I'd be able to continue using slrn to read Usenet. This is a not insignificant factor in my choice of operating systems: one factor in my failing to switch to Linux when I first looked it over about three or four years ago was that there weren't any decent offline GUI newsreaders at the time. Now that I'm on an unmetered dial-up I can consider online newsreaders, so slrn is a definite contender.

It's still early days - reading news online using an unfamiliar program is a very different experience for me after so many years of using Agent - but so far the signs are good.

I promise to try and get caught up with my comments (and email) over the weekend.

Posted by John at 11:28 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 18, 2002

Should I be feeling old?

John Sutherland analyses the reasons for the decline in the sales of Messrs Clancy, Grisham, Crichton, Turow and King.

I'm not at all sure that Sutherland is right to put so much emphasis on the ages of the authors. Fiftysomething is hardly old for a writer, especially one who had another career and may not have started writing until they were in their thirties. It seems to me that it's much more probable that there's no single reason for the poor sales for these authors' latest efforts. King only seems to put out something really good every three or four novels nowadays, Clancy appears to be milking his favoured subgenre dry, and Crichton's latest focuses on a menace which is old hat to science fiction fans but not really on the radar for the general reader. (Which means that a decade from now if some lab in Southern California is turned to gray goo he'll probably be hailed as a visionary!)

What really bothered me was Sutherland's thoroughly specious closing argument:

At the end of the day, it's down to age. As elsewhere, the race is increasingly to the young and swift, not the old and canny. This year's Booker was won by a young contender, Yann Martel, half the age (39) of the oldest shortlisted candidate. The same parameter shift is happening (belatedly) in bestselling books as happened, decades ago, in sport. Can you envisage a 33-year-old winning Wimbledon (as Jaroslav Drobny did), a 44-year-old playing cricket for England (as Wally Hammond did), a 45-year-old winning the world heavyweight title (as George Foreman did), or a 50-year-old playing top-class football (as Stanley Matthews did)?

Let's take those one at a time. The Booker Prize shortlist featured authors aged 36, 39, 42, 50, 67 & 74. An average of just short of 52: not so much a ringing endorsement of the vim and vigour of the rising generation, more a reflection of the length of a professional writing career. What would you bet me that the next Booker winner will be at least 50? (You might also note that the Booker isn't really about bestsellers, but that's another argument.)

Sports are a tougher case for oldies, but even so isn't it slightly rash to assume that Pete Sampras (31) or Andre Agassi (32) have no chance of winning the big one on the Centre Court ever again? It may not be likely, but is it really inconceivable? I'll concede that Sutherland has more of a point with respect to football, boxing and cricket, but I don't know that his argument translates to fields of activity where being in peak physical condition is at less of a premium.

Coming back to the writers, I'll bet that if we look back three years from now at least three of the bestseller authors named above will have recovered from the slump in their sales.

Posted by John at 10:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What's Elvish for 'The Two Towers'?

Take a look at the "Language" entry on the IMDB's page for The Two Towers. Cute.

Posted by John at 07:56 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Law Commission on internet libel

The Guardian is reporting that the Law Commission has responded to a request from the Lord Chancellor to look into how English defamation law affects the internet by suggesting that it may be time to grant English Internet Service Providers the sort of immunity from libel claims enjoyed by their US counterparts.

This is very welcome. The current system makes it far too risky for ISPs to keep allegedly defamatory articles online. It seems to me that it's the individual or organisation which writes the article who should be responsible for taking down the article or facing the legal consequences, not the ISP which is simply providing a means by which that writing is distributed. (I realise that the crux of the argument is that under current law "publishing" is deemed to be what everyone in the chain between writer and reader is doing. However, I'm writing this in normal English, not legalese. Where I use terms like "publishing" in this article, I'm using them in the everyday, non-technical sense.)

That's not to say that I think defamation law in England works well once the writer ends up in court. When it comes to newsgroups, in particular, it's difficult to see the justification for demanding that an ISP remove an allegedly defamatory posting from their news servers given that the person who finds a particular posting objectionable has the ability to post a reply to the very same newsgroup arguing their side of the matter. Usenet simply isn't like a newspaper, where an editor can bury a retraction in small print at the foot of page 23 five weeks later, so it shouldn't be subject to the same remedies. As for web publishing, there are numerous examples of issues where writers on both sides of an argument publish violently dissenting views on a given topic, and it's the job of the reader to sort it all out.

Defamation is one of those areas where the internet genuinely is different, and where the law needs to adapt to those changes.

Posted by John at 01:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 17, 2002

The wit and wisdom of the next generation

Jann posted a rather wonderful list of genuine excerpts from GCSE English exam papers. Some of these are much too good to be accidental:

• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
• The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan might just work.
• "Oh, Jason, take me!" she panted, her breasts heaving like a student on 31p-a-pint night.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

There are lots more where they came from: go now and read the rest.

Posted by John at 10:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Brin vs Tolkien vs Lucas vs Roddenberry

Having famously seen off Star Wars a couple of years ago, David Brin takes a swing at Tolkien's epic.

Let's start by remembering that history is written by the victors.

How do we know that Hitler was as bad as we are told?

We know because we live in a democracy that has given Holocaust deniers plenty of opportunities to make their case, and all they ever come up with is blatant drivel, ridiculous scenarios that are laughably easy to disprove. We see and hear countless witnesses to the Nazi horrors, conveyed via a press that, for all its faults, is relatively free. As implausible as the story of deliberate mass genocide might have seemed, in fiction, the reality was undeniably true, and worse than anything previously imagined.

Allied propagandists did not have to make up any of it.

But things were different in kingdoms of old, where one official party line was promulgated and alternative sources of information got routinely squelched. And that's in every kingdom, mind you. Go ahead, name one where it didn't happen. (Note how the Norman propagandists went to work on poor old King Harold, even as his body was cooling after the Battle of Hastings.)

My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.

So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?

Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?

In truth, the title of Brin's latest essay is needlessly provocative. In fact, he's just gently reminding us that it's both important and more fun to think "what if" about the fictions we encounter, to explore the implications of the stories.

While googling for Brin's Star Wars vs Star Trek essay I came across his comments on Attack of the Clones. At the end Brin notes that he's figured out a simple way to resolve all the plot holes in the Star Wars films to date, one that explains it all very elegantly. I can see where he's coming from, but there's not a cat's chance in hell that George Lucas would use it.

Posted by John at 10:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Mirror Lights 2

I really like this fiery image which Robyn has just submitted to The Mirror Project.

Posted by John at 09:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2002

Creative Commons launch

The Creative Commons officially opened for business today when it released its first licenses. Why does this matter?

The Licensing Project will build licenses that will help you tell others that your works are free for copying and other uses — but only on certain conditions. You're probably familiar with the phrase "All rights reserved" and the little © that goes along with it. Creative Commons wants to help copyright holders send a different message: "Some rights reserved" and our "CC Creative Commons" logo.

If you prefer to dedicate your work to the public domain, where nothing is owned and all is permitted, we'll help you do that. In other words, we'll help you declare "No rights reserved."

This promises to be a fascinating experiment, and one well worth supporting. If I ever produce any original content - as opposed to piggybacking on the work of others by writing a weblog! - then I'll certainly look into releasing it under one of the CC licenses. (Of course, if the writers of the sites with the original content I want to link to start using CC licenses I'll have to make sure I respect their wishes too. Hopefully the majority will default to using the Attribution license, or else the weblogging ecosystem will be in big trouble!)

Posted by John at 11:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Patrick "Cowgirl" Stewart?

Gender Bending: giving celebrities a sex change, with a little help from Photoshop.

I think Patrick 'Cowgirl' Stewart looks most disturbing of all, slightly ahead of Buff Nat(alie Portman).

Posted by John at 10:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

About Nowhere Girl

Warren Ellis interviews Justine Shaw, creator of a fine online comic, Nowhere Girl.

The web gave me near-complete control, only having to rely on hosting facilities. I'll be the first to admit I have trouble trusting people, so just putting it online and skipping the "middle-man" was very appealing to me. And, though I didn't think about this at the time it's very clear to me now: if I'd published NG in print, I'd be out several thousand US$, and no one would have read it. Online, people from all over the planet have seen it.

Posted by John at 09:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bare bear

Did you ever see anything sadder-looking than a bear losing its hair?

Posted by John at 09:17 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Eek!

Anja got a big surprise when she helped a colleague figure out why her PC was running so slowly.

Posted by John at 08:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 15, 2002

Switching

I've talked before about switching to Apple. If I do, it will be in part because of this page of parodies of the Apple Switch ads.

My starship ... used to run on Windows...
but I had to re boot during a battle with the klingons.
I    HAD    to reboot.

Now I use ... Macintosh...
and my battles are always won.

I ... never trusted Microsoft and never will,
after the death of my boy.

My name is James T Kirk,
and I'm a Starfleet Captain.

I mean, if it's good enough for Yoda, the Swedish Chef, Captain James T Kirk and Neo, how can I not switch?

Posted by John at 08:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Which Science Fiction Writer Are You?

It turns out I'm Olaf Stapledon. I'd rather have been Arthur C Clarke, but this isn't that far off. So, Which Science Fiction Writer Are You?

Posted by John at 08:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Giant lobster pot

The BBC reports that there are plans to build a 50-metre high stainless steel "Sky Vault" across a stretch of dual carriageway in the East Midlands. The idea is to create a landmark to match the Angel of the North.

I think it's a tremendous idea, especially if it's to be lit up at night. Contrary to the reservations expressed by the Highways Agency, I can't see how it would be any more distracting to motorists than driving across a well-lit bridge.

Posted by John at 08:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ho-ho-Homer

I'm indebted to Michele for bringing to my attention the finest outdoor Xmas decoration I've seen so far this year.

Posted by John at 08:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Chilly

Icy Bay, Alaska looks lovely by moonlight.

It's the sort of view that makes me glad I'm sitting typing this in front of a PC in a nice, warm room with a hot drink by my side.

Posted by John at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 14, 2002

Google Zeitgeist 2002

Google's 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist does exactly what it says on the tin. More information than you ever wanted to know about what the world looks for on the web. (What I'd really like to see is that ability to generate longitudinal stats on the popularity of any search item on the fly. But that's probably just me.)

I'm a little surprised to discover that David Beckham was the world's most searched-for athlete in 2002. Presumably in a year without a World Cup tournament he, Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane would have been well outside the top 10.

I'll be fascinated to see what this sort of thing looks like a decade from now, when Google can really put together a substantial timeline. Will Britney, J-Lo and the rest have disappeared from the lists? Will the weather still be one of the most popular search items in the UK? Will Linux still be ahead of Microsoft in the list of technology searches?

Posted by John at 10:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Boring Future

Further to my comments the other day about a return to the Moon, here's an article by economist Paul Krugman on the economic uses of outer space. Sadly, he's probably right.

Posted by John at 07:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown

It's a crime that the full, illustrated version of this article isn't available online somewhere.

Effective as the strapless evening gown is in attracting attention, it presents tremendous engineering problems to the structural engineer. He is faced with the problem of designing a dress which appears as if it will fall at any moment and yet actually stays up with some small factor of safety. Some of the problems faced by the engineer readily appear from the following structural analysis of strapless evening gowns.

Posted by John at 01:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 13, 2002

Menace to Society

David Cronenberg interviewed by Danny Leigh for The Guardian.

For a walking affront to decency, he's looking pretty dapper in all-black garb and immaculately coiffed silver hair. But then confounding preconceptions has always been his trademark. How else could you explain a career full of cerebral, deeply reflective movies that just happened to involve rampant sexual parasites (Shivers, his feature debut), the outer limits of gynaecology (Dead Ringers), exploding heads (the infamous Scanners) or insectile typewriters spurting orgasmically at the use of random words and phrases (the predictably crazed William Burroughs tribute The Naked Lunch)? "Weird" doesn't even begin to cover it: the long, productive marriage of a peerlessly gooey aesthetic and an ardent fixation with the overlap of evolution, technology and death.

I was surprised by the article's emphasis on how difficult it is for Cronenberg to get the money to make his films nowadays. I suppose it's because his films have shown up every three years for some twenty-odd years now, seemingly regardless of subject matter or the box office appeal of the actors involved.

I wonder how different Cronenberg's career would have been if he'd directed Flashdance.

Posted by John at 10:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Two Towers

Nick Nunziata reviews The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and gives it 9.3 out of 10.

Like a glass of wine that's been allowed to breathe a little, The Two Towers shows the creative team and the story finding their flavor and blossoming. All of the characters evolve here, and while the story is considerably darker the emotional core of the film remains consistent with the first film. These are characters to care about and ones who care for each other, and because the first film (especially the superior extended cut on DVD) defied convention and allowed things to unfold at a more leisurely pace, this film allows the growth to happen more organically.

Sounds promising. I'm especially pleased that Nunziata confirms that Gollum comes off as a credible CGI character. He's so important to the narrative than it would be dreadful if he'd turned out to be the bastard spawn of Jar Jar Binks and The Mask.

Posted by John at 05:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Womb With a View

Jon Carroll has a little fun with fundamentalist notions about the sanctity of life before birth. Reflecting on the notion that by certain lights male masturbation is presumably morally equivalent to murder:

On the other hand, female masturbation is just fine. This may be the Good News the fundamentalist Christians are always talking about. Menstruation, following the same logic, is morally questionable. One pictures God in heaven weeping: "And that one was going to cure cancer too, damn it."

(In passing, I should note that I'm indebted to Mr Carroll for the explanation of why Dorothy Parker called her parrot Onan.)

Posted by John at 05:20 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 12, 2002

Last Men on the Moon

Thirty years ago Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were walking around on the lunar surface, the last men to visit the Moon.

Isn't it about time someone paid another visit to our nearest neighbour?

Posted by John at 12:43 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 11, 2002

Is It Not Nifty?

New experiments in searching from those nice folks at Google Labs: Google WebQuotes and Google Viewer.

WebQuotes seems fairly hit-or-miss, in that it's easy to come up with a topic which produces a series of links with no comments at all. But if you hit the right topic then I can see this being pretty handy. For example, if you look for Sluggy Freelance you get a fair number of useful (and overwhelmingly positive) comments.

I didn't get on with Viewer, and I'm not sure what advantage it really offers over my ability to open a link in a new window. At least then I don't have to watch my results scroll past and frantically hit a button when the one I'd like to follow up appears.

Posted by John at 09:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Crazy Buttocks

It's official. The oddest book title of the year is Living with Crazy Buttocks, a compilation of cartoons by an Australian by the name of Kaz Cooke.

Myself, I'd have gone for either After the Orgy: Towards a Politics of Exhaustion or The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy: Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking. Either would have been a worthy successor to last year's winner, Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service.

Posted by John at 09:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 10, 2002

Ditching the desktop

Steven Johnson says that Apple and Microsoft are heading in opposite directions when it comes to how to improve on the desktop metaphor.

The problem with a one-size-fits-all metaphor is that there are inevitably occasions where the approach which works well for one class of information is distinctly sub-optimal for another. Furthermore, I have a sense that Microsoft's approach would be to tie all the different types of information on my computer in some horribly platform-specific way which would make it hellish difficult to use other applications to play with the same data, let alone transfer that data to a non-Windows platform. (See, for example, the fun and games if you try to use the Save As HTML option in any Microsoft Office application.)

Posted by John at 10:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Turkish Trek

Have you ever wondered what Star Trek would look like if it was done on a really low budget, in Turkish? Wonder no more.

Kirk decides to go down to a nearby planet and assembles an away team of Scotty, Mr. Spak, Dr. Makkoy and an unnamed guy in a green shirt who they hope will act as a human speed bump if any creatures on the planet rush them. The teleportation effects are, like all Turkish special effects, a strange combination of retarded and rad. The four men stand as still as possible while the camera goes out of focus. Ten seconds later, the film gets scratched in their general area and they run out of frame while the guy holding the camera hits pause and unpause. This gives more of the impression that something’s wrong with your VCR than of people being transported through space. Miniskirt technology is a much higher priority among their people than visual effects.

I think BBC2 should make up for the way they mess us around with Buffy by screening this show.

Posted by John at 10:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

"Where are the nuclear wessels in Alameda?"

Danny O'Brien has been watching the Elcomsoft trial.

The Defence [...] claimed Elcomsoft produced the software to expose weaknesses in e-book products. They introduced Dmitry's Defcon speech as evidence for this. Dmitry's speech is rather dry (apart from a hilarious moment at the beginning where another Defcon attendee forces him to say "Where are the nuclear vessels in Alameda?". I laughed a bit too loudly in court here.)

I'm afraid I'd probably have laughed quite hard too.

Posted by John at 10:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gimli/Treebeard interviewed

John Rhys-Davies is interviewed at CHUD today.

Q: Do you find that you now have kids coming up to you on the street? A new generation of fans?

Davies: No. How dumb do you have to be? Thirty years trying to be recognized and you bury yourself in a full prosthetic for three major movies. My career is over. All I should be offered now is the chance to play dwarves in German porno films with a strap-on. Now that's the real insult, isn't it?

Posted by John at 12:51 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 09, 2002

A real Power User

Having a PC which runs 37 different operating systems - from MS-DOS 6.22 to Windows 1.01 to QNX 6.2 to BeOS 5.03 - is pretty impressive. Crazy, but undeniably impressive. I just hope the owner doesn't get a nastygram from Microsoft's lawyers demanding that he produce valid licenses for a dozen different Microsoft operating systems. I know he thinks he's picked up licenses from his various PCs over the years, but I'll bet there's a clause in the licenses for each permitting installation only on the hardware with which it was supplied.

Unfortunately, the PC has to be rebooted to get from one operating system to another. It would be much more impressive if the system ran an emulator so that the user could run them all at once. (Even as I type this, I guarantee that a geek somewhere is working on the problem.)

One more thing. The guy who did all this is just 18. Just think what he'll get up to once he grows up!

Posted by John at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Earth from above

Yann Arthus-Bertrand has taken some tremendous pictures of this planet we're living on. His View of the Day feature is going into my daily viewing list, right alongside Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Posted by John at 09:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Quoth the server, "404".

Best 404 Page Ever? I'm not sure about "best" - not in a world with this - but it's certainly one of the classiest.

Posted by John at 09:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Microsoft Litterbug 2002

Contrary to Katie's comment, the image she links to in this entry isn't really a sign that she's been working on her research paper for too long. It is a telling comment on how really lousy Microsoft Word is at cleaning up after itself.

Posted by John at 08:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A killer site

Who Killed William Robinson? is a tremendous little site which allows students to browse primary documentation regarding a murder in British Columbia in 1868. Well designed and quite fascinating.

The only drawback is that the site only allows those with passwords access to the "interpretive essays" produced by the students for whom the site was created. When I tried clicking on the link anyway but failed to enter a valid password, I was greeted by a dialog box stating:

Incorrect: One percent has been deducted from your final grade.

Ooh, that's strict!

Posted by John at 08:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Marathon blogging session

If you were running a marathon would blogging be the first thing on your mind?

For this guy the answer was "Yes".

I can't quite make my mind up whether blogging while running is heroic or crazy. But I'm erring on the side of "crazy."

Posted by John at 07:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Shadows

The Moon's shadow moves over Africa during last week's solar eclipse.

I love this sort of image, a reminder that we're all sitting on a big ball of rock with another ball of rock orbiting it. And then that pair of objects is in turn rotating round a big ball of very hot gas which provides us with light and heat. Which is in turn part of one arm orbiting the big black hole at the centre of our little spiral galaxy. Which is in turn part of a Local Group of galaxies. (And so on...)

I could equally well have posted the same thoughts last week when this APOD was published.

What can I say? I love celestial mechanics!

Posted by John at 01:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 08, 2002

Does this post really exist?

Laura Miller reviews The Matrix and Philosophy.

It sounds as if the essays are pretty variable in quality, so I think I'll watch out for this one in my local library rather than rush to Amazon to buy a copy. I'm quite happy with the notion of exploring the deeper implications of works of pop culture, but for me the concept works better when applied to a TV series. (See, for example, Roz Kaveney et al, Reading The Vampire Slayer.)

Posted by John at 11:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Recursion

A recursive portrait.

My head hurts...

Posted by John at 10:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Administrivia: Comments

Just a quick note of apology for not really keeping up with comments over the last couple of days. I'm going to try to catch up with my comments (and email) tomorrow.

While I'm on the subject of comments, I spent a little while earlier this evening installing Brad Choate's Sanitize plugin for Movable Type, which makes it safe for me to let users add HTML tags to spruce up their comments. The comments form now lists the tags I've enabled.

(Those of you who don't know any HTML should just carry on entering plain text comments as normal.)

Of course, if I don't start responding to comments again soon then you'll all stop posting them and the issue of what tags I'll permit in comments will be moot...

Posted by John at 12:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 07, 2002

PowerPointless?

Scott McNealey on PowerPoint:

We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, What a huge waste of corporate productivity. So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, "What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work."

And yet, Sun's very own StarOffice/OpenOffice suite still includes a presentation graphics package very much like PowerPoint.

Posted by John at 07:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Desperate Measures

Ben Hammersley points out evidence from Cory Doctorow of just how determined the MPAA are to drag Jon Johansen into court in response to his attempt to make it easy for Linux users to play - not copy - DVDs.

I asked a lawyer-friend about this today: if Norwegian law doesn't have the "anti-circumvention" stuff that the American DMCA has, what has Jon been charged with? It turns out that the MPAA insisted that Jon be prosecuted and that the best the Norwegian prosecutors could come up with is a statute forbidding intruding on a computer, so they charged him with hacking his own PC.

Posted by John at 07:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 06, 2002

Once More With F...

Having just downloaded the latest TV listings for DigiGuide, I'm rather concerned that the BBC2 broadcasts of Once More With Feeling, the musical episode of Buffy, are scheduled to take up 45 minutes on Thursday 19th December and just 40 minutes on the early Saturday morning repeat on Saturday 21st.

The BBC web site only shows schedules a week ahead, and the BBC's Buffy micro site only confirms that the musical episode has been pushed back a week by snooker and makes no mention of running times.

I know there's a 42-minute cut of the episode, but I was expecting that the BBC would show the extended version, which runs about 8 minutes longer. Hopefully this is just a screw up by DigiGuide or whichever BBC department supplies them with listings. I'd hate to have to wait for the season 6 DVD to see the musical in full.

Posted by John at 08:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Online Advent Calendar

Leslie Harpold's Hoopla Online Advent Calendar is up. Very nice indeed.

Posted by John at 07:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

From the Plain English Campaign:

An unnamed lawyer's suggested replacement for the word 'container' in a patent application.

'a receptacle having at least one exterior surface and a plurality of walls defining a discrete object receiving volume.'

[...]

A proposed employment contract for management consultants Gleeds Group.

'13. Waiver

'No forbearance of failure by the Employer at any time to require performance of any provision of the Agreement or to enforce strictly the obligations of the Employee or to take action to suspend the Employee or to determine the Agreement forthwith upon discovering cause therefor shall effect the right of the Employer so to do any time and no waiver by the Employer of any condition or breach of any clause whether by conduct or otherwise shall constitute a continuing or further waiver of any such condition or breach or as the breach of any other clause.'

Posted by John at 06:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spamming a spammer

Spammer Alan Ralsky probably won't be doing any more press interviews for a while. In the wake of an interview a couple of weeks ago in which he bragged about his spamming, claiming that the profits from just one series of spam messages (or rather, as he prefers to call them, "marketing messages") funded the addition of a new wing to his house, anti-spammers have tracked down his new house's postal address and subscribed him to every junk email list they could find.

Naturally, now that Ralsky is receiving all this unsolicited mail he's threatening to sue for harassment.

Posted by John at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 05, 2002

I, Robot

I'm as disappointed as Max at the prospect that Will Smith will star in an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Robot stories.

But Max didn't mention the very worst element, the one that turns this news from a disappointment into a surefire calamity: the latest draft of the script was written by Akiva Goldsman.

Yes, I know he got a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. He also wrote Batman Forever, Batman and Robin and Lost in Space. You tell me whether this man should ever be let near a science fiction film again.

Posted by John at 09:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Novel fridge cools with sound

BBC News is carrying a story today about scientists who are developing a fridge which will use sound waves to cool food. The very idea is fascinating enough, but one passage in the report caught my eye:

The pair are using enormously loud sounds to keep their chiller cabinet cool.

Humans feel pain when they hear sounds of 120 decibels, a level typically reached next to the speakers at a rock concert.

The sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert.

Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion.

[Emphasis added]

Your hair would catch fire? How amazing is that?

Posted by John at 08:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

More Mathematical Magic

Yesterday it was the mathematics of vampire slaying, today another mathematician steps up to explain the most efficient way to tie our shoelaces.

I wonder what mathemagical wonders tomorrow will bring...

Posted by John at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 04, 2002

Our Earth As Art

Our Earth As Art collects images from the Landsat-7 satellite which are spectacular in their own right, quite apart from their scientific value.

The full-size JPEG images are fairly large, but well worth the wait for 56K modem users. It's just a pity that the TIFF posters are too large (at around 25-30MB) to be practical for me to download. If you've got a broadband connection, I urge you to go for it.

Posted by John at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Non-Story

It's reported that the Walt Disney Corporation has banned all but two models of PDA. The article in The Inquirer starts out by stating that:

That fabulous site Internal Memos appears to have secured a little memo-gem, if true, which must have implications for the PDA companies Walt Disney won't support any more.

The Walt Disney Corporation [...] appears to have instructed its staff on the kind of personal digital assistants they can use.

Oh my god. You mean those authoritarian swine in the Disney IT department are telling their staff they'll only support the connection of some types of PDA to their corporate network? The bastards!

Why exactly is this regarded as "news"? It's hardly unusual for an IT department - particularly in a large organisation - to insist that users standardise on the particular set of software packages and hardware which the IT department is prepared to support. The sole implication "for the PDA companies Walt Disney won't support any more" would appear to be that the likes of Palm won't have much luck selling PDAs to Disney.

Posted by John at 10:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I Love the Internet

Where else could I find a pointer to an article entitled Vampire Population Ecology which attempts to calculate whether Sunnydale can support all those vampires.

In principle, ecologists might employ two basic strategies to get at a problem like this. The empiricists would go out and find a field site where they could actually observe predators and their prey, and just tally the results over time. The theoreticians would chuckle at the empiricists, and construct mathematical models that probably approximate the behavior of populations in the field, keeping their hands more or less clean in the process.

In real life, most ecologists use both strategies off and on. Unfortunately, I don't know of any real life vampire populations in the field, so we're going to have to pretend that we are strict theoreticians. That means that we'll be using math: some algebra, some calculus, and some matrix theory. This is O.K.! It hurts a lot less than, say, getting bitten by a vampire as you're trying to fit the bugger with a radio collar.

Don't be scared off by the occasional equation.

Posted by John at 10:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"Reality" TV

I was going to post about The Great Reality TV Swindle, last night's Channel 4 documentary about the victims of a con man who claimed to be setting up a reality TV show. As it turns out, I needn't bother because Jon has said everything I wanted to.

Posted by John at 09:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Beware the Porn Burglar

'But honey, someone must have broken in and subscribed me to all those porn sites.'

Yeah, right...

Posted by John at 12:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 03, 2002

Die Another Day

I haven't made any fresh posts this evening because I was out at the cinema. The positive word on Die Another Day persuaded me to catch a Bond film on the big screen for the first time since Timothy Dalton played the role.

The verdict: not bad, and better than the last couple of Brosnan Bonds, but no classic. I did like Brosnan's grittier take on the role, especially in the first half of the film. Toby Stephens and Rick Yune tucked into the roles of the villain and his sidekick with appropriate relish (not to mention a side order of ham in Stephens' case). Rosamund Pike was simply gorgeous, outshining even Halle Berry, and Judi Dench and John Cleese were as solid and reliable as ever. Berry did what she could with a pretty thankless role. (No way does Jinx merit a spin-off film, on the basis of what we saw here.) The story used this time was the basic villain-has-satellite-which-can-rain-down-destruction theme, but worked well enough for the most part. The sword fight scene was terrific, despite the presence of Madonna.

Talking of whom: I don't care if she performed the (awful) theme song, Madonna should just accept that she's not a good actress and get the hell off our screens. The editing of some of the action scenes was pretty poor in places, with shifts into slow motion here or a "bullet time"-style shift in camera angle there which only served to keep me from following the action. The biggest problem for me was the quality of the special effects. A distinctly mixed bag, with one paragliding scene looking horribly fake and several scenes stretching my credulity beyond the limit as regards the way the laws of physics supposedly work in the film. My least favourite special effect was the invisible car. I know Bond films aren't exactly hard SF, but Q's account of how it worked simply made no sense.

The bottom line is that the Connery days aren't coming back, even now that Pierce Brosnan has a decent grip on the role. I'll probably catch the next film as a DVD rental.

(Finally, I must mention that I abhorred the last scene with Moneypenny. It was a rotten way to treat the character with the most thankless role in any Bond film.)

Posted by John at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A "Fellowship" for Fanatics

Laura Miller gives a balanced view of the merits of the Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

The value of the extended DVD edition of Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" is a tricky matter. Without a doubt, the theatrically released version of the film is a superior movie, quicker off the dime and less likely to dawdle over intriguing peripheries like one of those friends who insists on stopping to investigate every garage sale on the way to Sunday brunch. A filmgoer who has no investment in J.R.R. Tolkien's novel and thought the movie was pretty good should be perfectly satisfied with the DVD of that version of the film, released earlier this year. How far beyond that you want to go depends on just how geekish you're feeling.

[...]

Mostly, though, I marveled at how the movie hasn't paled for me, even though I had to watch it three times in fairly close succession to check out the commentaries. Either I'm a lot geekier than I realized or Jackson and company are even better filmmakers than I suspected. (Or both.) Just one more question you'll have to answer for yourself.

I just dread to think what happens a couple of years hence when the trilogy is re-released in an Super Extended Director's Cut DVD Box Set Edition. How will I be able to resist?

Posted by John at 01:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 02, 2002

Brewster Kahle interviewed

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, is interviewed by Paul Marks for New Scientist.

How can you be sure that you're not missing something important?

I guarantee that in the future researchers will curse us for having missed something absolutely critical. But only people using the archive can tell us about mistakes in what we collect. There is a cheaper alternative concept, called "dark archiving", which means that we should just archive things and not give people access to them. But preservation without access is dangerous – there's no way of reviewing what's in there.

Kahle is definitely one of the Good Guys.

Posted by John at 08:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The (Mis)adventures of Hello Cthulhu

This is just wrong on so many levels.

[Edited to note that the correct URL for Hello Cthulhu is http://www.underwhelmed.org/.]

Posted by John at 07:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 01, 2002

The Ultimate Webcam

"Mom, when I die, I want a Webcam in my coffin, and I'm serious about it."

How do you respond when your son makes an announcement like that? You could tell him not to be so silly, or you could make a film based on the idea.
(NB/- New York Times article - free registration required.)

I can't say that I can see the appeal of the idea myself, but then I wouldn't have expected to see a live autopsy on Channel 4 the other week so in matters of mortality I'm clearly a bit behind the curve.

Posted by John at 08:41 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Nowhere Girl

Chapter Two of Nowhere Girl is up. I read the first chapter ages ago and forgotten to check back for an update. Well worth a look if you have any interest at all in well-drawn, realistic online comics.

Posted by John at 08:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Humbling Experience

I have a feeling that in the unlikely event that I should some day attend a science fiction convention this story is a pretty fair depiction of how well I'd handle meeting a favourite author. Either that, or I'd just start incoherently rambling about how great all their work was.

(Yes, I know they're just ordinary people who happen to write books for a living. But knowing it and acting on that knowledge are two very different things.)

Posted by John at 08:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Smart Talk about Smart Mobs

Howard Rheingold has been talking about his new book, Smart Mobs on The Well.

There's plenty of thought-provoking material here. (Not to mention yet another book for me to look out for once it's out in paperback.) The discussion is naturally somewhat focussed on the US when it turns to the regulatory environment, but there are some fascinating contributions from Dave Hughes about his successful efforts to persuade the Welsh Assembly of the merits of community-based wireless broadband access.

Posted by John at 08:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Resistance is futile

Bob Cringely suspects that once their attempts to outlaw file sharing fail to kill the peer-to-peer networks, the recording industry will build a "legal" peer-to-peer network of their own. Oddly enough, he doesn't think that users' interests will be at the top of the recording industry's agenda, and eventually users will turn back to independent peer-to-peer systems.

None of this is terribly original thinking, but I do like the historical precedent Cringely wheels out to illustrate his point:

My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother if searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.

Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known for more than 3,000 years to seep all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.

Posted by John at 03:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

To Boldly Build What Nobody Has Built Before...

I must admit that I'm more than a little astonished if this is really the first time someone has tried to build the Enterprise D Out of LEGO.

Which is not to deny that it's an amazing project. Look at the blueprints the builder generated. Wonder at the care he took to keep to the right proportions. Consider how long it took.

It's nice to see that he's retained his sense of humour about the whole thing:

The model features accidental saucer-separation capability, as I've found out more than once.

Posted by John at 03:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack