SFGate: bored union reps make their own entertainment. “It was like a ‘Blazing Saddles’ routine, because every time these guys would move on their seats, you could hear flatulence,” said one union source. “And it went on the whole day! ”
Category: Uncategorized
I’ve moved to pinging blo.gs instead of weblogs.com; blo.gs seems to have some quite neat features.
some startup called ActiveBuddy has patented instant-messaging bots — in an application filed August 2000. Hilarity ensues…
ActiveBuddy founder Tim Kay: “We invented interactive agents. (jm: bwahaha) Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That’s basically why we secured this patent” (in 2000).
Chris McClelland of WiredBots: “The Net::AIM module (which allows bot developers to connect to the AOL Instant Messenger TOC protocol through Perl) was around since 1998”.
Aryeh Goldsmith (author of Net::AIM): “the Net::AIM module is distributed with a bot”.
Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg: (the patent is) a “big win for the ActiveBuddy folks,” especially if it holds up to scrutiny.
My emphasis. ;) Sounds like ActiveBuddy have just spent a lot of money patenting something with a whole CPANload of prior art, and are on their way down the dot.plughole.
The Rockall Times reports that Mel Gibson is to shoot Finnegan’s Wake in Hittite:
Highly talented Hollywood all-rounder Mel Gibson is to direct a film version of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake made entirely in the ancient Anatolian language Hittite, we can reveal.
Respected linguist Gibson — whose flawless Scottish accent in 1995 epic Braveheart wowed audiences worldwide — has further stated that the film will carry no subtitles. Hopefully I’ll be able to transcend language barriers with visual storytelling, he told a press conference. People think I’m crazy, and maybe I am, Gibson added. But maybe I’m a genius.
Hollywood agrees. Take any project, stick Mel’s name on it and you’ve got a surefire blockbuster, the film’s producer told The Rockall Times. In any case, we’ve rewritten the script to include a suitable anti-English imperialist slant and a couple of big battle scenes. That’ll pack ’em in. …
Gibson hopes that the success of Finnegan — Cry for Freedom will enable him to bankroll some of his other pet projects, including a Inuit remake of Bridget Jones’ Diary and his eagerly-anticipated Macbeth, set in 1970s Belfast and spoken entirely in Etruscan with Sanskrit subtitles.
the FoRK list comes through with some truly classic high wierdness:
If one wants to purge the sources of malice of say a black magician, then purge his dinosaurs and his dinosaur eggs. Unfortunately most of our religions are based on dinosaur protection of eggs and thus mind control, regardless of the front they put out to the public.
VNUNet: You have mail: 31 billion a day, set to rise to 60 billion by 2006 (according to IDC). “Only a more effective means of filtering out spam would ‘ensure that email continues to be a valuable business and personal communications tool,’ he said.”
Torture A Spammer, a nifty Flash game from “white hat” email-marketing firm, emailSherpa.
Argh, so much mail to get through; I was away this weekend, then
offline for most of today waiting for a new line to be installed. But I
did get a new candidate for the bizarre spam award: Q: DOES YOUR FOREIGN
ACCENT SIMPLY GET IN THE WAY? Simple answer: nope. next!
some ILUG regulars conducted a war-drive around Dublin and found 378 stations, with quite a high range of WEP use compared to previous surveys: 39%. BTW, is this the first use of warcycling? The green alternative!
Mozilla fans (and people who want to see how anti-aliasing is doing getting into Mozilla HEAD) may find Chris Blizzard‘s blog worth tracking.
I’ve added a few more folks to the blogroll — Jeremy Zawodny (who now hosts one of the SpamAssassin primary sites), Rod, who contributes regularly to SpamAssassin, and Joel, who just writes cool articles about software development. ;) Where? yonder over rightwards…
BoingBoing forwards 2 links to hilarious Nigerian Scam parodies, one from Dick Cheney and one from Laura Bush. Cory quotes it already, but it’s too good to miss, so I will too:
I am the widow of the late President George W. Bush of the United States of America. I am writing you this letter in confidence regarding my current circumstances.
I escaped the United States ahead of death squads with my husband and two children Jenna and Frank, moving first to England and then, when my husband’s political enemies took power there, to Austria. All of our wealth, obtained legitimately through baseball, oil drilling and insider trading, was seized by the new government of the USA under the despotic regime of (Dr.) Noam Chomsky, except for the contents of a few Swiss bank accounts. These bank accounts, which contain social security lock-box funds and the bulk of the 2001 budget surplus, could not be accessed by me or my children, due to agreements made between the socialist government of the USA and Swiss bank regulators. They seized our ranch in Crawford, Texas and now use it to teach homosexualist propaganda to schoolchildren.
Idiot falls for 419 scam, hook line and sinker, bankrupting her employers. “It’s unbelievable that she fell for this,” gasped investigating FBI Special Agent James Hoppe, echoing the sentiments of Jules Olsman, president of Olsman Mueller & James. “This is just absolutely beyond description,” he said.
Aliens create portrait of Richard and Judy. Well, not really aliens — John Lundberg et al — but it is very cool. (Richard and Judy btw are crappy daytime TV presenters in the UK)
Gamasutra reports from GDC Europe. It’s good to see Systemic Game Design is getting a lot more attention these days as CPU power increases on consoles, instead of the random 3D graphics tweakery that predominates on the PC platform. Systemic game design is defined here as follows:
“Instead of hard-coding lots of features into the game .. the systemic paradigm tries to create global patterns which provide emergent gameplay, and the ability to create alternative strategies using the level’s resources. … In this way a player can come up with new ideas to solve problems by combining items in ways that perhaps even the level designers hadn’t considered. This improves the sense of immersion and freedom, while emphasizing player’s self-expression capabilities through the game. … An example of a systemic game is GTA3, where each mission can be solved in dozens of ways, as compared to old lock-and-key adventure games, where player expression and alternative strategies were basically non-existent. In a systemic game world, the player can use different methods to solve a problem. In a non-systemic game world, you must guess how the game designer wanted you to solve the problem, even if that way does not feel very intuitive, nor fun.”
Mmm. Grand Theft Auto 3. PS: GTA3 can also be found on my Amazon wishlist ;)
P. J. O’Rourke visits Cairo — during Ramadan (made the same mistake myself). Highlights include driving:
I saw a driving school. What could the instruction be like? No, no, Anwar, faster through the stop sign, and make your left from the far-right lane. Surely John Kifner, Chris Matthews, and NBC News are kidding when they use Arab street as a metaphor for anything in the Middle East. Or, considering the history of the Middle East, maybe they aren’t.
And then plenty of politics:
I had lunch with an Egyptian who had been born in the United States. When he was in high school, in suburban Chicago, he became serious about religion and observed Ramadan with rigor. Then he went to Egypt to work as a journalist, and now, in Ramadan, he was having lunch. My sister is a Christian fundamentalist, I said. She wouldn’t crash a plane into the World Trade Center, but she might land pretty hard on evolution. And then we’d all have to remain amoebas. A lot of people don’t make that connection, the Egyptian journalist from Chicago said.
But O’Rourke then goes on to quote The Middle East Media and Research Institute. Do a search on The Guardian‘s site for more info on those guys (upshot: very loose cherry-picked “translations”, with an emphasis on misrepresenting the importance of the speaker — so, for example, “random lunatic with an axe to grind against Israel” becomes “government spokesman”, that kind of thing).
Apart from that, overall, an interesting article.
The sustainably-powered wireless network with satellite uplink set up at the Big Green Gathering, near Cheddar in Somerset, last July. Pretty interesting, although ghod knows I would not want to have to pedal too much just to check my mail.
And, oh look, there’s a spam-relevant comment in the Lessons Learnt section!
Many people will check their email happily, unless they have to (pedal) for an equal amount of time! If this is extended to the environment, then slow email servers and spam are causing huge amounts of wasted energy and pollution, and not just psychologically. The question on many people’s lips was “what is the alternative?”
Answer: SquirrelMail.
The Reclaim The Streets demo last Sunday went off well, sounds like. I would have gone but I hadn’t heard (or had forgotten) about it :(
The fact that it went well is a relief, because the last one became a bloodbath when some of the Gardai got a little over-excited, removed their identification, and started swinging clubs and “arresting” attendees indiscriminately. Very nasty, or so I hear. (I wasn’t back in Dublin by that point.)
Along with some reports of massive corruption in the Donegal police force, this event turned out to be a watershed in how Irish folks are viewing their police. That kind of thing wasn’t really a problem over here in the last few years — but now it seems to have all changed. Old news for people in the UK, US, Northern Ireland and Australia — but quite new to us here.
I’ve added titles to this blog, since RSS looks silly without them. But I am not going back through all those entries… argh…
While trekking in Nepal, I had a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to Trekking in the Himalayas, borrowed from our mates Caolan and Barbara. It was especially notable for its incredible medical section, which contained lots of info on what drugs to use to treat various diseases, described symptomatically (of course, in most of the world, most of the common illnesses boast symptoms similar to “I have greenish foul-smelling gravy squirting from both ends of my body”. But it’s good to be able to tell them apart).
It was also notable, because anyone who had a copy knew all about altitude sickness, and were indescribably paranoid. The ones who were charging up the trails as fast as they could generally did not have a copy, and no doubt half of them came back down again in slightly nasty circumstances.
Anyway, it was the best medical info I’ve ever read. Reading the paper today, I came across a reference to e-med.co.uk, which claims to be medical info, including treatment details, for people who might be far away from a doctor. The perfect resource for a know-it-all who doesn’t want to spend money and time on a doctor, just to be told to go home and take an aspirin! Unfortunately it seems to be a “consultation by email” service, rather than “look it all up” one. Ah well.
Caolan and Barbara should be somewhere around Oz by now. I must see if I can dig up the URL of their travelogue site, it’s great fun.
Spam cost calculator: figure out how much spam costs.
a good reply to the Nigerian scams, on Slashdot:
…unfortunately I don’t have that much money. I do have seventeen dollars and fifty-six cents. I really want you to have all of that. I hope you can overlook the fact that I’m several million short of your goal, but the key is that I try hard and I’m an excellent wind surfer.
BB reports that “Russian entrepreneurs are spraypainting logoed advertisements for their products and services on stray dogs and releasing them as walking, starving billboards.” This sounds just a bit too Chris Morris to me, and considering it came via Ananova / Orange Today’s “quirkies” service — which is not exactly reknowned for doing the backup research first — I would say it’s pretty unlikely… let’s see what forteana make of it.
Peerfear: a scraping sitefilter servlet for scraping sites into RSS.
quotes some guy called “Kevin Hemenway” who wrote a document called The Semantic Web: 1-2-3. So I was thinking “hmmm… Kevin Hemenway… I though Morbus Iff wrote that”. Then the penny dropped. Another pseudonym blown apart by the callous Mark Pilgrim!
hooray, I got rid of that horrible “add line breaks to preserve short lines in HTML” feature from EtText, it was driving me nuts. The irony is, I only added it because txt2html had it. Keeping up with the Joneses just causes trouble, it seems.
a spam mail asks: jm, do we have your money? There’s a very simple answer: “no you don’t, and you never will, you scumbags”. Scutterin’ gobsheens, as Podge and Rodge would say.
Spent an enlightening day clambering around Dublin’s rooftops with a bunch of helium balloons on a 20-metre piece of string. Can you guess what I was doing? Yes, it’s the latest geek pastime: Hunt The Line Of Sight!
All was well — we found it, the weather was lovely, my Aussie-learnt balloon technique rocked, and we came up with some better ways to do it in future ;)
This promo calendar for an Italian coffin manufacturer has been doing the blog-rounds recently — and the more eagled-eyed viewer might have wondered at the words MIKE LEAVE ME ALONE written on the back of the last model.
Well, wonder no more — an italian Forteana subscriber, Giuseppe de Nicolellis, has got to the bottom of it. Case closed!
Good article about SpamAssassin at IBM developerWorks:
After having used JunkFilter for years, and thinking it was pretty good, I was blown away by how effective SpamAssassin is. I think that this is due in large part to several good design decisions on the part of SpamAssassin’s developers.
Why, thank you! ;)
Aaron shares his rss-by-mail script. My reaction (cut from mail): “Together with my Mailman-archives-to-RSS script, and my blog (which is updated by mail), soon the semantic web will run entirely on SMTP…” (cackles evilly).
Well, maybe not yet — but it’s getting there. a bit.
Two weeks ago, six top financial institutions met privately with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, IBM and other leading corporate instant messaging providers and urged them to build communications networks that interoperate. …. The meeting, which took place at Merrill Lynch’s New York offices, was among the first convened by the Instant Messaging Standards Board (IMSB), a newly created consortium led by financial services firms Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, UBS and Deutsche Bank.
Holy shit, that’s a lot of gorillas! (via Doc).
Danny O’Brien is off to the event of the year: Philip Glass and the Glass Ensemble performing a live accompaniment to a showing of Koyaanisqatsi. I am, needless to say, green with envy. Chance of that coming to Dublin? Hovering around the “zero” mark I should think. Bugger.
In other news, Cam is back, and in good form, from the sounds of it. Apparently SpamAssassin filtered 7MB of spam while he was away. So someone gets more spam than I do!
goddammit. Just got a PS2 for my birthday (wahoo!), and immediately thought about getting hold of the Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi 2-pack DVD. But it’s region-coded to US/Canada only in the edition on Amazon.com, and not available at all at Amazon.co.uk. Region coding is evil.
Of course, I could buy it somewhere else — but I wasn’t planning to buy it, I was looking to set up an Amazon.com wishlist!
David Brin gets all anti-fannish about Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. I really don’t know why he bothers, it and Episode 1 were atrocious, George Lucas has lost it, full stop, IMO. But I did like the way Brin refers to Yoda as “one green preachy oven mitt”; I’d just append “with the voice of Fozzie Bear”.
And who are the critics who’ve never seen a Maori before? “bounty hunter Jango Fett even looks Latino” my arse.
Microsoft’s Spanish thesaurus, included in Word for Windows 6.0 in Mexico, contains some unfortunate synonyms:
- Indian: man-eater or savage
- Western: Aryan, white, civilized
- Lesbian: pervert, depraved person
That would be the risk when you use a mid-1930s source document, it sounds like!
Sitescooper: Aaron notes that the Wayback Machine has added support for diffing HTML, using technology licensed from DocuComp (demo), and he notes “HTML Diff is extremely difficult and they do a half decent job, but it’s got plenty of room to improve.”
Maybe they should look at Sitescooper: it’s had HTML diffing for the last
3 years, using diff(1) or Algorithm::Diff and some basic knowledge
of HTML presentation. Though mind you, DocuComp might have some trouble
having a look, as it’s free software, licensed under the GPL. :)
Of course, Sitescooper is a big, chunky lump of application, very oriented towards scraping an entire news site, downloading the latest news, stripping down the HTML and delivering that in one file — ie. exactly what you want for viewing news sites offline on a PDA, but when you want to use just nifty feature in there, you’re stuck with the whole application. It’s just not UNIX.
So, one thing I’ve been thinking about doing recently, is taking some of the code in Sitescooper and refactoring it into a UNIX toolset; a wget-style getting tool, which has Sitescooper‘s knowledge of how to cache and rewrite URLs; a HTML-differ; and a few other tools. But this is still thinking, at the moment.
A good article about Prague’s CZFree.net, via Cory. Hopefully it’ll provide some good ideas for the Irish-WAN folks:
The most promising way (of getting onto the internet) seems to be connecting to the backbone on a wholesale basis, which is what CZFree.net does through its backbone provider — TransgasNet, the telecoms arm of gas company Transgas. “The connection is already built, and it’s real broadband, guaranteed connection, so the issue of Internet connection is solved,” Janda said.
CZFree.net also has a unique approach to providing Internet connectivity to its members. Janda said that the idea is to give each user at least 32 kbps Internet connectivity (around two-thirds of the dial-up access speed) free, while users who want additional bandwidth will pay a certain fee. The fee is still undecided because the initiative is still in the formative phase, but it should be Kc 200 to Kc 300. The connection to the wireless network is free by default, although every user has to invest in the hardware necessary for exchanging data over the Wi-Fi.
If hackers ruled the world. My favourite:
