Tech: ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center. Great panel weblog, with some of the big names in the research field, dealing with several security issues quite nicely.
Category: Uncategorized
Code: Rod writes: ‘I have had a bunch of fun today, gleefully playing with a new source-control package. I truly lead a sad life.’
Tolkien: The Encyclopedia of Arda — great for settling those insanely geeky Lord of The Rings arguments, of which there have been loads recently. ;)
Free Software: Ciaran O’Riordan has just announced the launch of IFSO, the Irish Free Software Organisation:
Vacation: We’re back. Well, technically, my body is back, but the silver thread is reeling in somewhere over Greenland. So I’m pre-classifying my mail and looking for urgent stuff with my eyes glazing over instead of doing anything more useful.
Code: OOP over the top: a hilarious dissection of some of the most monstrous ‘how to rewrite OO-style’ I have ever seen — take a 15-line if/elseif/else clause and rewrite as a thoroughly over-engineered unmaintainable 7-class, 15-method disaster, using the Singleton and Factory patterns. The rewrite in the original article is intended seriously, as far as I can tell.
Innovation: Maciej posts a fantastic look back on the Wright Brothers from an interesting angle — their patent-related antics.
Politics: Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.
Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.
Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.
‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)
Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.
Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.
A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!
Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.
Security: Bruce Schneier points out some interesting angles on the official report into the US power blackout of Aug 14th:
Ireland: Apparently, the Internet Society of Ireland (ISOC) has set up its first Chapter working group to establish a consensus on best principles for governing the .IE registry.
Ireland: Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!
Health:
Revealed: how drug firms ‘hoodwink’ medical journals (Observer) — an
amazing attempt to mislead scientific progress for short-term commercial
gain. (via forteana):
Spam: This is funny — via IP, ANNOUNCING: The amphibious transport dock and spam relay:
Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!
Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here’s the scoop:
Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special ‘SWAT – The Movie’. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful ‘fish out of water’ in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was ‘claiming’ Colin as our own in an ‘inclusive’ way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.
KATE THORNTON: Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he’s become the man of the moment.
SAMUEL L.JACKSON: Really? Only in the UK?
KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he’s from Ireland.
SLJ: You can’t claim him because he’s from Ireland.
KT: Well we do because it’s close by. (laughter)
SLJ: Ok. That’s the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that’s ok we don’t need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)
KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.
SLJ: Ok good.
KT: As are you.
SLJ: Yeah all right.
KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?
SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.
KT: So you checked him out?
SLJ: Yeah.
[….]
The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it’s cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I’ve ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?
Yours sincerely,
Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com
Software: Joel on Biculturalism: ‘What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.’
Fun: 
C just got her xmas present; a digital camera,
the Sony DSC P10 to be exact. Results to right ;)
Spam: Let me take this moment to welcome our UK friends to the ‘spam now illegal’ club; unlike the US, the European and Australian anti-spam laws seem to be shaping up nicely, requiring opt-in before ’email marketing’ can be sent.
Patents: The Washington Post gets it. ‘The country “needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law,” said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. “It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age.”‘
Software: There’s a certain frisson to be had when you find out that your software is running somewhere really cool; I got this when I found out that PLP was being used in McMurdo Base, Antarctica and SpamAssassin as The Well‘s spam filtering system (SpamAssassin‘s now even more widely deployed, which is amazing — but this was the first ‘woo!’ moment).
Here’s a hot UL that’s floating around the irish web right now —
In a British program about Samuel L Jackson and Colin Farrell’s lastest movie SWAT presented by British presenter, Kate Thornton, the following exchange occured:
Thornton: What was it like working with Colin (Farrell), cos he is just so hot in the U.K. right now?
Jackson: He’s pretty hot in the U.S. too.
Thornton: Yeah, but he is one of our own.
Jackson: Isn’t he from Ireland?
Thornton: Yeah, but we can claim him cos Ireland is beside us.
Jackson: You see that’s your problem right there. You British keep claiming people that don’t belong to you. We had that problem here in America too, it was called slavery.
… yeah, right. ;)
(Update: Actually, believe it or not, that’s more or less how it really went. Here’s the transcript.)
Some commentary at
TheReggaeBoyz.com (quote: ‘I NEARLY DEAD TO RASS!!!!’) and
Kuro5hin.
It looks like the TV programme does exist; no scripts online, unfortunately, so we’ll never figure out if this one really happened, I think.
IMO, it’s made up for sure. That last line is just a little too harsh for a primetime schmooze-a-gram, at the very least. Plus, it’s the kind of thing only an Irishman would give a shit about — the perpetual adoption of Irish celebs and worthies by the UK media is a continual source of irritation for the Irish — as Dervala puts it:
‘No, Oscar Wilde was ours. You put him in jail, though. And Shaw was ours. And Yeats. And Johnny Rotten.’
Spam: Yoz comments on the bizarre new names appearing in spam, linking to a 2lmc spool entry and this entry at rereviewed.com, featuring such beauties as:
Irish: Sarah Carey‘s back — good to see it. Delivering a prime piece of moral outrage regarding malls (or ‘shopping centres’ as they’re quaintly called on the eastern shores), and their intolerance of political speech.
Politics: WorldChanging.org
on open source: ‘we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that
several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing,
they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the
world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?’
The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.
He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)
Environment: (the built one, that is): LA Observed links to a couple of stories about kayaking the grim concrete trench that is the Los Angeles River. Well worth a read, and don’t miss the 1999 LA Weekly story, in which the journalist makes it to the sea before being picked up by police.
Patents: Wonder why MS is just now starting to monetize^W’liberalise’ its patent portfolio, starting with a VFAT royalty fee for digital cameras?
Spam: Spamcop.net on securing MS Exchange systems against relaying. If you run an Exchange server that’s accessible from the net, this is a must-read. Summary:
Spamcop.net on securing MS Exchange systems against relaying. If you run an Exchange server that’s accessible from the net, this is a must-read. Summary:
- Exchange 5.0 is unsecureable (yikes!)
- Exchange 2000, installed as part of MS IIS/5, is open by default
E-Voting: Very interesting page reproducing a translation of part of an expert report detailing an incident that occurred during an ‘electronic election’ in Belgium on May 18th 2003.
Books: Smartypants, the book! I’m there.
Music: So the current news on the Irish web scene is the Irish Recorded Music Association, Ireland’s very own mini-RIAA, attempting to sue cheap CD vendor CDWow.ie out of the Irish market.
ADORABLE KITTENS TALK ABOUT POLITICS
Funny: Best commentary I’ve read all week: ADORABLE KITTENS TALK ABOUT POLITICS: