Justin's Linklog Posts

We’re currently zooming through New Zealand in the cheapest way possible,

while still managing to see some stuff - very hectic and lots of early 

Help! We’re staying in a tent in a malarial swamp for 56 bucks a night! Can you spell rip-off?

But I think that’s Byron Bay for you. We’ll probably stay here tonight for the night that’s in it — there’s lots of bars here (happy Paddy’s Day), then rock up to Lennox Head, which sounds like a thoroughly nicer (and cheaper) beach chill-out kind of place. With any luck Lennox Head has less fairy-tat-selling hippie shops, flaming jugglers, etc. as well.

Fraser Island was cool, dingoes spotted, still no snakes or sharks though! BTW I’m not impressed by the “that’ll kill ya, mate” stories — IMO, picnics in th’ oul’ sod are more beset by stinging insects, plants, and rampaging animals than this place is (Queensland stingers and crocs excepted). Sure, there are dangerous animals out there, but they’re extremely rare, whereas the minor irritations of aggressive wasps and nettles are far too common at home. Plus the weather’s nicer here ;)

In other news I’ve just plumped for a copy of Lord of the Rings, so my reading will be sorted for the next few months I think!

La Feile Padraig shona diobh, will update again soonish…

Touching land once again! Much swaying is taking place as the sea legs wear off.

The Whitsundays are lovely — a great archipelago of 74 islands off the Queensland coast, with beautiful blue seas and white coral and sand beaches. Good fish-watching too: pairs of cuttlefish, some large coral and potato cod, and — best of all — a huge (1.5m) Maori wrasse called “Elvis”. Catherine got some diving in, but I was surface-bound by a nasty cold so had to stick with snorkeling. Still, I think I saw more fish, ha.

Now off to Hervey Bay and Fraser Island (via the night bus. argh). Another update at that point!

Well, just back from diving on the Great Barrier Reef; lots of good fish, and no attacks from groupers called “Grumpy”, thankfully.

Disappointingly, there were no sharks either. But I spotted lots of other good wildlife; a good few green turtles munching coral, lionfish, and some pretty large coral cod.

Great diving! Hopefully the pictures will come out OK once they’re developed — if so, I’ll scan ’em. First though, there’s sailing in the Whitsundays…

Hi travelogue readers! Quick links for photos (probably will be very infrequently updated…)

• Watchcam photos

• older Thailand travelogue

Just back from tree-hugging around Victoria’s national parks; now in Sydney, bodysurfing! Great Barrier Reef next.

(Before I sign off, I have to note NTK calling me an “official NTK hero”. How nice is that? Cheers Danny ‘n’ Dave…)

One last blog. This has to be noted as a worthy aim. Ben writes:

I think it would be mildly amusing if a lot of people were to visit this page and enter star ratings and customer reviews that do a little bit to repay Mr. Myers in kind for what he has so unstintingly given to so, so many people over the years.

Read on for more…

End Of Bloggage, for now — updates will be infrequent for the next few months. I’m off! travelling back to Ireland via

• Oz
• NZ
• Bangkok, then overland to Laos and Vietnam (hopefully)
• Nepal, then overland to India
• and finally back to Ireland via Frankfurt

there will be intermittent bloggage ’til then. See y’all soon…

Aaagh! I’m going to be diving in the Great Barrier Reef pretty soon. Gotta avoid this bugger — having my head chewed by a giant 100-kilo grouper called “Grumpy” is not my idea of fun, let alone when it’s 20 metres down.

(The diver said:) It came from underneath me. I never saw it coming. Then it was just ‘bang’ and I was inside the fish’s mouth. It ripped off my regulator but my mask was still on and then, just as suddenly, it let me go. …

(The dive instructor said:) Giant grouper have very powerful jaws. Grumpy could have crushed Andre’s head like a soft peach and snapped his neck like a twig. That’s why I think Grumpy was only being playful.

The Turkish Star Wars. I reckon this has got to be seen.

What can anyone say? “The Turkish Star Wars” makes film criticism moot. From the early days of the flickering shadow scenes in the Lumiere Brothers’s shorts through today’s digital cinema, there has never been a film quite like this. Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi…help us!

Gary Stock @ http://www.unblinking.com/ seems to be running Googlewhacking, originally heard of via a post on 0xdeadbeef:

I’ve gotten addicted to looking for combinations of common words which have the lowest incidence of appearance on web pages, as indexed by google. So far, I have yet to find a set of two common english words which do not appear together on any web pages…

Gary has taken this, and run (far and wide) with it. So here’s my attempt: bearnaise destructor: that scores 10600 x 242000 = 2,565,200,000 points.

BTW, I meant to reply to the 0xdeadbeef posting when it came through. This is really a resurfacing of Net Bullseye, created back in 1998 by Harold Chaput:

You and your friends gather around a web browser and go to AltaVista. Now do a search on two words or phrases. …. The first person who enters a search request that comes back with only one found document is the winner.

It’s a lot easier than Googlewhacking, since there was less web out there, back then ;) and the phrase addition makes it easy-peasy. Some of our hits:

• +spindoctor +fertilizer (the hit was some kind of Northern Ireland “Peace Book”, appropriately enough)

• +freebase +”pogo stick”

• +sasquatch +”vacuum cleaner hose”

• +inflated +”distributed objects everywhere”

• +”ben walsh” +bum

• +”embarrassing anal leakage” +walsh

• +dinner +”baby’s kidneys”

Note the predominance of attempts to slag each other off. I’m particularly proud of my “embarrassing anal leakage” (so to speak), aimed right at Ben Walsh. Bullseye!

Chris Blizzard has a blog. Cool.

Even better, it looks like sub-pixel font rendering will be supported in official Moz builds soon-ish, thanks to some blizzard and keithp hackage.

This is good — it was seriously looking like it was going to be a ‘download third-party RPMs‘ deal for quite a while, based on the Bugzilla correspondence.

Guardian review of a new book about 18th century scottish sex clubs, via forteana:

The Beggar’s Benison, the club to which Stevenson devotes his attention, was dedicated to “the convivial celebration of male sexuality”.

BBC’s “The Experiment”, a recreation of the Stanford prison experiment, has been halted:

it is clear the participants – particularly those selected to be ‘prisoners’ rather than ‘guards’ – were placed under severe levels of stress. Friends of some who took part in the programme .. said that it was more gruelling than they had been expecting.

So, what were they expecting, exactly?

The page cannot be fucking displayed (via FoRK):

The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings, but most likely you’re a complete dipshit. You tell your friends you’ve been online since ’94, but Mr. “I’ve been on the net for 5 years” seems to call me a lot at 2 am in the morning and asking what settings you need to put in your outlook express to get your @home e mail, or how do I send something in icq? My favorite moments from you and your friends are when you send me the “I love you virus” or the e mails I get with the jokes that are so not fucking funny I wanna snap your neck like a twig. No I’m not your personal Microsoft hotline, and when I go to your place for dinner, please dont ask me if I could “Just take a look at something” you’ve been having trouble with. The next time you tell me you pride yourself on how much you’ve learned about computers over the years, just know that I’m thinking “Bullshit” over and over in my mind ya prick.

Megalithic Sound and Landscape: A research project to investigate whether ancient monuments were built with acoustic effects in mind, and how they related to the landscape around them. (via nutlog)

I’ve heard of similar theories before, and IMO there’s a lot of weight there. Every megalithic monument (well, enclosed ones like caves and barrow graves) in my experience have had great acoustic qualities, and it seems to make sense that in an oral society this would be very important. It’s one of my minor obsessions ;)

BTW, ObIrishness: Newgrange is significantly older than Stonehenge: Newgrange was built around 3200BC, Stonehenge about 1000 years later. na na na nah.

However, Stonehenge is the subject of a rocking Tap tune. More Tap:

Nigel: We saw the film that everyone else saw and we were quite upset because it was not a depiction that was accurate. You see someone like Derek not getting out of the pod. Most nights…

Derek: Every night!

Nigel: Well, 80 percent of the time…

Derek: But you don’t see that.

Nigel: What they choose to show…

David: They chose to show a time when we couldn’t get Derek out of the bloody pod.

Nigel: The night there was some mechanical misfunction and we become the brunt of a joke, and not the smooth act that we really were.

David: Skew, eschew…

Nigel: Basically, it’s all twisted. “Let me go into my little editing room and twist.”

Derek: What do they call that, McCarthyism?

David: It’s called McCarthyism.

Nigel: Charlie McCarthyism.

Derek: I call it DiBergiism.

Nigel: This Is Marty DiBergi should have been the name of the movie.

Slashdot gets all hot and bothered about a ‘free energy’ hoax. The story in question is titled Irish Inventor Says Cracks World’s Energy Needs, which, despite having some awful grammar, contains a clue right there: Irish.

The whole point of the story is the Irishness — if it was a USAnian inventor, there would be no story, because there’d be no blarney crap like this:

If the Jasker men really are onto something, it could be the most important Irish invention since Guinness.

The days of touch-tone hell are numbered: AT&T’s new natural-language-recognition system will fix everything. Aye right, as they say.

Hmm. I think I’ve just fixed a bug in WebMake which was screwing up dependencies and change detection on this blog. Let’s see…

The Onion seems to be back on form:

Confused Marines Capture Al-Jazeera Leader

DOHA, QATAR– In a daring effort to dismantle the vast Arab network, a company of confused Marines raided Al-Jazeera headquarters Monday and captured leader Mohammed Abouzeid. “Al-Jazeera has ties to virtually every country in the Arab world, and this guy was the key to their whole operation,” Lt. Warren Withers said. “Nothing went through the Al-Jazeera communications array without his go-ahead.”

Poorly lit stairways, rickety bed frames, dirty sex aids and repetitive movement injuries are among the chief dangers brothel workers face in New South Wales.

Happy 2nd birthday to Boing Boing! Mark and Cory get big linky points, every day. Dunno how they do it.

To help celebrate, I’ve given ’em top billing on my daily reading list above (new feature!)

Hmm. WTF is this “WAR ON THE WORLD – I FORESAW IT” crap? The ghost in the WebMake machine? Sounds like a Pravda headline to me.

Ah well, since I’m about to go off travelling for 4 months it’s unlikely I’m going to get to fix it ;)

Adobe’s AlterCast is attracting some attention from the CMS community:

AlterCast is imaging server software designed to integrate with existing content management systems and help maintain the ocean of graphics used in e-commerce sites like Amazon.com and Outpost.com. It automates the creation and repurposing of pictures and eliminates the repetitive nature of tweaking and reformatting them for various needs.

AlterCast is installed on a server (Sun Solaris or Windows NT/2000) and scripts are created by developers so that key layers of Photoshop documents can be edited dynamically from within the user interface. Scripts can be developed to handle almost any need. A single image can be repurposed for high resolution print, Web optimization, and even wireless devices. Creative scripting can weasel its way in too. A script could be created so that after someone has visited a product three times on a site, a special starburst appears over the image that says, “Now 52 percent less!” just to close the deal.

It would, of course, be a piece of piss to write a WebMake plugin which uses the Gimp’s perl bindings to do this.

Also worth noting is that Roxen supports this out-of-the-box with the <gtext> and <gh> tags.

All Adobe have added is some commercial polish (always welcome though) and bindings to the PSD doc format. Presumably they’ll probably add some built-in support in Photoshop, too.

From the IrelandOffline forum, (Irish premier Bertie) Ahern in bid to beat telecoms threat to economy:

Mr Ahern said Ireland is lagging

saik said:

bertie is in with the online gaming massive

LOL. The real Bertie quotes are here.

It’s good to see the government finally doing something when Ireland came in 27th out of 30 OECD countries in a recent survey on access to broadband, but I’ll believe this when I see it happening. A leaked document is not a policy statement, especially when there’s an election coming up.

Just got a mail about SpamAssassin from Aaron Swartz, noted RDF guy. He runs a very interesting blog called swhack, which I’ve seen cited before, but never visited for some reason. Now I have, and it’s on the bookmarks list ;)

Anyway, the main reason for blogging this is this blog item about a story called Darwin Goes Digital, which is quite a nice intro to genetic programming:

… genetic programming (GP) , developed over the last decade by John Koza and his colleagues at Stanford University. Instead of starting with a set of guesses for the solution to a problem, GP begins with guesses for the actual method that best solves the problem. These are usually stated as random groups of instructions written in Lisp, a programming language able to cope with the cross-breeding and mutation demanded by the GP approach.

Interestingly though, the first time I heard about GP-style techniques was in Tierra, Tom Ray’s Darwinian OS:

The Tierra C source code creates a virtual computer and its Darwinian operating system, whose architecture has been designed in such a way that the executable machine codes are evolvable. This means that the machine code can be mutated (by flipping bits at random) or recombined (by swapping segments of code between algorithms), and the resulting code remains functional enough of the time for natural (or presumably artificial) selection to be able to improve the code over time.

Along with the C source code which generates the virtual computer, we provide several programs written in the assembler code of the virtual computer. Some of these were written by a human and do nothing more than make copies of themselves in the RAM of the virtual computer. The others evolved from the first, and are included to illustrate the power of natural selection.

This system results in the production of synthetic organisms based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the “energy” resource and memory is the “material” resource. Memory is organized into informational patterns that exploit CPU time for self-replication. Mutation generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different genotypes compete for CPU time and memory space.

Diverse ecological communities have emerged. These digital communities have been used to experimentally examine ecological and evolutionary processes: e.g., competitive exclusion and coexistence, host/parasite density dependent population regulation, the effect of parasites in enhancing community diversity, evolutionary arms race, punctuated equilibrium, and the role of chance and historical factors in evolution. This evolution in a bottle may prove to be a valuable tool for the study of evolution and ecology.

It was very exciting to see artificial evolution techniques actually work in this way, as if operating on a real genotype (have to be careful w.r.t. terminology here, Catherine’s a zoologist and gets very peeved about this stuff). Unfortunately, Tierra development seems to have stalled since then.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: The Satanic visitation that began with a bloody killing on July 6 ended prematurely for Manuela Ruda and her husband, Daniel Ruda:

She says they went to cemeteries at night, climbed around ruins, talked about this and that, and drank blood — their own blood, or that from so-called givers. Would-be drinkers of blood can find willing givers on the Internet, Mrs. Ruda says, explaining: “You just have to be careful not to hit an artery.” Givers are happy to offer their arms or legs for a bite, she says.

According to her story, it was around this time that she had her incisors removed and replaced with longer, sharper implanted teeth identical to those seen in vampire films. She dedicated her soul to the service of Satan and swore to accept his “every word” as law. Mrs. Ruda says she tried therapy but stopped, out of fear that she would be locked up if she revealed what she was really like.

LoTR screenplay summarised:

INT. IAN HOLM’S COMICALLY SMALL HOME

IAN MCKELLEN enters, hitting his head on objects.

IAN HOLM

There you are, you sage old wizard!

They smoke from IAN MCKELLEN’S PIPE.

IAN HOLM (CONT’D)

Ah, Ian, you truly have the finest

weed in Middle Earth.

IAN MCKELLEN

Heh. Both of our names are Ian.

IAN HOLM

Holy shit! You’re right!

IAN HOLM falls backwards, laughing hysterically.

A ‘Where are they now?’ of UK ’80’s musicians from the Grauniad. What a mess!

Adam Ant

Remind me: In the early 80s, Adam Ant (real name Stuart Goddard) was a self-styled dandy highwayman. He wore a tricorn hat, brandished a pair of flintlocks, and painted a horizontal white stripe across his nose long before sporting professionals made the same fashion statement. Ant’s music borrowed the post-punk fetish for Burundi drumming that made Malcolm McLaren’s Bow Wow Wow briefly popular, and was wedded to lyrics that proselytised in favour of dressing up and bigging it up in an unprecedentedly large manner. …

Where is he now? The secure Alice ward of the Royal Free Hospital in north London, where he is detained for his own protection and the safety of others under section two of the 1983 Mental Health Act.

New layout. Hope you like it! There seems to be a bit of rogue metadata on the loose that’s changing the title to something bizarre, though ;)

Affogato! This month’s pics from the Watchcam are now up, featuring:

• an exceptionally bullshitty pic from the Ned Kelly Turdsperience,

• a giant Ned Kelly,

• a not-very-big “Big Cherry”,

• some bizarre peg-men from Geelong,

• and the weathercock. Your guess is as good as mine.

CNN: “A plaque intended to honor black actor James Earl Jones at a Florida celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, instead paid tribute to James Earl Ray, the man who killed the black civil rights leader, officials said Wednesday. … the erroneous plaque read: ” Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive”.” Whoops. Not everyone can make that bad a mistake.

Well, I’ve just added archives to the blog — about time too. Hopefully this will help keep http://taint.org/ fresh and sweet-smelling.

Students describe John Walker as bumbling zealot:

John Walker bumbled his way through his first trip to the Middle East, unwittingly insulting other Muslims and repeatedly getting into trouble with authorities, say those who encountered the Marin teen-ager in Yemen. …

Josh Mortensen, another student, said from Cairo that Walker asked peers to call him Suleiman, affected a “bogus” Arabic accent and wore traditional Muslim garb unlike that of most Yemenis. Other foreign students at the school mockingly nicknamed him “Yusuf Islam,” the name pop singer Cat Stevens took when he became a Muslim and rejected his music career. …

Islamic experts said that in his naivete, Walker, a baptized Roman Catholic who converted to Islam at 16, fell into a trap so common that Mohammed himself predicted it.

“A person who might have been living a typical happy-go-lucky life and then he really gets very much attracted to the teaching of Islam and its ideal, but then he wants to change overnight – that’s what the prophet actually was teaching against,” said Jamal Badawi of the Islamic Information Foundation in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “He said, ‘Go gently.”‘

“A wayward weighing machine that told a woman she was a fat pig and told a man than he was a fat * * * * has been removed from a Melbourne shopping centre.” Hmm, hidden keyboard eh?

Inevitable: Harry PotHead.

Joel @ rathergood.com’s made a Flash video for Destiny’s Child which is worth a look — you might need knowledge of UKian TV for this one — http://www.rathergood.com/alf/ . (fwded by Stewart Smith from forteana)

Japanese youth getting rowdy at their ‘coming of age’ ceremonies.

Lovely user support, a la Smoothwall. One of the /. comments notes:

I have visited irc.smoothwall.org only once. I do feel, however, that my experience there alone was almost enough to discourage my use of the product. I joined the #smoothwall channel in hopes that I might find answers from knowledgable users or developers that I had been unable to find in any of the available documentation (all of which I read in its entirety).

Upon joining the channel, I was bombarded with the omnipresent topic, “Welcome to #smoothwall :: Please do not expect free support if you haven’t donated. http://redirect.smoothwall.org/donate ”

Ignoring the blatantly anti-open-source sentiment, I proceeded to ask about features and functionality that I feel are paramount to implementation of a device designed to secure my entire network. Before anyone so much as regarded my first question, I was bombarded with “Have you paid yet?” A simple ‘not yet’ got me my first response: “Can’t you read the f**king topc?!”

Of course, I wasn’t looking for support — simply answers to questions about the products capabilities. Off to a great start.

Quite a few of the other comments say pretty much the same thing. IPCop is a fork of the code. Use that instead, I reckon.

I used to think that geocaching sounded a bit silly — but after visiting Glenrowan’s astonishingly cruddy animatronic-fest that is Ned Kelly’s Last Stand, this looks like it would have been a bit of fun by comparison.

The wineries had to suffice instead. Mmmm, booze. And — very surprisingly for a country town — Benalla’s art gallery was really excellent.

BTW, this bloggage is quite funny about the whole “Ned Kelly Country” thing. Just be thankful he didn’t pay the 15 bucks to see Ned Kelly’s Last Stand; it’s the most overpriced, so-bad-it’s-not-even-funny-anymore tourist trap I’ve ever seen. I have a feeling cgregory would just have chucked a heart attack, there and then.

Mr Bowron said the hotel was negligent in ‘Allowing or permitting the use of pork chops as footwear in circumstances that the defendant knew or should have known that such use would have produced a hidden trap and did so produce such hidden trap’.