(Things I found interesting recently.)
With a defiant cry of “right on motherfuckers”, pop superstar Madonna has presented one of the world’s most famous art prizes to conceptual artist Martin Creed for his controversial creation of a bare room with a light that switches on and off.
Riight. If there was ever any doubt, I reckon it’s now clear that the Turner Prize is all about getting column inches instead of actually awarding new, interesting art.
brrr. The weather here in Melbourne is pretty much exactly what the weather in Ireland would be — ie. cold:
Sure this was the second day of summer, but instead of worrying about bush fires, I decided to get the home fires burning again.
After all, it was a shivery 14 degrees – the average maximum of a day in June, not December.
I know that Melbourne’s weather is meant to be changeable, but could we be kidding ourselves when we say that December is summer?
Last December, when the average maximum was an unusually warm 26.2 degrees, there were no fewer than eight 30-degree days, while January turned out to be one of the hottest months ever experienced in Melbourne with 14 occurrences of above 30 degrees.
You have to go back to 1879 to find a December when the thermometer waited until the middle of the month before cracking 30 degrees.
Crime writer ‘solves’ Jack the Ripper mystery. Patricia Cornwell, a popular crime writer, reckons the impressionist painter Walter Richard Sickert did it — and (ludicrously) ripped up one of his paintings looking for clues.
Pentagon: US military forces have in their control a … US citizen:
All along, Americans have known there were Taliban sympathisers and supporters in their midst: the FBI has been focusing on little else for the past three months. However, it expected they would be of Arab descent, part of the huge wave of immigration from Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine of the past 20 years, living in one of the big, ambivalent Islamic communities, perhaps round Detroit or New York.
No one bargained on a 20-year-old white kid with a Swedish name, Irish descent, a strict Catholic father and a Buddhist mother.
A rumour of William Shatner farting during an interview pushed sales of a Star Trek video beyond the final frontier. Mark Borkowski applauds stroke of PR genius …
The source of the story was the video company’s publicist, who applied a nifty bit of creativity to one of the most intractable problems in entertainment PR. … Getting coverage for a video release is well nigh impossible because the stars have already done the circuit and everything’s already been said.
Slightly stale bits, but funny nonetheless:
Sevilla midfielder Francisco Gallardo has been charged by the Spanish soccer federation for an unusual goal celebration. Gallardo bit teammate Jose Antonio Reyes’ penis after he had scored in the 4-0 win over Valladolid. Reyes was besieged by ecstatic teammates after scoring and Gallardo was seen to bend down and nibble at the goalscorer’s genitalia.
He could face a fine or suspension for his actions, which may deemed to be an infringement of what is described in the federation’s rulebook as “sporting dignity and decorum”. “I felt a bit of a pinch but I didn’t realise what Gallardo had done until I saw the video. “The worst thing about it is the teasing I’m going to get from my teammates,” Reyes said.’
GNOME Vim: embedded Vim, for use in Evolution. Sweet.
Club patron sues ‘reckless’ stripper:
Bonnett was in the New Westminster club on Nov. 29, 2000 when a female dancer swung around a pole and kicked him, fracturing his nose, according to the lawsuit filed on Tuesday in British Columbia Supreme Court.
Another classic piece of Pravda translation. “ENDEAVOUR TO DELIVER 6,000 US FLAGS TO THE SPACE“, it seems, which will be handed over to “people who took part in de-mounting of hips on the spot of the tragedy.” Did that really just say “de-mounting of hips”?
Seriously though, I love Pravda’s english articles; it’s not just the iffy translation; sometimes you get some beautiful Russian turns of phrase thrown in — then mangled through the translation. ;)
From ZZZ online:
Here’s some old bits: The Gettysburgh Powerpoint Presentation. Still very funny — it’s a classic.
From: Bin Laden, Osama
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2001 8:17 AM
To: Cavemates
Subject: The Cave
A salutary tale of getting ripped off writing games. Nightmare.
None of which has happened. Why? Because: For half a year now Bethesda has been delaying the 150000USD, which they ARE TO pay according to the contract, and moreover, it even refuse to give us the reason why. We have not been paid even for the beta.
But still, from some source we know that by now Bethesda has sold about 50000 boxes of Echelon in North America, which means that Bethesda has already made over a million on the game.
http://www.uncontrol.com/ — a flash applet which provides a good collection of nature-imitating mathematical eye candy. Number 16 is beautiful.
I used to write graphics demos on the C-64, which used a lot of this kind of stuff (although a hell of a lot simpler for obvious reasons). It occurs to me that Flash makes writing demos a lot easier; it provides a decent language (scripting as opposed to 6502 assembly), it gives you a good set of drawing tools (anti-aliasing, alpha blending, and 24-bit colour), the hardware no longer limits what you can do in 2-D graphics, and you can even buy software which takes care of the text effects like zooms, scrolling, bouncing etc. In other words, all the cool tricks are done for you ;)
I wonder what demo writers are doing nowadays, as a result? One side seems to be what these guys have done — actually go for really interesting, good-looking effects, rather than just the “how did they do that” factor. I would imagine the other side of the demo “bleeding edge” is doing a hell of a lot of 3-D stuff. (By hand. In assembler. ;)
A great idea for a blog — “who would buy that?” — featuring auction oddities from all over the web. There’s some absolutely horrific tat to be found out there…
Nancy Banks-Smith on an ill-conceived method of reviewing, during her career as the Guardian’s TV critic:
Later, we all went to the BBC’s TV centre or various ITV offices, running after each other across town like a row of ducks. Then, programmes were shown in central viewing theatres such as at Bafta. This had the disadvantage that the actors were apt to show up, too, applauding their own performance. It was not a relaxed mix. It was at Bafta that Barbara Woodhouse snapped “Put that out at once!” with such dominance that the critic beside me swallowed her cigarette and had to be extinguished with water.
The winner of the Second Annual SatireWire Spam Slam, courtesy of Kelley on FoRK:
ELECTRIGEL CREME
Brazen Teen Bitches, Take a serious look at your life. And allow me to introduce a powerful new substance from the Electri-Cellular Industry. Electrigel Creme
I wouldn’t have believed it myself, But now there is a better way. There is no catch. I have to get this off my chest before I explode!!!
Electrigel Creme
It’s true you can earn $50,000 in the next 90 days
You really can find out ANYTHING ABOUT ANYONE! A university diploma is waiting for you! But no product is more effective than, Electrigel Creme
What does it do? That’s right. It really really does.
And that, my friend, is the bargain of a lifetime.
I am faxing a check
BillG recently claimed to have invented Open Source. As part of a discussion of this, his original open letter to computer hobbyists was uncovered. Makes interesting reading, in retrospect.
I think I’ve found a logo for SpamAssassin — Little Rubber Ninjas to the rescue! They’ve even got the Authentic Ninja Grimace.
I’ve just added weblogs.com support to taint.org. Been meaning to do it for a while, but plenty of other stuff got in the way in the meantime. :(
Due to a set of advocacy and plain show-off mails recently, regarding sub-pixel font rendering under Linux, my hand has been forced ;)
As a result, here’s a little HOWTO document I’ve written up for getting sub-pixel rendering working under Linux. Check it out if you’ve got a Linux laptop and want some sweet-looking fonts!
What’s hot in Kabul today? Apparently, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai = hot, Fakhir Mohammed = not. Can’t say I blame them.
Looking at whump.com’s moreLikeThis weblog, I found a link to a static web CMS using DocBook and XSLT: XM (XSLT Make), and the concept of site maps as a design pattern for websites. Both are similar to what I’m trying to do with WebMake, but unfortunately there’s no links to WebMake anywhere there. Gotta do more hyping, I reckon ;)
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing is on fire today. I was tempted to forward on an entry or two, but by the time I got to the end of today’s updates, I think the only thing a reader can do is just go there and read ’em: Quake players on drugs, Dance Dance Resurrection, and EMI uploading their own music to Gnutella…
Technician 1: My name be John. What problem do you have?
Hamlet: A heart so full of woe to shame the gods.
My father dead. My mother newly wed
To mine own uncle who hath stole my crown.
But worst of all, like demon born of Hell,
Connection’s lost; I hath no ISDN.
a classic tale of
in-flight mass hysteria, courtesy of 0xdeadbeef. Read on…
Found on /.: Nuon have released a free-as-in-speech SDK for third-party developers to develop applications which will run on certain models of DVD players. According to ‘What Is Nuon?’, the Nuon DVD hardware is essentially both a DVD player and an open gaming platform. Incredible! Looks like I know now what kind of DVD player I’ll be buying — the one I can write my own apps for ;)
Looks like my extensive Laxo and Publin experience will come in handy, if things get tight.
The publication in Genome Research gives details of (Jim) Kent’s algorithm as a demonstration of openness, which has been a hallmark of the public Human Genome Project.
“Instead of being a black box it details how it was done,” said John McPherson, co-director of the genome sequencing center at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., one of the many labs that contributed to the Human Genome Project.
The free exchange of information is a testament to why Kent became passionate about the public Human Genome Project in the first place.
“I thought it would help to get as much information about genes and the genome in to the public domain to help discourage people from patenting it wholesale,” Kent said.
“I was afraid that if the only people who had access were the people who could afford Celera’s (subscription) database, it would tie things up.”
Sorry, it’s old bits, but I hadn’t read it before.
Drop (a) food, in yellow parcels, then (b) cluster bombs, also in yellow casings.
Eventually realise potential for confusion.
“Do not confuse the cylinder-shaped [yellow cluster] bomb with the rectangular [yellow] food bag. […] All bombs will explode when they hit the ground, but in some special circumstances some of the bombs will not explode.”
Riiiight. Way to get the locals on your side!
Good article on building a large-scale e-commerce site with Apache and mod_perl, for what that’s worth nowadays, at perl.com. This bit was especially pleasing to my SQL-database-phobic mindset:
Since Perl code executes so quickly under mod_perl, the performance bottleneck is usually at the database. We applied all the documented tricks for improving DBD::Oracle performance. We used bind variables, prepare_cached(), Apache::DBI, and adjustments to the RowCache buffer size.
The big win of course is avoiding going to the database in the first place. The caching work we did had a huge impact on performance. Fetching product data from the Berkeley DB cache was about 10 times faster than fetching it from the database. Serving a product page from the proxy cache was about 10 times faster than generating it on the application server from cached data. Clearly, the site would never have survived under heavy load without the caching.
Ha! Take that, database-backed-website fans! ;)
Great article from Heise Telepolis, by Duncan Campbell: How the terror trail went unseen.
“It gives you a window into how it is that Al Qaeda … operates,” he added. Calls were so frequent were so frequent that the phone, rented from 1-2-1, was dubbed the “Jihad phone”.
But, like all the other European phones and lines mentioned in the New York trial, the “Jihad phone” didn’t use encryption to prevent the communications from being intercepted by the police or security agencies. It couldn’t. Yet investigators and surveillance centres apparently knew nothing of what was going on at the time, and were unable to piece together the links being run by the terror group.
The BBC World Service has for the last 8 years, apparently been broadcasting an Afghan version of The Archers, called “New Home, New Life”:
There is Nazir, the buffoon of a security guard based on Eddie Grundy, who in a recent episode set fire to his neighbour’s haystack. There is Rabiya Gul, the bolshie wife in the mould of Jennifer Aldridge who the Taliban routinely complain embarrasses their efforts to subdue women. And there is Rahimdad, the village barber, a solid Sid Perks type character whose shop is the meeting place – much like the pub in western soaps. In the seven years since the show’s birth, the fortunes of these characters have become so vital to national morale that it is thought not only to have saved radio from banishment, but to have encouraged the Taliban to soften their line on a range of other issues.
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Great story from Jon Callas about the history of CD-ROM drives, and why they can play audio CDs in the first place.