This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

The Metropolitan Police have a new poster (via Aquarion) showing London's citizens that they are "secure beneath the watchful eyes" of the cops. Great. I feel really reassured now. Where can I buy my telescreen that I can't turn off?

The Oxford Union debated the proposition that "the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music" (via The Reg and NTK). Final scores: 72 ayes, 256 noes. A pretty resounding defeat. The report notes that a few of the more memorable bits of the debate include Hilary Rosen lying about copy-protected CDs in the US (or at the very least being deliberately ingenuous about it), Rosen also getting shocked at how many people said that they do buy music because of filesharing, and a few unsupported assertions about the importance of the music industry which no-one was allowed to contest. For more background on this debate, see the Campaign for Digital Rights. -----

In accordance with prophecy, I haven't been updating because I'm working on something. A couple of things, actually; one is paid work and must be done, and the other is a little private project of mine and Sarabian's. So, sorry for the lack of stuff, and here's a Mark-esque catchup. I always feel, when doing this sort of thing, that it's so old-hat -- a list of links with very little commentary, that's what weblogging was in the last millennium, man. Not that I like the whole word "weblogging" (or "blogging"), but yeah. Anyway. On with the links.

• Curious Yellow, a network-aware coordinated "superworm". Interesting. I wrote an essay a while back about how worms should co-operate with other instances of themselves, but this is a layer of evolution beyond that
• Guess the Dictator and/or Television Sit-Com Character. ASks yes/no questions and tries to guess your choice, and if it gets it wrong asks for who it was and adds that information to its database so it'll be right next time. It's played about eight million times and is right two-thirds of the time, which is pretty reasonable.
• I'd forgotten how much I like Bob Cringely's articles. In A Hollywood Ending, he says, "Microsoft has more cash on hand than the total combined profits of all movie studios and broadcast and cable networks for the last decade. So why should Microsoft care about movie studios? Frankly, they don't. It's just a reason to give to people like me, and one to be believed by people like you." I noted someone else mentioning this a few days ago. Not gonna happen, but it's an interesting thought, isn't it? Would the RIAA be better if run by MS, who don't care about music piracy but do care about you buying their OS forever and about control through DRM.
• XIST "is an XML based extensible HTML generator written in Python. XIST is also a DOM parser (built on top of SAX2) with a very simple and pythonesque tree API." One to look at.
• The great Zeldman redesign continues. I don't like the teal, myself. Or the text, which never seems very readable to me, although that could be a font problem at my end.
• Office 11 XML. Be interesting to see how much of this is marketing BS and buzzword compliance. As Kam and I once discussed, you can get an existing binary Word document and put <worddoc> and </worddoc> tags around it, and it's XML. Not useful, though. If you want my opinion of how it'll go, I'd say that the industry press will wibble about the power it gives you, a few people will get into it, a lot of people will try and write tools that exploit it and then find that they haven't got quite enough information about the format or the data stored therein to do what they want, and Dorothea Salo (and others, but I'll see CavLec first and follow Dorothea's links) will be disappointed that MS could have done it right and ensured interoperability and document existence in perpetuum (in aeternam? not sure) and failed to do so out of short-sightedness.
• Blogger hax0red. Oops.
• Googlism tells you who a person is, by, I think, searching Google for "X is" and then displaying up to 10 words of an excerpt beginning with that. So, as Adrian says, searching for "Adrian Holovaty" returns "adrian holovaty is assistant database editor and product developer at the atlanta journal", which is true. Good show. I tried "Aquarion", to see how the man was regarded (and because things like this aren't good at finding me because I don't use my name much), and got a really interesting diagnosis, the best bit of which, after "aquarion is a bhc company affiliate" and "aquarion is the largest investor", and some true things too, was "Aquarion is on irc". Cracked me up, that :) Just in case he objects to this, I note that "aquarion is wonderful", too, just like Googlism says, and on Wednesday I'll try and remember to bring his CD back to him.
• Mozilla does small screen rendering without any special effort, unlike Opera.

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A new essay, Attention to Detail, which covers the need for intelligent code and better eror reporting, with reference to Hugh Daniel's talk at HAL2001 and the new RSS validator. -----

Joel discusses Terminal Services vs. VNC, and comes down firmly on the side of Terminal Services, with his only major disappointment being that the server has to be a Windows box. However, he's completely left out the issues of cost and licensing. Now, I appreciate that if you need some software and it's for-money rather than for-free then you pay for it, out there in the Real World. However, we use VNC at work -- we're not a TS shop, the alternative was Symantec's PCAnywhere until I pointed out VNC to people -- and, even ignoring that the zero cost of VNC makes it easy to put a VNC server on every desktop machine and make the helpdesk's life a lot easier (which is orthogonal to what Joel was talking about, in that I think he's talking about server administration), with VNC you don't have to worry about licences. Even if TS CALs were free, which they're not, you'd still have to ensure that everyone who needs one has one, every time you get a new member of the support team they get new CALs for each of the servers you admin, etc etc. And all those CALs mount up when each one costs you money. Especially since Microsoft's recent licensing ploy for TS seems to be that even if you're not using an MS client you still have to have a CAL, so something like the rdesktop client which has a reimplementation of the TS protocol for Linux still has to have the appropriate licence. With all that in the way, I say that the limitations of VNC aren't really that severe, especially since Joel's number 2 big reason (that VNC doesn't transmit shift+arrow keypresses) doesn't seem to apply for me -- maybe he's using an older version or something? In my experience, Citrix's MetaFrame is an equivalent of TS (well, TS is MetaFrame -- iirc, MS bought the Citrix code and rolled it into Windows proper, although that might just be my faulty memory) and has a more favourable licensing policy. YMMV, mind.

Advance posters for The Matrix Reloaded, due out next year. Want, want, want.

Mitch Kapor et al are planning to build a cross-platform PIM (via Aaron) in the spirit of Lotus Agenda, with one of its stated goals being " to make people want to move to it from whatever they are currently using", which, as Mitch points out, "statistically is probably Microsoft Outlook". And it's going to be in Python. Wow. Can I help? I'd like to help. -----

Unbelievable; I can't escape Buffy spoilers. The Google Weblog quotes a line from the new Buffy series in which Willow refers to googling someone. Come and google me any time, Willow babes. ;-) -----

Dictionaraoke (via Aquarion) -- MIDI karaoke with the words put back in from sound samples from electronic dictionaries. If Sid Vicious was still alive then he'd blow his own head off after hearing their version of Anarchy in the UK.

Some nice web dev bookmarklets (via webgraphics). The evolution of the bookmarklet seems to be from just things that JS can do (which includes lots of shockingly complex DOM stuff) to submitting things to a remotely-hosted CGI somewhere that then processes the data passed. Neat. -----

Mark talks about accessibility:

Dynamic menus with Javascript? Ho hum. Dynamic menus that validate and are based on real UL and LI tags and degrade gracefully all the way down to Lynx? Now you're talking

Now, I don't think that that is meant to sound like an anti-Javascript rant, because Mark's a smart chap and knows fine well that it's entirely possible to use JS to enhance pages without making it vital for navigation or anything. But it sounds like it, and it worries me that lots of people will forswear using Javascript optimisations because "Mark doesn't like them and he wrote Dive Into Accessibility". I hold up my own aqTree2, which converts a structure made of "real UL and LI tags" into an explorer-style expand-collapse menu, if you've got Javascript turned on. If you haven't, it leaves it as the accessible structure that it is. I also ought to note that, good as Eric Meyer's CSS menus are, you can't do what aqTree2 does in CSS, because you can't have more than one active thing on a page -- someone did try and do the expand-collapse thing on hover rather than on click, and it wasn't good. I'm the first to admit that relying on Javascript to make a page navigable is bad. If my scripts make pages somehow inaccessible I'd like to hear about it and will endeavour to fix them. But until then I wish people wouldn't tar all Javascript with the same brush, the one that dragged through all the IE-only-coders and the fancy-menus-with-no-point-coders and the javascript-pseudo-protocol-coders* before it got to me. -----

Sarabian takes his first steps into using RSS for syndication in the first article of a new series, RSS Journey, Part 1 : Beginnings. His articles on this sort of thing are always excellent, because they're always about things that I thought I knew about until it turns out that I do not. I shall be watching with interest. And picking up tips along the way. -----

A list o' links. Not much commentary, because I've spent almost all of today feeling sick. Bah. Extra chapters for Eric Meyer on CSS, an essential resource: "Tricking Browsers and Hiding Styles" and Picking a Rendering Mode (via Simon). Simon comments further on why Mozilla's new prefetch feature is over-aggressively prefetching pages, despite being conceptually a good idea. Someone downloaded all of Aquarion's website. Ah, popularity. Mark Pilgrim deconstructs the "myths of web accessibility", starting with the pervasive and wrong belief that an accessible web page has to be dull and boring. -----

This whole "blogging for money" thing (see Mark, CavLec, Doc, ad nauseam) seems to be suffering from the Webloggers Overblown Disease where it becomes the end of the world, although the main people commenting (the above, other luminaries -- you know all their names) seem to be lucid and reasonable, which cheers me up. I'm in general opposed to secret shadowy influences, but on the flipside I'm not convinced that there exists impartial advice any more. Everyone comes to everything with some bias. Declaring that bias up front is, OK, useful, but what it leads to is a world in which everything is disclaimered. I was disappointed to see the X-Box Linux project have a disclaimer saying, "Everything done on this project is for the sole purpose of writing interoperable software under Sect. 1201 (f) Reverse Engineering exception of the DMCA." A hobbyist project now has to clearly state its aims in the hope that it won't get into trouble, because you might be assumed to be wrong. Declarations of bias are much the same; yes, it's handy to not have to think about whether you're reading an advertisement or an independent review, but on the other hand some critical analysis skills wouldn't go amiss. If you expect to be warned of bias, then you lose the ability to detect it. -----

Andrew Odlyzko comments on an article about "solving the broadband paradox" (via Aaron) with some pretty wise ideas. Pretty radical ideas, too:

Total recorded music sales in the US come to a grand total of about $15 billion per year, while telecom spending is over 20 times higher. Thus in the abstract, it might be a wise investment for the phone companies to buy out the studios.

We need more thoughts like this: ways to make the world change, to open up possibilities. If the music studios refuse to embrace the new world, and they cannot be converted, then don't waste time and space and energy trying: just make them irrelevant. Big business has no compunctions about changing the ground under us, so why not do it back? As the Jargon File has it, "if you want to play in the Real World, you need to learn Real World moves". -----

Paul has bought a screen protector for his Zaurus. Now, I've not done that, because I've had no problem with the Z's screen, and I had no problem with the Palm IIIx's screen before that (well, I had one problem with it, but that's when I dropped the Palm and the screen smashed, which doesn't count). Something I should note is that the silver coating on the case doesn't stand up to hard wear, though (and anything that lives in my pocket 18 hours a day, nastling next to my keys and money, undergoes hard wear). It's scraping off along the sides and top of the screen, where the edges of the plastic flip-screen are. This isn't a problem for me -- I care about what it does, not what it looks like -- but I can see how some people might not like this. The Palm never suffered from this because there was no coating to scrape off; its case was merely hard textured plastic, and stood up incredibly well to the pocket test for three years. Didn't run Linux, though. :) -----

One year ago, on the 13th October 2001, my aunt Caroline died, from cancer. There was a notice in the paper this year.

It broke our hearts
To lose you
But you didn't go alone
For part of us
Went with you
The day God
Called you home

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Hixie comments further on MT 2.5's revised TrackBack spec in a whitepaper, Pingback vs Trackback 1.1. I still think he's right, in that I still think that Pingback is much simpler, because it's got a much more limited problem domain. -----

Wired magazine redesign in XHTML, citing accessibility, maintainability, and cross-browsing device usage, and crediting the WaSP. Good show. -----

Sam Ruby notes that Mark Pilgrim's latest upgrades to his referrer-log-powered Further reading section replicate TrackBack/Pingback functionality without requiring any active pings. Almost, I agree. My one big flaw with referrer-log-based linking is that it doesn't tell you if someone links to you. What it tells you is that someone's linked to you and someone else has followed that link. This means that someone who has a blog that no-one reads will never get their comments noted, no matter that they might be entirely apposite. What it actually ends up being is that you read a post of Mark's, blog about it, and then follow the link in your own blog post just so that your link gets noticed, which is not great at all and smacks of a "look at me" sort of self-publication. (Unless I'm missing something, Intertwingly is no longer pingbackable.) Update: As Sam notes, Intertwingly is pingbackable after all.)

Sam Rowe complains that the Pingback spec doesn't have any way to prevent spam or DoS attacks by repeatedly hitting a Pingback server. Now, the DoS suggestions is true but irrelevant, because you can DoS a server by just repeatedly hitting one of its web pages; Pingback is nothing special in this regard, and doesn't fix the problem because it's a problem inherent in serving stuff over a web server; it's Apache's problem, not Pingback's. The spam suggestion is a little more worrying, but it's something that we've discussed before (although I can't find a reference to it) -- essentially, you can spam someone's referrer logs the same way, and a referrer log display routine like, say, Mark Pilgrim's, will have the same problems unless it filters server-side to cater for this. I don't see it as a major problem, in short. -----

LawMeme are running a fabulous series called Law School in a Nutshell (currently up to part III, with parts II and I also available), which runs through Eldred vs. Ashcroft, the current case in the Supreme Court relating to the unconstitutionality of copyright extension, being fought by Lawrence Lessig among others. Fascinating: "To understand why legalese is so incomprehensible, think about it as the programming language Legal." -----

After the UK being rocked (not really) by an earthquake nearly a month ago, Bill sends me a Dudley Earthquake Appeal notice. Harsh, but very, very funny. -----

Why do we need a double-slash (//) in a URI after the protocol and colon? mailto: and news: URIs don't use it, but http:// and ftp:// ones do. It seems to me that the ones with double-slashes define things that look like filesystem paths (i.e., may have / in them as a separator) and ones without do not, but I can't see why you need it; why would http:www.kryogenix.org/writings/earthquake not be a perfectly reasonable URI? RFC2396 doesn't seem to help in this regard, in that it says they're required but not really why, unless I missed something. I bet Hixie knows why this is. -----

Smokymonkey's TRIGLAV (via Scott) is a single-player RPG written entirely in DHTML. Much better than Game Neverending, hopefully, which requires Flash and is therefore unavailable to me. -----

Gordon Bennett. Not only have the Americans set up a new agency called the Information Awareness Office (via conspiracyarchive, via jwz) that's designed to "provide total information awareness" in the wake of September 11th, not only did they let Admiral John Poindexter run it (a man whom, lest we forget, was convicted -- not accused, but convicted -- of conspiracy, destroying evidence, and lying to the American Congress), but what did they pick as a logo? The bloody eye in the pyramid! Honestly! Unbelieveable. Is this designed to drive every conspiracy whacko completely off the cliff or what? -----

My blogger code (via Aquarion) B2 d t+ k s u f i o e l c I suppose it was inevitable that someone would do one of these, although I thought that the codes had all pretty much died out these days. -----

After Zeldman drew attention to Microsoft using old, deprecated markup in their latest redesign, Dylan Foley has shown them how (via Zeldman again) to use validated code, just to demonstrate to Redmond what good web developers are. Jolly well done. -----

Good Lord. Just been having a browse through the Internet Archive, and it has copies of my web pages from 1996. Blimey. It's amazing how much has changed since then, and how much I've changed, my thoughts and opinions... -----

There is now less than a month to go until the end of the consultation period on the EUCD. STAND have a writeup about the EUCD in the UK, including directions on how to contact the Patent Office and protest. If you care about your rights under this law, or the lack of them, then protest. Don't think that you'll do it tomorrow, because you won't. Do it now. If you don't care about your rights that might disappear under this law, then OK. But ask yourself whether you might look back and wish you had cared. Because by then there will be a lot less that you can do about it. -----

Ananova - David Beckham's face appears on Jaffa Cake (via G). I don't know how this passed me by. I mean, we've seen 'Allah' written in tomatoes (including the Miracle Tomato of Huddersfield -- praise be!), eggs and beans, the NunBun, a cinnamon bun that looks like Mother Teresa, and dozens and dozens of Elvis sightings. But this latest one really takes the biscuit. -----

At the moment we're forced to use Internet Explorer at work in order to get seamless authentication to some web services, using Microsoft's proprietary NTLM auth. However, not only is there a Mozilla bug to implement NTLM auth which is looking close to completion, there's the 'NTLM APS', a small Python program that acts as a web proxy and authenticates to an MS proxy. I'm hoping that I can use this to install Debian over the network through the firm's MS proxy server. -----

Sam Ruby comments that there's not much in the way of adoption of pingback among his circle of friends. What I'd like to do is integrate it into MT, but it's beyond my Perl skill. -----

Is it possible to have a multiplayer deathmatch game of Quake or Quake II without buying any software? I keep seeing things about Quake mods, or OpenQuartz, and I know that the Quake and Quake II engines are now GPL, but: can you just get and play a game? What I want is just a downloadable game that I can install on a load of machines and then have people do deathmatches. That's it. Is it even possible to do this?

Phoenix 0.2, codenamed Santa Cruz is out (via From the Orient). And it is very, very cool. Why is it so much cooler than 0.1, I hear you ask? Mouse gestures! Hooray! -----

The Door Theologian of the Year: Buffy Summers! (via ordinary life) "We need someone who can not only deconstruct the problem of evil, but kick it's hiney; someone with a preternatural sense of comic timing and an eye for fashion. We need Buffy." Amen to that. -----

This site now has a CSS signature (via css-discuss) of www-kryogenix-org, so you can make changes to my layout or formatting with a user stylesheet. This concept is possibly a good way to get people to use a user stylesheet, I suppose :) -----

I've got a TraxAudio mStation MP3 player in my car. It's essentially an IDE hard drive with a pretty LCD on the front; you plug the drive into your machine, copy files to it, and then plug it into the docking bay in the car and listen to the MP3s thereon. I was using it on spike2, a Win2K box. Copied loads of files to it, and it worked fine. Then I downgraded spike2 to Win98. Now I put the drive in the machine, and it displays a few files on it with gibberish names. I tried copying some other files to the drive and then putting it back in the car, to see if it identified those newly copied files: no dice. The car thinks that the hard drive is empty. It's formatted as FAT32 -- did the FAT32 format change somehow between 98 and 2K? Thanks a lot, Microsoft. Thanks very much.

Some people I know did a ouija board at the weekend. Now, personally, I'm a sceptic about supernatural things, just like James Randi. So it shouldn't bother me. But it always does, this, not because I think it's trifling with powers or whatever, but because it makes me angry that people delude themselves into believing it all, I think. I don't quite understand why it always makes me irate when someone talks about fortune tellers or ouija boards, but it does. I'd be interested in other people's opinions on the whole subject.

A year ago today, Mark Pilgrim lost his job after posting on his weblog. Today he reminds us, just as Jean-Luc did, to fight the power. Illegitimi non carborundum. There are four lights. -----

Threads 1-25 of about 8,050 in uk.people.dead. As Bill points out: why? Why does this exist at all? -----

Aaron once again exhorts us to not use the javascript: pseudo-protocol in links. Sigh. You're right, it shouldn't be used. But I use it all the time. Why? Because when you create new elements with the DOM, specifically new A elements, setting their onclick handler doesn't seem to work in IE. Not even if you do it as a.setAttribute("onclick","whatever"). So I use "javascript:whatever" instead, and everybody whinges. -----