This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

A matter of trust:

In a recent financial statement, Microsoft revealed for the first time that desktop Windows makes a profit margin of more than 85 percent. To put this in personal terms, for every dollar you spent licensing the OS last year, Microsoft spent less than 15 cents on all Windows packaging, marketing, and, oh yeah, improving the product.

-----

I've just discovered mxTidy, a Python interface to the HTML Tidy program for tidying up HTML and XML. I wonder if this would make a good plugin?

Python persistence management is an article at IBM about PyPerSyst, a Python port of Prevayler, a Java system for object persistence. Vellum persists its objects; I wonder if it should be doing it this way instead?

-----

New (pretty trivial, but still useful) plugin for Vellum called Bookmarklet, which gives you a "Post to my blog" bookmarklet.

-----

A new Vellum release: 1.0a5. This one has lots of minor tweaks (big ups to Sarabian, Garth Kidd, Charles Cummings, and others), and a neat new plugin: Textile, which implements a subset of Dean Allen's Textile "humane web text generator" for entering text into entries.

I really must set up a separate weblog for Vellum stuff, and make the main Vellum changelog available...

None -----

There's lots of stuff I'd like to do here. Sarabian's /blogroll/ hack is excellent, and needs doing, and I've been thinking about his fetch-the-RSS approach as well, which would turn my site into my aggregator as well. (I've so far resisted desktop RSS aggregators.) I think what I'd really like is a "subscribe to this site" bookmarklet which would add it to my blo.gs blogroll if it could, or add it to my fetch-the-RSS blogroll if not. The idea needs work, but I think it's sound in principle.

I also need to re-enable an RSS feed here, which I haven't done since moving to Vellum, just out of laziness.

I want to think more about the comment notification stuff that was being talked about a couple of weeks ago, especially given the use-your-FOAF-as-id idea which I suggested (although I'm sure some other people had suggested it beforehand).

Anyway, I'm going to the pub now :)

Today I am another year older. A cube of an integer, too, which shouldn't be too difficult to guess. Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me-e-e-e-e, happy birthday to me.

That's enough of that. I, sir, am no Marilyn Monroe. Off to bed.

Christ, what a day. I know Mondays are meant to be screwed up, but yesterday takes the biscuit. The fickle finger of fate clearly passed over Castle Langridge with a vengeance.

1. Niamh woke up at 5am, feeling sick, and intermittently wassick.
2. A hole in a water pipe trashed our kitchen ceiling and took four hours and £125 to fix, said fix happening by the world's most useless plumber. It would have been better to have Mario and Luigi round doing the work.
3. We bought a wardrobe from Ikea that doesn't fit together. Some of the holes don't line up properly so you can put screws in. I don't understand this. Isn't it just as easy to drill the holes in the right place as it is the wrong place? Stuff you get for a low price always seems to have these hole alignment problems; if it's just a matter of tolerances on error at the factory, you'd think that once, just once, I might get one of the ones where they got it right, rather than one of the ones where they pushed the tolerances to the maximum.
4. The car broke down while driving (after it had a full service on Tuesday!) and we had to sit in it for an hour an wait for the AA to arrive, in the pouring rain.
5. Mam called: my grandad was taken into hospital after having either a heart attack or developing a blood clot in something vital. It's all a bit unclear, partially because all the action is happening in Ireland, and partialy because Mam is furious that her dad was taken in to hospital yesterday morning and no-one rang her to let her know for twelve hours.

I better be due some really good luck to make up for that day. You hear me, Dame Fortuna? The lottery, that'll do.

Matt Croydon has written a simple TrackBack implementation in Python. As Sarabian points out, that'd be a rather neat Vellum plugin. That said, it would need a fair amount of documentation about where to put all that RDF in your templates. I need to start bundling docs with plugins, I think.

-----

Looks like Mark has finally been driven mad by the stress of being the only person on the web who really keeps up with standards and doing a site redesign at the same time, as he advertises Dive Into Premium, "a new and better way to experience the 'Dive Into' empire!" Apparently, "for only a few cents a day, you get fast, uncluttered access to your favorite 'Dive Into' sites, with premium features available only to subscribers." Sadly, as the FAQ makes clear, it's just a big joke. Tragic; I was really looking forward to my signed 8 1/2 x 11 photo of His Greatness himself. Plus I'd get to point out that he spelled "painstik" wrong, but that'd just be picky and show me up as a Trekkie.

-----

Python coders' weblogs (via Simon Brunning). Neat little list; there are a couple here that I didn't know about.

None -----

Oggy, Oggy, Oggy, out, out, out! (via Stuart Homfray): apparently a rumour was going around that Steve Ogrizovic, the ex-Coventry City goalkeeper, had been kidnapped and was being held hostage in Kazhakstan. The potato-faced man himself actually had to come out and confirm that it's completely untrue, suggesting that he may have been cloned. I'm sure he was heartwarmed by the comments over at PetitionOnline, which included, "Please free Steve as he's a bent-nosed hero to millions"

-----

Ah, this sounds promising. Apparently Windows doesn't shut down an eepro100 network card properly when warm rebooting, according to Donald Becker, which sounds like the cause of my earlier problem. The pci-config program should be my solution here. Off to try that out.

The Daleks buy a hot dog in hilarious fashion. Especially the Davros bits.

None -----

Latin translations of popular songs: this is sheer genius. Honestly, if you're even remotely interested in language, then reading (and being able to sing!) Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind in Latin is just great. Better still, they've then re-translated the Latin back into English.

Respons'amici,
Se dedit flamini,
Responsum se dedit flamini.

-----

I had this problem where you'd visit the front page of kryogenix and all you'd see is, "Missing include file ../days/posts.html". The reason for this was that posts.html is a file created by Vellum that lists the last n posts, which is funkily cached, i.e., it doesn't exist until someone does an HTTP request for it. Now, the front page of kryogenix does an SSI include of that file, but it tries to include it as a file, not by doing a request. So, every time any entry in posts.html got "rebuilt" (i.e., deleted), the front page stopped working because the file wasn't there to include!

Oops.

So I fixed it by making the front page do an HTTP request for the file instead:

<?cas
import urllib
pfp = urllib.urlopen("http://www.kryogenix.org/days/posts.html")
response.write(pfp.read())
pfp.close()
?>

I do like Castalian.

I've been banging on at Sam for ages about moving her to Linux rather than Windows, for a number of reasons; easy administration for me, not using Windows, stability, etc, etc. Eventually she acquiesced, and I bought a new machine and installed Debian Linux on it, dual-boot with Windows (for playing games). KDE on the desktop, because it's all about non-experienced users (I use ROX myself). So all should have been rosy.

However, there was immediately a problem. Half the time, on booting, the network card doesn't work. It's an Intel EtherExpressPro, and it's fine; it works perfectly well when booted to Windows. The kernel detects it on bootup fine, but when /etc/init.d/networking tries to start up networking, it'll just hang for a bit and then give up. No network. It doesn't do this all the time, just sometimes. Obviously, though, this is a showstopper. I can't work out what the problem is at all; it works some times and not others. She was unimpressed with this, but I made "I'll fix it" noises and she agreed to wait.

Second problem: Palm Pilot. I gave her my Palm IIIx when I bought my Zaurus, promising that it would make working out the monthly money and whatnot a lot easier in comparison with doing it all on paper every month. I installed KPilot for syncs. Now, I had some trouble with KPilot back when the Palm was mine; it would sometimes hang during a sync, and it would (often) drop the connection during a sync. I assumed that this was because I wasn't running a proper KDE environment -- I was, sort of, but I'd had loads of window managers installed and thought that I might not have KDE set up right -- and that it would be better on this machine, as it was KDE and only KDE right from the start. And, guess what? It hangs during syncs, and sometimes it drops the connection during a sync. Today's was the best, though. KPilot scragged the data during a sync. It ate the data on the Pilot, causing the spreadsheet program to crash when it opened the spreadsheet. So, I thought, I'll just resync, with "Local overrides Pilot", and that'll put the good data back on. Nope. And the most recent backup hasn't got the data in that she needs. So it's completely buggered. Now, maybe you'll say that this is my fault for not taking backups. So, tell me, what's the difference between a backup and a sync? Why would I want to only transfer my files to the PC some of the time? I expect, when I sync, that it will back everything up. I also expect that it won't irretrievably scrag the data!

So she's lost that data, which took her ages to put in, and is rather upset about it. She wants to switch back to Windows. I think I'm inclined to agree, and I'm thoroughly pissed off that it has to be so.

None

Oops, just fixed a configuration bug; when a new comment is made, Vellum should mail me and tell me about it. Moreover, if it's a private comment, it does said mail but doesn't save the comment. However, this only works if you've got a MailServer set in your vellum.config file, which I now have, and private comments and comment notification to me now both work. I ought to document that. :-)

-----

The might of the blogsphere is gradually turning away from new-post-notification, which has Pingback, TrackBack, blo.gs, and whatnot in place, and toward the thorny problem of comment notification. Remembering where you commented on someone's weblog and then going back to check for updates is, frankly, a pain. Simon Willison points us at a suggestion by Dave Winer: the "You Know Me" button, where a weblog pings a central identity server when a new comment is made. I'm not sure about this; depending on central servers doesn't seem like a good idea to me, especially when that central server guy either runs out of money and gives up or starts charging people for access. It'd be interesting to have an identity, though; perhaps weblog comment boxes, instead of asking for your name, email address, and URL, should instead just ask for the URL of your FOAF file. Better still, just ask for the URL of your weblog and then auto-discover the FOAF file. In there you could quite happily have a "comment ping" URL which should be pinged whenever someone else posts to a thread in which you participated. Flash people with threaded comments can generalise this to a direct or indirect reply directly to one of your own comments.

None -----

I've just released Vellum 1.0a4, which has all new commenty goodness, among other things. It's all a bit untested, as you might imagine (the 'a' stands for 'alpha'), but the plugin thing seems to be working pretty well. There's a new Audience plugin, which Pingback and Comments now use; it's to provide a generic object type for 'responses to your posts', whether they're on your weblog or someone else's.

Maybe I can get Sarabian to upgrade now. :-)

None -----

So, I wanted to release Vellum's code so people could look at it. But my local copy of kryogenix.org was in the midst of a redesign, so I had to finish that first, hence the day or so's delay. You can now go and look at Vellum, which will be its home for the foreseeable future.

Phew. I am so glad I've finally actually converted and released some code. :-)

-----

Mark Pilgrim is serving up different CSS to different browsers via mod_rewrite trickery. He says:

I am aware that this is a complete reversal from the position I took last week, when I claimed that CSS hackery was the lesser of two evils (the other being browser sniffing).

Meanwhile, I'm having problems with mod_rewrite at the moment, but I'm sure I'll get it sorted eventually. -----

Well, I finally bit the bullet and moved as days pass by to Vellum, my weblogging system, rather than Movable Type. Seems to have worked OK. There will be Vellum code published pretty shortly; I just need to make it part of my local copy of the site so that my stage-to-live script will copy it up, and my local copy is totally spedged at the moment and must not be staged to live. But vellum is cool, trust me on this. This will also give me the opportunity to work on some of the plugins and whatnot; temporarily, a load of stuff has been disabled, like pinging weblogs.com, but I'll get there. It is, however, 3.15am, so I think I shall head for bed and do it all later in the week.

-----

Three people have now moaned at me about my permalinks not working. "Huh?", thought I, "they do work. I spent a while testing everything to check that." And then I tried them and they didn't. Cursing and swearing, I realised that it wasn't Vellum's fault at all. You see, the archived posts all live in a directory called days, but I don't want people who go to http://www.kryogenix.org/days/ to see a simple index of my posts; instead, I want them to go to the front page and see that instead. So, I added a redirect directive or two to my days/.htaccess file, which is where configuration directives for my webserver (Apache) go. It looked like this:

Redirect /days/ http://www.kryogenix.org/
Redirect /days http://www.kryogenix.org/

Spot the deliberate mistake? Those /days/ and /days bits should have $ on the end of them, otherwise Apache remaps /days/1234.html to http://www.kryogenix.org/1234.html. And that's why my permalinks didn't work. Of course, after I added the Redirect directives, I didn't retest it. Let this be a lesson.

-----

Lawrence Lessig: What lawyers can learn from comic books (via Mark Pilgrim). An assessment of the vast Japanese "dojinshi" industry, which consists of ordinary people drawing their own manga comics featuring the published characters. Essentially, this is fanfic, but in comic form. It's huge in Japan. Lessig cites an article by law professor Salil Mehra which discusses how dojinshi, while illegal under copyright law, is left alone -- even encouraged -- by the original manga artists because it contributes to and increases the popularity of their work. A violation of copyright isn't always a bad thing, and unilaterally condemning all such violations is blinkered; a kneejerk lawyerly reaction to a misperceived evil. As Lessig says, "lawyers look at copyrights as if they were ends in themselves...the law should therefore stop such violations [of said copyright] wherever it can", which is missing the point. Lessig's solution is that "management should begin to demand a business justification for copyright litigation", and he's not wrong. I wish more big businesses could see past their lawyers' kneejerks and get back to the stringent business cases, the justifications of spend, that applies to everything else they do to keep their business profitable. -----

Tom Gilder mentions ins and del elements, which I didn't even know existed. Of course, they're part of the spec. Interesting; a track changes function. I've essentially invented these tags with <span class="orig"> and <span class="change" title="01/01/2003 00:00"> in the past, but I shall switch to using the semantically correct versions. I was pleasantly surprised to see them supported by IE5.5, too.

-----

I went to see Star Trek: Nemesis. And it wasn't bad. You might be thinking, this is not overly effusive praise...and you'd be right. I have no intention of avoiding spoilers, so be careful if you've not yet seen the film.

I have formulated a theory of Star Trek films. The theory is this: no Trek film is entirely good. There are often good bits, even great bits. But there's always something that you don't like at all, and you don't like it enough that it stops the film being remembered as "good" in your mind. Therefore, no Trek film will ever be top on your list of great films. Evidence:

• First Contact: really good Borg Queen, Data, Picard-as-Captain-Ahab psychological bit. Ruined by the whole Cochrane and Lily "contemporary guys in the Star Trek universe" shtick. (This shtick is what comprised the whole of The Voyage Home, apart from the tree-hugger bits, which is why it's the worst of all the films).
• Insurrection: cool stretchy-skin villains, Picard being masterful as a captain and rebelling, etc, etc. Ruined by Picard's girlfriend, who teaches him how to stop time. Never see him use that little trick again, do we? Lame!
• Generations: Soran was an excellent bad guy, we got a Guinan origin story. Ruined by William Shatner being amazingly fat but still getting to ride a horse and whatnot. Bah! Mutton dressed up as slightly younger mutton.

Even the film that is by far the best of them all, The Wrath of Khan, is let down severely by the sheer idiocy of Kirk's son. Didn't you just want to punch his teeth down his throat? I would have, if I were James T.

Actually, if the truth is faced among us, tWoK is a not-very-good film which is elevated to enduring greatness by how unbelieveably marvellous Khan is. This goes to show what a good villain can do for your films, even if your good guy isn't all that great. Look at Batman: OK good guy (Keaton tried hard but wasn't given all that much to work with), fantastic bad guy (Nicholson gets let completely off the leash into insanity and portrays the Joker as a real out-of-control lunatic, and obviously loves it all the time he's doing it).

So, we come to Nemesis. Unsurprisingly, it follows the above pattern. (Amazing, that, eh? Can I get a research grant now?) It has some great bits. Riker and Deanna get married (finally!) and Picard does a pretty good best man's speech (but not as good as the one my best man did). Data dies, and it's really emotional. Someone kills the whole Romulan Senate with this really cool rain of death weapon. But it has its big flaw, and the big flaw is this:

The villain is lame.

Yes, that's right. The Picard-looking guy in the trailer, who you all thought was going to be the anti-Picard in the anti-Enterprise crew that they'd be up against? He's not. And he's pathetic.

There's a scene in the trailer where we see Picard say, "I'm a mirror for you as well." And the cool anti-Picard says, in tones of contempt, "Don't be so vain". Now, that's a pretty compelling exchange. But it wasn't in the film. Those lines were spoken, by those characters, in the same scene, but not one after the other. The bit in the trailer would have been a much better exchange than what we actually got.

Shinzon, the bad guy, for those of you who haven't seen it yet, is a clone of Picard, who suffered the torments of the damned throughout his childhood in the dilithium mines of Remus, Romulus' twin planet. The premise here is that Picard himself would be reacting exactly as Shinzon does if he had gone through the same tortuous formative period. Now, this idea has a lot of power behind it. We've seen Picard tortured by his own perception of himself -- witness Lily accusing him of being Captain Ahab in First Contact -- and we've seen him brought low by physical torture in the episode Chain of Command (which is the one with the "There are four lights!" scene, but you knew that). And we've seen what being confronted with a double can do for you, with Will Riker and his transporter-created duplicate, Thomas. Shinzon has the potential to be a really compelling, charismatic villain. He could have been TNG's Khan. And yet how did he come across? As a spoiled, spiteful child, lashing out at the surrounding world in a pitiful revenge fantasy. This was a criminal misuse of a character. It really was. Confronting Picard with the way he could have been if the situation had been different should have shaken the captain's foundation of self-belief to the roots, denying his firm conviction that he is a decent man to the core. The film tries to riff on this theme a little, but it doesn't succeed, because Shinzon is no majestic villain with the power to carry it off, but instead a petty Caligula, spiteful and childish.

I'm getting a bit bored with planet-destroying weapons, too.

So, Nemesis: a film with a great potential, let down by a big flaw. Well, it's nice to know that Star Trek is at least consistent.

Oh, one more thing. When you first saw the poster for the film (below), did you think, that's Morpheus from The Matrix?

Wesley A. Kose, over at Jaguaro, has a list of the "Features: One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately". Records that are "critic-mandated vanity archives", were at one point The Next Big Thing, or nostalgic favourites that you don't actually listen to all get the blindfold and high wall. I've not got all that many of them, which you might think is encouraging, but it's not; I don't have all that many albums (however many you have, I have less), so these are a correspondingly greater slice of my collection. Consider me humbled, and I'll do my best to get rid of:

• U2 - The Joshua Tree
• Nirvana - Nevermind
• Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
• Oasis - What's the Story, Morning Glory?
• Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik
• Chemical Bothers - Dig Your Own Hole
• Pulp Fiction - Original Soundtrack
• The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band
• R.E.M. - Out of Time
• Beastie Boys - Check Your Head/Ill Communication

So, 10% of the not-to-possess albums are here at Castle Langridge. In my defence, I haven't got one of these on CD; they were all taped off other people. Does this make me feel better? No. What does make me feel better is that I'm sure Tim and Andy have both got more of these than me, although they will gleefully point it out if they have not.

The Willamette Week, a newspaper in Portland, has just run an expose called "Rubbish!", in which, after comments by leading law-enforcement and local government officials that your rubbish, once put out for collection, becomes public property, they rummaged through the discarded rubbish of the local police chief, mayor, and district attorney. The police had previously searched the rubbish of Gina Hoesley, a police officer, in order to provide evidence for drug charges against her; they had no warrant, and staunchly maintained that none was required. So, what were the mayor and police chief's reaction when the WW confronted them with theirown discarded scraps, including credit-card receipts, investment summaries, job applications, and personal notes? Did they blow it all off, because it's OK to search through someone's rubbish, as they'd previously asserted? You guess, go on. -----

An article in Fortune: The Curse of Pooh, covers the ongoing legal battle between Disney and the descendants of A. A. Milne's American distributor over the rights to Winnie the Pooh merchandising royalties. It's a fairly reasonable summary, but not all that interesting, apart from one little bit:

The best indication is the federal lawsuit the company [Disney] filed in November seeking to terminate Stephen Slesinger Inc.'s rights under U.S. copyright law in 2004.

What? Did I read that right? They're claiming that Slesinger's rights time out in 2004 because of copyright law? This is the same Disney that violently opposes copyright law timeouts because Mickey Mouse is about to undergo the same fate? Did I just drop into the Twilight Zone or something?

-----

Burningbird makes some good points about the Tyranny of the Commons, where she's talking about webloggers who don't acknowledge the rest of the weblogging community, and she quotes Mark Pilgrim opining on the tendency for communities to create celebrities (although I think that there's a tendency for some people to want to become celebrities, which contributes; some strive hard for world fame and become film stars, while others are happy being a big fish in a fairly small pond).

She goes on, though, to talk about over-reliance on Google:

Oh sure I'm advocating that we burn down the house that Google built, but that's because our increasing dependence on this service puts us at some risk ... (Ask yourselves something -- what happens if Google decides to charge for searching?)

What happens is that everyone starts using AllTheWeb. Jakob Nielsen has been banging on about micropayments for years now, and I'm sure he'd love the idea of Google charging a tenth of a penny for each search that happens, but for this kind of basic structural function, the net treats payment as corporate bad news and routes around it. Note that I'm not talking about Google being a basic structure, but the idea of search engines. I admit that Google has, in a few short years, become the name in searching, but that's because they're technically excellent. Possibly their domination of the search space is something to be concerned about (and has been commented on lucidly in Google vs. Evil), but it's not something that I think is a major concern.

I've also actually got around to adding Burningbird to my blogroll, since every time I see a link to her weblog I go over, read it, am interested, and then forget. :) Two seconds at blo.gs and it's done.

-----

The Oak DNS server is a full DNS server written in Python. I might take a look at this, since I cannot, no matter how hard I try, get my head around Bind... -----

Pingback seems to be picking up more support; Simon Fell has been busy implementing for Radio. Meanwhile, Aquarion has got Trackback working in Epistula, and Sarabian has enabled Trackback at From the Orient. Sam Ruby notes that "the primary advantage of TB over PB is that TB adds access to the excerpt", although Simon Willison's implementation of Pingback retrieves an excerpt from the pinging page, so that's not an insurmountable problem. Greg Reinacker notes in a comment that PB and TB seem to require "pretty much the same" amount of code on the server in his implementation, and TB requires more on the client, the latter point in agreement with Sam. Phil Ringnalda summarises the differences and how both have bled a little into one another in a comment.

All in all, we're getting closer to the point where cross-linking all works neatly; the original purpose of Pingback was to enable a user to travel back up the ladder of links (it's easy to drill down by following links, but you can't go back upwards), and Trackback was (as Phil says) designed to make it easy to collect relevant conversation together (TB is a more social thing; PB more technical), but as a combination they seem to cover a lot and be getting wider support. Excellent.

-----

Cory Doctorow's new book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has been published. It's also available as a free download under one of the Creative Commons licences. Nice one, Cory; congratulations on publication.

-----

Alan Alda answers a question supposedly posed by the President of America, "What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?", for an article for The Edge (via Blog-Fu). Fascinating. Apparently Alda presents a programme called Scientific American Frontiers, who have a video archive of all their shows online. Nice, although I did have to manually parse the URL for the RealAudio file out of the HTML, because I don't like browser plugins (are there even RealAudio-capable plugins for Mozilla on Linux?) Idea that I can't be bothered to research (Lazyweb!): either a user stylesheet or a DOM bookmarklet that knows how to replace <object> tags for embedded movies with a div containing a link to the movie file, for people who don't like plugins. The reason I can't be bothered to research this is that each movie type (Real, WMA, ad nauseam) probably indicates where its movie file is in a different way, and I'm too lazy to work out what they all are. -----

William Gibson is actually on the net, with his own weblog (via Adam Wendt). Blimey. I remember when he stayed off the net because (a) he only understood typewriters and (b) he'd get fanboyed too much. Still, I suppose that Mona Lisa Overdrive was a long time ago now. If Gibson was the poster-child for the hackers in my generation, who'll be there for the new up-and-coming techies? What should I be reading now that's going to make me believe in the power of all this as much as Neuromancer and Count Zero did? -----

Jon Johansen has been acquitted of all charges.

Judge Irene Sogn ruled that there was "no evidence" that either Johansen or others had used the decryption code (DeCSS) illegally, Aftenposten reports. Judge Sogn dismissed prosecution arguments that Johansen intended to aid and abet DVD piracy.

What with this and Skylarov's similar acquittal, could this be a wind change for Big Media?

-----

Buffy starts on the 16th January 2003 on Sky One in the UK. I'm looking forward to it, but not as much as in previous years, because I'm worried that it might have jumped the shark, and because the discussions about this series won't be as good because not everyone gets to watch it. Nevertheless: 10 days to go... -----

Zeldman links to a thing called the Comp Graveyard, a resting place for all those picture mockups of prospective web designs that the client didn't like. Sounds like a neat idea. My enthusiasm for the team who are doing it, though, filter9, went down sharply when I visited http://www.filter9.com/ and got redirected to a page telling me that "filter9 is not optimised for Netscape 4". Maybe not. Why should this apply to me, though, since I was using Phoenix, which is Mozilla? I even got told to update to the latest version of Netscape or IE! Lose all accumulated web guru points, filter9. -----

New software publicised by James Randi: John Edwards: Ghosts. For those of you blessedly unaware, Edwards is a TV psychic who emplys cold reading techniques. This ginned-up software box is a laugh-a-minute. :-) -----

Happy War, Xmas is over.

Jamie Zawinski complains about a band giving out rolling papers branded with the band's name in his club:

I mean really, in what parallel universe is doing something like that ok? Don't these people watch the news? Don't they realize the kind of bullshit crackdowns nightclubs are facing these days? The DEA claims that glow-sticks are drug paraphernalia. I wonder what they'd think about rolling papers? Oh, but I'm sure "it's cool, man" because they probably said "for tobacco use only" on the back. Morons!

No, wait. In what kind of parallel universe is it reasonable that a nightclub owner might get their knickers in a twist about possession of rolling papers? I've got some in my pocket right now, because I smoke rollups. Blimey, that makes me a drug user, right? What happened to fighting the power? I suppose now that drugs are the single greatest evil in America (well, they're fighting for the gold medal position with Iraq and terrorists and Osama Bin Laden), anything even peripherally connected with them is a big no-no. And why is this the band's problem? If a nightclub worries that the faintest suggestion that drugs exist is enough to get them shut down, then it's the nightclub's job to worry about it. Not the band. The band are giving out promotional materials; so what if their fans decide to use them to roll spliffs? Not their problem. If the DNA Lounge management had said, you can't do that here, because were worried that the gummint might shut us down if someone in here possesses some sticky paper, the band might have said, OK, you're clearly anti-smoking fascists, but there we go,and not done it. But no, they're just "morons". I think not.

Personally, I don't think that Mark's posts by citation thing is all that exciting, but I seem to be in the minority. However, much like many other things that Mark does, it's taught me something that I didn't know (or in this case thought I knew and was wrong): I was under the impression that the thing in a <cite> tag was the text you were citing, not the person who said it. Since, when I quote text, I tend to make it a link to the remote site from which it's quoted, I didn't really see the point of the cite tag. Now I know better, which is good.

Tantek has extensively buggered about with the underlying HTML on his weblog; posts are now list entries in an unordered list. Clever. This site is well overdue a serious makeover.

Sarabian talks about reading RSS via NNTP. I've toyed with this idea a bit -- I already convert mailing lists that I read into newsgroups, and it would mean that, if I could finally find a decent bloody client, that I could read mail, news, and weblogs all in one place. However, I don't think that the NNTP model really matches RSS, because the essence of Usenet news is threading; without that, you'd have a newsgroup for each weblog with individual posts. What I'd really like to do is sit down and plan out how I can use Trackbacks, Pingbacks, referrer log entries, etc etc, to create a thread list for a post -- in essence, create a References field for a given post. To do that, though, I'd need to screen-scrape each site I was interested in (because RSS doesn't contain referback information), and then we get back to the "use XHTML for syndication" debate and everyone whines about how it's heavy on bandwidth and I'm stupid to even think that it's a reasonable approach. So that information's inaccessible.

Aquarion is learning Python. Finally. :-)

I got a DVD player and a CD burner for Christmas, so I've been exploring the wonderful world of VCDs. I also ran into a bit of a problem with hooking is up to my telly, because the telly is old. Ironically, Dave Farquhar wrote about exactly this problem just after Christmas, but I ignored his advice, because my setup's slightly different. See, most people would have a TV, with a chain of stuff connected to that TV. I, however, have two outputs from the chain; a TV, and a little box that rebroadcasts whatever signal you feed it, so that you can tune another telly in the house somewhere into the box's frequency and therefore beam, say, your video to a telly without a video on it. Neat, huh? But if I have all my signal producers (the aerial in the wall, the box for the cable telly, the video, the DVD player) in one long chain, you won't be able to send one thing to one telly and a different one to the beamer box. So it's set up like this:

The DVD doesn't connect to the TV digitally because the TV only has two inputs; a normal RF aerial lead, and a weird little 5-pin DIN socket (no, not a mini-DIN) with "Video" written above it. I assume that this is whatever odd video lead standard Hitachi were pushing when they built this telly. But the DVD only outputs composite A/V, SCART, and S-Video, so I had to buy a (30 quid!) SCART-to-RF modulator box, and then put the RF aerial feeds from the video (and cable and normal TV aerial) and the DVD into an aerial splitter and then into the back of the telly. So normal TV is on channels 1-5 on the TV, the video is on channel 0, the cable telly is on channel 6, and the DVD is on channel 7. This does mean that I can beam cable telly or a video while watching a DVD on the telly, which is great. I can't beam DVDs, but the beaming is to the TV in my daughter's playroom, and she hasn't got any DVDs, so that's OK.

-----