Skip to content

Month: December 2003

SpamAssassin wins twice in OSDir.com’s 2003 Editor’s Choice Awards in Open Source (fwd)

Published December 19, 2003

SpamAssassin: The 2003 OSDir.com Editor’s Choice Awards in Open Source. Woo!

Editor’s Choice for Best Application (Top 5 environments):

Email: SpamAssassin (Double Winner)

SpamAssassin keeps keeps me out of Anger Management classes. If you are not running SpamAssassin get thee to SpamAssassin.org. Now. If you need your friendly neighborhood system administrator to do it.. start sending flowers or Scotch today with a nice little note asking to get SpamAssassin going medieval on your mail server.

Miscellaneous Editor’s Choice:

Can’t Live Without: SpamAssassin

The fact that this doesn’t have to be explained says it all.

Wright Brothers Hack at MIT

Published December 18, 2003

Funny: The latest MIT ‘hack’: a replica of the Wright brothers’ biplane on top of the MIT Great Dome. Nice work!

The model was dismantled Thursday by Barber and Cunha, the Institute’s hack evaluation and removal team, who salvaged a completed FAA certificate of airworthiness form for the MIT Museum.

How Not To Use OOP

Published December 18, 2003

Code: OOP over the top: a hilarious dissection of some of the most monstrous ‘how to rewrite OO-style’ I have ever seen — take a 15-line if/elseif/else clause and rewrite as a thoroughly over-engineered unmaintainable 7-class, 15-method disaster, using the Singleton and Factory patterns. The rewrite in the original article is intended seriously, as far as I can tell.

As the xmldatabases.org article says: ‘this is really a general problem with OO development. Fancy object oriented architectures have become the goal and this article maybe makes that point more clearly then anything I could ever say. It’s representative of the thinking from a few years ago (written in 2000), and shows us just how much damage we now have to undo. It basically says that the simple solution that just works is wrong and will be unmaintainable. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not, nowhere does the article consider the question of whether or not that code actually needs to be that generic. It simply says that the simple solution is bad and that the seven class monster they came up with is the right solution. Talk about doing a disservice to students trying to learn how to build solid computer systems.’

(Found via sourcefrog.net — Martin Pool’s weblog, great for Linux and code bits).

WebMake: linux.com: An introduction to building sites with WebMake. W00t! Let’s hope nobody asks any questions while I’m away for xmas ;)

The Wright Brothers and Patenting

Published December 18, 2003

Innovation: Maciej posts a fantastic look back on the Wright Brothers from an interesting angle — their patent-related antics.

The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn’t what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation. In 1905, the Wrights were five years ahead of any potential competitor, and posessed a priceless body of practical knowledge. Their trade secrets and accumulated experience alone would have made them the leaders in the field, especially if they had teamed up with Curtiss. Instead, they got to watch heavily government-subsidized programs in Europe take the technical lead in airplane design as American aviation stagnated.

Fantastic article. If you’re curious about the history of patenting, and its many fundamental failures, I can’t recommend it enough.

Weblogs: Guardian’s ‘best of British blogging’: good set of winners this year.

Racism in New Zealand, Teapot, and Lena

Published December 17, 2003

Politics: Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.

A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Racism in New Zealand, Teapot, and Lena

Published December 17, 2003

Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.

A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Aug 14th 2003 Blackout and the Blaster worm

Published December 17, 2003

Security: Bruce Schneier points out some interesting angles on the official report into the US power blackout of Aug 14th:

Why the tortured prose? The writers take pains to assure us that the power generation and delivery systems were not affected by MSBlast. But what about the alarm systems? Clearly, they were all affected by something–and all at the same time.

To be honest, it sounds pretty damn close to me, as I’ve said before.

That Samuel L. Jackson quote again

Published December 16, 2003

Ireland: Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!

Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here’s the scoop:

Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special ‘SWAT – The Movie’. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful ‘fish out of water’ in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was ‘claiming’ Colin as our own in an ‘inclusive’ way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.

KATE THORNTON:
Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he’s become the man of the moment.

SAMUEL L.JACKSON:
Really? Only in the UK?

KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he’s from Ireland.

SLJ: You can’t claim him because he’s from Ireland.

KT: Well we do because it’s close by. (laughter)

SLJ: Ok. That’s the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that’s ok we don’t need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)

KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.

SLJ: Ok good.

KT: As are you.

SLJ: Yeah all right.

KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?

SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.

KT: So you checked him out?

SLJ: Yeah

The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it’s cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I’ve ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?

Yours sincerely,

Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com

Overheard on the radio

Published December 16, 2003

Funny: overheard on the radio just now, from the DJ interrupted during a station ident: ‘Your phone’s ringing. What, you have a text message? Fancy!’

Just to remind me I’m in the US ;)

Mind you, the DJ seems a bit out of touch; he’s clearly just discovered the Rock Gods that are The Darkness.

Overheard on the radio

Published December 16, 2003

overheard on the radio just now, from the DJ interrupted during a station ident: ‘Your phone’s ringing. What, you have a text message? Fancy!’

Just to remind me I’m in the US ;)

Mind you, the DJ seems a bit out of touch; he’s clearly just discovered the Rock Gods that are The Darkness.

Pharma companies ‘hoodwinking’ medical journals

Published December 16, 2003

Health: Revealed: how drug firms ‘hoodwink’ medical journals (Observer) — an
amazing attempt to mislead scientific progress for short-term commercial gain. (via forteana):

Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies, an Observer inquiry reveals. The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. …

Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for ‘lending’ their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed. …

(One) email, seen by The Observer, said: ‘In order to reduce your workload to a minimum, we have had our ghostwriter produce a first draft based on your published work. I attach it here.’ The article was a 12-page review paper ready to be presented at an forthcoming conference. Healy’s name appeared as the sole author, even though he had never seen a single word of it before. But he was unhappy with the glowing review of the drug in question, so he suggested some changes. The company replied, saying he had missed some ‘commercially important’ points. In the end, the ghostwritten paper appeared at the conference and in a psychiatric journal in its original form – under another doctor’s name.

25,000 ton spam relay

Published December 16, 2003

Spam: This is funny — via IP, ANNOUNCING: The amphibious transport dock and spam relay:

(USS San Antonio) supports the Marine Corps ‘mobility triad,’ the LCAC (Landing Craft Air Cushion vehicle), the ‘Triple A-V’ (AAAV – Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle) and the MV-22 (Osprey tiltrotor aircraft), and … spammers in Guangdong, Red China.

Ah, the perils of COTS.

That Samuel L. Jackson quote again

Published December 16, 2003

Looks like I was wrong about that Samuel L. Jackson quote — it really did happen!

Tom did the heavy lifting, and asked the production company; here’s the scoop:

Anyway in answer to your question, similar comments were indeed made on the TV Special ‘SWAT – The Movie’. In the programme Colin is considered a very successful ‘fish out of water’ in LA and the line of questioning was exploring how the Americans view him. Kate was ‘claiming’ Colin as our own in an ‘inclusive’ way. It was meant as a mark of comradeship rather than thievery and being of liberal mind I can assure you Kate has no intention of staking any real claims! It went like this.

KATE THORNTON: Now lets talk about Colin because in the UK he’s become the man of the moment.

SAMUEL L.JACKSON: Really? Only in the UK?

KT: Well everywhere but we kind of claim him as our own because he’s from Ireland.

SLJ: You can’t claim him because he’s from Ireland.

KT: Well we do because it’s close by. (laughter)

SLJ: Ok. That’s the source of all the conflict over there. You people always claiming the Irish as yours. We got a little problem just like that here called slavery but that’s ok we don’t need to talk about that so lets go. (more laughter)

KT: Well Colin is a very well paid slave.

SLJ: Ok good.

KT: As are you.

SLJ: Yeah all right.

KT: What did you know about him before you came to work with him on this project?

SLJ: I knew he was a hot, young, Irish actor who was good looking and I talked to a couple of people about him. I talked to Bruce about him and I talked to some script supervisors that had worked with him on a couple of things and they all loved him.

KT: So you checked him out?

SLJ: Yeah.

[….]

The programme was an irreverent promotional vehicle for SWAT and it’s cast and I must say that Colin gave the most honest interview I’ve ever heard on a junket. Long may his attitude prevail. Does this answer your question and win you the bet?

Yours sincerely,

Rufus Roubicek
Executive Producer
matchboxtv.com

Windows/Linux Biculturalism

Published December 16, 2003

Software: Joel on Biculturalism: ‘What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.’

I’m not sure I agree; I’ve met lots of Windows programmers who take what Joel calls the ‘UNIX’ orientation, and even a few Unix people who are as user-oriented in their coding as what Joel calls the ‘Windows’ way.

But, talking of the Unix/Win divide — it seems that Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, is joining MS, who have something called SharePoint Team Services, an editable-web group sharing system as part of Front Page.

If you ever wanted to see an illustration of a Windows-Unix divide in the web age, it sounds like this is it: Wiki has quick-and-dirty links in FuglyBouncingCaps, is text-heavy, has obscure text markup formats, has little in the way of roles, access control, or a workflow model, and has some odd magic pages that live in the same namespace as everything else despite being different.

SharePoint, by contrast, is integrated with everything in Office, is a great success where the MS Kool-Aid is viewed as tasty, uses role-based security and a workflow, and seems to be generally reviled elsewhere.

No better illustration. The only thing that could improve that would be if SharePoint has a talking paperclip I’ve missed.

A New Toy

Published December 15, 2003

Fun: C just got her xmas present; a digital camera, the Sony DSC P10 to be exact. Results to right ;)

Good: Sony’s easy-to-use use of USB mass-storage and open formats (GIF, JPEG, and MPEG). pnmstitch.

Bad: having to upgrade my kernel to 2.4.23 to get the bloody thing mounted! (Of course, iPhoto recognised it right away.)

Irish Anti-Spam Law, and Gaven Stubberfield Arrested

Published December 11, 2003

Spam: Let me take this moment to welcome our UK friends to the ‘spam now illegal’ club; unlike the US, the European and Australian anti-spam laws seem to be shaping up nicely, requiring opt-in before ’email marketing’ can be sent.

This actually happened in Ireland a couple of weeks ago, but I think I forgot to mention it here, so here’s the details:

Announcement, full text, full text as HTML. (It’s section 13 you want to read. Note that OpenOffice seems to have miscounted the bullet points in the HTML version ;)

The good stuff:

  • it’s opt-in, not opt-out like the cruddy CAN-SPAM act in the US. so that’s a fundamentally anti-spam position. Thanks EU!
  • each spam counts as a separate offence = lots of damages, I’d guess.

  • forging/disguising of originating header info is prohibited.

The bad:

  • if you run a mailing list, and you’re not sure that you got everyone’s permission to receive your mails (and if not, why not?), you’d better do a reconfirmation run quick ;)
  • no private right of action; but that’s pretty much std for Europe. we’re reliant on the Regulator to take action against spammers.
  • spamming to mailing lists is not prohibited — but then, I haven’t seen that blocked by any other law.
  • it’s unclear if spamming to role addresses (e.g. ‘foo-admin’, ‘info@company‘, etc.) is prohibited. I would guess that if they wind up in the mailbox of a ‘natural person’ it would be. But this may have to be worked out in court.
  • talks about ‘direct marketing’. Does this mean that faked-up ‘newsletters’ will be a loophole? Also, means that religious and political spam is permitted. But I haven’t seen much of that in Ireland… yet…

  • won’t be any good against US-based spammers. No surprise there. HOWEVER it may be useful against large multinational companies taking advantage of CAN-SPAM’s relaxed regime to indulge in a little spamming, if they have an Irish office.

    And, of course, it’ll mean that Ireland won’t develop Florida’s reputation any time soon, which is a good thing.

  • Will it be useful against spammers in other parts of the EU? That’s another question. Anyone know? I know of a bunch in France I’d really like to deal with.

    Brian Nisbet reckons it may.

I was reminded by this letter from the Department of Communications received by UCC , which notes:

But the Minister has announced that he intends using Ireland’s Presidency of the EU to initiate global partnership in clamping down on ‘spam.’

Global? Just don’t ask for any help from the Florida state government. ;)

Spam: Other (big) spam news: ‘Gaven Stubberfield’ arrested for ‘falsifying his identity so that his e-mails could not be traced’. SBL say that Jeremy Jaynes, aka ‘Gaven Stubberfield’ is the eight-most prolific spammer in the world, and is ‘notorious for ‘horsey porn’ spam’.

Irish: Irish WWW pioneer Peter Flynn now has a weblog, it seems. As far as I can tell, Peter was responsible for much of the good stuff at celt.ucc.ie, which reminds me to post this link to Pangur Bán I’ve been meaning to post.

Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindan:
bíth a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu memna céin im saincheirdd.

In my case, it’s mise agus Bubba Liath, otherwise pretty close despite the intervening 11 centuries…

Great WashPost article on patents

Published December 11, 2003

Patents: The Washington Post gets it. ‘The country “needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law,” said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. “It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age.”‘

BTW, one thing people say is that software patents are fine, as long as the technique is novel and new. What that misses is that novel, new techniques quickly become commonplace and standard infrastructure; consider image/audio/video compression, general compression techniques, cryptography, and so on. Those were all high-tech, super-complex schemes 5 years ago. Nowadays, we have JPEG, gzip, openssl, ssh, and all these other standard tools that are just part and parcel of our basic infrastructure. In software, ‘new and novel’ becomes ‘standard infrastructure’ remarkably quickly, and that’s what’s driving software innovation.

Now THAT is cool

Published December 10, 2003

Software: There’s a certain frisson to be had when you find out that your software is running somewhere really cool; I got this when I found out that PLP was being used in McMurdo Base, Antarctica and SpamAssassin as The Well‘s spam filtering system (SpamAssassin‘s now even more widely deployed, which is amazing — but this was the first ‘woo!’ moment).

However, I think Justin Frankel of WinAmp has got me well beat — the International Space Station. Bloody hell.

Aside: I wonder if they need a spam filter up there? ;)

Funny: We Love The SCO Information Minister. ‘Their assertions are incorrect. The source code is absolutely owned by SCO.’

Spam: 2 South Florida men agree to post $1 million bonds before spamming in future after an FTC bust — looks like a mortgage-scam spam team. Yay FTC!

The two portrayed themselves as mortgage lenders in unsolicited commercial e-mail, the FTC said, but their 30 Minute Mortgage operation was in fact not a lender and did not offer 30-year loans at 3.95 percent, as advertised.

Instead, the two were interested in getting potential customers to divulge their Social Security numbers, income and other sensitive financial data, which they then tried to sell to others, the FTC charged.

Samuel L. Jackson’s ‘Irish’ comment

Published December 10, 2003

Here’s a hot UL that’s floating around the irish web right now —

In a British program about Samuel L Jackson and Colin Farrell’s lastest movie SWAT presented by British presenter, Kate Thornton, the following exchange occured:

Thornton: What was it like working with Colin (Farrell), cos he is just so hot in the U.K. right now?

Jackson: He’s pretty hot in the U.S. too.

Thornton: Yeah, but he is one of our own.

Jackson: Isn’t he from Ireland?

Thornton: Yeah, but we can claim him cos Ireland is beside us.

Jackson: You see that’s your problem right there. You British keep claiming people that don’t belong to you. We had that problem here in America too, it was called slavery.

… yeah, right. ;)

(Update: Actually, believe it or not, that’s more or less how it really went. Here’s the transcript.)

Some commentary at
TheReggaeBoyz.com (quote: ‘I NEARLY DEAD TO RASS!!!!’) and Kuro5hin.

It looks like the TV programme does exist; no scripts online, unfortunately, so we’ll never figure out if this one really happened, I think.

IMO, it’s made up for sure. That last line is just a little too harsh for a primetime schmooze-a-gram, at the very least. Plus, it’s the kind of thing only an Irishman would give a shit about — the perpetual adoption of Irish celebs and worthies by the UK media is a continual source of irritation for the Irish — as Dervala puts it:

‘No, Oscar Wilde was ours. You put him in jail, though. And Shaw was ours. And Yeats. And Johnny Rotten.’

Spam Surrealism

Published December 10, 2003

Spam: Yoz comments on the bizarre new names appearing in spam, linking to a 2lmc spool entry and this entry at rereviewed.com, featuring such beauties as:

  • Inflorescence B. Afghan
  • Petards Q. Blinkers
  • Foobar Economides
  • Hillock H. Fossilized
  • Hotel K. Primate
  • Networked T. Crowley
  • Jitterbug I. Catastrophes
  • Pragmatism O. Playhouses

Me, I’m looking forward to getting spam from Collately Sisters with the international finance arse and Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan on new Euro-quota rates.

Oh look, I’ve found some war:

MORRIS: Back live now, progress on The Day Today smart bomb – Jonathan! Get rid of Hurd! Thanks!

(Hurd vanishes from a monitor, replaced by a bomb’s eye view of the war zone.)

MAN WITH GLASSES: Well, Chris, as you can see there’s the missile, cruising at around 2000 per second trying to locate the target the soldier it’s aimed at – there’s the soldier, it goes in through the mouth, down through the oesophagus, into the stomach and there’s the explosion. (The camera enters the gob of a surprised trooper before the picture turns to static)

MORRIS: Absolutely bang! That’s The Day Today bringing you another tear on the face of the world’s mother! Alan! Sport!

She’s Back

Published December 10, 2003

Irish: Sarah Carey‘s back — good to see it. Delivering a prime piece of moral outrage regarding malls (or ‘shopping centres’ as they’re quaintly called on the eastern shores), and their intolerance of political speech.

Redistributing the Future

Published December 10, 2003

Politics: WorldChanging.org on open source: ‘we pay a lot of attention to it here, so much so that several worldchangers have asked why. Outside of the realm of computing, they ask, what does collaborative software have to do with changing the world? With sustainability? With democracy? With justice?’

‘… as William Gibson reminds us, the future is here, it’s just not well-distributed yet. The answer to our problems is not to redistribute wealth, it’s to redistribute the future. In very practical terms, that’s what the open source (OS) movement is doing.’

Great article — and great picture from the CSMonitor (copied above) to illustrate it!

Warren Ellis on pop

Published December 9, 2003

Music: Warren Ellis on pop:

The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.

He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)

Warren Ellis on pop

Published December 9, 2003

Warren Ellis on pop:

The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.

He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)

Kayaking the L.A. River

Published December 8, 2003

Environment: (the built one, that is): LA Observed links to a couple of stories about kayaking the grim concrete trench that is the Los Angeles River. Well worth a read, and don’t miss the 1999 LA Weekly story, in which the journalist makes it to the sea before being picked up by police.

The LA river was once a real river, but due to its tendency to flash-flood, was turned into a trickle in a concrete trench back in the 1930s. Since then, it’s starred in a wide variety of movies and TV; the ones I can remember from the top of my head are Terminator 2, Earthquake, and V (which hilariously stole the river scenes directly from Earthquake, the cheapskates).

BTW, one interesting factor of living in the LA area is that you realise just how much of the TV and film of your childhood is taken directly from these surroundings; last time I was at the local train station, I looked out over a patch of sun-baked scrub and a couple of warehouses, and could clearly see The Six-Million Dollar Man running across it in my mind’s eye — wakka-wakka-wakka.

All along, I’d assumed these great sets were chosen for a particular reason, not just because they were right around the corner from the studio ;)

Talking of my local train station, here’s a good article about a very Irvine situation; it seems people keep a second, clunker car at the train station, due to the shortcomings of the Southern California public transit system.

MS and Marshall Phelps

Published December 8, 2003

Patents: Wonder why MS is just now starting to monetize^W’liberalise’ its patent portfolio, starting with a VFAT royalty fee for digital cameras?

Here’s a possible reason why — they’ve hired Marshall Phelps, from IBM, the executive who began IBM’s aggressive patent-based revenue program in 1985.

Microsoft has reached a point, (Eben Moglen) says, where the company can no longer enjoy the same annual revenue growth that it did in the 1990s. Like IBM in the eighties, it’s now looking for ‘creative’ ways to keep the shareholders happy.

CDWow: Anti-IRMA, pro-CDWow leaflet to print out and post somewhere (link via Donncha).

Report on Belgium’s Magic 4096 Votes

Published December 5, 2003

E-Voting: Very interesting page reproducing a translation of part of an expert report detailing an incident that occurred during an ‘electronic election’ in Belgium on May 18th 2003.

The latest EDRI-gram notes:

The total number of preferential votes cast on a specific candidate was higher than the total number of votes for his list. A series of tests was conducted on the computer of the president of the voting committee, but the error could not be reproduced. The difference in votes was exactly 4096, leading the research-team to the conclusion that the error was probably due to a spontaneous inversion of a binary position in the read-write memory of the PC.

This serves as a pretty good pointer to how, even if the software is audited to death and pronounced reliable, the hardware can still trip you up. Computers are fundamentally unreliable.

The solution? Why, a Voter-Verifiable Audit Trail of course. ;)

cdwow.ie

Published December 4, 2003

Music: So the current news on the Irish web scene is the Irish Recorded Music Association, Ireland’s very own mini-RIAA, attempting to sue cheap CD vendor CDWow.ie out of the Irish market.

CDWow sell CDs cheap, by shipping from Hong Kong. Yes, the price differential between Hong Kong and Europe is so big that even considering the shipping costs, it works out significantly cheaper for the consumer.

The IRMA page on the issue is hilarious, with vague threats of ‘credit cards floating through cyberspace’ (whatever that means), and comments like: ‘Remember every CD Wow purchase is a nail in the coffin of an Irish job’, because so much of the bland, multinational, big-music-industry output is produced in Ireland. Suuuure.

Read on at the Boards.IE discussion. ‘Doctor J’ on that forum notes:

I saw a Ween cd, manufactured in the USA, on sale in HMV for EUR44.99 last night.
  • CD Universe – EUR14.99
  • HMV.co.uk – UKP17.99
  • Tower.co.uk – UKP9.41
    • Are IRMA seriously suggesting it is in the interests of the Irish consumer

    to be ripped off by almost EUR30???

‘the exhilarating whoops and pant-hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys’

Published December 4, 2003

Humour: This year’s bad sex prizewinners. I think Rod Liddle deserved it, myself, purely for his comment:

Columnist and former Today programme editor Rod Liddle was almost struck out on the grounds that his sex scenes were actually rather well done, but his novel Too Beautiful for You, (‘after a modicum of congenial thrusting, she came with the exhilarating whoops and pant- hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys’) was reinstated after he said the judges were unqualified, since nobody on the Literary Review had had sex since 1936, in Abyssinia.

Self-plagiarised Horoscopes

Published December 4, 2003

Funny: Mick @ P45 has a good entry today on plagiarism. He notes that an academic pal once wrote a program to test for plagiarism by his students:

It uses a fairly rough and ready ‘brute force’ approach. Nonetheless, it can identify significant strings that have been regurgitated from Text A in Text B.

Anyway, he decided just for fun to fire the program at the website’s astrology predictions for the previous 18 months or so. The program churned away, and duly spat out the results. And – well heavens above – hadn’t the astrologer been copying and pasting very large chunks of his own predictions, apparently at random and nothing to do with ‘Uranus being in the ascendent’ or other such drivel that horoscopes concern themselves with.

Seldom-Asked Questions About Japan

Published December 4, 2003

Japan: This is fantastic; full of odd little facts about Japan. Here’s one I really like:

  1. ‘(How do you explain) the frequency of Japanese people (usually women) running or jogging for no apparent reason. In the travel agency, ‘let me get you a copy’ and she runs away. In my office a woman runs to the bathroom (can be explained) and then runs back to her desk (huh?). Most of the teachers I work with wait for the bell in the teacher’s room, and then practically sprint to their classes. Do you know why all this running is going on? Fitness? Service? An Edo-era leftover?’–Question submitted by Ben Schwartz
  2. I once teasingly asked a female with whom I worked why she always did a sort of feigned jog to and from the copier, especially since her jog was slower than her walk. The humour wasn’t lost on her, but she explained that many Japanese do this at work because the appearance of urgency is important in more traditional office environments. You don’t have to truly run around frantically, but just offer the gesture.–Answer kindly submitted by Lou C.

Another good one — it seems Bob the Builder had to have a finger added for the Japanese market, in order to not look like a yakuza.

Seldom-Asked Questions About Japan

Published December 4, 2003

This is fantastic; full of odd little facts about Japan. Here’s one I really like:

  1. ‘(How do you explain) the frequency of Japanese people (usually women) running or jogging for no apparent reason. In the travel agency, ‘let me get you a copy’ and she runs away. In my office a woman runs to the bathroom (can be explained) and then runs back to her desk (huh?). Most of the teachers I work with wait for the bell in the teacher’s room, and then practically sprint to their classes. Do you know why all this running is going on? Fitness? Service? An Edo-era leftover?’–Question submitted by Ben Schwartz
  2. I once teasingly asked a female with whom I worked why she always did a sort of feigned jog to and from the copier, especially since her jog was slower than her walk. The humour wasn’t lost on her, but she explained that many Japanese do this at work because the appearance of urgency is important in more traditional office environments. You don’t have to truly run around frantically, but just offer the gesture.–Answer kindly submitted by Lou C.

Another good one — it seems Bob the Builder had to have a finger added for the Japanese market, in order to not look like a yakuza.