taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Ever wondered what today’s internet meme images would look like on mid-’80’s home computing hardware?

Wonder no longer!

Tags: c64, commodore, computing, funny, hacks, hardware, internet, meme, today

Happy birthday, Perl! –

Perl was 18 today. In many jurisdictions, it can now drink intoxicating liquors, vote, and join the armed forces.

Global Warming Sceptic Bingo:

Just tick the box when they use the argument next to it. Get four in a row and you win!

Get well soon, del.icio.us.

Tags: bingo, birthday, box, global, happy, perl, sceptic, today, vote, warming

Dublin: Lean forwards on this story from today’s Irish Times. Sadly, it’s behind their subscription firewall, so I’ll just snip out a few choice quotes from Philip Shaffry, the current owner:

‘(The Stag’s Head) has been part of my life for three decades and I’ve been running it for 10 years,’ he says. ‘I’ve two small children and I’m living 10 miles out of town, so I’m hoping to find a pub a bit out of the city centre. But of course I’ll miss this place. I have got really attached to the clientele and the crowd that comes in.’

Looking around at the Victorian bar, opulently decorated with mahogany panelling and a red Connemara marble bar counter, Shaffry is confident there will be no changes to the building.

‘They won’t be able to touch it. This is the crème de la crème, the jewel in the crown, of Dublin pubs. It has been here since 1760, although it was completely refurbished in 1895. This is a grade-one listed building.’

But the bad news?

There are no State laws regulating some aspects of the pub, namely his family’s refusal to allow music – live or otherwise – or television in the bar. Any new owner could change this tradition, says Shaffry, which is a source of concern for some regulars. (….)

A spokesman for CBRE Gunne, which will auction the pub this afternoon, says there had been ‘enormous interest’ in the premises from Irish and international buyers.

Eeek! The guide price is 5 million Euros, if you fancy a shot.

Thanks for Philip for his excellent stewardship — here’s hoping any new buyer will keep his approach. That approach made the Stag’s what it is today — the best pub in Dublin. (In my opinion, at least ;)

Tags: approach, bar, building, crme, dublin, irish, owner, pub, stag, story, today

Patents: an interesting FUD-busting point from the FSFE-IE mailing list today. Malcolm Tyrrell wrote:

Why does the following point keep coming up? Do I misunderstand the issue, or is this just plain nonsense: (quoting this ENN article)

‘Indeed, the big businesses that backed the directive — such as Philips, Nokia, Alcatel and Microsoft (…) also say, in somewhat ominous terms, that without patent protection, big companies will be less inclined to spend cash on European R&D projects, because the governments of Europe cannot offer any guarantees that commercially useful technology will be protected. In the US, those much-needed safeguards are in place, patent supporters note.’

I presume that these big companies will obtain patents in all territories where patents are available, regardless of where the R&D is performed. Unless they are threatening this merely as revenge (and I would think that there responsibility to their own shareholders precludes this), there would be no more or less reason to do R&D in Europe whether software is patentable there or not. Am I wrong?

He’s right; in my experience, software patents are applied for world-wide, in as many regions as possible (and as funds and time permit) — and there’s very little barrier for an inventor in one country to obtain patents in other countries (apart from money to pay for all those billable hours).

However, Fergal Daly had a more interesting additional point:

‘As far as I can see you’re right and in fact this is a plus for Europe, as labs in Europe would be free to use other people’s patents during their research, whereas in other regions they would have to license them before they could implement them, even for private use.’

He’s right, too, as far as I can see. This would be quite a big win for European R&D, since it would also mean they could develop an algorithm similar to a patented algorithm, as long as the patented technique was only implemented in software inside their European labs. This would be illegal to do anywhere else in the world where software patents were legal, hence is a competitive advantage over their international competitors.

In addition, it would mean that in the scenario where a product is produced using a patented algorithm, but the algorithm doesn’t appear in the final product, that would allow them to perform production in Europe without paying the license fees that would be payable elsewhere.

In summary — the ‘patents needed for R&D’ line is FUD, and the reality is in fact the opposite!

Tags: algorithm, fsfe-ie, fud-busting, list, mailing, patent, patents, point, right, software, today

Patents: wow, this is amazing news! ‘IBM today pledged open access to key innovations covered by 500 IBM software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software. IBM believes this is the largest pledge ever of patents of any kind and represents a major shift in the way IBM manages and deploys its intellectual property (IP) portfolio.’

Even better, they are hoping to begin a ‘patent commons’ for other companies to join, and the OSI definitions of which licenses are judged ‘open’ apply.

More details:

• IBM’s press release
• PDF list of patents
• the list, as plain text (fixed!)

Of course, it would be better if it were also safe for commercial software development. But this is a valuable bulwark against Microsoft-style patent tactics.

Tags: access, ibm, kind, list, news, patent, patents, pledge, software, source, today

Web: in passing — here’s a bookmarklet for the current day’s Doonesbury comic strip: Today’s Doonesbury.

Tags: bookmarklet, comic, day, doonesbury, strip, today, web

Net: WINW Is Not WASTE: ‘WINW is a small worlds networking utility. It was inspired by WASTE … (WINW) has diverged from its original mission to create a clean-room WASTE clone. Today, the WINW feature set is different from that of WASTE, and its protocol is incompatible with WASTE’s protocol. However, WINW and WASTE achieve similar goals: they allow people who trust each other to communicate securely.’

Not quite there yet — just a Windows version with no sharing — but actively under development. One to keep an eye on…

Tags: clone, feature, mission, net, networking, protocol, today, utility, waste, windows, winw

News: Oops — I’ve just realised, that Newseum site I linked to a few days ago actually does change the URLs frequently for those front-page PDFs. However, the changing is limited to using the day of the month in part of the URL, as far as I can see.

So here’s bookmarklets that’ll do that:

• Today’s front page from The Guardian (PDF)
• Today’s front page from The Irish Indo (PDF)

Also — Breedster explained: Frequently Asked Questions On Viral Marketing. ‘Viral’, geddit?

Tags: change, news, newseum, oops, page, pdf, pdfs, site, today, urls, viral

EVoting: I didn’t realise it, but the Open Voting Consortium’s ‘EVM2003′ e-voting system looks excellent. Here’s the key point: it produces printed ballots, unlike the DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) systems. Those are what’s counted, and those are what the voter verifies. And it’s open-source, too, so the source is available.

Here’s a good intro from the Baltimore Sun:

Although it’s far from a finished product, the system retains what’s good about current electronic voting systems. It’s voter-friendly, easier than older systems to administer, and accessible to blind voters without assistance.

It also addresses the concerns of today’s critics. First, it uses open-source software that’s available for public inspection - eliminating the secrecy that outrages critics of today’s proprietary “black box” systems.

Second, the software is free and can run on a variety of computer platforms, which makes the system cheaper to acquire and maintain. Third, it creates a paper trail of printed ballots that can be counted by hand or machine in case of disputed elections – without compromising privacy for the blind.

Instead of printing a “receipt” that confirms a ballot cast electronically, it’s based on the quaint notion that the best ballot is still a paper ballot. “We didn’t see any reason to reinvent the wheel,” said Fred McLain, the project’s lead software developer.

Tags: ballot, consortium, evm, evoting, open, paper, realise, software, system, today, voting

News: Newseum: Today’s Front Pages (Flash map view). A great site;
the best thing about it is, a double-click on each newspaper’s ‘dot’ will pop up their front page as a larger image in a new window, and give you a URL for a full-page PDF file.

Best of all, those full-page PDF links update every day with that day’s front page… for example, these are eminently bookmarkable:

• The Guardian (PDF)
• Irish Independent (PDF)

Excellent!

A bit like The Guardian’s Digital Edition, but a whole lot cheaper and simpler.

Tags: day, flash, front, guardian, map, news, newseum, page, pages, pdf, today

Spam: Anne Mitchell on GMail’s spam filtering — sounds like her results are actually worse than mine were. But the ads worked well:

… just today, in an email from Mrs. Nwakama Ani, the wife of the late James Ani, a farmer in ZImbabwe, asking me to please help her to export $50million dollars which her late husband amassed, Gmail’s Adsense very thoughtfully offered me ‘Cheap airline tickets from the USA to Zimbabwe’. You know, just in case I want to go over there and help her personally.

Anne’s spam weblog looks like good stuff — I’ve added it to the blogroll…

Tags: adsense, email, farmer, gmail, husband, mine, spam, today, wife, zimbabwe

Tech: Excellent post from Colin Charles here:

Which brings us to an interesting point. Computers today are largely based on metaphors that the average urban bloke understands. Like we have a desktop, to represent our workspace. How do we transpose such an idea to someone in a rural area? What about a blinking cursor, in a language like Urdu that has no translation? They’ve resulted in calling it a ‘firefly’!

That’s taking Danny’s ‘eating out of the trash bins outside a cubicle farm’ comment even further…

Tags: bloke, desktop, excellent, idea, point, post, someone, tech, today, transpose, workspace

Code: Rod writes: ‘I have had a bunch of fun today, gleefully playing with a new source-control package. I truly lead a sad life.’

I’d guess that was our fault, moving SpamAssassin CVS to subversion at apache.org ;) Happy to oblige, Rod!

If I wasn’t so jet-lagged (still!), suffering from a cold, and busy with the day job, I’d be having that fun myself; SVN is very, very, very nice from what little I can tell so far. Only time will tell if it can beat the lovely Perforce, though, the virtues of which I have extolled on many occasions (earning myself a freebie T-shirt in the process, payola!).

But yeah, SVN looks really cool.

Tags: bunch, code, cvs, fault, fun, life, package, spamassassin, subversion, svn, today

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!

Tags: bomb, day, entry, hurd, lmc, soldier, spam, today, war, yoz

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.

Tags: beautiful, columnist, comment, editor, humour, modicum, novel, programme, sex, today, year

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.

Tags: approach, entry, force, fun, funny, pal, plagiarism, program, text, today, website

xscreensaver, the default (and greatest) screensaver on most free UNIX distros, may contain R-rated content, as this mail to the Fedora discussion list notes.

Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an ‘erect penis’ when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating:

$ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis
erect penis
flaccid penis

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA1

Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 13:45:35 -0500
From: Sean Millichamp (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Potentially objectionable xscreensaver module (GLSnake)

I just wanted to let everyone know that the xscreensaver module “GLSnake” has two object displays that some folks might feel is inappropriate or objectionable.

Much to my surprise, I stumbled across it drawing an “erect penis” when I returned from lunch today. So I did some investigating:

$ strings /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/glsnake | grep penis erect penis
flaccid penis

$ rpm -q xscreensaver
xscreensaver-4.14-2

Some folks who are planning on (or have) installed Fedora Core at home or in conservative office settings might want to check and make sure glsnake isn’t enabled by default.

If I end up deploying Fedora Core 1 to any desktops at my clients I will clearly have to sanitize or remove this module in some fashion.

I hope that the heads-up helps someone…

Sean

• –

fedora-list mailing list
(spam-protected)
To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Exmh CVS

iD8DBQE/zOjlQTcbUG5Y7woRAmsPAKCgQyfMtjwzMLFI/+6AOGMiorpd+wCgiBj9 pK/I94s4fgzbtKdSIraWgKM=
=gIci
—–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

Tags: begin, flaccid, glsnake, grep, lunch, module, pgp, surprise, today, usr

I’ve been reading Crooked Timber recently; a good literate weblog. Today’s interesting post, from Kieran Healy: Frustration is not a Strategy. Well worth a read for some context on today’s Middle East, and the fundamental problem with those ‘kill ‘em all’ proposals that keep cropping up from the hawks.

Blogs: Nathan Cochrane, Aussie journalist for The Age and writer of a very interesting weblog — has won quite a lot of money on a TV gameshow! I think the term is ‘goodonyamate’, if I recall correctly ;)

(Pity he couldn’t have fixed the BlogShares listing first though.)

Tags: context, crooked, frustration, literate, post, read, strategy, timber, today, weblog

There were some reports on the SpamAssassin-talk mailing list today, that all queries to the now-defunct orbs.dorkslayers.com DNSBL zone are now returning a true result.

Thomas Mechtersheimer pointed out the culprit: it turns out that b.gtld-servers.net, one of the top-level DNS global TLD servers ( run by Verisign, as far as I can see), is returning 65.246.50.11 for every query for a name that does not exist under the .com and .net zones. That includes second-level names, and anything under a nonexistent second-level name.

Take a look. a.gtld-servers.net is returning the correct NXDOMAIN results, b.gtld-servers.net is blissfully sending all this traffic to some poor UUnet dialup ;)

dig 242.110.40.68.orbs.dorkslayers.com. @a.gtld-servers.net.
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 27661
dig 242.110.40.68.orbs.dorkslayers.com. @b.gtld-servers.net.
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 52998
242.110.40.68.orbs.dorkslayers.com. 15 IN A     65.246.50.11
dig 4905893958xc98gdf9g8945.com @a.gtld-servers.net.
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 9454
dig 4905893958xc98gdf9g8945.com @b.gtld-servers.net.
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 42344
4905893958xc98gdf9g8945.com. 15 IN      A       65.246.50.11

Update: It's been fixed, as of about 1200 PDT.

Tags: com, dnsbl, header, list, mailing, name, net, spamassassin-talk, today, zone

my mate Luke passes on this gem:

I was driving along behind a plumber’s van today. The van was emblazoned with signs saying that the plumber was a sewers and drains expert. Along the rear bumper of the van was the company’s slogan:

‘Your shit is our bread and butter’

I am not making this up.

Tags: bumper, company, expert, gem, mate, plumber, shit, slogan, today, van

Incredible. The text ‘My wife, Jody’ has appeared, reliably, in spam for the last 5 years — I just got one today. (I haven’t actually seen one in my inbox for a while, though, since the chain letters that copy it generally get pretty high scores — this one hit a respectable 48.2 SpamAssassin points, no less.)

Here’s the text it appears in:

MORE TESTIMONIALS

‘My name is Mitchell. My wife, Jody and I live in Chicago. I am an accountant with a major U.S.Corporation and I make pretty good money. When I received this program I grumbled to Jody about receiving ‘junk mail’. I made fun of the whole thing, spouting my knowledge of the population and percentages involved. I ‘knew’ it wouldn’t work. Jody totally ignored my supposed intelligence and few days later she jumped in with both feet. I made merciless fun of her, and was ready to lay the old ‘I told you so’ on her when the thing didn’t work. Well, the laugh was on me! Within 3 weeks she had received 50 responses. Within the next 45 days she had received total $147,200.00 …….. all cash! I was shocked. I have joined Jody in her ‘hobby’.’

Mitchell Wolf M.D., Chicago, Illinois

It’s amazing that the chain letter is never changed, given that for the last few years they are all sent using spamware applications, so the senders must have some techie know-how.

I wonder if there’s a real Mitchell Wolf M.D. in Chicago, and what he’d think of 5 years of faked testimonials using his name?

Tags: chain, fun, incredible, jody, name, spam, text, thing, today, wife

The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 has been my main news source for several months (at least since I moved to somewhere with decent broadband, and didn’t have to contemplate getting up at unearthly hours to listen to it ;) .

In the past week or two, they’ve broken a major story, the ’sexing-up’ allegations against the UK government’s Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier (yes, that’s ’sexing-up’.)

There’s transcripts of the interviews here and on the Times website (thanks to P O’Neill for the pointer to the latter). Well worth a read, if you enjoy hearing evasive politicians getting skewered by a skillful interviewer. ;)

Tags: bbc, broadband, news, programme, radio, source, story, the, today, week

Salam Pax blogs about an interesting NGO:

I have heard today that a NGO called Communication sans frontiers has arrived in Iraq and will help. They will probably be doing what the Red Cross is doing, a center in Baghdad and a team moving around Iraq. The Red Cross has been moving its phone service, if you can call it that, around Baghdad. Two days for each district and they depend on the word of mouth to spread the news, usually they end up with huge lines and waiting lists but everybody is grateful. Many people have no way telling their relatives abroad how they are doing. A couple of Arabic TV stations, mainly Jazeera, has been putting their cameras in the street and allowing people to send regards to their relatives abroad, tell them they are OK hoping that they would be watching at the time. So what the Red Cross has been doing, and I think what Communication sans frontiers would ultimately be doing is much appreciated.

According to this comment on the command-post.org blog, it’s actually called Telecoms Sans Frontieres:

Telecoms sans Frontieres has created a new humanitarian aid concept: the humanitarian telephone system. TSF’s mission is to operate anywhere in the world, in the heart of military conflicts or in the wake of natural disasters, in order to enable the local population to simply say: I’m alive.

Now there’s a cool idea for any BOFHs who fancy doing some interesting volunteer work for a year… ;)

Tags: center, communication, cross, ngo, pax, red, salam, team, telecoms, today

Mark Lawson in today’s Guardian:

This time, digital satellite viewers can even use their red interactive buttons to call the shots of the shots: zapping between battle zones and international capitals like a James Bond baddie watching the world come down on 30 TV screens in his underground bunker… We belong to a generation which has largely ceased to be surprised by television, but think about this: those who wanted to were able to watch an enemy operation live from the banks of the Tigris. This weekend’s pictures have widened the eyes like nothing since the moon landings, though with rather greater moral complications. The essential problem is that in seeming to know everything, we know nothing. There are wise old journalists who will tell you that the word ‘raw’ is usually a warning. It is unwise to eat raw meat or smell raw sewage and it may be equally foolish to consume raw news coverage.

Forwarded by Tim Chapman on the forteana list.

Kind of irrelevant to me, seeing as I’m now based in the US, and the concept of unbiased, unfiltered TV news doesn’t really seem to exist over here.

Instead, the war coverage consists of an endless array of human interest stories with the troops and whizz-bang explosion footage. There’s absolutely no interpretation, apart from what it might imply for relatives of the US servicemen involved — that’s it. As far as I can see, there is no real liberal news, or a balancing viewpoint, on TV over here.

In about 3 hours of news on TV, I think I saw one opposing viewpoint, 5 minutes with ex-senator George McGovern. That was it.

I’m finding this to be a serious culture shock. Thankfully, I’ve got the web to read and listen to the European stuff instead, so I’m doing that instead. The old Barlow line about the internet and censorship springs to mind…

Tags: baddie, battle, coverage, guardian, news, nothing, satellite, time, today, viewpoint

wow, the Beeb fed 29,200 simultaneous RealMedia streams at one point today; that breaks down to 18,400 listeners in the UK, 12,800 elsewhere in the world.

Since getting back to bandwidth, I’ve been listening to a lot of Radio 4, waking up to the Today programme in particular. Definitely recommended; nothing like a few clipped RP tones to fill you in on all the details.

Also recommended: the Beeb’s live streams collection, featuring all the FM and digital-radio stations streamed with excellent quality. Who needs Napster when you’ve got internet radio ;)

Tags: bandwidth, beeb, lot, particular, point, programme, radio, realmedia, today, world

Daphne Oram, one of the pioneers of electronic music, has died. (BBC)

Almost un-noticed by the wider world, one of the pioneers of electronic music has died. Without Daphne Oram, we may never had known what the Tardis sounded like. Electronic music – as much a part of today’s life as whistling a tune to yourself – grew up amid milk bottles, gravel, keys, and yards of magnetic tape and wires. These were the sort of tools typically scattered around the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s and 60s, when they were used to generate wonderful and ethereal sounds for the airwaves. The mother of this great legacy was Daphne Oram. Aged 18, and armed with a passionate interest in sound, music and electronics, she started work at the BBC in 1943 as a sound engineer.

Tags: bbc, life, milk, music, part, sound, tardis, today, tune, world

Steppe by Step (Guardian). “I started wondering if (the ’six degrees of separation’ theory) was true today. … So 35 years on from the original experiment, I decided to test out the urban myth on a world stage: how many steps would it really take to get to someone on the other side of the planet?”

The London-based “city girl” author, Lucy Leveugle, makes it in 9 steps (hey, the world has expanded!) to Purev-Ochir Gungaa, a nomadic herdsman in the middle of the steppes of Outer Mongolia. Amazing.

Tags: experiment, guardian, myth, separation, step, steppe, the, theory, today, world

Danny at Oblomovka bought a Roomba, and finds it extra useful for scaring cats.

Still, we did our final moving cash splurge today, and bought a Roomba. And, what do you know, it’s actually pretty good: both at cleaning and removing the bejesus out of nearby cats. It backed Dyson into the corner of our living room within minutes – she kept tottering backwards for about ten yards, like she was facing the Feline Terminator.

In a similar vein: I can vouch that, if Lego Mindstorms is good for anything, it’s scaring cats with its Otherworldly Silicon Intelligence. I think most cats eventually figure out that if there’s a string or stick linking a menacing object and a human, odds are that the human is controlling the object somehow. As a result, a robot really freaks them out.

But with Lego Mindstorms, they do get their revenge eventually, by eating the smaller bricks next time you build a ‘bot.

Tags: cash, human, lego, mindstorms, moving, object, oblomovka, roomba, splurge, today

Argh, so much mail to get through; I was away this weekend, then offline for most of today waiting for a new line to be installed. But I did get a new candidate for the bizarre spam award: Q: DOES YOUR FOREIGN ACCENT SIMPLY GET IN THE WAY? Simple answer: nope. next!

Tags: argh, award, candidate, does, line, mail, offline, spam, today, weekend

BB reports that “Russian entrepreneurs are spraypainting logoed advertisements for their products and services on stray dogs and releasing them as walking, starving billboards.” This sounds just a bit too Chris Morris to me, and considering it came via Ananova / Orange Today’s “quirkies” service – which is not exactly reknowned for doing the backup research first – I would say it’s pretty unlikely… let’s see what forteana make of it.

Tags: ananova, backup, bit, forteana, make, orange, research, service, today

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing is on fire today. I was tempted to forward on an entry or two, but by the time I got to the end of today’s updates, I think the only thing a reader can do is just go there and read ‘em: Quake players on drugs, Dance Dance Resurrection, and EMI uploading their own music to Gnutella…

Tags: boing, cory, dance, doctorow, end, entry, fire, thing, time, today

Great article on practical counter-terrorism in Salon today:

Ask now of any action you mean to take — bombing, assassination, ground war — whether it means there will be more or fewer terrorists when the children who are now in preschool grow up to fighting age. This is not an argument against the use of violence. Violence is absolutely essential; but it has to be used so that it conveys the right political message to the people who might become terrorists when they grow up. The state has to become as good at theater as its enemies. There’s a short version of this lesson: “Don’t shoot the boys throwing stones.”

Tags: action, age, article, assassination, bombing, ground, salon, today, violence, war

Alan Turing is finally being honoured for his work, with a statue in Manchester. There’s an interesting follow-up mail from Mike O’Dell there, too: “the notes go on at length about the need for subroutines, subroutine libraries for common functions, and he even invented debugging and the concept of a debugger program. he also described what we today called a relocating assembler and linker – inventing the whole notion of “relocation” as an “obvious” aside.”

ALAN TURING, the national hero who broke the Nazi’s enigma code and is credited with turning the tide of the World War Two, is to be honoured with a life-size statute.

The bronze monument, which will be unveiled today, comes almost 50 years after the brilliant scientist was driven to suicide by persecution over his homosexuality. Five years after its inception, the pounds 20,000 sculpture of Turing sitting on a bench holding an apple will be displayed in Manchester’s Sackville Park in the city centre.

The mathematical genius became a national hero after his involvement in World War Two, he also helped invent the inaugural computer, at Manchester University, but was persecuted and prosecuted for his homosexuality. He committed suicide in 1954 by eating a poisoned apple.

Many believe Turing has never been recognised properly for his outstanding contribution to science. But Glyn Hughes, the statue’s creator, is confident that Turing has finally earned his rightful place in the history books. Hughes, from Adlington near Chorley, said: “It’s stunningly realistic. I’m sure it will go a dirty black over time, but it looks wonderful today.”

GRAPHIC: Glyn Hughes’ sculpture of the wartime hero, Alan Turing, will
be unveiled in Manchester today Paul Burrows

Via: David Farber (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: IP: Statue of a computer scientist
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 22:01:00 -0400
From: “Mike O’Dell” (spam-protected)

many years ago, the Journal of the British Computer Society published a collection of Turing’s papers and notes along with some history-of-science analysis.

what was truly stunning was that Turning not only invented the general purpose computer as we now understand it, but he also invented *programming* and even *software engineering* as we now understand it. the notes go on at length about the need for subroutines, subroutine libraries for common functions, and he even invented debugging and the concept of a debugger program. he also described what we today called a relocating assembler and linker – inventing the whole notion of “relocation” as an “obvious” aside.

he had the design for a complete computer almost done, and he was fighting for resources to build it, but caught up in his other problems it fell to others to build what was probably a lesser machine.

I hope all the BCS stuff got collected and republished somewhere, and if someone knows where I’d love to know as I haven’t been able to find it.

Reading those notes makes it abundantly clear that there’s very little in modern computing that Alan Turing didn’t invent or at least fortell.

His loss was an incalculable tragedy.

-mo

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