Yoz Grahame: Leaves Buildings Standing
Yoz Grahame: Leaves Buildings Standing
(An extended rant about liberal URL interpretation and how there isn't enough of it, mostly pertaining to one or two examples at the BBC website.)
By Randy Gierno, Wired News
It seems that the British public just can't get enough of hot, wanton, guilt-free sex. The average cutting-edge tech-friendly Limey barely gets through a single day without taking part in a "dogging" session or "toothing" with random phone-junkies on the Tube.
But now even the electronics-poor underclass have been getting in on the act and coming up with their own low-tech variations on peer-to-peer playfulness.
Last night, at the "Toucan" pub in London's fashionable West End, I witnessed a fascinating range of sexual activity which showed that gadget-free flirting already has a deep and varied subculture.
"Oh yeah, well, some of the birds round here, they're mad for it, innit?" said my guide in the brave new world of London sex, who I'll call Barry. "Have you in the bogs soon as look at you. I mean, this one girl, right... huge tits, nice smile, she gave me this look, and it was like, "Fancy a bit?" And so we went to the lavvy round the back and she had my trousers down in seconds. And then she pulled her friend in two and the three of us were like, y'know. And then they all came back to my place. Happens all the time."
Pausing only to spill some famous London ale down the front of his XXL-sized rugby shirt, Barry outlined some key points in the rapidly-evolving lexicon of British desire. "So what you do, right, is you spot a nice tart over by the bar and you think, lovely, I'll have a bit of that. And you tip her the wink, you know? And then, if she looks back at you, she's gagging for it."
"Just like Bluetooth signalling," I commented as I tapped hurried notes into my Zaurus. "Ingenious!"
"But then, they're all gagging for it round here," continued Barry. "They all want it. I had five birds round my place the other night, I couldn't walk for a week! Haha!"
Indeed, as I continued my wanderings around the city, I realised that Barry had opened my eyes. At least five strangers made eye contact with me, something that I, as a New Yorker, found strange and erotically intoxicating. I saw couples walking hand-in-hand, doubtless having met only a few seconds earlier and looking for a secluded spot in which to consummate their random, anonymous, instant-message-enabled desire.
In another pub I decided to try Barry's tips out for myself (strictly in the interests of research, of course). Sitting at a table, I spied a pretty young Londoner chatting to a friend at the bar. Following Barry's advice, I whistled loudly to attract her attention before giving her a long and careful wink. The measured, aroused stare I received in return was unmistakable. I approached her at the bar and, in a lowered tone, quickly made an offer using the key phrases of London sexual bargaining, dotting it with references to text messaging and social software so as to establish my credentials as a member of the technological elite. During this rapid conversation she slapped my cheek and yelled, "Piss off!" I smiled and nodded before retreating, having never intended to follow through, but it was fascinating to experience a London woman confessing her desires for violent sex and bodily fluids so readily.
London: a wild arena where language and technology are being used to forge brave new passages into a previously-taboo world. Horny Americans desperate for a sex-and-tech story to file should get their asses over here as soon as they can. It's cheaper than Burning Man, anyway.
Elsewhere in Wired News: "Why The Entire Population Of New York Cast Aside Their Old Religions And Now Worship A Giant Wicker iPod" by Leander Kahney
If you're a Perl coder who hasn't been keeping a close eye on CPAN then you may have missed the latest chunk of code making quite a stir, namely Brian "Ingy" Ingerson's marvellous IO::All. And it is marvellous: if Perl is the Swiss Army Chainsaw then this is the new light saber attachment - can't do anything you couldn't do previously but it slices through most IO jobs in one or two lines, from file slurping (one line, obviously) to creating a forking server (er, two lines). This Perl.com piece would be a great introduction if another burst of coding from Ingy hadn't rendered it half-obsolete a mere three days later. But, dammit, that's what we like to see!
IO::All's design could be described, for want of a decent OO education, as "overload one class with a billion different uses" and in this case it seems to work well. The vast majority of the code revolves around grabbing code from other modules and wrapping them up in several big contextualising switches so that this single class is almost all you need for your to-ing and fro-ing with the outside filesystem. In other words, it's all about the interface. It feels very Perlish in its mixture of minimal code and DWIMness so it's not surprising that many in the Perl community have jumped on it gleefully. This "The Best $DOMAIN Functions In The World... Ever!" approach to module-building is infectious, and Yung-Chung Lin's Var module is probably going to be the first of many imitators. If you fancy having a go yourself, then Ingy's Spiffy base class is what you want to start with, but please use your enhanced exporting powers wisely: packing a single class with tons of functions (a la Python) is fine and pretty, but doing that to the default namespace (a la PHP) is just inconsiderate.
(Regarding the bizarre disconnect between what spreadsheet applications were originally intended to do and what they are used for now, the surprising connection between Excel users and UNIX geeks, and how I'm standing out in the cold.)
Oh, that crafty Cory Doctorow! Prancing around all la-di-da! "Look at me! I put my books on the web for free!" Ain't he just the shiznit?
Yeah, well, his wasn't the first big new science-fiction novel to be given away free on the web, oh no! 'Cos back in 1997, when I worked on Starship Titanic website, we gave away the entire text of the tie-in novel. (concept by Douglas Adams, book by Terry Jones)
That's right. Every single word.
(Okay, now you have to go off and get the joke before you continue reading)
Well, okay, not every word, because we left off the last fifty and spun it into one of the web's stupidest competitions (that was, remarkably, won). But we also showed the world how it was done, with PIPA - one of the silliest/coolest/most compact bits of Perl I've ever written.
Returning to Mr Doctorow, I notice that his first novel, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom has been out in its new remixable form for a while now and not much has been done with it (other than a Russian translation), so it's time to change that:
"Beautiful," BEAUTY beauty, became. BECAME because because because because because because -- because because because because because because because because because because because because because because become become become become become become become bed bed bed. bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed, bed bed bedroom bedroom bedroom-bedroom beds bedside bedside bedside.
He chuckled. "No sausage, not mash. I'm into the kind of mash sausage that you only come across on-world."
I never thought that I would live, in order to arise, where the maintenance would decide A-Movin ' Dan at the person in possession of a favour light up to the death of the heat of the universe.
Remember this fab Wired piece about the virus-hunters at F-Secure? Remember their blog, full of the latest juicy virus tidbits? At last, there's an RSS feed. Day made! (Signed, Easily Pleased of Finchley.)
The Village Voice recently featured an overview of the American music industry's past year written by my Burning Man chum Douglas Wolk (who, along with his writing projects, runs one of the fabbest singles clubs ever). From amongst the usual news from the battle against file sharers this astonishing snippet leapt out at me:
The RIAA is also trumpeting its $200,000 settlement of infringement claims against Nashville's United Record Pressing, one of the few vinyl plants still operating in America. (If you bought an indie-label seven-inch single in the '90s, it was very likely pressed there.) It seems that they were hired to press some records that turned out to include unlicensed content ("more than 170 unauthorized sound recordings"). Everything that customers send to United is now "audio tested," and no samples of any kind are permitted. Fair use? The public domain? Out of the question.
Surely some mistake... but apparently not. As the copyright release says:
Samples are a copyright infringement. ALL samples require licensing. The licensing MUST accompany the order as to not delay production of your order. Licensing must be obtained from the copyright owner of the material being sampled. ANY sample must be licensed regardless of length.
In other words, if you're a young MC trying to make a start on the hip-hop scene with a homebrewed white label 12" to hand out to the local DJs, you can pretty much forget about it unless you're willing to spend several months (and several thousand in fees) coming up with licenses for the samples. Admittedly this is not, in itself, news; any kind of sampling without licensing is still illegal and not covered by the notion of "fair use". However, this is the first time it's been cut off at the point of pressing. Before this, our young MC could at least get his tune out to gather some buzz and wait until he'd got a record deal before worrying about sample clearance - which how so many dance and hip-hop legends got their start. (And I can't help but feel sorry for United Record Pressing, who are having to impose this nonsense while simultaneously trying to cater to eager DJs touting their tunes at the Miami Winter Music Conference. Of course, there's also the fantastic irony of their hideously-irritating loop samples playing on every page)
However, it's not only URP that's been forced into this: they're just the most notable of a huge number of CD, DVD and vinyl pressing plants across the world who've been certified by the International Recording Media Assocation's Anti-Piracy Compliance Program, an attempt to stamp on both unlicensed sampling and pre-release leaking at the same time. Those plants wishing to take part can look forward to implementing the APCP Standards & Procedures, a remarkably stringent set of processes which thrust the vast majority of the work and responsibility for license-checking into the hands of the plant staff, in return for which they get to pay several thousand dollars a year. And if, for some unimaginable and probably heretical reason, a plant doesn't want to join the APCP - well, let's just hope they're not pressing anything with uncleared samples, eh? Or they might get a visit.
To me, it just looks like another attempt by the RIAA to hammer nails into their own coffin by taking on the carriers in the middle - in this case, the carriers on who they depend. Those upcoming underground artists who were still hoping to have their own white labels pressed are getting used to CD burning and MP3 swapping, and those MP3s are starting to make it all the way to the other end of the chain without money changing hands in the middle. I'm particularly frustrated because if there's one aspect of music that fascinates me, it's sampling. As Strictly Kev's recent, extraordinary Raiding The 20th Century demonstrated, sampling is not a new or underground phenomenon. It's a fundamental and essential component of contemporary music, and until the law (which is meant to protect and cultivate music) reflects that, then many new artists are are effectively being charged for every note they play. But ultimately, who cares? The RIAA doesn't, and neither do the artists for whom the legality of sampling is about as relevant as the Ivor Novello awards. For them, the music industry is both damage to be routed around and more grist to the mill. As Pop Will Eat Itself said: Sample It, Loop It, Fuck It and Eat It.
The difference between a completed technical standard placed under the Creative Commons and a truly open one is the difference between being allowed to scribble over the President's name in the newspaper and being able to vote for his opponent in the first place.
(Note: I'm not referring to any particular standard in either case. I'm just saying.)
Most of us are used to relatively consistent ratios for data compression. The standard ZIP algorithm usually takes ASCII files down by a factor of ten or so, uncompressed binary data by a factor of three, both of those wobbling +/-50%. However, those are averages based on real-world use; if you aim to create a sample dataset purely for a high ratio, you can get 100:1 or better quite easily. Why? Well, if you ever played around with BBSes on a 14.4k modem, you may have seen some quite cool experiments that let you download a megabyte or so in a mere minute, taking advantage of v.32's run-length compression algorithms. (Of course, you were getting a megabyte of meaningless data, most of which was the same byte repeated over and over, but who cares? It was a MEGABYTE! In a MINUTE!)
But what use is there for such tricks now? Decompression bombs, that's what.
Here's an example scenario: A mail arrives at your super-barbed-wire-protected mail gateway. The gzip-compressed attachment - only 7k big - is grabbed by the anti-virus scanner, looking for any suspicious signatures. It starts to decompress it and BANG - the resulting file, over 100 gigabytes, crashes the AV scanner and completely fills the hard drive partition in the process.
Fortunately, a good number of the AV scanners that AERAsec tested aren't too vulnerable, but some require patching. Similarly, sending a gzipped-HTML bomb to a browser will crash a fair few of them. Not so scary, then, but nifty in an admirably-nasty way.
While looking for good test data for my code, a moment's idle musing confirmed (with scott/tiger coming up on the outside)
Five years on (to the day), the horrible truth can finally be told.
Quote from Major John Smith, the Pentagon's spokesman on the military commissions taking place in Guantanamo Bay, responding to accusations that the trials are unfair:
He claimed Maj Mori had misrepresented the system. "Different doesn't always mean unfair," he said. "It's very easy to be critical of the process because people haven't seen it in action."
... Yiddish for "go to sleep".
Now doesn't "gay shlafen" have a softer, more soothing sound than the harsh, staccato "go to sleep"? Listen to the difference:
"Go to sleep, you little wretch!" ... "Gay shlafen, darling." Obvious, isn't it?
Clearly the best thing you can do for you children is to start speaking Yiddish right now and never speak another word of English as long as you live. This will, of course, entail teaching Yiddish to all your friends, business associates, the people at the supermarket, and so on, but that's just the point. It has to start with committed individuals and then grow ...
Some minor adjustments will have to be made, of course: those signs written in what look like Yiddish letters won't be funny when everything is written in Yiddish. And we'll have to start driving on the left side of the road so we won't be reading the street signs backwards. But is that too high a price to pay for world peace? I think not, my friend, I think not.
-- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"
(This is what butter's fortune gave me today.)
Surely I'm not the only Windows XP user who, when right-clicking at the bottom of the screen, feels a compulsion to sing "Shareef don't like it! (dung-a-nung, dunnng, dung-dung) LOCK the taskbar! LOCK the taskbar!"
... by White Ninja
(Incidentally, there's a comic I saw a while back that I forgot to bookmark and it's evaded all Googling: Each panel consists of an identical layout, with a (1) in the bottom-left corner and a (2) in the bottom-right, and only the speech bubbles are different. It's fantastic. Any pointers would be gratefully received.)
UPDATE: It is Death To The Extremist and it is fab. Go look at it now. To the anonymous notifier - thank you!
Went into town with Bob for a recording of the long-running BBC Radio panel game Quote... Unquote, thanks to free tickets from a neighbour, and was very pleasantly surprised to see Andrew Mueller - one of my all-time favourite writers - on the panel. I've been a fan since university, when I read his work in the now-defunct Melody Maker. His collection Rock and Hard Places was the best book I read in 2000 and I've returned to it many times; it's damn-near unmissable (and thanks to the whims of the publishing industry, also damn-near unfindable).
The shows were funny though somewhat imbalanced, with Nigel Rees being somewhat codescending to Mueller and downright dismissive of Pam Rhodes, preferring instead to kow-tow to the irritatingly-twee John Suchet, a never-ending source of anecdotes about his brother. Fortunately Brian Sewell saved the day (and how often does one get to say that), particularly with this line:
I'm not going to have a funeral. I'm going to leave my body to science. It'll go to a medical academy where students can practise with it. And people tell me that I mustn't do that because they tend to take the penis and testicles and hide them in sandwiches and give them to girls. But I don't care!
After the show I managed to snatch a brief conversation with Andrew who, along with being incredibly nice, pointed me at his new site which contains a hefty chunk of his writing, including many of the pieces from the book and the complete archives of his current Time Out column.
I'm going to bed now, because I've just turned thirty. Bugger.
Via r0d, this short, cool, geeky and scary comic strip set in a phone box that's been, apparently randomly, encased in concrete with our hero trapped inside.
Phone boxes (or phone booths, to you Americans) make quite a rich seam for short stories, usually focusing on a combination of claustrophobia and random, sudden communication (protagonist hears a public phone ringing, answers it, and...) thus feeding a prime motivator of terror: it could happen to anyone - including YOU!
A few other examples:
Forty two may be a choice number for many things, but the amount of hours spent in labour is not one of them. Still, well done, Cait! (Though I imagine you won't be awake to read this till next week.)
While reeling from the pain of the latest spillage from MTV's favourite waste of functioning kidneys Good Charlotte I noticed that, for the second time in a year, they had used the common lyrical cliché phrase "stumble and fall". Is it just me, or do variations on that phrase get used all over pop lyrics? The obvious reference is Ben E. King's "Stand By Me" but also Everclear's "Everything To Everyone" and the Stereo MC's "Connected", as well as the titles of songs by The Mamas And The Papas, Xymox and No Fun At All. Oh, and these. Any others? Any origins? Why must "stumble" always be followed by "fall" in this way? Fire up the DaveGreenSignal! (Oh, and feed Good Charlotte into a woodchipper. Ta.)
