Need To Know 2004-08-06

archive
2004-08-06
#341
Yo Robot, Carry On Camping

2004-07-23
#340
from Odeon to Od-Iain

2004-07-09
#339
Browser Wars II - Electric Boogaloo

2004-06-04
MiniNTK #30
Not the NotCon final Schedule

2004-05-28
#338
Peek-a-boo Barney, Charles III "in charge"

2004-05-21
#337
Hey, Hey, Software Pa(tents) - slight reprise

2004-05-14
#336
A wip-woawing Widdecombe wollercoaster wide

2004-05-07
#335
A prawn sandwich and a BBC Micro

2004-04-30
#334
Eternal Sunshine of the Wireless Find

2004-04-23
#333
PayPal, piracy to "destroy society"

2004-04-16
#332
Loads more Gatesions, all-geek radio

2004-04-09
#331
Easter NotCon speaker hunt

2004-04-02
#330
The mass Onion-isation of pretty much everybody

2004-03-26
#329
LOAFs of spam, wifi settees

2004-03-19
#328
state of the "nanny state" nation

2004-03-12
#327
EU Ew-yew, pseudo- edutainment

2004-03-05
#326
SCO bandits, eBaywatch

2004-02-27
#325
Tidgy fridges, didgeridoos

2004-02-20
#324
ConConUK, Space 0.64 miles per second

2004-02-13
#323
All Tim O'Reilly, all the time

2004-02-06
#322
info on ebay scams only $10

2004-01-30
#321
the site now running on platform - well, whatever platform you like...

2004-01-23
#320
spam vs spam, Lisp to Perl

2004-01-16
#319
Name-calling, nuclear lan parties

2004-01-09
MiniNTK #24
Even more unpopular answers

2004-01-02
MiniNTK #23
Unpop quiz

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"I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1 percent of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year..." - Steve Jobs, still no closer to cracking that elusive "mass market" audience http://www.thinksecret.com/news/jobsmemo.html >> HARD NEWS << Perl hullabaloos Last year, DAN SUGALSKI, lead developer of the forthcoming Perl6 virtual machine, Parrot, bet the Python developers that he could run Python faster on the fledgling VM - and the creator of Python could throw a pie at him at the next OSCON if he didn't. He didn't; the pie-ing was duly arranged. As everyone knows, while Perlites are chaotic/good trickster archetypes who love such events, Pythonistas are peaceful, have-their-glasses-on-a-little-string types, like hobbits or the Dutch. In the end, Guido van Rossum refused to throw the pie, and instead offered to share it as food with the Perl developers. Nothing, of course, could have been more guaranteed to throw Perlsters into violent rage. An extended period of acrimonious bargaining followed, in which the Perl crew grew more and more insistent that their own chief developer be humiliated, with many walking out of the session, muttering about "all foreplay and no sex". Later, the Perl faction took it upon themselves to pie Sugalski - much, we are sure, to the shock of the pacifistic Pythonese, who may well have planned that using their psychomathematics and indented whitespace necromancy all along. (Mind you, that didn't stop Guido finally joining in. Feel the punctuation rising in you, Guido!) http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000372.html - Dan gets last laugh later in August >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious ["If you put all the doh's on one big web page", writes KEVIN BUZZARD, "then we miss all the sarcastic one-liners that you introduce them with", apparently overlooking the fact that http://www.dohthehumanity.com/ actually lets us write sarcastic one-liners of more than 40 or 50 characters if required - they're the bits in italics just underneath the date - *and* provide shorter links to any particular highlights into the bargain: http://xcom2002.com/doh/?s=04072614pic ] ... anyway, first NTK of the month means Puerile Google Goof time, in the form of: http://www.google.com/search?q=guv.uk , "in a new widow", cheesecak, gearshit, "abrasive git", "tights and responsibilities", "Alan Turning", "muscle spams" plus some deliberate usages but a few reassuringly misguided ones for "psychically fit"... which just leaves our Widdy of The Week: http://www.homes.miller.co.uk/error?pkit_error_messages=ANNE+HAS+YOU+NOW >> EVENT QUEUE << GOTOs considered non-harmful Camping - frowned upon in virtual deathmatches, yet apparently all the rage this summer in the so-called "real" world, in the form of the FOAF CAMP, FRIENDS OF O'REILLY FOO CAMP, RUNME- DORKBOT CITY CAMP, and even an anime WILDERCON CAMP (all taking place over the next few weeks at various European universities, except the anime one which starts today at Ampthill and Woburn District Scout Ground, Milton Keynes). Check the individual sites for further details, though we've all seen enough US summer camp movies to be fairly confident of the basic schedule - happy-clappy songs and toasted marshmallows round the campfire, giving way to scary ghost stories as the sun goes down, all about "some blogger" who forgot to clean the comment spam off his site one time, and was "gotten" by the terrifying spectre of "Andrew Orlowski". http://www.wildercon.org.uk/ - enigmatic apologies for "the situation that has transpired" http://readme.runme.org/ - Dorkbot one runs from August 25th in Arhus, Denmark http://foafcamp.asemantics.org/ - FOAF one from August 19th, at Twente University, Holland http://wiki.oreillynet.com/eurofoo/index.cgi - followed by O'Reilly one in same place (invitation only?) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/23/social_software_author_not_miffed/ - hey, at least he's thinking about the toilet facilities http://www.dnscon.org/dns7/index2.html - plus: DNSCon 7 *next* weekend, Imperial Hotel, Blackpool http://spacehijackers.co.uk/clp3/ - London Underground "party" tonight, if you get this in time >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Programs! Programs that write programs! Are the luckiest programs in the world! HTTP::Recorder is a Perl module that sits as a proxy between that goddamn impossible-to-scrape website and your browser, converting all your mad clicks and form-filling into short Perl WWW::Mechanize scripts. It don't do Javascript, but it do do https, thanks to a neat little control panel that performs https proxying via a URL window. The panel also lets you see script fragments update in glorious realtime-o-vision. So if *your* grown-up pride is hiding all the need (to write the boring bits of a scraping and/or website testing code) inside, perhaps you should consider using HTTP::Recorder. http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/06/04/recorder.html - make sure you get the latest version > 0.03 http://search.cpan.org/~MSCHILLI/JavaScript-SpiderMonkey/ - and if you had a minute and wanted to implement JS, that'd be nice >> MEMEPOOL << contains a source of http://snackspot.org/ is it just us, or are cinemas that can't afford night-vision- goggle monitoring for every show now leaving the house lights up bright enough to fricking *read by*?... US military's "get the oddest name into a news story" contest continues, with http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/27/navy_gestapo_server/ Lt. Bill Clinton recently overtaken by none other than Felicia Nazelrod: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/3536588.stm ... open source software now a threat to even the mighty VisiCalc (pic): http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/07/20/open.source.ap/ ... reassuringly detailed account of why mi2g has "no sense of humor": http://Vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=661&page=4 ... temporary Photoshopped cover of the month (love the barman's vacant eyeline): http://www.bbcshop.com/invt/bbcdvd1467&temp=popup ... new thrill: not sure how to screengrab this, but using BBC News RSS feeds to watch them rewrite the same story during the course of the day... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> you know, we somehow suspect that it was a multiple choice methodology (rather than "cued recall") that led to the lame "6% Of Young Britons Think Gandalf Defeated The Spanish Armada" promo headlines for BATTLEFIELD BRITAIN (9pm, Fri, BBC2): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/3537162.stm... after the success of WEAPONS THAT MADE BRITAIN (7.05pm, Sat, C4), you kind of hope that the presenter would be just as enthusiastic for a followup series on "Weapons That Britain Made (Then Sold To Poor Human-Rights Record Regimes)"... and obviously we're fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing, but Catwoman is *clearly* depicted as a villain in the original - and best - Adam West TV movie version of BATMAN (5.15pm, Sat, C5)... WITHOUT A TRACE (10pm, Mon, C4) continues its fruitless quest to track down millions of "missing" Channel4 viewers, though the clever money is going on gorier acquisition NIP/TUCK (10pm, Wed, C4), helpfully preceded by real-life prurient cosmetic surgery freakshow MY BREASTS ARE TOO BIG (9pm, Wed, C4)... still, all credit to them for commemorating next Friday's UK release of "Doom 3" with a token showing of arthouse road-movie filth THE DOOM GENERATION (1.45am, next Fri, C4)... FILM>> reader DUNCAN ROBSON points out that the Spanish poster http://www.cartelia.net/poster/24/yor.jpg suggests "worse than previously feared levels of jiggyness" for CGI-heavy "Blade Runner"-lite - and not in a bad way - Will Smith scifi romp I, ROBOT ( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=I%2C+Robot : Unlike Will Smith, [Kirstie Allsopp lookalike] Bridget Moynahan's character can afford frosted glass around her shower, so what you see is brief and not very clear. But it's definitely not a double and her body looks great) - as NTK's LEE MAGUIRE notes, the "real" US Robotics are much choosier about their product placement than you might have thought: http://www.hexkey.co.uk/lee/log/2004/05/13/ ... other than that, who on earth thought that Halle Berry's headgear looked anything other than completely ridiculous in next week's CATWOMAN? ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/catwoman.htm : risking human life to save a cat; resurrection by the breath of a cat; cat able to foresee future; much of [Berry's] upper torso skin, including massive excessive cleavage exposure and including below-navel skin - front and back, was fully viewable by every thirteen year old (and younger) in the audience. Slits and rips of various size in the pants of her outfit bared even more skin in this, yet another R-13 including much of Berry's buttocks skin)... >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent. Registered at the Post Office as "That's *Senior* Sarcastic Co-founder, if you don't mind" http://networking5.eliyon.com/PeopleFinder/PersonDetail.asp?PersonID=38655602 NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe or subscribe at http://lists.ntk.net/ NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntkmart.com/ (K) 2004 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Full license at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0 Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com - with NTK in the subject, cheers. All communication is for publication, unless you beg. Remember: Your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.