2001/7/31
According to the local street paper, the Bogan Bagpiper has been evicted from Flinders St. station. Brian McLaughlin, resplendent in mullet, faded blue jeans and heavy-metal T-shirts, has been playing the bagpipes on the station's steps for 18 years, but has now been banned by Connex (the new private operators of the station). Can anyone say "privatisation of public space"?
South Africa, Paris, Sydney: In Sydney, groups of youths from a Middle Eastern subculture are finding empowerment by abducting and brutally gang-raping young anglo-Australian women, some as young as 13. Police fear the attacks may be a racially-motivated and may have become an institution. (via Lev)
The War On Copying: According to some Extropian types, most US citizens are classifiable as "cyber-terrorists", under new corporate-friendly laws. This follows an argument that 55 million Napster users are federal felons. (All those skilled techie inmates should do wonders for the US prison labour industry, not to mention the correctional-services industry lobby; perhaps they'll even be able to release some classes of low-skilled crackheads to make room for them), and the denunciation of that group of pinko commie subversives, librarians, as enemies of copyright. (Known radical and un-American elements among librarians have been instrumental in supporting Napster and opposing the ban on DeCSS.) (ta, Mitch)
Film Festival: Tonight I went to see Possible Worlds, a Canadian thriller based on the premise that everything that can exist does exist, in some possible world. It was quite good, in a surreal kind of way; the photography was spectacular in places, and there were both funny and thought-provoking moments, though parts of it seemed a bit vague and confusing (though, with the premise being what it is, one can expect that; still, towards the start, I was half-expecting a Greg Egan-esque hard scifi treatment). It's a film that could benefit from a second viewing, though one it's unlikely to get given that it only screened at the film festival here and is unlikely to make general release or end up on a DVD.
(What is it about Canadian films anyway? If they're not dealing with incest or necrophilia or somesuch, they're edgy sci-fi mindfucks. Perhaps it's the need, deeply ingrained in the Canadian psyche, to differentiate their films from the committee-scripted, focus-grouped lowest-common-denominator swill that comes from south of the border?)
2001/7/30
Was the infamous Nazi "Sieg Heil" salute inspired by American football cheerleaders? A declassified CIA (surely they mean OSS) profile of Hitler, written in 1942, suggests so. It also reminds me of something I once heard, that in the US before World War 2, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (as in schools and scout troops) involved holding one arm outstretched, Nazi-fashion, which was changed for obvious reasons after the war. (via Lev)
2001/7/29
Following the US lead, Australian companies (such as Myer) are now turning to call centres in India, staffed by lower-wage workers with meticulously coached Australian accents and knowledge of local culture:
"They had a barbecue on the Yarra, they went to a footy match at the MCG, they went to the call centre in Burnley and they were all given a copy of the video of The Castle to take home, to help their accent, and to show the others at home."
Scare meme of the day: Drug users in the US are turning to a new kick: embalming fluid, which is comprised of formaldehyde, methanol and various other chemicals. Some of the users are robbing funeral parlours to get high. The effects of embalming fluid are said to include hallucinations, euphoria, a feeling of invincibility, and increased pain tolerance, as well as anger, forgetfulness and paranoia.
Dr Julie Holland, of New York University School of Medicine, said: "The idea of embalming fluid appeals to people's morbid curiosity about death. "There's a certain gothic appeal to it."
Coming soon to a goth club near you?
Extreme-right-wing and neo-Nazi organisations have developed a new recruiting tactic: leaving stickers in library books, with contact numbers. Didn't know that people who read books were a target demographic for them. Meanwhile, libraries are reluctant to implement some of the measures recommended to tackle the problem, such as searching patrons' bags or installing surveillance cameras, saying that the measures would be "Hitlerish". (via Lev)
Film Festival: Tonight I went to see two films; firstly, I saw Before Night Falls, the alleged CIA propaganda piece about the gay Cuban poet persecuted by Castro's regime. It was OK in places (Johnny Depp's camp portrayal of the macho Communist apparatchik was one of the highlights), though meandered quite a bit in places and could have been made a lot more concise. Afterward, I saw Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages; this is a Swedish silent film about witchcraft, made in 1922, reenacting the witch hunts of the middle ages, and comparing the phenomenon to the "modern" medical phenomenon of hysteria. This was quite good; as it was a silent film, they had a DJ mixing various appropriately ominous ambient soundscape music on stage to the film (I recognised some of Shinjuku Thief's Witch trilogy pieces in places).
2001/7/27
Far and Wide just played two tracks from the upcoming New Order album. Interesting; one wasn't too bad, but another just sounded like boring guitar-rock.
Penguinheads, take note: Borland's Kylix development environment for Linux is now available for free , but only for developing GPLed software. Which is a nice gesture on Borland's part, giving something back to the free software community and all. (you probably saw this on Slashdot already)
Some good news from the 4AD record label. (1) they've now signed Piano Magic (previously on a small label named Rocket Girl), which means they may get more exposure (as they should; they're pretty impressive, in an understated sort of way); (2) Neil Halstead (of Slowdive/Mojave 3) is working on a solo album, which is nearing completion, and is said to include "analogue synths, strings and layers of guitars", which should be interesting. (I must confess I never got into Mojave 3; they were a bit too Country & Western for my liking, though Slowdive are one of my All-Time Favourite Long-Defunct Bands.) And finally, there will be a Dead Can Dance box set.
2001/7/26
Poetry by suicidal poets contains telltale signs of suicidal tendencies, in the form of linguistic patterns. Researchers in the US applied computer analysis techniques to poetry by poets who took their own lives, including Sylvia Plath, as well as a control group of non-suicidal poets, and determined that the suicidal poets used many more singular first-person references, and fewer words associated with interpersonal communication, thus suggesting detachment and self-absorption. Surprisingly, emotional words such as "love" and "hate" did not vary significantly between the two words.
Alexander Abian, thou art vindicated: John "Lisp" McCarthy advocates reorbiting Mars to make it a born-again Earth. (ta, Mitch!)
2001/7/25
Scientists at Leeds University have developed a new weapon against crime: a noise impossible to ignore. The sound is comprised of many frequencies, and thus is easy to locate. Additionally, people hearing it reflexively turn to look at its source; as such, there are plans to use the sound with that most British of institutions, security cameras, to induce criminals to look at the camera and be photographed.
Psychoceramics in the news: Elaine Meredith, a 62-year-old widow in southern Wales, has been arrested for carving obscene words on parked cars. She had been at it for almost 18 months, while baffled police tried to catch whatever teenage delinquent they assumed was behind it. Ms. Meredith has prior convictions, and had been jailed for making harrassing phone calls and threatening to petrol bomb a housing estate. A motive for the attacks has yet to be determined. (via Meg)
The DVD Forum, those lovely people who safeguard your right to pay higher prices for narrower ranges of DVD titles, are moving to stamp out rogue DVD players with easily bypassable region enforcement. From October 1, DVD players will have to be certified compliant with region coding to bear the DVD logo. Mind you, this could just lead to a class of rogue "digital video disc" players, which are just like DVD players only cheaper and more hackable. (Also, I wonder whether this will mean that official DVD players will be illegal in New Zealand, where region-enforcing players are apparently considered defective merchandise.)
2001/7/24
Faced with public outcry, Adobe has folded, withdrawn from the prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov and asked that he be released. Though, in reality, that means diddly squat because the case is a criminal case (you see, the DMCA makes breaking copy protection a criminal offence, much like drug dealing or rape), and it's the Department of Justice that is prosecuting the case, without Adobe's involvement. Anyway, the next time someone tries something like this, they too would be looking at some quality time in a small room with a 300-pound man named Bubba.
Film Festival: I saw two films today: firstly, Bunny, about two immigrants from a war-torn eastern-European country who arrive in Los Angeles and end up working in a public-works project where they put on pink rabbit suits and listen to tales of woe from desperate people, who come along and pat their pink fur. It was an amusing concept, though the film could have probably made more use of it. Secondly, I saw Little Senegal, a French/Algerian film about a Senegalese man who goes to America to track down a distant cousin, whose ancestors were taken as slaves; in New York, he finds her working as a street vendor, and ends up applying for a job at her kiosk. It was an interesting and well-made film, which looked at the issues of cultural identity and heritage, and had some good photography as well.
Hacking meets literature: An interesting interview with Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of the classic Infocom text adventure games, and one of the first two people to be admitted to the Science Fiction Writers of America for writing interactive fiction.
I just posted a review of one of my all-time favourite CDs to Records Ad Nauseam. (This EP has probably shaped my approach to remixing quite substantially.)
2001/7/23
The Fifth Utility: Researchers in the UK, the birthplace of universal video surveillance, are developing software for detecting crimes before they happen, by detecting telltale behavioral traits of potential criminals:
The footage showed how car thieves tended to walk erratically and look in directions irrelevant to their path of travel. Before an act of violence culprits would walk aggressively, their arms static by their sides, taking long purposeful strides.
Mind you, it's only a matter of time until what the cameras look for is figured out, and tips on spoofing them start circulating on the underworld grapevine, becoming known to every competent criminal and writer of contemporary fiction; and so the arms race begins.
Coca-Cola does a Nike and has been availing themselves of the local right-wing death squads' assistance in sorting out labour problems; this time, in Colombia. Nothing like the disappearance of some trouble-making organiser, their mutilated corpse later to be found in a sewer, to keep the employees compliant and docile. Coca-Cola, however, denies involvement, saying that the bottling plants aren't owned or operated by them (much like the Nike factories, right?) Though, surely, if the plants have to meet a quality standards to earn the valuable and tightly controlled Coca-Cola trademark (and I doubt that Coca-Cola would want someone attaching their brand name to bottles of muddy water), the parent company could equally insist that they not torture or kill their employees, no?
Ominous tidings: Riot police shoot dead a demonstrator at anti-globalisation protests; the officers will probably be charged, but who gave the orders to shoot to kill? Meanwhile, a Russian programmer is in jail for revealing the secrets of Adobe's access controls (a crime under the DMCA), and hence Alan Cox has resigned from the USENIX committee in protest. Whether this will make a point or marginalise the penguinhead pirasite colony remains to be determined. Meanwhile, the US Government has created a special elite cyber-cop agency of highly-trained aspheads to hunt down intellectual property thieves, crackers, copyright violators and other enemies of capitalism (and that means you, hiding there with the DeCSS source and the eight gig of MP3s on your hard disk; don't think they cannot see you), further escalating the War On Copying.
Today I went to a screening of Angels of the Universe, which was showing as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. It is an Icelandic film about an artistically-inclined man who, upon being rejected by his girlfriend, suffers a psychological breakdown, becomes schizophrenic and is committed to a mental institution; there he meets several other patients, including a man who believes that he telepathically wrote all the Beatles' songs. He contends with his inner demons, muses on the nature of sanity or otherwise, and in the course of this, has a number of adventures, including paying a visit to the President with a fellow patient. It's a beautiful film; a very thoughtful and somewhat philosophical portrayal of sanity and its absence, set against the vast, cold, desolately beautiful backdrops of the Icelandic landscape, and featuring music from local post-rockers Sigur Rós. If you get a chance to see it (and it's showing on this coming Friday), doing so is highly recommended.
Some 80 years after being outlawed, some say as the result of a conspiracy of winemakers, absinthe is once again legal in France. And this is the real thing, so beloved of the likes of Baudelaire, Toulouse-Lautrec and Alfred Jarry, and not the allegedly inferior Czech variant. The first bottles are expected to appear on shelves by Christmas.
The memory of absinthe is remarkably green. People still tell the story of the day in 1901 when one of the biggest distilleries in town caught fire. Fearing an explosion, a quick-witted worker opened the vats. The river Doubs ran green for hours and the soldiers from the garrison rushed to the water's edge to lower their helmets and drink their fill.
I wonder whether they'll sell it over the Internet. (via Lev)
2001/7/22
Beware the Frankenstein computer god mind reading satellites.
Besides tracking a person's every action and relaying the data to a computer screen on earth, amazing powers of satellites include reading a person's mind, monitoring conversations, manipulating electronic instruments and physically assaulting someone with a laser beam.
(And this from Pravda, the Russian state press organ, too. UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED.)
Did somebody spike the Judge's water cooler? This is the most amusingly-written legal ruling I've seen:
Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact-- complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words--to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions. With Big Chief tablet readied, thick black pencil in hand, and a devil-may-care laugh in the face of death, life on the razor's edge sense of exhilaration, the Court begins.
The World Trade Organization has, one must admit, a bit of an image problem, especially amongst youngsters susceptible to the seductive underground brands of the anti-capitalist movement. So, to combat this, the WTO has commissioned a marketing campaign from yoof marketeers Y Not, to sell their vision of neo-liberal free trade to the kids under the brand of "Positive Anarchy". A leaked report floats a number of strategies, including beating the lefties at the merchandising game (gas masks and bandanas being relatively unexciting brands) and selling trendy teen clothing with the WTO brand, to getting comedians to take the piss out of the anti-capitalists and product-placing fake WTO-brand merchandise on Reality TV shows.
- Recruit model/spokespersons. Polling indicates that "Anti" has benefited significantly from association with high profile musicians/actors. (Note: 43% of teen girls identified U2 singer Bono as related to "Anti" "brand.") Through a third party, Y NOT, Inc. initially approached actresses Sarah Michelle Gellar and Tara Reid about serving as spokespersons for the WTO "brand," but made little headway. We have since been approached by a representative of Kevin Costner, but aren't convinced that he is "brand" appropriate.
Utilizing this strategy, the WTO "brand" would be replaced by a symbol or logo that teens consider more appealing. Note: in focus groups, 59% of teens reported that they would consider purchasing WTO product if associated with friendly talking frog.
As far as I know, this is not a parody, though it looks like one. (via Lev)
I spent yesterday moving into the new flat, loading stuff onto a truck, travelling for five minutes and then unloading it again, lugging it up a set of stairs and waiting for an extra bookshelf to arrive. Now I've got must things set up here, though there is still stuff all over the floor.
2001/7/19
Looks like we have to wait until September for MacOS X. Though it wil now support new features including SMB support. Let's hope that they fix Classic mode enough so that Fontographer runs under it, as dual-booting is a pain.
A researcher at Ohio State University has found that mysterious bad moods are caused by failures to achieve subconscious goals. These goals can be things which no longer consciously matter, but failing to meet them can cause bad moods anyway.
Interesting news: According to local street-press paper Beat, SBS (the local ethnic/art-house TV channel) have commissioned John Safran (3RRR breakfast show presenter and miscellaneous subversive gadfly) and Richard Lowenstein (who directed Dogs In Space and the upcoming He Died With A Felafel In His Hand film) to do a 10-part documentary about Australian bands and the music industry. It should be interesting.
2001/7/18
The Cure are back in the studio, working on some new songs(!) for another "greatest hits" compilation (!!). Anyone remember the eminently forgettable "Galore" compilation from a few years ago? Didn't think so. Mind you, the difference may be that now they own the copyrights to their back-catalogue, so it's them and not Fiction/Polydor/Warner putting it together. Still, given that their albums after Disintegration were rather uninspiring...
Interestingly enough, they also may be planning a "B-Sides" compilation. Let's hope it contains things like Carnage Visors and Splintered In Her Head and other classics.
(Wonder if there's any chance of a DVD release of their early videos, too...)
A BBC piece on the Indian Government's Simputer project, to produce an inexpensive and reasonably capable computer that can be used by the rural poor.
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: A Russian programmer has been arrested for copyright violation after divulging the secrets of breaking access control on Adobe PDF files at the DefCon conference. Dmitry Sklyarov is being held in a Las Vegas prison, whilst awaiting trial in California for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In the next step of its transfiguration into BMG's online secure music sales arm, Napster is abandoning MP3, in favour of a proprietary, encrypted format that enforces license payments.
Apparently Psion is not leaving the handheld market; now it seems that they're just discontinuing development of a Bluetooth device (that's some doovy universal wireless network system that never quite got off the ground, and/or whose doom was sealed by Microsoft not supporting it), but will keep developing new PDAs. Which is a good thing; the Psions are nice machines. (I'd get one, but I can't justify spending the money at the moment, and I already got work to buy me an Agenda VR3 to play with.)
2001/7/17
Coming soon to a PC near you: Columbine Highschool Massacre: The Game. Tell your teenage goth friends!
And speaking of our corporate friends, evil drug cartel Philip Morris has published a report saying that smoking is cost-effective, with the deaths of smokers reducing the costs of health care and housing for the elderly. The report was delivered as a cost-benefit analysis to the Czech government.
Up here for thinking: Our friends in Redmond have come down like a tonne of bricks on a charity distributing secondhand computers to needy children. The reason? PCs For Kids didn't buy a new Windows license for each PC distributed (most of which came from corporations with site licenses), and thus was guilty of software piracy. Complying with Microsoft's licensing terms would cost PCs for Kids up to $600 per machine. Hmmm... sounds like a good argument for throwing out Windows altogether, and just putting Linux, KDE/GNOME, the GIMP and StarOffice on there; then in a decade or two we may get a generation of kids who grew up improvising on and hacking Linux, rather than having been brought up in the One Microsoft Way; these kids won't assume that computers all run Windows. Won't Bill love that...
Scientists have discovered that cannabis is a potent female aphrodisiac. Which could explain why it was outlawed pretty much everywhere, what with needing to keep female sexuality under strict control and all that.
Scare meme of the day: The Russian Mafia have the best hackers, including ex-KGB professionals, and have been breaking into e-commerce sites everywhere; chances are they have your credit card number. This aggressive business strategy has tipped the Russian Mafia to become "the most powerful special interest group in the world". More powerful than ExxonMobil, I wonder?
Much like Meg, I'm not a morning person either. Left to my own devices, I would get up at about noon, do things, go walkabout before dusk for an hour or two, then do things and finally spend the wee small hours reading, or working on something, or just browsing the web and blogging, going to bed at 5am or so, before the sunlight makes sleeping hard. Though with work, I more often get up at around 10-11, and go to bed around 3, unless i'm too tired.
I have found that I tend to be most creative in the hours before dawn; perhaps it's the approaching deadline that motivates me. (Sometimes I feel inclined to go to bed at about midnight, but when I don't (which is most of the time, inertia being what it is), I stay up and sometimes get things done.
Mind you, one negative side effect of this is that I virtually never am awake to hear the 3RRR breakfast show, and thus depend on third-party reports of what John Safran has been going on about.
Viral marketing: A US marketing company is pioneering a new stealth-marketing method of selling products to ad-jaded GenYers: by hiring attractive-yet-approachable young people to to out and be overheard talking about the product, in a form of consumer-capitalist street theatre:
''We invent various scenarios, like, we'll make up what kind of company we work for and we say we just sold it so we're celebrating and we're going to buy you a drink,'' he says. ''Then we'll try to implant things about the product into their head that don't come off as if we're planting things in their head. It's somewhat challenging.'' For that challenge Lawrence earns up to hundreds of dollars a night. ''No one is going to be able to go out and buy a Lexus tomorrow from this,'' he says. ''You're getting paid to go drink for free and act weird.''
2001/7/16
This evening, I went to see Naomi Klein speak at the Athenaeum Theatre. She spoke mostly about the topics in her book, No Logo, such as branding, the privatisation of public space and scary new international treaties due to shift even more power to multinational corporations (apparently, corporations will soon have the power to sue governments for subsidising industries in sectors where private enterprise exists; this is happening with the Canadian postal service (being sued by FedEx or UPS), and Naomi suggested it may happen with educational institutions in Australia, thanks to things like Melbourne University Private).
Naomi spoke well and quite interestingly, stopping only to take sips from a branded bottle of No Logo soda. Then there were questions from the floor, in which one person in the audience claimed that provocateurs from the Lyndon LaRouche group were handing out alcohol at anti-globalisation protests to disinhibit protesters and turn them violent.
Outside the theatre, greenies and Marxists did a roaring trade handing out pamphlets. Perhaps surprisingly, there were no contingents of Young Liberals or Ayn Rand fans protesting Naomi Klein's appearance.
Killing for Life: Looks like some devoutly religious nutter in Australia decided to imitate his Army of God heroes and go kill some abortionists. A gunman opened fire in an East Melbourne abortion clinic, killing a guard. The gunman was wrestled to the ground before he could go from room to room, spraying patients and staff with machine-gun rounds and reading from the Old Testament, and is now in the custody of the police. Meanwhile, Australia's religious-right Right To Life group has said that the shooting was regrettable, though not surprising, and made it clear that pro-lifers don't kill abortionists, here or in the US, though they can see why others might be tempted to do so.
Sing me to sleep: When her boyfriend dumped her, webcam girl and electronic artist Stacy Pershall decided to end it all; so she posted a suicide note to her online journal, moved her webcam into the bathroom and swallowed lots of pills, right in front of the camera. Horrified (or possibly titiliated, depending on what kind of crowd it was) onlookers watched her pass out, slumped over her toilet, and then police and paramedics taking her away. Ms. Pershall survived this, her second suicide attempt at least, and probably got a lot of web hits in the deal. Meanwhile, a somewhat sarky parody site has opened, giving a vaguely misanthropic, Social Darwinist account of the incident.
"I often find that people who are very heavily involved in Net 'culture' such as the cam girls take themselves entirely too seriously. I believe the Net has become a haven for people who are socially inept."
CAU$E$-OF-WAR$: Two researchers at York University in Toronto have determined that wars are caused by an excess of young unmarried men; and hence that nations with higher proportions of young men to old men are more likely to initiate wars; a theory which dismisses the traditional economic theories of aggression:
Mesquida is particularly dismissive of the idea that individual leaders can provoke a country to start a war by themselves. Had Adolf Hitler never been born, Mesquida says, the Second World War would have happened anyway. "There would have been somebody else. There are always little Hitlers around, but they don't have much influence until there is a demographic situation that puts them there."
Mesquida prefers to deal with civil conflicts, which he says invariably occur in regions with fast-growing populations. He gives Northern Ireland as an example of a country that suffered through three decades of violence because of too many young men. Now that its population growth is slowing, Mesquida believes the violence will diminish. He is less hopeful for regions where high birth rates persist, such as Africa, the Middle East and parts of Southeast Asia. India and Pakistan are also potential hot spots, he said.
(via Plastic)
Did jazz improvisation arise as a side-effect of schizophrenia? One Professor Dr. Sean Spence from the University of Sheffield believes that one of the pioneers of jazz improvisation, Charles "Buddy" Bolden, began improvising as a means of coping with the onset of "dementia praecox", or schizophrenia; his novel playing style turned out to be so popular that others began imitating it, and the rest is history.
2001/7/13
Those zany zucchinis at the Cult of the Dead Cow, who brought you Back Orifice, are at it again. Their latest project, soon to be released, is named Peekabooty, and is a tool which supposedly makes life really difficult for anyone wanting to censor or control the Internet. Peekabooty isn't out yet, but they have a lengthy manifesto/rant/FAQ about it and their new Hacktivismo project.
Q: You mean you aren't interested in advancing human rights in the real world, on the ground?
A: Sure, but that's not where our competence lies. We're hackers, not social justice activists. Let's put it this way. Some groups and individuals are well suited to fight for social and economic progress around the world. If as a result of an initiative in Africa, for instance, economic standards were raised and more people could obtain computers -- that would be a good thing. But what kind of Internet would they eventually have access to? One where censorship or the proliferation of vulnerable software left them at risk? We're not willing to sit by and watch that happen. We think of hacktivism and the Internet the same way that homeopathist's think of the body: you have to introduce a little poison to create health. Code has consciousness and healing power whether you like it or not.
I recently got an Agenda VR3 through work. The VR3 is a PDA, a small device, physically not unlike a PalmPilot. The main difference is that it runs Linux; when you turn it on, you see the Linux boot messages scrolling past in a tiny font, and then the familiar X11 stippled background. There is also a Terminal application which gives you a UNIX shell (one of those tiny stripped-down rescue-disk shells, mind you; everything on the Agenda is done with economy in mind). How useful that is is another matter; the handwriting recognition system also seemed a bit slower and more erratic than the PalmPilot's (even than my aging Pilot 5000, whose digitiser seems to be going senile), making entering UNIX commands somewhat painful.
The software built into the Agenda is what you'd expect: notes, address book, scheduler, &c. However, much of it is somewhat rudimentary compared to the Palm. For example, there is no way to tell the scheduler to display days from 2pm to midnight, rather than the hegemonic 9 to 5 of the Morning People who rule the world, and adding events means going through dialogs.
The Agenda probably won't replace my aging Pilot; however, the fact that it's Linux-based and hackable raises some interesting possibilities.
2001/7/12
The BBC's new Head of Religion and Ethics is (gasp!) an agnostic. Alan Bookbinder, the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, is the first non-Christian to take the post. Some religious groups are questioning the appointment ("Would the BBC appoint a head of sport who knows nothing about football?", a member of the Evangelical Alliance asks), seemingly confusing not being in the thrall of a belief system with ignorance of religion. If anything, Bookbinder's mixed religious background and freedom from commitment to any one faith may make him a more qualified candidate in a pluralist, no longer exclusively Christian, Britain.
The Linux web browsing situation is looking slightly less dire, now that the KDE web browser Konqueror supports Windows ActiveX plug-ins. Well, some of them; Shockwave and Flash run, but Windows Media Player doesn't. Mind you, such plug-ins get full access to any filesystem WINE (the Windows-emulation layer) can see, which means that your files may be at the tender mercies of the proliferation of viruses, worms and spyware that infects the Windenburg world.
Perhaps someone should create a secure WINE library, which one can link to to provide Windows DLL loading and such for one's applications, and a specifiable subset of Windows API calls and access to the outside world (i.e., filesystems, networks). If we've got the WINE sandbox, we may as well use it to keep Bad Things from happening.
(via the Reg)
Hitler a failed artist, Mao a failed poet... Josef Stalin, paranoid mass-murdering fruitcake that he was, is still held in high esteem amongst parts of the Russian population; as such, archives revealing unflattering aspects of his personality (well, other than his penchant for exterminating real and imagined enemies from all sides) have been slow in emerging. But now it is revealed that Stalin was an avid cartoonist, and would sketch his enemies being put to death in various imaginative ways.
In one cartoon, which Ilizarov believes Stalin drew around 1930, his finance minister, Nikolai Bryukhanov, is depicted naked, hanging from a rope by his genitals... Under the heading "Special File", it read: "To all members of the politburo, for all his present and future sins, Bryukhanov should be hung by his balls. If they hold up he should be considered not guilty as if in a court of law. If they give way he should be drowned in a river."
He also tortured cats as a young child and, whilst in office, knocked up a 14-year-old girl, the existence of whose child by him had been suppressed by the KGB for decades. (via Shauny)
The results of the latest Bulwer-Lytton contest are in, and there are some beauties here:
The lone monarch butterfly flew flutteringly through the cemetery, dancing on and glancing against headstone after headstone before alighting atop Willie Mitchell's already lowered casket, causing gasps of awe to fly from the open mouths of five or six lingering mourners, until a big shovelful of dirt landed on it and it died.
(via Found)
Actually, Graham, I think Beijing would be a perfect candidate for the 2008 McLympic Games. The mechanisms of repression already in place could be put to use preventing people from wearing anti-Nike T-shirts in the vicinity of venues or tourist areas, or from otherwise diluting the sponsors' eyeball-herding investment by consuming non-sponsor products. A special law suspending civil liberties for the duration of the McLympics, as was passed in NSW, would not even be needed to turn Beijing into an Olympic Disneyland.
2001/7/11
A Newsweek article looking at the bizarre parallel universe of Christian pop music and pop culture, where things look just like the outside world, only with subtle yet pervasive threads of Bush-voting, Bible-belt values, and a curious absence of the usual rock'n'roll larrikinism:
Yet there's something about the ethos of alternative rock--staying true to your beliefs, never bowing to mainstream pressure--that is oddly simpatico with conservative Christian culture. "I think rebellion and Christianity go together," says Mark Stuart, 33, lead singer of Audio Adrenaline... "Singing about sex and drugs is the easiest thing to do. ItÂ’s old by now. So pretty much the most rebellious rock-and-roll person you can be is a Christian-rock frontman because you get people from every side trying to shut you down"
Moms are to Con Dios what strippers are to a Kid Rock show. While secular-minded teens would rather sit at home and do their math homework than attend a show with Mom and Dad, here whole families sit on blankets in the main-stage area under a local sponsor's banner
When being passed overhead by the crowd, these teens just can't relax. They sit straight up, stiff as a church lady in a pew, bobbing and listing until they topple sideways into the crowd. But in the mosh pit, spiky-haired boys do a fine job of knocking the bejesus out of one another, stopping midslam only to let a bunny-hopping conga line slip through. Then it's over. Newsboys leave their Con Dios brethren with a prayer, the lights come up and the kids begin picking up trash--voluntarily--before boarding their buses for home.
(Which reminds me of Harmon Leon's account of a Christian Hardcore Punk concert, which he recounted at the Comedy Festival)
I just noticed that Israeli psy-trance outfit Astral Projection have a lot of downloadable MP3s on their MP3.com page. They're one of the best acts in that genre, and good for when you feel like that kind of music.
Not quite sure what this is, but it's pretty, in an introspective, shoegazing kind of way. He certainly has admirable taste in music...
Miguel de Icaza (of GNOME fame) on his plans to embrace and extend Microsoft's .NET with a GPLed implementation, which, of course, will not be bound to things like Passport or Windows.
If Mahir Cagri was Scandinavian and really into 80s hair-metal and Neighbors (!), his page might look something like this.
Chicks - what is Rock if no for Chick! So I am think yeah we not rock without chick in skirt short of leather and leopard bra man. We need blond chick like see in magazine man (I have many magazine with blond chick) who like to rock at us. Here in Schwedernorske, I am not knowing chick except sister for sure but she not rock (that not what Meat think but, he tell me he want rock at my sister and now she scared of USA).
(via Grouse, which you should all check every day)
2001/7/10
The Catholic Church considers endorsing condom use, in AIDS-ridden southern Africa, anyway. Whether the Pope and the hardliners presently in charge will go along with that, however, remains to be seen.
This is rich: The Randroids have taken a leaf from the Nu Marxists' book, and are starting their own letter-number protest. December 2 (D2) is Walk for Capitalism. So show up and express your support for the system that gives us individual freedom and Nike shoes and Microsoft Windows, and without which we'd be slaves in some Stalinist collectivist second-hander gulag. Tell 'em John Galt sent you.
(The question that comes to mind is: can you hire someone to walk in your place?)
(via Kuro5hin)
2001/7/9
Last night I went to see a show named HamLET: Definitions, at the Planet Cafe; I heard of it because Dandelion Wine were doing some of the music (namely some 17th-century tunes, of which they did a sterling job). It was reasonably entertaining, consisting of about six short miniplays riffing off Hamlet. Some were essentially remixes of Shakespeare's (and Stoppard's) works, and others were different; infamous lefty pie-thrower Duff got up at one stage and did a rant about Hamlet, which was mildly amusing, and the end number (which consisted of the various players performing a Hamlet-themed version of Frank Sinatra's I Did It My Way, complete with cheesy disco dancing) was very entertaining.
2001/7/8
Yesterday I saw the Dogme95 film Julien Donkey-Boy at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. The film consisted of moments from the lives of various outsider types; primarily an adolescent schizophrenic and his (somewhat dysfunctional) family. Reasonably amusing in places, though I suspect that some of the editing violated the Dogme95 Vow of Chastity.
(Btw, am I the only one who finds it ironic that the Dogme95 web site contains Shockwave/Flash elements?)
MacOS X:I've managed to get the Classic environment working under MacOS X; the problem was that it doesn't work unless your MacOS X disk is in the HFS format. Though, much to my annoyance, I've noticed that Fontographer 4.1 doesn't run under the Classic environment. (Well, it starts, but as soon as I open a font, it dies mysteriously.) Rather annoying.
The MacOS X Resource List; a blog dealing with MacOS X-related tricks and tweaks. Pretty useful if you use the system.
2001/7/7
Computers for the Third World: A new plan for cheap computing for impoverished third-world countries involves giving them PlayStations running Linux, considerably cheaper than industry-standard Wintendo PCs. Mind you, given that the World Bank is behind it, it may be more used to set up data-entry maquiladoras on the cheap, where children can be chained to their desks for 18 hours a day than to actually empower the Third World to be anything more than a more flexible source of slave labour.
Tonight (well, last night, technically), I saw Ghosts of the Civil Dead at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. Not a bad film; a thoughtful look at the correctional-industrial complex with a touch of conspiracy theory. It is set in a futuristic prison whose exterior is in the American desert, but whose interior appears to be in Australia. Nick Cave was, of course, involved in its making, and he plays a raving psychotic inmate; a role which is, oddly enough, not much of a stretch from his musical career.
I sense a zeitgeist here: I just bought the new Faithless album, Outrospective; haven't listened to all of it yet, though what I have seems quite passable. I managed to find the UK limited edition, which has the video for their song We Come 1, which seems to be jumping on the No Logo/Nu Marxist bandwagon, albeit superficially. The video features the shaven-headed Maxi Jazz sitting on a couch, as police and demonstrators fight running battles in his living room. Not a bad track and video, either...
Disturbing image of the day:
Seen on the side of the "Spanish Donuts" truck parked outside Victoria Market
this afternoon, this charming image of a big-eyed, smiling, brightly pink hot dog,
gazing adoringly at its future devourer, in whose hands it is undoubtedly
cradled.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find this kind of thing slightly creepy?
Language and evolution: The word "retarded", for long a clinical term to describe IQs below 70, is now considered offensive, having gone the way of other clinical terms such as "moronic" and "feeble-minded".
Of course, it's a step up from "moron," "imbecile," or "idiot," which were actually codified as appropriate technical terms in 1910 by the AAMR, then known as the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiots and Feeble-Minded Persons. (Morons were the brightest, followed by idiots and imbeciles.) The AAMR replaced those terms with "mild," "moderate," and "severe" retardation in 1959, but the old words did not go quietly: Davidson recalls attending a guest lecture in graduate school in the 1970s where the speaker, an esteemed professor in the field, discoursed on "low-grade imbeciles."
(via Plastic; insert your own George W. Bush references here)
2001/7/6
Here comes the cavalry: In an attempt to stave off Microsoft's domination of the Internet through its .NET initiative, Ximian (the outfit pushing GNOME/Gtk on Linux and employing several of its key developers) is planning an open-source rival, with the uninspiring moniker of "Mono". More power to them, I say. If we end up in the Microsoft Millennium, let's not do so without putting up a good fight.
Who would have thought? The former deputy leader of Britain's Conservative Party calls for cannabis to be legalised, and available in special off-licences, much like alcohol is:
"Nothing could more vividly dramatise reaffirmation of our belief in freedom and personal responsibility than to move clearly in favour of liberalising the law on cannabis."
Keeping It Real: Since dumping her gangsta boyfriend, sassy hip-hop sista Jennifer Lopez (or "J-Lo" as she calls herself) has been struggling to hold onto her street cred. Her latest attempt to stay in touch with her assumed ghetto roots involved her using the honorific "nigga", considered acceptable if used by black people but extremely offensive otherwise, in a song. For some reason, this has not endeared her to the African-American community.
Why is it that male real-estate agents are invariably tall and athletic and look like basketballers, and female agents are invariably blonde and look like TV hosts? Could it be some sort of natural-selection thing, in which those who don't look and act like alpha-(fe)males and give off that winner vibe don't persuade as many clients, and end up dropping out of the business and becoming secondary school teachers or something?
2001/7/5
East Timor to get 90% of Timor Gap oil revenues after new treaty with Australia; more than the 50% the Indonesian occupiers got. Quite a laudable deal, and probably quite good for the fledgling nation; at least now they're less likely to be forced by the World Bank into enslaving their populations in "export processing zones" to pay off debts. Though let us not forget that Australia did screw East Timor over quite shamefully by vigorously recognising the Indonesian occupation, and that the previous Timor Gap treaty was a reward from Indonesia to its southern accomplices in the rape of Timor.
Pinkness and horror: I got into the office this morning (it was one of those rare days when I needed to be at work in the morning), and switched on the radio whilst I checked my mail (3RRR has a good show named Sitelines on Thursday mornings, which discusses arts-related events and plays some quite good music). Imagine my alarm when the music faded out and, instead of the intelligent tones of the 3RRR announcer, there was the artificially stimulated, rapidfire, mindlessly mercantile voice of a commercial radio announcer, in full shoving-Top-40-hits-down-the-listener's-throat mode.
It seems some gremlins came and retuned my radio to FOX FM (a commercial radio station listened to by pinks, crowd-followers and people who prefer their radio conformistic and predictable) overnight.
(I did change to 3RRR, though, and caught part of Sitelines; interestingly enough, they interviewed Robert Reid of Theatre In Decay, whose latest play, Drops in the Ocean, is currently showing.)
Victoria Police superintendent Peter Billing, who drafted the police code of conduct, wants to ban police from accepting discounts from the Nike store, which has been the focus of anti-capitalist protests for the past few months, on the grounds that doing so may lead to a conflict of interest. The Nike store has a policy of giving uniformed police a 20% discount, which they say serves to deter shoplifters, rather than intimidating ultra-violent ferals. Police officers wearing their "discount suits" are eligible for special rates from numerous establishment, including fast food outlets, nightclubs and brothels, who wish to ensure their place on the good side of the law.
2001/7/4
Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, badly: I've been playing with MacOS X a little recently (in between doing a dozen other things), and all in all, it seems pretty doovy. One thing I'm not too fond of is that the UNIXyness only goes up so far. For example, there is no audio device under /dev. Presumably, to access audio from a program, you have to make all sorts of arcane API calls, with their own names, structures, data types and so forth; a less than ideal state of affairs when there are open(), write()/read() and ioctl().
And justice for all:
A disabled woman is
suing the organisers of a mingers'
swingers' party for discrimination after she was allegedly discriminated
against because she was in a wheelchair. Kathleen Ball claims that she
was told to
move off a bed that other guests wished to use, after which she staged
a "non-violent sit-in" in protest.
Ms Morgan gave evidence that she made the comment about wheelchairs when flustered and intimidated by Ms Ball. She said she had experienced four hours of harassment. Guests had been upset and she had tried to talk to Ms Ball about her body odor and language, but Ms Ball had started screaming. In court yesterday, Ms Ball said she had bathed an hour before the party.
Ms. Ball is claiming that the incident left her "highly suicidal" and feeling "dehumanised", and is seeking unspecified damages for unlawful discrimination and court orders forcing the organisers to invite her to future parties. (If this was the U.S., there'd probably be a bit about them having violated her civil rights to get laid or something.)
So much for retail therapy: A study from the University of Newcastle (Australia) has shown that materialism can cause depression, or at least, is negatively correlated with life satisfaction. This applies both to "haves" and "have-nots".
Saunders explained that one source of depression among dedicated consumers was the fact that the property they acquired tended to lose value quickly. ``If your self-worth is invested in what you own, as can be the case in our market-driven society, then these things may not hold their value for very long,'' he said.
Or, as Tyler Durden said, "even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."
The Raelian UFO cult's heroic plans to clone a human being and bring the human race into a new golden age of science took a setback after the FDA raided their cloning lab, shutting it down. The Raelian-backed Clonaid was working on cloning the deceased 10-month-old son of a wealthy benefactor. But not to worry; the group says they will reestablish their lab somewhere far from the prying eyes of busybodies and the torch-wielding peasantry.
The Age has a piece on Naomi Klein, anti-corporate activist and author of No Logo, who will be speaking in Melbourne soon.
2001/7/3
"As my brothers in the burglars' guild like to say, whenever the good Lord closes a door, He opens a window."
2001/7/2
This is not The Onion: The great Balkan tradition of tolerance and pluralism manifested itself in Belgrade on the weekend, as Serbian gay and lesbian activists held the city's first-ever gay rights march. The activists, and attendant police, were outnumbered and bashed by hundreds of Serbian nationalists and football fans, who then went on to attack the offices of the political party that backed the extradition of former strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
Be paranoid: A look at some of the really hidden files MS Windows and its ilk keep on yor hard disk, and the tricks used to keep them hidden whilst giving you the illusion of control. Of course, if you ran a non-proprietary operating system, this wouldn't happen...