- 8th
- Who won the war anyway? → How we didn’t win the war . . . but the Russians did. This makes a lot of sense. It does seem odd that we called ourselves the winners when half of Europe was merely passed from one tyrant to another, and then subjected to a further half century of communism.
- 10th
- George Bush Admits Demolitions? → Craig Hill, in a hilarious (as in Hillary Clinton) paid advert on SupportTheTruth.com asks: “George Bush Admits Demolitions?” You have no idea how hard I want to point and laugh, but I will humour him and give a straight answer: No, he didn’t. Bush’s speech of 15/9/2006 is quoted in an embedded audio file (why do [...]
- 12th
- The right to not be offended → Islam is wicked, aiiii. The BBC reports on Nick Griffin, a fascist thug, and Lord Falconer, who brought us well thought out sensible government schemes like the Millennium Dome: Lord Falconer said the government had to show young Muslims that Britain was not anti-Islamic, adding there should be “consequences” from saying Islam is “wicked and evil”. Meanwhile, the [...]
- Observations → Google will happily drop a page from its index, but it never drops images from its image index, even if the site disappears for 6 months. Yahoo apparently never drops text from its index. MSN Live Search probably hasn’t indexed either in the first place. Archive.org is surprisingly comprehensive. I hope this has been enlightening, even though it’s probably [...]
- Dr Zaius Dr Zaius → Testing Youtube (Gootube? Yoogle? Youtgle?) embedding: I only just found out that Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus is the origin of the Stop the Planet of the Apes: I Want to Get Off! song. The Simpsons is officially 20% less cool now that I know this. I also only just found out who Falco is. How much shine does [...]
- 13th
- Error 402: Payment required → I just discovered how to generate arbitrary HTTP response codes using apache. You put a configuration line, for example Redirect 410 /2003/recent somewhere apache will see it. That could be in the main server config file, an .htaccess file in the web site’s root directory, or - my preferred solution - an .htaccess file in the directory [...]
- 14th
- Nine myths about capitalism → Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools. Chapter 9 is entitled “Nine Myths about Capitalism”. 8 of them are well-explained, but Capitalism harms the environment is bizarrely circular: One way to judge the impact of capitalism on the environment is to compare the environmental records of capitalist countries with those [...]
- 15th
- More RMS-bashing → Copyright and globalization in the age of computer networks [The following is an edited transcript of the conclusion of Richard Stallman’s talk. A transcript of the complete talk including the question-and-answer session is also available.] RMS is a God, but so is Huitzilopochtli, demander of human sacrifice. One wants to tie you to a slab and [...]
- Welcome to Intex Systems → TEXTUPDATE ACCCELERATOR INSTALLED
- 16th
- Morans → Get a brain
- 20th
- Casino Royale geek notes → I went to see Casino Royale with some people named Dave, Peter, Florian and Jessica. Here is what I noticed: (Begin spoilers) Bond sends an email tendering his resignation. The text is something like: Dear M, I hereby tender my resignation with immediate effect James Bond It looks like plain ASCII, but when he presses send, it says “Sending: 85KB”. That bloat’s [...]
- Freedom vs freedom → I like this bloggage about artists and copyright and I’m chastened that substantive issues of IP are part of the second year of my degree and not the current one, which must be dealt with first. So I can’t really respond to it meaningfully. But I can try. I think the institution of property is amongst [...]
- 21st
- 20 to life → One further note on the copyright theme: extending copyright to life plus 70, life plus 95, and beyond is very often castigated as a corrupt concession to the interests of Big Media. It is, but I’ve seen few explanations of why it happens anyway. If a studio spends $100m on a new film, it can collect [...]
- The PS3 fails → Surprise surprise, the PS3 is a big disappointment Who could’ve guessed that Sony would release a technically impressive piece of hardware with shitty, incomplete, broken, crippled software? And no good games? Grand Theft Auto 4 - possibly set in London - is just about the only game worth looking forward to, and that won’t be released for [...]
- Adsense trial → It turns out one page is consuming 85% of my bandwidth, so I added adverts to it. I also added them to the next few most popular pages. I wonder… Update 2006/11/23: Not looking good. I will keep the ads on until I receive one click, and see how much I get from it. It’s looking extremely [...]
- Codex vs Crystal Maze → I watched Channel 4’s Codex the other weekend, for two reasons: Tony Robinson presents It’s billed as a new Crystal Maze What utter horserind. Update 2006/11/28: Holy jesustongs! The puzzle designer of both shows replies in a comment below! The concept is neat enough: a team rushes around the British Museum at night, solving historical puzzles and attempting to crack [...]
