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        "I feel quite upset by [blog comment spam], and angrier with 
         the spammers and their lack of respect for the principles of 
         online co-operation than I have been for years..."
          - Bill Thompson ponders predictable side-effect of bloggers 
          all using the same off-the-shelf content management systems
                    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3210623.stm
         ...aye, you knew where you were with the "gentleman spammers" 
                of Usenet: they "only went after their own", you know


                               >> HARD NEWS <<
                               tu-whit tu-whoos

         Ah, here's the third shoe falling: after PUBLICWHIP and
         ICAN, comes MYSOCIETY, a little venture philanthropy .org
         intending to scout out worthy politics-hacking projects, and
         then actually give them some real money. To be honest there 
         appears to be quite a glut of society software already in 
         production right now - admittedly much of it being hacked
         upon by folk linked with this scheme. And there seems to be 
         a potential chicken-inside-egg problem regarding educating
         high-powered people sufficiently to get them to fund stuff
         that's languishing because they don't understand it. But,
         hey, free money! Send your proposals to the estimable Tom
         Steinberg, and he'll do the heavy-lifting of touting the
         best proposals around potential funders. Or browse through
         the admissions so far, and maybe see if you can't implement/
         open source them before anyone gets their chequebook out.
         http://www.mysociety.org/mysoc_me.php3
           - and none of your "pave the earth" BOFH projects, neither
         http://www.lazyweb.org/
             - or fill with personal hobby-horses, whichever's easier

         We're great believers in retrospective sympathetic magic
         here. So thanks, then, to everyone who is about to think
         good thoughts about LARRY WALL and DAMIAN CONWAY, chief
         canaries of the PERL 6 process, who are both recovering
         after some rather nasty bug reports. Damian's been down
         with some "light pneumonia", which led to him producing all
         the wrong kinds of Conway hacks and wheezes for a month. Mr
         Wall, true to form, posted a message to Usenet, which, after
         several pages of comments on continuations, exceptions,
         scoping, and making Perl6 better for beginners, noted that
         he's out of hospital and down one benign tumor ("with
         complications"), but still on a drip and unable to eat.
         "Full recovery is expected any month now", he says. Your
         thoughts will go back in time and help them to recover at
         exactly the fast rate we're seeing now.
         http://perlfoundation.org/index.cgi?page=contrib
          - and all those future payments to the Perl Foundation help
      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20031016003050.GA7845%40wall.org
                               - not the POD extraction anyone wanted
      http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3F9DA3BB.9080106%40conway.org
                                          - yet another poorly hacker

         A couple of quick followups on previous stories: we were 
         reassured that we weren't the only people to cover DEREK WYATT 
         MP's ingenious "postcode lottery" approach to beating spam, as 
         it also made the front page of VNU's respected IT Week, where 
         his additional brainwave of sticking "a country code suffix at 
         the end of each domain name" was repeated without a hint of 
         wondering whether this was either feasible or indeed remotely 
         desirable. And if you thought they'd save that kind of 
         editorialising for their leader column, that's where you'll 
         find Wyatt damned by the faint praise that he seems "happy 
         to suggest innovative strategies whenever they occur to him". 
         On a cheerier note, Marks and Spencer's Channel Development 
         Manager STEVE WIND-MOZLEY wrote to update us with the news 
         that Safari, Opera and a whole host of "indie" clients are now 
         welcome at "the UK's best loved retailer's web site" (his 
         words, not ours), with a Mozilla-compatible code release also 
         coming "soon". "In the meantime", he concludes, "should any of 
         your readers be in urgent need of fresh underwear, please 
         remind them that we have more than 320 stores that do not run 
         'sniffing' technologies on the way in".
         http://www.marksandspencer.com/
            - Steve's subject line: "Mozilla users don't go commando?"
         http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohwy1.jpg
         http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohwy2.jpg
                      - tastefully highlighted in light blue and grey 


                                >> ANTI-NEWS <<
                             berating the obvious

         old thrill - return of the inadvertently appropriate banner 
         ad: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohcheryl.gif ... Benatar 
         unveils new look for "Love Is A Battlefield, Possums" comeback 
         tour: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohpat.gif ... romance not 
         dead: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohrom.gif ... "please do 
         not post the password [in the previous sentence] on the Web": 
         http://www.minitex.umn.edu/cpers/elm/kit.asp#galepassword ... 
         hoping that's a deliberately ironic use of "Go home" in the 
         nav: http://www.blackinbritain.co.uk/ ... double-URLtendres of 
         the week - filthy rich pigs: http://www.champagneswines.com/ , 
         http://www.barf1.com/ , http://www.letshitit.com/ ... mind the 
         gap: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/24/dohref.gif ... right lads - 
         Diet Coke break: http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohpost.gif ... 


                               >> EVENT QUEUE <<
                         goto's considered non-harmful

         The Alec Bussey Scout Centre (formerly Norwich 2nd Boy Scouts 
         Hut) is hinted to be one of Norfolk's few venues capable of 
         containing tomorrow's NORWICH SPECTRUM AND SAM SHOW 2003 
         (10am-4pm, Sat 2003-11-01, Rowington Road, Norwich, free from 
         the looks of things), featuring an "official opening from 
         Councillor Steve Land", a "SAM talk and Q & A" *plus* a 
         "Spectrum talk and Q & A" - and probably someone from NTK 
         selling off the last of those "Born to Run" t-shirts, among 
         other bargains. That's assuming we don't stay too late at 
         tonight's B3TA HALLOWEEN PARTY (from 7.30pm, Fri 2003-10-31, 
         Babushka, behind King's Cross, London N1, also free), where 
         you can nod and say "Yeah, you photoshopped that polar bear, 
         did you? Nice one!" and take part in a raffle that is rumoured 
         to have Mr NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown's very personal supply of 
         new HobNobs Flapjacks among the prizes.
         http://homepage.ntlworld.com/speccyverse/orsam.htm
                                                     - Ah-haaaaaaaaa!
         http://www.b3ta.com/party/halloween2003.gif
                                                     - Ah-helllllllo?
         http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/news/
                                   - A-munch-munch-munch-munch-(gulp)
         http://www.internetworldnorth.co.uk/
           - also next Wed/Thu (apparently "badly broken in Mozilla")


                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

         Got a bunch of old laptops hanging around? Want to use them
         for something, but have *slightly* better things to do than
         fiddling with an openMOSIX cluster or playing "laptop
         Jenga"? If one of those slightly better things is compiling
         C, C++ and Objective C programs, DISTCC is the package for
         you. Distcc is Martin Pool's system for distributing gcc
         compilations across multiple machines. It runs in userland;
         it just does gcc; it gives compilations broadly linear
         improvements (double the PCs = half the time). Your nodes
         don't need to have synchronised watches or to drop
         everything else to run it. Kernel versions don't matter,
         *operating systems* don't matter (distcc's the basis of
         Panther's Xcode distributed build feature). And if you're
         running GNOME, you get a nice stripy graphic to stare at
         during what little time you didn't save.
         http://distcc.samba.org/
                           - imagine a Beowulf cluster of ... oh wait


                                >> MEMEPOOL <<
                contains a source of http://snackspot.org/

         corporate anthem reprise - "making love (all night)" by the 
         light of our BenQ 1000 ANSI Lumen digital projection system: 
         http://www.benq-eu.com/news/?year=2003&id=435 ... UseCrime in 
         progress - "Wednesday media is... a web usability consultancy" 
         http://www.wednesdaymedia.com/ [view source]... portable radar 
         http://www.plextek.com/news70.htm imitates "Creatures may be 
         beneath the floor": http://www.iseran.com/Steve/alien.html ... 
         inside DJ Shadow's head: http://www.io.com/~dork/records/ ... 
         this week's "one of these pics is not like the others" #32: 
         http://images.google.com/images?q=%22the+seventh+seal%22 ... 
         was www.wannafight.com taken?: http://www.textbanter.com/ ... 
         http://www.freestateproject.org/ sending 20,000 libertarians 
         to New Hampshire - why can't they send them all there?...


                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                                  get out less

         TV>> b3ta.com raid their back-catalogue for the official site 
         to novelty Jimmy Carr quiz show DISTRACTION (10.40pm, Fri, C4) 
         http://www.channel4.com/distraction/ ... while Rutger Hauer - 
         who else? - heralds another week of scary movies, including 
         his own THE HITCHER (12.45am, Fri, C4), Pamela Anderson/ David 
         "MCP" Warner VR-sex nonsense NAKED SOULS (12.15am, Fri, C5), 
         Mark Kermode's precious THE EXORCIST (10pm, Sat, C4), and the 
         ever-excellent FINAL DESTINATION (9pm, Sun, C4)... the latter 
         hopefully also commemorated in HEATH ROBINSON: SUBURBAN 
         SUBVERSIVE (10pm, Thu, BBC4) - an effective UK translation of 
         "Rube Goldberg", for any American readers who make it this 
         far... Channel 5 gets a full 65 minutes out of lists like 
         http://hal9000.inetstrat.com/parodies.html - in a parody-title 
         pron roundup entitled SHAVING RYAN'S PRIVATES (11.15pm, Mon, 
         C5)... the undercover Money Programme considers whether a diet 
         consisting exclusively of meat and lard might have any adverse 
         health effects in ATKINS - A FAT PROFIT (7.30pm, Wed, BBC2)... 
         then FIVE THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (8pm, Wed, BBC2) sees a man 
         "proving" his girlfriend can't read a map... WHAT NOT TO WEAR 
         - THE TRIBES OF MAN (8.30pm, Wed, BBC2) starts another run
         of the makeover series predicated on the radical notion that 
         anyone can look better if they spend 2000 quid on newer, more 
         fashionable clothes... as yet another schadenfreude-relocation 
         show NO GOING BACK (9pm, Wed, C4) this week features its most 
         unprepared ex-pats yet: an Extropian couple "determined" to 
         fulfil their dream of moving to a platform mining metallic 
         hydrogen on Jupiter, even though the technology doesn't yet 
         exist to get them there, the husband has yet to master the 
         most basic nanotech control languages, and the local climate 
         is so different to what they're used to in Surrey that they'd 
         simultaneously freeze, suffocate, *and* be instantly crushed 
         to death... 
         
         FILM>> now featuring the "nest" scene immortalised in Alan 
         Dean Foster's movie novelisation, there's a surprisingly 
         nationwide release for pre-DVD promo ALIEN - THE "DIRECTOR'S 
         CUT" ( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=Alien+%281979%29 :
         Sigourney Weaver strips down to a very little white panties 
         and see-through shirt; There is not much nudity on display in 
         this scene - upper rear only. But the scene is extremely 
         erotic, nonetheless)... a similar conclusion is the highlight 
         of the all-too-glossy nasty remake THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 
         ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/texaschainsawmassacre.htm :
         wet T-shirt ghosting of [Jessica "7th Heaven" Biel] female 
         anatomy; three-year cohabitation; terrorizing with a chainsaw, 
         many)... while Meg Ryan's idea of playing "against type" 
         appears to be impersonating Nicole Kidman in the gritty, 
         somewhat average serial killer character study IN THE CUT 
         ( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=In+The+Cut+%282003%29 : 
         The major sex scene has Meg taking off her dress to reveal 
         absolutely perfect beautiful breasts. I mean, they're worth 
         the price of admission [alone])...
                  

                               >> 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
                                "inappropriate"
                    http://www.ntk.net/2003/10/31/dohgest.gif

                                 NEED TO KNOW
            THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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