"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.
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