>> HARD NEWS <<
insufficient excuse
So what did you do on your Newtonmas Holidays? Made a New
Year's Resolution to foment revolution, possibly using your
cool decentralised reputation-management idea, which this
year you'll be writing in OCaml or maybe Ruby? Well, if that
doesn't pan out again, here's what some other NTK readers
came up with on their societally-mandated periods of enforced
semi-isolation:
The shadowy figures behind SPY.ORG.UK (of which we cannot
speak, but who have haunted NTK since issue 1) have started
a blog to gather and their track Freedom of Information
requests, so you can have a nice RSS feed of wriggling civil
servant replies. And, just to make life even more snugly
private, you can anonymously provide your own requests,
which they will forward as a sort of human anonymising proxy.
http://www.spy.org.uk/foia/
- watching him (or her) writing to them, writing to you
http://community.foe.co.uk/tools/right_to_know/request_generator.html
- links to Friends Of The Earth DIY request generator
http://www.spy.org.uk/icb/
- and analysis of ID cards bill too, speaking of which...
And GAVIN BELL, smarting that the only official copies of the
EU Constitution reside in some PDFs marked "Beware of the
Leopard", is creating a usable, permalinkable, annotable
version for the Web. He's looking for Moveable Type and
Mediawiki hackers to help him out. The perfect hobby for
those wanting to open up what Gavin says will be "the social
software for 500 million people for the next twenty years" -
or if you just want to *really* annoy Andrew Orlowski.
http://www.betageek.co.uk/
- your chance to put tubgirl links into a founding document
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/3021490/
- looks like Andrew may have other things on his mind
http://www.commonhouse.net/wiki/secretorigins
- speaking of wiki-fiddling: help Danny talk design in Jan
>> ANTI-MEMES <<
there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/
Taiwanese heatsinks offer "high-density excretion technology",
"crotched fin design" http://www.evercool.com.tw/index_eng.htm
... depending on level of responsibility, perks include "home-
made chilled apple, avacado and ginger soup", or "home-made
mulled wine": http://historicalengineering.com/People.shtml
... Dell miss the "destroying what they're trying to save"
subtext of "Team America": http://delltechforce.com/ - vs
http://theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=30491 :
MSDN meets TVGoHome... for top-notch "lorem ipsum" copy needs:
http://translationexpress.co.uk/translators/latin_translator.php
... (semi-)new thrill - puerile Google Scholar misspellings:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=%22neuron+scattering%22 ,
http://google.com/scholar?&q=%22silicon+geranium%22 - maybe
not fully http://google.com/scholar?&q=%22pier+reviewed%22 ?
... "I took them away from all that, and now they work for -
Jakob Nielsen": http://nngroup.com/events/tutorials/camp.html
(bottom of page)...
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
Flash? Open fire all weapons and dispatch war rocket "Ajax"
to bring back its body! Ah, we wish: but if you'd like to
dick around with vector graphics without delving into
Macromedia's proprietary little quarterback, Walter Zorn's
ingenious JAVASCRIPT VECTORGRAPHICS LIBRARY may be worth a
peek. Using coloured DIVs and some of that old Bresenham
algorithm magic, Zorn has done the impossible:
standards-based, programmatic drawing of lines, rects, and
ellipses anywhere on the Web's broad canvas, from IE 4
upwards. Performance is... forgiveable: old schoolers may
find themselves typing "FOR I = 0 TO 360" instead of legal
JavaScript at times. The library has been around for so
long, we're surprised it hasn't popped up more before; but
there's still time to score ridiculous amounts of hits for
your JavaScript implementation of Missile Command.
http://www.walterzorn.com/jsgraphics/jsgraphics_e.htm
- you only have 17 hours to save the earth
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#graphics
- kills time while waiting for this
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
TV>> Jessica "Spaced" Stevenson and the writer of "My Family"
- together at last! - inexplicably avoid a "sex" pun for the
title of doubtless-abysmal new sitcom ACCORDING TO BEX (9pm,
Fri, BBC1), though perhaps it was called "The Joy Of Bex" or
"The Opposite Of Bex" in development and changed at the last
minute... the BBC come up with an innovative new vehicle for
expensive acquisition Dom Joly - aimless, "absurdist" hidden-
camera pranks - in WORLD SHUT YOUR MOUTH (10.35pm, Fri, BBC1)
- should be more laughs in imaginative teen-horror procedural
FINAL DESTINATION (11.05pm, Fri, BBC1)... and it's not
entirely clear where the estimate of "3000-8000 obscenities"
originally came from (The Daily Mail?), but given that Richard
"Fist Of Fun" Thomas and Stew Lee's JERRY SPRINGER - THE OPERA
(10pm, Sat, BBC2) is only 2 hours long, that's an impressive
rate of one every 2.4-0.9 seconds... the world seems strangely
less outraged by the prospect of imminent environmental
catastrophe, as highlighted by C4's WAR ON TERRA season
(7.30pm, Sat, C4), also featuring "current effects of climate
change" SEVEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WEATHERMEN (8pm, Sun, C4)
and anti-car exploration WHAT WOULD JESUS DRIVE? (8pm, Mon,
C4)... political reality-show VOTE FOR ME (11pm, Mon-Fri, ITV)
falls into the usual trap of assuming that the public will
deign to exhibit even the slightest interest in the "winners"
of these programmes ever again... while a new series of HORIZON
(9pm, Thu, BBC2) preserves its up-to-the-minute reputation
with an overdue look at the phenomenon of "global dimming":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1108853,00.html ...
FILM>> sadly the controversy over unflinching portrayals of
"alternative lifestyles" and military imperialism threatens to
overshadow the epic technical achievement - but that's enough
about next week's magnificently jaw-dropping pseudo-satire
TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE ( http://mpaa.org/ : Rated R for
graphic crude and sexual humor, violent images and strong
language - all involving puppets)... apparently cinemagoers
were less surprised to learn that the protagonist was bisexual
than to learn he had a broad Irish accent in Oliver Stone's
characteristically sweeping-yet-underdeveloped ALEXANDER
( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=Alexander+%282004%29 :
Rosario ["Josie And The Pussycats"] Dawson's nude scene comes
at 1 hour and 30 minutes into the film; We see [Colin
Farrell's] bare ass about 15 minutes after the wedding scene)
... while Michael "Batman" Keaton can "hear dead people" in
radio and TV static - presumably inquiring how they're going
to continue contacting the living when the "analogue switch-
off" eventually comes around - in not-based-on-the-excellent-
Dom-DeLillo-novel psychological horror nonsense WHITE NOISE
( http://mpaa.org/ : Rated PG-13 for violence, disturbing
images and language)...
>> 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
"annoyingly, rtk.net was already taken"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4142755.stm
NEED TO KNOW
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