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Tips, news & gossip to tips@spesh.com - with NTK in subject line, cheers.

         
                               >> HARD NEWS <<
                               cheerily obtuse

        The new year at Grange Hill starts, as ever, with induction
        day: induction into the Big School of Fansites Taken Down By
        Evil Corporate Bullies, that is. After a fractious few years
        fending off sporadic legal threats, GRANGEHILL.NET's US hosting 
        was successfully DMCA-d last week by the owners of the BBC's 
        freshly privatised "Grange Hill" series, Mersey TV. Quite 
        why the company suddenly got all hardcore now is hard to tell.
        Perhaps it was the new series; perhaps it was the rumoured
        preparations by Mersey TV to sell out to a new owner; perhaps
        (they maintain) it was the recent admission by Mersey TV's
        legal advisor that the site was "driving traffic away" from
        their own new website. If that's the reason, it might not be
        enough that the site has gutted its collection of fair-use
        (and perhaps less clearcut) images, and moved to another
        server. Or maybe they're in with a chance: few websites can
        call upon a terrifying 25-year-long span of net users
        overobsessed with the trivia of their childhood's TV. And
        Phil Redmond, that loveable rogue, faced with thousands of
        young protestors, will surely cave in like so many
        fair-minded headmasters, faced with school uniform pickets,
        before him.
                        http://www.grangehillfans.co.uk/ghonline.html
    - you know what they really need is a pro-fair use novelty single
http://www.brandrepublic.com/mediabulletin/news_story.cfm?articleID=231955
                                      - insert dinner money joke here
        http://www.jubileeaction.co.uk/justright/autumn2002_article2.html
        - if 80s TV didn't matter, why is Paxman presenting Newsround?

        Drink! Feck! Falcoo! MIT's Dublin-based Media Lab Europe is 
        closing due to lack of funding, fulfilling founder Nicholas 
        Negroponte's vision of "Being Digital" by doing an on/off 
        transition itself. After all, "bits are bits", but money is 
        money, it would appear. Meanwhile, http://www.hackthebid.org/ 
        is a new site aiming to prevent perhaps similar white elephant 
        wastes of public money, giving everyone the opportunity to 
        voice why they might not want London to host the 2012 
        Olympics, and so to provide some balance to the current, 
        dubiously-representational "Text LONDON to 802012" poster 
        campaign. It's hoped that the site will also become a hub for 
        anti-Olympic campaigning of all kinds, possibly discussing 
        the appropriate typeface and font size for printing stickers 
        that could transform the first two letters of "Back The Bid" 
        posters to "Ha" or "Fu" - that sort of thing.
        http://www.hackthebid.org/more.html
          - Parisians, New Yorkers invited to set up sister sites too
        http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/15/euro.risks.idg/
                 - Europeans: oddly unconvinced by upstart Negroponte
        http://indianink.net/forums/General/posts/2895.html
        http://www.medialabasia.org/mlaList.php?typeId=6
                  - MIT parted ways with Media Lab Asia 18 months ago
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1393816,00.html
             - Guardian asks: where's Kevin Warwick when you need him?


                               >> EVENT QUEUE <<
                         GOTOs considered non-harmful

        Just in case you haven't given all of your disposable income 
        to deserving charities already this year, London's geowanking 
        fraternity have come up with an intriguing proposition. With a 
        grand's worth of Russian 1-meter resolution satellite pics, 
        they believe they can stitch together an entirely free, 
        redistributable vector database of the capital, freed from 
        the shackles of the Ordnance Survey's restrictive copyrights, 
        and thus open to all manner of GPL-style repurposing. LONDON 
        FREE MAP's Jo Walsh and Schuyler Erle should hopefully be 
        touching on this topic at the FIRST WORKSHOP OF THE PERVASIVE 
        AND LOCATIVE ARTS NETWORK (Tue and Wed 2005-02-01/02, The ICA, 
        The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH, 51.5066N -0.1306E, tickets UKP1.50 
        per day, apparently), in the company of geo-taggers Urban 
        Tapestries, location-based gamers Blast Theory, and 
        investigative journalist (yes, the) Duncan "Zircon" Campbell, 
        who we believe might know a thing about satellite surveillance 
        - or two.
        http://open-plan.org/index.php?plan-ica-announce
               - yes, it does seem cheap for the ICA. Could be a trap?
http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2004-December/000132.html
             - today London, tomorrow... ze (Ordnance Surveyed) world!
        http://openstreetmap.org/
         - or get on your GPS-enabled bike and start uploading tracks
        http://www.no2id.net/news/events.php
                  - next Tue: Ross Anderson vs ID cards, in Cambridge
        http://www.netimperative.com/awards
         - and 1 week left to get entries in for Netimperative Awards


                                >> ANTI-MEMES <<
               there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/

        browser security masterclass - just put SSL padlock *at the 
        bottom of the popup window*: http://ipextreme.us/order.html 
        ... historic NASA mission marked by *worst infographic ever*: 
    http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/images/sc-components-litho.jpg 
        ... always end your last blog post on a enigmatic high note: 
        http://www.nepanewsletter.com/polar.html - "Daytime sightings 
        have now been reported, as have motherships"... new(-ish) 
        thrill - vaguely CV-related puerile Google goofs of the month: 
        http://google.com/search?q=%22can+program+in+html%22+resume 
        http://google.com/search?q=%22irrelevant+sense+of+humour%22 
        http://www.google.com/search?q=webmater+CV - and, just for old 
        time's sake: http://google.com/search?q=%22singed+copy%22 , 
        http://google.com/search?q=%22Common+Object+Request+Borker%22 
        ... UseCrime in progress - "Concordia is the only product 
        available that supports both printed and online distribution", 
        muses http://symbolics.com/Concordia-1.htm - apart from bloody 
        enormous jpegs, of course...

          
                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

        CPUs aren't getting faster! Multi-core is the future! Which
        means we'll all need to learn concurrent, multi-threaded
        programming, or else our software is never going to get
        faster again! That's what Herb Sutter's future shock article
        in Dr. Dobbs says (below). But before you start re-learning
        APL, here's a daring thought: maybe programmers are just too
        *stupid* to write multi-threaded software (not you of
        course: that guy behind you). And maybe instead we'll see
        more *background* processes springing up - filling our spare
        CPUs with their own weird, low i/o calculations. Guessing
        wildly, we think background - or remote - processes are
        going to be the new foreground. Oh yeah, and increasingly
        we're going to need some consistent way to display quiet,
        passive user notifications from these processes that won't
        interfere with the main flow of our single-threaded human
        masters. What we're trying to say here is that, primitive
        though they may be now, apps like GROWL (on the Mac) and
        XOSD on Linux are going to be the new squishy UI innovation
        area, and you should check them out, futz with them, and
        work out your own solutions. You're already curious about
        your background tasks, and soon the whole world will be.
        CRISWELL PREDICTS! 
        http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
            - lock your daughter threads! here comes multiple futures!
        http://growl.info/
                          - more interesting than the website implies
        http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2004-09-26
        - more interesting python, rendezvous and remote unix hacking
        http://www.ignavus.net/software.html
                                 - xosd for your tail-piping pleasure
         

                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                                  get out less

        TV>> reassuringly, THE GADGET SHOW'S (7.30pm) god-awful bid 
        http://www.7digital.com/downloads/gadget/ to "get a coveted no. 
        1 in the download chart" appears yet to trouble even the Top 
        20: http://bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart/top40/download.shtml - maybe 
        the bloke who sounds like Donald Sinden could have done some 
        slightly less flat vocals?... speaking of online audio, Stuart 
        Maconie devotes his 3-hour 6Music FREAK ZONE to TV theme tunes 
        (5pm, Sun, http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/freakzone/ ) ... 
        though you might want to exercise the "Listen Again" option on 
        that one http://dave.org.uk/streams/ , as it risks running 
        into the world premier of the new Chemical Brothers album 
        getting the http://prodigyremixed.com/ treatment on XFM's THE 
        REMIX (6pm, Sun, http://xfm.co.uk/theremix )... you wait all 
        year for an offbeat look back at current events, then THAT'S 
        SO LAST WEEK (11.05pm, Mon, C5), Tyler "Wallpaper" Brule's THE 
        DESK (10.30pm, Tue, BBC4), THE COMIC SIDE OF 7 DAYS (8.30pm, 
        Thu, BBC3) and DON'T WATCH THAT, WATCH THIS! (10.30pm, Thu, 
        BBC4) all come along at the same time - what's up with *that*, 
        eh?... THE FLY (11.50pm, Mon, C4) was succesfully remarketed 
        to the insect community as the story of a brave Drosophila 
        melanogaster - who finds himself gradually transforming into a 
        human being!... Wednesday is "lethal killing machines" night 
        with the Frank Miller-ish ROBOCOP 2 (10pm, Wed, C5), WESTWORLD 
        (11.35pm, Wed, BBC1) and AMERICAN PSYCHO (11.50pm, Wed, C4)... 
        plus, even if you agree with what he's saying, feel free to 
        get enraged by Michael Moore's trademark scattershot approach 
        and patronisingly sounds-like-mock-whining-but-is-apparently-
        genuine voiceover in FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (9pm, Thu, C4)...
        
        FILM>> a busy week for superhero spinoffs, with that blind old 
        guy from "The Blues Brothers" getting his own feature-length 
        adventure in RAY ( http://capalert.com/capreports/ray.htm : 
        unseen intercourse, twice; long series of drug addition 
        withdrawals - graphic; smoking, with no consequences, 
        frequently)... oh and Jennifer Garner is back as the eponymous 
        undead ninja gymnast in the not-very-Bill-Sienkiewicz-ish 
        ELEKTRA ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/elektra.htm : 
        unholy control of objects; unnatural rapid movement by 
        mortals; bodies evaporating into yellow-green gas; lesbian 
        kiss)... good to see the BBFC "Contains Strong Bloody 
        Violence" advisory being used as part of the marketing for 
        next week's Franka Potente/ Ken Campbell unwitting-urban-
        exploration London Underground horror CREEP (only loosely 
        based on the Radiohead song of the same name)... yet they 
        appear to have - shockingly - not used the Bomb The Bass 
        "Xenon 2 (It's A Megablast)" remix of the theme tune for the 
        largely unnecessary new remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 
        ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398712/keywords : convict/ 
        detroit-michigan/ police/ siege/ lasersight/ molotov-
        cocktail/ person-on-fire)...


                               >> 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
                      "it'll be ready - when it's ready!"
           http://www.freecherrypy.org/asbradbury/archive/0434600


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