Need To Know 2005-02-18

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NTK 2007

NTK 2006

2005-12-02
#366
Revealing the totaliser for this year's appeal

2005-11-04
#365
November spawns a Dorkbot

2005-10-07
#364
Mery, Cory, Buzz and Ning

2005-09-02
#363
Cheap books and backronyms

2005-08-01
#362
Digital Rights vs The Management

2005-07-01
#361
Open Tech registration, WhatTheHack, Aibo Nation

2005-05-27
#360
*Not* NotCon 2005, Punt Picnic Ahoy!

2005-05-13
#359
The XML Factor, Microsoft mind robbery

2005-04-29
#358
oh no, not again

2005-04-15
#357
not a(nother) pathetic MP quiz

2005-04-01
#356
Temptation and the Supremes

2005-03-18
#355
O'Reilly Factored

2005-03-04
#354
There's money in them thar licenses

2005-02-18
Mini NTK #31
Contentions, M and S pants

2005-02-04
#353
Round up the usual patents

2005-01-21
#352
Mucker, Tucker, Ducker - and Spaz

2005-01-07
#351
Freedom of Information, Vectors of Zorn

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>> HARD NEWS << reluctant adieus The lack of drugs and casual sex is surely beginning to take its toll on the indy coders of CODECON. The only open source conference that takes place "in a nightclub"(TM) does indeed still looks like the inside of a JWZ fanboy's head. But its sensibility is slowly changing. The core contributors are getting older: some of them - including the co-founder, Bram "BitTorrent" Cohen, have scored decent incomes; toddlers run at the feet of the attendants. Still, age has not withered most, nor made the code less gnarly. Perennial NTK favourite DAN KAMINSKY is now streaming *video* over thousands of DNS servers; WHEAT is a sort of Zope-you-write-with-a-Wiki; Leonard Richardson's ULTRA GLEEPER is a link recommendation engine with an "Indy Pete" algorithm to eliminate *too* popular sites. All are alt enough: so why so much grown-up worry at the after-con parties? "This will be the last year we can explore without worry", says one maudlin attendant. "The Grokster case will come, the Supreme Court will abandon Betamax; innovation will die." Is that why so many of the codeconners now commute between America and Canada? Is that why one attendee vacationed with his 9-months pregnant wife to Brazil, so that his child would inherit another country's citizenship? Organiser Len Sassaman was shouted down when he suggested moving the conference over the border; but if the copyfights and patent wars break out in earnest, where else is there to go? http://www.codecon.org/2005/ - actually, everyone said http://www.omgaudio.com/incoherence/ - was the most fascinating of the talks But don't forget - many of the web's more "out of the box" solutions come not from lone mavericks, but from the lateral- thinking employees of some of our most familiar high-street brands. Sharp-eyed shoppers at WWW.MARKSANDSPENCER.COM have recently noticed that every single "Enlarge picture" popup proudly announces "Microsoft Internet Explorer by Marks & Spencer" in the title bar, even - and this is the clever bit - *if you're not actually using IE*, because said phrase has actually been hard-coded into the title tag by someone presumbaly under the impression that that's how all popup windows should "normally" behave. Following the site's browser compatibility issues examined by NTK just over a year ago, if this doesn't submliminally persusade M&S visitors to exchange their home-knitted Firefox and Opera browsers for Microsoft's sensible 100% polyester alternative, what will? http://www.xcom2002.com/doh/images/0502181602dohmarks.gif - NB: put browser detection code *above* mention in title tag http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-10-17&l=78#l - would-be haberdashers to NTK readers since October 2003 >> EVENT QUEUE << GOTOs considered non-harmful Calamity - avoided! As briefly mentioned last issue, next week's UKUUG LISA/WINTER CONFERENCE ON SECURITY AND NETWORKS (Thu & Fri 2005-02-24/25, Paragon Hotel, Birmingham B12 0PJ, as little as UKP20/ session student rate, preceded by the first International Exim Conference, with sessions on perl 6, ntpd, bgpd, LDAP and SPADE) should finish just in time for dedicated scenesters to hop on the Eurostar and get down to Free And Open Source Developers' European Meeting FOSDEM in Brussels (Sat and Sun 2005-02-26/27, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, B-1050, apparently free), and featuring Alan Cox, Richard Stallman, and Wikipedia's "The Outlaw" Jimmy Wales. http://www.ukuug.org/events/winter2005/booking.shtml - doh, booking closed on Wed, mail for late booking enquiries http://www.fosdem.org/ - are you going to produce an online encyclopedia of reliable, authenticated information, or are you just "whistling Dixie"? You know, our "Blink"-style instinctual snap judgement is that MALCOLM GLADWELL IN CONVERSATION (7pm, next Tue 2005-02-22, the ICA, London SW1Y 5AH, UKP8) will probably sell out as quickly as his "stating the obvious" popular-pseudoscience books appear to. But even more exotic hairstyles should be on show the following Tuesday at the launch of REMIX READING (Tue 2005-03-01, South Street Arts Centre, Reading RG1 4QU, UKP2 on the door), a celebration of Creative Commons-licensed music, art and poetry in the company of "veteran contemporary guitarist" Roland Chadwick, ambient electronica artists Yimino and the magnificently-named "David Meme". And for anyone wondering whether Reading has the artistic community to keep this ticking over - to paraphrase "The Office", Reading's a big place. And when they're finished with Reading, there's Slough, Aldershot, Bracknell, Didcot, Yateley... http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=13907 - vs http://www.worldatwork.org/boston2004/photos/photo6.html http://www.remixreading.org/ - "Future Sound Of Didcot" best name for a club night *ever* www.lse.ac.uk/collections/alumniRelations/events/20050118t1723z001.htm - and Mon 28th: UKP8 to see the amazing blogging Bunder at LSE >> ANTI-MEMES << there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/ "better than 6ft-long pic of the Enterprise on fanfold paper": http://www.romanm.ch/index.php?var1=text/ascii-movies-text ... back up again - and for your bonus round: guess which well- known e-commerce site are all the music clips coming from? http://www.scenta.co.uk/whatthatsong/ ... Widdy of the week: http://payontime.co.uk/whypay/certificate.html?name=Enron ... "Worst population animation in British history?" (top link): http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/games/population/population.html ..."Yours faithfully, PWC" (please excuse wobbly handwriting): www.bluesq.com/static_bsq/audit/Review_LuckySquaresBallSelection07_03.html ... you keep sending in puerile Google goofs, so we'll keep running: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22drug+addition%22 , http://www.google.com/search?q=penisoner , semi-neologistic usage of http://www.google.com/search?q=%22rest+bite%22 , and using http://www.google.com/search?q=%22semi-skilled+milk%22 leads to http://www.google.com/search?q=%22butter+overflow%22 ... plus some surprising (and not-so-surprising) results for: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=satan,%20cupertino,%20california >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering There's a rich vein of irony to be ploughed in the current stand-offishness of collaborative editors: apps like the Mac's SubEthaEdit that let multiple users edit the same document simultaneously. Collaboration in SubEthaEdit's case seems somewhat limited: its protocol is closed, and creators the Coding Monkeys aren't that open to porting the app. MOONEDIT is a two-year old equivalent for Linux, FreeBSD and Windows. In the ongoing spirit of collaboration, though, it's closed source too - and there's no Mac version. Perhaps the only hope for true co-operation in this area lies in the fledgling DocSynch project, an IRC-based open protocol which has the barest beginnings of a cross-platform jEdit implementation. Oh God, but that's *Java*. How bad can this get? http://me.sphere.pl/indexen.htm - Moonedit: a compressed, static binary no less http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/faq.html - protocol "based on open standards" http://chalks.berlios.de/dokuwiki/doku.php - and there's the networked version of old tracking python fave, Leo http://docsynch.sourceforge.net/ - can't we all just get along? >> 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 "not as good as Amateur Parapsychologist Monthly" http://mildlydiverting.blogspot.com/2005/01/supper-with-stars.html NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. 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