Need To Know 2006-06-09

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NTK 2007

2006-09-29
Mini NTK #32
Muttley's top games, dastardly ID cards

2006-07-14
#373
Techa Kucha culture, Steve "Coast to" Coast

2006-06-09
#372
Dorking Burn-Bot, You Propose It To Them

2006-05-05
#371
Bruce Sterling, 5 (count 'em!) things happening outside London

2006-04-01
#370
Still valid if you're on California time

2006-03-17
#369
All the events, all the time

2006-02-17
#368
Plugs, more plugs, and intelligent mains

2006-01-13
#367
Web 2.0, mail from 2004

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>> HARD NEWS << more They-Build-For-You's Understandably overlooked in the recent furore over John Prescott's "grace and favour" extravagances: the near-250K dropped by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2004 to help fund MySociety, the UK's premier purchaser of web domains consisting of combinations of the words "Them/ They", "Write", "Work", "For", "To" and "You". Apparently, they've got "a little bit" of that (among other) cash left over, and are therefore once again calling for proposals for projects that are "Founded on electronic networks", have a "Real world impact on democratic and community aspects of people's lives", and "Low or zero cost scalability", which ought to narrow it down from your usual late-night rambles about "LazyWebs". There isn't actually a disclaimer to this effect, but we suspect that, by entering, you're kind of waiving any personal ownership of your idea - and we don't think the "winner" actually gets any of the money themselves (unless they subsequently persuade MySociety to employ them as some sort of specialist contractor, which - by our limited understanding - is sometimes what spending public money is all about). http://www.mysociety.org/proposals2006/about - view "other people's proposals" for a decent starting point http://www.mysociety.org/?p=217 - deadline extended to midnight June 16, especially for you http://iawiki.net/LazyWeb - you'll run out of stack space if you recurse too far >> EVENT QUEUE << GOTOs considered non-harmful Reasons We Like The World Cup #1: pubs which aren't showing the matches will be temporarily transformed into temperate sanctuaries of calm and contemplation, where one can sit in a quiet corner with a cold glass of "Turbo Shandy", thoughtfully inscribing pencil notes in the margins of an O'Reilly manual or two. Or, if you like things a little livelier, there's also next Sat's @MEDIA SOCIAL (from 1pm, Sat 2006-06-17, The Livery Bar, 130 Wood Street, nr St Paul's, London EC2V 6DL, free but buy your own drinks and food) - a fringe event to this week's @Media web design conference, and featuring a "best of" lineup from this year's London Geek Dinners, including Molly "Web Standards Project" Holzschlag and Dave "CSS Zen Garden" Shea. Specific get-togethers are scheduled for particular fields (2pm CSS, 3pm Accessibility, 4pm JavaScript etc) during the afternoon, a thoroughly civilised arrangement which bodes somewhat better than some "fringe" events we've been to recently, not least because they've relaxed that usual daft "Geek Dinner" criterion of having to pay in advance for a variable-quality pub buffet. http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2006/social - warning: page contains embedded Google map http://spy.typepad.com/reporting/2006/05/wemediafringe.html - "Alan Connor [...] was very engaging"; others not so http://www.wnc.co.uk/tg/turboshandy.html - or a Vodka Mule or Lemon Bacardi Breezer, if available http://www.andfinally.com/geek.html - this June 18: Bill T still promising "6 [punts] per person" Something else on which we and cheeky Nico Macdonald (however reluctantly) agree: we wouldn't put money on the "ad-hoc un- conference" concept of BARCAMP LONDON actually happening "sometime in June/July" now - unless they're referring to the "June/July" of a different year. Perversely picking one of the less summery months for *their* annual "off-site", however, is the BURNING-DORK DORKING-BURN DORKBOT-LONDON CAMP (Bentley Copse Scout Camp, nr Dorking, Sep 2006-09-01/04, probably some sort of small accommodation charge), the ideal opportunity to finally get your badge for GPS Open-Mapping, Self-Sufficient Electric Animal Constructing, or other traditional "People Doing Strange Things Without Mains Electricity" activities. http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/camp06/ - vs http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=15015 http://barcamp.org/BarCampLondon - Brit bloggers : un-conference :: piss-up : brewery >> ANTI-MEMES << there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/ BBC News Online: where science fiction becomes... science captions - "The circuits in existing iPods will not work with nano-transistors": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/4768323.stm , vs "Cloaking devices are a staple of science fiction stories": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/5016068.stm ... good-enough-to-eat Google goofs: http://google.com/search?q=%22web-basted%22 , http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22diary%20farmers%22 , http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22investment+baking%22 , http://www.google.com/search?q=%22please+beer+with+me%22 , http://google.com/search?q=%22kentucky+friend+chicken%22 , http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22lime+manager%22 , plus http://google.com/search?q=%22cafe+rogue%22 - favoured eating place of http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-03-07&l=99#l 's "Rouge Trooper"... go to http://google.co.uk/search?q=SOCKS , click top-left Sponsored Link, weary-sounding lxdirect.com announces "Your search for 'cocks' was spell-corrected to 'socks' and produced 31 results"... >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering If you want to be truly loved, write a data recovery utility. We can't imagine there's a day when Christophe Grenier isn't swathed by offers of beers, steak dinners and marriage for TESTDISK and PHOTOREC, his two open source disk and file recovery utilities. The test TestDisk gives is sort of a final exam for your futzed partition block, quizzing your unreadable drive for tell-tale NTFS, HFS+, Ext3 or what-have-you data, and cribbing the lost partition data from what it finds. PHOTOREC gives up on such fripperies as a filing system and instead grubs directly on the drive for file data, spotting beginnings for popular file formats and having a stab at where their ends might be hanging. PHOTOREC, as the name suggests, started as a utility for clawing back pictures from bit-rotten flash cards, but can now sniff out files from Ogg Vorbis to Microsoft Powerpoint. Both utilities will run on Mac, DOs, Windows, Linux, and probably vegetable oil for that matter. Forget about them for now - when you need them, you'll find them. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download - though you'll waste an hour searching NTK for "olive oil" http://www.flickr.com/photos/manuelidades/113461346/ - voila! c'est un web deux point zero shot de screen >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV FEEBDACK>> Reasons We Like The World Cup #2: eventually the BBC will stop showing that appallingly contrived "stupid foreigners taken commentating metaphors literally" promo http://www.duncans.tv/2006/bbc-fifa-world-cup - "The stadium has come to life!" (you see what they've done there?). Still, you're relatively safe on ITV4 - even though they've run out of "Larry Sanders", there's still another 40 or so episodes of DREAM ON (0.25am, Tue, ITV), they're re-repeating UFO (6pm and 1.55am, Tue, ITV4 - the "Mindbender" one where Straker hallucinates he's on a film set being a particular highlight), plus they're just coming up to the acclaimed "Sniper" story in HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET (9pm, Fri and Sun, ITV)... Elsewhere, the Radio Times anticipates interviews with "bands who made it big on the back on rave culture" in SUMMER OF - RAVE, 1989 (9.10pm, Sat, BBC2) - likely to include The Shamen, who were releasing "remix it yourself" CDs as far back as 1991: http://discogs.com/release/58164 . Noel Edmonds takes on the football with prime-time bouts of DEAL OR NO DEAL (around 8pm, Mon-Fri, C4), but this week's Freeview finds remain skateboarding docu DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS (9pm, Tue, More4), and the imminent second season of Robbie Coltrane psycho-profiling classic CRACKER (11pm, Thu, ITV3)... Which just leaves, in the wake of last month's comments on the overuse of "H128" in Irwin Allen's "City Beneath The Sea" (almost every minute at around 0:45, peaking at once every 10- 15 seconds), ANDY TRIBBLE's allegation as follows: "When Jon Pertwee was the Doctor he was stranded on a planet along with some Daleks and humans [...] in search of some magic element that could stop a plague", an element which Terry Nation had mischievously named "Perineum". So, "Jon had to run about saying things like 'If only we could get our hands on the Perineum' etc etc". In fact it was spelled "Parrinium", Andy http://google.com/search?q=daleks+parrinium - a fact we record here primarily to preserve any other readers from the eye- opening results of Googling for perineum + "doctor who"... >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last month or might happen next month. 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 "hospitable, but music-free" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/07/another_effing_own_goal/ NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe or subscribe at http://lists.ntk.net/ NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntkmart.com/ (K) 2006 Special Projects. 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