Now I want you all to go and read this outstanding article on the Daily Telegraph‘s real role in world journalism. Essentially, it’s become a crucial link in the global bullshit cycle. Like the water, nitrogen, and carbon cycles, bullshit circulates around the planet; some actors are bullshit sources and others sinks. The Telegraph‘s role…
Read More idiots round the world stand hand in hand…Following on from the last post, we’re unlikely to have funding to dose every school kid in Britain with radioactive markers and fMRI-scan them a term later to see how their neurons are getting on any time soon, even if you could get that past the ethics committee and the Nuclear Dread. So unless someone…
Read More free our data, I supposeIs neurogenesis perhaps the most interesting scientific discovery of the times? I rather think it is. The government minister’s version: until quite recently, we thought that once you passed a certain early age, that was it for your supply of neurons, and you would only lose them. Paradoxically, that wasn’t incompatible with learning, as ones…
Read More insane in the membrane, insane in the brain!Minor triumph. Hacker News dropped 2,095 hits on this post yesterday, which just shows you what a bit of well-directed whining can achieve; the fleeting attention of one million social-network Skinner-box pigeons. But yes. Anyway, Reggie makes a very good point in comments – why can’t I subscribe to somebody’s contact details and have them…
Read More contacts, againIf you want to upload something to rapidshare.com, quickly, and you only have command-line access, what do you do? This script was promising, but failed on line 30 because a regular expression didn’t match on something that turned out to be an empty (NoneType) object. I replaced this code:def upload(self): sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) sock.connect((“rapidshare.com”,…
Read More command-line rapidshare uploadSo people wanted to know what my rational method for assessing obscure bands turned up. Here goes with the tracklisting, and brief reflections on each. 2020Soundsystem – Shiver Remember Robert Miles, “Children”? Sure ya do. Similar mood, vaguely krautrock underpinnings. But slightly average. Are we sure about this project? Bloodgroup – Chuck Ah, this is…
Read More musicThinking about contacts, and also reading this, it struck me that if there is anything in computing that needs a manifesto it’s Polite Software. As in: it behaves helpfully towards others, by exporting and importing data in standard formats correctly (and if there is a common incorrect way of doing something, it should provide the…
Read More polite computersWhy is contact management implemented so poorly in every software package I’ve ever encountered? It’s almost as bad as the all-time worst application, voicemail. Outlook, Gmail, KDE Kontact, MS Entourage, Mozilla Thunderbird; they’ve all been carefully pessimised to incorporate every possible pain in the arse. For a start, file formats and vendor lock-in. There is…
Read More contacts considered crappyThere is more truth about Afghanistan, counter-insurgency, insurgents and empires in this cartoon than in the vast pile of thinktank and military-academic reports on my local hard disk. (Today’s is pretty good, too.)
Read More Afghanistan the Doonesbury wayHere are two news stories whose contrast should tell you a lot, via Charlie Stross. Spy chiefs fear Chinese cyber attack: INTELLIGENCE chiefs have warned that China may have gained the capability to shut down Britain by crippling its telecoms and utilities. They have told ministers of their fears that equipment installed by Huawei, the…
Read More spybreak!