Month: July 2004

Salad Fingers

Tags: humour, weird

I love Flickr.com, they offer a photo hosting service with a plethora of features. A key component of the Flickr service is to create a community of photographers by allowing people to form groups and comment on other people’s photographs.

I decided to utilise the comment feature and create an illustrated version of the Sherlock Holmes tale The Speckled Band. I broke the text up into 58 sections, picked a keyword from each bit of the text then searched for a photo that was tagged with that word. I then wrote the text into the coment box for each photo linking to the next photo and bit of the text.

The game is afoot.

Tags: photography, Sherlock Holmes

I’ve just had a rather bizarre conversation with a man of the cloth. In he walks to the cinema wearing his dog collar, stinking of booze and wishing to use our toilet. Having used our facilities he asked me which pub I thought he should visit next as he was looking to offend people. He told me it was his day off but he still wore the collar because it was a part of who he was.

He seemed very keen on telling me statements of fact. “Statement of fact. Even though I wear this collar I’m no different from you. I urinate. I defecate and occasionally I even fornicate.” Also he liked to drink gin.

I think he may have been having a crisis of faith as he seemed to be very cynical about the world and he couldn’t tolerate liars. He told me that he thought people could do whatever they wished within reason as long as they didn’t lie about it. This is a philosophy that I share to an extent.

The most bizarre thing happened as he was leaving to go to the pub I recommended. We shook hands and I told him it was nice to have met him as it was break from the monotony of the day by having a real conversation with someone. He asked me what movies we were playing and he said that he’d see me exactly one week from now and pay me ten pounds for every person that had just watched King Arthur who then stuck their fingers up at me. But he’d only pay me if I didn’t lie to him next time I met him.

The surrealness of the whole experience makes me think that things weren’t quite how they seemed. At first I thought he might not really be a clergyman, it crossed my mind that he might be an actor. Later I became convinced that he was real but may have been suffering a ‘crisis of faith’. Now, one hour on from the experience I’m having doubts about whether he was even human.

Tags: cinema

The Pillow Book done in the style of a blog.

Found via BoingBoing.

A blogger named Simon Cozens is translating the classic Japanese text The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) by Sei Shonagon into English and republishing it as a blog. It’s easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read — well, rather like a blog.

The Pillow Book was a book of observations and musings recorded by Sei Shonagon during her time as court lady to Empress Sadako during the 990s in Heian Japan. This is an interesting project that offers an unique insight into Japanese culture that is in its way still relevant today.

Tags: books

An intriguing update to this post here in which I briefly wrote about the INDUCE act.

The creators of the satirical JibJab.com web site have produced a music video parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” featuring George W. Bush and John Kerry. In doing so they may have violated the copyright for the song.

An odd knock-on effect of this is that the TV networks that covered this story in their news reports have encouraged viewers to download the spoof film by providing links to the JibJab website via the online version of the news report. If the video parody is indeed found to be a violation of copyright then these TV networks maybe guilty under the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (aka INDUCE Act).

The Home Recording Rights Coalition has issued a press release making this very argument.

Tags: copyright

Google’s web-based email service Gmail is a hell of a service although it is not open to the general public at the moment. The killer feature of it is the generous 1GB of email storage should be enough for a lifetime of email messages for the average Joe, but not it appears for Kevin Rose.

Rose decided to test the limits of the service by asking people to send him email messages with attachments of over 5MB. The results were quite astounding.

Within 5 minutes, Gmail processed over 300 mail messages (most with 5+ MB attachments). 10 minutes into the test, I started receiving various internal server error messages and was no longer able to login. Proceeded to login with other Gmail accounts to ensure this was not a site wide problem. All other accounts worked fine.

In fact the experiment may have been a little too succesful as almost immediately people who were trying to send him messages were having them bounced back.

So how many emails where sent? No way to tell for sure, but considering that our network is in 50+ million homes, that I plugged it twice, and I received over 2,000 complaints from people who actually took the time to dig around and find my personal email address, I’m thinking we hit Gmail with around 50-75,000+, 5MB+ emails in a 10-15min window.

Was this test just a bit of fun and essentially a complete waste of time, well maybe but perhaps as a byproduct it helped Google improve their service and cope with the huge load that may eventually build up when it is open to everyone to join.

Tags: internet

BBC News: Third Star Wars film gets title

The new film will be released in May 2005
The third and final Star Wars prequel – due for release next summer – will be called Revenge of the Sith, producer Lucasfilm has said.

See Star Wars: Episode III for more information on the movie.

Tags: movies, Star Wars

Freak waves spotted from space

The shady phenomenon of freak waves as tall as 10 storey buildings had finally been proved, the European Space Agency (Esa) said on Wednesday.

Sailors often whisper of monster waves when ships sink mysteriously but, until now, no one quite believed them.

As part of a project called MaxWave – which was set up to test the rumours – two Esa satellites surveyed the oceans.

During a three week period they detected 10 giant waves, all of which were over 25m (81ft) high.

I don’t know why but I love the idea of huge waves spontaneously appearing in the middle of the ocean. The unknowable power of Mother Nature. Why are governments spending billions of dollars exploring the Universe when we don’t know enough about our own planet?

Tags: nature

Bugmenot.com now has a registration page for users of the service to fill in. Odd if you consider that bugmenot’s service is to give you log in details for sites such as The New York Times that require registration before usage.

However, upon closer examination you may find that it is a spoof with some rather personal information being asked for such as

Out of ten how would you rate your partner’s satisfaction with your sexual performance?

and totally crazy ones like

Would you be willing to have an RFID chip inserted under your skin in exchange for a free, 12 month newspaper subscription?

Having to register at websites just to read articles is fucking annoying and bad security as it means yet more passwords to remember. Most people hate to remember many passwords so they will use the same password that they use for sites that actually require some security such as their bank account.

One other thing is that it makes these sites inaccessible to search engines so that when you search for something at Google it’s unlikely that you’d get a link to the page of the article from The New York Times that covered it.

Tags: computer security, security

My Beef With Big Media: How government protects big media–and shuts out upstarts like me. By Ted Turner

Ted Turner argues that the big media corporations are stifling innovation and should be broken up.

I agree particularly as they are encouraging Senators to produce rather insane bills such as the INDUCE act proposed by Senator Orrin Hatch et al. An overreaching act that would hold technology companies liable for any product they make that encourages people to steal copyright materials. It would in effect ban any device capable of recording a copyrighted work. Wired magazine asks Will Copyright Bill Kill Tech? and Lawrence Lessig (Professor of Law and author of Free Culture) writes even I can’t believe this.

Also in on the act so to speak is the RIAA whose letter in support of INDUCE has been reproduced and annotated by Ernest Miller of Corante.

The RIAA wishes to protect its menbers from loss of revenue due to illegal file-sharing over the Internet even though there is evidence to the contrary.

Yet despite the industry’s belief that file sharing is anathema to record sales, a recent study has shown that it may not be so clear cut. “Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero,” the controversial report claims, even going so far as to suggest that for popular albums, “the impact of file sharing on sales is likely to be positive”.

The US Copyright Office goes further than the RIAA and says that the INDUCE act doesn’t go further enough. Ernest Miller writes

Yesterday, Marybeth Peters, the head of the US Copyright Office, testified before the Senate regarding the INDUCE Act. Her testimony was even more radical than the RIAA’s. Not only did she (inappropriately) explain what outcome the Appeals Court in the Grokster case should reach and argue (wrongly) that the INDUCE Act wouldn’t have a chilling effect on innovation, she actually said she thought the INDUCE Act was not enough. The Register of Copyrights argued that the Betamax decision, which made VCRs legal, should be overturned by Congress. Wow.

Tags: copyright