FaxYourMP movement

Posted: January 23rd, 2003 | 4 Comments »

“You’re not evil. You’re just really dirty.”

As Mozilla continues its evolution from browser to platform, disease more interesting side projects are popping up daily. They range from small-but-useful browser add-ons like
MozBlog to complete new desktop environments like OEone’s HomeBase via fascinating saucer-crash spin-offs like XP Server. (Oh, and this is probably a good place to mention Phoenix for the Mac, which is a good thing because it means there’s now a XUL runtime for OS X which isn’t dog slow.)

So off we go, we proud, evangelical Mozillians, to run around mozdev.org, slurping up XPI files as fast as our connections will carry them. But when half of them turn out to be unstable shite that reduce our browser to a mess of buggy widgets, what then? We search in vain for some kind of uninstaller, but there isn’t one. Most of the projects don’t even have proper Preferences panels, let alone a (usually unconnected) “Uninstall” button. Unless we decide to brave the horrific mess of subdirectories and cryptic XML and Javascript files to find the right wires to cut, the only resort is a full wipe and reinstall. Ouch.

For some reason, the current version of the XPI API, despite tons of useful functions, has absolutely nothing for undoing those functions. Apparently early versions of Mozilla had some kind of package uninstaller but it never worked properly.

This was going to be an entry bemoaning the lack of an uninstaller framework, but it turns out that help is on the way: see this Bugzilla bug proposing a nice ‘n’ easy uninstaller panel in the Preferences. Of course, all the Mozdev projects will have to rewrite their installers to work with it, but they’re already doing that for Phoenix and every other new browser that comes along anyway…

(Note: This trick requires you to be using either Windows 2000 or XP, there and to have not already uninstalled Winamp3 and returned to version 2, food sneering in disgust)

Before you start, online get yourself a decent skin. There. Doesn’t that feel better?
Start playing a track. Choose something fun and jumpy that Winamp will like. (We don’t care about what you like.)
Open the AVS window. (This is the visualisation window that does the pretty patterns. Look for it in the Thinger window. You want the icon that says avs in big letters.)
Admire the pretty patterns for a moment.
Double-click in the AVS window to bring up the Editor window.
Choose Display from the Settings menu.
Check the Overlay mode and Set desktop to color checkboxes on the right.
Aaaand… wheeeeeee!
Show it off to everyone in the vicinity.
Now see how long you can carry on working with that running.

This is the bit where I’m meant to whinge about Winamp3’s size, slowness, bugginess, horrific default skin and the fact that it takes five times longer to load than Winamp 2.0. Fortunately, I’ve been distracted by the continually-increasing fabness of the AVS. However, I will say this: If premature optimisation is the root of all evil then Winamp3 can look forward to an unhindered ascent to heaven (where it will doubtless be given a huge, oddly-shaped halo textured with a picture of Jennifer Love Hewitt).

(Note: This trick requires you to be using either Windows 2000 or XP, there and to have not already uninstalled Winamp3 and returned to version 2, food sneering in disgust)

Before you start, online get yourself a decent skin. There. Doesn’t that feel better?
Start playing a track. Choose something fun and jumpy that Winamp will like. (We don’t care about what you like.)
Open the AVS window. (This is the visualisation window that does the pretty patterns. Look for it in the Thinger window. You want the icon that says avs in big letters.)
Admire the pretty patterns for a moment.
Double-click in the AVS window to bring up the Editor window.
Choose Display from the Settings menu.
Check the Overlay mode and Set desktop to color checkboxes on the right.
Aaaand… wheeeeeee!
Show it off to everyone in the vicinity.
Now see how long you can carry on working with that running.

Look Around You! In particular, public health
look at the Periodic Table.

Following on from being an unwitting accomplice in the approved 3604, diagnosis 807299,00.html” title=”BATTERED COD – FRYING SQUAD”>”Welsh drivers using cooking oil instead of diesel” controversy, British supermarket chain Asda has started running its fleet of lorries on reprocessed chicken fat:

Asda produces more than 50m litres of used cooking oil and 138,000 of waste frying fat every year from its canteens, restaurants and rotisseries. The gunge was a disposal headache rather than a potential money-earner until an unexpected phone call last spring.

“We were approached by a biodiesel firm, which cleans up waste cooking oil, adds a bit of methanol and sells it as a much cheaper alternative to diesel,” said Rachel Fellows of Asda yesterday. “We were only too happy to do business with them.

“But then we thought: hang on, isn’t there something we can do here for ourselves?”

Biodiesel, while being a combustion fuel, is not only considerably cheaper than normal diesel but releases only 40% of the emissions, as well as being “simple to use, biodegradable, nontoxic, and essentially free of sulfur and aromatics.” (see the FAQ) Plus, “Biodiesel is the only alternative fuel to have fully completed the health effects testing requirements of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.”, which may be of interest to Californians.

One of the hottest topics this past week has been the formation of Mitch Kapor‘s OSAF and its big project, healing look you fools”>Chandler, a kind of souped-up do-everything PIM. The term that’s being bandied about at the moment is “Outlook on steroids” but, as the product page says, Outlook is not the right comparison model here. The feature summary looks like a standard-issue email client until you hit the bullet points at the bottom:

structure data how you like it, view it that way, change your mind at any time

automatic recognition of names, places, dates, and etc.; automatic categorization of items

Those features go way beyond what most PIMs offer today, yet they come from a 15-year-old DOS program. Chandler’s true daddy is the PIM that Kapor delivered to the market in the 80’s: Lotus Agenda.

Prompted by others’ reminisence on haddock this time last year (“I’ve been playing with Lotus Agenda via dosemu, and it’s fucking fantastic,” said Nick. “That program damn near got me organised,” said Danny) I did some snooping and Googling, determined to find out what it was that made the program so useful. (I didn’t have a PC to play with until ’94, so Agenda passed me by completely)

A good starting point is Michael Stocker’s Agenda links site. Off it, we find Walter Rowe’s quick tour through the magic of Agenda:

What does Agenda do? With it, you can weed through a mountain of information and arrange it into categories. Suppose you keep track of phone calls, are writing a proposal, and need to maintain a daily calendar. If you type “Call Bob and tell him to send the proposal notes by Friday,” Agenda is clever enough to read this sentence and assign this item to the categories: phone calls, proposal, even Friday. When you ask the computer what you have to do Friday, it will remind you to call Bob and insist that you ask him about the proposal.

The automatic recognition of facts (dates, people, places etc.) within free text is obviously incredibly useful and not all that hard, so it’s odd that few PIMs have done it since. It’s the magic icing on top of Agenda’s most prominent feature, in fact the core of its design philosophy: the flexibility of data formatting and categorisation. If you want to just enter stuff in free, flat text, you do that. Agenda will help you sort it.

Lotus Agenda is the only available database in the market that allows the keying of data to precede the creation of database tables. It may appear dull, since more thought has been given on its internal design than on its physical appearance, but Agenda is an excellent tool for sorting piles of information into meaningful categories. With this program, users can keep track of their activities, writings, research, notes, expenses and even other programs. Agenda can accurately read dates in practically any wording, from ‘next week from Friday’ to ‘6/30/93,’ and can create a separate category for items that have not been classified under any particular category.

Much heavier detail about the structure of Agenda is available in this document from Agenda’s creators. The most notable part is their list of key design requirements for the program:

The user must be able to easily enter, edit, and manipulate free textual items without concern for the underlying structure of the database.

The user must not be required to specify the structure of the data in advance and must be able to modify the database structure as it evolves without losing data or reorganizing the database.

The user must be able to define reports in idiosyncratic formats. Through these reports, the user must be able to create and modify both database structure and content.

The reports mentioned above are referred to in Agenda as views, which work in a similar way to views in RDBMSes. From James Fallows’s lovesong to Agenda for The Atlantic in 1992:

Views, finally, are presentations of the information in
your items, arrayed and selected according to the categories you
specify. This may sound similar to what a normal data-base
program does. With Paradox, dBase IV, RBase, and so on you can
retrieve pieces of information, through a “query,” according to
the criteria you choose. (“Show me the last name, first name, and
phone number for all families whose addresses have a zip code
from 10001 to 10292.”) The difference is that Agenda eliminates
the need for queries. In most data-base programs, there is one
bed-rock chunk of data, the mother lode, from which you request
samplings from time to time. In its fundamental technology,
Agenda also has one mother-lode of data, but – in ways that are,
again, easier to appreciate on the screen – it creates the
illusion that the information exists in small, pre-customized
chunks. You can create an Agenda view called “New York City,”
comparable to the zip-code query above. Whenever you flip there,
with one key, it can show you all the dealings you’ve had with
anyone in New York.

(I love his hyphenation of “data-base”. It feels so quaint and different to the way we write to-day.)

The use of user-defined categories was a key part of Agenda, but you could save the task of categorisation until after your data had been entered. Furthermore, the task was made much easier by being able to define remarkably-capable sets of rules and triggers; see the section on “Automatic Assignment and Implicit Actions” in the designers’ overview. Most importantly, a piece of information could be tagged with any number of categories.

So the way Agenda worked was to let you enter your data (contacts, appointments, notes, ideas) as freely as you liked, then slice and dice with views. However, it could give you a formalised interface to your information, depending on context: Agenda 2.0 came with Planner, a sample, customised view suited to appointments and to-do lists.

One negative point that I continually come across is the idiosyncracy of Agenda’s interface. While not being too hard to learn, it was still different enough to put most people off, people who preferred to stick to classic interfaces such as Lotus’s other PIM, Organiser. This was its downfall. Rowe:

Victor Cruz, spokesman for Lotus Development Corp., says Lotus stopped developing Agenda after selling only 100,000 copies. They thought Agenda was too difficult to learn, so they bought a no-brainer program called the Threads Organizer from a company in the United Kingdom. Threads looks like a notebook and a day calendar, so it is obvious what it does. Agenda is more subtle. Lotus has sold 450,000 copies of Threads.

Jimmy Guterman speculates that the program fell foul of the subjective suitability of most freeform idea managers:

It’s unlikely that all of the people who bought (or whose companies bought them) Agenda used it, or used it as suggested–not everyone’s mind works like Kapor’s. Anyone who has taken a single course in perception or neurobiology knows that every person’s brain interprets and organizes information differently. There are basic similarities (i.e., we all use the occipital lobe for visual information), but our neurons are as unique as our fingerprints. It’s easy to be skeptical when a company claims to have a program that “organizes your computer like your mind.” A recent PIM, “The Brain,” made such a claim, but it only worked like the developer’s brain and appears to have flopped in the marketplace.

The feature that appears to be most relevant to Agenda’s usefulness, and most lacking in today’s applications, is its use of views and categorisation to slice your information in as many ways that you need. From Guterman’s 1998 interview with Mitch Kapor:

But Kapor realizes that, as millennium approaches, none of the currently popular PIMs match the original vision Agenda. “Oh, we’ve had some evolution. PIMs have evolved a lot. They’ve gotten better at handling contacts and appointments. They’ve become very sophisticated. But the one thing that was the greatest thing about Agenda and why it still has a cadre of followers is the one thing that hasn’t been incorporated into PIMs: multifiling.”

“Today,” Kapor observes, “the PIMs are very Web-influenced, they have connectivity features and all, but they’re stuck in the old mindset. They’re focused on managing contacts and calendars. Agenda was all about managing ideas. Maybe that means Agenda isn’t really a PIM. But then again, the term ‘PIM’ was invented by Connell Ryan, Agenda’s marketing manager, at the time of the product’s first release. He invented that category name, but in retrospect the category didn’t describe what Agenda was.”

I’ve certainly been continually astonished by the lack of these relatively basic features in popular applications. The most obvious one is email: I have yet to find a decent personal-level email system which will let me file the same mail in more than one folder, or allow me to store and reuse views across my mailboxes. I certainly can’t get anywhere near Agenda’s rule and action capabilities without getting into my mail server and writing code. As my friend Manar Hussain said to me, years ago: “Your email is probably the most important database you have, so how come you can do so little with it?”

It also got me thinking about something we take for granted in the software world: continual feature evolution. We tend to think of software functionality as being on a linear good-bad scale. Good tech evolves and thrives, bad tech dies. Yet this is one case where some obviously good technology had to sit in the dustbin of history for many years before being revived; it’s lucky it’s being revived at all (and it still may not be, given Chandler’s current non-existence). If Apple hadn’t rescued NeXT from oblivion, what would have happened to brilliant ideas like Display Postscript?

It’ll be many months before Chandler is anywhere near useful, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on it. It sounds like this thing is easily the closest to my dream PIM, and anything that has the faintest hope of getting a shloch like me organised deserves the red carpet treatment.

(Coming up next: A take on the whole OSAF/Open Source anti-competition argument, and a brief overview of some of the other idea managers that have arrived since Agenda. I’d particularly welcome suggestions for the latter.)

Radio 4’s Book At Bedtime was utterly fantastic tonight: Ewan McGregor read Anton Chekov’s short story “The Bet”. You can catch it info I’m afraid”>here, but only for the next week. Go on, it’s only 15 minutes.

I forgot to mention that you can download and play with Agenda 2.0 right now; you just need to be able to run DOS programs. Practically any version of Windows will run it. Linux can run it under DOSEMU. (I wonder if anyone’s ported DOSEMU to OS X yet?)

Michael Stocker’s Agenda site has instructions on downloading and creating install disks, vitamin but there’s an easier way: use this nicely-zipped install.

Michael Stocker’s Agenda site has instructions on downloading and creating install disks, and but there’s an easier way: use this nicely-zipped install.

An astonishing discovery thanks to Google: one Health
grow up”>Pictures of my cock!

Michael Stocker’s Agenda site has instructions on downloading and creating install disks, and but there’s an easier way: use this nicely-zipped install.

An astonishing discovery thanks to Google: one Health
grow up”>Pictures of my cock!

Dammit, patient
prostate The Arecibo message is too wide to use as a phone logo!

Mind you, site the new message, website like this
while being way bigger, is much cooler. (Have a flick through the PDF)

As I was saying to salve apparently”>Quinn just now, physiotherapist it’s good to know that in this age of uncertainty, when new-media heroes rise and fall faster than their socks, there are still some people you can rely on: the ones who are convinced that a homosexual elite is running the British Internet. One particular ambassador to The Land Of The Queer Jackboot has been harrassing various friends of mine, on and off, for several years now. I don’t want to invoke him, but let’s just say he’s infamous across several UK mailing lists for his intense streams of vicious phone calls and emails, not to mention a bipolar instability akin to a crackerjack compass needle.

He’s been calling and mailing Quinn pretty much non-stop for the past week or so, making all kinds of bizarre accusations and innuendos. (Apparently he was terribly disappointed to discover that Quinn is both female and Danny’s real wife. Must have ruined his wild three-boys-in-a-bed fantasies.) And being Quinn, rather than trying to run from this nutter, she’s blogging about it, and asking for all the traffic she can get. (So at least she’s guaranteed Dave Winer’s support. Hey, maybe we can set him and Ian off against each other. I’d pay to watch that.) She has also asked me to spank her regularly if she doesn’t keep it updated. This blogging lark gets better every day!

To echo the stalker’s own sign-off: Without prejudice!

So there I was, case desperately trying to get some work finished before going out, overweight when apoplexy he said. It’ll take five minutes, he said.”>Matt IMed me out of the blue and derailed me in the surest way possible: namely, by asking me to do a quick fun bit of Perl hacking for him. (Click here to see why)

What he wanted (and was sure existed out there somewhere but couldn’t find it) was a running CGI script (sorry, RESTian Web Service) that takes a URL to a page and replaces all occurences of a given string with another string before spitting the page out. Since I had the code on hand already (in my form linker service) it only took a couple of minutes. You can try it here:

As you may see if you run the default example above, it’s good but it’s not
perfect. This is a shame because, apart from the base URI problem, writing these kinds of filters is an utter doddle. (That’s British for “really easy”) You too can write your own Pornolizer or ValleyURL! See below for a brief bit of exploration and advice, as well as a plea for help to anyone who can help fix the bug.

Let’s get the basics out of the way first: even a novice server-side coder can write this stuff in a few lines. All your script is going to do is:

Read in some form variables to use
Go fetch a page from a given URL
Alter the page in the desired fashion
Change the base URI of the page so as to keep relative links working
Spit it out

If you can’t do point 1, you need to go off and learn about CGI programming.

Point 2 is usually achievable with one line of code if you have a decent URI/web toolkit. I use the fantastic LWP::Simple for Perl, like so:

my $html = get($url);

And that’s all it takes to grab a page from the web and stick it in a string.
It is also all it takes to expose a freaking huge security hole.

Most generic URI-fetching libraries will fetch many different types of URIs, not just the ones that start with http://. And this URI that you’re fetching was given to you from an untrusted source. So if some joker comes along and types in:

file:///etc/passwd

… I hope you see the problem. Fortunately, all you need to do is check that the URI starts with http:// and return an error if it doesn’t, and you’re sorted. (You may want to allow https:// URIs too)

Next, altering the content. Hey, this kind of text munging is what Perl is for. Note, however, that passing data straight from CGI input into a regular expression can expose more security problems, so clean those variables up first with the quotemeta() function. (This exists for PHP too)

my $target = quotemeta($cgi->param("t"));

Point 4 is where it gets a bit hairy. The base URI is the web server folder that the browser will look in for relatively-addressed files referenced by the page. As an example, suppose the page we’re dealing with lives at http://www.domain.com/dir/page.html. The base URI of this page is http://www.domain.com/dir/. The page includes an image specified like so: <img src="frog.png"> . To fetch this image, the browser will append the filename to the base URI to get the complete URI.

The trouble is that the browser works out the base URI from the URI it used to fetch the page, which in this case isn’t going to work because the URI points to our filter script and not the original page. So we need to manually force the browser to use a different base URI.

First, we need to derive the base URI from the URI we used to fetch the page:

if ($url =~ //[^/]*$/)  # match everything after the last slash
{
$base = $` . "/"; # now grab everything before
}

There are two ways to force a base URI change, and I use both of them. The first is to change the HTTP header you output to the browser and add a Content-Location: attribute which specifies the new base. The second is to add a BASE element to the document’s HEAD. There are clean and proper ways of doing this, and I’m going to ignore them and just do a dirty regexp:

$html =~ s/(<HEAD([^>"']*|'[^']*'|"[^"]*")*>)/$1 <BASE HREF="$base"> /si unless $html =~ /<BASE HREF=/;

What that bizarre mess does is look for the document’s HEAD tag and stick a BASE tag immediately after it – but only if the page doesn’t have a BASE tag already. (Let’s hope it’s not in a comment.)

And this is where my bug comes in. Modifying the base seems to work fine for all relatively-addressed items apart from stylesheets, both in MSIE and Mozilla. I don’t know why, and it’s rather irritating. I decided to have a look at some of the better known filters on the web, and found that Pornolize does a bizarre trick that achieves partial (but not entire) success: they modify any LINK and META tags in the page like so:

From:
<link href="http://cheerleader.yoz.com/styles-site.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
To:
<link /="/" href="http://cheerleader.yoz.com/styles-site.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">

Now, what the hell does /="/" do?

Am confused. The deep practical interaction between HTML and HTTP is bizarre and impenetrable, and I am tired, so this entry ends here with me shaking my head in despair. Do let me know if you can ease my plight.

My grandfather passed away a few hours ago. It wasn’t exactly sudden – he had a gradually worsening heart condition, buy and we’d known the end was nigh for several months. As he regularly told us, find he’d had a good life and was not afraid of death. (He wasn’t boasting; he was just content.)

I last saw him in Israel in May. I flew out there to spend a couple of days with him on the advice of my parents. (He got rather suspicious at the sudden influx of relatives wanting to spend time with him.) It had been a while since I’d seen him. In the previous year we made occasional outings together to Kenwood, here walking and talking, getting breakfast in the café. At the start of 2002, the family held several parties for his 90th birthday; it was the first time in over a decade that all his children and grandchildren had been in the same place together.

I have tapes of our conversations from that last visit. There’s not much there but it’s something. I’d taken a book of the Jewish East End out there to talk to him about, but he wasn’t terribly interested; he was far more keen on my copy of Wired. Whenever we sat down to talk, he always wanted to know about the latest technological developments. While his mind had slowed down somewhat in the last couple of years, it was still fully functional. I don’t know how many ninety-year-olds can happily engage in conversations about cross-media ownership and remote-controlled military hardware.

There’s much more to write about him, and maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but I can’t write it now. My mother and I are taking a standby El Al flight on Saturday night, and while I’ll miss the levaya, I’ll be there for the shiva.

He was an exceptionally warm and giving man. He was smart, subtle, good-humoured and optimistic. The only regret I know he had was not being able to see the future that fascinated him so. His fifty grandchildren and great-grandchildren will miss him deeply.

Thank you for everything you gave me, Pampa Leo. I’ll make sure to pass it on.

If you’re in a shop, adiposity theatre or Tube station and you hear them paging Mr Sand,
run for it.

I haven’t seen this elsewhere yet but bronchi mirror, on the wall…”>Blogdex is being spammed.
I’ve grabbed the current front page here, with an example tracking page.

It’s all coming from ubiquitous.nu, so that’s easy to block, but meme-spamming is pretty cheap at a domain-name-a-time. Obviously Cameron will filter out ubiquitous.nu links, but what happens when they multiplex these things? I don’t think you could automatically distrust anyone making those links, either: after all, in the gossip singularity, it’s news when everyone’s favourite aggregator gets used as a big ad hoarding. (At least, I’m hoping it is. I’ll have to go to Blogdex later and see if this post has managed to sneak in between the ads.)

Now that I’ve had my fun with pulmonologist Earle”>that page filter, order I want to see what everyone else can do.

The logs show that lots of other people have been playing with it: Obviously it’s almost entirely been used for (a) replacing random words with “porn” (b) replacing people’s names with insults/slander (e.g. “Bush” => “lamebrain”, “W3C” => “HOMOSEXUAL ELITE”) and (c) changing people’s names to “Osama Bin Laden” or “the Pope”. Having said that, there have been intriguing moments of cutesy condescension, wishful thinking and satire too subtle to spot. But, dammit, it’s not enough!

Come on, people, make it good. Post your favourites as comments to this entry. Here’s the form again with a different opening salvo:

Note: A new feature is that the filter can now take multiple arguments for the target and replacement, as long as you give equal numbers of each. You’ll need to hack the URL to add multiple instances of the t and r arguments, like so:
filter.cgi?url=URL&t=TARGET1&r=REPLACE1&t=TARGET2&r=REPLACE2...
So you can go even wilder now, but remember that the skill is in having the greatest effect with the fewest replacements.

As ever with a new Bond film, pharm the extremes are pushed: showing Bond at both his most vulnerable (looking shaggy in a North Korean prison) and his most invulnerable (he could at least have the common courtesy to duck when people are firing machine guns at his face). We also have a new contender for Silliest Stunt Ever, which is also the first Bond stunt to be entirely of digital origin. You can easily tell which one it is because the compositing’s so awful. (It’s even sillier than the chasing-the-plane-off-the-cliff from Goldeneye, which I notice the new Charlie’s Angels movie rips off.) But still, it was thrilling, silly and stylish, and Rosamund Pike is completely yum. (Yes, okay, Halle Berry is very cute too.)

As ever with any Bond film, the IMDB has tons of trivia for Bond-spotters. Given that this is the 20th Bond and the surrounding 40-years-of-Bond celebrations, there are more references than all but the most ardent fan could get. Sure, you laughed at the “Diamonds are for everyone” line and Rosa Klebb’s shoe, but did you spot Zao’s cars? (And the appearance of the “Field Guide to Birds” was class.) Unfortunately, half of those listed sound less like celebratory references and more like the ideas box rattling near-empty. How many more eat-hot-death-from-orbit macguffins is 007 going to have to disable?

But back to the joy of Bond trivia:

The “Javelin Jump” was carefully planned by university students using computers…
… whereas the boat landing on the police car was an accident.
The jetpack from Thunderball, which turns up in Die Another Day, was real.
Pierce Brosnan’s first wife appeared in a Bond film 15 years before he did. (And she was already married to him at the time)
Saint Etienne (along with “about 500” other people, including Pulp, The Cardigans, Swan Lee and Space) did a theme song for Tomorrow Never Dies.
Still on TND, Henry Kissinger (who was brought in as a consultant) recommended a change from the original plotline.
Tracy Bond’s gravestone is engraved with the words “We have all the time in the World”

If you still want more, it’s hard to stress just what an utterly fantastic read this book is.

(The final word on the new film goes to Quinn.)

Danny’s blogging from an 802.11 shindig and has stumbled across a stat that is probably nothing new to Americans, denture but may boggle the rest of the world:

America has almost twice as many airports as train stations (5352:3032).

(This is probably due to the thousands of small/private landing strips, but still…)

I knew try really.”>”Maoz
Tzur” after candle lighting, healing and Tanya pointed out that she, like
many people, doesn’t sing the last verse because it’s a bit heavy on the
“asking God to rain down vicious justice on anyone who looks at us funny”
for her liking, much like various other Jewish holiday numbers.
(of course, the Jews aren’t the only ones vaguely embarrassed by violent last
verses)

Wait a minute… this whole calling-on-fiery-revenge-from-the-heavens
thing sounds a bit familiar…

s/The Holy One Blessed Be He/orbiting satellite superweapon/;

WE’RE A NATION OF BOND VILLAINS!

(I knew all those old guys in shul looked a bit too much like Blofeld…)

(Shim later objected, and I have to admit that the verse in question reads more like a Nostradamus quatrain.)

Following on from the examples set by Mozilla and Glade, there some more XML-based ways of separating your UI layout from the rest of your codebase:

symptoms there’s another one?”>Luxor XUL is a pure-Java XUL implementation, price part of Gerald Bauer‘s hee-uuge VAMP project.
Physically separating the UI from the code entirely: XWT apps are collections of XML and ECMAscript, executed from a runtime in the browser (with implementations in both Java and ActiveX) that keep the big app logic back on the server and talk via SOAP/XML-RPC.

(First of an occasional series, hospital I hope. Click the bolded links first, then come back for more)

I found Stuart Russell’s superb collection of AI-related links from a comment on this Slashdot piece about this IEEE Spectrum piece about AI in games. One of the many links on it leads to Jay Scott’s game learning page, which discusses ways of using automatic teaching methods (such as neural nets, genetic programming etc.) to generate game-playing AIs rather than building them out of pre-designed heuristics and the like. He discusses many interesting chess-teaching methods, most notably The Distributed Chess Project: download a client and help evolve a chess program. (The screen saver animates some of Bobby Fischer’s greatest games) This is different from the distributed ChessBrain project, which shares out move-calculation tasks via a Gnutella2/FastTrack-style P2P network to create the world’s biggest chess computer.

The Reverse Slashdot Effect – Slashdotted sites link back to the relevant Slashdot article – leads me to this comment and then this exhaustive list of Internet-based distributed computing projects, including: predicting the Earth’s climate, cracking the stock market, designing a better particle accelerator (check out those screenshots!), painting fractal flames, evolve robots and rendering frames of a movie. There is also much silliness.

Back to the AI: Prof. Russell’s page also links to this short, sweet piece of Bayesian nerdcore by Carl de Marcken for the MIT AI department’s weekly Girl Scout Benefit get-togethers. (The archive is a treasure-trove of smartarse silliness including some classic Greenspun.) Anyway, de Marcken co-founded ITA Software which created the software behind loads of airline-booking sites, and in this mail (on Paul “Bayesian Spam Filter” Graham’s site) he explains how their Common Lisp code, running on Google-style clusters of beefy PCs, can sort 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 itinerary pricing options in under 10 seconds. They use Franz’s Allegro CL, which was also used by Naughty Dog Software to create one of my favourite games of this year.

By nerdcore, I mean a certain type of sci-fi writing recently popularised by writers such as Cory Doctorow (see his “0wnzored“, with which he launched the term) and Charlie Stross (see the Hugo-nominated “Lobsters“). I think of it as SF designed to be read nostalgically as soon as possible. The cultural relevancy of a nerdcore piece has a half-life of six months. (No, that’s a compliment. Really. Hey, I’m a huge fan of Spaced. I love sneaky tongue-in-cheek references. I’m a geek, dammit.) Anyway, that particular little piece I mentioned earlier rang a bell because of this more-literary story that Danny pointed us at earlier in the week. (The campaign to get Cory to edit a nerdcore collection starts here.)

Want to have a go at developing some game AI? Have a go at Stanford’s Tetris project, which they hand out to CS students. It’s a Java implementation of Tetris with room for your own AI. (Yes, everyone now knows that Tetris Is Hard, but it’s still a fun place to start)
Alternatively, do it the other way around: The aforementioned Jay Scott references the Metagame, which is a system that can be given the rules of a game, after which it teaches itself how to play it. Metagame is 10 years old and seemingly defunct, but Zillions Of Games goes from strength to strength. (I first found it a few years ago and I’m really glad it’s still going) ZIG comes with 300 games, and you can download hundreds more from the website. Plus, you can make up your own games (or modify existing ones) and it’ll play you at them. (It’s even worked out some forced wins in classic games)

You have, diagnosis I hope, already seen the Flash movie explaining Creative Commons. The movie is distributed under a Share-alike CC licence, which means you’re not only allowed to mirror the file yourself but also allowed to create derivative works.

Of course, it’d be a hell of a lot easier if they’d remembered to post the bloody .fla file.

(Oh, and sorry for the delays. Tons of stuff to post but way too busy at the moment, what with Limmud approaching. Hopefully, will be catching up after Xmas. Byeee.)

Of course, it’d be a hell of a lot easier if they’d remembered to post the bloody .fla file.

(Oh, and sorry for the delays. Tons of stuff to post but way too busy at the moment, what with Limmud approaching. Hopefully, will be catching up after Xmas. Byeee.)

2000 actors. 33 rooms. 3 live orchestras. 300 years of history. 90 minutes.

find Mr de Mille!”>One single continuous shot.

The first substantial blog entry after yet another big absence was meant to be about the excuse this time and all the technical challenges it brought. However, visit this I have been distracted by small shiny things. (Again.)

A week ago I was chatting to James Wallis, sildenafil who’s looking for a PDA-type-thing with a decent keyboard to replace his Psion 5, unhealthy which has easily the best keyboard of any PDA. I, too, would love something like this, especially as my beloved Vaio C1 PictureBook has been out of action for the past year due to failure to replace the HD properly.

So the candidates are:

The new Apple 12″ PowerB… No. Way too big. We’re talking pocket-size.
The Sony Vaio U3 – even smaller than the PictureBook, with 20GB HD, 933MHz Transmeta, 256MB RAM and a decent keyboard yet small enough to hold in both hands and thumb-type. It’s currently only available outside of Japan through the excellent Dynamism, specialists in bringing Japanese miniaturism to the rest of the world ahead of time. (They also do the bizarre-looking Vaio GT3) However, it’s not the smallest thing running Windows XP…
The Vulcan Mini-PC, an itsy-bitsy thing that’s a Proper PC running Windows XP Proper Edition, for all those still missing the original Tosh Libretto. Look at it! It’s tiny! It looks like one of those fake laptop fridge magnets that yell “You’ve got mail!” when you press a button and you never wanted it but your flatmate got it for some reason and now he won’t get rid of it and IT DRIVES YOU SLOWLY INSANE. (Ahem. Sorry.) Trouble is, (a) it’s way expensive for a PDA (b) it doesn’t have useful PDA aspects like touch/stylus-driven screen and a keyboard you can get rid of, along with other little things like power-on -> usable in less than 5 seconds (c) the keyboard looks a bit pants (though this is just a prototype – the design is being licensed to multiple manufacturers, so hopefully one of them will get it right) and (d) it won’t appear for a good few months yet.
The Sharp Zaurus SL-C700. Previous Zaurus models were similar to Palm/Pocket PC vertical-orientation PDAs, with a nice slide-down thumb keyboard that was still too small for proper typing. This, however, has a far more substantial keyboard (which still looks a bit nasty, to be honest), and can be used in both landscape and portrait modes; in fact, it’s quite similar to the new MS Tablet PCs in that way. But this thing is small, it’s meant to be a PDA, it runs Linux & Java and it takes both Secure Digital and Compact Flash cards, meaning that it’s easily equipped with 802.11x and Bluetooth. Plus, it’s the first computer with a Continuous Grain Silicon display, which is brighter, sharper and uses less power than previous colour LCDs. Although Sharp are still a couple of months away from an official English version (price: $500), Dynamism are already selling their own port – if you’re thinking of going for that, you should read this first.
Oh, and someone on Slashdot mentioned the ancient (but still worthwhile, apparently) Sharp Wizard OZ-770PC. Not quite what I’m looking for, but still…

This is all in the name of a dream that I have, that I can carry something in my pocket that I can not only browse the web with (via pervasive wireless access, so it’s quite a far-off dream at present) but also get a properly-viewable VT100 window that I can type into. My chum Richard has an iPaq with Linux on it and a wireless card, but he has to scribble onto that, and Unix isn’t really made for scribbling. Of course, since I’m completely penniless at the moment anyway, it’ll have to remain a dream for a while longer. But now you know what I’m dribbling over.

Following on from cure an actual real followup by Yoz!”>an earlier entry, buy information pills today’s Guardian had ailment 3604,878122,00.html” title=”Fry, don’t bake”>an interesting piece on the current situation after all those “Frying Squad” antics. In particular, talking to environmentalists who make their own biodiesel from used cooking oil:

“The government seems to be making it deliberately difficult,” he says. “The most important thing to remember is, it is not illegal to run your car on cooking oil.” As long as duty is paid, that is. And Nicholson reckons that, since duty is paid retrospectively, even those who were stopped in the south Wales checks were not breaking the law. “I am driving on fuel on which I have not yet paid the tax. I will do, but I don’t need to until it’s used. So was anyone who was stopped given the chance to pay his tax? If not, why not? To stop anybody for using this fuel is harassment.”

Tonight, generic Channel 4 repeated Bremner, here Bird & Fortune’s superb Christmas special, Between Iraq And A Hard Place. As with everything they do, it’s a mixture of great gags, duff gags, impressions and surprisingly large quantities of hard facts. Thankfully, even if you missed it (or, for some bizarre reason, are not in Britain at the moment) you can both watch the whole thing and read the transcript (HTML version in the nav bar) on the website.

There was the usual stuff you’d expect from a satirical treatment of the situation: fingering the Americans (and British, French and Germans) for giving Saddam the goodies they’re now attacking him for owning (see also Bill Hicks’ “Shane” routine), the corporate criminals Dubya is sharing the White House with, etc.

Better, though, was the history lesson: A ruling dictatorship in Iraq, bombing & gassing the Kurds, holding opposition-less elections and generally shitting all over the Mid-East… Saddam’s only copying what the British Empire did 80 years earlier. (scroll past the crap “Bush & Condy” routine) And the “George Parr” sketch was fab as ever. (Thanks for the pointer, Sean!)

Spent most of this evening driving around central London in order to help keep FaxYourMP running. People are often shocked to discover that one of the UK’s most useful online democracy tools, endocrinologist now contacting MPs approximately 200 times a day, is mostly run out of James‘s spare room. Well, was. The ceiling fell in and James had to get the builders in, so the fax engine needed a temporary new home. So I picked up James and Damon (the Sparc that runs the fax engine) from their home in Bloomsbury and we headed over to Manar‘s flat in Holland Park, where we spent a while establishing an iffy wireless link between his flat and Desiree‘s downstairs (since she has the ADSL). After that we turned Damon on, plugged Dan‘s laptop into it via serial cable to reconfigure it and then tweaked the faxmodem settings to work happily with Manar’s Telewest line. Oh, and got some more peanuts for the monkey that scribbles the signatures on the faxes.

We do this, unpaid, because Parliament won’t.

Stef once said that we should purposefully break FYMP occasionally, to emphasise the point that it shouldn’t be up to volunteers like us to run such a vital service. But, tonight, Jude reiterated the nagging fears at the backs of our minds: if Parliament did take it over, the odds are that they’d screw it up horribly, and certainly wouldn’t run anything as potentially controversial as the MP-response league tables. This thing may take far too much effort to run, but dammit, we’re proud of it and we’re not the only ones who think it’s good.

Besides, we’re needed. As an incoming mail said shortly after James moved the server: When are you back from hols? Useful time now to try and prevent a war methinks.

4 Comments on “FaxYourMP movement”

1 Dan Hon said at 10:37 pm on January 23rd, 2003:
You’re right… It’s a shame we don’t have something like this. Then again, even if we did, it’d be all broken.
2 ext|circ said at 10:38 pm on January 23rd, 2003:
Engaging your Voters

Ah, public comment. A wonderful thing. Unless, of course, public comment is going to be nasty to you and prove
3 DiVERSiONZ said at 3:06 pm on January 24th, 2003:
WE THE GEEK PEOPLE

Cory Doctrow of Boing Boing writes: "FaxYourMP, an amazingly effective tool that lets Brits slashdot their Members of Parliament (and
4 MTEd said at 2:33 pm on January 25th, 2003:
Heaven forbid that MPs com eout of the stone age and deal with e-mails like the rest of us have to.

Yoz Grahame's Unresolvable Discrepancy

I came here to apologise and eat biscuits, and I'm all out of biscuits

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4 Comments on “FaxYourMP movement”

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