March 2004 Archives

Quote from Major John Smith, the Pentagon's spokesman on the military commissions taking place in Guantanamo Bay, responding to accusations that the trials are unfair:

He claimed Maj Mori had misrepresented the system. "Different doesn't always mean unfair," he said. "It's very easy to be critical of the process because people haven't seen it in action."

(An extended rant about liberal URL interpretation and how there isn't enough of it, mostly pertaining to one or two examples at the BBC website.)

By Randy Gierno, Wired News

It seems that the British public just can't get enough of hot, wanton, guilt-free sex. The average cutting-edge tech-friendly Limey barely gets through a single day without taking part in a "dogging" session or "toothing" with random phone-junkies on the Tube.

But now even the electronics-poor underclass have been getting in on the act and coming up with their own low-tech variations on peer-to-peer playfulness.

Last night, at the "Toucan" pub in London's fashionable West End, I witnessed a fascinating range of sexual activity which showed that gadget-free flirting already has a deep and varied subculture.

"Oh yeah, well, some of the birds round here, they're mad for it, innit?" said my guide in the brave new world of London sex, who I'll call Barry. "Have you in the bogs soon as look at you. I mean, this one girl, right... huge tits, nice smile, she gave me this look, and it was like, "Fancy a bit?" And so we went to the lavvy round the back and she had my trousers down in seconds. And then she pulled her friend in two and the three of us were like, y'know. And then they all came back to my place. Happens all the time."

Pausing only to spill some famous London ale down the front of his XXL-sized rugby shirt, Barry outlined some key points in the rapidly-evolving lexicon of British desire. "So what you do, right, is you spot a nice tart over by the bar and you think, lovely, I'll have a bit of that. And you tip her the wink, you know? And then, if she looks back at you, she's gagging for it."

"Just like Bluetooth signalling," I commented as I tapped hurried notes into my Zaurus. "Ingenious!"

"But then, they're all gagging for it round here," continued Barry. "They all want it. I had five birds round my place the other night, I couldn't walk for a week! Haha!"

Indeed, as I continued my wanderings around the city, I realised that Barry had opened my eyes. At least five strangers made eye contact with me, something that I, as a New Yorker, found strange and erotically intoxicating. I saw couples walking hand-in-hand, doubtless having met only a few seconds earlier and looking for a secluded spot in which to consummate their random, anonymous, instant-message-enabled desire.

In another pub I decided to try Barry's tips out for myself (strictly in the interests of research, of course). Sitting at a table, I spied a pretty young Londoner chatting to a friend at the bar. Following Barry's advice, I whistled loudly to attract her attention before giving her a long and careful wink. The measured, aroused stare I received in return was unmistakable. I approached her at the bar and, in a lowered tone, quickly made an offer using the key phrases of London sexual bargaining, dotting it with references to text messaging and social software so as to establish my credentials as a member of the technological elite. During this rapid conversation she slapped my cheek and yelled, "Piss off!" I smiled and nodded before retreating, having never intended to follow through, but it was fascinating to experience a London woman confessing her desires for violent sex and bodily fluids so readily.

London: a wild arena where language and technology are being used to forge brave new passages into a previously-taboo world. Horny Americans desperate for a sex-and-tech story to file should get their asses over here as soon as they can. It's cheaper than Burning Man, anyway.

Elsewhere in Wired News: "Why The Entire Population Of New York Cast Aside Their Old Religions And Now Worship A Giant Wicker iPod" by Leander Kahney

If you're a Perl coder who hasn't been keeping a close eye on CPAN then you may have missed the latest chunk of code making quite a stir, namely Brian "Ingy" Ingerson's marvellous IO::All. And it is marvellous: if Perl is the Swiss Army Chainsaw then this is the new light saber attachment - can't do anything you couldn't do previously but it slices through most IO jobs in one or two lines, from file slurping (one line, obviously) to creating a forking server (er, two lines). This Perl.com piece would be a great introduction if another burst of coding from Ingy hadn't rendered it half-obsolete a mere three days later. But, dammit, that's what we like to see!

IO::All's design could be described, for want of a decent OO education, as "overload one class with a billion different uses" and in this case it seems to work well. The vast majority of the code revolves around grabbing code from other modules and wrapping them up in several big contextualising switches so that this single class is almost all you need for your to-ing and fro-ing with the outside filesystem. In other words, it's all about the interface. It feels very Perlish in its mixture of minimal code and DWIMness so it's not surprising that many in the Perl community have jumped on it gleefully. This "The Best $DOMAIN Functions In The World... Ever!" approach to module-building is infectious, and Yung-Chung Lin's Var module is probably going to be the first of many imitators. If you fancy having a go yourself, then Ingy's Spiffy base class is what you want to start with, but please use your enhanced exporting powers wisely: packing a single class with tons of functions (a la Python) is fine and pretty, but doing that to the default namespace (a la PHP) is just inconsiderate.

(Regarding the bizarre disconnect between what spreadsheet applications were originally intended to do and what they are used for now, the surprising connection between Excel users and UNIX geeks, and how I'm standing out in the cold.)

Oh, that crafty Cory Doctorow! Prancing around all la-di-da! "Look at me! I put my books on the web for free!" Ain't he just the shiznit?

Yeah, well, his wasn't the first big new science-fiction novel to be given away free on the web, oh no! 'Cos back in 1997, when I worked on Starship Titanic website, we gave away the entire text of the tie-in novel. (concept by Douglas Adams, book by Terry Jones)

That's right. Every single word.

(Okay, now you have to go off and get the joke before you continue reading)

Well, okay, not every word, because we left off the last fifty and spun it into one of the web's stupidest competitions (that was, remarkably, won). But we also showed the world how it was done, with PIPA - one of the silliest/coolest/most compact bits of Perl I've ever written.

Returning to Mr Doctorow, I notice that his first novel, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom has been out in its new remixable form for a while now and not much has been done with it (other than a Russian translation), so it's time to change that:

• Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (CAPIPA Remix) - in which the original has its words reordered alphabetically, using PIPA's new cousin, CAPIPA, which retains capitalisation. (Thanks for putting it online, Sean!)

  "Beautiful," BEAUTY beauty, became. BECAME because because because because because because -- because because because because because because because because because because because because because because become become become become become become become bed bed bed. bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed, bed bed bedroom bedroom bedroom-bedroom beds bedside bedside bedside.

• Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (Sausages & Mash Remix) - in which the original has all words beginning with the letters S and M replaced with "Sausage" and "Mash" respectively, in accordance with the classic children's game.

  He chuckled. "No sausage, not mash. I'm into the kind of mash sausage that you only come across on-world."

• Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (More And Bloodier Wars Remix) - in which the original is run through Babelfish several times, from English to French to German and back to English again. (With some help from Dan Urist's WWW::Babelfish module)

  I never thought that I would live, in order to arise, where the maintenance would decide A-Movin ' Dan at the person in possession of a favour light up to the death of the heat of the universe.

Remember this fab Wired piece about the virus-hunters at F-Secure? Remember their blog, full of the latest juicy virus tidbits? At last, there's an RSS feed. Day made! (Signed, Easily Pleased of Finchley.)