A response to Dave Winer about Google AutoLink

For those of you who haven’t yet heard (forgive me, web ailment I’ve been really disorganised and somewhat relying on network effects): The shortest audioblog post evar. (200k mp3)

Jewish Poker
For quite a while the two of us sat at our table, viagra wordlessly stirring our coffee. Ervinke was bored.
“All right, seek ” he said. “Let’s play poker.”
“No,” I answered. “I hate cards. I always lose.”
“Who’s talking about cards?” Thus Ervinke. “I was thinking of Jewish poker.”
He then briefly explained the rules of the game. Jewish poker is played without cards, in your head, as befits the People of the Book.
“You think of a number; I also think of a number,” Ervinke said. “Whoever thinks of a higher number wins. This sounds easy, but it has a hundred pitfalls. Nu!”
“All right,” I agreed, “Let’s try.”
We plunked down five piasters each, and leaning back in our chairs, began to think of numbers. After a while Ervinke signaled that he had one. I said I was ready.
“All right.” Thus Ervinke. “Let’s hear your number.”
“Eleven,” I said.
“Twelve,” Ervinke said, and took the money. I could have kicked myself, because originally I had thought of Fourteen, and only at the last moment I had climbed down to Eleven. I really don’t know why.
“Listen,” I turned to Ervinke. “What would have happened if I had said Fourteen?”
“What a question! I’d have lost. Now, that is just the charm of poker, you never know how things will turn out. But if you nerves cannot stand a little gambling, perhaps we had better call it off.”
Without saying another word, I put down ten piasters on the table. Ervinke did likewise. I pondered my number carefully and opened with Eighteen.
“Damn!” Ervinke said. “I only had Seventeen!”
I swept the money into my pocket and quietly guffawed. Ervinke had certainly not dreamed that I would master the tricks of Jewish poker so quickly. He had probably counted on my opening with Fifteen or Sixteen, but certainly not with Eighteen. Ervinke, his brow in angry furrows, proposed we double the stakes.
“As you like,” I sneered, and could hardly keep back my jubilant laughter. In the meantime a fantastic number had occurred to me. Thirty-five!
“Lead!” said Ervinke.
“Thirty-five!”
“Forty-three!”
With that he pocketed the forty piasters. I could feel the blood rushing into my brain.
“Listen,” I hissed. “Then why didn’t you say Forty-three the last time?”
“Because I had thought of Seventeen!” Ervinke retorted indignantly. “Don’t you see, that is the fun in poker: you never know what will happen next.”
“A pound,” I remarked dryly, and, my lips curled in scorn, I threw a note on the table. Ervinke extracted a similar note from his pocket and with maddening slowness placed it next to mine. The tension was unbearable. I opened with Fifty-four.
“Oh, damn it!” Ervinke fumed. “I also thought of Fifty-four! Draw! Another game!”
My brain worked with lightning speed. “Now you think I’ll again call Eleven, my boy,” I reasoned. “But you’ll get the surprise of your life.” I chose the surefire Sixty-nine.
“You know what, Ervinke,” – I turned to Ervinke – “you lead.”
“As you like,” he agreed. “It’s all the same with me. Seventy!”
Everything went black before my eyes. I had not felt such panic since the siege of Jerusalem.
“Nu?” Ervinke urged. “What number did you think of?”
“What do you know?” I whispered with downcast eyes. “I have forgotten.”
“You liar!” Ervinke flared up. “I know you didn’t forget, but simply thought of a smaller number and now don’t want to own up. An old trick. Shame on you!”
I almost slapped his lothesome face for this evil slander, but with some difficulty overcame the urge. With blazing eyes I upped the stakes by another pound and thought of a murderous number: Ninety-six!
“Lead, stinker,” I threw at Ervinke, whereupon he leaned across the table and hissed into my face:
“Sixteen hundred and eighty-three!”
A queer weakness gripped me.
“Eighteen hundred,” I mumbled wearily.
“Double!” Ervinke shouted, and pocketed the four pounds.
“What do you mean, ‘double’?” I snorted. “Whats that?”
“If you loose your temper in poker, you loose your shirt!”Ervinke lectured me. “Any child will understand that my number doubled is higher than yours, so it’s clear that -”
“Enough,” I gasped, and threw down a fiver. “Two thousand” I lead.
“Two thousand four hundred and seventeen.” Thus Ervinke.
“Double!” I sneered, and grabbed the steaks, but Ervinke caught my hand.
“Redouble!” he whispered, and pocketed the tenner. I felt I was going out of my mind.
“Listen” – I gritted my teeth – “If thats how things stand, I could also have said ‘redouble’ in the last game, couldn’t I?”
“Of course,” Ervinke agreed. “To tell you the truth, I was rather surprised that you didn’t. But this is poker, yahabibi – you either know how to play it or you don’t! If you are scatter-brained, better stick to croquet.”
The stakes were ten pounds. “Lead:” I screamed. Ervinke leaned back in his chair, and in a disquietingly calm voice announced his number: four.
“Ten million!” I blared triumphently. But without the slightest sign of excitement, Ervinke said:
“Ultimo!”
And then took twenty pounds.
I then broke into sobs. Ervinke stroked my hair and told me that according to Hoyle, whoever is first out with the Ultimo wins, regardless of numbers. That is the fun in poker: You have to make split second decisions.
“Twenty pounds,” I whimpered, and placed my last notes in the hands of fate. Ervinke also placed his money. My face was bathed in cold sweat. Ervinke went on calmly blowing smoke rings, only his eyes had narrowed.
“Who leads?”
“You,” I answered, and he fell into my trap like the sucker he was.
“So I lead,” Ervinke said. “Ultimo,” and he stretched out his hand for the treasure.
“Just a moment” – I stopped him: “Ben-Gurion!”
With that I pocketed the mint’s six-month output. “Ben-Gurion is even stronger than Ultimo,” I explained. “But its getting dark outside. Perhaps we had better break it off.”
We paid the waiter and left.
Ervinke asked for his money back, saying that I had invented the Ben-Gurion on the spur of the moment. I admitted this, but said that the fun in poker was just in the rule that you never returned the money you had won.

Due to the BAFTA-nomination of youth health no tea, it’s all the same to me”>the BBC’s new version of the Hitchhiker’s text adventure (as updated by Sean, Shim and Rod Lord), the guy who co-created the original game is coming to town next week.

We think it’d be fab if we could get him in conversation publically, you know, giving a talk about the games he’s worked on (such as the legendary Planetfall and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), the history of Infocom, his work at WorldWinner and all that.

Except:

1. We need to find a decent central London talk venue for 100-or-so people
2. Once we have that venue, we need to announce it

The most suitable date for this is Thursday 3rd March. (There is a small but definite chance that it may be Tuesday 1st instead, but for now, it’s the Thursday we’re working on.) Obviously, final details will be posted here once I have them.

Can you help? Let us know.

UPDATE: All sorted. Big thanks to James Wallis for the venue suggestion and James Cronin for booking it!

Very Late Update: An audio recording of the event is available here (90MB .ogg file)

In honour of the BAFTA award nomination for the BBC’s new Internet edition of the classic Infocom computer game, cheap The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, we present two titans of the text adventure:

Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater, in conversation

(on interactive fiction, Douglas Adams and other lost worlds)

As well as working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker’s game in 1985, Steve Meretzky is responsible for such other classics of the genre as Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Zork Zero. In 1999 he was named one of the industry’s 25 “Game Gods” by PC Gamer magazine. He currently holds the position of Principal Game Designer for WorldWinner, Inc.

Veteran writer and broadcaster Michael Bywater has been involved with interactive storytelling since the eighties, both with Douglas Adams on Infocom’s Bureaucracy and the legendary British games company Magnetic Scrolls. He worked with Adams again in the mid-nineties on The Digital Village’s Starship Titanic. His third book, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost & Where Did It Go? (not, as previously suggested, a collection of his columns for The Independent On Sunday) is out now.

Date: Thursday 3rd March, 8:00pm

Price: £4 on the door – all proceeds go to Save The Rhino and The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

Venue: The Brockway Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL (map)

Any questions: yoz@yoz.com

Like many others, patient I had written off Dave Winer’s recent obsession with the new Google toolbar. That was until I actually downloaded and installed the thing, check and realised – oh my god! There are some really important points he’s raised, and everyone needs to hear them right now!

Read the rest of this entry »

At last, I understand the dangers of Google AutoLink!

For those of you who haven’t yet heard (forgive me, web ailment I’ve been really disorganised and somewhat relying on network effects): The shortest audioblog post evar. (200k mp3)

Jewish Poker
For quite a while the two of us sat at our table, viagra wordlessly stirring our coffee. Ervinke was bored.
“All right, seek ” he said. “Let’s play poker.”
“No,” I answered. “I hate cards. I always lose.”
“Who’s talking about cards?” Thus Ervinke. “I was thinking of Jewish poker.”
He then briefly explained the rules of the game. Jewish poker is played without cards, in your head, as befits the People of the Book.
“You think of a number; I also think of a number,” Ervinke said. “Whoever thinks of a higher number wins. This sounds easy, but it has a hundred pitfalls. Nu!”
“All right,” I agreed, “Let’s try.”
We plunked down five piasters each, and leaning back in our chairs, began to think of numbers. After a while Ervinke signaled that he had one. I said I was ready.
“All right.” Thus Ervinke. “Let’s hear your number.”
“Eleven,” I said.
“Twelve,” Ervinke said, and took the money. I could have kicked myself, because originally I had thought of Fourteen, and only at the last moment I had climbed down to Eleven. I really don’t know why.
“Listen,” I turned to Ervinke. “What would have happened if I had said Fourteen?”
“What a question! I’d have lost. Now, that is just the charm of poker, you never know how things will turn out. But if you nerves cannot stand a little gambling, perhaps we had better call it off.”
Without saying another word, I put down ten piasters on the table. Ervinke did likewise. I pondered my number carefully and opened with Eighteen.
“Damn!” Ervinke said. “I only had Seventeen!”
I swept the money into my pocket and quietly guffawed. Ervinke had certainly not dreamed that I would master the tricks of Jewish poker so quickly. He had probably counted on my opening with Fifteen or Sixteen, but certainly not with Eighteen. Ervinke, his brow in angry furrows, proposed we double the stakes.
“As you like,” I sneered, and could hardly keep back my jubilant laughter. In the meantime a fantastic number had occurred to me. Thirty-five!
“Lead!” said Ervinke.
“Thirty-five!”
“Forty-three!”
With that he pocketed the forty piasters. I could feel the blood rushing into my brain.
“Listen,” I hissed. “Then why didn’t you say Forty-three the last time?”
“Because I had thought of Seventeen!” Ervinke retorted indignantly. “Don’t you see, that is the fun in poker: you never know what will happen next.”
“A pound,” I remarked dryly, and, my lips curled in scorn, I threw a note on the table. Ervinke extracted a similar note from his pocket and with maddening slowness placed it next to mine. The tension was unbearable. I opened with Fifty-four.
“Oh, damn it!” Ervinke fumed. “I also thought of Fifty-four! Draw! Another game!”
My brain worked with lightning speed. “Now you think I’ll again call Eleven, my boy,” I reasoned. “But you’ll get the surprise of your life.” I chose the surefire Sixty-nine.
“You know what, Ervinke,” – I turned to Ervinke – “you lead.”
“As you like,” he agreed. “It’s all the same with me. Seventy!”
Everything went black before my eyes. I had not felt such panic since the siege of Jerusalem.
“Nu?” Ervinke urged. “What number did you think of?”
“What do you know?” I whispered with downcast eyes. “I have forgotten.”
“You liar!” Ervinke flared up. “I know you didn’t forget, but simply thought of a smaller number and now don’t want to own up. An old trick. Shame on you!”
I almost slapped his lothesome face for this evil slander, but with some difficulty overcame the urge. With blazing eyes I upped the stakes by another pound and thought of a murderous number: Ninety-six!
“Lead, stinker,” I threw at Ervinke, whereupon he leaned across the table and hissed into my face:
“Sixteen hundred and eighty-three!”
A queer weakness gripped me.
“Eighteen hundred,” I mumbled wearily.
“Double!” Ervinke shouted, and pocketed the four pounds.
“What do you mean, ‘double’?” I snorted. “Whats that?”
“If you loose your temper in poker, you loose your shirt!”Ervinke lectured me. “Any child will understand that my number doubled is higher than yours, so it’s clear that -”
“Enough,” I gasped, and threw down a fiver. “Two thousand” I lead.
“Two thousand four hundred and seventeen.” Thus Ervinke.
“Double!” I sneered, and grabbed the steaks, but Ervinke caught my hand.
“Redouble!” he whispered, and pocketed the tenner. I felt I was going out of my mind.
“Listen” – I gritted my teeth – “If thats how things stand, I could also have said ‘redouble’ in the last game, couldn’t I?”
“Of course,” Ervinke agreed. “To tell you the truth, I was rather surprised that you didn’t. But this is poker, yahabibi – you either know how to play it or you don’t! If you are scatter-brained, better stick to croquet.”
The stakes were ten pounds. “Lead:” I screamed. Ervinke leaned back in his chair, and in a disquietingly calm voice announced his number: four.
“Ten million!” I blared triumphently. But without the slightest sign of excitement, Ervinke said:
“Ultimo!”
And then took twenty pounds.
I then broke into sobs. Ervinke stroked my hair and told me that according to Hoyle, whoever is first out with the Ultimo wins, regardless of numbers. That is the fun in poker: You have to make split second decisions.
“Twenty pounds,” I whimpered, and placed my last notes in the hands of fate. Ervinke also placed his money. My face was bathed in cold sweat. Ervinke went on calmly blowing smoke rings, only his eyes had narrowed.
“Who leads?”
“You,” I answered, and he fell into my trap like the sucker he was.
“So I lead,” Ervinke said. “Ultimo,” and he stretched out his hand for the treasure.
“Just a moment” – I stopped him: “Ben-Gurion!”
With that I pocketed the mint’s six-month output. “Ben-Gurion is even stronger than Ultimo,” I explained. “But its getting dark outside. Perhaps we had better break it off.”
We paid the waiter and left.
Ervinke asked for his money back, saying that I had invented the Ben-Gurion on the spur of the moment. I admitted this, but said that the fun in poker was just in the rule that you never returned the money you had won.

Due to the BAFTA-nomination of youth health no tea, it’s all the same to me”>the BBC’s new version of the Hitchhiker’s text adventure (as updated by Sean, Shim and Rod Lord), the guy who co-created the original game is coming to town next week.

We think it’d be fab if we could get him in conversation publically, you know, giving a talk about the games he’s worked on (such as the legendary Planetfall and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), the history of Infocom, his work at WorldWinner and all that.

Except:

1. We need to find a decent central London talk venue for 100-or-so people
2. Once we have that venue, we need to announce it

The most suitable date for this is Thursday 3rd March. (There is a small but definite chance that it may be Tuesday 1st instead, but for now, it’s the Thursday we’re working on.) Obviously, final details will be posted here once I have them.

Can you help? Let us know.

UPDATE: All sorted. Big thanks to James Wallis for the venue suggestion and James Cronin for booking it!

Very Late Update: An audio recording of the event is available here (90MB .ogg file)

In honour of the BAFTA award nomination for the BBC’s new Internet edition of the classic Infocom computer game, cheap The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, we present two titans of the text adventure:

Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater, in conversation

(on interactive fiction, Douglas Adams and other lost worlds)

As well as working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker’s game in 1985, Steve Meretzky is responsible for such other classics of the genre as Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Zork Zero. In 1999 he was named one of the industry’s 25 “Game Gods” by PC Gamer magazine. He currently holds the position of Principal Game Designer for WorldWinner, Inc.

Veteran writer and broadcaster Michael Bywater has been involved with interactive storytelling since the eighties, both with Douglas Adams on Infocom’s Bureaucracy and the legendary British games company Magnetic Scrolls. He worked with Adams again in the mid-nineties on The Digital Village’s Starship Titanic. His third book, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost & Where Did It Go? (not, as previously suggested, a collection of his columns for The Independent On Sunday) is out now.

Date: Thursday 3rd March, 8:00pm

Price: £4 on the door – all proceeds go to Save The Rhino and The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

Venue: The Brockway Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL (map)

Any questions: yoz@yoz.com

Like many others, patient I had written off Dave Winer’s recent obsession with the new Google toolbar. That was until I actually downloaded and installed the thing, check and realised – oh my god! There are some really important points he’s raised, and everyone needs to hear them right now!

Read the rest of this entry »

This Thursday – Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater, London

For those of you who haven’t yet heard (forgive me, web ailment I’ve been really disorganised and somewhat relying on network effects): The shortest audioblog post evar. (200k mp3)

Jewish Poker
For quite a while the two of us sat at our table, viagra wordlessly stirring our coffee. Ervinke was bored.
“All right, seek ” he said. “Let’s play poker.”
“No,” I answered. “I hate cards. I always lose.”
“Who’s talking about cards?” Thus Ervinke. “I was thinking of Jewish poker.”
He then briefly explained the rules of the game. Jewish poker is played without cards, in your head, as befits the People of the Book.
“You think of a number; I also think of a number,” Ervinke said. “Whoever thinks of a higher number wins. This sounds easy, but it has a hundred pitfalls. Nu!”
“All right,” I agreed, “Let’s try.”
We plunked down five piasters each, and leaning back in our chairs, began to think of numbers. After a while Ervinke signaled that he had one. I said I was ready.
“All right.” Thus Ervinke. “Let’s hear your number.”
“Eleven,” I said.
“Twelve,” Ervinke said, and took the money. I could have kicked myself, because originally I had thought of Fourteen, and only at the last moment I had climbed down to Eleven. I really don’t know why.
“Listen,” I turned to Ervinke. “What would have happened if I had said Fourteen?”
“What a question! I’d have lost. Now, that is just the charm of poker, you never know how things will turn out. But if you nerves cannot stand a little gambling, perhaps we had better call it off.”
Without saying another word, I put down ten piasters on the table. Ervinke did likewise. I pondered my number carefully and opened with Eighteen.
“Damn!” Ervinke said. “I only had Seventeen!”
I swept the money into my pocket and quietly guffawed. Ervinke had certainly not dreamed that I would master the tricks of Jewish poker so quickly. He had probably counted on my opening with Fifteen or Sixteen, but certainly not with Eighteen. Ervinke, his brow in angry furrows, proposed we double the stakes.
“As you like,” I sneered, and could hardly keep back my jubilant laughter. In the meantime a fantastic number had occurred to me. Thirty-five!
“Lead!” said Ervinke.
“Thirty-five!”
“Forty-three!”
With that he pocketed the forty piasters. I could feel the blood rushing into my brain.
“Listen,” I hissed. “Then why didn’t you say Forty-three the last time?”
“Because I had thought of Seventeen!” Ervinke retorted indignantly. “Don’t you see, that is the fun in poker: you never know what will happen next.”
“A pound,” I remarked dryly, and, my lips curled in scorn, I threw a note on the table. Ervinke extracted a similar note from his pocket and with maddening slowness placed it next to mine. The tension was unbearable. I opened with Fifty-four.
“Oh, damn it!” Ervinke fumed. “I also thought of Fifty-four! Draw! Another game!”
My brain worked with lightning speed. “Now you think I’ll again call Eleven, my boy,” I reasoned. “But you’ll get the surprise of your life.” I chose the surefire Sixty-nine.
“You know what, Ervinke,” – I turned to Ervinke – “you lead.”
“As you like,” he agreed. “It’s all the same with me. Seventy!”
Everything went black before my eyes. I had not felt such panic since the siege of Jerusalem.
“Nu?” Ervinke urged. “What number did you think of?”
“What do you know?” I whispered with downcast eyes. “I have forgotten.”
“You liar!” Ervinke flared up. “I know you didn’t forget, but simply thought of a smaller number and now don’t want to own up. An old trick. Shame on you!”
I almost slapped his lothesome face for this evil slander, but with some difficulty overcame the urge. With blazing eyes I upped the stakes by another pound and thought of a murderous number: Ninety-six!
“Lead, stinker,” I threw at Ervinke, whereupon he leaned across the table and hissed into my face:
“Sixteen hundred and eighty-three!”
A queer weakness gripped me.
“Eighteen hundred,” I mumbled wearily.
“Double!” Ervinke shouted, and pocketed the four pounds.
“What do you mean, ‘double’?” I snorted. “Whats that?”
“If you loose your temper in poker, you loose your shirt!”Ervinke lectured me. “Any child will understand that my number doubled is higher than yours, so it’s clear that -”
“Enough,” I gasped, and threw down a fiver. “Two thousand” I lead.
“Two thousand four hundred and seventeen.” Thus Ervinke.
“Double!” I sneered, and grabbed the steaks, but Ervinke caught my hand.
“Redouble!” he whispered, and pocketed the tenner. I felt I was going out of my mind.
“Listen” – I gritted my teeth – “If thats how things stand, I could also have said ‘redouble’ in the last game, couldn’t I?”
“Of course,” Ervinke agreed. “To tell you the truth, I was rather surprised that you didn’t. But this is poker, yahabibi – you either know how to play it or you don’t! If you are scatter-brained, better stick to croquet.”
The stakes were ten pounds. “Lead:” I screamed. Ervinke leaned back in his chair, and in a disquietingly calm voice announced his number: four.
“Ten million!” I blared triumphently. But without the slightest sign of excitement, Ervinke said:
“Ultimo!”
And then took twenty pounds.
I then broke into sobs. Ervinke stroked my hair and told me that according to Hoyle, whoever is first out with the Ultimo wins, regardless of numbers. That is the fun in poker: You have to make split second decisions.
“Twenty pounds,” I whimpered, and placed my last notes in the hands of fate. Ervinke also placed his money. My face was bathed in cold sweat. Ervinke went on calmly blowing smoke rings, only his eyes had narrowed.
“Who leads?”
“You,” I answered, and he fell into my trap like the sucker he was.
“So I lead,” Ervinke said. “Ultimo,” and he stretched out his hand for the treasure.
“Just a moment” – I stopped him: “Ben-Gurion!”
With that I pocketed the mint’s six-month output. “Ben-Gurion is even stronger than Ultimo,” I explained. “But its getting dark outside. Perhaps we had better break it off.”
We paid the waiter and left.
Ervinke asked for his money back, saying that I had invented the Ben-Gurion on the spur of the moment. I admitted this, but said that the fun in poker was just in the rule that you never returned the money you had won.

Due to the BAFTA-nomination of youth health no tea, it’s all the same to me”>the BBC’s new version of the Hitchhiker’s text adventure (as updated by Sean, Shim and Rod Lord), the guy who co-created the original game is coming to town next week.

We think it’d be fab if we could get him in conversation publically, you know, giving a talk about the games he’s worked on (such as the legendary Planetfall and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), the history of Infocom, his work at WorldWinner and all that.

Except:

1. We need to find a decent central London talk venue for 100-or-so people
2. Once we have that venue, we need to announce it

The most suitable date for this is Thursday 3rd March. (There is a small but definite chance that it may be Tuesday 1st instead, but for now, it’s the Thursday we’re working on.) Obviously, final details will be posted here once I have them.

Can you help? Let us know.

UPDATE: All sorted. Big thanks to James Wallis for the venue suggestion and James Cronin for booking it!

Very Late Update: An audio recording of the event is available here (90MB .ogg file)

In honour of the BAFTA award nomination for the BBC’s new Internet edition of the classic Infocom computer game, cheap The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, we present two titans of the text adventure:

Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater, in conversation

(on interactive fiction, Douglas Adams and other lost worlds)

As well as working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker’s game in 1985, Steve Meretzky is responsible for such other classics of the genre as Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Zork Zero. In 1999 he was named one of the industry’s 25 “Game Gods” by PC Gamer magazine. He currently holds the position of Principal Game Designer for WorldWinner, Inc.

Veteran writer and broadcaster Michael Bywater has been involved with interactive storytelling since the eighties, both with Douglas Adams on Infocom’s Bureaucracy and the legendary British games company Magnetic Scrolls. He worked with Adams again in the mid-nineties on The Digital Village’s Starship Titanic. His third book, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost & Where Did It Go? (not, as previously suggested, a collection of his columns for The Independent On Sunday) is out now.

Date: Thursday 3rd March, 8:00pm

Price: £4 on the door – all proceeds go to Save The Rhino and The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

Venue: The Brockway Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL (map)

Any questions: yoz@yoz.com

Steve Meretzky event next week – venue wanted

For those of you who haven’t yet heard (forgive me, web ailment I’ve been really disorganised and somewhat relying on network effects): The shortest audioblog post evar. (200k mp3)

Jewish Poker
For quite a while the two of us sat at our table, viagra wordlessly stirring our coffee. Ervinke was bored.
“All right, seek ” he said. “Let’s play poker.”
“No,” I answered. “I hate cards. I always lose.”
“Who’s talking about cards?” Thus Ervinke. “I was thinking of Jewish poker.”
He then briefly explained the rules of the game. Jewish poker is played without cards, in your head, as befits the People of the Book.
“You think of a number; I also think of a number,” Ervinke said. “Whoever thinks of a higher number wins. This sounds easy, but it has a hundred pitfalls. Nu!”
“All right,” I agreed, “Let’s try.”
We plunked down five piasters each, and leaning back in our chairs, began to think of numbers. After a while Ervinke signaled that he had one. I said I was ready.
“All right.” Thus Ervinke. “Let’s hear your number.”
“Eleven,” I said.
“Twelve,” Ervinke said, and took the money. I could have kicked myself, because originally I had thought of Fourteen, and only at the last moment I had climbed down to Eleven. I really don’t know why.
“Listen,” I turned to Ervinke. “What would have happened if I had said Fourteen?”
“What a question! I’d have lost. Now, that is just the charm of poker, you never know how things will turn out. But if you nerves cannot stand a little gambling, perhaps we had better call it off.”
Without saying another word, I put down ten piasters on the table. Ervinke did likewise. I pondered my number carefully and opened with Eighteen.
“Damn!” Ervinke said. “I only had Seventeen!”
I swept the money into my pocket and quietly guffawed. Ervinke had certainly not dreamed that I would master the tricks of Jewish poker so quickly. He had probably counted on my opening with Fifteen or Sixteen, but certainly not with Eighteen. Ervinke, his brow in angry furrows, proposed we double the stakes.
“As you like,” I sneered, and could hardly keep back my jubilant laughter. In the meantime a fantastic number had occurred to me. Thirty-five!
“Lead!” said Ervinke.
“Thirty-five!”
“Forty-three!”
With that he pocketed the forty piasters. I could feel the blood rushing into my brain.
“Listen,” I hissed. “Then why didn’t you say Forty-three the last time?”
“Because I had thought of Seventeen!” Ervinke retorted indignantly. “Don’t you see, that is the fun in poker: you never know what will happen next.”
“A pound,” I remarked dryly, and, my lips curled in scorn, I threw a note on the table. Ervinke extracted a similar note from his pocket and with maddening slowness placed it next to mine. The tension was unbearable. I opened with Fifty-four.
“Oh, damn it!” Ervinke fumed. “I also thought of Fifty-four! Draw! Another game!”
My brain worked with lightning speed. “Now you think I’ll again call Eleven, my boy,” I reasoned. “But you’ll get the surprise of your life.” I chose the surefire Sixty-nine.
“You know what, Ervinke,” – I turned to Ervinke – “you lead.”
“As you like,” he agreed. “It’s all the same with me. Seventy!”
Everything went black before my eyes. I had not felt such panic since the siege of Jerusalem.
“Nu?” Ervinke urged. “What number did you think of?”
“What do you know?” I whispered with downcast eyes. “I have forgotten.”
“You liar!” Ervinke flared up. “I know you didn’t forget, but simply thought of a smaller number and now don’t want to own up. An old trick. Shame on you!”
I almost slapped his lothesome face for this evil slander, but with some difficulty overcame the urge. With blazing eyes I upped the stakes by another pound and thought of a murderous number: Ninety-six!
“Lead, stinker,” I threw at Ervinke, whereupon he leaned across the table and hissed into my face:
“Sixteen hundred and eighty-three!”
A queer weakness gripped me.
“Eighteen hundred,” I mumbled wearily.
“Double!” Ervinke shouted, and pocketed the four pounds.
“What do you mean, ‘double’?” I snorted. “Whats that?”
“If you loose your temper in poker, you loose your shirt!”Ervinke lectured me. “Any child will understand that my number doubled is higher than yours, so it’s clear that -”
“Enough,” I gasped, and threw down a fiver. “Two thousand” I lead.
“Two thousand four hundred and seventeen.” Thus Ervinke.
“Double!” I sneered, and grabbed the steaks, but Ervinke caught my hand.
“Redouble!” he whispered, and pocketed the tenner. I felt I was going out of my mind.
“Listen” – I gritted my teeth – “If thats how things stand, I could also have said ‘redouble’ in the last game, couldn’t I?”
“Of course,” Ervinke agreed. “To tell you the truth, I was rather surprised that you didn’t. But this is poker, yahabibi – you either know how to play it or you don’t! If you are scatter-brained, better stick to croquet.”
The stakes were ten pounds. “Lead:” I screamed. Ervinke leaned back in his chair, and in a disquietingly calm voice announced his number: four.
“Ten million!” I blared triumphently. But without the slightest sign of excitement, Ervinke said:
“Ultimo!”
And then took twenty pounds.
I then broke into sobs. Ervinke stroked my hair and told me that according to Hoyle, whoever is first out with the Ultimo wins, regardless of numbers. That is the fun in poker: You have to make split second decisions.
“Twenty pounds,” I whimpered, and placed my last notes in the hands of fate. Ervinke also placed his money. My face was bathed in cold sweat. Ervinke went on calmly blowing smoke rings, only his eyes had narrowed.
“Who leads?”
“You,” I answered, and he fell into my trap like the sucker he was.
“So I lead,” Ervinke said. “Ultimo,” and he stretched out his hand for the treasure.
“Just a moment” – I stopped him: “Ben-Gurion!”
With that I pocketed the mint’s six-month output. “Ben-Gurion is even stronger than Ultimo,” I explained. “But its getting dark outside. Perhaps we had better break it off.”
We paid the waiter and left.
Ervinke asked for his money back, saying that I had invented the Ben-Gurion on the spur of the moment. I admitted this, but said that the fun in poker was just in the rule that you never returned the money you had won.

Due to the BAFTA-nomination of youth health no tea, it’s all the same to me”>the BBC’s new version of the Hitchhiker’s text adventure (as updated by Sean, Shim and Rod Lord), the guy who co-created the original game is coming to town next week.

We think it’d be fab if we could get him in conversation publically, you know, giving a talk about the games he’s worked on (such as the legendary Planetfall and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), the history of Infocom, his work at WorldWinner and all that.

Except:

1. We need to find a decent central London talk venue for 100-or-so people
2. Once we have that venue, we need to announce it

The most suitable date for this is Thursday 3rd March. (There is a small but definite chance that it may be Tuesday 1st instead, but for now, it’s the Thursday we’re working on.) Obviously, final details will be posted here once I have them.

Can you help? Let us know.

UPDATE: All sorted. Big thanks to James Wallis for the venue suggestion and James Cronin for booking it!

Grave intelligence

For those of you who haven’t yet heard (forgive me, web ailment I’ve been really disorganised and somewhat relying on network effects): The shortest audioblog post evar. (200k mp3)

A crap fix for a crap bug (Soft hyphens in Mozilla)

Date: Fri Oct 29 13:45:53 2004 PDT
From: ?
To: *Short Attention Span Theater (#75504)

First they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the homosexuals and I said nothing because I was not a homosexual.
Then I realized that there would never be anything good on television ever again.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, website like this Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, audiologist apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, information pills wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, treatment Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, capsule apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

Those of you who are subscribed to my blog and frustrated by my wild inconsistency in output may be even more frustrated to learn that I have been blogging consistently for several months now, adiposity just not here. Of course, cough it’s easy to blog consistently when all you’re doing is saving a link and adding one occasionally-witty line of comment, which is why I’ve put so much more into my del.icio.us linkblog. Clicking on that link takes you to my full del.icio.us account, which may be rather more than you want, since I also use it just for things I want to bookmark for myself. Links that I specifically want other people to see – about a third of the total – go into my top tag, from where they are reflected to Haddock Linkblogs. So if you want a good linkblog from me, I’d suggest starting with top. One day, I may even get around to integrating into this site, if I can find the room in my hideously-crowded front-page layout.

(Other recommended tags, based purely on the amount I throw into them: perl, software, windows and funny.)

I’ve been a big fan of del.icio.us for a long time and have done occasional bits of hacking on it, such as my avar.icio.us posting interface (some bits of which have now found their way into Greg Sadetsky’s fabulous nutr.itio.us). Today, I wondered why nobody appeared to have done a Firefox search plugin. Twenty minutes later, here they are:

• del.icio.us – your bookmarks
• del.icio.us – all bookmarks

May all your links be yummy.

There are some things that machines are better at doing than people, visit this and vice versa. Automation is all about the former and CAPTCHAs – those little mangled-text images that you have to type in before you’re allowed a free email account – are all about the latter.

The purpose of CAPTCHAs is to foil automated attempts by spammers to harvest tons of free email accounts. The trouble is that, as was identified over a year ago, you can automate circumvention, if you’re clever about how you harness and use human processing power. In this case, you set up a site with content that people really want to get. (Porn, or warez, or… you get the idea.) In order for people to get to the content, they have to go through a CAPTCHA test – except that the CAPTCHA is actually grabbed from the web service whose defenses you want to breach. Your eager porn-surfing visitors are doing all the hard work for you.

I’m writing about this now in response to this post by Jon Udell, which discusses some of the pros and cons of CAPTCHAs. The main downside he identifies is that, in order to withstand computational defeat, some CAPTCHAs have become so hard that the average human can’t pass them. Similarly, as Matt May points out in this excellent post, CAPTCHAs are an accessibility black hole.
While these are notable problems, I think it’s pretty trivial compared to the CAPTCHA-farming idea I’ve outlined above, which lowers the CAPTCHA barrier to a trivially-breakable level.

To sum up: CAPTCHAs are a pain to users, they trample all over good accessibility practice and, most importantly, they’re useless as a defense against automation. So why the hell are Yahoo et al still using them? Am I wrong in calling CAPTCHA a dead duck? (I have no metrics to back them up, and invite any web techies from large CAPTCHA-using services to contradict me)

I took note of the CAPTCHA-farming idea when I saw it because it’s an ingenious way of harnessing large amounts of brainpower in tiny chunks, for which there are all kinds of applications. Here’s an example: instead of making CAPTCHA-style image tests which look like this…

… make ones that look like this…

… and then you can lay off half of your data entry & verification staff. (The above image is an excerpt from a census form on this Lockheed Martin press release, which claims that they have handwriting-recognition up to 85% accuracy. That still leaves a ton of human intervention if you’re dealing with 100,000 forms)

Okay, I’m not being entirely serious with that example, but there are industries out there existing entirely to harness the power of web surfers who’ve lost their way. Prime example: those websites full of secondary link lists that exist purely to show up in Google results and act as a banner-loaded intermediary before sending the on their way to buy a digital camera, via an affiliate link. Popular Power – the late lamented startup that wanted to sell spare cycles of desktop computers to computationally-hungry customers – was aiming at the wrong resource. Distributed CPU cycles are worthless unless you’re SETI or Pixar. Distributed brain cycles… now that’s a much more intriguing proposition.

Or, to put it another way…

Tired: Third-world data-processing sweatshops
Wired: Thousands of clueless web surfers + a good aggregation engine

Here’s something that you probably didn’t know (it was certainly news to me): Mozilla’s HTML 4.0 support is lacking. Some go as far as saying it’s not fully compliant. It’s always been like this; even worse, stomach in this particular area, herpes IE’s support is just fine. It’s just the kind of standards-conformance problem that designers should be screaming about, pilule yet there’s mostly an eerie silence on the topic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Goodbye CAPTCHAs, hello Distributed Porn-Powered Processing

Date: Fri Oct 29 13:45:53 2004 PDT
From: ?
To: *Short Attention Span Theater (#75504)

First they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the homosexuals and I said nothing because I was not a homosexual.
Then I realized that there would never be anything good on television ever again.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, website like this Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, audiologist apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, information pills wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, treatment Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, capsule apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

Those of you who are subscribed to my blog and frustrated by my wild inconsistency in output may be even more frustrated to learn that I have been blogging consistently for several months now, adiposity just not here. Of course, cough it’s easy to blog consistently when all you’re doing is saving a link and adding one occasionally-witty line of comment, which is why I’ve put so much more into my del.icio.us linkblog. Clicking on that link takes you to my full del.icio.us account, which may be rather more than you want, since I also use it just for things I want to bookmark for myself. Links that I specifically want other people to see – about a third of the total – go into my top tag, from where they are reflected to Haddock Linkblogs. So if you want a good linkblog from me, I’d suggest starting with top. One day, I may even get around to integrating into this site, if I can find the room in my hideously-crowded front-page layout.

(Other recommended tags, based purely on the amount I throw into them: perl, software, windows and funny.)

I’ve been a big fan of del.icio.us for a long time and have done occasional bits of hacking on it, such as my avar.icio.us posting interface (some bits of which have now found their way into Greg Sadetsky’s fabulous nutr.itio.us). Today, I wondered why nobody appeared to have done a Firefox search plugin. Twenty minutes later, here they are:

• del.icio.us – your bookmarks
• del.icio.us – all bookmarks

May all your links be yummy.

There are some things that machines are better at doing than people, visit this and vice versa. Automation is all about the former and CAPTCHAs – those little mangled-text images that you have to type in before you’re allowed a free email account – are all about the latter.

The purpose of CAPTCHAs is to foil automated attempts by spammers to harvest tons of free email accounts. The trouble is that, as was identified over a year ago, you can automate circumvention, if you’re clever about how you harness and use human processing power. In this case, you set up a site with content that people really want to get. (Porn, or warez, or… you get the idea.) In order for people to get to the content, they have to go through a CAPTCHA test – except that the CAPTCHA is actually grabbed from the web service whose defenses you want to breach. Your eager porn-surfing visitors are doing all the hard work for you.

I’m writing about this now in response to this post by Jon Udell, which discusses some of the pros and cons of CAPTCHAs. The main downside he identifies is that, in order to withstand computational defeat, some CAPTCHAs have become so hard that the average human can’t pass them. Similarly, as Matt May points out in this excellent post, CAPTCHAs are an accessibility black hole.
While these are notable problems, I think it’s pretty trivial compared to the CAPTCHA-farming idea I’ve outlined above, which lowers the CAPTCHA barrier to a trivially-breakable level.

To sum up: CAPTCHAs are a pain to users, they trample all over good accessibility practice and, most importantly, they’re useless as a defense against automation. So why the hell are Yahoo et al still using them? Am I wrong in calling CAPTCHA a dead duck? (I have no metrics to back them up, and invite any web techies from large CAPTCHA-using services to contradict me)

I took note of the CAPTCHA-farming idea when I saw it because it’s an ingenious way of harnessing large amounts of brainpower in tiny chunks, for which there are all kinds of applications. Here’s an example: instead of making CAPTCHA-style image tests which look like this…

… make ones that look like this…

… and then you can lay off half of your data entry & verification staff. (The above image is an excerpt from a census form on this Lockheed Martin press release, which claims that they have handwriting-recognition up to 85% accuracy. That still leaves a ton of human intervention if you’re dealing with 100,000 forms)

Okay, I’m not being entirely serious with that example, but there are industries out there existing entirely to harness the power of web surfers who’ve lost their way. Prime example: those websites full of secondary link lists that exist purely to show up in Google results and act as a banner-loaded intermediary before sending the on their way to buy a digital camera, via an affiliate link. Popular Power – the late lamented startup that wanted to sell spare cycles of desktop computers to computationally-hungry customers – was aiming at the wrong resource. Distributed CPU cycles are worthless unless you’re SETI or Pixar. Distributed brain cycles… now that’s a much more intriguing proposition.

Or, to put it another way…

Tired: Third-world data-processing sweatshops
Wired: Thousands of clueless web surfers + a good aggregation engine

Mmm, yummy

Date: Fri Oct 29 13:45:53 2004 PDT
From: ?
To: *Short Attention Span Theater (#75504)

First they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the homosexuals and I said nothing because I was not a homosexual.
Then I realized that there would never be anything good on television ever again.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, website like this Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, audiologist apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, information pills wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, treatment Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, capsule apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

Those of you who are subscribed to my blog and frustrated by my wild inconsistency in output may be even more frustrated to learn that I have been blogging consistently for several months now, adiposity just not here. Of course, cough it’s easy to blog consistently when all you’re doing is saving a link and adding one occasionally-witty line of comment, which is why I’ve put so much more into my del.icio.us linkblog. Clicking on that link takes you to my full del.icio.us account, which may be rather more than you want, since I also use it just for things I want to bookmark for myself. Links that I specifically want other people to see – about a third of the total – go into my top tag, from where they are reflected to Haddock Linkblogs. So if you want a good linkblog from me, I’d suggest starting with top. One day, I may even get around to integrating into this site, if I can find the room in my hideously-crowded front-page layout.

(Other recommended tags, based purely on the amount I throw into them: perl, software, windows and funny.)

I’ve been a big fan of del.icio.us for a long time and have done occasional bits of hacking on it, such as my avar.icio.us posting interface (some bits of which have now found their way into Greg Sadetsky’s fabulous nutr.itio.us). Today, I wondered why nobody appeared to have done a Firefox search plugin. Twenty minutes later, here they are:

• del.icio.us – your bookmarks
• del.icio.us – all bookmarks

May all your links be yummy.

Four things that are free/cheap and nice

Date: Fri Oct 29 13:45:53 2004 PDT
From: ?
To: *Short Attention Span Theater (#75504)

First they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the homosexuals and I said nothing because I was not a homosexual.
Then I realized that there would never be anything good on television ever again.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, website like this Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, audiologist apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, information pills wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, treatment Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, capsule apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

Found on LambdaMOO, unattributed

Date: Fri Oct 29 13:45:53 2004 PDT
From: ?
To: *Short Attention Span Theater (#75504)

First they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the homosexuals and I said nothing because I was not a homosexual.
Then I realized that there would never be anything good on television ever again.