The Blog




"Every once in awhile we collectively need to get our asses kicked to remind us of what is important. We got our asses kicked big time in 2001, in every imaginable way." [thanks, Dotcom Scoop] Tell me about it. Gizzajob. I could do that.

This christmas give the gift that keeps on giving. An online business!

IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ CAREFULLY! : If that does not solve the problem, try banging on the side of your monitor a few times.




Dotcom Scoop: 2001 : The e-commerce winners and losers of 2001. Favourite quote. Microsoft: Nothing can stop the man of steel. If Bill Clinton was teflon, Bill Gates is invisible. Break-up my ass.




TRYING TO GROW the library of applications for Linux, IBM on Tuesday announced a program for developers that makes a server available to them over the Internet. [thanks, Lockergnome Bytes] Um. IBM. Do you think we could have some money please? We've already got a server.  

Psych Central: Dr. GROHOL's Mental Health Page - Psychology of Weblogs : Most weblogs are drivel, banal shit written by angst-ridden teenagers and adults sharing feelings, thoughts, and mind-numbing details about their daily lives that provide little insight into anything or anyone. No Comment!

AutoWiner! I hesitate to give the great dAVE whiNer any more publicity, but for those who read him this site was a hoot.





The Register axes third of staff : The Register will soon appoint a non-executive chairman and a full-time financial officer. After making four redundant and leaving an editorial team of 7.
Does this sound like sense? "The privately owned service is extremely popular, taking around 30% of traffic in the IT sector according to online measurement company Hitwise, and beating services backed by major publishers such as ZDNet, VNU Net and Silicon.com." If I wasn't broke, I'd give them some money.

The reports in this morning papers are beginning to quote the US military as saying things like "The trail has gone cold." "We don't know where Osama is", "We don't know if he's dead or alive". Meanwhile comments are being made about the Elvis Effect. Even if he's really dead, we'll start to hear reports that he's been seen in a supermarket in Boise Idaho. Or Munich. Or Beirut. And we'll never know if they're true or not.

My own feeling is that if /bin/laden ever actually existed, which does seem likely, he just cut his hair, changed his clothes and faded back into the landscape. Even travelling by donkey, he could be in the Steppes or Ulan Bator by now.

But then I started thinking about the film The Usual Suspects. Surely Osama bin Laden IS Keyser Soze "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

When the Berlin wall came down, Gorbachev said something like, "I worry about America. Now they have no demon to fight". And what better demon than a man that doesn't exist, but one who "just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't. Who would rather see his family dead than live another day after this."

"A suspected member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network claimed that Islamic militants infiltrated Microsoft and sabotaged the company's Windows XP operating system, according to a source close to Indian police." Link [thanks, bOing bOing] Did MS actually need any help? happy

sbp: Q: "Does BrainFuck.Net use the controversial Microsoft Passport system for authentication?"; sbp: A: "No. The Brainfuck language has only 8 commands, and none of them are related to authenticating remote network users."; sbp: I await a Befunge port...; (2001-12-18 00:18) [thanks, Swhack Weblog] This is just SO geeky, I had to post it. For the hard of hearing, here are the 8 commands. And it's Turing Complete!
  • + Increment value under pointer
  • - Decrement value under pointer
  • > Increment pointer
  • < Decrement pointer
  • [ Loop while value under pointer is nonzero
  • ] End of loop
  • , Read character from input into pointer
  • . Output value under pointer to screen

    Can I use BrainFuck.Net to write webservices? No. Well, probably not.

  • Getting mildly irritated (nothing like two days ago) with the daVe wINER "Scripting News Awards". The I fell over the Metatalk discussion about same, which led me to last year's "Bloggies" and the "Anti-Bloggies". Last year's Bloggies winner was "#!/usr/bin/girl" which apart from being a perfect Grrrl blog name, led me to "What to do about an Aggressive Moose", at which point I decded I really should stop surfing, get up and go and do something more useful like buy a christmas tree. but instead I posted this and then read more news




    Quite a Sunday. plastic and Kuro5hin both returned after a 3-4 week hiatus. K5 is splitting from OSDN and Plastic lost it's corporate sponsorship in the summer, so they're both going to be strapped for cash. Let's hope they keep going as having just Slashdot was limiting the viewpoints.






    The Simulation Argument Are you living in a computer simulation? (a la The Matrix). To which the answer has to be... Yes!

    Keep half an eye on this one. SpamSubtract.com




    Meanwhile... Tony Blair, speaking to a cheering throng of mindless Euro collectors, openly admits "Yes, my fellow EU-peans... I am the anti-christ!!!" [thanks, blackholebrain] I'm just looking at this and thinking that we should really be called EU-Peons since that's what we are. Menial workers in thrall to the EU.




    Just stumbled on Communications From Elsewhere Apart from the blog, there's also the Discordian Tarot reading and the CGI Random PostModernism Essay.

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