katlalog archive January 2002

020131 19:00 scifi

it's over. Farscape season 3 just ended 15 minutes ago on BBC2. and i'm in shock. i should really trust the writers by now to pull it off every time, to turn the strangest storyline into a ride that leaves you shaking for 30 minutes after, to always come up with a cliffhanger that is on one hand incredibly satisfying (because they didn't f**k it up) and on the other hand deeply disturbing... (for those who haven't seen it yet, expect open-mouth-effect) of course the knowledge that they do pull it off every time, should eliviate the anxiety that this ending left me with. ...i wish !

as a filmologist (as my father calls me) i am seriously impressed with every aspect of this series (i missed the first 3 episodes ever because i thought it looked silly), from script writing to cinematography. the confusion created in the viewer by never telling the whole story, bluring realities... the constantly swaying camera... the cuts... the really good acting...

on top of all that it is also the raunchiest relationship storyline ever.

020130 23:18 Evil Empire

phewwie. it's a rumour. i am not going to lose Homesite to Microsoft. Microsoft is not going to aquire Macromedia.

020130 22:08 Battle of the Evil Empires

AOL's motives revealed.

020130 13:17 Corporate

One step on from the Trojan Room Coffee Pot Webcam, this coffee pot will spread its aroma through the office encouraging workers to gather and participate in corporate community building. Japan's always been famous for its approach to management. (via boingboing)

020130 11:03 geeks

business as usual on slashdot:

020129 14:59 geeks

signature file of the day:

Penguinillas Pack GNUzis

020128 16:58 Society, scary society...

let's all bring guns and then we're save. the author of More Guns, Less Crime complains about the under-reporting of how another american high school shooting was prevented:

What is so remarkable is that out of 280 separate news stories (from a computerized Nexis-Lexis search) in the week after the event, just four stories mentioned that the students who stopped the attack had guns.

let's repeat that, just in case...

In all, 72, stories described how the attacker was stopped without mentioning that the student heroes had guns.

heroes!
remember what the last period of growing militarism in our history led to?
this sentence is my favorite:

This misreporting actually endangers people's lives.

now you know.

020128 15:59 Capitalism

strange tactics for anarchists: chumbawumba makes money selling a song to advertising and then gives it to anti-capitalist campaigners: (via robotwisdom)

"We'd discovered through all the years of having no money just how powerful it can be if it's in the right hands," the band said on their website.

020128 10:47 Media

i have developed such an extreme aversion to advertising and commercials that i can see myself chucking out my tv in the next few months. after adjusting storytelling and script writing to the regular intrusions of commercial breaks, they will now be cutting frames out here and there to fit in another few seconds of advertising. i want those frames! and i'm sure the directors and writers wanted them too. but they will adjust and drop quality even more. tv has developed into a form of entertainment that has no artistic or intellectual merit at all anymore. (via /.)

020127 17:21 Microsoft

A new year, a new focus. Microsoft discovers security and the guys from Zero Knowledge have some tips for them:

Originally, e-mail was text only, and e-mail viruses were impossible. Microsoft changed that by having its mail clients automatically execute commands embedded in e-mail. This paved the way for e-mail viruses, like Melissa and LoveBug, that automatically spread to people in the victims' address books. Microsoft must reverse the security damage by removing this functionality from its e-mail clients, and from many other of its products. This rigid separation of data from code needs to be applied to all products.

020127 00:45 Internet

i'm waiting for 'googlewhacking' to show up in google's zeitgeist.

020124 19:55 Battle of the Evil Empires

i'm beginning to wonder whether AOL bought Netscape specifically for the battle with Microsoft for world domination. their recent interest in linux seems to fit in there too... although, they did claim that's only rumor.

Update 020126 21:28
it seems Business 2.0 had the same idea:

...it's just sad that Netscape, once so proud and seemingly destined for greatness, has been reduced to nothing more than a whipping post for AOL's lawyers.

020124 17:01 Media

Watching Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott doing propaganda films now, very disappointing!) from a different viewpoint: Somalis cheer Black Hawk Down.

"There's not one single word of the Somali language nor Somali music, almost nothing of our culture in the movie,"...

If you examine download sites, such as Download.com , you'll notice a definite trend toward payware. Though the original spirit of freeware still exists, software is typically presented in demo fashion for free, with the ability to upgrade for a fee.

020123 09:30 Politics

How to spot propaganda:

American propaganda had its birth, so far as I can tell, in the advertising industry. The pioneers of advertising - a truly loathsome bunch - learned early on that people would respond to purely emotional appeals. Abstract theory and logical argument do nothing to spur sales. However, appeals to sexiness, to pride of ownership, to fear of falling behind the neighbors are the stock in trade of advertising executives.

020123 08:52 Battle of the Evil Empires

The two pretty-much-monopolies are going to fight it out over world domination: AOL Files Antitrust Suit Against Microsoft. I bet this is going to be far more successful than the government's 'meddling in business affairs'. This time it's industry giant against industry giant.

020122 23:04 Web design

found this great argument for long web pages (=bad usability according to papa nielsen): Short Pages Slow Down Knowledge Transfer.

The theorists who point out the "downloading time problem" with long pages are just biased. When you measure the actual time for aiming, clicking, and waiting, to get the same amount of information (not an unreasonable comparison), long pages turn out to be the fastest, most efficient approach. Because thousands of people have slow modems, you should create long pages, not short pages.

020121 17:45 Monopoly

Gotta love Microsoft. In a sort of 'I told you this would happen' way. This time they're breaking the MIME specifications. Rules? We make the rules! (via camworld)

The problem is that due to the Market share of Microsoft an error in a Microsoft program may force non-Microsoft users to make changes, and possibly also imply a loss of mail functionality.

Someone on the web-authors mailing list at work recently mistook market domination for standards. I put him right:

> Standards has to mean what most of our users,
> sorry customers, use outside [the university] and
> that is for better or worse some flavour IE.

no, standards are not what MS forces on us by taking over the market in the most fascist way. standards are what a consortium of people work out in co-operation to ensure accessibility to all.

and i am seriously unhappy about this business terminology creeping into academic language, we are not 'selling' education to 'customers', we are 'providing' education to the 'people'. did anybody follow the recent hospital privatisation debate? noticed the use of 'customers' instead of 'patients' there? that is even more worrying.

iris

020121 17:28 Society

England had its new-age travellers, America has its new-age hobos, and they use they web to organize and plan their travels. (via boingboing)

It's impossible to say how many hobos and train-hoppers are riding the 173,000 miles of railroad in North America. Estimates range from 2,000 to 20,000, with growing numbers of Web-savvy kids taking to the rails.

020119 16:17 Monopoly

This must be the worst news I've heard in ages:
AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat?
I hope this is not true. Must be punishment for the previous post. They're just trying to scare me.

020119 01:20 humor

from ntk 2002-01-04:

OK, here's a tough one. Of course, we're broadly in favour of any initiative which encourages users to ditch AOL and venture out onto the big wide internet. And that's the basic idea of the X-AOL workshops (3-5pm, Sat 2002-01-26, downtown LA, free) - the catch being that they're intended to help *artists* start 2002 AOL-free, conflicting directly with NTK's own ongoing campaign to "Keep Artists Off The Net".

020118 22:41 email

aaaaaaahhh ! they've changed stuff ! yahoo has changed stuff. i hate it when they do that. no, i don't want to the new improved version, i liked it just the way it was. in fact, yahoo mail has always been my favorite.

... or should i say rocketmail ... good old rocketmail ... from the good old days. <sigh> got bought by yahoo just before hotmail fell into the hands of you-know-who.

i was so glad i was with rocketmail then. and the changes that yahoo has put rocketmail through over the years were bearable, apart from the huge ads.

but now they've added some really useless stuff ('Mark as Unread', 'Flag for Follow-Up'???). where did they get that? user demands? ... a huge 'mark as unread' button. what for? for people who don't know how to manage email? ... so they shift the 'move to' box to the left and the previous/next links to the right, so that after years and years of clicking automatically i now have to stop and find the right link every time ... and the delete button is just a touch too unprotected now.

moan moan. yes, i'll get over it. after the death of excite i'm just a bit jumpy.

020118 21:11 more fun

The Secret Diary of Aragorn (via boingboing)

Day Four:
Stuck on mountain with Hobbits. Boromir really annoying.
Not King yet.

Day Six:
Orcs killed: none. Disappointing. Stubble update: I look rugged and manly. Yes!
Keep wanting to drop-kick Gimli. Holding myself back.
Still not King.

020118 20:06 fun

having fun catching up on that backlog of email from the hols. today on the RSI list:

At 19:39 18/01/02 +0000, you wrote:
>> mens sana in corpore sano
>> (Juvenal, 58-130 AD, roman poet)
>
>(Hey you did it, you pressed Shift! Thrice!)

hehe, no i didn't, that was a cut and paste job from a website ;)

iris

020114 16:51 Internet

Low-tech and text-based is back, says Wired. Back? I don't think it so. Blinded by the sparkles of the commercial web, Wired just didn't notice them for a while.

There are 2 cultures on the web. One, the younger one, the mainstream one, is obviously willing to wait for Flash splash pages, loves what you can do with email these days and sends huge attachments like stupid 5 second videos that take 2 hours to download (someone who obviously doesn't know you very well thought they were funny, but your response ensured he'd never make that mistake again). And let's not forget them MS files that are so heavy that your computer breaks through the floorboards to the basement, from people who have never heard of Notepad, the same ones that simply aren't interested when you try to explain what 'plain text' versus 'HTML mail' means.

While I'm at it, BadTrans was the first virus that kept hitting my mailbox. There would be a simply way of stopping this: by unsubbing from all those mailing lists that have a large percentage of newbies / Outlook users on them.

020110 11:43 Society

This stupid article made it onto /. today. I've been involved in the co-operative movement for 10 years. Whenever this article mentions 'co-operation' they could have easily replaced it with 'tyranny of the majority'. They seem to think a cultural model similar to that of the Mafia is acceptable. Social cohesion? But at what prize?

Cooperation can flourish if the public-spirited majority can punish freeloaders, say Swiss economists. People will pay to punish - suggesting that their notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations. [...] The emotional satisfaction of dispensing justice seems to spur them on: "People say, 'I like to punish'," says Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich.

Notions of fairness??? Notions of power, more like it. I'm thinking of Bart Simpson and family electroshocking each other, first because it's fun, then because they can.

020109 21:29 Mac

after a long absence, spent in a computer free environment, building snow forts in the best winter in a long time, i return to the most amusing news: the new iMac. ...or is it iMuffin, iShavingMirror or iWantOne? i'm not much of a Mac user but i just love the stuff they come up with. i think the iLamp belongs on the mantelpiece of a supergeek next to the lego podracer and the lavalamp. my boyfriend suggests 'iBoob', which leads me nicely to this article, dicovered earlier on /.

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quote of the month

[12:30] And then our connection to the network died, so I put on a DVD and locked the door.

bofh, 18/01/2002

jarmin.com

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