The people at CAP Alert have a bit of a problem with The Passion of the Christ. On one hand it's exactly the the sort of film that they would like people to go and see. On the other hand, it's such a violent film that it scores really badly on their "Wanton Violence/Crime" scale. So badly in fact that it has got a red light on their "should you see this film" traffic light.
Good job I always ignore their advice then as I'm planning to go and see it next week.
Ann Widdecombe. As an agony aunt? In the Guardian?
That is wrong on so many levels.
Someone seems to be advising George Bush that if he turns the absence of WMDs in Iraq into a big joke then we'll all just laugh and move on.
When I was first playing with HTML many years ago, one of the first web sites that I built was one that gently took the piss out of Barbara Cartland. I haven't done anything with it for years. In fact I was mildly surprised to find it there when I moved all my sites to a new server last year.
This afternoon I got an email from the webmaster of the official Barbara Cartland web site. He said that they had added a links page to their site and that they would add my site to the list if I'd give them a reciprocal link.
Of course I added their link to my site and now it's on their links page. But I can't help wondering if they ever read the sites that they link to.
According to this BBC Survey almost three-quarters of the population of the UK would support a ban on smoking in public. There are a number of other similar stats in the report, but I don't know how much trust you can place in a report on statistics that includes the line
More than two thirds of respondents (64%) said ...
Update: They've fixed it now.
As given by Marc Andreessen[1] at the "Open Source in Government" conference.
Christopher Eccleston is to be the new Doctor Who. I think that's a good choice. He's a great actor and I like the way that the choice completely side-steps all of the more obvious candidates whose names have been mentioned before like Eddie Izzard, Alan Davies and Anthony Head.
This sounds like it's going to be a very interesting re-invention of the show. There might even be Daleks.
I'm really looking forward to it.
When I was younger and interested in the music charts, it was incredibly rare for a single to go straight in at number one. Usually a single would enter the charts lower down and move upwards over the newxt few weeks. A single going straight in at number one was something for the record books. When The Jam did it three times it was unprecedented.
Of course all that has changed now. Singles generally enter at their highest position in their first week of release and then fall. It's rare that a single moves up the chart to number one. But I didn't realise just how rare it was until I saw some discussion about the single that reached number one last week.
Apparently the single (Cha Cha Slide by someone called DJ Casper - whoever that is) was number two last week and has now moved up to number one. It's the first single to move up to number one since January 2002. The last one was apparently More That A Woman by Aaliyah. Since then there has been an unbroken run of 58(!) singles that have gone straight in at number one.
A number of things contribute to this situation. The most important two seem to be the fact that singles sales are down dramatically on twenty years ago and the relentless promotion of singles for a month before they are released. This means that most singles sales are in the first week of release.
Of course, hardly anyone takes any notice of the singles charts these days.
I was going to link to a story in today's Guardian where they pointed out the fact that Zoo Weekly's web site seems to be invisible to Google for some reason (currently this site is still the top result for "Zoo Weekly") but when searching for the article on their site I came up against the fact that the Guardian have introduced registration on the MediaGuardian site.
Now, personally I don't mind registering to access the MediaGuardian site. I'm already registered with the Guardian site. But I can't expect people following links from my site to go through that process.
So you won't be seeing any links to MediaGuardian until their policy again.
I've been asked to speak at the April meeting of the North London branch of the British Computer Society (more details nearer the time) and they invited me along as a guest to the March meeting so I'd get a feel for how their meetings work.
The meeting was at a Microsoft office in central London and the topic was Digital Rights Management - so I was already feeling a little uneasy as I took my seat.
The first few talks gave a quick overview of what DRM is and the legal ramifications of copyright in the digital world. This was followed by a chap from the British Library talking about how they are facing up to their huge DRM nightmare.
But the main point of the evening was the two chaps from Microsoft talking about their Rights Management Server[1]. This is a frighteningly Orwellian system whereby you have complete control over what people can do with documents that you create. You can prevent them from copying, forwarding or even printing them. Of course, in order to do this you need an "RMS-enabled" application and currently that means Office 2003 or IE6 with the appropriate add-on. This, of course, breaks backwards compatibility with older versions of Office and anyone using something like OpenOffice.org to read Office documents will be completely out of luck. I asked if they'd be releasing the specs so that other people could produce RMS-enabled applications and they suggested that as it was a SOAP application you might be able to reverse engineer the protocol by sniffing the wire.
I really hope that this doesn't take off. Currently I co-exist pretty happily with people in the Windows world. I can read 95% of the stuff that I get sent. But if RMS becomes common that percentage will fall dramatically.
I know that Microsoft will be selling this as a solution to the problem of of copyright theft and many people might be persuaded by that argument. But I find it hard not to see it as another Microsoft attempt to ghettoise people who aren;t using the latest versions of their products.
[1] And what marketing genius decided to call this piece of software RMS for short. I bet that Stallman is livid.
I've just been sent[1] a free sample copy of TheOpenCD.
This is an evangelism project which provides nicely packaged CDs containing open source applications for Windows users. The version I have contains OpenOffice.org, the Gimp, Mozilla and a host of other less well-known apps. It also contains tutorials and a few books about open source. I've just seen it even contains a trailer for Revolution OS.
This looks like a really good idea to me. I think I'll be burning a few copies (which you are encouraged to do) and sharing them with Windows-handicapped friends.
[1] By which I mean that it arrived by snail mail
It's twenty years since the start of the miner's strike and the papers are full of retrospective pieces. One of the best is this piece by Seumas Milne from Saturday's Guardian.
The miner's strike was one of the most devastating episodes from recent(ish) political history and it's very worrying to see that even now (under a supposedly Labour government) the strikers and, especially, their leaders are still so demonised in the popular media.
At the time, no-one came close to estimating how quickly the British coal-mining industry would be killed off. At the start of 1984 the UK had 170 working pits. Now we have just 20.
A number of British football players have been accused of sexual assault whilst in Spain. I'm sure that, by now, no-one is surprised by stories like this.
But a report that I saw on the TV this morning contained a very strange quote from the club involved. A spokesperson was quoted as saying "we will do all we can to secure the release of the players". Surely that's jumping the gun a bit. There's no way that the club can be sure that the players are innocent. Surely they should have said something like "we will do all we can to get to the truth of the matter and to ensure that justice is done".
Here's a perfect example of the madness I mentioned last week.
I have a set of four compilation CDs which were released in 2001/2 called The Album. Yesterday I started ripping them. I use grip to rip CDs and grip gets CD and track data from FreeDB. FreeDB gets its data from submissions by users.
You can configure grip to name the files it produces to suit your preferences. I've configured it to use the filename %A/%d/%n.ogg. That means (as I mentioned before) a directory for the artist (%A is expanded to the artist's name), a subdirectory for each album (%d is expanded to the disc name) and each file gets the name of the song (from %n). Most of the time this works pretty well (with the caveats that I discussed previously) but this time it just created a huge mess.
The problem is that people have decided that because these albums are compilations, then they are recorded by an artist called "various" (or sometimes "various artists" or just "va"). They then squeeze the real artist name into the track name slot. But, of course, there's no standard to how they do it. Some of them are "artist - track", some are "artist / track" and some have the artist and the track the other way round.
One idiot even decided that it was essential to have the track number in the track name field, so the track "name" was "01 - artist - track".
What I want to end up with is a "Various Artists" directory (because that's who the album is by) with a subdirectory called "The Album Vol 1" and files in that subdirectory named for the titles of the songs. And I want the tags within the files to contain the actual name of the artist who recorded that one track.
And getting to that is going involve a lot of manual patching of tags, directory names and m3u files.
And computers not doing what I want them to makes me grumpy.
Looks like I'm part of a named demographic. According to The Guardian I'm "50 quid guy".
On a hot day at County Hall in London, [David] Hepworth stood up and gave Britain's record-company bosses a lecture about their own customers, concentrating on "the 50-quid guy", a term he had picked up from friends in retail. "This is the guy we've all seen in Borders or HMV on a Friday afternoon, possibly after a drink or two, tie slightly undone, buying two CDs, a DVD and maybe a book - fifty quid's worth - and frantically computing how he's going to convince his partner that this is a really, really worthwhile investment."And as for musical tastes:
He likes the White Stripes, Coldplay and Blur and has persevered with Radiohead through the difficult last three albums. His latest buys are the debut albums from the Stands, who remind him of the Byrds, and Franz Ferdinand, who remind him of the Glasgow art-school bands of 1982. The fact that most of the new bands sound old is a definite help."Melody Maker"
The Return of the King was, of course, a very good film. But was it really that good? Be honest. Was it really the best film of last year in eleven separate categories? And can you even remember the song that it won an Oscar for? I know I can't.
It's hard to see this as anything other than the Academy over-compensating for the fact that they hadn't recognised either of the previous films.
Academy Awards have always been a bit of a lottery but it recent years they seem to have lost all relationship with reality. The best example of this is, of course, that one of the most decorated films of all time (equal with this year's whitewash and, previously, Ben Hur) is Titanic - which is actually just about the most appalling thing ever committed to celluloid.
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