As a result of last night’s storms, 900,000 tons of raw sewage…I’ll say that again: 900,000 tons of raw sewage…poured into the Thames and the London streets, killing massive numbers of fish and generally filling the place up with, well, shit.
The last time this was a news headline was in the middle ages. So why’s it happening now ?
Another question: why is our postal system no longer the envy of the world (as it was 10 years ago when Michele first arrived), and instead the laughing-stock of the world ?
Here’s another one: why is British public transport worse now than it has ever been…well at least since the invention of the train ?
What about the health service – why is it so crap these days (a value judgement that I can back up wih some pretty bloody convincing stats ) ?
Well, I don’t know. But one piece of evidence that is common to all of the problems is…privatisation.

Let’s just take the floods/sewage.
Never in my life have I heard anything like this. The reason is that, until privatisation, the job of the water board (as was), was to make the water system work properly. Now, it’s to ensure that the share-holders make an ever increasing profit. How do you keep increasing your profits ?

• Pay your workers less
• Don’t be so meticulous with the “day to day” jobs (like cleaning storm drains, fixing rail tracks etc etc
• Make your business more efficient – (by sacking the overly heavy management layers…oops no, sorry, even though they are paid an order of magiture higher than the skilled people on the front-line, they are worth far more…probly)
• Ditching all of these luxurious things like holidays with pay for workers and contracts
• Not making “environmental” concessions to sate the liberal lefties (tree hugging tossers). You can’t stop progress. The needs of the planet (and its inhabitants) should be secondary to thos of a healthy free market. Oh wait, we are inhabitants of the planet…fuck us, we are expendable in the name of business…but not the liberal, commie, “planet”.

Interesting item in The Reg about how Penguin (books) and some bird called Katie Dirtbox (or something) have decided to try and appropriate katie.com from the legitimate owner, thus causing her a great deal of hassle and bad vibes. Legal threats, bad-publicity, you name it, katie.com has had it.
Now this isn’t really of earth-shattering importance I grant you, but it is a simple example of something that humans really need to learn.

The law only exists to protect money and power

So why does everyone have to be so interested in it ? Why does every mailing list, blog (yes including this one now…), discussion forum and debate always have to go through long periods of discussion about whether something may or may not be legal ?
It doesn’t matter! If the lawyers are set on you by enough money and power, you’re fucked. Whether they win the case, or spend you to death, they’ll get you. Whenever you see some arsehat on some mailing list say “IANAL” say “Yes! You Anal!”. Stop worrying about it. Stop making out that there is any logic behind the law. It, and its well-paid soldiers, are there to screw you…and they will. Lawyers never lose, even if they lose.
So, please, please hear me people:

• Don’t play their game, you’ll just encourage them! – if you’re concerned that something you’re doing might not be legal ie it’s something that isn’t clearly illegal, then do it anyway. If you start getting threatening letters from the soldiers of satan then reassess.
• Stand up to the bullies – their main tactic is to scare you into complying. If you are clearly in the wrong then back down and they will too. Otherwise wipe your arse on their letter. DON’T RESPOND!
• Don’t keep going on about it! If “you anal” then shut up and stop ruining the mailing list.
• If you do end up in legal muck, go out firing!

OK, I know there are exceptions to the rules. People sometimes do win when they deserve to (morally, not legally I mean). But they are just that…exceptions to the rule. Yes, Microsoft’s lawyers did leave me alone after their initial threats, but not because they realised they were in the wrong. They could choose to return at any time, and they’d win.
DRM and software patent suits are the next Big Thing, and the more people humour the lawyers, the more stifled and restricted all of our lives are going to become. Don’t play!
Rant over.

OK – I’m sure I’m late in on this one, but I do own a “Morris Minor and the Majors” 12 inch so I’m happy to be associated with such things. “Guns don’t kill people” by Welsh Gangster Rappers, “Goldie Looking Chain” is a masterpiece. Available on a p2p/bt network near you.

Guns don’t kill people, Rappers do –
I seen it in a documentary on BBC 2
— Goldie Lookin Chain

FoF is really quite good. It’s shambolic code, but it works, just like my code – sort of.. It’s an “RSS Aggregator” which means you can get all your favourite news/blog/bullshit sites on one page, for simplicity. And it’s server side so you can check it anywhere 🙂 And it’s free. And it’s open source. And it works. And it knows RSS, RDF and Atom.

Yesterday I added Trackback support to my blog. No reason really apart from wanting to play too. In fact I hate Trackback. I hate “Movable Type”. They’re simply tools for getting self obsessed wanky bloggers to be able to promote each other up the googleranks…like me really.
In the next few months I predict Trackback will be killed by spammers.

Have you ever tried Teoma BTW ? Quite nice.

When “Charmin” first started hawking their bogroll in the UK they had an advertising campaign involving bears shitting in woods. I liked this frankness, and I liked the fact that there was no attempt to hide what you were supposed to do with their product. However, tonight they demonstrated how shite their current marketing scum are with a new ad:
Two sisters, arguing over bogroll. Their banter is clearly supposed to make us, the lumpen target audience, identify with them: “heh, me and my sister have arguments like that all the time! I think I’ll buy that bog roll”. They decide to perform a dubious set of experiments, involving blue liquid of course, to see who was right. Amazingly, the Charmin advocate won, purely on scientific grounds!
So, viral marketing gurus, listen up. Here is a way to make a lot of money. Remake the Chamin advert, but instead of the blue liquid, acually get them to wipe their arses and compare the results!
People will love the honesty 🙂 Charmin would surely pay for that sort of publicity.

The producers of Big Brother clearly miss “The Word”. While they haven’t had the bath in shite or eaten a bar of lard or bowl of toenail clippings, they have had to drink pureed fish guts, cod liver oil and salt water. I don’t care what you say…odious people puking makes great telly.

A perl script here (thoughtfully released under the GPL) lists loads of hex numbers that make words. Isn’t it a bit of overkill when you can just do:

grep -i '^[abcdeflo]*$' /usr/dict/words |tr '[lo]' '[10]'

Surely someone with some m4d obfuscation skillz can make it more 1337 ?

The last time Tony came down, he left me a book called “Where did it all go right ?”. It’s essentially the autobiography of a guy called Andrew Collins from birth to age 19. I would never have chosen to give this a try without Tony’s recommendation, looking as it does, like some diabolical 1970s nostalgiafest. In fact, it is a diabolical 1970s nostalgiafest but one of the most enjoyable, funny, and insightful books I’ve read for a while. I’ll lend it to you. At the end of it I felt like I knew him intimately – odd when you consider I’d never heard of him a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway – yesterday I heard him presenting “the day the music died” on Radio 2, and I got quite freaked by it. There was this presenter, whose voice I didn’t really feel I knew, but whose friends, family, school-friends, sexual partners, musical tastes, and favourite films were all familiar to me.
Unless he was lying of course.
It made me feel a bit like a stalker or, at the very least, a voyeur.
And you’re reading my blog. Perve 🙂

So I found a couple of interesting blogs yesterday that also give me that slightly unnerving feeling. Chocolate and Vodka is a blog by someone who, like me, doesn’t go out much, favouring prolific blogging, IRC and promoting the Welsh language (she’s not Welsh).
Oblomovka is Danny O’Brian’s blog, and spiffing it is too…if you like that sort of thing.

When we moved in here, I set up wireless and left it wide open to see if anyone would try and take advantage of it. To make it more interesting I stopped it doing SSID broadcasts so the only people who would find it would probably have to looking properly (ie using some sort of netstumbler software).
Last week, we noticed a few people sitting on the wooden bench at the top of our stairs, using laptops. Hmm. I checked the AP logs and sure enough, they were associated. So I set them a few tests. Changed the network name (easyhack@fatsquirrel.org). Took them two days, but they found it again. Next, MAC address ACL. Sadly they never managed to nobble that one. 14^^3RZ!
So, I opened it up again, tcpdumped all of their traffic over 24 hours for later grepping, and then WEPped it up. They’re still trying, bless them, but I don’t hold out much hope.

Someone very clever reverse-engineered the Google toolbar enough to work out how to generate the checksum needed to get a pagerank.
In a nutshell, drag
this link into your bookmarks or toolbar, and then whenever you want to know the pagerank of the page you’re viewing, just click the button.
The most surprising find for me was that of all of the various pointless sites I have up, the one with the most Google juice is…sandwich selector. Funny old world.
Yet another Friday night I don’t remember. Yet again a lacklustre plan to give up drinking for a while. Yet again woken at 2:30am by a couple of Italian students that erroneously believe that we operate a 24-hour “door opening service” for Surrey House. Michele was so infuriated (this is a frequent occurance),she went up to the front door, shouted at the poor bastards and then closed the door on them…
However, Michele has a plan. We will construct a tape of hold music, with occasional interjections such as:
“Welcome to the Door Opening Service. All of our door openers are busy at the moment but we will open the door as soon as someone is available.”
and
“Sorry for the delay, your door-opening request is important to us. Please continue to hold”
or
“Sorry, we are experiencing more door-opening requests than usual. Please continue to hold, or request the door is opened at a more reasonable time.”
Loop it, and play it down the phone the next time some pillock decides to rin random bell number at 2 in the morning.

The new Prodigy album is superb. Michael Jackson should be glad someone improved on Thriller (see “the way it is” for details of what the fuck I’m going on about). I’m going to go out and buy this 🙂