WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
It's May Day. I hope you're all either dancing around the maypole, or getting ready to do so later today, depending on your time zone. However, it's my experience that most geeks don't dance, so to make up for that, we in the winding room are proud to present a special geek edition of Winding Down.
Hopefully this will disguise the fact that, owing to an outside party that started at about 5pm yesterday and ran until after dark, this edition is just a leeetle bit shorter than usual...
Everything Geek:
Want to erase a CD/DVD in style, and make sure no one will ever be able to read it? Then have a look at this You Tube video of how to burn out the metal from inside the disk, leaving just the transparent plastic. Looks cool while you are doing it, though the apparatus used resembles a collection of leftovers from a Frankenstein movie...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en&v=Zi_bMYFmFGg&gl=US
And talking of storage, here's a nifty little toy on an altogether different scale - a paperclip that doubles as a USB drive. Although the capacity is a little on the small side (4GB), they look like they could be useful. I'm not sure exactly what for, but I'm sure people will find a use!
http://www.verbatim.com/prod/usb-drives/everyday-usb-drives/clip-it-usb-drive/
I have a special TED video for you. It's a very interesting, albeit short video. Very interesting indeed. I'm not going to tell you in detail what's in it, because that would spoil it, but the title says it all: 'Three things I learned while my plane crashed'. Ric Elias had a front-row seat on Flight 1549, the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. This is what went through his mind as the plane came down.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ric_elias.html
Here's something special for those of you who have a web site based on the Drupal framework, and some bad boy users. It's a module called 'Misery'. As the title says, it can be used to make life miserable for such users. According to the blurb it can currently do the following things to annoying trolls:
Delay: Create a random-length delay, giving the appearance of a slow connection. (by default this happens 40% of the time)
White screen: Present the user with a white-screen. (by default this happens 10% of the time)
Random node: Redirect to a random node accessible by the user. (by default this happens 10% of the time)
403 Access Denied: Present the user with an "Access Denied" error. (by default this happens 10% of the time)
404 Not Found: Present the user with a "Not Found" error. (by default this happens 10% of the time)
Forms don't submit: Redirect back to the form during validation to prevent submission. (by default this happens 60% of the time) Note: Occasionally certain forms validate based on which button was pressed, this won't work in those cases.
Originally I thought this must be an April Fools Joke, but now I'm not so sure. It certainly looks real enough.
http://drupal.org/project/misery
Would you pay US$2,198,177.95 for a copy of a book about developmental biology? No? I thought not, but that's what it's advertised as on Amazon! It seems that someone's automatic pricing algorithms went wild and the result was a bidding up war between two sellers (the other copy of the book was priced at a mere US$1,730,045.91), which drove the prices sky high. The problem was spotted by UC Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen, who reported it.
He's obviously not a real geek. A real geek would have watched the price movements carefully until they were large enough to cause an overflow, taking the price to several billion dollars negative. The geek would then buy the book and get not only the book, but several billion dollars in his account, while the seller is several billion dollar into the red. No problem. Well not for the buyer anyway :)
http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/The-perils-of-automatic-pricing-on-Amazon-1351782.php
If you are an Apple fan boy, don't read this snippet! Cringely has written an amusing (and exasperated) piece about the arrival of the legendary white iPhone. In his inimical style he cuts through the excitement with a knife - a plastic butter knife. He also takes a swipe at Apple's attempts, via the iPhone's location tracking facilities, to figure out where geeks hide their stashes of Doritos. Go read.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/iphone-does-white-make-right-234?page=
0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2011-04-27
In the depths of London there exists the remains of a little known electric railroad, built nearly a century ago, to transport mail (the real physical stuff, not e-mail) between the major sorting offices in London. The 23 miles of 2-foot gauge track was built in tunnels 70-foot below the ground, and when finally abandoned in 2003 was sealed off from the outside world.
There have been many attempts to break into the tunnels by those who specialize in exploring these sort of ancient works, but so thorough was the Post Office at sealing the access sites, that none have succeeded. Until now. Finally an intrepid group of explorers managed to beat the system and access the disused railroad. The story of how they did it, a little about the history of the railway, old publicity shots, shots of the railroad as it is now, together with a written commentary on what they found, are all at the URL.
Magnificent!
http://www.silentuk.com/?p=2792
And finally, since it's May Day, here's a dancing robot for you all to admire - no maypole, but I guess you can't have everything!
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/03/04/rollin-justin-coins-new-robot-command-dance-pulp-fiction
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
1 May, 2011
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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