Dear oh dear. The well-loved and well-respected actress Mollie Sugdenhas died, aged 86. In tribute to Ms. Sugden’s most famous character, Mrs. Slocombe, and to the constant running jokes about her pet pussy cat Tiddles, Jonathan Ross sent out a tweet encouraging one and all to use the Twitter hashtag#MrsSlocombesPussy in their tweets. Unbelievably rude, but also staggeringly apt! However, Twitter has decided (perhaps algorithimically) not to display search results for that hashtag: that, in and of itself, is somewhat disappointing. The hashtag became so immediately popular it appeared in Twitter’s list of trending topics, dominated in recent days by topics like Michael Jackson, and Glastonbury.
What’s more disappointing, however, is how US technology gossip blogs TechCrunch and Mashable dealt with this information. They considered it an attempt to poison the trending topics list with spam, neither bothering for an instant before publication to check and see if perhaps it was legitimate in some way.
Both sites have since been put right by blog commenters, and they’ve updated their posts to reflect that, but their knee jerk reaction was to condemn the tag as spam. $deity forbid that a territory outwith the US with a better sense of humour, and with less instinct to consider mild double entendres as nasty in some way, would gather up the power to invade the hallowed Temple of Twitter’s Trending Topics.
The blogs’ concerns were that the system could be gamed, but are we saying that those clicking through the trending topics list are stupid, and can’t tell the difference between targeted spam, and legitimate trends?
YouTube hasn’t had their DNS hijacked; Yelvington describes a wildcard match in the whois tool which let’s you see not only youtube.com but other records where youtube.com forms part of the overall domain name, but doesn’t actually affect the lookup of *.youtube.com at all, e.g. YOUTUBE.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM. Check out something similar which happens when you lookup microsoft.com.
The simple fact is that YouTube is inaccessible due to the leak of network route announcements from outside a Pakistani ISP’s network border to implement a government-sanctioned block of certain YouTube ISPs. In other words, someone messed up. YouTube can easily re-appear on the net once either the Pakistani ISP resolves their route announcement snafu, or Google shift the servers onto alternate IPs not part of the /24 block being announced. Simple.
My blog software, WordPress, has been nagging me to upgrade it for a few days now. It’s normally an easy process: go to the website, download the tar archive, untar into a temporary directory, then cp -a the files into my blog’s Apache virtual host directory.
However, Aq noticed a slightly easier way: use Subversion. Now I can upgrade WordPress with a simple svn switch command, followed by a click on a database upgrade script. Much, much easier.
It is good for Microsoft, as it gives them an “in” into both the FOSS community and corporate arenas, and it’s good for Novell, as it helps them solidify their role in the enterprise Linux market. An associated patent agreement, where Novell pay licensing fees Microsoft for specific patents, and Microsoft agree not to litigate on those patents, is just a cherry on the cake, although cynics may suggest that the patent part is the meat of the deal. I’m unconvinced. The patent deal is to keep shareholders happy; the collaboration deal is to keep customers happy. And isn’t that what FOSS operating in a corporate environment is all about?
Just sifting through some tech stories on the BBC News site this morning, and chatting about it to folk on IRC, there are some reporting discrepancies that really wound me up. Hey, what’s new; I love railing on the BBC for minor screw-ups, but for BBC News to get things wrong like this doesn’t bode well.
File-sharing ‘darknet’ unveiled “A “darknet” service that allows users to share music files anonymously on the web has been launched in Sweden”, squeals the first paragraph. The problem is, that the service — Relakks — costs €5, or 49 swedish krona per month. How can something be anonymous when you have to pay for it? However, the critical part is that it isn’t a “darknet”. Wikipedia currently defines darknet as “a private virtual network where users only connect to people they trust”. Relakks is a PPTP VPN service which allows all your Internet traffic to be sent via a PPTP server in Sweden, where you will appear to all intents and purposes for IP lookups. This isn’t a darknet, this is a proxy service. Eeshk.
Blogs buzz on Dell battery recall Stop me if I’m wrong, but of the sites they mention — The Inquirer, The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica and Engadget — only one, Engadget, is by definition a “blog”. I’m pretty certain Slashdot would refute the blog label, and The Inquirer, Ars and el reg are news outlets. Is the BBC trying to belittle online tech news sites by calling them “blogs”, and in the process attempting to lead naive readers to see the Beeb as one of the only authoritative news sites? Thanks to sporkle for that one
Smash hit for internet chav guide Decapitalizing “Internet” (it’s theInternet, not aninternet) aside, this is a story about two girls from Somerset who got 30,000 hits on their YouTube-submitted video called “How to Be a Perfect Chav”. A quick flick onto YouTube reveals videos about a cat crapping into a toilet (~ 646,000 hits), a dog humping a cat (~ 260,000 hits), someone making pancakes (~ 299,000 hits), and Gizmodoshowing off the new Sony Mylo (~ 820,000 hits). Really, 30,000 hits is a drop in the bucket – many popular YouTube submissions have millions of hits, some even only a week or two after being uploaded.
Well, looks like one of ThinkGeek’s excellent 2003 April Fools — the George Foreman USB iGrill — is still wreaking havoc amongst the gadget blogging community. Not only did Wired’s Gear Factor(cached copy) pick up this from mobilemag.com(cached copy) as though new — Wired, newsflash, it’s over three years old — before deleting the article — Wired, breaking news, Google remembers all — but numerous other gadget sites carried the same thing as though real, including Gadgetspy(cached copy). Someone even tried to digg the story.
I kinda ripped into Kevin Smith the other day for some of his more-than-usually-over-the-top media whore antics in the past few months, but his disgust at movie critic Joel Siegel walking out of Clerks II when only 40 minutes had passed is well placed and well described. If I was to be paid to watch a movie to review it for a publication, I’d damn well make sure I watched the whole thing.
Thanks Kevin, you’ve restored both my faith in humanity and in your capability to bitch about the right things in life!
I finally caught up with the new Clerks IItrailer at apple.com. It bodes well that it received an eight minute standing ovation at Cannes last month, but after seeing the first 20 minutes of Jersey Girl again on Sky, I can’t get over the dichotomy that Kevin Smith is a dick.
Let me rephrase, as that comes across as I don’t like or respect the guy. He made Clerks and Mallrats, two movies I love. He’s a maverick independent film-maker. He’s best buds with Tarantino and Rodriguez. He talks openly yet eloquently about his productions, his life and his friendships. But here’s the rub: he made Jersey Girl and he consistently whores his wares across all his company’s websites in such a fashion to make said sites almost unreadable. Maybe I’m just jealous — teeth-grindingly, shaking-fist-wildly-in-the-air jealous — but for a guy with such clue, he seems to fumble the ball more often than most in recent years. This galls me, because as I said, it’s not that I don’t like or don’t respect him.
I’m struggling to find a point here. Perhaps I just need to get these two minor points off my chest: people will buy Kevin’s stuff regardless of how heavily or lightly it’s pimped on his websites, and Jersey Girl really, really licked balls. Seeing another Smith production making its way towards the cinema merely returns those emotions to mind and gives me the chills that the Jersey Girl Effect could happen again: great cast + shit script = shit movie.
viewaskew.com reports that Kevin will be in the UK in August to promote Clerks 2’s likely end-of-August release date over here, and with the first leg of the trip being in Edinburgh, that seems to co-incide with the Fringe (or more specifically the Edinburgh International Film Festival). I may just have to wander across and ask these very questions in a less vulgar manner. “Oi, Smith, you’re a dick: explain” may not be received too well in person!
Looks like the Scottish Blogs site been updated. Funny, I was just looking at nyc bloggers and thinking, “we should really have something like that … hang on, didn’t Gordon McLean [who runs Scottish Blogs] say something about setting up our version of that?” Lo and behold, after making a bit of clicky, I was there, and he had There are still niggles to be sorted out, but it’s looking like a great start, and a definite improvement over a simple webring.
Well, looks like one of ThinkGeek’s excellent 2003 April Fools — the 
