EPICYCLE

I have to eat humble pie, tonight, after I've finished picking up the top of Mike's head and reattaching it... He evidently did a little more checking around at the Board Game Geek site, and did indeed find my long-lost wargame already documented there... I'm certainly not going to be able to find anything more obscure than that one, now, so I shall have to admit defeat and acknowledge that the site is indeed most remarkably comprehensive and voluminous, and that I am unworthy even to re-index its databases.   <retires, muttering>

Meanwhile, Koolance finally have released their PC3-736 water-cooled case, and as expected it's a real monster. Based on the full-height Lian Li PCV-2000, it has space for six 5¼" drives, twelve internal 3½" hard disks, and a motherboard about the size of Kansas. Now that I'm looking at pictures of it, though, I'm actually starting to wonder whether I really need a chassis that large, but as I'm being quoted a lead time of several months from the UK distributors and shipping direct from Koolance in the US would cost in the order of $300, I have plenty of time to make up my mind...

Elsewhere:

Top ten non-dictionary words  - I was especially fond of "cognitive displaysia", an ailment from which I suffer terribly every time I go away for a few days holiday.

Deep Throat steps forward - ex-FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt claims to be the legendary source who leaked details of the Watergate scandal, but this has not yet been confirmed by Woodward himself.   [Update - yep, looks like it's official - the Washington Post has published the story, too]

Spamming the wrong people - New York law firm Ziegler, Ziegler & Associates took exception to having their email system clogged with junk, and decided to... uh... take the law into their own hands.

The LiveCD List - a marvellous catalogue of bootable CD images, mostly Linuxes of one flavour or another, for performing some useful specialist function - firewalls, data recovery, security auditing...

Worms starting to turn - elements of the French legal system are starting to raise objections to the draconian and excessive sentences that the media industry is demanding for small-scale file sharers.

The Science Of Consistency - an interesting article on the demand for continuity within science fiction movie plot lines, and a tantalising hint that the mystery of the Klingon forehead may yet be revealed...

Dissolving the boundaries - Bathsheba Grossman is "an artist who explores the region between art and mathematics", apparently, and although pricey her work is certainly appealing and unusual.

Thinking the unthinkable - at Boing Boing, a long article on the advisability and technique of cleaning your computer keyboard by putting it in a household dishwasher. I remain unconvinced, myself.

My über-geek friend Mike has been staying this weekend, and pointed me to a couple of classic geek web sites. The first, the aptly-named Board Game Geek, is clearly the premier site for everything to do with (did you guess?) board games. They have details, photographs, user reviews, discussion areas, and various other resources for many thousands of games of all genres, and really are an excellent example of how wonderfully thorough this kind of special interest site can be. I used to be an enthusiast of board games and wargames myself, back in the day, and Mike challenged me to find one that the site didn't already feature. I tried a dozen that I thought might be sufficiently obscure to have slipped under the radar, without any success at all (rather the opposite, in fact, as many of them turned out to be extremely well documented!) but fortunately I managed to find one before Mike's smug grin became so broad that the top of his head fell off - an obscure magazine game based on the Battle Of Arsouf in the 3rd Crusade. He's now gone off to track down further details so that he can submit it to the site's database.  :-)

He also pointed me to Parks Sabers, a manufacturer of extremely impressive Star Wars light sabre replicas. They sell a dozen different designs of handles, nicely turned from aluminium or stainless steel and with assorted LEDs and controls to add detail, and the detachable "blades" are electro-luminescent tubes of various colours sealed inside a tough polycarbonate outer. They look marvellous, as indeed they should considering that they cost upwards of $250, and although I'm not tempted I have to admit that I am impressed.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

It hasn't been a good week for US Government computing, it seems... Firstly a university student at Georgia Tech published a report on the role of poorly secured military systems in spreading the Witty worm last year, next the Government Accountability Office revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission has failed to implement adequate security and auditing procedures internally, and finally federal auditors have released a scathing report on the woeful state of the controversial Homeland Security Agency. Apparently the agency has failed to devise any plans for restoring the national data infrastructure in the event of an emergency, and in fact is generally unprepared for exactly the sort of crises that it was created to manage. Hmmm.

And talking of government IT disasters, the UK's appalling ID card scheme, currently being pimped around as a solution to the growing problem of identity theft (how, when the majority of such fraud is committed via electronic means where an ID card would be completely irrelevant?) might turn out to be even more expensive than the already significant cost claimed by the proposal's sponsors. Experts at the London School of Economics, cited in The Observer, suggest that the true cost of implementation could be more than £18 billion, triple the official figure and the equivalent of £300 per UK adult. Support in Parliament is mixed, but the UK public seems to be surprisingly fond of the idea - proving how poorly they understand any of the civil liberties implications and technical problems inherent with the scheme, and also how successfully the Labour government has deceived them about the claimed benefits it would bring. Not good...

Still on the subject of unfortunate IT - the latest version of the venerable Netscape browser was released earlier this month, and all has not been plain sailing. To begin with, the release version shipped with a generous handful of security vulnerabilities (one of which had already been identified and patched in the related Firefox release), and more recently it emerged that installing Netscape 8 breaks Internet Explorer's ability to render XML, killing RSS aggregators and similar tools. AOL hasn't yet released a solution to the problem themselves, but fortunately Microsoft has provided a workaround. However, this requires that Netscape is uninstalled (you can imagine the laughter at Redmond!) because of its habit of over-writing the registry key on question every time it is run.

Playing with the new protocol - two projects are underway to develop custom firmware for the popular Linksys WRT54G wireless/DSL router, enabling IPv6 functionality without sacrificing support for the conventional IPv4. The long-awaited IPv6 is the great white hope of the next generation Internet, and we're all going to have to come to grips with it sooner or later.

Thoughtless Acts - a fascinating new book explores how people react to an environment that is not perfectly suited to them, the modern world, and how they modify this environment (sometimes even subconsciously) where possible. The web site introduces the book, and allows readers to add their own contributions - of which there are already a significant number.

Ah, the weekend at last - and thanks to the bank holiday a long weekend at that. With one of my PFYs away on leave this week (and next week, too, which is going to be even worse as I have a generous scattering of annoying but important meetings to cope with as well) I'm more than usually glad for the break.

Small, but surprisingly powerful - dual CPU, dual SLI video, four SATA interfaces, and all the usual gubbins - somehow packed into a SFF PC chassis. I can't help but wonder how hot it gets inside, though, with all that silicon!

At Ars.Technica, a useful discussion on building a CD of support tools for working on a relative's computer while visiting - until a couple of Mac bigots jumped in with their tired and formulaic "ditch the POS Wincrap" invective. Sheesh.

Various new enhancements to the BitTorrent P2P application have emerged recently, including the controversial search and trackerless versions -the MPAA et all must be foaming at the mouth over this, and it's a bad time to be baiting them, for sure...

Monitoring the undead - CipherTrust's new ZombieMeter is an online map illustrating the number of new, unique zombie PCs detected every hour around the world. As I write this, the UK has seen a total of 5573 in the last twenty four hours, representing 3% of the world's compromised systems.

Device drivers the new Trojan horse - both Windows and Linux systems are at risk from buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities in 3rd party device drivers, according to a new report. It never fails to amaze me how poorly-written some device drivers actually are, so the news is hardly a surprise.

All is not rosy in Mac land, it seems, at least among readers of The Register. The new Tiger version of the OS is receiving criticism from a wide sector, citing an ever-restrictive interface, serious usability issues with the Mail app, and of course the infamous VPN issue - to name but a few!

At Tom's Hardware, all the ins and outs of lighting up a PC case.

The evils of DRM - upgrading eBook software cost this hapless user an expensive download.

Evolution in action - Macedonian cockroaches learn to live on laser printer toner.

The pre-history of the Internet is revealed in a documentary on the 1980s BBS culture.

Abusing Amazon - more cunning hackery with their wonderfully flexible and powerful API.

At the New York Times, a review of Microsoft-founder Paul Allen's SF museum in Seattle.

To boldly go - Voyager 1 has officially left the solar system, our first step into deep space.

Working with what you've got - a minor digital masterpiece, created with the primitive MS Paint!

Who knew? Tim Henman accuses Wimbledon's tennis balls of being flat and lifeless...

The Register tells it like it is - "UK ID scheme rides again, as biggest ID fraud of them all".

Like one of his own stories - SF writer Robert Sheckley is still trapped in a Ukrainian hospital.

One step forward and two steps back - UK court bans online sale of adult videos.

Sinn Fein are selling an MI5 bug found in their offices, after eBay cancelled their original auction.

So, my little dance of domains and web servers is over, now, and everything seems to have settled into place very nicely. My previous domain host, Freeparking, used an annoying masking technique which meant that a web browser just showed the URL as epicycle.org.uk wherever one actually was in the site. An equally annoying side effect was that I couldn't use paths to particular pages along with the domain name, but instead had to use the non-masked address of the web server itself, thus losing the Epicycle "branding" and confusing search engines and online site management utilities no end. Now, however, I can give out a URL such as http://www.epicycle.org.uk/weblog.htm, which will redirect straight to the current weblog page - much more elegant, and very convenient as well!

Unfortunately the migration process involved moving my pages to a different virtual server within Fasthosts's server farm, and so none of the old links to my site are now valid. The native address of the server itself will still work, domain816798.sites.fasthosts.com, (although there's no need to use that now that the epicycle name works properly) but the previous site address of domain385250 is completely defunct, and that's going to wreck havoc with my beloved stats until Google has crawled my new address.

Bizarrely, the URL that first hosted this site, cix.co.uk/~dominict, is still active - if extremely outdated by now! That address is at my old ISP Pipex (the provider formerly known as Cix, Telenor, Nextra, and GX Networks), and in spite of the fact that I severed all connections with the company back in November 2004, they haven't actually got around to removing my pages from their web server! Instead, they've spent most of this year chasing me for money for a long-cancelled DSL connection, and although they're happy to send out erroneous bills they seem incapable of actually reading and understanding any of the multitude of letters, faxes and emails I've sent them in reply. They really are the most incompetent and frustrating ISP I have ever dealt with!

As I've had domain names so much on my mind of late, it occurred to me yesterday to look around and see what the other variants of the "epicycle" name are doing with themselves. Epicycle.com, epicycle.uk.com, and epicycle.net are owned by three of the now ubiquitous domain speculators, and are currently just standing idle. Unusually, the majority of the other domains remain available - with the exception of the epicycle.co.uk domain, which has been used for the home page of a Chicago-based pop group of that name! Now, I have rather a bee in my bonnet about flagrant misuse of top-level domain names, and this example definitely ticks me off - acquiring a UK domain when you're firmly based in the middle of the North American land mass is just plain butt-headed, and is a sign of either someone with either a complete disregard for netiquette or a complete lack of knowledge about the way the Internet is supposed to work. Whichever, it's making me grit my teeth and stifle an angry but probably completely pointless email...

Administrative note - the http://www.epicycle.org.uk domain name has settled safe and snug into its new home at FastHosts, and although there are some more tweaks I can do to make the fully qualified paths a little more elegant the basic functionality is intact again. Bookmark away.

Meanwhile, the usual start-of-the-week links...

Dan rides again - Dan has been unusually quiet, recently, so it's good to see him back again with a new letters page. The advice on deleting locked files from within Windows is especially interesting.

No billboards in space - the US Federal Aviation Administration is proposing regulations to ban giant advertising satellites in low earth orbit - but they may have a sinister hidden agenda...

MS on multi-monitor support - flat panel monitors are getting better and cheaper, and this makes multiple monitors an attractive proposition even for those without huge desks and deep pockets.

iPod health warnings - following what seems to be the start of a backlash against the little white bastards, The Register has been running a contest for the best anti-iPod slogan.

Answers to creationist nonsense - a wonderful article at Scientific American, listing the common arguments made against the theory of evolution and the appropriate ways to refute them.

Phone fraudsters ignore fines - although ICSTIS fined 16 premium-rate phone operators a total of £1.3m for using illegal automated calling equipment, they have yet to collect a single penny.

Internet telephony threatened - true to form the incumbent telcos are acting to protect their monopoly by throwing obstacles into the path of the IP phone services.

Writing on a hair - a team at Boston College has used a laser to deposit a polymer onto a human hair, without affecting the hair itself. The material they deposited formed the letters to spell out "H A I R".

Giant iceberg rampage continues - following the rather anti-climactic collision with the Drygalski ice tongue in January, the 115 kilometre B15-A iceberg is now menacing the Aviator Glacier.

Administrative note - I've just started the process of transferring the epicycle.org.uk domain name between the original registrar and the provider that is now hosting the site, as the first stage of a general re-vamp of my domain forwarding. This is likely to take several days, of course, and may bring unexpected side-effects - so if during the coming week you can't see this page at the usual address, you'll know why. Normal service will be resumed at some unspecified future date.

Meanwhile, back on the web...

Windows exploit detection tool - Microsoft are developing a network of probes to seek out rogue web sites that are using OS exploits to infect PCs with malicious code, analyse the types of attack that are being used, and report back so that the pages can be removed. The bizarrely-named "Strider HoneyMonkey" uses a combination of technologies emerging from Microsoft's Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group, and although its early days the technology certainly looks extremely promising.

Vigilantes attack phishing sites - meanwhile, some white-hat hackers are taking direct action themselves, breaking into rogue web sites and not only identifying the pages as scams but also removing any dangerous active components. Web monitoring firm Netcraft says that it has found evidence of two such "attacks" in recent weeks, one against a site posing as paypal.com and the other that was imitating the NatWest bank. The practice is a touch dubious legally, of course, but I say more power to them!

Spooky robotic cat - Mark at Boing Boing disapproves of robots that are that little bit too lifelike, and having watched the video of this robotic cat I rather agree with him. It's not that it's 100% convincing, as it isn't, but that actually makes the aspects of feline behaviour that they have modelled perfectly look even more disconcerting. The way that it rears it's head back when the girl moves to stroke it, for example, or the way the ears twitch and the eyes narrow, is absolutely perfect.

Amdahl CPU board - found by accident on eBay a few years ago, this circuit board from a 1992 Amdahl 470-series mainframe is a marvellous example of the state of the art at the time - the front of the PCB has an array of 42 air-cooled CPUs, neatly laser-bonded to the substrate and each with their own little heatsink... The back of the board, on the other hand, is a mass of hand-wired connections, probably to rectify errors in the design of the multi-layer PCB itself, and although this may indicate that the board was an engineering sample many mainframe systems looked like this even in production.

Video game docs - replacementdocs is an archive of downloadable instruction manuals for computer games, currently providing several thousand manuals across a couple of dozen platforms and with more being added all the time. Unusually for this sort of site, it has the full approval of many of the original manufacturers - and some, such as Atari, are actually linking to the site from their own tech support pages. It's neat - I've just found the quick reference card for the old Gunship! helicopter sim, which I lost track of several years ago and without which the game is completely opaque to me!

Dissing Infinium again - following the complete absence of the controversial Phantom console at the E3 technology expo, and the recent filing of an extremely depressing financial statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, it seems increasingly doubtful whether Infinium will actually be able continue as a company at all, let alone whether they will ever bring their long-delayed console to market. So, no surprises there, then...?

I've listened to a lot of AC/DC over the years, especially the earlier songs, but they've never really been a group that has spent much time on video and so the forty tracks on this pair of DVDs have been something of a revelation to me.

The first disc is the classic era that I grew up with, from their earliest appearance on Australian TV in the seventies to a recording of Highway To Hell made only ten days before the untimely death of founding singer Bon Scott in 1980. The other features the band's second life with Geordie front-man Brian Johnson, starting with the definitive Hell's Bells and ending with videos from their 1990 album The Razor's Edge - their 14th release in as many years.

The opening track, way back in 1975, is certainly the most unusual - a cover of blues standard Baby Please Don't Go, featuring not only guitar diva Angus Young in the schoolboy outfit that became his trademark, but also singer Bon Scott as a bizarrely twisted schoolgirl - blonde Heidi wig, heavy makeup, and school pinafore. Perhaps fortunately, Scott apparently didn't consider the gimmick worth persevering with, but somehow Angus's shorts and school cap became an accepted part of the heavy rock mythos - an unlikely phenomena, with hindsight, but definitely a favourite with the fans.

I have to say that the majority of the remaining tracks are pretty much formula - the band have always been extremely accomplished rock musicians, they obviously love what they do, and they've just never felt the need to branch out into anything more adventurous. That really doesn't matter, though - their music is easily among the best of it's genre, and if you happen to like that genre you're going to like a whole bunch of it even more. Buy this DVD, turn the volume up, and then dust off your air guitar - Angus' Young's clear, elegant and yet stunningly powerful riffs are thoroughly infectious, and you're going to need it!

I am really looking forward to the end of the week... I've been up to my elbows in SNA printing problems, and after that sort of work I always feel a little dirty. Unfortunately it looks as if, having managed to avoid any intimate acquaintance with the company's out-sourced IBM mainframe for over six years, I'm now going to be forced to cosy up to it only a year or so before it is due to be retired and replaced with a SAP/Siebel system running in-house on my Wintel servers. Ah, well, there goes both my street cred and my dignity.

There's still time for some quick links, though, before I have to go and wash my hands again...

Intense competition to wire the Tube - with sixty companies bidding for the contract to wire the London Underground for cell phone use, there's obviously a lot of money involved - and that's no good thing.

More corporate bullying - Stelios Haji-Ioannou has threatened legal action against a small Welsh cell phone company who have been in the business for several years longer than his new EasyMobile.

Oracle settles whistleblower suit - they've paid off the vice president who exposed the alleged scam over billing for government training with $8 million, but are still professing their complete innocence....

Commodore Teapot - these inspired lunatics ripped the guts out of an old Commodore PET and installed a spinning, illuminated wire teapot of the sort beloved by James Blinn and Alvy Ray Smith.

Flying, flocking Linux - and talking of lunacy, a team at the University of Essex is building helicopters piloted by ultra-compact embedded systems that communicate with each other via Bluetooth.

Scavenging space hardware - villagers living near the Plesetsk Space Center in northern Russia are making ends meet by recycling debris from forty years of launches, in spite of the serious health risks.

Cracking laptop locks - there was something of a fuss about security products from Kensington and others, last autumn, and this video demonstrating the technique is sure to stir up the market again.

PS3 specs - hot on the heels of the semi-launch of the XBox 360 comes the PlayStation 3 and, unlike Microsoft, Sony have committed to backwards-compatibility with both their previous consoles!

Robot skin - bristling with infra red sensors to detect physical contact, a new material developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre could be used in the next generation of robotic probes.

Travelling at C - a set of photos of a German street try to give an impression of how it would look to drive through the town at the speed of light. One would need excellent brakes, of course...

Country Joe McDonald - the veteran singer-songwriter's web site is full of fascinating history, new music, anti-war protest (you choose the war!) and a whole bunch of other stuff. Recommended.

A colleague brought in his home PC for some emergency repairs, yesterday, and I became quite uncomfortable when I realised that it had two 160Gb hard disks that weren't mirrored to each other.  The idea of all that data at the mercy of a manufacturer's designed-in MTBF statistics is far too scary to contemplate with equanimity, and I had to bite my tongue when I found myself on the point of lecturing him on data security - he's actually been in IT rather longer than I have, and certainly knows what's what, but even the more technical users just don't think about these things the way a veteran sysadmin does.

It's that start-of-the-week ennui, again, so just some quick links...

Hot hardware - At the redesigned Bit-Tech, a discussion on the innards of the new Xbox 360 - and the specs are actually rather impressive. Three 3.2GHz PowerPC cores, for a start!

Slimmed-down Windows - designed for corporates that need to stretch older PC hardware for a little longer, Eiger will run on a Pentium II with 128Mb RAM, updating systems currently running Win 9x.

MS security suite - One Care, comprising anti-virus, anti-spyware and a firewall, will be aimed at home users and licensed by subscription as expected. The Register has some worthwhile comment.

Air conditioned case - not exactly a Prometeia or a Vapochill, but Nextherm's ICS 8200 features a Peltier with its cool side towards an inlet fan, and is certainly an interesting budget idea.

Collaborative anti-spam - desktop spam filtering software around the world should exchange information on junk messages currently in circulation, increasing the success rate for everyone.

Test your own code - a new product can check source code against a database of 38 million open source files, to make sure that nothing has sneaked in that might violate the terms of the GPL.

Doctor Who e-books - courtesy of the BBC, eight freely downloadable stories from across the canon, complete with new illustrations. Annoyingly, though, they only seem to be in single chapter files!

Space-age ant farm - "as used on a 2003 NASA space shuttle experiment", according to manufacturer Scientifics, Antworks is a blue gel in a neat Perspex container - ants not included!

Sun spits tiny squirt - just to prove that not all solar events are on a cataclysmic scale, the smallest coronal mass ejection yet observed has emerged from an area a mere 10,000 miles across.

Doubts haunt new XBox - although extensive details of Microsoft's upcoming XBox 360 have now been released, one huge question remains unanswered - will it be backwards-compatible with games written for the original console? Amazingly, it seems that Microsoft have not yet decided on this basic feature, which is raising a few eyebrows around the industry given the lateness of the day. Speculation is rife as to whether it's a licensing issue, or a marketing strategy, or even that the three 3.2GHz PowerPC CPUs don't provide enough raw power to emulate the original hardware's 733MHz Pentium III. Whatever the reason, though, backwards-compatibility is likely to be a major factor in the success of the new console, and they'd better make their minds up soon...

In December 1959, physics diva Richard Feynman, one of the earliest proponents of what is now called nanotechnology, offered a $1000 prize for the first working electric motor no larger than 1/64th of an inch across. He said at the time that he didn't think he'd have long to wait before awarding the prize, and sure enough, less than a year later, a man wandered into his office at Caltech carrying a large wooden box. Feynman groaned to himself - he'd already suffered through a number of approaches from would-be entrants who had misunderstood the challenge, bringing him small but conventional motors many orders of magnitude larger than he had envisioned, and this seemed to be yet another waste of his time. This offering was very different, though - the man opened the box and pulled out a powerful microscope, and Feynman grinned wryly as he realised realised that he was probably about to reach for his chequebook.

Sure enough, the motor, one of ten made by engineer Bill McLellan, was even smaller than Feynman had specified. The wires of the coil were made by patiently rolling the thinnest wire commercially available between two glass slides, reducing its diameter to just 1/80th of a millimetre - a trick McLellan borrowed from watchmakers - and the thirteen separate components were painstakingly assembled using toothpicks and the tips of the finest paintbrushes. Actually, Feynman admitted that he was disappointed by this approach, as he had been hoping to inspire a completely new technology, but he paid up willingly and added the tale to his ever-growing store of anecdotes. None of the motors survive, today - one was actually crushed by a BBC television crew attempting to film it, and the final one, still on display near Feynman's office in Caltech, burned out in 1991 having survived over thirty years of attention from undergraduates.

Four decades after Feynman inspired McLellan, some of the challenges he threw down in his legendary talk "There's Plenty Of Room At The Bottom" have been surpassed many times over. The huge technical advances in micro-miniaturisation that have been developed for the computer industry have ended up with researchers routinely showcasing their work by spelling out words using individual atoms, and highly-convincing simulations illustrate far more complex and sophisticated ideas. Nanotechnology is now a multi-billion dollar research sector, and although little of genuine value has yet been brought to market, the science media is full of fascinating components that seem tantalisingly close to being brought together into actual, working products. It may take a good few years yet, but nanotech is undoubtedly going to change the 21st century in just the same way that computers changed the 20th - and I'm waiting with bated breath to see it happen.

Crying wolf - a paper released today at a Canadian security conference brings news of a possible flaw in the HyperThreading technology used in Intel's high-end processors, such that a rogue process running on one virtual CPU may be able to eavesdrop on security keys being calculated on another. However, a long thread at Slashdot suggests that a) the guy is a bit of a loon, and probably angling for a job in IT security, and b) the flaw, if indeed it does exist, is so incredibly theoretical and ineffective that it's really not worth losing sleep over. I certainly won't be - when some of my users can barely enter their IDs correctly at a login prompt, that sort of risk is the least of my worries...

Stupidity is its own reward - a Melbourne teen's iPod was accidentally put through the washing machine, and so he decided to open it up to repair it... At which point it exploded (rather gently, admittedly - there really isn't much oomph in a battery that thin, even if it is lithium-ion chemistry), ending up with him being treated by paramedics for inhalation of fumes. Excuse me while I cram my fist into my mouth to stifle the laughter.

Exotic weaponry - the DREAD gun is a new design based on a rapidly spinning centrifuge that releases ball bearings at speeds of up to 300 metres per second, equivalent to a handgun. The rotary action would be quiet and reliable, and allows an unprecedented density of fire - with a mere 8.5mm between each round, the mass delivered to the target in any given period of time is extremely high. Full details in an article at New Scientist, and further background (with video!) at a pair of articles in Defense Review.

Son of Broadcast Flag - I certainly didn't think that we'd seen the last of the Broadcast Flag, but I have to admit that I didn't expect it to be resurfacing this soon. The MPAA has already started schmoozing around Capitol Hill, looking for a Congressman willing to sponsor what is apparently an even more draconian, wide-reaching version of the FCC's proposals, recently overturned by the Court Of Appeals. The new draft not only re-states the original intention of restricting the re-broadcasting of digital media, but also seek to control "all devices capable of performing an analogue-to-digital conversion". This is scary stuff indeed, and technically extremely implausible, but the smart money doesn't rate the MPAA's chances very highly - political support for the media lobby is waning, it seems, as in spite of extensive lobbying not one Hollywood-backed law has been passed in the last eighteen months.

It's that link again.

Trouble in paradise - Google's new accelerator has been withdrawn only a few days after the launch, with the company citing inadequate capacity on it's servers. The widespread stories of serious security issues caused by caching credentials are probably nearer the mark, however...

"Now that the living outnumber the dead" - a new report reveals that the UK currently has more cell phones than people, which won't come as a surprise to anyone who has seen the Motorola graveyard in the bottom drawer of my desk. 3G phones are still a pointless waste of silicon, though, it seems...

Poring over the fine print - the RealID act that has just been passed in the US has all sorts of bizarre and disturbing clauses, it seems, and Hannibal at Ars.Technica has been trying to make sense of the ramifications. Even the staunchly-Republican NRA zealots aren't going to like some of them, he thinks.

Deserting the cause - Apple are considering scrapping the open source model for their Safari web browser, and moving to a new proprietary code base in order to "resolve compatibility conflicts". The announcement is ruffling feathers, of course, and it has to be said that they were fairly ruffled already...

And talking of open source - a new survey has brought some unexpected responses, with surprisingly low numbers citing lower cost or better security as a key benefit of the open source ethos, and 14% claiming that they saw no actual advantage over proprietary software. Is the honeymoon ending?

I've just paid out a surprisingly small amount of money for a 1Gb SD memory card for my Palm, and in order to prove that hope springs eternal I stuffed it into my USB card reader to see what happened. The reader is a nice little piece of hardware (it's black, which is a damn good start), but I've never had any luck with the larger capacity memory cards that are now increasingly common - it's happy enough with the 128Mb MMC I use in the Navman, and the 256Mb CF in the camera, but the 512Mb SD cards I used to use in the Palm don't even seem to register as being present. I've emailed the manufacturer a few times, and painstakingly deciphered their bizarre flavour of English to update both drivers and firmware, but even some serious hacking about with INF files has brought no success at all.

I was surprised, therefore, when not only did it read the new 1Gb card perfectly, but also the 512Mb cards that had proved so problematic before. I'd pretty much given up on the whole thing back in the autumn, so I have absolutely no idea why or when it suddenly started working again (and if it stops working tomorrow I still won't be any the wiser) but I'm quite happy to make the most of it while it lasts - a gigabyte of MP3s and Audible audiobooks took only a few minutes to copy over, rather than the half hour or more that it would have required via the Palm's hotsync. Neat!

DIY graph paper - PDFs of graph paper, including some fairly exotic varieties: asymmetric, iso-dots, hexagonal and Celtic knot. No polar coordinate or logarithmic, though, I notice...

Real ID Act passed - more stealth legislation, sneaked through as part of an $82 billion spending bill authorising funds for the Iraq war and tsunami relief. As the saying has it, "no good will come of this"...

20 Questions - at the excellent Cool Tools blog, a hand-held twenty questions game based on a neural net that has been learning to play for seventeen years! It looks extremely cool...

Unusual cooling - a stripped down PC running quite happily immersed in an aquarium full of vegetable oil. As so often with these things, it was done for a bet... Thanks to Boing Boing for the pointer.

Odd links...

Marvellous car decorations at Ring Of Fire Enterprises - I'm especially fond of the Darwin fishes, based on a certain well-known religious emblem.

New technology at AnandTech - SATA II hardware is starting to ship, with performance boosted by NCQ acceleration, and Samsung are releasing hybrid disk drives with flash memory cache onboard.

Coincidence? - Michael Dell has personally invested $100 million in debentures from Linux firm Red Hat - but the value of the company's shares has fallen by almost 45% in the year since the purchase.

Pots and kettles - ex-RIAA bigwig Hilary Rosen is up in arms about the iPod's embedded DRM, but amazingly she seems quite happy about the idea of "geeks" bypassing the protection!

Innovative - Bram Stoker's classic Dracula, reworked as a weblog with posts made on the same dates as those in the journal of Jonathan Harker that forms the novel. A very clever idea...

Consolidation - Adobe is to acquire Macromedia in an all-stock transaction valued at around $3.4 billion, leaving just three of the dozens of graphics companies that existed twenty years ago.

Over-reaction? - all 900,000 subscribers of UK ISP Telewest have been blacklisted by the SPEWS anti-spam service due to the huge number of PCs that have been compromised by spammers.

As it stands the hardware itself finally seems to be working correctly, but it has to be said that the software still leaves something to be desired. Fortunately, other people have noted its shortcomings too, and some of them are software developers. Something I've just stumbled upon is the ShowCenter Plus Pack, and this adds a few interesting new facilities, but although Pinnacle's software looks quite slick and polished these days it still isn't very feature rich.

Recently I've been testing the open source Oxyl~Box, which apart from being linguistically rather too German for ease of use, is superior in almost every way to Pinnacle's own offering, and probably the best alternative if you're disappointed with the bundled application. Other 3rd party servers are Open Showcenter and SwissCenter (although I've yet to look extensively at either of those) and Neuston's Media Center is also fully compatible, as their Virtuoso MC-500 appliance uses the same Sigma Design REALmagic CPU (if you can call it that!) as the ShowCenter itself.

It's well worth exploring some of the alternatives, especially considering that Oxyl~Box can apparently co-exist quite happily on the same server system as the original ShowCenter software. Current versions will even perform the firmware upgrade and configuration tasks that until now have been unique to the original app, and given how little one has to lose by switching I'd strongly recommend doing just that.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Operation Salami Drop - a Newark deli is trying to help the troops, but doesn't the concept of shipping two tons of decidedly unclean food into an Islamic country seem to be a little bit... tactless?

The dangers of MP3 - another article on the risks to hearing associated with personal MP3 players, although I remember this going back to the eighties when the Sony Walkman first became popular!

Firefox exploit demonstrated - two flaws in the open source Firefox browser can be combined to render the host PC vulnerable, according to Secunia, who have rated the risk "extremely critical".

Apple's Safari browser compromised - a proof of concept virus attacks the newly released Tiger OS, and it seems likely that genuine malware will follow soon. A bad day for the anti-Microsoft camp...

Personal supercomputer - the Orion Multisystems DC-96 contains 96 interconnected 1.2 GHz processors, giving an impressive peak capacity of 230 gigaflops from the fridge-sized unit.

Fooled by hype - protestors are complaining about the "Nano-Tex" coating used in clothing from Eddie Bauer, in spite of the fact that the brand name owes far more to marketing than to science!

Just some random links, tonight.

Oh, the irony - OpenX is a special tool for opening those incredibly annoying plastic blister packs, and it really looks the business. As Boing Boing points out, though, it comes blister-packed itself...

But who would use one? - and talking of gadgets, if not nearly as useful, a telephone line powered... uh... "personal massager". Well, it could be worse - at least it's not another stupid USB device!

Microsoft U-turns again - the fracas over anti-discrimination legislation is making Microsoft spin like a top, right now, and this time they've announced full support for any future proposals. Will it last?

Mars probe spotted - the wreckage of the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, which crashed when its engines failed during re-entry in 1999, has been found after examination of photos taken by later probes.

US restricts computer access - in another butt-headed attempt to protect the country, computers of more than a certain processing capacity have been ruled off-limits to foreigners without a license.

Software crackers jailed - four British members of piracy group DrinkOrDie have been sentenced following a worldwide crackdown. Unusually, all of them held fairly senior positions in the IT industry.

Lies and damn lies - apparently HP's ousted CEO, Carly Fiorina, is now on the lecture circuit discussing what was apparently "the most successful hi-tech merger in history".  <cough>  Bullshit.

New Palm leaked - a few scant details of Palm's new handheld, the LifeDrive, have appeared on a listing at Amazon.com. It certainly looks pretty, but I've been fairly unimpressed with recent models.

The transaction with UN Company went perfectly smoothly this time, and now that I have the scope in my hot little hands in fact it's a very nice piece of hardware. Everything is metal except for the zeroing knobs and the reticule illumination control, and it's fairly solid, well-finished metal at that. The mount is integrated into the rails that form the sides of the tube, a standard dual-clamp mechanism that is tightened down with a pair of allen screws.

Isn't it pretty!  :-)  It's added half a kilo to the weight of the replica, too, and as the gun already has a metal body on top of that massive SR-25 RAS front-end, it is now officially bloody heavy. The next job is to sight it in, of course, and hopefully I'll be able to do that without attracting too much unwelcome attention from the neighbours.

Elsewhere, some links...

Vintage hardware with a twist - at Photoshop contest site Worth 1000, some marvellous entries as usual. I loved the car radio and the Palaeolithic multitool, but they're all good...

Hollywood calling - the two UK-based owners of a website which links to BitTorrent content that has fallen afoul of the MPAA have been summoned to appear before the District Court of New Jersey.

Cisco announces Wi-Fi tracking - initially only for their Airespace range of access points, but soon to be extended, the system will allow any 802.11 device to be pinpointed to within around 5m.

VAT payable on data transfers - unlike information sent by traditional paper methods, the same data sent electronically is subject to the 17.5% VAT, thanks to a little known EEC Directive from 1977.

The Sideshow reminds us that today is the anniversary of the shootings at Ohio's Kent State University in 1970, and although it may seem like a long time ago and a long way away, it's not something that we should let ourselves forget. Given the growing tension between activists and the British government over the last twenty five years, it seems likely that the only reason we haven't seen a similar tragedy in this country is that until recently our law enforcement officers did not routinely carry guns - but thanks to Bush and Blair that is changing, with more and more policemen not just armed with handguns or even SMGs, but instead carrying military assault weapons such as the H&K G36. That's serious firepower in comparison with the Ohio National Guard's WW2-era Garand M1 rifles...

What would have happened during the miner's strike of 1984-85, the poll tax protests of 1990, or even the persecution of the "travellers" in the mid-eighties, if the police involved had been armed with pistols, let alone the range of weaponry available to them in today's media-hyped and government-sponsored climate of fear? The routine level of police brutality and the tendency for massive over-reaction displayed then makes it perfectly clear that if the police had been armed, we would have seen corpses on the streets - and not just a few of them, either. The current generation of protestors and political activists may well be taking their lives in their hands in a way that has never before been the case in Britain, and as I remember Kent State I can't help but feel a sense of foreboding.

Elsewhere...

In spite of the rumoured upturn in the global IT industry, the giants are still tightening their belts. IBM is cutting up to 13,000 jobs, many in Europe, and Hewlett Packard are continuing the strategy that earned previous CEO Carly Fiorina the nickname of "the pinkslip princess", with around 2000 workers taking "voluntary" redundancy instead of waiting to be downsized with extreme prejudice at a later date.

Meanwhile, hardware guru Dan Rutter's fearless stance on exposing quack technology has certainly brought the loons out of the woodwork again. This week's letters page at Dan's Data has contributions from a fervent supporter of a ludicrous battery enhancer gizmo, whose claims for the product are even more over-blown and implausible than those of the manufacturer, and a representative of the old guard in the shape of a homeopathic medicine evangelist who can't even spell the name of the concept she is defending. It always impresses me that Dan can stay so polite and reasonable in face of abuse from these idiots - I know I couldn't!

More than 170 London businesses have withdrawn their support from the city's controversial 2012 Olympic bid, following the failure of the London Development Agency to provide a realistic budget to relocate them from areas that would be demolished to build various Olympic venues. It's good to be reminded that not everyone in London is as gung-ho to win the bid as Mayor Ken Livingstone claims.

At Ars.Technica, an excellent article on the history of the GUI, from Douglas Englebart's mouse in the late sixties, through the Alto computer and Smalltalk at Xerox PARC in the seventies, and then on to Apple, IBM, Microsoft and all the other imitators. The next time someone tries to tell you that Microsoft stole the GUI from Apple, remember that everybody was guilty of stealing it from Xerox.

Yesterday The Sideshow linked to an article by SF and fantasy author Orson Scott Card, with the comment "Why is Orson Scott Card dancing on Star Trek's grave?". It's a fair question, but I'd take it further, as having read the piece it seems to me that Card has lost the plot entirely. Now don't get me wrong - I'm a huge fan of the majority of his work, and his linked Ender and Bean stories may well be my favourite SF series overall, but this particular article has me foaming gently at the mouth from a combination of factual errors and bizarre, unreasonable assertions. For example:

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s

The 1930s; really? Does Card actually remember the sort of stories that were being published in the 1930s? I would suspect not, as I never noticed anything in the original Star Trek that particularly reminded me of John W. Campbell, E.E. Smith, Olaf Stapledon or the other luminaries of the period. Now, if he'd said the 1950s, then yes, I could see his point - there's a lot of the spirit of Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber and A. E. Van Vogt in the TOS episodes, which is unsurprising as these were probably some of the authors who influenced the relatively unknown scriptwriters working on the show. Actually, a number of the better episodes were written by established names in the field, such as Harlan Ellison's The City On The Edge Of Forever, Norman Spinrad's The Doomsday Machine or Theodore Sturgeon's Shore Leave - and to suggest that any of those writers were trapped in the 1930s is just plain silly.

Charlie Kaufman created the two finest science fiction films of all time so far: "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

Well, I've watched "Being John Malkovich", and found it whimsical, charming and entertaining - but by no means the finest SF film of all time. And as for "Eternal Sunshine", that was apparently such a spectacular movie that it passed completely under my radar, and although I know the name I hadn't even realised that it was SF! The IMDB review somehow makes it sound like one of the formulaic Robert Sheckley novels that I've usually been rather disappointed by, and while I'm willing to accept that it's probably not that bad, I somehow doubt that it's all that... Most Top 10 lists seem to mention such offerings as Blade Runner, Alien, Dark Star, Brazil, or The Matrix - tastes vary widely, of course, but there have been so many stunning SF movies made in the last thirty years that choosing as the best two from the same writer smacks of dogma.

So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long? Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction.

Oh, dear... It's hard to know where to begin. I know a fair few hardcore Trekkies (yes, I know they prefer "Trekkers", these days, which is why I don't use the term...) and the single thing they have in common is that they all read. A couple of them don't read much else but Star Trek novels, I admit (and, boy, are there a lot of those these days!), but nevertheless - and the majority have eclectic but wide-spread reading tastes not only outside the Star Trek canon, but outside SF in general... Roman history, Victorian railways, romantic poetry, human psychology, political theory, you name it. A fair number of them write, too, on equally diverse subjects.

To broadly condemn Star Trek fans as non-readers is not only inaccurate but insulting, and as that assertion is one of the focal points of the article I can't help but conclude that his entire premise is rather too flawed to be of any value.... I shall go on reading his books (the latest in the "Shadow" series is downloading from Audible as I write this) but I'm afraid that from now on I shall have to reserve the right to bitch about "The Mormon", as two of my notable fan friends call him, whenever I can persuade someone to sit still long enough to listen.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Desktop fab - 3D printers are a technology whose time has come, it seems, and rather to my surprise interest is especially high in developing countries.

Online action painting - fancy yourself as a budding Jackson Pollock? The ArtPad lets you throw a bucket of paint with the best of them, and you can even hang your work in a virtual gallery afterwards!

More on MS anti-discrimination stance - and now it's turning ugly, with the hate-filled, bigoted evangelist who started all the fuss accusing Microsoft execs of lying about the original meetings.

The chemistry of water cooling - an extremely useful pair of articles at Overclockers.com, with the full skinny on the thermal properties, wetting, corrosion, turbulence and unwanted life forms.

TSA eBay scam - all the items confiscated from airline passengers by the Transportation Security Administration in the name of safety are being sold off - including a terrifying purple sombrero hat...

More quick links, as I have no energy and no heart for anything more, tonight.

The end of Budmonkey - there was a site selling cannabis online? What marvellous chutzpah!

Bennett Robot Works - cute little robot sculptures made out of all sorts of retro oddments.

Pork spammed - Manchester's chief constable was receiving over 2000 spam messages per hour.

Go for deployment - the Mars Express probe has finally started to unfold, ready to scan the surface.

Dan has resurfaced after a hiatus, with more letters and a rant on the future of display technology.

And, finally, audible revenge - a CD of sound effects designed to annoy your neighbours - a drill, a party, drumming children, domestic arguments, you name it... and it makes me think of this:

Just a few very quick links, tonight...

SCO, Groklaw and Monterey - an article at The Register clears up a mystery that never was, and then a second article has some more information, some contributed by people involved in the doomed project. Just when you think the whole SCO thing has burned out, up it flares again!

Tax the iPod! - another butt-headed idea, equivalent to the tariff that killed DAT and Audio CDR.

Revolver Tech - at Arnie's Airsoft, an excellent guide to the internals of Tanaka's Pegasus revolvers.

Illuminati Leather - what self-respecting secret society would be without their logo on a jacket?

Fundamentals of the sciences - "If you could teach the world just one thing", asked Spiked.

Rube-Goldberg technology - a 3D printer made from Meccano and a hot glue gun. Classic!

Pastures new - hackers are increasingly turning their attention to targets other than Windows itself.

Testing, testing - a neat little network cable tester, right down at the bottom of the market.

And there we are. The DigiDoc reports a nice high, stable voltage on both 5V and 12V rails, and it looks as if all is running nicely. The wiring isn't quite as neat and tidy as the previous incarnation, but as I'm planning a migration to a new chassis in the next month or two there didn't seem much point in being anal about the fine details. The next incarnation is likely to be a bit less complex, too, with luck - with water cooling for the CPUs and disk drives I can do away with a proportion of the fans, and so a proportion of the fan and temperature monitoring cables as well. Of course, I'll be adding a bunch of water hoses in their place, so it will be interesting to see how it all works out.