Stormcaller.net

Sunday, January 26, 2003 - "The inner box unpacks the outer box at the same time as the outer box unpacks the inner."

> Science/Tech

With their revolutionary solar tower, Australian company Enviromission plan to power 200,000 homes per tower with renewable solar energy. They are planning one tower in Australia by 2005 and another four by the end of the decade. [Details]
I would really... really like one of these. [Details]
Here's a question I bet you never thought you'd get an answer to: What happens when you microwave a CD then put it on a tesla coil? [Details]
Nuclear rockets = win. [Details]
MC's co-worker puts it nicely: "Hmm, printing organs. I wonder if it supports 14" paper." [Details]
Let's bring back the weekly "I want one!" feature. [Display]
> Geek

Old SAAB + old barbeque + stones + wood + gas = sauna in a car, or SAUNAAB, with built-in barbeque! [Details]
I never thought I'd say this, but good for Robbie Williams, who this week was speaking about how great music piracy is. Article copied almost verbatim from here, but what are you gonna do? [Details]
Lindows is taken, so I guess this would have to be Windux. Or LinuXP? [Details]
Mmm... cheap hard drives. I might have linked this already - read this at school last week, away from my home computer, so can't remember. Anyway, Slashdot duped it, so why can't I? Shorter BBC article here. [Details]
So much for anonymity. Evil RIAA, as usual. I'm so, so glad I live in the UK. [Details]
Techno/electronic/drum 'n' bass type tracks created using DNA sequences. [Details]
A nicely done review of the Farscape Role-Playing Game by a friend of mine, Rel Fexive. [Details]
> Stuff

Joel Veitch over at Rathergood.com has finally gotten round to making Blode 6 - Attack Of The ÜBER-PEA! [Destroy]
He's also now very kindly provided a track listing for the excellent music used in all of his animations. [Details]
A guy in a power wheelchair with a snow blower on the front. 'Nuff said, really. [Details]
No headline needed, I think. [Details]
There's no way to paraphrase this. It's dinosaur porn. [Display]
A pair of b[l]enders making fools out of themselves and random passers by (mostly old people). [Details]
Not, as the name may suggest, a satire on Linux. [Destroy]
Okay game, schweet music. [Destroy]
Three lovely images posted by MC on his site, quarter-flash.com. [Display][Display][Display]
Flash Flash Revolution. Damned if I can do anything past the intro of any of the tracks, but it's well made. [Destroy]
Photos of the my old school building being demolished. Not very interesting unless you went there, in which case very interesting indeed. [Display]

Posted by Stormcaller at 12:25 AM GMT [Link]

Sunday, January 19, 2003 - "Photo album"

The photo album (formerly photos.stormcaller.net, but now at stormcaller.net/photos) is back up. There's still no proper front page to it, but a directory listing is perfectly adequate until I can be bothered to do one. Gallery pages with clickable thumbnails are done in Photoshop.
Lots of new photos, including selected photos from the London Farscape event and some pictures from the last three [WoF] events. For those of you who know me in "Real Life™", there are a bunch of webcam snaps, a whole load of various pictures from different places and now Chubby Rich! I'll be adding more photos as I take, scan or am sent them.
The Stormcaller.net photo album can be found here.

Posted by Stormcaller at 1:58 AM GMT [Link]

Saturday, January 18, 2003 - "Everything in moderation, including excess!"

> Science/Tech

Is http://www.airstrike.mil really a good idea? [Details]
Anyone want some cheap Pentium IIII chips? [Details]
Apparently some 16-year-old has written an internet browser which make surfing the web "up to 6 times faster", plays DVDs and all other major video formats and has a plethora of other features including a speaking 'assistant' avatar. Slashdot readers cry bullshit, claiming that "780,000 lines of computer code" in 18 months is pretty much impossible for one guy and that his claims are highly skeptical, but various groups including a journalist with MIT connections says it seems to be for real. [Details]
Wouldn't say no to one of these. Was this the same thing as the flying thing that you could only buy if you agreed not to use it? [Details]
Is that really the best piece of clipart CNN could come up with for this story? [Details]
> Geek

If this is true, authentic and a real threat, we could all be in a lot of trouble. Not from the RIAA, of course - they couldn't ever hope to prosecute even one percent of those who download MP3s. But multi-headed worms ("hydra") of this sort, infecting multiple systems and spreading through multiple p2p networks, could cause some serious havok. If these guys are to be believed, then a project like this backed by the RIAA will be properly funded and developed to a very high standard, and could be hard to detect or protect against. Of course, all this should be completely illegal, but isn't. Under US law, due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this would now probably be legitimate. [Details]
...so it's damn lucky that it seems to be a hoax. That's what the RIAA themselves are claiming, anyway. [Details]
MC wrote about two interesting films he saw on Sunday - "Koyaanisqatsi", meaning "Life Out of Balance", and "Powaqqatsi", meaning "Life In Transformation". Read his reviews here... [Details]
...then find out more about these two unusual films at their website. [Details]
All Blogs Die Eventually. So enjoy it while you can. [Details]
A new copyright license takes the free software community by storm. [Details]
Bastards would never dare... [Details]
Not entirely sure how I got on to the subject of Assassins. I think it was something to do with Vitenka, which led to this discussion, which led to something to do with Cambridge University, which led here. But I'm not quite sure how I got onto the subject of 'Tenka. Maybe it was the Circle Line link below, which is on the cam.ac.uk servers. Confused. Oh, but I finally found out what Vitenka's real name is. [Details]
...and more here, if you're actually interested. It's a fun idea, and pretty complex for a Cops And Robbers variant. [Details]
Yeah, I've been seeing billboard adverts for this. I can't believe some mobile phone ringtone/logo site is trying to become a major player in the broadband arena. £27.99, but if you have any common sense you'll go with a company who know a bit more about being an ISP, namely anyone else. I use Eclipse - £22.75 a month for 576 downstream, and they actually know what they're doing. [Details]
I happened to come across the Star Wars telnet movie again, mainly after realising that blinkenlights.de was something different from blinkenlights.nl. And it's incomplete! I had it running on my second monitor for a quarter of an hour, and it got up to Luke, Han and Chewie going to rescue Princess Leia on the deathstar before ending in a "To be continued...". What a swizz! [Details]
Scorpius speaks. [Destroy]
Oh, there's supposed to be a gaming element to this, right? C&C: Generals funky collectable stuff. [Details][Display - HiRes]
There's a new trailer to download, too, for the Global Liberation Army. [Download]
This Starcraft: Ghost thing looks wubly too. [Details]
Never mind Haldir. Figwit lives too! [Details]
Screenshots from all versions of Windows from 1.01 to XP. Warning: large images. Lots of them. [Details]
Chris Chapman was kind enough to link me over at his weblog, and it's my pleasure to do the same. As he put it, we seem to share all the same interests and visit lots of the same links - we originally met through the Save Farscape campaign. Check his (pleasantly designed) site out at some point. [Details]
> Stuff

Some London Underground-related stuff.
Have I Got Tubes For You? [Display]
The Circle Line - now circular! Plus some interesting stuff on networks further down. [Details]
A geographically correct Tube map, for completeness' sake. [Display]
A site with all kindsa of random flash-type Underground/London maps. [Destroy]
What a good idea. A tube map of London bloggers. I guess I'm one of them. [Details]
Tales of Hoppits, Aragorn Son of Aragorn and Mr. Elf. [Details]
You know some movies/games/sites carry a warning about epilepsy, motion sickness etc? This website really will make you feel ill. [Display]
A lovely site. Seems to talk about itself a lot - it's a design type company's site, I think. But it's beautiful. [Details]
Some kind of nature simulation. Quite interesting, before all your plants die repeatedly. [Destroy]
This really shoudn't be fun at all, by all rights. I'm not sure why it's so cool. [Destroy]
So now you know. [Details]
Sauron lives! Muahaha! [Display]
Not only is this a complete rip-off of the classic Liquid.se 3D Pong, it's also far slower, easier, stupider and generally inferior. [Destroy]
Paper Aeroplane simulator - see if you can beat my distance record of 82ft. [Destroy]
That silly Slime Soccer thing that all my exceedingly bored friends have been playing recently at school. [Destroy]
...and an entire site, domain name and everything, dedicated to the strangeness that is Slime Sports. [Details]
British chocolate wins! Victory is sweet. Suck that. Ok, I'll stop. [Details]
Someone set up us the bomb! [Display]

Posted by Stormcaller at 1:26 AM GMT [Link]

Friday, January 17, 2003 - "Constituency Crap"

So what is my local Member of Parliament busying himself with since 21,432 (52.5%) of us voted him in during the 2001 general elections?
"Hendon MP Andrew Dismore shared a bite to eat with Abhay Lakhani, chairman of the Bhaktivedanta Manor Foundation, and Sivarama Swami, head of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
The duo visited Mr Dismore at his constituency office on Thursday last week to thank him for a campaign to bring religious tolerance to Hungary."
- Hendon & Finchley Times
Dear Mr. Dismore,
I salute your efforts to promote religious tolerance and bring fairer treatment to ethnic minorities in Hungary. While on the subject, could you please provide contact details for anyone in the Hungarian Houses of Parliament who would be able to help the poor, oppressed constitutents of Hendon?

Posted by Stormcaller at 9:17 PM GMT [Link]

Saturday, January 11, 2003 - "Man, you just can't beat crazy. I have to get crazier. I'm working on it. Stay tuned."

> Science/Tech

Wow, I can't decide if this is a motorbike or some kind of missile. It shares a name with a cruise missile. I want one! [Details]
This is very schweet too, and not just because it has a guided missile launcher on the top. [Details]
Fact: Gravity moves at the speed of light. So now you know. [Details]
Right, now for some planet-related stuff.
Some incredible renderings of Mars using actual data from the Mars Orbited Laser Altimeter (MOLA)... [Display]
...and what the red planet would look like if it was terraformed. [Display]
Cut out and fold your own Jupiter! [Details]
Planetary maps and lots of other bits for all of the planets and major moons in out solar system. All kinds of topological data, bump maps and other stuff. [Details]
Insanely detailed map of the whole of the Earth's surface, from the above linked site. Larger images available here. [Display]
And, of course, the US Government's answer to all of the above. [Display]
Some lovely timelapse movies - Quicktime needed. This guy has also done a whole load of nice astronomical visualisations, mostly of Jupiter and its moons. [Destroy]
> Geek

DeCSS in haiku form! Delightful! [Details]
Porn Lord vs Porn Lord. Does anyone really care? [Details]
Evil Sci-Fi. I can't decide if that's a "go away, we're scared of you" or a challenge. It's certainly made a lot of people very angry. Evil Sciffy.[Details]
And my article on the above. [Details]
So common that I'm not sure if the 'geek' category even applies, but still funny. [Destroy]
Yet another crazy American project, but this one is actually very clever and comes off well. I want one. [Details]
Wikipeda - a free online encyclopedia in which anyone can anonymously and instantly edit any entry or even page on the site. [Details]
> Stuff

Screw the vote - I can imagine plenty of my friends simply salivating over the pictures. Mostly the girls, I'd hope. [Details]
Remember Penn And Teller, that crazy magician duo who exposed all those magic secrets? Turns out Penn is a big freedom/rights/privacy advocate, and runs a nice little blog. Anyway, here's a little story. [Details]
This Lord Of The Rings craze is still spreading... [Display]
...and I'm brushing up on my Hamlet in preparation for my English Literature coursework this term. [Details]
Don't read this site. Don't even follow this link. [Details]
Well, ok. You can read just this one. But don't say I didn't warn you. [Details]
Am I President Or Not? [Destroy]
Fancy buying one of the US Virgin Islands*? *Note: Virgins not included. [Details]
I don't mean to insult Italian Catholics, but this is really stupid. [Details]

Posted by Stormcaller at 6:49 PM GMT [Link]

Wednesday, January 8, 2003 - "The last Farscape rant"

It's been far too long since I've written a nice column on the whole Farscape affair - and what opportunities this week has brought. I'm going to keep this short, but I felt I had to write something regarding Bonnie Hammer's recent interview with TV Guide, in which she tries to defend her decision to cancel Farscape (against a popular online magazine which is a big fan of the show). Hammer is Executive Vice President of the Sci-Fi Channel, the US-based cable network (previous owners of, and still affiliated with, the UK Sci-Fi Channel) who produce, help create and pay for such original shows as Farscape, Stargate SG-1 and Tremors, as well as the Dune miniseries and Stephen Spielberg's "Taken".
Yet again, the issue is being avoided. The usual excuses: higher production costs and lower ratings. The production costs were no higher than during season four, a fact that has been confirmed by the Jim Henson Company, and the only increase in price was because of Sci-Fi asking for extra airing rights. Farscape has been "the top-rated series on Sci-Fi for three years running" (again, Hammer's own words), and for a series that had only been going for about three years that certainly doesn't sound like bad ratings. What's worse is that she had the nerve to blame this on the fans who have supported the campaign to save the show, saying they would have been able to do another full series "i all of those incredible fans who wrote in and sent notes and flowers and [whatnot] had actually watched it every week". So all these Scapers were organising campaigns, petitions, rallies, publicity and events just to support a show none of them watched?
She even uses Farscape's serialized structure, where there's an actual ongoing plot and character development throughout the series, against the show. Talking about Stargate SG-1, which many believe was a major cause of the cancellation due to Farscape being moved to a later slot and having its marketing toned down a lot to accomodate the newer Stargate, Hammer says "My husband is a kind of absentee watcher, and he would tune in every fifth or sixth episode and have absolutely no issues [with following the plots]", or as one fan paraphrased her, "Stargate SG-1 - the show where you can skip 5 out of every 6 episodes and you won't be missing anything!" That's the point. The Sci-Fi Channel seems to be moving away from science fiction. They are on the quest for the ever elusive "casual viewer", preferring throwaway shows and series of this nature with individual and unoriginal episodes to something which Hammer herself stated was "one of the best-written shows on television, period." Perhaps a more complex show is a little harder to pick up, but it's most certainly a lot more difficult to stop watching once you're into it.
Ms. Hammer hasn't been the favourite person of Farscape fans in recent months, but now even the critics are giving her a slamming. The Washington Post has included an item in their TV column - scroll down to near the bottom and have a read. It's interesting to note that even they had a milder version of the facts; the "11 more episodes" the article mentioned were not even 11 extra episodes, just the second half of series four that had already been made and were waiting to be shown. Watch Farscape, the 'official' Save Farscape campaign website, has compiled and written a response to the article, quoting figures and statistics to refute Bonnie Hammer's claims. It's worth reading.
Whatever you want to call them - Sci-Fi, Skiffy, SlyLie or various other, less printable nicknames - the fact that they sold out the real fans and a large core of their viewers has now been more or less confirmed by these words from Bonnie Hammer. Nobody is calling for a boycott of the Sci-Fi channel. They are now showing the second half of Farscape season four in America, starting this week from Friday the 10th. Everyone watching could bring up the ratings, and every Sci-Fi viewer is a potential Scaper. If the ratings are high enough, who knows what could happen?
But if they don't pick up Farscape again, with other shows being nerfed left right and centre and all the other decent stuff on the channel (read: animé) being moved and shrunk, perhaps there'll be nothing left worth watching.
You can catch the last 11 episodes of Farscape at 6:45pm every Monday on BBC2 in the UK, and at 8pm on "Sci-Fi Friday" every week on the Sci-Fi Channel in the US.

Posted by Stormcaller at 9:15 PM GMT [Link]

Tuesday, January 7, 2003 - "DeCSS Victory(ish)"

For those who don't know (well, most people), DeCSS is a small piece of software that breaks the CSS (Content Scrambling System) encryption in most DVD movies and allows the reading of encrypted DVDs. The guy who coded it was sued in 1999 by an organisation representing companies and studios from the film, music and electronics industries. The distribution of the utility was banned by a US judge.
I've been casually following this issue for a while. I actually sat down and read a deposition and some other parts of the case against the creator of this page (details of the actual case half way down the page), which displays the DeCSS source code in as many creative ways as possible without actually directly printing the source code itself - he's got it on t-shirts, hidden in images, in plain English, lots more - partly to illustrate that there should be no legal difference between an executable program, source code and other description of the code, and partly as a political message.
But now the US Supreme Court has refused to get too deeply involved, dealing a defeat to the prosecutors. The court order banning distribution of the DeCSS program has been removed and the case has effectively been thrown out, though the creator is still open to the possibility of being sued again if he does distribute the utility.
IANAL and I don't know nearly enough about the whole thing to contribute to that in any substance. Besides, enough has been written on the subject of DeCSS, the various trials and legal matters regarding it and the cases for and against it (well, mostly for the geeks and against the studios). Nevertheless, I will say that more than a just and righteous victory for the coders and free speech advocates; this is a significant defeat for major hollywood studios and other greedy electronics companies trying to stifle free speech in order to make a couple more million dollars.
Bah - I wrote this late last night. I should have posted it before Slashdot got hold of the news this afternoon. You can read their summary and more in-depth discussion here.
[Uh, I made a post about Cascading Style Sheets last week and I'm talking about Content Scrambling Systems this week. Don't get confuzzled.]

Posted by Stormcaller at 5:37 PM GMT [Link]

Monday, January 6, 2003 - "DVD Writer"

CD-RW drives are going for dirt cheap nowadays - I just saw one for &163;38, which is the price of a couple of spindles of CD-Rs.
Thinking of getting a DVD writer - I'm trying to make a serious stab at clearing some stuff off my hard drive, but SVCDs are just a pain and need three CDs for a decent quality, two hour film. DVD would be much more suitable, and it's getting more affordable now. Anyone got any idea of:
A good price for a DVD writer?
The best brands (or models) to go for?
A good place to buy one?
What the advantages and disadvantages of DVD-RW and DVD+RW are, and which technology is better to go for?
Let me know - drop me an email.

Posted by Stormcaller at 7:06 PM GMT [Link]

Sunday, January 5, 2003 - "photos.stormcaller.net"

Just a reminder that the photo albums are still up, though the address has changed slightly and I haven't linked to them yet. The new address it http://www.stormcaller.net/photos/, as opposed to http://photos.stormcaller.net which no longer works.
I've got some new photos from France and other events which I'll be putting up once I've cleaned them up a bit in Photoshop.

Posted by Stormcaller at 9:11 PM GMT [Link]

Sunday, January 5, 2003 - "Power. The only thing nicer than toast."

Well, New Year's Eve came and went. Happy 2003 to all, etc. etc. Hope this year doesn't suck quite as much as the last one.
Back to school tomorrow (Monday). Blegh. Last day of holiday, and still some work to do. I didn't manage to get done half the stuff I'd planned to this holiday, including getting all my work done early, watching Terry Gilliam's film "Brazil" again, watching the remaining few special features on the Fellowship of the Ring extended DVD, getting Mandrake Linux up on either the spare PC that's still lying around unused or on the small empty hard drive on this computer, and finally getting around to making a website.
Well, that's not entirely correct. I've now got what's at least an adequate front end for these weekly posts up at Stormcaller.net. The splash image is now clickable, and there's actually a site of sorts underneath it. I'm using Greymatter for the back end, an open source CGI/Perl-based setup controlling a news system, automatic archiving, searchable entries, comments and various other bits which then lets you do what you like with the front end, using template variables to stick the content where you choose. The main page is the fruits of my investigation into CSS and DIV classes, which I've found to be easy and effective. I'm still screwing around with colours, eventually I'll have the layout in a better format and the comments/archives pages are still not "ready", but for now I've done what I meant to do: get something usable and readable up by this weekend.
So anyway - you can now read this at http://www.stormcaller.net/gm/. I'll still post to MORAT every week for a while, but I suspect that'll be dropping off when it becomes a hassle and when my site is looking and working a little better. Maybe you should get into the habit.
> Science/Tech

A very long but truly amazing story of a teenager who built a nuclear breeder reactor in a shed in his back yard and nearly caused a nuclear crisis, causing the US federal government's nuclear agencies to be called in. [Details]
And apparently you can make your own fusion reactor using this dubious device, which seems to have gained a cult following recently. [Details]
Yes, we should be going to the moon. Why not? If we could do it in the sixties with the equivalent computing power of a pocket calculator, we can do it now easily and cheaply with the technology we have now and the International Space Station as a jump-off point. A moon base of some sort could be self-reliant, useful for observation of both Earth and the rest of the galaxy and would make missions to Mars even remotely feasible. Screw the political wrangling - we want to go to the moon! Problem is, a European mission to Luna is pretty much a dream. As someone on Slashdot pointed out, NASA's budget for 2003 for human space flight is $6.1billion, while the ESA's entire budget for four years is somewhere in the region of €1billion euros. Even so, the UK government are being very short-sighted (now there's a change) by denying British scientists and citizens the chance to be involved in such a programme. At least this might shut up some of the conspiracy theorists who say the Americans never landed on the moon. Ooh, far too much interesting discussion in this thread to mention it all here. Go read. [Details]
The top ten physics highlights of 2002. [Details]
> Geek

Bollotics, data entry monkey, post-ironic, blamestorming - BBC's "e-cyclopedia" of all the stupid (or otherwise) words that people have thought up this year. [Details]
This Spam Arrest thing looks pretty good - the idea is simple but would work very effectively. However, for $19.95 every six months they can shove their spam protection up their inbox. [Details]
The RIAA trying to own everything again. I'm just going to quote a post on Slashdot on this issue. "Think about what Turkewitz [the RIAA bloke] is saying. Importing public domain material from Europe to the US is piracy. I'm sure [he] firmly believes what he is saying, and that Jack Valenti firmly believes watching tv without watching the commercials is 'theft of programming'. These people live in a COMPLETELY unreal world, which is why we have to make them shut the hell up and go away, instead of letting them write our laws for us." Evil free-registration-required NY Times article (less evil Slashdot post here. [Details]
When I go to University, I aspire to have this much time on my hands. But this is damn cool. [Details]
Tolkien's eleventy-first birthday, the big 111, was on January 3rd. [Details]
Some sad British blogger turns the 1660+ diary of Samuel Pepys into a serialised weblog. [Details]
"Mr Stallman, meet Mr Carmack." and "The Distributed Republic of Blogistan" in article. Brilliant. [Details]
Farscape (yes, there had to be a Farscape link) banners. I've got a nice one on my site, and these guys have added Stormcaller.net to their list of supporting sites. Go support them. [Details]
> Stuff

Being on Apple.com and being called Kill Bill, I assumed this was some Mac swipe at Microsoft. I was pleasantly surprised. [Destroy]
Reading the FAQ, I actually can't tell if they are serious or not. Next they'll be trying to outlaw Kleenex. [Details]
And Candles are apparently the gateway to hell, or something like that. Americans... [Details]
It's the new form of argument! [Display]
What was top of the charts on the day you were born? Something crap :/ [Details]
Low budget horror films (and not even the good kind), childrens animated adaptations, ninja/Chuck Norris/US Army/police/otherwise terrible action films (including all the hundreds of crap Delta Force movies), low budget sex-films and countless other straight-to-video movies that nobody ever saw/heard of. - and not a single DVD out of 596 that I'd pay £4.49 for. [Details]
But they do have the Shawshank Redemption for a fiver. Go buy. [Details]
Mugshots of the year! [Display]
Pure, pure genius. Americans are funny. [Details]
Or just stupid. [Details]
Well, it's a bit too late, but never mind. [Destroy]

Posted by Stormcaller at 2:35 PM GMT [Link]

Sunday, January 5, 2003 - "216 very evil colours"

I've lost all patience with the web-safe colour palette. They really are the most terrible set of colours - most of them are stark, bright, very saturated colours, with very few paler, less bold colours. Screw the grand total of zero people using 256-colour/8-bit computers, PDAs, colour mobile phones et al to view the site. If the creator of the palette says it's obsolete, it's obsolete. I want an off-white, and I'm going to use one.

Posted by Stormcaller at 12:41 PM GMT [Link]

Thursday, January 2, 2003 - "CSS"

This'll be my first time using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), but it seems to be working pretty well. CSS is actually very simple, and I've had no problems setting up a fairly effective page template in just a few minutes. Even a custom scrollbar should be pretty easy should I decide to have one.
Still fiddling with colours - I like this background blue (#336699), but when there's actually some content I'm eventually planning for it to be more subdued by the entry boxes, which I imagine I'll be keeping as white with the same blue for links and some text.

Posted by Stormcaller at 6:19 PM GMT [Link]

Thursday, January 2, 2003 - "New site in progress"

Looks like this Greymatter thing is pretty good, and appropriate for what I'm using it for unlike PostNUKE or Zope. I literally just set it up, so I'll be configuring and sorting it all out over the next few days hopefully.

Posted by Stormcaller at 4:48 PM GMT [Link]