Category: Links
You are viewing all posts from this category, beginning with the most recent.
2001: The aliens that almost were
An interesting piece on Kubrick, Clarke and collaborators trying to design the aliens for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Via Daring Fireball.
Google is Buying Sparrow, but not Updating the Apps
This is annoying. The only thing that was stopping me from making Sparrow my default mail client on my iPhone was the fact that it doesn’t do rotation to landscape mode yet. Now it looks like it never will.
It’s rarely good in the long run when big software companies hoover up small ones, it seems to me.
A British Court Bans a TV Broadcast
The most chilling thing about this is not so much banning the broadcast; there could conceivably be a legitimate reason for that, though it’s hard to imagine a good one. Rather it is this:
For legal reasons, the Guardian cannot name the judge who made the ruling, the court in which he is sitting or the case he is presiding over.
This meta-blocking smacks of the "superinjunctions" that we heard a lot about a few years back (but which strangely seem to have dropped out of sight recently).
Bash - how to recursively find the latest modified file in a directory
From the mighty Stack Overflow, some useful tips on using find with dates.
Weird Law-Enforcement Things
There were three slightly weird law-enforcement- or intelligence-related stories in the news today:
- Two jailed in Northern Ireland over police officer's murder.
I heard the policeman’s wife on the radio. She spoke calmly about how getting the murderers off the streets was good for the community, and positively about the people who had bravely given evidence (at least one had to be given protection).
The odd, disturbing, and intelligence-community-related thing is that army intelligence had a tracker device in the car of one of the murderers, and at first they refused to reveal its details to the police undertaking the investigation. The police had to threaten to get a warrant. Then when they did provide the data, it turned out to have sections mysteriously missing. You have to sympathise with the PSNI here: they had both the Continuity IRA bampots and the army working against them.
'Dark Arts' involved in MI6 officer's death.
So what, this GCHQ codebreaker on secondment locked himself inside a bag using magic? I’m surprised that they’re even considering that it might not be murder here; or at least that someone has covered something up. More importantly, there’s the fact that the DNA evidence got messed up by a typo. Surely there’s got to be a better way?
Police officers deleted records of crime gangs
And then there’s this business about the corruption in the Met. Evidence allegedly deleted on the orders of crime gangs? That’s some scary stuff. I’m pretty sure that when the Serious Organised Crime Agency was set up, it was meant to be anti-organised crime.
No real connection between these, I just heard about them all today.
Penguin Pete's Blog - Using Bash To Solve A Brain Teaser
[Great use of Bash scripting to do a maths puzzle, but demonstrating lots of useful features.](http://penguinpetes.com/b2evo/index.php?title=using_bash_to_solve_a_brain_teaser&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1)
Link: Writers’ Bloc – a Literary Band
Writers’ Bloc – a Literary Band « East Kent Live Lit.
Some nice thoughts on what my friends in Edinburgh get up to with their spoken-word performances and chapbook publishing.
I really must get up for one of their performances.
Link: Screenwriting Tip Of The Day by William C. Martell - Romeo to Rambo
How good scripts get turned into bad movies: Screenwriting Tip Of The Day by William C. Martell - Romeo to Rambo