Author: Paul Wright

11 comments on "Song Lyrics Meme Sheepage"

Via terriem, comes the meme:

Step 1: Get your playlist together, put it on random, and play.
Step 2: Pick your favourite lines from the first 25 songs that play (in my case, excluding parodies and Thundercats out-takes, oh yes).
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song the lines come from.
Step 4: Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly.

Update: as people seem to have run out of steam, I’ve added the answers to the ones no-one got.
<lj-cut text=”Here are the lyrics”>

1. You wave your hand and they scatter like crows, they’re nothing that’ll ever capture your heart. Downtown Train by Rod Stewart.

2. The sun is setting like molasses in the sky.Black Velvet by Alannah Myles. terriem

3. Flashback, warm nights, almost left behind.Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper. terriem

4. Pale blue eyes, same old house, no ties. When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring) by Deacon Blue.

5. The dizzy dancing way you feel, as every fairytale comes real Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell. terriem

6. That summer feeling, is gonna fly, always try and keep the feeling inside. Sparky’s Dream by Teenage Fanclub

7. All I do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme. Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits. terriem

8. Too in touch with myself – I light the fuse Changingman by Paul Weller. phlebas

9. Will you marry for the money, take a lover in the afternoon? Gloria by Laura Brannigan.

10. Laugh at the wonder of it all, laugh so loud you break your fall Sound by James. lisekit

11. No me dejes solo con mi corazon que esta enloquecido con esta pasion Dimelo by Marc Anthony, as popularised by Dave Sheridan’s Amazing Latin CD.

12. And I want to wake up with the rain falling on a tin roof, while I’m safe there in your arms. Come Away With Me by Norah Jones. terriem

13. Eye to eye, they solemnly convene to make the scene Music to Watch Girls By by Andy Williams.

14. Cos your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance, well they’re no friends of mine. Safety Dance by Men Without Hats. phlebas

15. Through these fields of destruction, baptisms of fire. Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. marnanel

16. I’d like to believe, in the terrible truth, in the beautiful lie. There Goes God by Crowded House. lisekit

17. So cool she was like jazz on a summer’s day. Valerie by Steve Winwood.

18. I dream of Michelangelo when I’m lying in my bed: little angels hang above my head and read me like an open book. Angels of the Silences by Counting Crows.

19. Fat man starts to fall. Inside by Stiltskin.

20. I get the same old dream, same time every night/ Fall to the ground and I wake up Since You’ve Been Gone by Rainbow. phlebas

21. Sail on silver girl, sail on by, your time has come to shine. Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel. terriem

22. The blonde waitresses take their trays, they spin around and they cross the floor Walk Like an Egyptian by the Bangles. terriem

23. And I think that I could love you ’cause you know how to be free. Walk this World by Heather Nova.

24. Call my name and save me from the dark Wake me up inside by Evanesence. lisekit

25. Can’t even hear ’em no more, all the voices and choices, now only one road remains, just [TITLE], two hearts, two souls, tonight, two lanes. Strangers in a Car by Marc Cohn.

4 comments on "Hey Google, don’t be evil!"

Usenet news is the Internet’s original discussion forum (in fact, technically it predates the Internet, but that’s not important right now): groups organised into a hierarchies, with messages (articles) in them which have a similar format to email, but which are distributed using a different mechanism. You can read news using a news-reader, a piece of software which connects to a news server to retrieve articles. There are thousands of newsgroups out there, covering every topic you can imagine and some you’d probably rather not. A whole lot of the Internet’s subculture originated on Usenet.

A while ago, Google acquired a Usenet archive dating back for a couple of decades, and did their usual search magic with it. Unfortunately, they’ve since lost the plot. The latest revamp of Google Groups, which went live yesterday, has sacrificed the usability of the news archive to promote Google’s own discussion groups. These internal Google groups are presented on the same site, in a move which seems to be designed to compete with the Yahoo! Groups! service!. What’s wrong with the new site?<lj-cut text=”Bad Google, no biscuit.”>

In decreasing order of badness:

  • They’ve broken old links. There are countless web pages which cite Usenet threads by linking to Google’s archive. These are now all dead links. Old links to individual articles (which refer to the Message ID of the article) are redirected (hurrah!), but into the top of the thread which contains the article (doh!): good luck finding the article you thought you’d linked to in a thread containing hundreds of responses. Oh, and the new way of forming links to individual articles doesn’t use the unique Message ID which is already in the original article, but a unique ID of Google’s own devising. That ID is presumably subject to change the next time Google’s developers are bored.

  • Google are tracking clicks on URLs in messages (the URLs are re-written to go via Google). I regard that as somewhat sinister: why do they need to know which links you’ve clicked? They’re not doing that on their web search, presumably because they know what would happen if they tried it.

  • They’ve tried to obscure email addresses throughout the articles, replacing some of the local part (that’s the bit before the @ sign, RFC 2821 fans) with an ellipsis. They’ve ended up obscuring similar looking things, like mention of Message-IDs in the original messages. Obscuring email addresses in Usenet articles is pointless: spammers already suck up email addresses directly from Usenet servers.

  • In all these changes, they’ve still not fixed the problem of Google users replying to messages from years ago. Or, as far as I know, the other problems (like not honouring the Followup-to header) which mean Google’s posting interface isn’t a good Usenet citizen.

  • They’ve tried to be clever with fonts. The text of articles is shown in a proportional font (one where all the letters are not the same width). Some levels of quotation seem to be in monospace fonts (where they are). Mock HTML tags (like, say, <sarcasm>) seem to confuse it, for some reason, as do other variations in spacing. If you have a post which discusses HTML itself, Google gets confused and may render the whole thing as a huge link, or with random spacing and fonts.


On the plus side:

  • The new interface is pretty.

Google provides a valuable service by making the Usenet archive searchable for free. But it is also using this to drive traffic to their own discussion groups, and doubtless hopes to make money from ads, in a similar way to the Google web search and Gmail products. Unlike the web search or Gmail, though, Google has made a product by reproducing people’s copyrighted work in its entirely (except for those ellipses, naturally). In the past Google has got away with it because their product enhanced the experience of Usenet, which is, after all, full of people who want to be heard. Every change will produce some resistance from people who liked things how they were before, but in this case something has been lost, and pretty fluff does not make up for it.

0 comments on "In One Ear"

<lj-cut text=”Dancing and that”>

GD on Friday was fun. CDC had been running events all day to raise money for Children in Need. In the evening, we had silly games at General Dancing, including the one where you put hats on people, play a quickstep and tell them to put the hats on other people. You stop the music occasionally and people who still have hats leave the floor. I got knocked out fairly quickly: I claim I was disadvantaged by dancing with Safi, who is too short to plonk hats on people’s heads from above (having the woman do this is clearly the best strategy, as it leaves the man free to steer). Ginger Joanna and I did win one of the “one dance to the tune of another” competitions, but cannot for the life of me remember which dances were involved. There was also a ceidlidh, although that suffered from the caller and band being a bit quiet (possibly down to a dodgy sound system) and assuming that we all knew what things like “set to your partner” meant. Oh, and they played the St Bernard’s Waltz painfully slowly. But it was all for charidee, so I shouldn’t grouse so much. I then decided I wasn’t rigged for hip-hop so ran away when that came on.

Went to a better ceidlidh on Saturday, for Allen’s birthday. It was a one man show by the inestimable Karl Sandeman. A good time was had by all. Thanks to Karl’s dressing up bag for use when dancing The Flying Scotsman, I now have a new user icon (the bigger version is even scarier). My attempts to channel Rab C Nesbitt were described as “actually scary, even though I knew it was you” by one onlooker. So, can yer mammy sew?

You can’t have one of these updates without mentioning religion, so I thought I’d point out an interesting article on Ship of Fools about university CU missions (like CICCU’s Promise this year). There’s a link at the top of the article to a longer PDF version, which is worth a read.

The author talks about most students being apathetic toward religion and student politics as if this were a recent change. I’m not sure I believe this, though. Kate Fox’s Watching the English mentions “The Importance of Not Being Earnest” as a general rule of Englishness: we’re naturally suspicious of anyone who appears too keen on anything. When she talks about religion, she also notes that while many people will say they’re C of E on census forms, few people actually care about religion enough to bother arguing about it. The hothouse environment of the vast Cambridge friends-of-friends web magnifies the importance of religion, since it is full of people who have thought about it and decided one way or the other.

This is probably a good thing, since it means that there is no political capital in placating the fundamentalists in this country. No Bush for us: Tony keeps quiet about his (quite serious, by all accounts) Christian faith. We’re far more interested in class war: witness the way that, as shreena pointed out, the ban on foxhunting got far more press coverage than the introduction of civil partnerships for gay people.

2 comments on "You May Not Be The Coolest Person Here"

Last night, we went to a fine dinner party, courtesy of bluap. The BBC has put on a new series of Strictly Come Dancing, so we watched that before we ate. Excitingly, a couple of the non-dancer blokes did pretty well: both Roger Black and Aled Jones have some sense of rhythm and moved their hips a bit. Poor Hazel Newbury had Quentin Wilson from Top Gear as a partner, and he really couldn’t dance, so one of the best dancers in Teh World Evar went out in the first round. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in future weeks, as there are some strong contenders this time around.

After that, there was food and conversation and stuff. I must link to Bob the Builder vs Eminem, Tony and Dubya’s lovely duet (and again) and yet more Enimem mash-ups for people who hadn’t seen or heard them. There was lots of discussion on whether LiveJournal was geeky or whether web-logging and suchlike is now a pop culture thing. I think one of my previous entries sums up what I think about that.

4 comments on "Attitude Adjuster"

Click for a bigger version

If you’re an English geek of a certain age, one Christmas you probably received a computer game which wasn’t like any games which had gone before. It came in an A5 box, big enough to hold the manual, the novella, the poster with all the ships on it, the leaflet listing all the keys you needed to fly your spaceship, and, I dunno, some other stuff, probably. Elite pitted you and your trusty Cobra Mk III against an open-ended universe, where you could make a living by trade, piracy, bounty-hunting or, as your reputation grew, by carrying out missions for people. It depicted the universe in glorious wire-frame 3D. As Francis Spufford explains in Backroom Boys, it was groundbreaking and absorbing. That particular Christmas, I played it so much that, as I slept, visions of Pythons danced in my head.

Oolite is a free, open source Elite clone in Objective C for Mac OS X. It’s faithful to the original, but there are some improvements (the targetting box which shows the distance, ship type and legal status in the picture above, for example), and some nice touches (notice the skull and crossbones on the Mamba?) You also feel more a part of the world than in the original, as you come across other ships engaged in combat, or a pirate caught by the long arm of the law. The nostalgia! Buy a Mac and play it.

2 comments on "Ravished By The Sheer Implausibility Of That Last Statement"

robhu made an entry about visiting an evangelical church, which lead us into a discussion about the implicit assumptions of evangelical Christianity, and just what the word “Biblical” means. It sort of follows on from cathedral_life‘s observation that evangelicalism seems to be more about a philosophical theory (an epistemology, I’d say) than about discipleship (see what large words I use as I type this entry with my own hands!)

Meanwhile, over on rec.arts.sf.written, there is a huge crossposted thread about Philip Pullman. This included a posting from an ex-Christian, about the difference between the personal God “who helps grandmothers find their car keys” and the God-of-the-Philosophers who is unreachable and unknowable. More specifically, about how some Christian apologetic arguments switch between one and the other when it’s convenient. Good examination of a tendency I’d not thought of before, but recognised when it was described.

I must also recommend livredor‘s answer to shreena‘s question on whether livredor has ever doubted her Judaism. Interesting stuff.

8 comments on "Sanctioned Parts List II"

Some while ago, Mark Pilgrim did a post on cool software tools he couldn’t do without. In the absence of any pending rants about religion, here’s mine. Probably only of interest to fellow geeks, so cut for length.
<lj-cut>
Mail:

I’m still using Pine, that staple from university days. As it’s terminal based, I can use it to read my mail by logging in to my machine from wherever I happen to be. It supports multiple incoming folders for mailing lists and the like, and multiple roles. It’ll invoke an external editor, so I can use Vim to write email. The address book is nice. It keeps mail in flat text files, which, despite being a somewhat broken format, is easily understood by grep and the like. What more do you want? I hear good things about Mutt and also Apple’s own Mail.app, but nothing which compels me to change.

I run Exim as a mail transport agent, and use its nice filtering lanuage to handle sorting stuff into folders, ditching HTML mail sent to my Usenet posting address, and that kind of thing. Fetchmail gets the mail to Exim. Exim calls dccproc, which checks for bulkiness, and rbfilter, which checks for blacklisted senders.

My pobox.com forwarding address has been around since 1998 and so gets a tonne of spam, but since I used their spam filtering options to block China, Korea, and Brazil; and also turned on their cunning “looks like a consumer broadband machine” test (which looks for bytes from the IP address in the machine’s hostname, as that’s a common naming convention for broadband addresses), spam is a solved problem for me.

News:

I was using trn, but gave that up after failing to compile it for OS X. slrn is a worthy replacement, with colour highlighting and a useful scoring language. As well as using that to killfile people, I can increase the score of posters or threads which interest me and sort by score in the thread view. slrn shares trn’s handy habit of doing the right thing when you just keep hitting space, which is handy for eating and reading news at the same time.

I use Leafnode to fetch news from a variety of servers (NTL groups from their server, news.individual.net for everything else). A tip for Mac users: Leafnode creates directories full of lots and lots of small files (one per article, in fact). HFS+, the native OS X filesystem, is dog slow at accessing these. Make a UFS disk image and put your news spool on there.

Editing:

I use Vim, which combines the usability of the old Unix vi with the startup time of Emacs. It does all the usual good stuff like syntax highlighting every language known to man (including quoted text in mail messages, which is nice), indenting automatically and all that jazz. A killer feature is the function which will complete words from occurrences in the same file, or from a tags file (a list of all the names defined in a program). Helpful for not getting variable names wrong and also in rants where you find yourself writing “evangelical” a lot. The interface to cscope is also very useful when writing C code (and more importantly, trying to understand other people’s C code).

Browsing:

Since I started using OS X, I’ve been happily using Safari as my web browser. When writing long comments here on LiveJournal, I occasionally miss the text entry box editing facility of Mozex, since I could then edit the comments with Vim, but since no-one’s ported Mozex to the Mac yet, I’ve not switched to Mozilla or Firefox. You Windows users should so switch, of course, because Firefox is nicer and a lot more secure than IE.

Uploading:

I maintain my websites with sitecopy, which replaces that Perl or Python script which everyone seems to have written at least once to FTP stuff to their provider’s web space. sitecopy is works with both NTL’s and Gradwell’s servers and can do useful stuff like uploading based on hash values rather than modification times.

I post to LiveJournal using Xjournal, a pretty and featureful client for OS X. If I want to post from the command line, I use Charm.

Scripting:

I prefer Python to Perl for scripting tasks. As Yoda says, you will know Python is better than perl when your code you try to read six months from now.

Mudding:

I use Mudwalker when I have the OS X GUI available, mainly because I’ve made it talk using the Mac’s speech synthesis stuff. I’d also recommend Crystal.

Coding:

From within Vim, I make heavy use of ctags and cscope for browsing around code and jumping to declarations and references to a symbol. You can do it with grep, but it’s not as nice (and a lot slower on big projects).

I’ve also used Smatch to write customised static checkers for C code. Smatch is a modified version of GCC which outputs an intermediate language which is readily processed by your scripting language of choice. If you’ve ever found yourself writing Perl or Python code to parse C directly, you probably should have used this instead. There are some scripts which come with it which can do useful things like attach state to particular code paths as your script parses the code, and allow you to describe what happens to that state when the paths merge (so you could check that all paths free anything they’ve allocated, say).

15 comments on "Ethics Gradient"

lisekit has a discussion on novels, religion and relativism in religion. She says that, where religion is concerned, she doesn’t like to say that anyone’s views are more or less valuable than anyone else’s. This set me thinking about the idea of relativism in general (which lisekit isn’t advocating, lest I accuse her of it, as she mentions respect and tolerance as moral virtues).

I seem to have been brainwashed by Neal Stephenson into believing that strict relativism is undesirable because it does not work. If you cannot say one thing is better than another, the only sin left is hypocrisy (and, perhaps, intolerance 🙂 In a sense I’m a relativist, since I don’t believe in absolutes imposed by a deity, but in another sense, that of refusing to say that one thing is better than another, I am not. In morality, say, I advocate things which I believe will lead to a society which I hope will be a good one for myself and people I care for. In religion, I would like to see well-reasoned disagreement between people who do think their viewpoint is the right one but are prepared to learn from others. Better that than the pop-culture spirituality which accepts everything that feels good (poor Greg Egan’s disgust for that sort of thing in Silver Fire makes me think he’s forgotten what G.K. Chesterton said happens to people who stop believing in God). Stephenson again:


The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And–again–perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other.

On the other hand, if you are raised within some specific culture, you end up with a basic set of tools that you can use to think about and understand the world. You might use those tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but at least you’ve got some tools.

In this country, the people who run things–who populate major law firms and corporate boards–understand all of this at some level. They pay lip service to multiculturalism and diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don’t raise their own children that way. I have highly educated, technically sophisticated friends who have moved to small towns in Iowa to live and raise their children, and there are Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New York where large numbers of kids are being brought up according to traditional beliefs. Any suburban community might be thought of as a place where people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go to live among others who think the same way.
— In the Beginning was the Command Line

(The rest of Stephenson’s essay is a huge digression on technology and culture, seen through the lens of the Windows/Unix clash: it’s well worth reading if you’ve an hour to spare).

I suppose I’m back to morality as enlightened self-interest again: the reason these people are inculcating their children in their particular culture is because those cultures work, and they want their children to be happy, fulfilled and all that stuff. There are cultures which don’t, and I’ll gladly preach the superiority of those which work over those which don’t, as it’s in my own interest to do so.