How To Spot A Psychopath

Listening to 185 different versions of the Doctor Who theme, one after the other, does something to a man. It could be worse, I suppose.

After I downloaded the full Whomix archive, I of course had to listen to them all, so I could figure out which ones to keep. I’d downloaded a few of them individually in the past, but who knows what I might have been missing by not getting the lot of ‘em?

That torrent file is not perfectly up to date; newer versions of a couple of the better mixes have come out since then, as have a couple of completely new worthwhile mixes. Most of the mixes lean on the BBC’s downloadable samples quite heavily, as you’d expect, but not all of them do.

All official versions of the theme smoothly mixed together, ideal as the soundtrack for the movie in which all of the Doctors (including Rowan and Joanna!) and, what the hell, three Masters and both Romanas get together to prevent the destruction of the universe by, I don’t know, 200 foot high Dalek-mecha: Regenerations 2006. A tad long for the normals to tolerate, though, and that mix also makes it even more perfectly obvious to me that the Who theme reached its apogee in the Third Doctor version of Delia’s original, when the resonance-sweep start-of-credits cliffhanger screech debuted.

In this modern world, a stereo mix is permissible. But that’s all you need.

The current version with Delia samples and orchestral accompaniment is better than the FM-synthesis 80s versions, but that’s not saying much.

Version, given the above, that I still wouldn’t have minded hearing as the theme for the current series: Positionhigh’s remix.

Oh, For Pete’s Sake winner: Scooby Who.

Syncopated Version That Doesn’t Suck: Time Tunnel v3, which manages some real KLF swagger. It’ll be a good soundtrack if the Doctor ever digs the Whomobile out of UNIT’s basement and flies it to a nightclub in 1988.

The Alternative Time Mix has some balls on it, too, and also contains a sample of the one moment when Jon Pertwee actually said his famous line (see also).

On the subject of the deadly allure of speech samples, A Trip In Time has the least annoying use of them. You do still really need a little chemical enhancement to really enjoy it, though.

Most phat and buttery bassline: Trial of a Time Rat v2. Shame about the lead that comes along at 0:44.

Dubbiest: The 100% sample-free Jah Humphreys Dr Who Dub Explosion.

Best use of a sonic connection that hadn’t previously occurred to you: Acid Wilhelm’s Blue Whale Mix.

Most suitable for use in the Doctor Who/The Matrix crossover (”K-9 needs guns. Lots of guns.”): Breakbeats in Time and Space. That version’s got a bunch of unnecessary voice samples in it. The “12 inch” mix lacks them, but it’s not separately listed on the Whomix site. It’s in the torrent, though, as “Doctor Who - 12inchbreakbeats.mp3″.

Non-Whomix options: Orbital’s “Doctor?”, Bill Bailey’s Belgian jazz version (”Docteur Qui”!), and the downright startling version by “Dean Gray”, “Dr Who On Holiday”. That last is from the various-artists American Edit mashup album, which was available for direct download for a rather brief period. It is, of course, not hard to find elsewhere.

There’s a popular perception among foreigners that in Australia every shoe, beach and toilet seat is crammed full of deadly poisonous creepy-crawlies.

Well, on the one hand, yes, we’ve got a lot of poisonous things here. And crocodiles, and stuff.

But the most deadly animal in Australia, in deaths per year, is apparently the European honeybee. People get bitten by nasty spiders and snakes all the time, but unless it happens while they’re out in some trackless wasteland with no access to antivenom (in which case they might also not make it into the official statistics), they all survive. Steve Irwin had to go to some really extreme lengths to find something that’d actually kill him.

So there’s that.

But then again, there’s this.

Huntsman spiders are found, in one variety or another, all over the world. They’re common in suburban Australia, though. Australian houses are seldom tightly sealed and double glazed, and huntsman spiders are wide and flat, so they can and do sneak indoors.

The above example, a mere four inches or so across (this strain grows to about six inches across), was on the outside of the kitchen window, so you get to see the less common “ventral aspect“. Or, to put it another way, his underside.

I think it’s a him. Huntsman males and females are similar in size (many spider species have tiny males and big females), but huntsman males have a smaller abdomen.

Huntsman spiders are physically harmless - you can get bitten by one of them if you really try, but if you then go to the hospital they will point and laugh at you. But they’re psychologically traumatising for many people. Including me, though I’ve managed to become slightly saner about them over the years.

Huntsman spiders, you see, really are hunters. They don’t hang around in a web waiting for food to come to them; they sit still most of the time, but when prey presents itself they go after it, at speed. They can use this same turn of speed to avoid capture, and they are perfectly capable of locomoting at a full gallop sideways.

It’s the sideways-ness that bothers me most.

But that’s probably only because I don’t often spend time looking at the ventral aspect.

Madre de dios.

Given the commonness of Australian huntsmen, it’s surprising that there don’t seem to be any on the otherwise excellent What’s That Bug.

What’s That Bug has also, by the way, convinced me that North Americans can just shut up about scary insect monsters in Australian houses, given the commonness of house centipedes over there. Not to mention things that are actually called “toe biters“, and whose bites are (a) much more common and (b) far more painful than huntsman bites or, apparently, the bite of any other insect - though they admittedly won’t actually kill you.

I suppose you’ll do that yourself, after half an hour or so.

On the first day of Christmas, the universe gave to me…

…a big fat Macintosh disk error.

(When it’s doing an operating system update, and it goes to sleep in the middle of it, and then it won’t wake up again, that’s bad.)

I know very little about fixing Macs.

Well, I knew very little.

Now I know that when it boots to a blue screen (then a different shade of blue with a pointer, then the first shade of blue, repeat until bored), and the problem’s not an incompatible login item, and this procedure ends when fsck announces that the volume could not be repaired, and five million Web pages say that the next step is to try fixing the drive with DiskWarrior, but the computer will not boot from your DiskWarrior 4 CD (that you got from the only place you can get commercial software from on Christmas Freakin’ Day, nudge nudge), no matter how hard you hold C on startup, and the Mac goes into target disk mode just fine, but the only device you then get to see on your Windows PC via MacDrive as you hopefully try to copy files off it is the optical drive which still contains the apparently perfectly valid DiskWarrior CD, so you have to boot with the mouse button held down to get the bugger to eject, and you then plug in some random spare drive via a FireWire doohickey, then install OS X (v10.4) again to that drive, you can then boot the computer from the external drive, put the DiskWarrior disc in again, fail to run DiskWarrior because of some folderol with permissions, fix that, eject and replace the disc, run DiskWarrior again, then it’ll hang the whole operating system at “Step 9: Waiting For Mac OS X system services to complete…”, and you figure that maybe that’s because your old hard drive is overheating, so you’ll point a little USB fan thing at the drive and power cycle everything yet again, and now the drive runs a lot cooler but it’ll still hang at exactly the same point, leaving the computer unable to do anything but blank its screen according to its default power settings…

…then you’re screwed, right?

I’m thinking that the first thing we should have done with that computer when we went to my mum’s place for Christmas was, perhaps, to make that first backup she’d never gotten around to, not to click “yes” to the months of queued-up update requests and then leave the room.

But we didn’t, and now it’s like this, and I’m thinking all I’m going to be able to do is try an erase-and-reinstall of OS X on the munged hard drive, destroying all of my mum’s un-backed-up data.

And, if that doesn’t work, go shopping for a new hard drive.

Unless one of you has a better idea.

(Yes, I’ll buy a legit copy of DiskWarrior when the shops are open again to sell me one, if anybody thinks it will actually have any value to me.)

Note that “Take the computer to the friendly staff of the Genius Bar at your local Apple Store!” does not qualify as “a better idea”, unless you also send me the money to fly to a country that has Apple Stores in it.

Here in Australia, our Apple retailers appear to favour the more rugged “Jeez, Yeah, That’s Buggered. Wanna Buy Another One, Mate?” Bar.

With respect and appreciation, I present:

The Metafilter “Tell Us What You Really Think” Award Winner for this Christmas Eve (PST), 2006.

I thank you.

I’ve just had digestion of my Christmas lunch interrupted by discovery of the Nordost VIDAR, a “cable conditioning” device.

You plug audio cables into it and it, um, conditions them.

Apparently it’s been around for a few years now.

According to the ad in the newspaper gadget supplement in which I found it, “both new and used cables often have very high levels of electrical charge which must be neutralised if they are ever to achieve their maximum performance”.

(Apparently this very high charge level, which comes from nowhere, has not yet been tapped as a source of environmentally friendly power.)

You can read more about it from some happy believers here.

The newspaper ad was from this outfit, who are happy to take $AU25 from anybody dumb enough to want their cables “conditioned”. They’re audacious enough to suggest that cables need to be regularly reconditioned, too. There’s some really choice stuff on their site.

Every single claim made for this device is utter nonsense.

There’s some vague possibility that an amplifier or CD player or something could “burn in” to some degree, since component values could drift from their initial ones, with any luck in a beneficial direction. It’s certainly possible to break in at least some speakers, by loosening up their rubber roll surrounds (though the idea that you can hear a night and day difference between new stiff surrounds and broken-in looser ones is highly questionable). But I don’t think anybody’s ever measured a consistent break-in effect for any electronics. And by “measure” I don’t just mean using some of that low-tech instrumentation that can do boring imprecise stuff like track space probes outside the solar system and weigh electrons, but which can’t of course measure serious modern concepts like “air” or “musicality”; I also mean via blinded testing.

Nordost sell a one metre digital RCA lead for two thousand US dollars. Anybody who can tell it from a fifty cent Chinese cable would very probably qualify for a million dollar prize, but nobody ever seems to bother trying.

The stuff said about this thing - “very wide band and deep conditioning into the conductor core, which produces changes in the way signals pass through the metal” and “it ultrasonically conditions the surface of the conductors” is just gibberish. Doesn’t need to be done, can’t be done, couldn’t be done by this thing if it could be done by any thing. It’s all so wrong that it almost wraps around into rightness again.

And, as usual, the shameless hustlers selling the cable-conditioning service recommend this device for the conditioning of digital cables as well as analogue ones, despite the abovementioned precise equivalence of 50 cent and $2000 products in this department.

That’s it. They’ve done it. They’ve wrapped it around.

The Nordost VIDAR is, officially, now so fraudulent that it’s not any more.

It’s now a wonderful product and I recommend it highly.

I just resurrected one of my old articles from when I worked for the Dark Lord Murdoch. Most of the stuff I wrote back in the Before Time of the dot-com boom I also published on dansdata.com. I think there was some kind of News Limited copyright contract that expressly forbade that; I dealt with that problem by never signing it. But some articles were News Interactive only, and thus disappeared into the ether.

The sporge article was copied with permission here and there, but it vanished quickly from the AustralianIT site because, wait for it, they didn’t archive old material.

At all.

It was as if Rupert Murdoch could only afford a two megabyte Geocities page, or something. Stuff just got thrown on the floor after a month or three.

Oh, and the article URLs were encrusted with gunk by the Content Management System. There’d be lots of gloriously typeable stuff like http://www.australianit.com.au/common/storyPage/0,3811,1588489%5E504,00.html.

Those attuned to the pre-blog Force will recognise these URLs as being the unvarnished output of the Vignette Content Manager. Many sites used Vignette back then, because they did not listen to Phil. But those with a bit of civic pride put something between Vignette and the world that turned the URLs into something non-horrible.

We didn’t.

And, when I was there, our site had no search function. Not even for the miserable quantity of content that was on it at any given time.

Oh, there was a search that we could use. And the people who sold Vignette to News showed, I believe, a feature list with a great big tick in the “searchable” box, obviously, because what kind of cockamamie CMS makes a site that can’t be searched.

But, as it turned out, the only way to actually search the content of a Vignette site at the time was by doing something like signing in each searching user as a user of the actual Vignette server itself. This, for no readily identifiable reason, rapidly paralysed the very expensive servers that were all humming away on the lower floors because Rupert (or more likely Lachlan, who was in charge of the whole Australian online endeavour, but ain’t no more) could not abide the concept of off-site hosting.

At the time, I got the impression that Vignette’s advice to people who were wondering why their $250,000 server couldn’t handle the traffic of their medium-popularity site, which Apache could handle happily on a single processor 400MHz P-II box, was “buy a $500,000 server”.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you say. So far, so unremarkable. Messed-up stuff happening during the dot-com era in places where the big bosses made eleventy-three figures and people with piercings played pool and Dreamcast when they were meant to be working. There were only about a million of those stories, right?

The punchline, though, is that the Australian IT site is still, seven years later, now that the Web is more than twice as old as it was then, exactly the same.

Check out this recent piece.

(Or don’t, if you’re reading this long enough after I posted it, ‘cos it won’t be there any more!)

Ugly URL? Check.

(Apparently the latest, version 7, edition of Vignette finally kills the comma-ed monster URLs. Either News still isn’t running that version, or they’re running it in backwards-compatible mode.)

No search box? Check.

And don’t expect to be able to find anything by using that new-fangled Google or anything, either, because every page has a big bold <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”> header, which tells search engine spiders to bugger right off. And there’s a matching robots.txt, of course.

All of the other news.com.au pages have the robot-repellent, too. Though they add a trailing slash, ‘cos they’re cool.

News.com.au itself is, to be fair, not quite as bad as my old sub-site (which was australianit.com.au at the time, but is now a news.com.au sub-domain).

News.com.au has a search box, and an archive that goes back a whole thirty days - a fact I determined by searching for the name of Australia’s prime minister, then chugging through to the oldest article, which when I found it was 29 days, 23 hours and 58 minutes old. See if it’s still up when you read this - the searcher has, of course, now lost it).

But the searcher only searches news.com.au pages, not the australianit.news.com.au subdomain. Search for computery stuff, find nothing.

News Corporation, of course, owns a buttload of other newspapers and TV stations and such.

The UK Sun’s site betrays in its headers that it’s still running Vignette version five (with, of course, the commaed URLs to match), and it’s got the NOARCHIVE tag too, plus an entertainingly officious robots.txt. It’s got its own search box, though, and that seems to give access to miles of old articles.

Rupert owns the UK Times and News of the World, too. The Times is the same deal - NOARCHIVE again, but with an, um, archive of articles. But NotW breaks ranks, with less painful URLs, search engine archiving allowed, but no search box of its own.

(I wonder if someone sweated blood to get that to happen? There’s a bloke called Dave whose e-mail address is at the top of the source of every NotW page. Perhaps he’ll tell you.)

And then there’s the New York Post, another News property. It appears to be entirely untouched by the pernicious spread of Vignettery, and behaves as a newspaper site should; 1337 h4XX0rZ may enjoy probing the short list of directories that robots.txt wants Google to leave alone.

Back here in the land of jumbucks and billabongs, though, News Interactive seems determined to keep itself as irrelevant as possible, by preventing people from finding articles current and old, even if they’re willing to pay for the privilege.

This seems, on the face of it, to be a strange decision for Murdoch to make. Whatever else he may be, he’s not stupid, and someone who’s supposed to be so gosh-darned enthusiastic about bending the world’s opinions to his will would, you’d think, be more keen on letting people read what his minions write.

If you excise yourself from the search engines and don’t even keep a pay-for-access archive of old stories, then as far as the Web’s concerned, you pretty much don’t exist.

Then, however, it hit me.

All of the Web-excised newspaper sites may say things that Rupert wants the world to believe, and they may not. Rupert’s flagship educator-of-the-proletariat, though, is not any of these mere papers; it is the entirely unbiased Fox News.

The Fox News site has Vignette URLs (and that Version 5 tag, too).

But it also has a big old archive, and no ROBOTS taggery at all, beyond this. Google indexes all of its pages just fine, just as it does with the similarly conservative New York Post.

So, in the end, all this is not WTF-worthy at all. It’s part of the plan.

So take heart, everyone who still works for one of the News properties whose Web sites are hidden from the world.

Even if you have a hard time looking at yourself in the mirror these days, Rupert still does not believe you are trustworthy. Even The Sun isn’t on-message enough any more.

I bet you didn’t feel like a bunch of dissidents, did you?

In the early yuppie era, I remember reading in National Geographic that the deluxe chocolate business was the beneficiary of some counter-intuitive marketing. The more expensive the chocolatiers made their products, the more loud rich young idiots bought them.

I don’t think the gold-plated-truffle industry ever quite recovered from the Crash of ‘87, but marketing marcheth ever onward. Today, there are more outrageously expensive chocolates on the market than were ever available to the junk bond whizkids with Motorolas even bigger than their Rolexes.

This exposé of the makers - in a manner of speaking - of some really thrillingly expensive choccies, therefore, tickled my funny bone.

(Via.)

My gift-giving strategy, which works pretty well, is to maintain a “present pile” on which I put whatever nifty things I find whenever I find them. This is much less soul-destroyingly organised than Doing Your Christmas Shopping Early, but it can amount to the same thing - you just have to match gifts to people later on.

I buy a lot of products aimed at kids as presents, because you can give them to anybody. A good toy is, in my opinion, better than 90% of gifts meant for adults.

Accordingly, allow me to recommend Navir’s line of toy optical devices.

Navir’s flagship product, on display in overpriced-allegedly-educational-toy-stores the world over, is the Optic Wonder (that’s it right there on their home page), different versions of which combine a folding opera-glass contraption with several other thingies.

The Optic Wonder does indeed work as binoculars and a microscope and all the other stuff they talk about, but its optical quality can’t help but be pretty darn poor, since its lenses are unenclosed and ambient light can leak in all around. Light leaks are not a big deal for magnifiers, but they’re very bad for telescopes; they give you a washed-out view, and can make it hard to see anything if there’s a lot of ambient light hitting the lenses and not a lot coming from the target.

So I’d rather have more specialised toys, that’re closer in design to the proper grown-up versions. And Navir have lots of those.

I bought a slightly used set of their Super 40 Red binoculars a while ago, and was impressed enough to get another new and shiny set to give away.

They’re plain “Galilean” binoculars (Wikipedia has an excellent article explaining all this), with just a lens at each end, so they only manage 3.5X magnification. But they’re solid and feel nice and work well and are, most importantly, cheap - $AU14 plus delivery, from this eBay seller, for the ones I bought.

The Super 40s are sized for a child’s hands, but an adult can use them easily enough.

If your play scenarios run less to “intrepid explorer” and more to “battleship commander”, the more imposing Super 60s may be in order. They’ve got a whole 4.5X magnification and 60mm objective lenses, which means that they may actually qualify as the world’s cheapest astronomical binoculars, if they can manage half-decent sharpness. Low magnification and high light-gathering ability is, as I have explained in the past, exactly what you want from a basic astronomical instrument, because many interesting things in the sky are quite large, but very dim.

“Proper” binoculars have, for more than a century now, used prisms of one kind or another to allow wider spacing of the objective lenses (for a bit more stereo effect) and higher magnification (the prisms fold a longer optical path into the instrument without making it unmanageably bulky). But 3.5X magnification is actually quite enough for many viewing tasks, and it also means the image doesn’t jump around annoyingly. And the image quality really is pretty good, too; certainly not excellent, but if you assume “toy binoculars” equals “useless binoculars”, these cheapies will surprise you.

Cheap telescopes, in contrast, invariably have frankly lousy image quality. They don’t have to, but they’re forced into it by the fact that they’ve all got lots of magnification. That’s because you just can’t sell a cheap telescope that only says “10X” on the side. High magnification, unfortunately, also magnifies all of the problems with cheap lenses and tubes. Focus consistency (if it’s sharp in the middle of the circle it’ll be blurry on the edges), chromatic aberration (coloured fringes on everything), light leaks and internal reflections (because matte black light-tight tubing is more expensive than cheerfully coloured plastic). All perfectly tolerable at 3.5X, but awful at 30X.

That said, I like the Navir Explorer telescope. It cost me only another $AU14 plus delivery, and for that price it is a fine product. It’s another basic Galilean design, with a not-too-stupid 15X magnification and the classic collapsible design that’s essential for games of Horatio Hornblower Versus Blackbeard The Pirate.

You can pay a lot more than this for a Super Professional 50X Astronomical Very Good Telescope in a department store and get surprisingly little extra for your money. It’s much harder to see things clearly through the Explorer than through the lower magnification binoculars, but at least you don’t feel ripped off.

And then, there’s this. It’s the Looky periscope, and it does what you’d expect it to do. Collapsible tube, mirror at each end, siblings, for the spying on. It cost me only $AU10 plus delivery.

Navir have a couple of more impressive periscopes - one tank-ish version and one with magnification - but they’re not nearly as sneaky as the little one-eyed Looky.

The Looky is the least educational Navir product I’ve bought, but it’s also the one I most want to keep for myself.

This is great. It starts out with a straightforward job that’s technically impossible (but, like many technically impossible things, easy to do when near enough is good enough), and leads into an entertaining discussion of mathematical proofs, both accepted and faulty, many of which have a lot more direct application to human life than you might at first think.

See also the gloriously annoying Doctor James Anderson, a computer scientist and garden-variety mathematical crank who’s recently attained a certain amount of celebrity for his tireless work in polluting the brains of children with nonsense.

I didn’t have the faintest idea that someone was making a (live action) TV version of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. But they were, and they have, and it just screened on Sky One in the UK. Dunno when it’ll make it to other parts of the world. Those of us with little patience can, of course, find it for download in the usual hives of scum and villainy.

Good points: Effects more than good enough. Most acting fine. Stuff that’ll severely bother small children and delight larger ones all intact. Three hours long (different sites have different estimates, but without ads, it’s three hours), so it doesn’t rush through the story. And, despite that, there’s little spoon-feeding, yet people who’ve never read a Discworld book should be only mildly puzzled.

Also, “Ian Richardson as the Voice of Death” is a good thing to have in the credits for any show. Imagine what it’d do for The Bold and the Beautiful.

Bad points: Susan Sto Helit played by attractive piece of wood. Mr Teatime played by British actor doing strange American accent for no obvious reason, beyond the director’s warped desire to have Scorpio from Dirty Harry in his film. Not the quickest-moving story in the world, but better some slow scenes than everything mashed into 75 minutes, if you ask me.

Given the hideous violence that a TV movie could do to a Pratchett book (and Hogfather’s one of the better ones, too), this is an excellent result. Four stars.

(See also: The animated version of Soul Music, which I’ve now watched enough of to be quite sure that it’s not nearly as good as Hogfather. Christopher Lee as Death’s voice is even better than Ian Richardson, but most of the actual book dialogue is gone, and that kills the whole thing for me just by itself. I keep thinking I’m watching Masters of the Universe In Discworld, or something.)