WillWybrow.com

Twitter has just introduced a ‘people you may know’ feature, lifted straight out of Facebook, it seems, right down to the position on the Twitter website is appears in.

Why? I’m not sure it really enhances the user experience much. With Facebook, you make friendship connections with people you’re meant to already know from real life. So if you and some third party have a lot of mutual friends then there is a chance that you will know that person as well, through one or more of said mutual connections.

But Twitter isn’t like that. You don’t follow people you know just because you know them. You follow them because you might be interested in their updates. I wouldn’t automatically follow someone just because I know them and I wouldn’t expect any of my friends to put up with any of the tweetstream spamming I do unless they actually get something out of it.

So all the ‘people you should follow’ feature can offer is suggesting Twitter accounts that the people you follow are following. That’s not really helpful. If everyone followed every suggestion we’d all end up following each other and that would make Twitter pointless.

A better option would to be some kind of semantic analysis or hashtag logging that suggested people who hashtag the same kinds of topics as you. But that is almost redundant because hashtags are clickable to find out who else is talking about that stuff. It would require some long-term data collection to build up a profile of hashtags that could then be compared like a last.fm profile to match your tweet-compatibility.

I think this could be another feature that the Twitter team is trying to monetise. We’ve all seen the ‘promoted’ button next to certain trending topics… how long before Coca-Cola appears in your ‘people you should follow’ box with a little ‘promoted’ sticker next to its name?

I thought I’d at least have already quit Facebook by the time Twitter got ruined.

Saw this last night. I have a few thoughts on it that aren’t really related to how much I enjoyed the film. Here goes:

Woody’s arm was better

At the end of Toy Story 2, Woody’s arm was all bulbous and poorly repaired. This was a pretty big plot element because his breakage is what sets off the whole story about the broken penguin Wheezy and is how Woody is found accidentally by Al. Thus the resolution of this at the end of the film ties off the whole adventure nicely. But in Toy Story 3, Woody’s back to normal.

Bo Peep is gone

Woody’s love interest is gone! If, like me, you didn’t think much of Bo, this is probably a good thing. She wasn’t good for him anyway. Who wants to date a woman who’s already got sheep? Woody should find someone younger and have some sheep of his own, right? I personally always shipped Jessie and Woody because I like him more than Buzz but we can’t have everything, right?

If there were a Toy Story 4…

…then it’d be worth it just to have Timothy Dalton and Kristen Schaal playing the new toys. And Whoopi Goldberg as that cool-looking octopus was good, and Richard Kind (that hypochondriac, Harvey, from Scrubs) as the bookworm was a nice touch but I don’t think the new characters really had enough to say. The film could have done with being thirty to sixty minutes longer possibly. I reckon it’s a shame they wasted Kelsey Grammer as the villain in Toy Story 2 because he’d have made a good Lotso. It’s good that they didn’t play out the older-and-revered-father-figure-turns-out-to-be-evil thing for very long before the “reveal” that Lotso was the villain because that was basically cut and pasted from Toy Story 2.

Spanish Buzz was hilarious

but very unrealistic. There’s no way an action figure would contain that much processing power. I’m guessing his developing personality would have to be stored in some kind of flash memory and that his ‘demo mode’ would live in some EEPROM on the circuit board inside along with his default settings for Spanish Mode. Maybe Buzz is running a quad-core i7 processor inside his back? Actually, yes, I’m sure that’s it. And if you unscrew his chest there are 2 USB ports and a DVI out and he’s got two SLi GeForce GTX 480s in his legs and can run Crysis at 60FPS on full settings.

“lol Ken is gay”

Also pretty funny I thought. Though it would have been better had he actually turned out to be gay. Not only would it have been a positive message for kids but it’d probably have the religious right up in arms and “controversy” that sparks off those nutcases is always a good thing.

That’s probably enough for now. I did really enjoy the film (though I think I enjoyed Inception more) so thanks, Pixar, for not fucking up for three whole films. I am sure the Toy Story trilogy will enjoy its place amongst the Great Trilogies. That is until some years down the line someone says “why don’t we resurrect Toy Story?” and then they make Toy Story 4.0 where an evil iPad has taken over the world’s digital infrastructure and Shia LaBeouf has to team up with an aged-looking Woody who’s past his prime in order to take down the culprit by using explosions.

There has been some discussion online about this Julie Bindel article in the Guardian about a book by Gail Dines that’s been going on over the past few days between some acquaintances of mine, and I was reprimanded for making a sarcastic comment about it because of how trivially wrong I felt the main point covered in it was, so I’d like to just write a little thing about it.

The idea raised in this article that I felt was most forceful and most wrong was the claim that watching pornography can make people commit sexual assault.

At this point I don’t think it matters whether one thinks that pornography or the sex industry is demeaning and exploitative to those in it or whether one thinks it’s empowering and freedom of expression or whether you don’t really know or care either way. It doesn’t matter if you’re pro- or anti- pornography, I still feel my exception to this is justified.

I found this point offensive for two reasons: firstly, it diminishes and marginalises the responsibility of anyone who commits a sexual assault on another person by suggesting that there was some reason or justification for it. “I saw it in porno and thought it was okay” would never legitimise any act of violence, sexual abuse, rape, misogyny or misandry against another person and it’s completely irresponsible to even suggest that the ’cause’ of rape is anything but something wrong with the person committing the act. There’s no excuse for it. Nobody would ever excuse a murderer from his or her actions for them using a defence like “I saw it in a video game,” so why should the influence of watching pornography even come into the equation when looking for the motivation of someone to commit rape? It just shouldn’t.

Secondly it greatly exaggerates the impact of the media on people’s behaviour and even attitudes and suggests that some (or most? or all?) people can’t tell the difference between something they see on their TVs or computer screens and what goes on in real life. Maybe my faith in people is misplaced but I’d like to believe that the majority of us do know that on-screen crime/violence/sex is not comparable to reality. I’d like to think we’re more than just suggestible lumps of amorphous clay ready to be moulded into likenesses of whatever is beamed into our eyes. People do know what’s right and wrong behaviour and what are right and wrong attitudes to have.

There are honest ways of highlighting the terrifying and heart-wrenching prevalence of sexual assault without trying to explain it away as a by-product of the sex industry, and I think (again, without requiring anyone to take a stand pro- or anti- porn) that lumping the two issues together is both misleading and unhelpful to dealing with the problem.

God sake, computers, what is wrong with you?

Running Fedora 12 as my main OS at the moment. It’s fine for some things but I honestly prefer Windows Seven to anything else and I long to go back to it.

But my stupid Windows installation is fucked. Some bits in the registry must seriously be corrupted beyond all hell. I don’t know where the Windows serial number information is stored in the registry but it cannot currently be a valid entry because selecting Computer » Properties displays some generic error message under serial information. And I can’t read or edit it using third party tools so I don’t know what’s gone wrong there. I tried reinstalling it at one point but I’ll lose all my settings if I do a from-scratch installation and it won’t allow me to do an in-place upgrade because my user data is on a different partition from my Windows installation (some monumentally stupid restrictions on Windows installation there that amounted to the most trouble I’ve ever had with a Windows upgrade when I switched from Vista to Seven).

What’s more is that my Windows BCD is also fucked. That can’t be read or written by BCDEdit.exe or EasyBCD for again some unknown (and maybe unknowable) reason. But my Windows Seven installation still boots when I ask it to. Could this be my GRUB bootloader interfering? Maybe, but I’m pretty sure EasyBCD should know what’s going on there. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t even load to the main interface to let me see what it thinks is going on. Great. But my Windows installation’s serial information is still messed up so Windows thinks it’s not genuine and therefore powers off after whatever set amount of time that is. A few hours maybe? It’s not long, at any rate.

I really want to reinstall Windows Seven but I can’t decide how to go about doing it. If I format everything it means a long, drawn-out reinstallation of all my Windows software (Office, browser, games, μTorrent etc.) and reconfiguring it to have all my custom shell folders and appearances and everything else that I’ve had to do to make Windows less of a piece of shit to use. But I can’t see any other way around it and I’m very wary of putting in installation CDs because they tend to silently change boot settings that will make it impossible or difficult to boot back into Fedora which is currently my most usable OS.

If I get some time this weekend in between all the other real-life jobs I’ve got to get done in preparation for my trip the following weekend, I might image my whole boot drive to my spare HD and then go about trying to patch up my broken installations. It’d be useful to be able to dual-boot Fedora and Seven until someone gets their act together to make one OS that can do all the good things of both but failing that I’d much rather have my Seven installation fully-functional than have it broken and dormant on my hard drive while I use Linux, forever lurking in the back of my mind and brought to the forefront every time I am frustrated by how pathetic Gnome is for anyone who actually uses a PC (Nautilus seems to have this great feature that means sometimes windows open with no address bar and navigating the filesystem spawns new windows every time I want to change directory – as if anyone’s ever found that Windows 95-esque interface helpful at all, ever) which is basically every time I want to open a file.

This isn’t really a request for advice although I suspect many of you will have “opinions” on the matter and suggestions from “learn2Linux” to “go and buy a Mac lol” which I of course would read and give full consideration to. And if anyone tells me to just scrap the box and all of technology and go live in a cave somewhere, well, I might take their advice because at the moment avoiding all the hassle forever and becoming a hermit is a very tempting option.

When I was a kid (and we’re talking infant school here), sometimes I let my imagination get the better of me. I had (have?) a really good imagination and I’m surprised it didn’t lead me to more a more theistic worldview. But I guess you need gullibility as well as imagination? Anyway:

I used to pretend that in order to get a pen working that had stopped, you could ‘trick’ it into beginning to work again by writing swear words in big letters in your school book over and over again. The pen would realise what you were doing and it would try and mischievously get you into trouble (the pens were obviously very mischievous – why else stop working in the middle of a school day for no reason?) by turning the inkflow on again just as you’d stopped paying attention to what you were writing and would unconsciously proceed to write “FUCK” in big letters across your times tables.

But I always just used to feign inattentiveness to doubly trick the pen. Once it started to produce the goods again and work for me, I’d just stop writing. And there it was, I’d outsmarted the pen. I don’t remember if the pen continued to work for a while because it couldn’t just withhold ink immediately at will or whether that was just a cover to not let me know that I’d outsmarted it, because it was too proud to concede defeat. Either way, this method got excellent results and I recommend it to anyone who needs to get a dry pen working again in a hurry. But remember, it has to be something important that you’re scrawling bad things on. The word “cunt” at the top of your mother’s day card, for example, or your girlfriend’s sister’s name on a gift tag or something like that.

Thanks friends!

Best people.

There are probably millions of posts outlining who you should vote for and why, and I didn’t really want to add this to the slew of unread opinions on the internet but I think I have perfected the criteria for picking a political party to vote for.

If you guys have been paying attention on Twitter or whatever then you’ll have a reasonable idea of which way I intend to vote on Thursday. I derive my ultimate choice of political party from my personal decision to hold the unofficial AHS motto as a primary life value. Above all else, it suggests, “dinnae be a cock.”

That’s basically all the election advice you need. Don’t be a cock, just fucking vote for some good guys. A party beginning with the letter L is a good place to start. Even if Cameron is as progressive as he claims his party is now, that doesn’t hold true, I’m sure, for most Tory PPCs. They’re still consumed with this resentment towards helping people they perceive as undeserving. Their “let’s cut benefits” poster is terrifying. I guess their sense of entitlement to hold on to a little bit more money is greater than the feeling of compassion for those who do not abuse the welfare system and genuinely need the money to support themselves or even just to keep themselves alive.

Labour party has fucked up a couple of times just lately but how much really depends on how bad you felt about the war in Iraq. Regardless, this is a) the future, after that mistake has already been made and b) Gordon Brown, who I don’t think really cares about killing Iraqis because all he can talk about is how desperate he is not to let David Cameron give the economy a right dicking (in a bad way). Fair enough, he was Shadow Chancellor for five years and Actual Chancellor for ten after that; he knows what he’s good at.

The Liberal Democrats, well, I had decided to vote for them ages ago (more than a year ago, even) when I heard a radio interview about their views on education. I can’t remember what exactly was said but since it struck a chord, I took some time to read up on them. And now that it looks like they’re going to do better than they have in a long time in this election, I’m beginning to get my hopes up that they’ll be able to push through some benign, helpful policies as well as score some electoral reform before the next election so we can fix the pathetic excuse for a voting system we’ve currently got.

As for securing the economic recovery, well, I don’t think it’d be too much to ask of Brown, Darling, Cable and Clegg to get together one weekend, get in a stack of Domino’s pizzas and some Red Bull multipacks and hammer out a reasonable and sensible plan for all the cuts that will have to come into effect, as well as plan when they’re going to happen (since Gordon’s oft-repeated claim that cuts right away risks falling into recession again seems both genuine and appropriately cautionary). And a Lib/Lab coalition government would prove to the scaremongers that there doesn’t need to be a majority party to have a workable government. I wonder if Nick Clegg would actually be happier working with Labour in a coalition than the Tories, but can’t say so because a lot of progressives are already torn between the reds and the yellows and Clegg doesn’t want to give them an excuse to vote Labour like Gordon did with his ‘I agree with Nick’ mantra in the first debate.

At first I’d hoped just to put “don’t be a cock” as the only line in this entry but I’ve guilted myself into elaborating. If you are really stuck about who to vote for this election, there’s always this handy guide.

I figure I spend a bunch of time Googling syntax or functions in code if I can’t remember them. And sometimes I’ll even lift out a whole section of example code from a search result and try and change as little of it as possible to maximise the time I spend not doing work. These little shortcuts make life bearable.

So I’ve decided to invent a new programming language. Each line is a search query you’d type in to bring up a reference page and an example of what you’re trying to do. Then, at compile time, the compiler does the searches, lifts out the example code from the top hit and then builds the binary from the collection of sample code.

It would probably be a fruitless and very tiresome (if not never-ending) effort to list ALL the things that could do with being shaken up around here. So for the moment I am going to settle for this very brief but presently high-profile list of some shit that needs changing.

1. Decriminalisation of Drugs

   I am sure I don’t need to link you to any of the number of articles online about the decriminalisation of drugs in Portugal. Google it if you want to. This, from the TIME.com article about it:

   “Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research [into its success]. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

   In light of the news about the mephedrone deaths that have just happened, the government will inevitably end up adding it to the list of banned substances, like they did with synthetic cannabinoids at the end of last year. That they still have to keep banning the new ways people find to get themselves high suggests that people are going to try it regardless. The only real way we can increase the safety of those who do choose to try it is by regulating the quality of the drugs sold (so that they’re not cut with rat poison) and to fully understand through scientific experimentation the effects so any short- and long-term effects can be made clear through education. Legalising the old-school drugs that everyone knows about will cause users to gravitate towards them. They’ve been more extensively studied than these new ‘legal highs’, so that bodes better for education and treatment of ill-effects and addiction.

2. Libel Law Reform

   In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of one of the most (if not the most) high profile libel lawsuits of late, Simon Singh was recently accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association. He wrote that any chiropractic practitioner who claimed to be able to cure things like colic in babies was lying, with plenty of demonstrable evidence showing it to be ineffective. As well as in being counter-intuitive to assume that spinal manipulation can solve all your problems. While with any reasonable set of laws, the chiropractors would have no hope of achieving anything from suing someone with stacks of scientific evidence to back up their claims, actually suing someone for libel is no longer about who wins or loses. Because of the incredibly dramatic cost of being sued for libel, often the accused has no choice but to back down and not fight if the accuser is financially well-endowed. With a relatively small cost to a corporation, it can silence any individual or small organisation it wants to with the threat of expensive legal action, and thus hide any of its wrongdoings. The Libel Reform campaign seeks to raise awareness with the ultimate goal of getting this changed. And while it might not benefit the majority of people directly, it is a freedom of speech/censorship matter that needs to be addressed and corrected lest it remain an affront to liberty forever.

3. The Digital Economy Bill

   Sometimes I think Lord Mandelson doesn’t see things the way the rest of us do. His perspective on certain subjects is so skewed, I think maybe he might benefit from some psychiatric evaluation.

   Even if he passes the lunatic test, though, this doesn’t make his Digital Economy Bill any less insane. Mandelson wants to be given unlimited power to amend copyright legislation. He wants rights holders, via the courts, to be able to disconnect people suspected of filesharing without requiring any proof. He is willing to deny internet access to whole households to punish (and that’s punish, not rehabilitate or force repayment from) copyright infringers. There has also been a clause added that says ISPs would be obligated to block access to certain websites that facilitate copyright infringement (which could even include YouTube and possibly Google), but again this seems to only take place at Mandelson’s command.

   I’m also interested in the overlooked modifications to Nominet. It’s a kind of nationalisation of the service for registering domain names in the UK. Might not mean much to most people, but putting more of the internet in the hands of this government unnecessarily (Nominet is functioning fine as an independent body at the moment and can’t possibly benefit from being under government control) is an unmistakably bad thing. Some of us have registered domain names and don’t want ownership of them revoked at the whim of Lord Mandelson.

That’ll be all for now, I think. I will do some more when I get back to my chat logs and assemble all the ideas I came up with when Chris put me on the spot yesterday evening with all the policies I’d have if I formed a political party.

*Yawn*

So all the Guardian-reading left-wingers are in an uproar over Tony Blair’s alleged deception over the legality of the Iraq war. Well, fuck those guys.

It’s not against the law at all to go to war. Or, not any real laws. Laws are made for people in countries. Laws are meant to stop you punching babies in the head or driving your car on the wrong side of the road. Laws are imposed by governments who, by election, rank higher than all the people in the country individually.

Countries set laws for people. But who sets laws for countries? The answer, you might think, is the UN. But you’re wrong: nobody sets laws for countries. Who do countries have to answer to if they do something wrong? Nobody but other countries. It would be like having a room of people and getting them to enforce laws amongst themselves. It doesn’t work like that. There has to be some kind of higher authority to defer to and when you reach the top of a country’s government, there is none.

So to anyone saying that the war is illegal… says who? Nobody can slap the wrist of a whole country. Even if they think they can.

The state of international affairs was much better when everything was simple to understand: the country with the biggest army gets to dick on all the shitty countries with the smaller armies. If your country is dicking on countries in the name of good (cf. the British Empire), everyone just lets it go ahead. Britain are obviously the good guys. But if you are the Mittelmächte, you are almost certainly evil and other, nicer countries who have blue on their flags will probably team up to do something to stop you.

The people at ArrestBlair.org, for example, don’t realise that international laws are meaningless words that happen to apply just because most countries are reasonably happy with their neighbours. In reality, anyone can go to war with whoever they want for any reason. So suck it up, you fucking hippies, and just let Iraq go. Nobody cares.