Red Flag Linux

NPR reported this morning that the Cultural Department in Nanching, China, has been requiring that internet cafe owners replace Windows XP with their home grown Red Flag Linux - a “free” operating system that comes with a mandatory $726 maintenance contract.

The move is ostensibly to crack down on piracy, but at least one internet cafe owner has claimed that legitimate copies of Windows and other Linux distributions have been removed too.  This lead Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley, to conclude that Red Flag Linux was an instrument of online government control.

Gotta love that free software!

Wow, I think the Tidy Boys and So Solid Crew just had a baby.

This interesting factoid was reported in several outlets after Her Majesty paid a visit to Google UK:

According to the Palace, the Queen was the first monarch in the world to send an email, at an Army base in 1976.

Sterling work Ma’am!  After further research I also discovered that she created her first lolcat (pictured) in 1979 and in 1982 she produced the first ever entry on YTMND.

While we’re on the SUBJECT (yay!) of the Queen, I just want to clear up this common mistake:

It was exciting, it was an honour. To think when we started three years ago that we’d have the Queen of England uploading a video to her channel on YouTube,” said Hurley.

That’s YouTube founder Chad Hurley forgetting that Her Majesty’s official title is Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis, Head of the Commonwealth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Duke of Normandy, Lord of Mann, and Paramount Chief of Fiji.  Get it right next time or the DMCA will be the least of your worries.

I don’t have cable, and my TV signal sucks, so I’ve been streaming video podcasts and downloaded TV shows to my Xbox360 using TVersity.  TVersity works great for streaming but getting content is a different matter - for TV shows you’re basically stuck with torrents and the wifi bandwidth they suck up kills the streaming.

Hulu is an interesting service, providing free network-sanctioned, ad supported streaming of recent and classic TV shows online for free, but so far I’d given it a miss because watching TV shows at my PC doesn’t appeal.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place via a tip off from this week’s dl.tv - the PlayOn application sits on your computer and serves up Hulu streams to the Xbox360.

The good:

• Lots of TV shows and a few movies too
• Ads are kept to a minimum (usually one 30 second ad per break)
• Decent video quality

The bad:

• Lots of awful content (including the hilariously awful Germano-Canadian sci-fail Total Recall 2070)
• Difficult to navigate through the crap with the Xbox360 interface (hopefully the fall update fixes that).
• Netflix streaming doesn’t seem to work
• Uses lots of bandwith on your local network
• Application will cost $30 when the beta expires

It’s an interesting idea that’s fairly well executed - maybe one day PlayOn and Hulu will morph into a complete IPTV solution.

I finally got embroiled in the credit crunch yesterday after Landsbanki’s subprime reindeer investments collapsed.  Does anyone else think it’s kind of funny that Iceland have frozen their assets?

Maybe I should have listened to the secret coded message in the lyrics to Bennet’s 1997 hit “Mum Has Gone To Iceland”.

More food mama
Give us more food mama
Give us prawn ring mama
Give us anything mama
Thank God
My Mum has gone to Iceland

More cash dadda
Give her more cash dadda
Be a bit flash dadda
Give here more cash, more
Thank God
My Mum has gone to Iceland

And we don’t have the dough
As the ad men well know
Got no concept of your bad cash flow
And if that ain’t enough
Just as life gets more tough
They bring out a new game for my Nintendo
My head’s popping
TV window shopping
And there ain’t no stopping
With that ice cream topping
Thank God
My Mum has gone to Iceland

We want mama
What you can’t afford mama
And the TV pressure’s
Aimed at your little treasures
Thank God
My mum has gone to Iceland

Bleedy daddy dry
Watch my mummy cry
And I can’t stop wanting
No matter how I try
Thank God
My mum has gone to Iceland

I don’t much like TV news.  In the UK they tork to u laik a 5 yr old and in the US it’s all whizz bang graphics and nitpicking over the minor semantics of soundbites (which, by the way, I will be doing myself at the end of this post).  Thankfully in this age of the interwebs I was able to stream a live, unedited, unanchored feed from CLTV.  Interestingly the stream had about 30 minutes of padding either side of the actual debate and I was able to uncover such trivia as the fact that a number of stage mics were held up with zip tags (”don’t cut that too close to the wire Hank”) and that some of the audience had found the debate rather an ordeal (”I dunno bout you but I’m ready to get the hell out” guffaws).

A potentially boring moment at the start where debate chair Gwen Ifill and the audience sat in complete silence for almost 15 minutes waiting for the start was enlivened by the arrival of a fire engine outside my apartment.  Reebok and I relaxed after the jovial bunch of firefighters casually sauntered from the suspect flat joking about what a douche the tenant was.

So what of the actual debate.  This is the first unfiltered look I’ve had at either of the VP candidates and I was hoping for the kind of gaffe-filled funfest you’d expect if the Duke of Edinburgh were debating against Cheryl Baker.  Sadly it wasn’t quite as good as that but I did learn a lot.

Biden for his part was very strong speaker, and having seen him in action I’m a little disappointed that he’s not running for the top spot.  He went into several policy specifics, in attempt to both befuddle Palin and refute the charge that his ticket’s platform contains too much Blairesque hot air.  I thought that was a smart move on his part.  Less smart was constantly banging on about Bush - Palin quite rightly called him out on it but he still kept coming back for more.  However think he just about managed to save it at the bell by launching a pointed attack on McCain’s maverick image.

An unexpected moment came as he choked up talking about a personal tragedy, in which he lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash.  In that one moment he wiped out all of Palin’s chummy winks and cheeky (and largely irrelevant) references to her hockey mom image, supposedly one of her greatest strengths.  If that was a calculated move, it was a master stroke, but it didn’t come across that way for me.  I wonder if he’s ever pulled that trick before…

Palin, for a secret weapon, is not being deployed well.  It’s been said before that the McCain campaign are so scared that she’s going to say something stupid that they have coached all the life out of her - and apart from her appeal to the religious wing of the Republican base, her connection with ordinary people was supposed to be one of her strong points.  Time and again she awkwardly answered questions with a speech that was both unrelated to the original question and very obviously rehearsed - I kept expecting her to finish up with “…and I approve this message”.  Even before Biden turned on the waterworks, her mateyness seemed artificial and forced.

Before the debate it was suggested that the best Biden could hope for was a draw - a win in the debate for him would end up as a net lose because he would appear to be a bully.  I think he pulled it off though - working through the details of his own policies as Palin stumbled through hers, and saving his most vicious attacks for McCain and Bush.

After the jump I’ll leave you with a few of the candidates’ most incomprehensible quotes.  Can you guess what they are trying to say?

Palin:

I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.

I wonder which of the five colleges she went to taught her that kind of sentence structure.  Bear in mind that her degree is in journalism, too, also.

Palin:

…there have been so many changes in the conditions of our economy in just even these past weeks that there has been more and more revelation made aware now to Americans about the corruption and the greed on Wall Street.

She’s on to something there, barely a day goes by now where a new revelation is not made aware to my realisation of just even seeing it.

Biden:

No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.

Wait, so you don’t do support it?  Or you do don’t…  I think the what you call it part is something that Biden picked up as a MC in London’s grime scene.

Palin:

An armed, nuclear armed especially Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider.

Please be brave and face the danger of considering it.

Palin:

But for a ticket that wants to talk about change and looking into the future, there’s just too much finger-pointing backwards to ever make us believe that that’s where you’re going.

Yeah, keep that up that backwards finger pointing and everyone’s going to start thinking you’re moving… um… forwards.

Biden:

With Afghanistan, facts matter, Gwen.

…and they don’t everywhere else?

Palin:

My experience as an executive will be put to good use as a mayor and business owner and oil and gas regulator and then as governor of a huge state…

Wait, you’re going to rewind your whole life and run through it again?  What about being VP?

Palin:

When the Democrats, either, though, this last go-around for the last two years.

When the Republicans, either, though, too, also.

Enjoy the full transcript here.

Pretty limited audience for this one but I had to do it.

To get this you’ll need to have been exposed to both the delicious convenience of McCain oven chips and payattention.org’s attempts to improve voter registration amongst the under-represented binge-drinking 21-35 year old urinal user demographic.

This is Usher’s “Love in the Club” played by the mighty Rock-Afire Explosion.

The insane genius behind this has a number of other performances on YouTube but he’s really hit his stride with this one.  Wikipedia, as always, has more.

Web app HopStop (via LifeHacker) allows you to access public transport directions directly from your phone.  It’s currently available for some of the major metropolitan areas in the US and based on my tests in Chicago it works pretty well.

This makes for a much more usable experience than the CTA’s not-particularly-mobile mobile site, although there are a couple of improvements I’d like to see to make this perfect:

• Make it understand intersections - right now it seems to need a street number, unlike Google Maps or the CTA website.
• Have your bookmarked locations work with the text message interface (a workaround is to save your favourite start points as text message templates).

Then I’d be able to send “home to roscoe and damen” to plan my trip to Mulligans later this evening…

My CTA card has been playing silly buggers for the last couple of weeks. My rather uninformed theory is that it has been locked in an unending radio-frequency conversation with my Oyster card about the correct pronunciation of the word ‘tomato’ and finally stopped talking altogether as matter of principle.

My other pet theory is that while I’ve been fumbling around at the card reader with an increasingly agitated line of commuters building behind me, it has been randomly deducting credit from other people’s accounts. It’s the little moments of Schadenfreude that keep me going.