Author: bakert

Clay Shirky’s latest article, File-sharing Goes Social is an interesting look at where filesharing might go should the RIAA lawsuit bandwagon eventually cause Kazaa and similar networks to degenerate to the point of uselessness.

I don’t think its a done deal that these RIAA lawsuits will force even the “Connectors” to shut down (they seem to have largely ignored the threat so far) as there is an awful lot of them but the future he envisions is a definite possibility.

Watched a short called ‘Outsiders’ on Channel 4 about music outside the mainstream. Best thing in it was Bingo Gazingo who made a great track called You’re Out of the Computer with a band called My Robot Friend. MP3 from the usual places. Can’t find the lyrics online anywhere though, so here’s my best bash. Any corrections? bakert+logoff@gmail.com or stick them in the comments.
Update 2003-10-24 10:14 – after a quick email chat with the robot from www.myrobotfriend.com I got the real lyrics and have replaced my effort with those:

(www.myrobotfriend.com)

you’re out of the computer
written by bingo gazingo

you don’t exist
you’re off my list
you’re just an intruder
you’re out of the computer
i didn’t abuse you
i didn’t shoot you
i just took you
out of the computer
and i turned my head
and i said
you couldn’t be cuter
but you’re out of the computer
because you’re the world’s worst slacker
and i’m the world’s greatest hacker

i didn’t know
you were a hooter

you’re out of the computer

B-I-

what does a hooter mean? it’s a breast? yeah.

N-G-O

i took you out of my heart with a roto router
and i ran you over with my brand new scooter
and i turned my head
and i said
you’re out of the computer
’cause you’re the world’s worst programmer
and i’m the world’s greatest hacker
you were the one i would die for
you were the one i would climb the sky for
you were my lover
but you made me suffer
when you became
the world’s greatest surfer
now you’re
out of the computer

you were subline
but you were offline
with the online
do i have to draw you
a diaroma
you’re the world’s worst scammer
you’re the world’s worst slammer
i wish things could be smoother
but they couldn’t be blacker
i’m the world’s greatest hacker
i’m the world’s greatest hijacker
i’m the world’s greatest…

B-I-

i’m the world’s greatest hacker

N-

and you’re the world’s worst…

G-

limburger… i don’t know… fuck it…

O

i took away your key
i took away your mouse
i’m a turkey
i’m a louse
i threw you out of the house
and now you’re out of the computer
and even if you yell “i need a key!”
you ain’t getting back
’cause you’re out of the computer

i spent wonderful moments
in your components
get out of my memory
get your digitals out of my modules
get your mish-mash out of my macintosh
or i’ll hit you with a swiss wrist watch
you showed them your modem
and as sure as my name is yahuda
you’re out of the computer

we were riding down the highway
when you put your hand up my byway
and you tried to sell me a floppy of my biopsy
and a copy of my autopsy
you looked in my iris
and you gave me a virus
you took away my lap desk
you took away my website
you took away my disk drive
you took away my database
and you drove away with my jalopy
and you scrambled my scanner
and you took away my banner
you’re the world’s worst home shopper
you’re the world’s worst pornographer
and if you see me first
you say hello
and if i see you first
i’ll say hello

hi hello
hello hi

LOG OFF!

You’re out of the compuuuuterrrrrr.

Lyrics from the best band that ever went to my school (The Cooper Temple Clause) are up on the Kick Up the Fire, and Let the Flames Break Loose lyrics page. Just have the raw scans plus one OCR-ed track will do the rest soon. My See This Through and Leave lyrics page is still where its always been. Enjoy.

I am writing a .NET application which has a number of classes that are basically just data holders. They are instantiated by Factory objects that know about the DB but they themselves are just a collection of data members. For example, the User object has Email, Name and other such values but does no real work.

I did create all the getter methods (there are no setter methods as all values are put in the constructor) as methods but then I discovered Properties — one of the few things different between C# and Java. I am now in the process or replacing all get methods with Properties. Probably because I’m used to Java though code like this, “user.Region.Currency.Code” seems strange. I suppose its no different to “user.Region().Currency().Code()” but it just looks wrong!

I can’t find anything on the web about when to use properties and when to use methods (they are the same thing really) and the fact that I don’t really use setter methods means I don’t get that much benefit from Properties anyway. But I am using them to be more idiomatic and why not. What do you think?

Soulseek is not down — its just moved! slsk.org no longer works and the new site is www.slsknet.org

You can make your old version of soulseek work by adding the following lines to your hosts file:

38.115.131.131 sk2.slsk.org
38.115.131.131 www.slsk.org
38.115.131.131 mail.slsk.org
38.115.131.131 server.slsk.org

Enjoy!

I think i came to the party late on this one but a number of my long-term filesharing wishes have just been satisfied on soulseek like When in Rome Kill Me by Cud and Long, Lonely Day by the Go-Betweens. Also the only filesharing system with genuine Razorlight (best new band of the year) songs.

Update 2004-04-24: Soulseek is now based at slsknet.org so I’ve corrected the above URL.

These are just too good:

LRB subscribers – get six free issues and your money back if you’re not entirely satisfied with Market Rasen monkey (M, 78) – ‘The most serious and radical love monkey around’. Direct debit forms, and dried fruit, to Box no. xx/xx.

My previous contributions to this column were self-serving and contained many glaring omissions. This one gives it to you straight: I’m fat, thick, 48, still have uncooked semolina between my toes after an Aga-related accident in 1995, and look like the dwarf in Fantasy Island who yells: “Da plane! Da plane!” And I live in Ipswich. Any takers? Box no. xx/xx.

Many good ones ommitted. Best reader-contributed column in the history of man.

Adam wanted a spellchecker for his new blog without paying for it. I outlined a possible solution:

if you want to do it with writing as little code as possible then you 
will want to do it in Bash where you have "spell" and "cat" already. www.cygwin.com 
however, if you want to do it in the easiest way for you possible perhaps an 
ASP page on your local machine that you fill in the details on which spell 
checks against the attached dictionary file offering both a preview with 
highlighted possible spelling mistakes

The spell check is just:
' remove all punctuation symbols with Replace
' replace all whitespace chars with spaces
' recursively replace 2 spaces with one space (this step may be unnecessary)
' split on space and compare each var in resulting array with file (contents
' of which are in memory - its just an InStr(vbCrLf & strWord & CrLf, strDict)
' warning: dict file may be newlines only not CRLF

Or better yet get the words with a regex (supported in IIS5) along the lines 
of [^.;&
]* and then cycle through the matches.
So program flow is like this:
    Big text box with Preview and BlogIt buttons
    Preview => Show text from box with possible spelling mistakes in red
        and box appears below for editing with Preview and BlogIt buttons
    BlogIt => Force it through to submit page of blogspot.

Cool!

And while he messed with how to get the spellchecked story to post from his local machine to his blog I wrote it (in ASP).

Then it turns out that the blogger API is for XML-RPC which ASP can’t do (easily). So he wants me to rewrite, preferably in PHP which is what he has the submission stuff in.

I had never written any PHP before but I did the conversion which apart from a few sticking points was very easy (JSP/ASP/PHP are very very similar in the fundamentals).

The code shortened to 298 lines (from 363) and no longer requires an external sorting library as there is one built in to PHP.

Part of this reduction in size was due to the inlining of the ExtractWords function as with PHP’s regular expression support (just like Perl’s) it was a two-liner.

BUT there is no equivalent of Option Explicit in PHP! The best you can do is set ERROR_ALL in php.ini which is not the same thing at all. I must be overlooking something but I can’t find information about it anywhere on the web.

I still have some kind of problem with escaped apostrophes (PHP’sbastard hack called magic_quotes which I was happier not to know about) and the sorting is irrelevant because the algorithm does not take advantage of it and stop searching the dictionary when there is no longer any chance the word is in there (for that matter the dictionary isn’t sorted either!)

Finally I get a solution to my missing get_aspx_ver.aspx 404 and alert email:

"VS.NET looks for this file if it needs to determine what version of the framework you’re using. Since it doesn’t care about the contents of the page, it just looks in the headers and ignores the Internal 500 message. — The file doesn’t exist, but VS has to call *something* to get a response header."

"It’s not actually a problem, it’s “supposed to work that way”. Heh whatever. It’s still a pain. Suggested workarounds from Microsoft include changing your error handler to ignore calls to the file or to just create an empty one."

Inspired by googlefight.com I’ve written a little Java screen-scraper that tells you how many jobs a certain keyword or combination of keywords finds on jobserve.com (IT jobs section only) and scheduled it to run every night at 3am.

Here’s the number of jobs for a given programming language or keyword.