Al-Qaeda's secret plot to turn America gay with... the gay bomb. Remember kids: You read it on t'interweb, so it must be true ;-)

A convoluted route around t'interweb lead me to AVFS. This looks like the start of "the web filesystem".

I dunno about you, but I find Redhat Fedora's up2date feature a bit unreliable. I mean, it basically works, but seems to hang on downloads quite frequently. It seems that certain times of day are better than others, but it's pretty much impossible to update a new system without quite a lot of messing around. I have a "solution"...

RowingExcellent! A worthy use of all that PhotoShop skill. Now if only I had some of that...
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Why bother to teach anyone anything? It's far easier to have laws for everything instead.

Get a grip. Sad there was an accident, but what's next? Microwaves that say "are you 18? Yes/No" when you press "start"? Come on...

This is a bit random, but does anyone know how to convert the grs1 character set into utf8?
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For various reasons, I'm hacking about with Zebra and grs1 output records. My actual scenario (if it matters) is that I have utf8 SOIF records, and get them out of Zebra using Zap. To do this sensibly, I've ended up using grs1 format retrieval into Zap.

The grs1 character set is really weird. I've found that a » character appears to become » when piped though grs1 (very much like looking at the utf8 character with iso-8859-1 eyes). I'd like to have a proper grs1 character -> HTML entities converter, but alas, I can't find anything about the character set on t'interweb.

I have found a hack which seems to work, although probably will cause more problems than it solves. It's a Perl regular expression:

$data =~ s/..Â(W)/$1/g;

...I dunno why it needs two characters before the  - hex dumps of data don't really show up what's going on either. I'd really like to get this cleaned up and working properly (ie. without some god-awful hack in place!).

UPDATE (30th Aug, 2004):
I've got a long way to sorting this out. Certainly, it now works in the majority of cases, unlike the regex which really doesn't work at all.

I've written a Perl module to perform character conversions from GRS1 to Unicode (and back again). I can't guarantee it's a full implementation, or even that it'll work how you might expect, but it does seem to do what I need (at least). Do with it what you will.

Z3950::grs1 (567k file) (POD documentation)

This isn't London (via Plep - which goes from strength to strength)

I'm wearing a suit, and I'm in a bad mood! (something to do with authority and class issues, so I'm told).

However, it don't matter what rocks I got, I'm still Jenny from the Block.

This reminds me of this. Both future customers of this, or perhaps this.

Senator denied flight because his name appears on No-Fly list.

This is fantastic, and the start of the end of the US's ridiculous no-fly list. If you're a terrorist, create some fake ID with a name a bit like anyone famous (preferably polically famous). Attempt to fly, but arrange to be denied flights because you're a terrorist. Now, sit back and wait while "innocent person" works the system, thus enabling you (and them) to fly. Marvellous.

Of course, if you're an innocent person and get denied a flight, it's your duty to spend three weeks of your life calling Homeland "Security" and get it sorted. The more calls they get - the less people will go on the no-fly list.

Fortress America vs. Social Engineering. There can only be one winner, and it's pretty obvious which one it'll be.

Update: More at Blogdial. More communist than the communists.