Salon.com > Jamais Cascio

Swords, spells and Academy Awards?

Tue, 23 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

For eight minutes, we are in another world. A dying man lies on the ground of his cell in a medieval insane asylum, as dust motes float in a Brownian dance across a shaft of sunlight. As he tells the story of meeting a stranger at a crossroads inn, we see the tale unfold before us. A hooded figure staggers into the inn, drawing the attention of the hardened warriors who sit and drink around the fire. The stranger is in pain, barely able to contain the demons that reside within him. We watch as the demons are temporarily unleashed, easily killing all but the narrator, who hides in the corner and watches. The inn is set ablaze, and the stranger walks out, the narrator following him on his journey. Roll credits.

Playing along with a handful of other animated shorts at a theater on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Calif., last week, "Diablo: The Calling" seemed only slightly out of place. It wasn't the sole computer-generated film in the collection, nor was it the only one with a truncated plot. But it was the only film participating in this screening -- all fulfilling the "public exhibition" requirement for Academy Award consideration -- that had been originally produced as the intro animation for a computer game. (The short is eligible for the Oscar because it was shown on a screen before it appeared as part of the game.)

The teeny-weeny Web server

Mon, 16 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Remember the olden days of computing, way back when a Web server was laughably massive -- at least the size of a box of matches? Those steam-engine days are long gone, thanks to Hariharasubrahmanian Shrikumar, a computer science graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. Hariharasubrahmanian (Shri, to his friends) has developed a Web server that works on a $1 microprocessor the size of a match head. If Shri has his way, these micro-Web servers will soon be everywhere, from alarm clocks to corporate air conditioning systems, perhaps even riding on the backs of small animals as tracking devices.

This micro-Web server, called the IPic, can currently be found here, but -- since it gets moved around a fair bit -- has its contents mirrored here.

Meesa like Web talk?

Wed, 23 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

As if you needed more Jar Jar in your life, the Jar-Jargonizer has appeared -- to translate e-mail and Web pages from English to the annoying patois of "The Phantom Menace's" Jar Jar Binks. You can even send translated mail directly from the site. Amaze your friends! Frighten your enemies!

Created by Scott Murdock and Ken Wilson of Bad Movie Night, the Jar-Jargonizer is a toy for both Jar Jar fans and Jar Jar haters alike. According to Murdock, "Ken thoroughly hated 'The Phantom Menace' and felt that it was an insult to all true 'Star Wars' fans. I liked the movie but winced every time Jar Jar Binks spoke."

The Jar-Jargonizer works best with large, diverse content, such as that from a Web site devoted to discussion. Slashdot and Salon.com's Table Talk work particularly well. "Don-nuh read it if you-sa're pure of heart," is the translation from the Slashdot excerpt: "Don't read it if you're pure of heart."

Will Linux be banned down under?

Mon, 07 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Did the drafters of Australia's new Net censorship legislation ever imagine that
their rules might ban Linux? After all, the Linux source code has quite a
few instances of the word "fuck" sprinkled throughout, mostly as commentary
about problems with software. Can an operating system be considered unsuitable for minors?

Using grep -- the powerful Unix search command -- to go through a recent version of Linux, I came up with some comment lines and error messages
that were clearly intended as the sort of coarse humor engineers of all sorts engage in.

Some examples:

 ./drivers/block/cmd640.c:16: *  These chips are basically fucked by
design
./fs/ufs/ufs_super.c:184:     printk("ufs_read_super: fucking Sun blows me\n");
./lib/vsprintf.c:9: * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up :-)

The last is particularly amusing -- "Torvalds" is, of course, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish computer scientist who started Linux in the first place.

The problem is, while adult engineers might find commentary such as this humorous, the sort of people who want to censor the Internet are more
likely to find it offensive. Which leads us back to the simple question: How will the Linux source code fare if the the Australian censorship law
passes?

Write your name on Mars

Mon, 10 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

When will you get a chance to visit Mars? Who knows -- but your name could easily make its way onto the very next mission. By visiting the Sign
Up For Mars Web site, you can give NASA your name and let space agency officials burn it onto a CD-ROM that will be carried to the Red Planet on the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander. John Lee, a program analyst for the Mars 2001 mission, expects to collect "3 to 4 million names at a minimum."

A similar CD was carried on last year's Mars 98 Polar Lander -- but only school-age kids could participate. Over 932,000 kids' names were collected, and Lee says that quite a few adults wanted in on it, too. Now they're getting their chance. Within a day of announcing the new CD on a NASA mailing list, nearly 9,000 people signed up to have their names rocketed into space in April 2001. Lee says adults are as excited as kids about the names CD, if not more so. In fact, he's been hearing from kids who don't want their names sent to Mars, but who have been added to the CD by "overzealous uncles." Some kids are afraid that the CD will be used by Martians to compile an invasion hit list.

The ecology of computer viruses

Wed, 07 Apr 1999 17:36:00 +0000

I admit it: I am highly amused that a virus named after a topless dancer from Florida managed to bring the Internet to its (figurative) knees. I can be amused, since I wasn't affected by the virus in the least. Unlike the hapless users who found that a list of porn-site passwords had been sent from their machines to 50 of their nearest and dearest friends, I'm on a Mac, and I use Word Perfect and Eudora.

Although the press trumpeted Melissa as the worst Internet attack since the Robert Morris Worm, only computers running a particular combination of Microsoft software were vulnerable in any meaningful way. You had to be running Windows and Word 97 and Outlook e-mail. People who weren't just sat back and wondered what the fuss was all about.

For those of us who pay attention to such things, the fuss was, at its root, about organizations mandating a certain operating system, word processor and e-mail program for all of their users. Turns out that many of the places reporting an infestation of Melissa (and its variants) were corporations and government agencies that had enforced a single standard for computing within their confines.