Jesus.

No casualties, thankfully. London’s new Bendy Buses seem to have an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames. Three have been destroyed by fire in the past 18 months (compared with three of the old Routemasters in 45 years), creating another reason why the Routemaster is by far a superior form of transport.

Have been reading some articles marking the anniversary of the Iraq war - George Monbiot pens a thoughtful piece on interventionism while Andrew Anthony sums up his doubts on the anti-war movement leaders (many of which I share - even if I hadn’t been with Francis on Saturday I would not have joined the protests in London this time). He refers to a particularly disgraceful passage by John Pilger referring to the Madrid bombings as part of the “struggle agains the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination” (more in this piece) while Monbiot refers to a spluttering performance by perhaps the least talented political hack in the world, Harold Pinter, on a Newsnight Special [RealVideo link] last week. Both of these articles sum up my utter frustration that the leading (well, noisiest) names against the war are hysterical idiots. Another example - after the comedy random word generator that is Julie Burchill accused George Galloway of stealing his ex-girlfriend’s knickers (in fact it was a completely different MP) she was lambasted for making “a deliberately malicious, malignly-motivated smear, on a Goebbellian scale”.

This favouring of shouting “They’re all Nazis/fascists” comes far too easily to those leading the anti-war brigade (Pilger refers to the American regime as “the Third Reich of our times”, while Yvonne Ridley equates the pro-Taliban jihadi with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, in a truly loathsome article), is a source of tremendous frustration for me and, I suspect, many others on the left who oppose current neo-conservative American and British policy in Iraq but are looking for constructive, principled voices and not hysterical rubbish like this. As far as I’m aware, there is little support or action for the pro-democracy movements in Iraq from people like the RESPECT Coalition, who are more concerned with wild rhetoric (and Julie Burchill) and are happy to ignore what’s happening in the real world. By failing to acknowledge the fact that the war went ahead and neglecting to face up to the consequences, the anti-war movement has failed its own commitment to democracy and peace. We should now be doing our damnedest to help a democratic Iraq take hold, instead of childish posturing like supporting the attacks of the resistance (whose victims are more often Iraqi than American or British) as Pilger has done.

“A couple of days later she dared me to meet next to the toilets at the mainline station we were heading to. We met, we fucked and toothing was born.”

This has a look of total and utter bollocks to it (especially the claim that hundreds are doing it), but apparently there’s a new scene called ‘Toothing’, where complete strangers (often commuters on trains) will link up via Bluetooth on their phones for meaningless sex. Nice. So if you have a Bluetooth phone in your pocket which is doing nothing apart from looking like an 80s throwback and ruining the line of your suit, then check out the Toothing FAQ.

Not sure what to make of this - a blog of two guys trapped in a house, whilst fighting off zombies. A joke? Viral marketing for some zombie-related product? A new form of blognovel? I can’t figure it out.

(Random related links - Samuel Pepys’ Blog and 253)

What with all the travelling and work recently, I haven’t actually looked at much on the Net, it has to be said. What I have been doing is reacquainting myself with treeware - although slightly disturbingly the two books I have recently been reading are both concerned with high-school massacres, or rather their aftermath.

The first that I read, Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (which won this year’s Booker Prize), was a bit of a disappointment. Quite frankly I can’t see what all the fuss is about, yes the character is interesting, in a sort of modern Holden Caulfield way, but he lacks the really acidic insights into life that makes the Catcher in the Rye so great. The plot is thin, the ‘twists’ predictable, and the “wrap it up nicely and put a bow on it” ending is just plain irritating. There are good bits, the extreme, to the point of sick, parody of the voyeurism and rapacious greed of modern American life, and some of the characters are amusingly dark and twisted (but none apart from the protagonist are really fleshed out). I’m not convinced, and I’m especially not convinced as to why it got the Booker.

The second book, Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland is much better. The quality of the writing is superb and kept me hooked all the way through, the four principle principal characters are complex and left me asking questions about religion and faith and love that I hadn’t really thought of before. There isn’t much plot, to be honest, (though the detailing of the massacre is done in a much more convincing and chilling way than in VGL), but the characters are much deeper and the subjects touched much more serious, and the ending is suitably open and fitting. Full marks to Coupland, and I’m now keen to go off and read some more of his (the only other work of his I’ve read is the seminal geek tale Microserfs, which I also recommend).

Recovering from a pretty good weekend - was in London for Francis’s stag do. We went go-karting in the afternoon, which was a hell of a lot of fun, although my team came a ignominous last (thanks to Hugh’s comedy spinning off in the pit lane). Then we spent the evening at Bierodrome in Islington, which has an amazing selection of Belgian beers and top-quality food to boot. We consumed large quantities of both, and we all got merry. I can just about remember the evening and I don’t think I did anything that bad…

I got up very late today (for some reason I spent several hours criss-crossing London on various Night Buses and didn’t get home until sunrise) but woke to discover many magnificent bruises on my body - I think these are from being bashed about during the go-karting rather than being random drinking injuries. Luckily for you I don’t have a digital camera or I’d have posted pictures of them - there’s a fucking huge one on my leg that’s the size of the palm of my hand, it’s a beautiful shade of vermillion. Anyway, I think I’ll be snacking on the Ibuprofen for the next few days.

Update: Derek has uploaded his photos of the karting.

Further Update: Chris Gammie has put his online as well.

The world’s two worst variable names was an amusing read (via Small Values of Cool), and led me onto spend a lot of time reading Bad Code and Funny Things Seen In Source Code And Documentation in c2.com’s Wiki.

The most obfuscated code I’ve wrote recently is probably this, in Flash Actionscript:

clockwise = (clockwise) ? ++obj._rotation < 10 : --obj._rotation <= -10;

which when repeatedly called would oscillate an object’s rotation between -10 and 10, in one line - basically it’s this:

if (clockwise) {
 ++obj._rotation;
 if (obj._rotation >= 10) clockwise = false;
}
else {
 –obj._rotation;
 if (obj._rotation <= -10) clockwise = true;
}

but a lot more horrible.

The worst code I’ve ever written, as in actually offensively poor and shoddy, I can’t honestly remember, as usually if I’ve discovered something awful then I’ve rewritten it and since forgotten it. My favourite bad code from work was when Andy once wrote:

Properties properties = PackageProperties.getProperties(PROPERTIES);

which I found amusingly confusing.

Diebold, amongst other things, make ATM machines. Unfortunately, it seems that when you reboot them, they boot normal Windows and allow you to play around with it as you like.

Still, with a secruity flaw like this, at least it’s only a few banks that get hurt, right? Not as if Diebold do anything else important. Oh yeah, apart from manufacture the electronic voting machines used in the US Elections.

I’ve commented on this before, regrettably have not done much since, but will write an updated version when I have more time, and especially, I’ll try to dig out more on the possibility of electronic voting machines in the UK. In the meantime, Black Box Voting and Rebecca Mercuri are good starting places to find out more.