<insert crazy ramblings here>

Cory Doctorow has just posted a quick explanation of why DRM can't work, for the laymen.

It included the fantasic line: "ever since Alan Turing and the lads at Bletchley Park broke the Nazi ciphers and spent the rest of the war reading Hitler's secret dispatches and snickering to themselves."

If you want a full on Geek-fest on why trying to implement a thorough Digital Rights Management system is a bad idea, listen to Cory reading "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection". Or, read it yourself. It's an incredibly detailed breakdown of all the costs (financial, chronological, and futile) of Vista's copy protection system. The punch line of which is it lasted 1 week in the wild. Before a geek got annoyed he couldn't play something he'd paid for.

There was a bit of a Anti-Patterns discussion at work today. The article is a big list of bad software development practices, with amusing names. Like "Continuous obsolescence", "God object", and "Reinventing the square wheel". The conversation was of the "How many of these do we do?" sort.

The polar opposite of which is The Joel Test. A list of good practices for a software house. I won't tell you what we scored, but we probably hit a higher percentage of the anti-practices.

Finally, proof that Republicans are for Voldemort!

Seen at ool272's Librarium.

I'm off to play rude scrabble with EvilJ and iBon soon, but have some time to kill. Even though spelling is optional, I thought I'd look up the exact spelling of Gonasyphaherpaloids", and found that Skippy's List is being updated again. Including this fantastic tale of Battalion Commander receiving a squid to the face.

For anyone who hasn't seen it Skippy's List is a list of things that one soldier has been explicitly told that he is not allowed to do in the US army. Such as:

34. (Next day) Not allowed to chew gum at formation even if I *did* bring enough for everybody.
100. Claymore mines are not filled with yummy candy, and it is wrong to tell new soldiers that they are.
185. My name is not a killing word.

The squid thing isn't on the list, because it was technically allowed.

Reckless Life is an action packed comic, following the life of a wise-cracking, small-time (but high-tech and skilled) thief.

It's incredibly well drawn in a style that reminds me of Batman: The Animated Series. The coulouring scheme, greyscale with lots of red, gives it a distinctive atmosphere. A lot of the comments on there seem to be suggesting Tim Demeter should get this made as an animated series.

Websnark once wrote that one of the difficult thing in story telling was switching between a silly bit of fun, and character driven plot. Especially while consistently brining the funny. I think he said that Sluggy Freelance was a master at this. Tim is just as good at this.

Here's a character driven strip on finding someone with your ex.
Here's a silly fun strip on a week of random Ninja attacks.

X-posted at Snarkoleptics

Phase 1: Steal underpants. Phase 2:... Phase 3: Profit!

Blatantly stolen from EvilJ!

The comments on the BBC's piece on the Helvetica font turning 50, seem to be split between hate, praise, humour, and a profound loathing for Comic Sans MS.

Good for them :)

I almost missed the cute detail in the background of today's Nukees.

Looking back through a few random bar strips, Gav really does a good job at populating the bar with distinctive characters in the background. They're not usually so exciting though.

I also noticed a change in style. It's quite gradual but in old closeups you get more detail. Then closeups became not different to the rest of the comic. Now closeups have a thicker line. With line thickness becoming a very good indicator of distance from the viewer.

X-posted to Snarkoleptics.

Small boy fails at chemistry, tickled my inner Geek.
It's the that sort of strip that keeps SMBC on my trawl list. At times the Black Comedy is a bit too Black.

I've certainly suffered from the too many email accounts problem. I've been trying to tidy up my address book, since I lost my phone, and I've got about 5 email addresses for some people.

Hey it's one of the Myers-Briggs personality test thingies. I've never got around to taking it before.

Seems I'm ENTP.

Extraverted 56%
Intuitive 50%
Thinking 12%
Perceiving 44%

It's all just seeing what you want to see, but fun nevertheless. (Please don't hate me tiny Carl Jung!)

Just try it look up your opposite and I bet you can still see lots of places where you think, "yeah, that's me."

Seen on johncoxon .