This girl is better for quotes than George W Bush! In addition to calling her lawyer a Hotman (well, it is his name), she provides a keen insight into life behind bars:

“It’s like reality television. It’s scary, really scary…”—Schapelle Corby

Now all they need is to put cameras into the jail, and we’ll have guaranteed entertainment for the next 20 years. That’s nearly as good as Neighbours!

Remember Good Idea, Bad Idea from Animaniacs? I do. So does the Canadian government, apparently, judging from the two top stories today:

Good idea: Legalising gay marriage nationally.

“We are a nation of minorities. And in a nation of minorities, it is important that you don’t cherry-pick rights. ... A right is a right and that is what this vote tonight is all about.”—Paul Martin

Bad idea: Adopting US border entry standards.

“This is all a part of this very deep integration concept that has been talked about and I think threatens Canadian sovereignty.”—Mr. Layton

Okay. I’m not making this up. This is media quote of the week:

“I’m thinking clearly now. You, Mr Hutapea, are a Hotman, and are very much needed to work your expertise, to do the best you possibly can to help me to be a free woman.”—Schapelle Corby to her recently fired and re-hired lawyer, Hotman Paris Hutapea (I’m not making that up).

For those living overseas or in caves, the hottest news item right now down here is a Queensland beauty student who was arrested in Bali for attempting to smuggle some drugs into the country. She’s always claimed her innocence, but she was recently thrown in jail for 20 years (the normal punishment for this kind of thing is death, so 20 years ain’t so bad).

Anyway, the whole thing’s turned into this insane media circus, starring people with silly names – like Schapelle, Hotman, Mercedes, Downer and Trowell. I can’t wait to see what happens next. Not.

This is freekin scary. In a nutshell, scientists have killed a dog and replaced its blood with a saline solution. After a light lunch, they came back, replaced the solution with blood, gave the poor dog a nasty electric shock, and played a game of fetch with their new un-dead doggie.

They plan to do it all over again with a human, next year.

Read all about it.: Ooogaboogabooga!

Hey this is pretty handy, grabbed from the flotsam and jetsam of the data I see fly by …

Megabyte
1,024 kilobytes. The length of a short novel or about the storage available on an average floppy disk.

Gigabyte
1,024 megabytes. Roughly 100 minutes of CD-quality stereo sound.

Terabyte
1,024 gigabytes. Half of the content in an academic research library.

Petabyte
1,024 terabytes. Half of the content in all U.S. academic research libraries.

Exabyte
1,024 petabytes. Half of all the information generated in 1999.

In year 6 or 7, I wrote the first short story that I was really proud of. It was about the death of a kid, about my age at the time, in Hiroshima. We’d been studying the second world war and the atomic bomb as part of our history course – fairly heavy stuff, in retrospect. To make it more poignant, I made the kid half-American, the son of an American sea captain, who fell in love with a Japanese woman. I wrote his story, from the time the bomb hit to when he lay down on the banks of the river for a quick nap that he never woke up from.

I thought about this story while I was in Hiroshima walking through Peace Park, seeing the building they kept as a reminder. (As an aside, it’s interesting that Hiroshima has that building, Berlin has the Emperor Wilhelm Church or “Ged�chtniskirche”. Humble ruins as reminders of wars. New York is deleting their reminder and building what will be the world’s tallest building overtop of it – a sign of swaggering bravado if I’d ever seen on).

I’m reminded of my Hiroshima story again today, when stories from Pulitzer-prize winning journalist George Weller (RIP) were published on the Mainichi News site. He snuck into Nagasaki a month after the bomb was dropped there, and wrote about what he saw. Unfortunately, (and somewhat predictably) the US censors destroyed the story. Weller’s son found some carbon copies in his attic, and has released them to be published, 60 years after they were written. It’s a wonderful historical document.

I’m an art-school dropout. That’s pretty low, considering what a walk in the park art school is. In fact, the reason why I dropped out was that I wasn’t being challenged, it wasn’t interesting, and I realised I could get all this education for free by hanging out with my friends, going to galleries, and just kind of creating stuff by myself. No need to pay all that money. So I stopped.

A few days ago, Steve Jobs made a speech to the graduating class at Stanford, in which he praised the value of following your gut. In his case, his gut said to drop out. It’s an unusually personal talk from Steve, who is notoriously private about his life. More than any other corporate CEO type, he has a celebrity sheen about him that keep people interested in the soap opera that is his life. He’s aloof, and has managed to stay “cool”, in spite of it all.

Anyway, check out the transcript of the speech posted by some kind soul at Slashdot.

A while back, gentle reader, I posted what I thought was the world’s worst joke. It is, by any account, very bad. However, a man named Christian showed me (by way of his comment), a joke that is even worse than that. Check it out, if you dare.

Apple’s announcement on Monday was interesting, and somewhat sad. If you’d been living in a geek cave for the past little while, Apple announced they would be abandoning their PowerPC chips, and going for Intel ones. The announcement, in and of itself, is not a big deal. We’ve been through architecture transitions before: 680×0 to PowerPC, MacOS9 to MacOS X. The NeXT side of things, where OS X really came from, were making programs that ran on four different kinds of chips (680×0, HP, Sun and x86). So the chip exchange itself is not that scary.

The scary part is what happens to development on the Mac. Right now, to get a program to run on the Mac in any kind of mainstream way, a developer needs to write something specifically for the Mac. While one could still buy some kind of Windows emulation program and run your Windows programs in that, they were all slow and had trouble with drivers. So really, that wasn’t much of an option.

Now that the Mac will be based on Intel chips, these Windows-on-Mac programs will be much faster and more compatible, because they no longer have to translate Intel commands to the PowerPC – it’s already an Intel chip. Major speed and compatibility boosts there. Woo-hoo! In fact, there’s nothing stopping someone from loading Windows onto Intel-based Macs, and booting into either Windows or MacOS at startup. Going one step further, there is lots of software out there now that allows people to run one operating system “inside” another. Many Linux people, for example, use Win4Lin to run Windows applications “inside” Linux. I’m sure some clever developer will release something to allow Windows programs to run on the Mac transparently. We pretty much have it already with the newer editions of Virtual PC.

Once that happens, why should a Windows developer bother to rewrite their program for the Mac, if it runs there already? Sure, yeah, programming on MacOS X is better, blah blah blah. That’s a fairly moot point. Some effort is required on the part of the programmer to re-code their stuff from the Windows-way to the MacOS-way. If the software runs fine on the Mac already, why bother?

I bring this up because I remember my history. I used to be an OS/2 user. It was a great operating system – it was fast, it was 32-bit native, and it ran Windows programs. In many cases, it did that better than Windows itself could. Over time, there were fewer and fewer OS/2 native programs being built, as the developers moved to Windows. There are a lot more users running Windows, and making a Windows program meant it would still run on OS/2. Also, it was difficult getting new developers to code for OS/2 because OS/2 applications wouldn’t run on Windows.

You’re in a room with 100 people. Five of them speak English, and the rest of the room speaks Hungarian. If you want to communicate with the people in the room, you’ll have to speak both languages. Now the English speaking people learn Hungarian, you don’t have to worry about both languages. English is the easier (“better?”) language for you, but why bother speaking it, because you can get your message out fine in Hungarian.

That, for me, is the essence of the problem.

If Apple comes up with a way to allow Mac apps to run on Windows, we might have a solution: allowing (presumably) better-written Mac software to run everywhere will even the playing field a bit. That’s a major technical challenge though, but they do have two years to do it…

Of course, Mr Cringley thinks that Apple and Intel are about to merge. He makes some very interesting points in his article, and asks some very good questions. I don’t think his conclusion is correct, but, like me, we’re both just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

I recently found this via a friend’s (never updated) blog. When Roy Disney resigned from the company that bears his name, he sent a letter to the Michael Eisner, the chairman. This is the letter. It’s a fine account of bitterness, regret and defeat. The P.S. is missing though, where he tells Eisner where to shove the letter once he’s done reading it.