The Null Device
2000/8/14
And now some eye-candy, in the form of screenshots of new games for the upcoming Nintendo GameBoy Advance. Though it's a pity that there won't be a non-Japanese version of Tottoko Hamu Taro Tomodachi Dai-Sakusen De Chu... (via Slashdot)
Big things happening on the penguinhead front, with Sun, IBM, HP and Compaq backing GNOME. Sun will adopt GNOME as the interface to Solaris (possibly displacing the clunky, committee-designed Motif-based GUIs that commercial UNIX has traditionally suffered from). Don't write KDE and Qt off as dead yet, though, as Borland's visual development tools are based on those. (And besides, Qt is much nicer from a programmer's point of view than Gtk.) This will be interesting to watch...
A French judge has ruled that Yahoo must block sales of Nazi memorabilia from French Internautes, and ordered that a panel of three experts be convened to determine a technical means of enforcing this. If this succeeds, the applications of the technology could be far-reaching; for example, Arkansas and Tennessee could theoretically order amazon.com and its ilk to use it to block sales of Harry Potter books and Marilyn Manson CDs. Eventually, the MPAA may end up mandating its use to prevent mod-chipping Antipodean scofflaws from buying Zone 1 DVDs of films not yet locally available.
Upcoming movies: According to A Week in Melbourne, Princess Mononoke will be playing at the Kino during a Japanese Animation Festival (sometime between Aug. 31 and Sep. 3). (For those not in the know, that's an animated epic set in a magical feudal Japan, and translated into English by none other than Neil Gaiman.)
Speaking of VST plug-ins, this site seems to have a number of VST soft synth plug-ins of various sorts (standard analogue, drawbar organ, wavetable). Looks interesting, though one can't help but think that the names leave a bit to be desired...
Interesting VST plug-in of the day: VSamp, a virtual sampler for VST 2.0. May be useful for using all those vintage synth separates off Future Music cover CDs...
Coming up next from our glorious Prime Minister: work for the pension, putting those deadbeat aged pensioners to use as productive human resources. Perhaps they should unify it with the Beast's national-service-for-the-dole plans and create army divisions of elderly conscripts...
Graphic of the day: The Tokyo subway map would make a good textural element in rave visuals or the like. (Yes, I know everyone linked to it a few weeks ago...)
Elizabeth "Prozac Nation" Wurtzel deconstructs Britney Spears. (Incidentally, aren't they going to be making a film of Prozac Nation with Drew Barrymore playing Wurtzel?)