WiReD magazine is coming back to the UK. I set Reg readers the task of Photoshopping some covers here. You can see the results in a gallery here.

Wonderful stuff.

As we noted this week, all kinds of fascinating social possibilities elude the iPodder. Music is a social activity, but the children are only responding to corporate advertising that encourages solipsism – “to shield ourselves,” as Oscar Wilde put it, ironically, “from the sordid perils of actual existence”.

But there are other solitary pleasures that are bad for us, and nanny governments rarely miss the opportunity to scold us about them.

The EU demands that cigarette manufacturers display excruciatingly personal warnings.

In Brazil, the consequences of smoking are dramatically illustrated, as we see here -

But would this couple even have got as far as the boudoir, if they’d been iPod users? They’d have looked right past each other, and gone home to blog about their near miss, alone.

So we modestly propose that in the interests of consistency, anti-social technology such as the iPod should carry similar health warnings. Reg reader, artist and music activist Mark Splinter has risen to the challenge, with these fine examples.

Here’s a gentler version of the same.

It may seem as if we’re picking on Apple, but only because they’re first into the breach,. Apple is simply pioneering this ugly trend of de-socializing music, and others are following suit. Apple has gradually disabling the sharing functions from its iTunes.

So the warning could be more specific -

Or personal -

Harsh. But not entirely without foundation. We cite as evidence iTunes’ “Party Shuffle” feature, a computer algorithm that Apple describes as “The ultimate DJ at any gathering.” Oh yeah? Try it. Shuffle’s juxtapositions are so clumsy that it will have cleared the room by the time it gets to Song #3. Clearly, the billionaire fruitarian must employ something, or someone, to retain his guests. Because it sure ain’t his music.

Technology has been accepted when it helps us do what we already like doing. But technology companies are now determined not only betray their own consumers, but they also betray the potential of the technology for which we pay them. As ever, we’re only one piece of paper away from a fix - a trusted, traditional solution – that keeps everyone happy.

Our thanks to Mark who concludes his batch of Health Warnings with this excellent suggestion.

Got more? Mark has donated the source for these graphics (available on request) – so a prize goes to the best health warnings you can come up with. Load your brushes and masking tools, music lovers.

But now we must mend our ways, shift our gears, and adjust our paradigms once again – for the concept has received a powerful endorsement from one of the dot.com era’s most lauded “thinkers”.

Clay Shirky, speaking at the O’Reilly ETech blogging conference, now thinks the ‘tele-phone’ will become an important part of our lives. It may one day be so affordable, he predicted, that even the middle class will be able to buy one. He sketched out a future of people talking into their portable ‘tele-phones’ as they walked down the street, or sat in their personal hovercraft. Phones would one day be so powerful, Shirky predicted, that they would even allow the user to play a simple naughts and crosses game, written in Python.

One day, wire-less Tele-Phones like this will be everywhere, predicts Shirky

Initially, warned Shirky, only highly Emergent People will be able to find a use for the ‘Tele-Phone’ – such as webloggers and Wikipedia contributors. But these are your typical “early adoption nodes“, he said, and soon ordinary people will figure out how to use the box.

The choice of name, initially puzzling, now becomes clear. ‘Phone’ is to do with sound and hearing. And ‘tele’ means telepathic, which is what bloggers are. So if you think of it as a “tele-pathic hearing device,” it’s quite easy to remember.

The O’Reilly ETech conference is famed for such forward, blue-skies thinking, so put aside your skepticism. And away with your doomsday predictions that the United States’ is failing to invest in its technological future by neglecting science education, and by promoting irrationality. Its future is surely fine; on the conference circuit, geniuses are everywhere you look – daring to think what only a couple of years ago was quite unthinkable.

Beginning with Monday’s comic, radio interviewer Mark questions aging rock star Jim Thudpucker about “free music”. Thudpucker returns with a barrage of techno utopian babble that suggests he’s been inhaling the heady vapors of the blogosphere.

“There are no rock stars any more!” insists Thudpucker. “With file sharing, we’re being liberated from the hierarchical tyranny of record sales… Careers henceforth will be concert-driven, fragmented, and small!”

“And fan bases?” asks Mark.

“Will be kept in Palm Pilots!” replies the blog-brained Thudpucker.

This brilliant satire of the belief that technology can by itself topple entrenched institutions will be familiar to anyone who’s picked up a copy of Wired in the last decade. Thudpucker is an ever-present type at any blogging convention. The conversation continued throughout the week, and we won’t spoil any more of Trudeau’s punchlines, except to note that he captures the other worldliness of this strand of techno utopian idiocy very sweetly.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with utopianism in itself: it’s simply a wish for a better world, and we should all be able to imagine something better. But when utopianism becomes a denial and a retreat from the real world, it serves no useful purpose. It becomes a distraction, draining time and energy from what can be achievable. And like fringe political activism, it can eventually become no more than a psychological crutch for its advocates.

Creative Commons – launched by Professor Lawrence Lessig after a catastrophic Supreme Court defeat two years ago, which set back the copyright reform cause by many years – is one such noble idea.

But there are reasons why the campaign – widely blogged, but even more widely ignored – has failed to gain much traction.

Broadcaster Bill Thompson picked on one reason why the campaign has got nowhere fast. (Try calling the Creative Commons office in the hope of finding a human on the other end of the line and you’ll realize another – there’s no one home.)

But Thompson highlights the legalistic, American-centric basis of the campaign.

“Lessig doesn’t understand why people in Europe care about an author’s moral rights, which are inalienable in European law. And because he doesn’t understand, he dismisses it. To an American constitutional lawyer copyright is simply an economic matter,” Thompson told us.

“I have an objection to the British National Party using something I wrote in their party political broadcasts. That’s my right.”

“I’m a critical supporter of Creative Commons, but I don’t accept US hegemony in this or any other area.”

So Creative Commons is emblematic of how even the best of the US fails to understand how the rest of the world works. Is this a failure of empathy? Or a deeper philosophical failure which places too much emphasis on the law, and therefore “hacking” the law? Your thoughts, as ever, are most welcome. As we know, you can’t throw an iPod in the United States without it hitting either a lawyer or an economist. And look where they’ve got us.

Fortunately we have more practical remedies to such escapist fantasies to hand. We only need to put them to work.

:Big Reg oops: Trudeau’s strip, which captures the flavor of the debate today, was originally published two years ago. And as the Professor says, you can’t hold the cause responsible for the wilder fantasies of its supporters. Quite correct.

That surely was the unspoken sentiment behind Google’s first ever analyst meeting in Mountain View this week, which left Wall Street’s finest perplexed. CFO George Reyes gave a brief introduction, took a couple of questions, but didn’t give a presentation, as is the norm.

Instead Charlie Ayers, former Grateful Dead chef, described how he’d prepare a delicious lunch of grilled pork tenderloin.

Executives gave nothing away.

The slideshow can be found here, although we’ve distilled some of the essential banality of the day by capturing some screenshots, such as this one:

This approach is consistent with the company’s attitude towards accountability. While it’s happy to see the Googleplex menu published (“Joaquin’s Potato Salad – steamed fingerling potatoes, with red onion, English peas, basil, parsley and a lemon aioli – and Portabella Mushroom Pizza – Roasted portabella mushrooms topped with a roasted tomato sauce, kalamata olives, pepperonchinis and parmesan,” to take one day’s example), it won’t publish a policy for Google News.

“They had a formal presentation by their chef but not their chief financial officer,” Mark Mahaney, American Technology Research told the New York Times. “I have never been to an investor day where the CFO didn’t speak.”

However, CEO Eric Schmidt reprised his creepy line that he wants a “Google that knows you”.

Last year Schmidt told USA Today that he dreamt of a product “that… would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user’s tastes, friends and predilections.”

So Google plans to improve its search by making use of its users’ personal data. All the time we thought Google was run by brilliant mathematicians, we were wrong. Data harvesting now appears to the preferred way forward.

While we hold Wall Street’s wisest in about the same high regardas Brin and Page evidently do, the company would be foolish not to pay heed to public opinion – especially now that Google is the custodian of $1.8 billion worth of other people’s money.

In a recent Google competition on the excellent Fark.com, at least half the submitted Photoshop entries were on the theme of ‘Big Brother’.

Or take another glamorous example of the mercurial codesmith-as-shamen. In Po Bronson’s Nudist On The Late Shift - one of many books of the dot.com era that tried to persuade us work was simply another form of leisure, the eponymous hero is a programmer so dedicated to his task that he forgets to put his clothes on. And he’s so vital to the organization, no one minds.

But if this was really happening – what would you think? You’d ask yourself, what would drive a man to toil over a computer, in a deserted building, stark naked? Just what would possess a man to lose his dignity like that? The lonely soul must have been tearing his heart out. About, what exactly?

Well, what was probably going through the mind of the nudist at that very moment can be found on page 203 of this marvelous book, by Verity Stob. He was probably thinking something like this.

Once upon a time there were three special COM string types: BSTR, _bstr_t and CComBST. BSTR was the most straightforward: it was a typedef for a pointer to a wchar_t, and w_char_t was a typedef_ of a 16-bit Unicode character. Therefore BSTR was a Unicode equivalent of LPSTR [which is what Microsoft called strings in Win32].Ha! Got you there. BSTR was no simple null-terminated string; rather it had a secret length count and extra null terminator, and was allocated and freed with special functions. One was not supposed to know the format of its contents, and it was not obvious how you were supposed to make conversions to /proper/ strings. [Which in any case, would break the 'make no assumptions about content' rule].

But why manipulate BSTRs as pointers? The answer was “Yes, of course it was a natural for a class”, which was two were supplied, “A _bstr_t object,” said MSDN in its _bstr_t page, “encapsulates the BSTR data type,” whereas the entry for CCombSTR began “the CComBSTR class is a wrapper for BSTRs”.

Both ignore Bruce McKinney’s MSDN-bundled, and therefore officially sanctioned 1996 article “Strings the OLE Way” where he proposed a BSTR wrapping class of its own, called ermmm, String.

Well, when run time error hilarity ensues, do you wonder why a programmer would rip his clothes off – wouldn’t you?

Here then is the grim reality of the code face, once the marketeers and consultants have taken their colored UML diagrams down and departed. Somebody has to keep our machines running.

For 17 years a mysterious English lady called Verity Stob has been chronicling the dilemmas of people who do on a monthly basis – with amazing felicity, wit and patience, and here are her columns in one place for the first time, in a real paper book.

Verity Stob is to computer programming what the BOFH is to network administration. Both are so acutely well observed, and so well written, that like The Office, enjoying them causes anguish as well as giggles. Both are consistently funny, truthful and inventive not just occasionally, but year in and year out.

But there, the similarities end. Verity Stob’s humor is in the stoic British tradition of a Tony Hancock, fiercely moral but utterly non-judgemental. (With only one exception). Faced with libraries, languages, frameworks and tools that don’t make sense, often accompanied (as we see above) by documentation that doesn’t exist or really shouldn’t have in the first place.

Systems programming has its own folklore, in the Jargon File. But for Windows programming – the grim toil undertaken by the rest of the programming world? Verity Stob is its Queen and its chronicler.

There are great flights of fancy, such as Brunel applying for a C++ job, or a sentient Google cluster, or a superdense history of computing – the funniest ever written. Or her Beaufort Scale of PC Decay, which is so well observed that anyone who’s used a post-Windows 3.0 PC will recognize each stage.

Cruft Force 1: “New” … “The mouse does the poltergeist trick where, with the actual mouse stationary, it drifts three inches due east and then stops. For no reason at all…”… Cruft Force 3: “Lived In” … “One time in seven when the user starts word or other Office 2000 app, instead of running it pretends it is installing itself for the first time and starts a setup program” …

… Cruft Force 8: “Decrepit”: “…The SETI screensaver overnight creates 312 copies of itself in an impressively expanded system tray that fills half the screen”…

We recommended this to Apple to use instead of their silly “Twitch Over From Windows” campaign, but really it should be etched onto the side of space probes to warn advanced extra-terrestial civilizations that if they get any closer to Earth, they face asymmetric warfare.

Stob saves plenty of scorn for middle management and the schemes they introduce to justify their positions.

Especially memorable is the “code review” – a fad in the early 1990s, where Verity is upbraided for failing to record the return value of a printf() statement, but flirts her way out of trouble. And any Microsoft Certified Professional will recognize the BSY or “Bill Says Yup!” examination. Or level 2, BSYI, the “Bill Says Yes Indeedy” exam. The ISO 9000 program gets repeated attention, too.

Verity’s BFG is the literary parody, and we’ve praised the History of the Borlandites epic here before, faithly capturing the rhythms of the King James I Bible. There are many more here, but the pomes are probably the best. These are incredibly hard to do well. Auden’s Night Mail is note-perfect, and you can imagine Verity’s excitement when she discovered that Longfellow’s Song of Haiwatha borrowed its meter from the Finnish national epic Kaleva.

Finnish, you say? Away she goes.

In a city called Helsinki 
Capital of icy Finland 
Where the days are dark in winter 
Where the nights are bright in summer 
Where no mother’s son drops litter 
(Finns are very down on litter) 
Dwelt a Swedish-speaking youngster 
By the name of Linus Torvalds 
“Linus” being Shulz for blanket 
“Torvalds” simply meaning Torvalds

Although Verity says she wants to rebuff, in advance, any suggestions that the collected columns resemble a social history of computing, it’s still an amazing potted history of man’s inhumanity to man in the name of programming. If the lady could curate a computer museum, what a place it would be. And section two, “1995-1999: The Rasp of The Modem”, could give it its name. Modern historians forget what a gruesome task programming the x86 segmented architecture using MS-DOS interrupts really was. And then how good that suddenly looked when Microsoft introduced OLE and COM. Stob finds an article in the Microsoft-published Developer Network magazine (MSDN) that begins, “I love COM. COM is good. Like a fine pilsner or ale, COM never disappoints. In fact, the more I look at COM, the more I like it.”

(And here it is. And look, the lunatic who wrote it is still causing mayhem - only he now works for Microsoft!)

Years later, after Microsoft discontinues OLE and COM, Verity finally encounters an example that works.

“I for one still feel a thrill of excitement and surprise when Word does what I asked it to, often followed by a second thrill, of a different kind, when it abruptly stops doing so.For a long time the big problem with Automation, in my opinion, was the lack of robust and realistic examples showing what it could do—especially where Outlook was concerned. Happily this shortcoming has in recent times been addressed, and addressed in spades.

Of all the script viruses, “I Love You” is still my preferred source of useful snippets for manipulating the Outlook address book, even if its author does insist on spelling mail “male.” By the way, ILY also contains some good stuff demonstrating the VB file system object – I would lobby for its inclusion in MSDN, but I suppose it is too late now.

Lovely. And true.

About Verity herself, little is known – except that she has an older sister, Parity Stob. But this might well the funniest book written about computing, and you should treat yourselves without delay.

The good news is that we finally have official confirmation of these strange sightings of amphibious craft making sometimes very slow, and sometimes incredibly quick, but always unplanned detours across Europe, thanks to MapPoint or Autoroute.

But the bad news is that the fun might end soon. No longer will Norwegians, Latvians and Estonians be able to press the web equivalent of Asteroids’ “hyperspace” button and find themselves in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. There are no surface-effect vehicles, modeled after Alexeev’s Caspian Sea Ekranoplan, being tested in the Baltic.

Or at least, not by Microsoft. This is what we were told.

“Microsoft aggregates the most accurate and up-to-date driving directions possible for our customers using information pulled from the industry’s top data providers“, the agency tells us.

Yes, of course.

“The MapPoint team of cartographers uses the best data from each of our providers, and a complicated routing topology to calculate routes.”

A complicated routing topology? What, like this?

Thanks to Kees Huyser

But let’s return to the official explanation.

“We are aware that errors in the data provided to us could result in incorrect driving directions, and we work to quickly resolve any issues.”

But just in case, fit a fin and some wings.

“In this specific case one road segment was attributed incorrectly in the topology, causing the routing algorithm to ignore that road and generate the error in calculating the driving directions. We are currently working on a fix for this issue, and we expect it to be available in early February.

But we suspect that there might be more to the problem than just a solitary ignored road. Toben Mogensen from Denmark highlights this journey from Stockholm to Helsinki.

“The suggested route starts in the middle of the Baltic Sea on a ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. Then you drive around in the Southern part of Finland before, magically, driving across the Baltic Sea on ‘local roads’ to arrive in Tallinn,” writes Toben.

“The distance is given as 68.4 miles (which sounds about right) and the estimated time for the journey is 4 hours and 36 minutes. The return journey is by the same route in reverse, only now it takes 4 hours and 53 minutes.”

So we know the flying car will do scheduled pickups – so long as you’re prepared to bob around in the North Sea.

Or wait for an Exranoplan. And not every one believes the explanation can be so simple.

“I believe this to be a decoy tactic,” writes Simon Walke. “They are involved in something far more sinister, potentially involving the relocation of thousands of Norwegian citizens.”

For proof, click for a larger version of that sinister warning from Autoroute 2003.

“The Norwegians are lovely people, but I think they might take offence at having their capital city shifted,” writes Simon.

Wormholes … for mermaids?

If it was a road missing, that would be a logical explanation. But then Christian Carey provided evidence of this fantastic voyage:

“Have a look at travelling from Sääre, Estonia (near the southern tip of the island of Saaremaa) to Ventspils, Latvia: 0.0 km net distance travelled in 3 hours, 21 minutes. Note that the starting point of the trip is about 125 km NNW of Sääre. Perhaps there are previously unpublicized wormholes throughout northern Europe? It might explain the Flying Car route optimizations…”

Or maybe the tide carries you along. Who knows? Either way, it’s a real petrol-saver.

And don’t forget the details. The last piece of advice for the Microsoft developers comes from Roy Øvrebø. He took this fantastic, high-speed boomerang journey of only 480 miles from Haugesund to Helsinki, and was advised it would take 65 hours and 58 minutes. Well of course it would. However, he noticed an error most of us who’ve used in-car GPS systems will know:

“Step 3 requires you to turn right the wrong way down a one-way street in the center of Haugesund.”

Finally, Friso Dikstelbergen claims that ten years ago he tried to trip up the DOS-based route planners for the Dutch and Belgian railways, without any success. “I couldn’t really fault them. In the end I had to resort to using the “via” box to get them to display really bad information. It just shows you how far we’ve come in ten years.”

We’ve come along way, indeed.

The two fathers of ‘podcasting’ have called for jokes and satirical broadcasts to be clearly labelled as such, after they were bamboozled by a comic female impersonator.

Two “bloggers” – former MTV video jockey Adam Curry and former software developer Dave Winer cooked up the idea of enclosing audio files in some XML code so they could be pulled off the web onto a portable device – a nifty, if not terrible original idea. With real,grassroots webcasting itself in mortal danger, its seems an odd distraction. The Webcaster Alliance is locked in epic battle with the RIAA over the right to distribute art, but instead of supporting them, these bloggers have other priorities, and top of the list is the right to be able to burp at home, and then broadcast it over the fabled Interweb. Unscripted burps are particularly welcome.

And so not surpringly, people have taken the idea and run with it, making their own burpy broadcasts in their kitchens, and shoving them up on the web. For a week on their own burpy ‘show’, Curry and Winer rebroadcast the adventures of a podcaster they admired, one Yeast Radio’s Madge Weinstein.

Madge Weinstein is really a database programmer called Richard Bluestein, who performs the part of “a domineering Jewish lesbian” – firmly in the tradition of John Waters’ diva Divine, and a long-line of female impersonators including Dame Edna Everage. He’s been recording his own scatalogical skits for a while.

But Curry and Winer didn’t realize that Madge wasn’t really … a woman.

It’s an easy mistake to make, looking at the pictures of Madge in action (below), hearing her show, or if you don’t have an internet connection, where Madge flaunts let’s it all hang on a number of web sites.
Judge for yourselves -

Madge Weinstein is really a man in drag. Who would have guessed?

Now let Winer himself describe the historic moment in podcasting history where they realized that Madge was actually – gasp – a man in drag!

In a post entitled: “Oh shit, Madge is a hoax” Winer [audio] wrote -

“I looked over at Adam and asked how he felt about this. “Not good.” Then he asked how I felt, and I said I had repped Madge as being something other than what she or he was. An act.”

The intrepid twosome leapt into action.

“We both agreed we should do an instant podcast to explain and raise questions.”

And so they did.

“It’s borderline podcast material to do that,” opined Winer. “It’s like stage material, or fiction. It was scripted – clearly scripted.”

The horror! Curry agreed.

“Oh my god, this is scripted” replied the 80s throwback former video jock.

“How much is scripted?” wondered Winer. “I clearly wasn’t talking to Madge, a transgender 50 year old jewish guy with a beard. So… it’s an act!”

Winer articulated his anxiety further.

“I don’t want the feeling that this is a script written by a comedian who just wants to er, entertain us.”

Of course, there’s no danger that anyone could mistake Curry and Winer’s earnest podcasts for entertainment -but the script scare had to be dealt with, urgently. Great issues of morality were at stake. And so Winer demanded that Bluestein report in to the Podfathers to explain hershelf.

“We need to hear from whoever Weinstein to it is as to how we should interpret that other stuff,” he declared. “We’ll give her another chance.”

“I want a direct statement on how we are intended to interpret this podcast. And then I’m going to make my decision,” huffed Winer.

These very issues are going to be discussed at a conference he explained, at Harvard, where until last year, on the recommendation of Professor Lawrence Lessig, he was appointed a Fellow of to the Law Schools’ internet think tank, the Berkman Center.

“Madge broke the rules” concludes Winer. “I need to know which parts of what’s she’s doing are real!”

Gender bender

Alas the happy podcast nation didn’t take this outbreak of morality very well.

“You guys sound like you are about to start regulating what podcasters can do and your first rule is that you cant be make-believe? What kind of shit is that?” asks ‘Dave’.

“You must be the only two people in world of podcasting who thought he/she/it was legit. Get a grip guys!”

” I think podcasting just bit you in the ass” writes Ian.

On Madge’s blog, much more incredulity is expressed at the gullible and Pompous Podfathers.

“Do they go out to clubs and think, ‘Wow, this place is great! Barbra Streisand AND Carol Channing together on stage! Though I had no idea Barbara had such huge feet.” writes one.

“Who they heck are Dave and Adam to define what should and shouldn’t be the content of a podcast?”. I appreciate that their efforts have been key to the popularity and success of podcasting as a medium,”

“To the fathers of podcasting- wake up. Your revolution is about to start leaving you behind,” agrees another ‘caster.

“Fuck you” replied Winer, echoing a theme he had developed earlier on this weblog. The great communicator issued a pre-emptive welcome for the press on New Year’s Eve.

Here’s a screengrab -

“I’ve been accused of being dishonest but that’s from people who don’t know what the fuck they’re taking about,” she declares. “I am a lesbian. I am a rock band manager. And most importantly – a former lover of Ethel Merman.”

Which should be good enough for anyone.