My local (grade II listed) cinema, the Ultimate Picture Palace has a fascinating history. It was built in the Edwardian era, and for many years served as a furniture warehouse.
Nowadays its a thriving cinema showing a mixture of mainstream and arty cinemas. You can read more about it on CowleyRoad.org. There’s even a movie about it featuring Ian Hislop and Brian Aldiss among others.
One of the more interesting stories is that in the mid-90s it was squatted for a month or so, but a collection of activists, and some homeless young people, who called it the Section 6 cinema after the piece of legislation that forbids forcible entry into premises and hence protects squatters from illegal eviction.
They showed films and organized community activities and built an autonomous space on Cowley Road.
Anyhow, the other day my pal dug up some old magazines I'd stashed in his attic back in the day. Among which was the Industrial Workers of the World house magazine, Burning Fuse. And in that magazine was an article about the occupation written by some participants.
Its a fascinating glimpse into the radical politics of the time and a thoughtful analysis of what the occupation was like for people involved in it.
I wanted to put it on CowleyRoad.org but I don’t actually know who holds the copyright. If you’re the copyright holder and don’t want it to be up here, give me a shout.
I had a hell of a time the other day trying to find a reasonably up to date Debian Jessie virtual machine for testing on.
It doesn't take too long to install Debian, but its much nicer to just grab an OVA file, open with virtualbox and be ready to go.
I have only installed a very minimal system, though I did set up sudo, vim and git (which it is hard to live without)
The user is called user (password resu) and the root user is called root (password toor). Obviously this is for use in testing. Change the passwords if you put it somewhere that others may find it.
Twitter recently got rid of the ability to get search results as an RSS as part of their API update of 11 June 2013.
I found those feeds rather useful, so I made a little screen scraper that reimplements the functionality without needing to auth against their API (it just pulls the results out of the web search page). I guess this will be good for a while longer, like enough time to switch to statusnet, identica, or whatever.
It might be of use to some others in the monastry and illustrates the power of HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath.
Back in the old days of the internet, googling for Bullshit used to bring up dack.com's web economy Bullshit generator.
Bullshitr came along a few years later to update the concept. The Web 2.0 name generator and what the fuck is my social media strategy brought their deliverables to the table too.
So it isn't like there isn't prior art for this sort of thing. The unique combination of Bullshitr2.0Beta++ is that it screen scrapes the existing generators to make a complete web application home page entirely out of bullshit. Fuck yeh!
I've put the bullshitr.pl script, which does makes this work online in case you want to leverage some bluesky bullshit against the wall and see who salutes.