Monday Links from the Microsoft® Visual Bench Explorer Express Edition™ Vol. XVII

[NickFitz]

Just enough time after my dinner to sling together another collection of... well, links, I suppose would be the best way to describe them:

• Top Ten Mysterious Texts - "From obscure religious texts and books about magic to unbreakable codes and ciphers, the following are the ten artifacts of literature that have most confounded researchers and translators."
  
  
• EXCLUSIVE: The Day Einstein Died - Life magazine photographer Ralph Morse was the only photojournalist to find out the location of Einstein's funeral, but his photos weren't published at the request of the family. Now, 55 years on, Life finally reveals them in this slideshow.
  
  
• To The End Of The Line - Between April 2007 and January 2009, Ian Jones visited and photographed every station on the Tube. "Some of the best moments came when I really did get to the end of the line, and found myself in that most eerie of places, the terminus..."
  
  
• Much ado about NULL: Exploiting a kernel NULL dereference - "We think that it’s important for developers and system administrators to be more knowledgeable about the attacks that black hats regularly use to take control of systems, and so, today, we’re going to start from where we left off and go all the way to a working exploit for a NULL pointer dereference in a toy kernel module."
  
  
• Interface Hall of Shame - "The Interface Hall of Shame is an irreverent collection of common interface design mistakes. Our hope is that by highlighting these problems, we can help developers avoid making similar mistakes. We are constantly searching for examples of design practices that are worthy of extinction..." It hasn't been updated in ten years, and has moved homes several times since then, but this is a classic collection of real user interface failures - sometimes so unutterably ill-thought-out as to reduce one to laughter.
  
  
• Nothing but a G-string - "Jay Thunderbolt boasts his very own strip club ... in his house."
  
  
• Politics and the English Language - George Orwell's classic essay. "... the English language... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." (If you find that a bit heavy, then why not try A Nice Cup of Tea?)
  
  
• Amazing sculptures that look like they are in motion - Gallery of beautiful works by Belfast sculptor Claire Morgan.
  
  
• Atlas Obscura - "Curious and Wonderful Travel Destinations" including "The Prison Cell of Ludger Sylbaris" on Martinique, and "The Mundaneum" - a Belgian effort to itemise the entire knowledge of the world on 3" by 5" index cards.
  
  
• If Shoes Could Kill - One for the laydeez (and the foot fetishists). "At If Shoes Could Kill, we love featuring the craziest, craftiest and often most-unfathomable shoes on the web. But every Saturday, we’ll feature an odd find that’s actually wearable and buyable!"
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[HairyArsedBloke]

To The End Of The Line - Between April 2007 and January 2009, Ian Jones visited and photographed every station on the Tube. "Some of the best moments came when I really did get to the end of the line, and found myself in that most eerie of places, the terminus..."

I only scanned the blog, but I wonder just how many times he came close to being arrested under the terror laws or even shot.

[NickFitz]

I only scanned the blog, but I wonder just how many times he came close to being arrested under the terror laws or even shot.

I've taken photos in Tube stations loads of times, usually of pieces of infrastructure such as the wires hanging out of the Northern Line ceiling at Leicester Square or the equipment between the lines up the tunnels at Mornington Crescent and Hampstead, and never had any hassle.

I do try not to run down the escalators if anybody's following me though