Monday Links from a Cosy Armchair Vol. XLVII

[RichardCranium]

Post 1,234,567 !!!!!

Some more good ones

That was post 1,234,567!

[QUOTE=TykeMerc;1234567]Some more good ones [/QUOTE]

[TimberWolf]

I've been monitoring the 'hot shop girl index' for some years. A few years ago shops were brimming with young eastern European girls, these having replaced middle and older age people, and now I see young bright, possibly university educated, people wo/manning the tills.

[OwlHoot]

[*]More Vanishing Cigarettes - "In my last post, I highlighted some examples of attacks on cultural history represented by cigarette censorship... But that is only the tip of the iceberg for cigarette revisionism." I can't believe they airbrushed a cigar out of a photo of Winston Churchill

Great links, as always Nick.

Take no notice of Dim - He's obviously just jealous.

I'm surprised the vanishing cigarettes article didn't mention that famous photo of Isambard Kingdom Brunel wearing a cigar in his face, which some neurotically overzealous health nazis airbrushed out not long ago for use in schools.

[EternalOptimist]

vanishing cigs ???

good one nick

[TykeMerc]

Some more good ones

[bogeyman]

Jolly good. Not sure what the "zealot" stuff is about; I just thought it was an interesting example of the way aspects of old technologies can have unexpected ramifications many years later.

Nice to see you taking time out from your busy schedule to check out the tediously dull links

I find your links normally very interesting Nick, so thanks for sharing.

It's the sort of stuff I'd never delve deep enough to find for myself, usually.

[NickFitz]

•Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC

Fixed in .NET 4.0 you sad zealot.

Jolly good. Not sure what the "zealot" stuff is about; I just thought it was an interesting example of the way aspects of old technologies can have unexpected ramifications many years later.

Nice to see you taking time out from your busy schedule to check out the tediously dull links

[Platypus]

[*]Letters from BBC Television Licensing - "From the beginning of 2006, I decided... to stop watching broadcast television and now spend the £142.50 saved from the TV licence fee on video tapes and DVDs... The only fly in the ointment has been aggressive letters from TV Licensing (TVL), which collects the licence fee on behalf of the BBC." This anonymous individual has posted every single letter he has received from TV Licensing over nearly five years; there are also quite a few other interesting bits of information relating to TV licensing on the site.

Thanks, Nike, good stuff. A friend of mine who watches no broadcast TV was wondering about stopping paying his licence fee. I'll pass this on

[DimPrawn]

•Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC

Fixed in .NET 4.0 you sad zealot.

[NickFitz]

The truth is out there. However, you can ignore it for now and read this lot instead:

• urbex : uk - "This site is about the infiltration of derelict structures in the UK. Enter if curious. We do." One of the original and best UK urban exploration sites.
  
  
• Signs That You Are Living The Top Myths of Freelancing - "Below is a list of top myths that envelopes some truth in them and how freelancers make them into reality."
  
  
• HTTP cookies, or how not to design protocols - "For as long as I remember, HTTP cookies have been vilified as a grave threat to the privacy of online browsing; wrongly so. That said, the mechanism itself is a very interesting cautionary tale for security engineers - and that will be the theme of today's feature." Exhaustively detailed article about cookies (the web kind) by Michael Zalewski.
  
  
• Letters from BBC Television Licensing - "From the beginning of 2006, I decided... to stop watching broadcast television and now spend the £142.50 saved from the TV licence fee on video tapes and DVDs... The only fly in the ointment has been aggressive letters from TV Licensing (TVL), which collects the licence fee on behalf of the BBC." This anonymous individual has posted every single letter he has received from TV Licensing over nearly five years; there are also quite a few other interesting bits of information relating to TV licensing on the site.
  
  
• More Vanishing Cigarettes - "In my last post, I highlighted some examples of attacks on cultural history represented by cigarette censorship... But that is only the tip of the iceberg for cigarette revisionism." I can't believe they airbrushed a cigar out of a photo of Winston Churchill
  
  
• Failure by Design - "We hold onto design directions on projects that seem to be going poorly, hoping that they might turn around. To stop and scrap it all would be admitting that you, as a professional, made a mistake and wasted the client’s money... Failure and loss can be good. If you aren’t finding failure in your design work, then you aren’t really exploring all the possible solutions." Francisco Inchauste makes an excellent case for accepting failure as part of the process of improvement.
  
  
• Hot Waitress Economic Index - "In New York, we have our own economic indicators, often based on the degree to which people are being thwarted by the lack of opportunity. An old standby is the Overeducated Cabbie Index... The indicator I prefer is the Hot Waitress Index: The hotter the waitresses, the weaker the economy." Controversial idea from Hugo Lindgren, but he argues his case well
  
  
• Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC - "In 1973, an operating system called CP/M was born. CP/M had no directories, and filenames were limited to 8.3 format. To support input and output from user programs, the pseudofiles COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, LPT1, LPT2, CON, AUX, PRN, and NUL were provided." Benjamin Pollack explains why Gary Kildall's 1973 technical decisions still affect the latest version of Microsoft's web application platform.
  
  
• Computers, Cut-ups & Combinatory Volvelles: an Archaeology of Text-Generating Mechanisms - "Around 1650, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer devised an ingenious ballet. It's simple: first, give each dancer a board inscribed with a letter of the alphabet; then watch as new words or phrases emerge from dance. The very movement of the dancer's bodies will act as a combinatory mechanism from which language springs." So begins Whitney Trettien's post-modernist thesis which is itself implemented as a labyrinth of hyperlinks to short sections, quotations, and photographs arranged on a grid, navigable by many different paths
  
  
• 30 Awesomely Bad Unicorn Tattoos: A Gallery - "You can't shake a stick these days without hitting someone who has a unicorn tattoo (and I shake a lot of sticks.) I'm not sure why people would get a unicorn tattoo, but it appears to be a really popular thing to do these days. Some of them seem serious, others funny, some intentionally bad, and some that are just the worst. So here's a collection of them." Some of these are breathtakingly awful.

Happy invoicing!