I downloaded a copy of the second official (’domestic’ = ?) trailer which was released Sunday 22nd April - to save The Leaky Cauldron’s bandwidth - and I keep watching it. I love the second or two we see of Snape - “discipline your mind”.
I’m not sure if reality TV is a good thing for the people involved. Watching Wife Swap tonight I’m feeling a little uncomfortable. It’s not the kind of feeling you get watching the appeals on Comic Relief, like you know you should do something…it’s different from that. I’m thinking of the effect on the people who take part whether they like to or not.
I’ve spoken to two former Big Brother contestants and both were a little crazy. I know people who want to go on it and some who would never consider it. Marcus Bentley, who has narrated all thirteen British series of Big Brother (including the Celebrity and Teen BBs) told me personally he never would, though this was more due to him ‘loving [his] job too much’ I believe.
A new Xinki site has launched. CGSB News is a kind of portal for CGSB news, views and content. I’ll advertise it about and see what happens…
I’m going to be reviewing a book in the next few weeks. I’ve ordered a review copy of “MediaWiki Administrator’s Tutorial Guide” and will write what I think here. A guy on the MediaWiki-l mailing list recommended it, so I’m interested.
Finally I recommend Akismet to anyone running a WordPress blog. If like me you allow anonymous comments, you can easily get spammed. WordPress tells me: “Akismet has caught 53 spam for you since you first installed it.” - all without me even seeing it!
I’ve already pre-ordered the final volume of the incredible Harry Potter series from Amazon.
I’m now considering going to a midnight launch party thing. I know at least two people who’re interested as well, so I might be going, which would be very cool.
The thirty-third series of HIGNFY starts this Friday - tomorrow. It’s recorded the night before transmission - tonight then - and I’m sure we can guesstimate some of the topics they might be discussing. Faye Turney and the other marines taken hostage by Iran selling their stories to the media, and the government’s U-turn on whether that was the right thing to do. Odd as when I first heard that name (Faye Turney) I thought of Faye Rainey, who is audience co-ordinator for Hat Trick Productions who make the show, as well as being a member of HIGNFY’s production team - see the credits.
Anyway, HIGNFY starting Friday is the main point of this entry. The first of eight shows features Jeremy Clarkson guest hosting and Krishnan Guru-Murthy (This guy is good, as you’ll know if you watch Channel 4 News) and Michael McIntyre (don’t know who he is) joining the usual suspects, team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton. Something new this time around is the addition of a podcast. Have I Got News For You - The Inevitable Internet Spin-off will be available after the show’s transmission, 9:30pm Fridays.
The hard-working Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team have now completed the first stage of their ultimate goal: 1,964 of the best (many featured) articles of the English Wikipedia are now available on a CD costing $13.99 (around £8.50) from a French firm called Linterweb. A proportion goes to the Wikimedia Foundation.
You can also download an .ISO (’image’) of the release, which, like the disc itself, contains static versions of each article and open source software written to display the articles offline called KiwiX.
Update (08/04/07):
While this is certainly an important step towards a useful offline edition of Wikipedia, I don’t quite understand the people on foundation-l who are saying they will buy it. Why? It’s online for free! I’d suggest donating to the Foundation instead. The target audience for WP 1.0 is not Wikipediholics like us, it’s those who wouldn’t otherwise have access to a good quality encyclopaedia - for example, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project which inspired Jimbo to announce One Encyclopedia per Child.
I said this on foundation-l but I’m not sure if people understood me. Someone else made a similar, better-formed point later on which I clarified was what I was attempting to say.
Read the announcement on foundation-l and Titoxd’s post with interesting information on how we arrived at today’s news.
I just saw this when I clicked a link from a previous post to the English Wikipedia’s article on The Beatles:
“Not Found
The requested URL /wiki/The_Beatles was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
Standard 404 message, but on Wikipedia? A refresh sorted the problem for me. Someone on IRC just mentioned they found all the Wikimedia sites slow. Temporary I’m sure 
I saw this on the front page of a magazine at the library and found it on their website. I suppose it makes sense; they (the dogs) need somewhere to learn how to…do what they do on trains, and Legoland is their place of choice, apparently.
This is good news, and this is even better.
If it’s too much effort to click on two links, I’ll summarise: EMI have announced all their music available digitally will soon be DRM-free. Added to this catalogue will soon be the music of the Fab Four - The Beatles. Excellent!
(I know this is a few days old but I’ve just got round to writing about it…)
WordPress put out another security release a few days ago which I only noticed today. This blog is running 2.1.3; right now WaggishBLOG is not. I created a guide for upgrading in my personal setup on the Xinki Lab wiki.