Jonathan Hitchcock - Vhata Vas Hyah

Get Behind Thee, Satan

By High Society

Running through checkers, jumping and hopping
Raise your arms and drop your shopping!
Let's throw some Che Guevara styles,
And start a revolution in the aisles!
They will never take us alive,
We'll take control of till number five.
We'll make our motives understood,
Raising riot till they lower the prices of canned goods!
Singing stirring anthems for a brave new land,
With a gun in one hand and some Omo in the other hand
Fighting the struggle like Nkosazana Zuma
We'll show them what it means to be a militant consumer
Like Lenin, Castro and Chairman Mao
Let's bag our freedom now!

Because society is like a sick oil spillage
Coming to your village, to rape and pillage
Breaking all the vows that you're making, forsaken
Get behind thee, Satan. Get behind thee, Satan!

Existential dilemma can be remedied
All you need is a notebook and some cali weed
I write ridiculous rhymes, it's all my fault:
I don't have to leave my room to revolt.
I'm revolting... Against your attitude
I find it insulting - it makes me rude
So, good luck to all you empty-headed ravers,
And let's just hope that God will save us
From these conglomerates of investment bankers
Dealers, lawyers, pushers and wankers
Masturbating on the human race
Concentrating on the telly rate
But I just relax
And pay my tax
And watch the world collapse

Because, society is like a sick oil spillage
Coming to your village, to rape and pillage
Breaking all the vows that you're making, forsaken
Get behind thee, Satan. Get behind thee, Satan!

Not only does beer help fight cancer, but it can save you from natural disasters too!

Cheers.

Update: This sucks. Snopes has debunked the avalanche story. [via]

Update: The age-old dilemma about whether to have coffee or beer for breakfast is solved! Caffeinated Beer! Oh stop that behaviour!

The SA Blog awards are now open. Mail sablogawards@gmail.com with your nominations. [via]

This is a quick entry to demonstrate the Apache webserver's content negotiation. This system allows browsers to specify their capabilities to the webserver, which then chooses the most suitable form of the requested URL for the browser. I've used this for a while (e.g. when I link to my CV, which is both an HTML file and a PDF), but I only noticed it in its full glory when I tested it as follows:

In my page's .htaccess file, I added the line:

Options +MultiViews

Next, I created a PNG image, and a text file, one named content-negotiation.png, the other content-negotiation.txt (working out which one I named which is left as an exercise for the reader). Next, I link to the root filename content-negotiation. Browsers that are capable of displaying the image should receive the PNG image, whereas text-only browsers should receive the text file. Try it in both!

Interesting weekend for, erm, stuff like that.

Some guy has released "the first open source board game": he has licensed it under the Creative Commons, and invites people to "patch" it to make it better: Dugi [via]

On a similar note, Microsoft have opened the XML schemas for the Microsoft Office document formats - see the Slashdot discussion. My two cents: I'm glad about this. It means they're showing willing. However, I'm cynical enough to believe that they're only doing this to win government contracts (a lot of governments stipulate "open standards" rather than "open source"). Their licensing doesn't seem to be GPL compatible, which is unsurprising because they hate it with a passion that is almost irrational. (See Update below).

Finally, Bill Gates was interviewed by the BBC in two parts: first and second. The reason I'm putting it up is that I want to point out how he avoids the question in the second part about whether he actually ever thought that he was being anti-competitive. It's astonishing. He literally refuses to answer the question, twice, and finally, when the interviewer says, basically, "Goddammit, Bill, WERE YOU EVER ANTI-COMPETITIVE?", he mumbles something about how rocking the computer industry is, without any reference to Microsoft at all.

Update: I couldn't resist posting this link: The BBC reports: some doodles were found on a podium, and thought to be by Tony Blair. Handwriting experts said they indicated a lack of leadership, and all sorts of nasty things. But as it turns out, the doodles belonged to Bill Gates...

Update: Slashdot has posted a new story: Microsoft hasn't really opened its standards.