The Weekly Round-Up: 31.03.06

If you're one of the Round-Up's many readers who work at the coalface of IT then you probably wile away your working hours dealing with things like system security, project management, procurement, server configuration or having to tell people in marketing to turn their computers off and on again.

If you're prepared to endure this for five days straight then come the end of the week you're probably sick of it and frankly you wouldn't want to read about anything tech-related in a Friday newsletter.

Thankfully, the Round-Up is here to help and is happy to reveal that this week's column is so full of sex, violence, gore, bad language, digs at Bill Gates, death and hundreds of poisonous snakes on commercial aircraft that it should probably carry a health warning.

However, if the Round-Up did go the trouble of including such a warning, it would have less room to write about sex, violence, gore, bad language, digs at Bill Gates, death and hundreds of poisonous snakes on commercial aircraft so quite frankly it can't be bothered.

Assuming this email has somehow made it through your company's email filters after the previous two paragraphs you may be titillated to learn that the latest movie from New Line - the studio that brought you 10 hours of Tolkien-inspired movies about midgets with terrible ring complaints - features Samuel L Jackson trapped on a plane full of poisonous snakes. The film, rather wonderfully, is called 'Snakes on a Plane'. You can see what they did there, can't you?

Our man Sam is an FBI agent (called Neville) escorting a crime informant to a court case. The people this man will testify against aren't overly enthusiastic about hearing what he has to say to the judge and decide instead to kill him. Rather than shoot or stab him or in fact do anything else remotely sensible they decide to smuggle a few hundred poisonous snakes on to the plane carrying him to court and release them in the hope that one of them will conspire to bite him.

The (tenuous) technology angle amid all this snake-related imbroglio is that the as-yet-unreleased movie has taken on a life of its own online and built up a cult following of web users with nothing better to do with their time.

Fans have taken the movie and its title to heart and developed fan sites, blogs, T-shirts, poems, fiction and songs. The title itself, sometimes abbreviated as "SoaP", has emerged as internet-speak for fatalistic sentiments that range from c'est la vie to "s*** happens".

When the studio tried to change the film's title to the more sensible - but duller - Pacific Air Flight 121 the fans revolted. New Line quickly reverted back to Snakes on a Plane and even added a line to the script based on a fan-made trailer, which has a Jackson 'sound-alike' shouting: "I want these mother****** snakes off the mother****** plane!"

This is actually a neat little bit of marketing savvy from New Line, which has long recognised the power of the web to nurture fandom and appeal to the geek psyche. The studio pulled a similar trick with the Lord of the Rings movies by encouraging fan websites and forums. Director Peter Jackson maintained close links with über-geek movie website Ain't It Cool News - answering detailed questions from fans about the movie trilogy prior to release.

New Line is also responding to fan demand by producing an R-rated DVD version of the PG-13 film containing more nudity, death, gore and, naturally, more snakes. (If anyone can explain why anyone would want to get naked on a plane full of gore-splattered snakes please email editorial@silicon.com )

The same studio was rumoured to be doing a similar thing on one of the extended DVD versions of the first Lord of the Rings film but, alas, it bottled it and instead gave us more exposition and hobbit sing-a-longs.

If they're prepared to go this far to appease the geek legions they could go all the way and market the film to other established fan bases.

Jackson could dispatch one snake with a purple-bladed light sabre, persuade another to surrender by speaking in Parselmouth, and intone: "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil snakes..."

Perhaps the most successful use of the web as a marketing tool was that of the Blair Witch Project whose viral campaign successfully transformed an ultra-low-budget flick into an ultra-high-profit box office hit. The movie studio, Artisan Entertainment, persuaded the world that it was a documentary rather than a work of fiction and people bought it.

Anyway, back to the mother******* snakes.

The film opens in cinemas in August - and presumably as in-flight entertainment on long-haul journeys shortly after. You can find out more about Snakes on a Plane here. Alternatively, there are lots of websites and blogs about it.

Far too many if the truth be told. Hissss...

Regrets, like poisonous snakes, are difficult things to live with. Tim Berners-Lee, the 'father of the web', has a few (regrets, not poisonous snakes) and he shared them with the British Computer Society (BCS) recently.

His major regret is that he used a single slash rather than double slash in URLs. To be fair, it's not really much of a regret is it? It's not as if he always wished he'd become a vet or asked that girl with the red hair from school for a night out at the pictures that day when the sun shone through the maths class window and made her tresses shine like a golden halo. It isn't really something to lose much sleep over, is it?

Regrets aside, he's going to be given one of two gongs at some swish awards ceremony run by the BCS.

Berners-Lee is a past winner of an Outstanding Contribution award from silicon.com's publisher, CNET, and – almost as importantly – was last year knighted for services to technology.

Sir Tim has the congratulations of the Round-Up and clearly earns his gong entirely on merit.

The recipient of the other gong at the BCS awards will be Microsoft research academic Dr Andrew Fitzgibbon, who will receive the Microsoft-sponsored Roger Needham Award.

Returning to the subject of sex, violence and wanton gore...

The Firefox foundation is considering some saucy TV ads to support its campaign to win over users from rival browsers. Or users of one browser in particular.

You know, the users who may be sick of endless security hassles and who may not want to contract a virus from certain websites.

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's community co-ordinator, said the Foundation may screen some of the adverts on TV or in cinemas.

He added: "Some are not appropriate for children as people have looked at what sells - violence, sex and humour. There's one video that's pretty violent."

As commendable as Mozilla's open-mindedness is with regards to its marketing, why it would want its ads to glorify exposure, exploitation and (possibly) penetration when that's exactly what its core audience wants to get away from in a browser?

Mmm look! Open ports, saucy...

Do you have problems conveying the mainstream business relevance of your open source technology projects to your management team? If you do, then take a good look at your feet.

What do you see? If you see a pair of smart brogues or pumps, then your proposal strategy is probably pants and needs more work. But there is hope.

If you can see your socks or, worse, your toenails, then it doesn't matter how strong the business case, the fact is your boss is probably paying more attention to your dodgy open-toed footwear than whether your sums add up. To be honest, you'd stand a better chance if you got a haircut, too.

This is a sad but bona fide fact, at least according to former Massachusetts chief information officer Peter Quinn, whose word the Round-Up would take over a member of its own immediate family.

Quinn, who played a key role in the Bay State government's decision to mandate the use of OpenDocument-based products, said appearance matters when trying to convince decision-makers of the merits of open source software.

Quinn, who no doubt is always well turned out and probably owns at least three smart blazers, accused the "sandal and ponytail set" of detracting from the business-ready appearance of open source technology.

Quinn, who possibly lists one of his hobbies as whacking wasps' nests with a ruddy great stick, blames developers for the sluggish adoption of Linux among businesses and governments.

As depressing as this might sound he probably has a point, although it says as much about the narrow-mindedness of corporate America as it does about reinforcing the stereotyped image of the open source advocate.

Now, if you want to see a man with the perfect image for success in the competitive IT world, click here.

(Yes, it's about the umpteenth time the Round-Up has posted that link and it won't stop doing it, you hear? Never! Anyway, the point is: not a sandal or ponytail in sight and billions in the bank.)

So to conclude: the business case won't stand up to scrutiny unless you wipe the egg off your tie. And you'd better lose the Buffy T-shirt as well. That's not going to cut any mustard with the big boys. Hell no...

Finally this week, the Round-Up recently brought you news of camcorder-wielding maniacs taking videos of funerals.

The Round-Up returns somewhat improbably to the joint themes of technology and funerals with news of an increasing - or decreasing - breed of people who want to be buried with their mobile phones. Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘pay as you go', doesn't it?

Much like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, who liked to be buried with their favourite possessions, like gold, jewels and the funny little man who did the laundry, more of us are inexplicably taking our personal communication devices into the ground when we go to the great Talk Plan in the sky.

This clearly raises some difficult questions for relatives at an already difficult time. When does one cancel the contract? Does one re-record a voicemail greeting in advance? That kind of thing.

As for the reasoning for being with your mobile for evermore? Maybe you were buried alive. Maybe you could use your Motorola RAZR to prise your coffin lid off and scoop earth out of your way as you head upwards. Slim phone; slim chance. But if you've been buried alive with a rubbish phone then you may as well make the best use of it because you're unlikely to get a decent reception down there.

But you never know. One day you may be paying your respects at a funeral only to hear a muffled Nokia ring tone from six-feet below and a distant voice bellow: "Hello? No, I'm in Heaven! What? No, it's rubbish!"