oZo's Bits

Pink Floyd — Comfortably Numb

2009-08-19T11:24:00.003+01:00

The first solo is awe-inspiring. The second is good, but it's more cliché rock solo. The first is a masterpiece; from that first transcendent, soaring note through a stellar space of revelry and through to the final dying phrase as the second verse slowly draws into focus.

There are two guitar solos in this song and I prefer the first one.

There. I've said it.

Clarkson vs. Government

2009-02-08T13:24:00.009Z

Jeremy Clarkson's recent verbal attack on the leader of our government, Gordon Brown, was amusing.

Now he did call Gordon Brown a 'one-eyed Scottish idiot', (YouTube video) and each of those statements taken individually is pure Clarkson territory and — in his typical context — rather funny. However, Jeremy's latest soundbite has been seen as being a bit above and beyond the grounds of taste and decency.

I did notice one thing, though, and it was this: Clarkson apologised for " [making] a remark about the Prime Minister's personal appearance".

Clarkson did also call the PM a liar. At least he implied this in a way which left very little room for alternative.

So, he's apologised for the labels Scottish and one-eyed, but idiot and liar have gotten clean off.

Good. At least free speech is still alive and well, even if freedom of opinion seems to have taken a battering.

We're kind of on dangerous ground here. Here's a man, admittedly a man with access to a larger television audience than most of the rest of us, stating his opinion about something. Now, broadcasting codes aside, he spoke freely.

In order to justify a position which ostracizes Jonathon Ross and praises Jeremy Clarkson, I must make important the distinction between someone freely stating his controversial opinion and someone openly and carelessly aggravating a person (or, even worse, being allowed the same) by dragging their privacy and their dignity irreverently into the limelight.

These are very different cases. I watched the Clarkson incident unfold with a great deal of interest.

If we are to cling to the last threads of "democracy" in this country, we must realise that in cases such as this it is our government's job to defend, using the full extent of the law of this land, the right of people — yes, even Jeremy Clarkson — to freely speak their mind.

The Economy doesn't appear to be working. Please try later...

2008-11-25T13:00:00.003Z

I think this sums things up quite well.

Electronic Arts in Common Sense Shocker!

2008-10-01T09:50:00.009+01:00

"...people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale."

So says Mariam Sughayer, of Electronic Arts' corporate communications.

Now, the implications of this statement are quite far-reaching. The obsession of the recording industries in pointing out that they are losing millions in revenue due to 'illegal' music downloading is lost when the facts are taken into account.

Here's a fact: To lose millions, you first have to make millions, then lose them.

Such a business model — built on imaginary losses — is a logical and mathematical mess. The world's economy is in the shape it is because it is in the hands of minds like this.

As far as the global economy goes, a little Darwinism is all that's needed, if the governments will allow that to happen.

But Electronic Arts' message is a sensible one, and one which many businesses could do with taking on board. They're taking the wider view, which is concentrate on what you do best.

Make good golf games.

The RIAA

2008-09-19T14:57:00.006+01:00

And what they're up to.

This guy is starting to take a little heat from the RIAA.

Support him. Visit his site:

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com

Do your bit to ensure the future freedom of people who actually want people to hear what they've got to say.

Spread the word.

Time...

2008-09-17T11:02:00.000+01:00

...is merely a function of the complexity of the universe.

Chrome update

2008-09-05T10:34:00.004+01:00

Two things, here.

Chroming my way around reddit, I noticed This is the coolest animated gif you will ever see in your life.

So I clicked the link. It took me to a bare page with an — actually, quite good — hand-drawn animation as a .gif file.

After a few seconds, though, I noticed something was up. The animation started to slow down. From the 40-ish fps it kicked off at, the rate dropped to around 15 fps and even lower.

I opened the same page in IE and FF. Animation ran full speed for the duration.

Hmm. Not so good for Chrome.

Secondly — and this has been a pet hate of mine with tabbed browsing all along — the link at the start of this post was obviously copied from reddit. First, I copied the text into my post, then, after highlighting the text I'd just pasted, clicked the 'link' icon at the top of blogger's text form. A dialog appeared, and I clicked to go back to the reddit tab to then grab the URL. Except the dialog had locked the blogger tab and I couldn't switch.

Close the dialog, switch tabs, copy the URL, switch tabs again, click the link icon again, paste the URL.

Details, people...

Chrome

2008-09-03T10:19:00.010+01:00

First impressions of Google's new browser, "Chrome", are pretty good.

Things I like:

Tab management.
Clean look, like Firefox, but easier on the eye.
Quick page loads.
Add a new tab to get thumbnails of recently viewed pages.
'Incognito' mode.
Less user interface, more web page.

Things I don't like:

Double clicking the tab bar 'restores down' the window.
Dropping text links onto the tab bar does nothing (FF will open the text link in a new tab).
Opening the Options dialog has always caused Chrome to crash. (My work machine, XP 64 bit).
No home button.

Allow me to elaborate.

Tab management is very neat. Like IE and FF, tabs can be rearranged so that relevant tabs can be grouped together. As well as the underlying functionality of this working very well, visually the process is well represented, the tabs gliding and snapping smoothly into place.

This clean visual style is carried throughout the rest of the browser window. The navigation controls are simple to understand, although the lack of a home button is a mild annoyance. Moving the tabs above Chrome's Omnibar (that's Google for address bar) is a stunningly simple design, representing the idea that each tab has its own address and properties, something which is true even 'under the hood', as a tab can be dragged away from its native window into an entirely new window instance, complete with history and other properties. Compare Chrome's presentation of tabs to IE's and even FF's tab and address bar layout, this is a revelation and visually more representational.

Pages load (or, probably more accurately, are parsed and displayed) noticeably quicker. On my local work's intranet I could almost hear an audible 'snap' as pages appeared.

A better implementation of IE's thumbnail view is revealed on opening a new blank tab. Rather than a blank page, you get a bunch of thumbnails, your recently visited sites. Also, a neat bookmarks section is displayed to the right below a Google search box which will trawl your history.

A new browser would be incomplete without some kind of 'secret browsing' mode. Both IE and FF have recently introduced features which Chrome calls its 'Incognito' mode. Right clicking a link and selecting 'Open link in incognito window' opens the linked page in a separate browser window with a darker shaded border and an icon top left, like a cliché of a Private Detective dude, complete with hat, high collar and shades. Pages viewed in this window won't store your history or temporary files like cookies and whatnot, a plus for those concerned about online privacy.

The lack of a menu bar and status bar (by default. Other browsers do allow you to turn these off) means that, 'out of the box', this browser steals the least screen real estate from your web site. At the bottom of the window, the web page ends, and your Windows task bar starts within a pixel or two. However, hovering over a link or loading a page brings up a semi-transparent status bar which promptly disappears when no longer needed. Neat.

Another neat feature is that, if you happen to click a link which takes you to a series of pages, you won't have to click back through all of the pages before you finally reach the page which referred you to the series. Right-clicking on the back button brings up a familiar history but at the bottom of the list of pages you've just clicked through (a photo gallery, for instance) you'll see the page which referred you to the site, maybe 15 or 20 clicks ago. Smart.

Some people may whinge about the absence of RSS functionality, but the major downer for me, besides a few personal annoyances, is that I could not access any of the options on a Windows XP 64 bit installation. The application bailed messily and without warning whenever I tried to access this most important of features. To that end, I have absolutely no idea how customisable Chrome may be and it is the one thing that I have to say has genuinely spoiled my first experience of this otherwise easy to use and nice looking browser.

Having said that, it's a beta, people. It's not really officially launched as a working browser. We've been publicly invited to Google's unveiling of a new piece of software. They've lifted the cover on their creation and said, 'Everyone, excuse us, and, you know, don't take this too seriously, but look at what we did!'

And I have to say I'm looking forward to the finished product.

Get it here.

Repairing the Rhodes

2008-08-25T19:06:00.007+01:00

Acquiring a Rhodes piano (not mine, but I desperately wanted it to work to record) gave me the opportunity recently to do something I've kind of had on my mind for a few years now.

I wanted to fix it. The last time I seriously used it, I had to be tactical about the chord inversions I used to lay down the grooves, as some of the keys didn't sound.

This is no way to play a musical instrument, of course, and so I was driven to find out what the problem was and work out how to fix it.

I knew that the mechanism itself was fine, because lifting the lid revealed hammers which were mobile and smooth, hitting the tines squarely and firmly. So, the problem had to be either with the tines (the metal rods which vibrate when struck by the hammers and whose motion is converted into an acoustic signal by pickups) or with the pickups themselves.

Moving a tine assembly to a note which did not work revealed that the tine didn't work in this position, thereby proving that the pickup was to blame and not the tine.

Fitting them was a little tricky, but I now have a Rhodes with the main part of the scale perfectly intact. There are a few keys which still don't work but I never really heard the top octave or so of a Rhodes being skilfully played before, so I've left them alone. I have spare pickups if I ever decide to use these notes.

Of course, this is just one part of the process of getting everything sorted out properly. Pickups in place, I now wanted to 'voice' it, this being the process of getting the notes to sound the way I wanted them to.

You may know the closing bars of Donald Fagen's 'New Frontier' from his 1981 album 'Nightfly'. If you haven't heard it, buy it. It is some of the best produced and played Rhodes piano I've ever heard.

Next on the agenda, new hammer tips for the whole range of keys. I think this is the way to go for that consistent sound as some of the keys sound loads better and it's not down to pickups.

I'm working (gradually) on a music website, but that might be even further away than a well-tuned Rhodes.

But watch this space..!

America King of the Hill in Beijing

2008-08-19T12:30:00.010+01:00

The Americans have been doing really well in the Olympics. At the time of writing, they're top of the medal table.

Yes, that's right. Have a look here. They are top of the league. Well above China. Despite picking up more bronze medals than any other country, that is.

Now I don't want to demean the efforts of any Bronze winning athletes out there but if an athlete is honest with themselves, they will know that such medals aren't really what winning is all about. It's a nice gesture and it is something to be proud of, worthy of the hard work they must undoubtedly have put in.

However, promoting an image of their country based on people who came second or third is evidently and historically irreconcilable with Fox's s representation of the greatest nation on earth. In the real medal table, of course, China reigns supreme with America and England coming in second and third.

But America being second will not do, so long as there is some way for Fox to fix the tables to make it appear otherwise.

So, it falls to Fox to manipulate the facts to suit their delusions of national grandeur. I'm sure that intelligent Americans will only cynically acknowledge Fox's attempts to represent their country this way and realise that it would be better to count only the actual wins, while of course praising the efforts of the rest of the field.

If Fox were to be honest with themselves and dared to apply this mentality truthfully, boldly and with no exceptions, would they count America as a winner if they picked up a silver in the war on terror?

Why is Wikipedia not automated?

2008-08-06T19:06:00.004+01:00

That might sound odd.

But I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to have Wikipedia spider itself with a view to turning more words in its articles blue. If someone puts a page up about a given subject, say the Waterloo Monument, would it not make sense to have Wikipedia—in its spare time, when it's not serving articles—to linkify articles that have the words 'Waterloo Monument' in them.

I think it's a good thing of course to have it human-edited, because machines don't yet have the common sense that seems to avoid the George W. Bushes of this world. But give it time.

In fact, would having a self-modifying database such as Wikipedia be maybe the first step towards a computer intelligence? If Wikipedia is supposed to be a neutral repository, there should be no cases of corporate competition or litigation. Most of the pages I've read have [citation needed] or [This section does not meet Wikipedia's guidelines for neutrality] and other such human generated directives.

Surely, if these directives are followed (and there is no reason why they shouldn't be. The world is editing it, after all) would it make sense to leave the editing to the humans and the linking to Wikipedia's future algorithms?

Our Intelligent Evolution

2008-07-28T12:58:00.005+01:00

I read an article in the Science section of US News' website which briefly mentioned the trend of people choosing the genetic makeup of their children and I wondered about what this meant from an evolutionary point of view.

It seems to me that if we are allowed to 'choose' the genetic makeup of our children, we are simply evolving to take advantage of the environment we find ourselves in and as a result evolution will once again prove its point through our continued success as a species.

Clarke/Kubrick's 'Man-ape' in '2001: A Space Odyssey' discovered how to use a bone as a tool which he then used to conquer everything that was denied the choice by some extraterrestrial force, a force which obviously judged the Man-apes to be intelligent enough to make such a creative leap.

Evolution in the pure sense, of course, is not guided in this manner but I hope you can allow me that simple illustration in the same way that I gratefully allow the suspension of my disbelief whenever I watch that movie.

I believe that we are now at a similar evolutionary crossroads, only this time our tools are not bones and the rewards are not mere survival.

Now our tools are the genetic understanding of our species through technology; the rewards, to explosively take our species to the next level both genetically and technologically.

Mistakes will be made and critics and sceptics will use these mistakes to promote their own ideals but true progress never 'uses the mistakes of others'; true progress is pure and entirely self-supporting and -propagating.

So, when I read that some people believe that "the [evolutionary] makeover isn't big enough or fast enough", and that they are taking matters into their own hands by choosing the genetic makeup of their children, I see evolution still at work. The parent's decisions are based on intelligence and—because parents will likely choose intelligence, creativity or some other similar trait—this intelligence or creativity will be passed on through their decisions to their children who will be even better equipped to take advantage of this—and their own future—environment than were their parents.

Of course, evolution always has a cost but we must look forward to the benefits when these costs manifest themselves. Evolution plays the longest game and it will always win because that is its stable state, to persist, without prejudice.

the.new.boom

2008-06-27T08:49:00.006+01:00

ICANN, the organisation responsible for administering top level domain names and coming up with new top level domains (your .coms, .uks, .orgs etc) has pushed the web towards the next step in its evolution.

Since the dawn of the web, domain names have been restricted in that they always had to 'resolve' with a particular suffix. They always had to 'look' the same as everyone else's suffix, .com. Other top level domains (or TLDs for short, the name given to this last part of a domain name) became available; .gov, .edu, .mil and so on but you were still restricted to a selection of arcane abbreviations with which to finish off your domain.

This has just changed. ICANN has just announced that from May next year, you should be able to register pretty much anything you want.

How about www.pizzas.newcastle or www.pubs.scotland for starters? Besides this almost novelty value, expect a whole new web business model as registrars gear themselves up for reselling these domains to the likes of you and I.

I have to say it would be quite cool to have ozosbits.blog or biking.lakedistrict. Or even blog.ozosbits and lakedistrict.biking, for that matter.

Such an impact will these new domains have, I think that we are heading for a much needed rush, a boom in the web the like of which we haven't seen since the 90s when it first literally took the world by storm.

Of course, these new names won't come cheap. Having your very own version of a .com or .uk will cost you in the region of $100,000. So, by the time they are implemented that should be no more than the price of a tank of petrol...

I have some news you may find disturbing...

2008-06-17T16:14:00.004+01:00

Ceiling cat doesn't exist!

It's true!

Srsly!

Ceiling cat is a myth they tell you at kitty school to get you to do work. It's not all bad news, though. To turn your back on ceiling cat is to also turn your back on basement cat.

This raises some problems.

How does a cat know right from wrong? What becomes of morality? Is there a purpose to existence?

I believe the answers to these questions are within the self.

Be the journey.

Reciprocation is a choice.

Be excellent to each other...

Then vs. Than

2008-06-04T15:54:00.005+01:00

Consider:

"I am taller then you"
vs.
"I am taller than you"

Only one of these sentences is grammatically correct. In case anyone reads this page and decides that the top sentence is the correct one, I'll state it here:

THE TOP SENTENCE IS WRONG.
THE BOTTOM SENTENCE IS CORRECT.

Friends

2008-05-28T17:40:00.002+01:00

Even though I've seen most episodes at least three times, I still have to watch it when it's on.

Why? Why is this so?

It's like 25 minutes of audiovisual heroin.

Why are these people so watchable? I wish they were still releasing new ones.

The Illusion of Democracy

2008-05-23T14:22:00.003+01:00

If we wanted to change the world, would voting for the next President/Prime Minister/Premier be the way to do it?

I don't think so and I'll tell you why.

All the parties and opposition parties may well have different rationalisations for their policies but the final chapter in the book of politics will be written by the winner, from a position of great power and great wealth, and its title will be 'How to keep the gravy train running without the populace finding out about it.'

It seems that whoever you place in power by exercising your 'democratic right' to vote, they all basically do the same thing.

Remove your finances and freedom, almost imperceptibly, one bit at a time.

It's easy to be cynical, I know, but politics (and not the sham that is the American Presidential Race) does interest me and—a bit like a room with a living person, a dead person and a smoking gun—it's difficult to look at the situation without forming an opinion of it.

While I'm sure that politicians do have a very difficult job, it seems to me that their time must be spent at least as much suppressing the opposition as tending to the health of their societies.

I think Douglas Adams hit a nail (one of many) on the head with his philosophers vs Deep Thought argument. Imagine Deep Thought as democracy to its 'practitioners' and I'll share a moment of this wonderful monologue with you:

"Everyone's going to have their own theories about what answer I'm eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?"

This monologue could apply to a number of institutions. Here, Deep Thought was placating the philosophers, but he could have been speaking to a priest, an economist, a football manager or even a politician.

The illusion is that, no matter who we vote for, they will end up doing everything they can to sustain 'democracy' because it's keeping them rich and the rest of us ignorant.

Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?

2008-05-16T09:00:00.004+01:00

I don't really know the answer to that one and I'll diet for a month if Morgan Spurlock ever finds out.

Entertaining it may well be and I might give it a look. I watched Supersize Me and (other than the movie seemingly owing its existence to an argument with his wife about his non-vegetarian diet) it was quite entertaining. I have no doubt that the hunt for bin Laden will be equally entertaining but I feel sure that he would garner more credibility with a Supersize Me 2.

I don't believe the hype of the news and take most of everything I hear with a large pinch of salt. The situation in the middle east is undoubtedly complicated and tense but news reports of action there are beginning to look like movie trailers.

That said, does anyone in this world seriously believe that the American Government are going to give money to the man to cross borders into dangerous territory or that hostile middle eastern regions will grant this enemy of their cause access to their homeland, with the singular purpose of finding out where the man at the centre of it all — Osama bin Laden, probably the most wanted man in the western hemisphere — lives and then just wrapping production and going home without a single shred of evidence or intelligence?

Maybe it's a double bluff.

But I doubt it.

Promotion through Fear

2008-05-14T13:18:00.003+01:00

How would you feel if Tesco's started marketing mobile phones by inducing fear into you of what may happen to you if you don't happen to own one?

I think it would be well below par for such an organisation.

Irresponsible. Outrageous. Damaging. Frowned upon. Arguably even downright unethical.

Any such advertising campaign would ensure a downturn in their sales, I'm sure, and deservedly so. No company should ever believe that marketing of that standard is something that — as a society — we should accept.

But don't forget to pay your TV licence.

Or else...

HDR Images

2008-05-06T20:30:00.001+01:00

Scotland Sky
Originally uploaded by motophiliac

Getting there on the HDR front. I did write a short while ago about HDR images the easy way with Photoshop and layers. It seems that there is actually an easier way with something called Photomatix but I prefer to do things the complicated, tweakable way.

This is my first blog post from flickr so it may look a little different.

Lollipop Cameras

2008-05-01T13:07:00.003+01:00

While I can understand the idea behind putting miniature cameras into the 'lollipops' of Lollipop Ladies and Men across the nation, I think we have to be careful.

We're getting too used to our news services telling us that 'cameras can now talk' or that 'we are the most surveilled country in the world'.

This may or may not be conditioning, depending how paranoid you or your friends (are you sure they're really your friends?) are.

Regardless, the effect is that we are becoming a society complacent of the cloud of surveillance we find ourselves increasingly having to come to terms with.

There is a post at the bottom of a road near where I live. On top of it may be found a camera. Every month or so the camera is 'removed'. After a few weeks or so it is reinstalled. Ad nauseam.

The bottom line here is that, simply, society — at the point where it means the most — does not want a camera. How much more vocal can a society be?

And yet, here we are, welcoming the presence of cameras on lollipops.

I think we need to keep an eye on those who so want to keep an eye on us.

The future of the Net

2008-04-22T13:18:00.006+01:00

Through the decisions they are making right now, people like Neil Berkett of UK ISP Virgin Broadband are ensuring the death of the Internet as we know it.

Their names will go down in history. Not in a good way, either.

The children of tomorrow will look up at their mothers and fathers, and ask, "What was the Internet like when you were little?"

Their parents will answer.

"We had YouTube. And blogs. It was a time when domains flowed through the registrars like water and services were free. People like you and me could write what they wanted and publish what they had written to the entire world. For a while, it looked as if the World War may not have happened, as well.

You see, politicians — the people who run the world — took to a global audience and had to change the way they ran the world. They had to be more tolerant of different cultures, races and beliefs.

I remember I met your mother on a website called Facebook! Without the Internet, you may never have been born! It was a little annoying, sometimes, though. You know email?"

"You mean the channel?"

"Kind of, but more, er, personal. If you wanted to tell someone something, you could write it on your computer and send it in an email to them."

"Was email free, too?"

"Back then, yes, which meant that there was lots of it because people didn't have to pay. Sometimes we complained about how many emails we were getting from websites like Facebook."

"Was that spam?"

"Kind of. Although with Facebook and other sites like it, you would tell the site that you wanted to receive emails, even though sometimes you'd get lots of emails that told you the same thing."

"That sounds like a waste."

"I suppose it was. But wouldn't you rather read an email to find out if it was interesting, rather than not be told about it?"

"Is that what happens now?"

"I think so, yes. Companies who control all the Internet's hardware, you know the cables that connect all the houses?"

"Yes."

"Well, the companies who own those cables didn't like people using them to look at certain websites. They wanted to charge everybody for certain websites. I suppose you could say they started caring for themselves more than the people who paid them."

"That's not a good business model! That's a, er, what d'you call it, a dictatorship."

"Ha ha! Well, kind of. I wish you could have told them that!"

"Can I call Meli?"

"Yes. But be careful. Don't mention what we've just been talking about online. Okay?"

"Okay, dad!"

It seems in the future, we'll have to be even more careful online than we do now but for very different reasons. I hope this is not the shape of things to come. It's not too late to do something about it. Give your business to Net-Neutral ISPs.

Dear ISP,

2008-04-09T12:09:00.008+01:00

When you say 'unlimited', what exactly do you mean?

Do you mean that I can download as much as I want? As quickly as I want? Over my 8 mbit connection? Which doesn't run at 8 mbits anyway, but that's a another letter...

Or do you mean that I can download as much as I want until I've downloaded too much? Isn't that just another way of saying that my service is not 'unlimited' after all, despite having a contract to that effect?

Fair use is something that you could argue about in court, I guess, so does this mean that if I'm disconnected while watching BBC iPlayer for instance, I can take you to court for breach of the same contract?

Oh, you want BBC to pay for that bandwidth? Well, hang on, doesn't that take you out of the loop, then? Shouldn't I just pay BBC directly? What, exactly, am I then paying you for?

I'll tell you what, exactly, I'm paying you for.

I am paying you for providing Internet to my house.

I am NOT paying you for providing content to my house. I don't care how you do it, but if you are to remain an Internet Service Provider, you maintain my connection to the Internet and all that that implies, otherwise you get out of the way and let someone else do the job.

If you want to stay in the game, let the consumer decide. If you're not about the consumer, you're obviously in it for yourselves and have only yourselves to blame for the problems you are now facing.

How about letting consumers know exactly what they're paying for and how much of it they're paying for?

If I want to download 5 gigabytes of iPlayer content in a day, charge me for it. Don't get above yourselves and pretend that you're concerned about the content. Give me a wire or cable with Internet coming out of it and shut the hell up.

Yours angrily,

Mr Internet Consumer.

My problem with Facebook

2008-03-31T10:18:00.004+01:00

Surely it wouldn't bee too difficult to send all taggings or anything else that warrants an email notification at once, when a person leaves an application, or signs out?

Maybe one email containing a list of things that have happened?

Instead, I get this:

I'm sure with the many thousands of Facebook developers that there are out there that this kind of problem could be avoided.

Anyone fancy a go? I dare you.

Please?

The reach into the past

2008-03-28T08:52:00.009Z

New technologies are not exclusively applicable to our future, but also to our past. In fact, not even new technologies are necessary for this, just new applications of technologies that have been widespread for many years.

A piece of paper covered with soot from an oil lamp doesn't sound too interesting. Maybe drawing a kind of simple stylus across it with the intent of attempting a visual analysis of sound is of more interest.

Of course, at the time the idea that the tracks left by the stylus would be of any use other than visual reference probably didn't even enter the mind of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.

At that time, the idea of recording and replaying sound was totally alien to people. There were no MP3 players, no CDs, no vinyl records. Even Thomas Edison's wax cylinders were around two decades away, so the ideas that the pieces of paper had even captured the sound, or were able to reproduce it, were probably beyond the imagination of Édouard-Léon.

The thing that strikes me is that we have used technology — not even particularly cutting edge technology — to create a link to an event in the past which previously had not remotely occurred to us. How far can this process go? It was sheer coincidence in this case that the (I don't want to call it a recording, because that was never the intention) experiment took place in such a specialised manner, but given recent (and explosive) advances in nanotechnology and computing power, what other analytic methods will we be able to wield in future to probe greater treasures in artefacts of similar age or even further back into human history?

CAPTCHA helping the Next Generation

2008-03-26T10:47:00.006Z

A while ago, I posted about CAPTCHA and how it would allow computers to understand written text and begin the process of machines being able to contextualise and 'understand' written text.

Well, it turns out that CAPTCHA is way ahead of me.

I didn't know this, but every time you submit a correct answer to any CAPTCHA challenge, you are actually telling the CAPTCHA database how to read the very text you've just been challenged with.

It seems that the challenges are taken from texts that were written before the advent of computers (if anyone can remember that far back...) and are used in the challenges to first of all, prevent machines from subscribing to web services such as email and profiles with the intention of spamming people from the accounts they create, but — and this is the interesting bit — the challenges are also used to verify single words scanned from texts which are difficult for machines to read.

In effect, every time you succesfully respond to a CAPTCHA challenge, you're making it more difficult for future web users to sign up to these services because, by the time CAPTCHA has 'solved' the problem of reading difficult to read text, the future challenges will become ever more difficult as the — self-taught — machines will be able to solve these challenges more readily.

That's the key phrase, here: self-taught.

So, if you want to be part of the future web, you'd better visit your library and dig out some old texts to brush up on your reading skills. The CAPTCHA computer database is...

Dunkable biscuits

2008-03-22T17:23:00.005Z

Always beware of biscuits which, after having been dunked, absorb the drop of tea (or coffee. They're not fussy) which forms, clinging, to their lowest point.

You will go through an entire packet in a single sitting
They are prone to disintegrating
They will leave a puddle of scum in the bottom of your cup.

You have been warned.

"...for every man who has ever lived,

2008-03-19T23:07:00.004Z

...in this universe, there shines a star."

Epic though Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece '2001: A Space Odyssey' was, it would never have grown without the wonderful mind of Arthur C. Clarke.

The seed, his original short story, 'The Sentinel', was to evolve into a compelling story detailing mankind's desire to discover as much about this universe as was physically possible, and of the enduring goals, challenges and tragedies of our future history.

The movie had an almost overwhelming effect on me when I first watched it. Frightening, awesome, challenging and rewarding, it is a remarkable piece of filmmaking by a man who so obviously had a close, genuinely constructive relationship with its author.

The book is a startling exploration of humanity and its place in the universe and communicates to the reader ideas which may seem difficult to embrace, but which would be impossible to dismiss.

Not that I would want to. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

Arthur C. Clarke, thank you.

Urban. Photographers. One or the other...

2008-03-12T09:36:00.005Z

Urban Photographers are of a kind, like Lifestyle Coaches, who seem to justify their 'art' solely to their peers.

Don't get me wrong, anyone with a camera has the potential to be the voice of global society given the opportunity. That, of course, is a good thing.

The ones that wind me up, though, are those with a little more time and technology on their hands than they apparently know what to do with.

Second hand graffiti savagely exposing social truths, humour derived from the decontextualisation of street signage and visual allusions to a paranoid political commentary.

Just stop it. Most of these images are really only going to mean anything to people who are actually there.

Nice composition, good lighting, focussing really picks out the 'A' in 'MIND YOUR HEAD'. Seriously? I know it's the Internet, but that's no excuse for derivative.

There is a statue of William Wallace on Union Street in Aberdeen. Below it, a plaque tells the story of a man who fought for his country. Besides documentary evidence, a photo of this plaque would not do the monument or the location any emotional justice.

To understand its story and what it means to the people who live with it every day, you have to appreciate the time and the place of the subject. Taking a snapshot of it and posting it on the Internet may elevate it to the realms of culture, but never art.

That's that dealt with. I'm off to icanhascheezburger...

HDR Images. The easy way.

2008-03-11T17:22:00.011Z

I've read quite a bit about HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging recently. Up until now, my stock method of producing good, wide exposure photographs was to shoot three images, each a stop apart. Typically, I would then take the darkest of the images and the lightest of the images and use a faded composite to allow a nicely exposed sky to show through above a nicely exposed landscape.

All good, but what about where there are details in the foreground that are lighter? Or where the line between land and sky is not even roughly straight? How do you draw the line between the different exposures?

Well, after looking around and finding lots of tutorials about HDR images I decided to have a go at developing (pun not intended) my own technique.

Using Photoshop, I have been able to easily blend the darkest exposure with the lightest exposure and get Photoshop to do the difficult bit of deciding which bits of each image should show through to produce a final, wide-exposure image.

The first steps to producing an HDR image are getting (in my case) three different exposures. Some folks might use five, seven or even more different exposures but my technique hasn't developed that far yet.

However you do it, ensure that it is the exposure time you use to control the exposures as the aperture obviously has an effect on depth of field and can have some odd side effects when it comes to blending your final images. Although this could be interesting...

Anyway, you will typically have three exposures:

A sky exposure. This means that the sky looks really good with lots of cloud detail, but the landscape looks dark or even black.
A land exposure. This is where the landscape is well exposed, the grass is good and green but the sky is washed out or even white.
A middle, or 'correct' exposure. The land and sky will ultimately be a compromise and will probably look weak and washed out.

Open Photoshop and load up your three images. You will need to organise them into layers, with your darkest exposure on top, your middle exposure in the middle and your lightest exposure at the bottom.

Obviously you used a tripod to take the three separate exposures. If you didn't, go get one and start again.

Your three layers will be lined up, pixel perfect. Now for the magic.

Your top layer, change its blend mode to Screen.
Your middle layer, change its blend mode to Multiply.
Your bottom layer, change nothing.

Yep, it looks a pretty mess. However, now the really clever bit. The middle layer is about to work as a kind of mask, allowing the dark bits from the lightest exposure to show through to the middle layer, and allowing the top layer to show its lightest exposure over the middle layer. We do this by doing two things to the middle layer.

First, we desaturate it because we already have all the colour information we need in the darkest and lightest exposures (the top and bottom layers).

Next, we invert it. This has the effect (because it is 'Multiplied' with the bottom layer) of darkening the light parts of the bottom layer. The top layer, being 'Screened', will add its light areas to the Multiplied bottom layers.

The result? See for yourself:

Not the most attractive image, I hope you'll agree, but it does show a wider range of exposures than certainly my camera is capable of.

The image does show a lack of contrast, but I think I can overcome that with some judicious leveling of the light and dark exposures.

I'll be perfecting this technique over the coming weeks and hope to have some better images to show you.

The Unconstitutional State of America

2008-03-07T09:12:00.005Z

It seems you can fight for your country but only as long as you are Christian.

If you are Atheist, you will apparently be prevented from advancing through the ranks on the grounds that you may not be that good of a leader despite the fact that — in my opinion — a person devoid of any religious prejudice would be in a better position to lead.

The American Constitution was formed and signed by people who agreed that the way forward was to allow individuals the freedom of speech, expression and belief. The text of the First Amendment goes like this:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Apparently in the current global political climate, democracy is once again being allowed to destroy the rights and beliefs of an individual.

Spc. Jeremy Hall was allegedly denied his Constitutional Right to freely discuss Atheism while on duty in Iraq and it appears his promotional prospects have been adversely affected because of his beliefs.

Now, I can understand how this has come about, and how difficult under the circumstances it must be to deal with. Soldiers in combat must do whatever it takes personally in order to justify killing people and they must believe they are right to do so. That must be extremely difficult.

But an attempt to prevent someone from using their own justification and beliefs is commonly called bigotry.

The problem as I see it is not between Jeremy Hall and his superiors. Rather it is in allowing Atheists into that situation. There is a choice to be made:

Either allow and support people with no beliefs as you do people with beliefs;

or

Decide that — as a nation — you are not happy having your society split in this way and extradite all the Atheists. Or Christians. Or Scientologists. Or Muslims. Or Jews. Or Buddhists. Or Rastafarians. Or Hindus. Or Sikhs. Or Zoroastrians. Or Taoists.

I could go on all day, but that's it. That's all you have to do. You really can't have a free and open society on the one hand, when it comes to someone being productive and making money for you and then — in the next breath — tell someone that they don't live in a free and open society and that they must submit to your beliefs and deny them their own.

There. I've said it.

CAPTCHA and the Next Generation.

2008-02-26T18:43:00.006Z

If Ray Kurzweil is to be believed (and I for one subscribe to his core hypothesis) we should at some point in the not-too-distant future (say within 10 years) bear witness to the birth of the next generation of life on this planet.

I don't really mean anything as outrageous as robots storming Parliament or the White House. The coming Singularity will arrive in a series of jumps, or shifts. In the past, these jumps, or bullet points in history, have been notable as things like the adoption of language. Once language had established itself, we evolved to the stage where language could be visually recorded. Then came the ability to record the sound of language itself. Not long after this, we invented computers. Very shortly after this, the Internet blossomed into existence allowing the completely free, global exchange of pretty much any kind of information, including written and spoken language as well as the more recent incarnations of communication, photographs and moving images.

The communication explosion is upon us. There is a global community out there ravenously feeding itself with the writings, images, sounds and movies of countless millions of people. Cultural mashups are already happening, enabled by the thrust of this new technology. But where are the changes that are necessary to allow this explosion to accelerate toward the next step?

The changes are already happening. One example of this is the recent cracking of the CAPTCHA test we all know and hate which is necessary to prevent the automatic creation of email and other online accounts by computers.

Previously, any web site which had a 'Register' page was vulnerable to attack by another computer which would visit the page and 'make up' a whole profile, complete with name, email address and other information which would then be used by the attacking computer(s) to advertise goods or services on the victim site's message boards, forums or through email or personal messaging, all using the freshly created fake profile.

To combat this practice, the CAPTCHA test was created. This test — which often presents users with difficult to read sequences of letters and asks for these letters to be entered with the registration information — is to allow the site to differentiate between a computer trying to create an account and a real person trying to create an account. The test works because computers aren't very good at converting the image into text, whereas humans are very good at recognising these patterns and pass the test with relative ease. This test, therefore, prevents computers from registering for many thousands of email accounts every day.

However, the news that a group of hackers has beaten the CAPTCHA system on Google's Gmail registration page is — as well as potentially being both a security and privacy threat — one example of how the Internet is getting more intelligent, even if at the moment that intelligence still comes from people.

However, consider that with the breaking of CAPTCHA, the technology now clearly exists to allow computers to read text in images very easily, even when it is somewhat scrambled as in these tests. Marry that software technology to a database of images (say Google images, which is itself a text-based image search engine, or Microsoft's unbelievable Photosynth web-based image processing application) and you have a level of cross-referencing and machine-based semantic processing way above anything we have now.

Of course, we've had text recognition software for a while now. Number plate recognition and OCR systems to read cheques and other machine-readable stationery have been around for many years. The difference is that now, any computer connected to the World Wide Web has access not only to images, but increasingly the means to understand the images and the text based content of them. It is easy to imagine a computer algorithm refining itself by learning from images scraped from the Web, bypassing the need for the algorithm to be refined by a human programmer.

This is just a small step, but how long will it be before people lose touch with exactly how this process works? I know that these processes are some way above my ability to understand them. The complex network of friends, applications and connections hosted by Facebook is utterly beyond me, maybe even partially beyond Facebook themselves as it seems to be quite difficult to completely remove any one user from its database, just as it seems to be difficult to remove a single memory from a human mind.

The algorithms involved in grouping people and applications or words and images in such a way as to contextualise them are difficult problems and I believe that, at some point, the very people who laid the foundations of the systems which are solving these problems will learn to rely on the systems, rather than create them.

At that point, we relinquish a level of control of the Internet to machines. Grandiose that may sound, but — even if at a subtle and seemingly unimportant level — the changes are happening. A lot of information is already on the web and I for one know that I rely on the web as well as my own skill set and memory to live my life and do my job. The line between the Internet and us is blurring on many levels at an increasing rate. In 1990, we had just about perfected the ability to view a web page with static information on it. In 2008, just 18 years later, we can organise large events. The September 11th attacks were largely believed to have been organised — at least in part — using the Internet and its various services. Just over 6 years on and the Web is already a level ahead of what was available then. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the explosion of online social media had not yet taken off when the planes hit the Twin Towers of the New York World Trade Centre.

We are in the middle of a fantastic age of information, technology and communication.

Hopefully, something wonderful will happen to us through its global adoption.

YouTube outage. So..?

2008-02-25T13:35:00.005Z

Well, YouTube's problems on Sunday seem to me to be one of the symptoms of the times.

Whether politically-based or not, the re-routing of traffic away from YouTube by Pakistani ISPs was a small-minded move in my opinion. The internet is not something you can have bits of. You can't order it like a pizza and pick off the jalapeños. You buy into it or not.

One way of looking at this is a kind of cultural test of your nation's tolerance. If you're not happy being part of the rest of the world, you are going to have problems in the future and as the web becomes ever more prevalent these problems are going to get a lot, lot worse.

I'm not sure what the solution is. If I knew that, I probably wouldn't be sitting here writing this but I do know that this situation cannot be ignored. At some point either the Pakistani authorities must accept the Internet and the global opinions that go with it (blasphemous content and all) or it must cut itself off from it and carry on alone.

However, I'm eager to know how YouTube will deal with this. I'll be a bit disappointed if they lower themselves to the level of people who order a pizza and then complain about the peppers. The only thing they really need to do is strengthen their 'bit' (pardon the pun) of the internet to ensure this doesn't happen again, however that may be achieved. The Pakistani Government — in this case — just need to be managed rather than confronted with threats of legal or other action. A bit of tolerance on both sides here would go a long way towards keeping our global culture stable and constructive.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, this planet has never in its history been in quite the situation it is now. The globalisation of culture may prove to be a dangerous thing.

Policy. Language. Economy. Copyright law. National security. Religion. The fundamentals of life in every country — indeed for each and every individual — need to be taken into consideration and the only way forward is not confrontation, blame or denial; more an opportunity to realistically assess the genuine needs of the individuals, corporations and governments the world over.

The balance of power in the Middle East will be very tightly fought and I think the Internet will be the prime catalyst in forcing the situation to a head. It's not going to be easy. I think there are difficult decisions ahead but I believe that we are living in exciting times and I would not want to live in any other.

Microphones and Snare Drums

2008-02-19T11:41:00.003Z

I recently took delivery of a new PDP birch snare drum from a friend who has upgraded his kit. He now has something very new and very nice, a Chad Smith signature thing which — of course — I'm itching to hear but this means a whole new sound to my kit which I have been eager to record. The weekend gone gave me just such an opportunity when a young lady friend of mine and a guitarist/bassist friend wanted to cover the KT Tunstall song, Heal Over.

I saw an opportunity to hear my new snare so jumped at the chance to play kit for them and I have to say I'm ever more impressed with my ability to mic a snare drum. All I need now is the ability to mic the rest of the kit just as well and I'm laughing. My main problem right now is that the snare — which I need to be very sensitive — is activating in sympathy with the toms when I play them and the effect is very noticeable as I have miced the snare side of the drum to pick up that breathy sound which I like so much on Donald Fagen's "Brite Nitegown", courtesy of the outrageously talented Keith Carlock.

I know I'm never going to achieve such a standard but I have to say the new snare is a move in the right direction.

I'd like at some point to set up a website with recordings of this stuff to let people listen to and critique. I've searched mostly in vain for detailed hints and tips on mic placement and if I can get my ass into gear I'd love to put everything I've learned about this experience up onto the web for all to either learn from, build upon or criticise.

Suffice to say that Messrs Fagen and Carlock (and anyone else who puts genuine feel and passion into their productions) have a lot to teach but that, as with all music, it's there to hear and learn from if you choose to listen.

Here's to more and better mics and more time to put them to good use!

The Deal with Piracy

2008-02-06T09:50:00.001Z

What is the big deal with people downloading music for free? Is it stealing? What — really — is the issue?

Consider that the entity that stands to make the most money out of terrorising children into paying for a CD are the corporations who represent the artists. The artists aren't into that kind of negative publicity. I don't think a genuine musician would inflict the threat of court, fines, the inherent stress and hassle of judicial action on anyone, and the shops are doing their best to trust the corporations but their patience will only last for so long.

While I'm not a professional (as such. Except for the odd free round at the pub) I would like to think that if I was capable of producing large quantities of music that people wanted to listen to, I would certainly not be looking for an agent, publisher or distributor in this day and age.

They are an anachronism and we'd be better off without them.

I have the knowledge to produce a short run of CDs, encode some medium quality 'taster' tracks and put my own site together, maybe set up stores on some of the better known websites. I'd work the system that is currently in place, just the same as the distributors and publishers did fifty years ago and more.

I do not have a problem with the illegal downloading of copyrighted music from any of the available sources online.

Certainly one illustration of this is that my current (bought) CD collection contains a lot of music which I had 'previewed' online, because it was free. I have discovered a wider musical taste within myself as a direct result of the technology, and that suits me.

As a result, I have spent money on CDs where I might previously have not.

I think it's about time that the companies who 'represent' (read: rip off) the genuine artists in this world stop bitching about how the rest of the world overtook them. If these people were doing their job properly and weren't so far removed from the people they were pretending to serve, they would have spotted this revolution years ago and maybe invested in an ISP or bought into the technology to allow them to make the most of the situation they are now so publicly feeling sorry for themselves for.

It is low to blame the world for a mistake made with other people's livelihoods years ago, when it would have been more profitable for all concerned to have done something about it then.

Professional musician Benn Jordan was interviewed by Torrent Freak. Read his account of the current climate here.

Iran. No Internet. No Coincidence?

2008-02-04T11:46:00.001Z

IF:

You were a large government and fancied an enforced occupation of an overseas country — a country you suspected or were sure had nuclear capabilities — and you knew that communication to and from that country would complicate your mission;
You had already attempted to inhibit communications to and from that country by for example denying them access to publicly available technologies such as email;
Had the ability to — in one easy stroke — sever that country's most valuable communications connection to the rest of the world;

How would you do it?

The next war may have already started. The first step in making a move is to ensure that the news of the invasion and its consequences for the people are not broadcast for all the world to see.

Or maybe the fact that the cable that supplied the Internet to this country severed itself, completely by accident. Maybe a big shark bit it. Maybe a big shark bit all three...

I hope I'm just being paranoid...

...

FCC Auctions. Google for the win?

2008-02-01T14:18:00.000Z

The chances of Google ending up with a significant win from the FCC wireless spectrum auctions are pretty high, especially with the news that Microsoft are making serious advances on Yahoo!

If Microsoft acquires (or at least gains a controlling interest in) Yahoo!, this will distill the conditions for the next round in the never-ending fight for global supremacy in the Internet wars.

Let's face it, installed operating systems (Vista, XP, Linux Ubuntu et al) are becoming largely transparent and increasingly being used to run online applications rather than enjoying the privilege of running local installations of these applications. While there is still room in the market for offline, local apps, this won't last forever. Software as a service (SaaS) is the way forward, certainly for enterprise level software the likes of which Microsoft currently produces.

I have wondered, though, why Microsoft didn't capitalise on this idea many years ago when they pioneered (or should that be 'marketed') the concept of webmail with their infamous Hotmail. Maybe if they'd carried on down this road, they would now have a brace of online applications themselves and would be well above competition from the likes of Google. We could have been using online versions of Word, Excel or Powerpoint by now.

The fact is that Microsoft tend to keep their products and ideas up to date by doing the absolute minimum, often waiting for a threat to arise before doing something about it. Look at the history between Netscape and Explorer and more recently Firefox and Explorer. It could be very persuasively argued that Explorer is only the success that it is simply because it came bundled with the dominant operating system of the time.

I believe the same is true of online applications. Their recent approach to Yahoo! strongly suggests that they are not afraid of a face off with Google.

However, Google may well have its own ideas about where the market is heading next. From the off, they claimed that they would pitch in with a 4.6 billion dollar bid for a portion of the wireless spectrum auctioned off by the FCC, even cheekily laying down conditions about the eventual use of the spectrum to the FCC in exchange for a promise to bid.

It looks as if these two giants will still find room to avoid each other for a while yet, if Google wins the spectrum and Microsoft acquire Yahoo!

Google powered mobile devices running Google and Microsoft/Yahoo! applications.

Where will it all end...

Pregnancy test vs I.Q.

2008-01-29T19:12:00.001Z

According to an advert I've just seen, 1 in four women have difficulty in reading a pregnancy test.

Hey! You, yes you 1 in four!

If you're not intelligent enough to read a pregnancy test:

Why are you having kids?
It's probably too late to worry about it.

Just a thought for the day.

On beliefs...

2008-01-16T09:57:00.001Z

I found an interesting article on Atheist quotes which had gained a respectable number of diggs and discovered a fascinating collection of comments in reponse to the article.

I posted a reply to someone who was having a hard time coming to terms with their belief system as they were contemplating discarding it in favour of a more natural, physical system. I include my reply here:

I was religious for a while. Out of my own choice — not from any form of "education" or pressure — I chose to believe for a short period of my life and I put my trust that the world was a good, moral and constructive place in the hands of the subject of my faith.

After a year or so I started to learn that there was a lot to this place that doesn't need a god or controlling influence. Evolution, or natural selection, can — even to molecular and cosmic extremes — take care of any question you may need to ask.

The universe is endlessly evolving. You are part of it, physically related to the stars you gaze upon at night, the people you love and relate to and the atoms and forces that tie it all together.

Realise your place in amongst all of this and decide for yourself how you want to deal with it.

Read books on chaos theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, physics, genetics, evolutionary biology or artificial intelligence. You've probably already read your holy book. They're hard to read, but that's because of the language, not the concepts they're communicating. Language can be learned and this is in itself an enlightening process.

Most importantly of all, make a balanced decision. Talk to and listen to people, not to piggyback upon their beliefs, but rather to understand how they arrive at the decisions that shape their lives. Of course, this may or may not help, but at least you'll meet interesting people along the way and become better at communication and understanding. This will all help.

Never forget that people are more important than beliefs. If anyone gets that bit wrong, they're in for a rough ride.

As for Jesus Christ, he may well have existed. However, after two thousand and seven years it is difficult to know who he was or where he came from but the identity of his father is a mystery to me.

Network Solutions Blow. I can prove it...

2008-01-10T10:58:00.001Z

There has been a lot of mud slung right across the web as one of the largest domain registrars, Network Solutions, have apparently taken to the practice of registering domains that people have searched for using their domain search tool.

Normally, you can go to a domain registrar's website, type in what you're after and click search. You'll get a list of available domains with the various .com, .net, .uk or whatever in a list from which you can choose which domains you want to then register.

Skip back a bit. Once the list of available domains appears on Network Solution's website you will find — for a period, at least — that the domain will be unavailable if you then search for it through another registrar.

Here, I'll prove it. Just before I posted this entry, I searched for network-solutions-blow.com on their site, was told that it was not registered by anybody else and was therefore available (surprisingly). I then immediately flipped over to 123-reg.co.uk to search for the domain there. The search revealed that my prospective domain had already been taken, although a whois showed that it was still available.

Of course, I could still buy the domain through Network Solutions, but the domain isn't freely available through any other registrar.

Bear in mind that all I've done here is ask a company if a domain is available. I have not agreed to anything, paid anything or asked for anything other than the availability of the domain, yet it has effectively been withdrawn from other registrars.

This level of underhandedness is a sure fire way to undermine the confidence of every businessman or entrepreneur in the market for a website or thinking of getting into the web.

Congratulations Comcast. Out-of-orderness on a grand scale means that Network Solutions is now my new pet web hate.

Don't search for domain availability through Network Solutions.

You know it makes sense.

The hangover has subsided...

2008-01-02T14:15:00.001Z

...but only just. 1 o' clock in the afternoon, I have just finished boiled eggs on toast, the first solid food to have passed my lips in something like 48 hours.

After a gig at a local pub in the Borders of Scotland, I spent the rest of "Auld Year's Night" in increasing states of drunkenness until some time after 4 am. New Year's Day was an ill, migraine-ridden write off.

However, looking back at 2007 from the warmth of a mild 2nd of January, I have to say that I am excited to be witnessing the world as it is, and anticipating what may be to come.

With advances in medicine, social technology and the increasing prevalence of the Internet, I can't wait to see what 2008 might bring.

So, if you're capable, charge your glasses once again and toast the New Year and all the change that it will bring.

Cheers!

A reason why IE truly sucks

2007-12-19T14:29:00.001Z

I have Hotmail (sorry, Windows Live mail) open and am composing a message to a friend, a response to an invite to his for beers and televisual entertainment. The email includes various examples of 'Oooh! I'll put that in.' because a few noteworthy things have happened in the last couple of days.

I need an image for a project at work, so I have another instance of Explorer running with a pageful of Google image results, several of which look quite promising and useful.

Now I need to figure out how to pass GET variables from a Flash movie to a PHP script. So I spawn another instance of IE and Google an appropriate phrase then follow a link to Adobe's website. Which must have dodgy Flash or Javascript on it, because IE promptly hangs.

Ok, I'll just go away and leave it to it. Let it clear its mind enough to — horror of horrors — render a web page.

I go back to Firefox (which I use for casual — read serious — browsing at work) and do digg for a short while. Heading back over to IE, I give up and close Adobe's window and click the End Now in response to IE having soiled its underwear.

I simultaneously, and without warning, lose my email message, my Google images and of course the Adobe page.

Imagine if those three windows had had several tabs each open, as well? And what's with locking the whole of IE, even if only one of the tabs is in the grips of some awful modal dialogue?

Internet Explorer SEVEN.

How many times does Microsoft insist on overlooking these awful problems with one of the worst web browsers on the market?

Gillian Gibbons — Free

2007-12-03T10:32:00.001Z

I can't imagine what would have happened if a British child had named a teddy bear (named — don't forget — after Theodore Roosevelt) Jesus.

I know that there are different and lesser issues at stake. This is after all about Christianity vs Muslim.

But why should it have to be about anything vs anything? I think an important step towards a larger community has been taken by Sudan's president today. I just hope this gesture of goodwill isn't forgotten in a hurry.

However, the naming of a teddy bear (as in the context of a child's fluffy comfort toy) should hardly be the subject of international outrage, let alone calls for the poor teacher's execution. I am sure that there were no malicious political or religious motives behind the naming (by the class, don't forget) of the toy and I am more hopeful after hearing news of the pardon that such an incident will not appear as reprehensible to Sudan's future generations.

Here's to a smaller world!

Ebooks. Not again...

2007-11-22T22:45:00.001Z

Yes, again. But this time, there's a difference.

A difference which — at first — may not seem very important. You see, up until recently, say the last year or so, electronic displays were seriously hampered. They were bulky, needed lots of power for backlighting and switching thousands of pixels on and off all the time, their resolution was — to be honest — pitiful for the crisp rendering of well formed letters and words.

All of these problems have now been solved by the invention of E Ink. Allowing a resolution of around 160 pixels per inch, it is high enough to render text with enough definition to allow swift reading without the squint of working out whether you're looking at 'rn' or 'm'. You can work it out with close scrutiny, but when you're reading and don't want the technology to get in the way, a higher resolution is the only answer.

Also, the new technology doesn't need power to maintain an image, only to change it. A practical application of this in an ebook device means that it is only powered for a fraction of a second as you 'turn the page'. Once the new page has been rendered, the device can effectively power off until the next page.

The technology inherently shuns the need for a backlight, being an entirely reflective medium. This means that reading in bright, direct sunlight is most preferable whereas with TFT or similar technologies, bright sunlight drowns out the pitifully dim screen. Reading by artificial light will be just as easy as with a book.

So where does this leave us? With a choice, of course.

Sony's Reader, which sells for around $300-$350, depending on which review you see, looks quite sleek and certainly seems slim and small enough to fit in an inside pocket or a bag. Amazon's Kindle at $399 is a bit more expensive, but has the advantage of an effectively free cellular broadband connection, allowing you to download books wherever you are without having to cable connect to a PC as with the Sony device.

Myself, I'm sure that within a year, we'll see the kind of diverse and cheaper market that we now have with MP3 players.

Sure, you can buy the original branded iPod in various incarnations for anything up to £150, maybe more, but £30 will get you a cheap alternative that works, albeit with fewer features.

My money's on the wait.

25 million records. Lost...

2007-11-20T20:32:00.001Z

What are we to think from this? Of course, the Conservatives are all over it like a rash, but I do think there are bigger issues at stake.

While it's true that the current government are still trying to get ID cards legislated into existence, and that a similar 'accident' with the records for such a system is also very possible, I reckon — even assuming that this kind of mishap never happens again — that these particular bits of plastic would be better off as crisp packets, SD cards, cheaper Blu-Ray movies, anything other than ID cards.

The reason is quite simple. Despite what we're told about this system's security, the database and the people who work with that database are still fallible. It's all well and good having 'procedures in place', but people are inventive things, which is why they're so good at everything.

If someone can find an easier way to do something, like update a record in a database, he or she will do it. Even if this is at — perhaps microscopic — risk to security. To that person, it's really not a big deal. I bet you've done it yourself to get the kettle on earlier or make a meeting on time. Not to mention that the whole process relies on the ID card being in the possession of the person to whom it is administered. The whole system is a mockery of the intelligence of the people it is pretending to protect, and if we're not careful, Mr Orwell's futuristic vision will begin to look like the good old days.

DNA archiving for the purposes of solving crimes is another example of a misguided project. The best way to remove oneself from suspicion of a crime or from mistaken identity — indeed to protect one's identity — is simply not to take part in it. The more people there are on such a database, and the more people that are employed to maintain and to administer it, the greater chance of error. That is the most basic assumption anyone should ever make about any system and is self-evident. Anyone who says that their system is foolproof, or that they have every eventuality covered, is a person to whom one should never trust the responsibility.

There has to come a point where the balance fundamentally shifts and the system starts to work at the expense of the individual, rather than for the individual.

I have to say that if this government carries on shifting the balance, I for one will be changing my vote at the next election, although I'm not even sure that that will change anything these days.

Seems to me that in a Democratic society, 'I' am always in a minority...

The Global Politics of the Internet

2007-11-08T11:35:00.001Z

So. Hotmail and Yahoo have both withdrawn access to their free webmail services from Iran. No surprise that Google's policies regarding this country haven't changed.

I believe we are seeing something of a cultural or political shift towards a have and have-not global society where countries are being either denied access externally or are internally filtering the Internet and its related services, such as email and the web.

Both of these situations are of course undesirable.

I'm happy to live in a country where I can openly write on a blog things that might portay my government as selfish, misguided or less than competent. It's called free speech and it's such a fundamental building block for an open, constructive society that it would go without saying if it weren't for lawyers. My Internet — once I've admitted a monthly usage charge — is essentially free. I use it like water. It's part of the make up of my life. To know that the greatest educational and social tool on the planet was being even partially denied me would be a massive issue, I'm sure most people would agree.

However, Hotmail and Yahoo's motivations here are the American Government, not the Iranian Government. This is essentially America saying 'Deny this part of the world access to that Internet resource.'

What does America think it's playing at here? It's only two out of countless services, but they are two of the largest in the world. If this isn't an proclamation of global superiority — even a very specialised and subtle one — I don't know what is.

In Iran, information denial is in place in the shape of Internet filtering as well as, more famously, the Great Firewall of China, but at least these policies are their country's own. Looks to me as if we are seeing the symptoms of the start of a cultural split on a scale hitherto unimagined in human history.

Flock. Posting blogs from...

2007-11-07T14:52:00.001Z

Well, if you're reading this it means that the Flock browser has done one thing well.

Browsing the web, all I've done is click a button in Flock's toolbar and started typing. Of course, I had to sign in once, but it looks as though that's all I've got to do.

I'm hoping that we won't see a sudden, short-lived flurry of new 'social browsers' and instead will see these features implemented on existing browsers. This sounds a bit harsh, but the browser wars are already tiresome enough without adding another one to the battlefield. At least using Firefox means that it's easy to add this kind of functionality without too much hassle.

Flock is a relative newcomer to the browser market, and has just released it's version 1 on a rather suspecting public. I've yet to take it for a full test drive, but it seems to render styles and pages well enough, even if it did take a little while to start, and the features I haven't even touched yet but I'll be looking at them in more depth as I use it more and more.

If you're looking for a new slant on how to browse the web with a few social features thrown into the mix, this might just be what you're looking for with integration into Facebook and other social sites included in the install. One thing, though, is that these aren't intrusive and only make their presence known if you decide to use them. As this blog entry is testimony, these additions seem to be quite constructive and usable.

Although it seems to be just another Mozilla engine in a pretty wrapper, it might just prove to be a springboard for a fresh way to browse the web.

I, for one, am not holding my breath.

Check out Flock here.

And the award for best gameplay goes to...

2007-11-07T00:33:00.000Z

...Portal.

I'm a bit drunk, but listen...

The cake is a lie. The game is sweet, though.

Really, I've not played (or deemed playable) anything this good for quite a while. I'm not exactly a seasoned gamer, but this game just seems to have something that so many games these days don't have.

It's not particularly large, or even that difficult. It's a bit contrived in places, but the sense of humour more than makes up for that. What's the fuss about?

Well, imagine being able to make a hole in a wall and then make another hole in the floor. So you jump into the hole in the floor and pop out of the hole in the wall. Imagine now having to puzzle your way through 19 levels full of traps, laser-sighted gun turrets, rocket launchers and other surprises armed with nothing more than a gun which makes these holes, or Portals.

It's pretty good and visually it's a bit like Being Maurits Escher. The physics of the game are stunning and will take a while to master but the result, once you complete the last level, is absolutely worth it.

Remember, the cake is a lie...

Playstation 3 Distributed Computing

2007-11-06T15:13:00.001Z

I've read a bit recently about the 'Folding@home' project — indeed I have the screensaver installed on my work machine — and I never thought that a gaming console would make such an impact in this area of research.

The global network of PS3 machines recently set the world record of 1 petaflop for the speed at which they calculated the solutions to one of the most difficult problems facing scientists today, that of protein folding.

Due to the immense complexity of the problem, huge amounts of computing power are needed and — rather than buy their own petaflop computer — the team at Stanford University decided to use the world's Internet-connected computers to help them achieve this computational milestone.

Ray Kurzweil estimated the computational capacity of the human brain at about 16 petaflops meaning that we are not that far away from at least real time simulation of a full human brain.

There is a problem with this comparison, though.

The Folding@home project is aimed at a very narrow area of expertise, that of simulating protein folding. Unlike a brain, a computer system — even a distributed computing system — will only ever be good for solving the problem it's been programmed to do. The human brain is capable of at least contemplating a huge number of different concepts so computing power alone seems to be in this case a false ideal.

Should we be looking at ways of changing the way these machines can talk to each other, as well as just how many are talking? A new, underlying and powerful means of allowing computers to connect and share chunks of memory, caclulations and even computational methods needs to be devised if we are ever to see machines move beyond the rigid, preprogrammed lumps that process our words and serve our web pages.

But, way to go Sony for at least opening these channels of communication in the first place.

You can download the Folding@home client for your machine (whatever it is) here.

No idea what to call my first post here...

2007-11-06T14:36:00.001Z

...so I'll just say hi.

This is the other blog. I already have a blog on the front page of my website but this is for a different subject entirely.

Seeing as I spend my working life developing/maintaining two websites for a large school, it's no surprise that I have an interest in the techy side of life, hence this blog, the one you're now reading.

I felt I needed to express my geeky side without alienating readers of my motorcycle blog.

So, here it is. Hopefully I'll post another entry soon after this one. Then another one after. Anything more than that is too far down the timeline to make any serious judgements but I hope I regularly fail to disappoint my legions of reader.

Check back soon, if only to kick my ass for not posting anything.