machine-envy

As part of my current obsession with visualising test coverage for my huge app at work (I have a sneaky suspicion that other coders are not testing their code) I have been playing around with tree visualisation. My first port of call, graphviz, works ok for a small app but cant handle the huge […]

I use eclipse with the excellent pydev for my coding. Yes, I know I should be using emacs but at work I’m forced to use windows so I like the way eclipse insulates me from the OS. Also, I could never get over the ugliness of emacs default fonts (anyone know to make it […]

A few people commented on my previous post asking if I knew how to get the n80 working with bluetooth. File transfer works out of the box using gnome-obex-server, but the modem was a little more tricky. The chat scripts seemed to not get any response.
Turns out, nokia have changed the bluetooth channel […]

Amnesty International released a new report yesterday calling on Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google to stand up to China and come clean to their global customers on web censorship behind the Great Firewall. Here’s my report on it for openDemocracy:

“Could people power stop Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! from doing business with China’s repressive […]

This week’s column in the New Statesman is on the Gowers Review of Intellectual property and a report from Rufus Pollock for the ippr:
“As the British Phonographic Industry, the body that represents the UK music business, begins a fresh assault on those who use peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to download music illegally off the internet, it’s […]

My fortnightly column for openDemocracy has just gone live, an extension of this post of last week:
“It is nearly two decades since the British government tried to ban Spycatcher, and you would expect them to have learned their lesson. After throwing £2 million in legal expenses after the biography of former MI5 operative Peter Wright, […]

The ippr have just posted audio from an event I attended on Friday last week, the last in their series to accompany the UK Gowers Review of Intellectual property. Hear Lord Sainsbury (DTI), Chris Parker (Microsoft), Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation) and Dr Richard Jennings (Cambridge Enterprise) on Innovation in the Information Age, then listen […]

This week’s column in the New Statesman is all about bubble 2.0:
“It is unlikely that when Prince penned the immortal line “Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1999″, what he had in mind was a bunch of old media professionals hunkered in a central London hotel basement earnestly discussing ways to “monetise content”. Yet […]

So Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, whose memoir Murder in Samarkand was finally published last week after spending months in legal limbo following claims from the UK government that they damaged the national interest, has attracted fresh legal trouble in the form of copyright takedown notice from none other than the FCO.
Murray alleges […]

My new phone arrived from Orange yesterday. It’s a brand new nokia N80 with the kind of contract you can only get by threatening to dump your mobile provider. The N80 is a phone that you can turn on itside and use as a 3 megapixel camera. The good points of the phone […]