machine-envy

This week’s column at the New Statesman is a reaction to all the silly season stories calling for a complete ban of Facebook/YouTube/the internet.

Some people are so quick to judge. At the beginning of August, the national treasure that is Sir Elton John was reported, albeit by that other great national treasure, the Sun newspaper, as calling for a complete closure of the internet. Apparently, Reg was advocating an experimental halt to all internet traffic in order to see whether, as he believed it might, such a return to our creative roots would stem the tide of mediocrity in popular music. As part of his Luddite rant, Elton chastised Sun readers, telling them to “get out there - communicate”, which prompted one of my more sardonic email pals to quip: “You can see he’s really got the whole internet thing, can’t you?”

Read the rest here.

The day after I wrote it, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee released an altogether more sensible critique of personal security online. It’s well worth a read, just for the amazing expert evidence their Lordships collected.

A few weeks ago, I was having tea and cakes with a friend, talking about the usual stuff - Second Life, DRM, the BBC’s iPlayer. Together we came up with a rather implausible train of thought, which said friend dared me to turn into a piece for my New Statesman column. I think it’s turned out rather well:

It is a well-known fact that, despite the oft-lauded opportunities for self-development through digital creativity offered by the online virtual world Second Life, many people still use it exclusively to explore the more adventurous side of their sexuality. Although I’m not a regular S’Lifer myself (my excuse is that my laptop does not have the appropriate graphics card) it came as no surprise to me when, dining with a Second Life enthusiast last year, I was informed of the competitive market for penises in-world.

Apparently, the creative ingenuity of the businesses supplying avatar add-ons is so great that models intended to attract admiration become obsolete within months. If nothing else, this conversation resulted in the coining of what I still consider would make the world’s best band name: Last Month’s Penis.

On 27 July, the BBC is to launch its controversial iPlayer…

Read the rest here.

I thought Bongboing would pick this up, but since they didn’t here’s the late, breaking news that will confirm what Tux fans suspected all along - that mankind is in fact descended from a race of giant penguins.

Read the real story here.

Its coming to that time of year again, when a festival-goer has to consider the prospect of paying Anheuser-Busch or the like upwards of three pounds for the privilege of a cold beer. Since the wall has arrived, the number of vendors of cold beer has declined, allowing the ridiculous prospect of only getting beer from a paper cup at London prices.

Which is why we need a good method for keeping your beer cold. In fact, I would like to offer the prize of a four pack of cold beer, redeemable at the festival, to anyone who can come up with a Glastonbury friendly beer chilling method. The rules are that the method must:

1. Not involve electricity
2. Be light to carry
3. Be made of stuff that you can get in the UK, legally

To kick you off, I think you could get a cold beer from 260ish grams of Ammonium Nitrate. Just mix it with water, place the beer in the water and off you go. At about a kilogram for a cold six pack, I’m not sure this passes (1). Also, ammonium nitrate is controlled in the UK so (3) might be a problem as well (but this is Glastonbury, so maybe not so much of a problem). The calculation also involves silly things such as a perfectly insulated chilling chamber, so the beer would probably end up lukewarm anyway.

The MPAA to sue themselves.

Our conference packs here in Buenos Aires included a map I had not seen before - showing the distribution of royalty fees paid in 2002. From the site, creator, Worldmapper:

Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of these fees were also received in Japan and the United Kingdom.

These fees are the payments made by someone who wants to use an idea, invention or artistic creation that legally belongs to someone else. To receive these fees a copyright or patent is needed, which may remain active for years after the initial invention…

Read the rest here.

I’m in Buenos Aires at a Freedom of Expresion Project conference this week. Last night, I went to a fantastic tango show.

Flash photography was not allowed, so I ended up taking these long exposure shots. I think they’re pretty cool.

I was playing around with random L-systems when I ‘discovered’ this shape. Random L-systems tend to be very, well, random so this symmetric image was quite interesting. The ruleset to produce it was very simple, so I decided to vary the parameters and see what other images would come out. Turns out there were many more shapes in this family that are interesting.

Continue Reading »

Can anyone recommend a decent XML editor.  XML is all about the tools, so where are the decent XML editors?  At work, people use XML spy but this is non-free and windows only.  I’m also surprised I can’t find an eclipse XML editor that is any good - eclipse development requires loads of XML.

I just did a fresh install of feisty on a new machine and I’m not happy.  Lets take a look at two packages, all beginning with fire, both of which are pretty standard for me:

1. Firefox - this just segfaults from a brand new install.  Thanks.
2. Firehol - this is the best way of writing firewall rules I’ve found, and it’s broken on feisty

Not a great impression.  Also, getting ADSL to work with a USB modem requires an unbelievable amount of messing about - no GUI helpers at all.  On the plus side though, the mythtv installers are a lot better.