Passing Thoughts

Update

Bit quiet on the blog front because I have been working hard to get a release of our product out, followed by illness. Today I am watching things run (a lot of web archiving involves watching processes run across large amounts of data) to make sure they are working so here is a quick update.

The picture above is the pile of books next to my bed. The ones that are visible are mostly 'to be read', underneath lurk books that have already been read. Of particular note is 'light' by M. John Harrison, one of the best SciFi books I have read in quite some time.

Work wise I have been doing lots of Javascript and ajax - for the non technical reader - this is what makes things like google mail work. It is messy, complex and non-standard from browser to browser. The best description I can think of is imagine trying to build a house and live in it at the same time - painful and inconvenient. Still it is getting there.

Music wise I have just discovered the Sustain-Release label. I guess you would best describe the music as acoustic drone - beautiful and powerful. The CD's come in gorgeous packaging - complete with 4 sycamore seeds as well. Richard Skelton is based in Wigan - not a million miles from here. There seems to be a decent music scene in Lancashire - what with Colin Potter and Paul Bradley being based in Preston. All of which has spurred me onto starting to make some music again. No tracks recorded yet but I have been assembling sounds and background material.

Super cool

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/01/macfuse-fuse-for-mac-os-x.html

This is really cool (well it is if you are a Mac owner). FUSE is kernel extension that allows the development of user space files systems. And in English - well basically it lets people write things that look like file systems simply and easily (and without being a kernel hacker). This results in some really cool things like sshfs which lets you mount file sytems on other machines just using ssh.

firewire

Hmmm, still not sure about firewire although I now have three firewire devices - an iSight, an external disk and an audio interface (I will get round to making some music one of these days). I foolishly tried daisy chaining them at first - only to find that they all became a bit flakey. However my firewire hub arrived this morning and now they suddenly all work properly again.

The moral of this story - get a firewire hub

The Passing of DRM?

Digital Rights Management is the last stand of an industry that relies on physical distribution, and accounting methods based around that distribution, to try and extend their old business model into a new digital world where all the rules are changed. As many intelligent people have been pointing out though - consumers are not going to be buying devices that cost more and do less with their content than they can already do. Everyone wants to be able to timeshift and move content from their pocket media player (psp or ipod or whatever) to their laptop to their TV. They don't want to have to buy the same thing several times over. I sounds a little like the media industries are beginning to wake up to this - this article, while still not mainstream, sums up things I have been hearing more and more of late. When we see stuff like this appearing in news papers the writing really will be on the wall. The big media players still have time to turn things around and embrace the new digital online media world (the one most of their customers have been hooked into for a while now...) and learn new ways of making money. What is going to be interesting though is how Vista fairs: it is widely assumed that the delays have been because of the DRM technology baked deep into the OS - technology that is going to cause a lot of problems. Of course the attitude is - the DRM only kicks in if you play DRM'd content - BUT anyone that has done any work with windows drivers will tell you that the DRM is adding layers of complexity to the weakest part of your computer system. Almost every-time you get a blue screen or system lock up in Windows - that is almost certainly down to drivers. Vista has made the hardware more complex, the software more complex and added new modes where downgrading of quality or stopping working are expected behavior. If DRM dies a death - all that extra complexity (and the attendant support development costs ) will be pointless and Vista is going to look like some great lumbering dinosaur.

A Sorry Hanging

I don't support the death penalty at all, I think that it reduces us to barbarians and there is little or no evidence that it provides any deterrent. The death of Saddam was even more despicable though - as well as the lack of dignity at his actual death I don't believe for a moment that the seemingly rushed trial - widely criticized by human rights organizations - provided justice for anyone. Was Saddam guilty of evil acts? undoubtedly. What was his role in the acts that he was tried for? I doubt anyone will every really know. What was his role in a thousand other atrocities in Iraq - again it is possible no one will ever find out. Justice is to help the victims as well as to punish the perpetrator. As the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa has shown - societies need to be able to examine what happened in order to move on. In the years to come the victims of Saddam will not be able to look back and say that he was held to account over what he did to them and indeed it is likely that revisionist histories will emerge portraying Saddam as a victim of the US, who was killed because they wanted him out of the way and not because of what he did. This feeble trial and execution has played right up to this. Bush has fine rhetoric about spreading justice and democracy around the world - it is a pity he and his government have absolutely no idea what those things are. The fact that our government is unable to condem the actions of the Iraqi (with the notable exception of John Prescott who at least criticized part of the process ) is just shameful and shows just how much respect our fine leaders here in the UK have for the processes of justice and human rights.

Google and spam

You have also got to love the fact that someone has bought the keyword 'spam' so that you get advertising for some food product in your spam folder in google mail...brilliant!

Off World Now!

My explorations of google services, coupled with the timely release of their pop retrieval mechanism means that Google Mail and Google Reader are looking rather attractive. I have just taken the step of turning NetNewsWire and Apple Mail off for a few days to see how it goes. Now that I am using more than one machine it is nice to have synchronized mail and RSS. Google Mail is very slick and just sucks up all the email from my different accounts into a single easy to manage location. It also has the advantage of not being slowed down by large quantities of email - unlike Apple Mail which can be treacle slow at times. Google reader is very nice too - it manages to be free of the things that irritated me about other online services and have an almost desktop like slickness. It is actually nicer than NetNewsWire in one or two places as well.

All this means two less applications running on the desk top as well so my system is a little faster too.Of course the only catch is when I loose my internet connection I loose my RSS backlog.

Enthusing

You have probably noticed by now that I don't really do reviews. I guess I don't consume my media in an analytical enough way to discuss it clearly afterwards. However I still need to enthuse about things I have read and seen. The holiday has been a great time to catch up on things so here are a couple of favourites:

Chris Moriarty - Spin Control Hard SF with great ideas and a tense, exciting, thriller like plot - what more could you want? Interestingly Chris Moriarty turns out to be a woman. Whats interesting about that I hear you say? and indeed there shouldn't be - there is loads of great womens sci-fi out there. So why on earth is there deliberately no mention of Chris' gender on any of her books? No need to make a big thing about it but aren't we past the time when we have to carefully not mention it in order not to harm sales? Anyway this book (and its predecessor - Spin State) are excellent and well worth checking out. Spin Control also has a rather dangerous ( from my point of view) further reading list which leads to:

Journey to the Ants. . This is an amazing book - the shear enthusiasm the authors have for their subject is very infectious. Ants are an extremely successful form of life and one that is essential to the worlds eco systems. If the human race disappeared tomorrow their would be little negative impact - the biggest change would be that the current mass extinction would halt. If the ants disappeared there would be catastrophe and dramatic changes. Ants live everywhere from the arctic circle to the equator, underfoot and in the tree tops. Their societies are complex and there is some argument for seeing the society as the organism and not the individual ants. It is rare you come across a non fiction book you could describe as a page turner but this is just such a thing. A must read!

Spam

Every so often I have a quick trawl through my spam folder to make sure nothing has been tagged as spam that I should have received. As I do so I am filled with incredulity - firstly at the shear incompetence of the spammers: emails addressed to $RECPIENT and $NAME, the endless duplicates - if I got just one spam saying "Bob:Merry Christmas" then I might possibly open it out of curiosity, but the fact I got 300 means I know it is spam without even looking. And then I start to think of who all this noise is aimed at - I can only assume that it is the desperately stupid. Those who are prepared to risk their money for items with little chance of working with retailers who are the most dubious on the internet. Those who will buy any unlikely claim of riches, increased sexual prowess or miracles.

This great noise of stupid people selling things to other stupid people fills the internet night and day all year long. Every email box is being battered with it. Hundreds of thousands of computers battle endlessly to identify this material and file it in spam or junk folders so we might not have to waste our time deleting it. And yet there must be people out there making lots of money from this or it wouldn't be happening. One of the most depressing aspects of humanity writ large.