Am I Spartacus?

At the weekend there, in the aftermath of Paul Chambers losing his appeal on the #twitterjoke this, there was a great outpouring of something on Twitter, thousands of people retweeting his original 'menacing' tweet about blowing up Nottingham's Robin Hood airport. It was a great show of solidarity.

But something bugged me, there was something that didn't feel right about tweeting

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!! #IAmSpartacus

Its that bit at the end, appending the hashtag. Its incorrect, just as incorrect as getting the 'may be a joke twibbon'. Its a disclaimer and that's wrong. Twitter shouldn't need such things, the context is inherent to the medium.

Its like if in the original Spartacus scene, the folk joining in stood up and said "I'm Spartacus! Just kidding, I'm not really, you were right the first time". It agrees with the original charge.

If the sentiment you want to express is solidarity then don't undermine it by joking.

The show of solidarity would have been more profound without the #iamspartacus hashtag, and with a wider range of targets being menaced. "I've left a suitcase of explosives in Victoria Station, you have 28 minutes to find it", "A plane will crash in the next seven hours", "I just pushed a man under a train", etc, purposefully tying up so much of the security services' time in investigating 'menacing' messages on twitter, that the authorities would have no choice but to admit they were wrong, that the twitter medium is not to be taken seriously.

I had this similar idea a few months back, the NATO phonetic alphabet thing, Foxtrot, Bravo, November, etc, to do a similar alphabet using terrorist keywords. So, if any authorities are monitoring voice phonecalls, they'd be snowed under with assassinations, bombs, capture, hijackings and so on.

Thorn Dice

Am currently clearing my flat and loading up a storage container, so of course I'm getting distracted by cool things on the internet.

I was looking for a cool new hobby to get into, 3D printing seems neat, considering it can produce wonders such as these thorn dice.



I'm not a gamer any more, but WANT!

Revulsion of Desire

My heart, it swelled, I was so ready to love, the joy of the life we could have lead together.

But it wasn't to be.

I can't stand my HTC Desire, and I'm going to have to take it back to the Orange shop.

I got it yesterday, after awaiting for ages for the Orange online shop to have some in stock, I took the advice of the internet and went into Harrow to check out the high street shop. The gentleman who served me was friendly and helpful, he gently tried to persuade me to get the Samsung Galaxy instead, but my heart was set n a life with the HTC Desire.

Somehow I'm on the £15 a month Dolphin price plan, but regularly pay £40 a month, somehow although the internet shop says I'm entitled to an HTC Desire as a free upgrade, in real life I'd have to pay £50 to upgrade, but my heart was set on our life together, so £50 wasn't so bad. I handed over the money, was advised to charge it for ten hours before I used it and skipped merrily home.

But after a few hours with it, no, its not to be, and back to the shop it will go.

Before I go on, here is a small bullet-pointed list of the reasons why:-

• 9 hour battery life
• Cluttered up with irremovable Orange Apps
• Poor 3G signal
• Poor GPS signal
• Orange SafeGuard censor/filter thing
• Clunky user interface

Like the nice man said, I charged it up for ten hours, so it was the middle of the night when I started playing with it, and after a few hours I needed to charge it again. My last phone was a BlackBerry Curve, which when I first got it, had a battery life of ten days, more than a week. The HTC Desire, I'm going to have to charge it up every time I go near an power socket. Maybe some folk are used to crap battery lives, their phones always on the very foreskin of technology, but for me that kind of neediness is too much.

I'd be a little fucked without a phone, and so a short battery life is Thomas the Tank.

There are two Maps applications on the phone, google maps and Orange Maps, two app stores, the Android Marketplace and the Orange App Shop, there are a tonne of games. I'm not really a game kind of person. Sure, I'm addicted to Mario Galaxy 2 on the gf's Wii right now, and I have been dreaming of buying an Xbox 360 S 250Gb for months and months in the hope I'll be able to play Warriors and Project Gotham Racing 2 again, but on a phone, I don't want games.

No games on my phone please. Sadly you can't remove the Orange installed games, there's five of them taking up valuable program list real-estate. I have to scroll past them, any time I want to go into the program list, there's no way to get rid of them.

Similarly, the stocks and shares app, the weather app, and whatever the heck FootPrint is, there's no easy way to get rid of the or hide them. At least on the BlackBerry you could hide stuff, but on the Desire, nope.

I dunno, maybe only some of the unwanted apps are Orange-installed, and some are Android HTC affairs that are also locked. Either way, I don't care, it don't matter to me, all that matters is the only way to declutter the list of programs is to take it back to the shop an not bother with the Orange HTC Desire.

Ooh, I downloaded a bar-code reader app. Its great, you just point it at any barcode on anything, and it'll read it. 2D barcodes too, so you can see what all those cool internet folk are really saying in their 2D barcode avatars. I spent a joyful few hours going through the gf's cosmetic collection, scanning barcodes then searching for how much these potions cost online.

Maybe I'm a dirty perve, but its so much fun.

GLEE!!!!

But is it enough fun to keep the phone, to spend my life with it forever?

I downloaded the FourSquare app and we headed off to Brent Cross. On day I shall be mayor of all of London, with my Blackberry I was making good progress, alas it didn't have GPS, so I was always in the vague area, but with the HTC Desire from Orange, it would know exactly where I was.

That was the plan, that's what was supposed to happen, but no no.

Wandering round Brent Cross there was no GPS signal, and barely any 3G signal, I couldn't even update Twitter to moan about it. My little FourSquare dreams of skipping hand in hand with my Desire through clothes shops and coffee bars, came tumbling down. The grim reality of silence and shite signal strength.

Ah, in the old days of my BlackBerry Curve I'd spend hours on google reader, catching up with the world, reading blogs, frothing at the injustices of the world. Hours at work would fly by, with muted snorts and sniggers, evening with loved ones spent smiling and nodding and vaguely agreeing with whatever they were prattling on about whilst I was in my own little world.

With the Desire's larger screen and fast 3G connection and cool pinching zooming in type things the world ought to have been a more beautiful place. But no, my dreams were dashed again, as soon as I sign into google reader, I get some blocking screen from something called Orange SafeGuard, that is to protect me from things only over 18 year olds can view.

I'm a youthful looking chap, even with a couple of grey hairs, the folk at work reckon I'm a good decade younger than my ID has it, so its understandable that Orange SafeGuard would try to protect me. I have a healthy appetite for porn though, redtube, youporn and pornhub being my choice video sites, and Curvy, Menage a 3 and Chester 5000 XYV being my choice of rude webcomics, so I clicked through to get the SafeGuard thing removed, only to have my dreams dashed once more with a broken link, so I couldn't actually remove SafeGuard.

Strangely though, the next time I logged into Google Reader, I had no problem. That kind of inconsistency frustrates me.

Hours pass, and I've installed a few new apps, and had my dreams dashed by them, and I think its about time to tidy up the desktop from the standard on, move things around a bit, and that experience was clunky too. I couldn't find how to delete apps and widgets from the desktop so I had to start a new clean slate, and then if I made a mistake and placed an app where it wasn't wanted, I couldn't shift it, and had to start again. Maybe there's an easy way of doing it, but with the rest of the shite I've put up with the thing, I can't be arsed.

Not everyone has these problems, some people enjoy using the HTC Desires, I've seen them, they're satisfied.

I'm not though.

I painted a beautiful picture in a heid of life with an HTC Desire, and this thing from Orange don't match it. It doesn't come close, it is a worse experience than my two year old BlackBerry Curve. And so, back to the shop it'll go.

Then what?

On Twitter @marksany is the herald of the iPhone. I have given this though. I like the idea of the iPhoniverse, the Apple life. I'd want an old school iPhone 3GS rather than the iPhone4, that antenna business hasn't been resolved satisfactorily.

But no, its not going to happen, I'm not at a point in my life where I can embrace the iPhone. I'm typing this blogpost on my Acer Aspire One net book, running Ubuntu. There's no iTune on Ubuntu. I have no Apple Mac, and my old Windows desktop 'puter is about to be packed away, and unlikely to ever reappear. Without some kind of home computer to 'tether' (if you will) the iPhone to I'd be missing a chunk of the iPhone experience. Its unsatisfactory.

I could be wrong.

I often am.

In fact, one of the main points of this blogpost is incorrect. It is possible to remove the Orange-installed apps from their HTC Desire. I can re-flash the memory with the uncorrupted Android OS. People off of Android fora all over the internet have done it. It voids the Orange warranty, but it resolves the issue. It requires a Windows PC, but it does resolve the issue. I'm unwilling to try. I've had the HTC Desire from Orange for just over 24 hours, and I think I prefer my old BlackBerry Curve.

Its possible, I guess, that in the next few days @conorfromorange might announce that the new version of the Android software, Froyo, is coming out to Orange users, and without is the removable of all the frustrating apps and shite that annoys me so.

But that won't help the crap 3G and GPS signal that thwarted my FourSquare dreams and subsequent moaning, but would that be enough to keep me as an Orange customer?

I don't like having my emotions toyed with like this. I've dumped beautiful women for less.

I fear maybe I'm being stupid and ungrateful here, that the HTC Desire from Orange is a great phone, loved by thousands, why don't I love it? Why must I make a fuss, why can't I just accept it the way it is, embrace it tightly and love it like I've loved others before?

I handed over fifty quid for it, when other upgrade phones would have been free. I paid for it, and all I got was heartache, a big load of heartache.

My next madcap scheme

For the past week or so, since I decided to put the Glasgow Indie Eyespy Movie on hold, I've been having a bit of a dilemma about what my next 'thing' is going to be. I need a focus, I need a thing to do.

I was undecided between picking up the Teach Yourself Java book I'd acquired a few weeks back, or picking up my guitar again.

A friend had urged me to set up a Facebook fan page without specifying why, so I did and found that I could use it for posting videos and stuff, so maybe I could do something like my old video webcasty thing from Glasgow, but bang in the new decade, with just me playing guitar. Could I record a song every night? Even if its just a cover or something I'd written years ago. How long could I keep it going for? Would it become a thing that would help get me a slot at next years Indietracks? Would other people want to get involved? Some cute stripey-topped keyboard player, or a very tall bass player. Would it work?

On the other hand, learning Java would be useful, I could put it on my CV, or use it for building neat web apps, like one that would generate a heatmap for KML feeds from Foursquare, or some fancy automated way of compiling the list of videos from Indietracks bands by scraping some kind of feed. It could get me a well lush job guffawing all day on the internet and shedloads of money with which to redistribute to London's Indiepop music scene and purveyors of Xbox 360 Elites.

I couldn't decide, so I used the marvel that is AllOurIdeas.org. Its a simple organic poll engine I fell in love with a week or so ago when I tried to find out what was the most pressing civil liberties issue facing the UK government.

Neglecting the use of the word 'madcap' I put up the question "what should my next time wasting/life enriching scheme be?", along with three options:-

• Java
• Video webcasty things of my playing guitar
• Abusing other people's photies of Indietracks by using them to reenact South Park

The last option being a wildcard, cos I'm just a crazy kind of guy. AllOurIdeas allows respondents to add additional suggestions into the mix.

So after three days I find a clear favourite has emerged, one suggested by someone else.

They want me to have kids.

Could be difficult, cos its not really the sort of thing I can do on my own in my bedroom, like the other options, but if that's what the internet has decided for me, then so be it.

On the other hand, another received suggestion was to "quit the internet for a few weeks, see how evolve without it".

That would be weird.

Anyhoo, kids it is!

Hot or Not for everything with All Our Ideas

I found a link to a really cool website, its called www.allourideas.org and its the greatest innovation on the entire internet ever, trust me.

Its like Hot or Not, but for opinions. Here, take a look at http://www.allourideas.org/ukcivlib while I explain...

I've asked the question "What is the most pressing civil liberties issue facing the British Government?" And I've suggested three answers, smoking band, photography, cctv. The website offers you two answers at random and you can chose one of the other.

Or you can suggest something new, then the next people who visit the site can chose from those I suggested and those suggested by other people.

On the results page you can then see which answers are most popular and which are least popular.

In the case of the other week's government crowd-sourcing exercise in suggesting which laws to repeal, it was bogged down in thousands of irrelevant and dumb suggestions in a matter of hours. With All Our Ideas the best ones float to the top and the least popular ones sink.

Apparently the folk who created the site got the idea from KittenWars but the Hot Or Not site has been around for years. I'm just glad that someone has put together this sort of thing now.

It took me about thirty seconds to set up my http://www.allourideas.org/ukcivlib this sort of thing is easy now. let me know if there's any other neat questions out there.

London Bloggers Meetup:- Talk Talk

Wha, where, when... A month passes, I emerge from London's underground network, into Oxford Circus and Soho, only a few moments ago I was in darkest Wembley, eating Chinese and looking for my phone charger. The evening of the London Blogger's meetup has come round again.

I emerge blinking into the sunlight, looking for familiar sounding street names, and before long find myself outside the Talk Talk Customer Experience place. Large glass front, neon lights, there are many people inside.

I step in, fail to think of something amusing to write on a name tag, then go looking for people I know.

I find some and we chat. The talk covers many topics but one that sticks in ma heid is the Old Spice advert.

There is a speaker, this evening a cycling Rob talking about podcasting. Its a very indepth talk, covering what hardware to use (the latest Zoom recordery thing), what software to use (audacity) and what services to use to host and cast your pod cast. More of the details are at this link here, but what sticks in my mind is RadioKate's interruption pointing out that Audioboo has new features that the cycling Rob didn't know about.

Crikey, that must be unsettling, having you talk corrected by an audience member. I keep wondering what I'd talk about if it was me up there, what would I say that would hold people's attention, could I even hold people's attention at all.

The short train of thought lead me to ponder, would Andy the LBM organiser consider hosting a special, where all the regular bloggery meetuppery people had to do a 60 second talk. Some deal with twenty slides in a minutes or something. Would that entertain?

Anyhoo, the evening was hosted by talktalk, they were generous with their nibbles and booze and net access, I feel a bit guilty for the blog posts what I wrote back in February its not their fault, its BT with their hellish slow line connections. I hope that it doesn't matter who I direct my frustration at, as long as I vent it.

Regular readers of my blog will know I'm currently trying to write a screenplay, in the vague hope that someone reads it and decides its the greatest and most imaginative thing ever and then goes on to shower me with money and makes it. This you already knew.

I had an idea, a wee cutaway flashforward scene, like what they drop in to Scrubs or Lost. The scene involves a familiar character mentioning someone they know, some significant person in their like that the film's main protagonist doesn't know, the the flash forward to four years in the future, the protagonist finds themselves at a party or blogger's meetup, completely unrelated to four years earlier, chatting with a person who gives away just enough information to identify them as the person their friend mentioned. Then suddenly back to the narative.

As is my usual 'thing' for these blogger meetups, here's a list of bloggery people I spoke to.

• Aref-Adib
• Nima
• Peter marshall - My London Diary
  
• Thomas debuzzy
• Tom - Flashboy
• RadioKate
• Pradeep - Blogger User
  
• James - Battle Theme London
• Angus
• Reyes
• Melissa - Miss Geeky
• As - BBC
• Anna - Completely Novel - cool book publishing site
• Phil - Red rocket
• Rob - Real cycling
  
• Anthony - Fresh Plastic
• Caroline - Caroline's Miscellany - London's historical curiousities
• Longhaired crazy seat slasher chap
  
• His less haired friend called Matt

And here's a list of folk I made vague eye contact with or possibly nodded at and they nodded recognition back

• Lolly - blog til you drop
• Tom - Tired of life
• Doreen owl elbows - Tasty Fever
  
• Andy Bargery - The Marketing Blagger
  
• Londoneer
• Tiki Chris
• Annie Mole
• Proactive paul
• Guitar churchy
  

And here's a graph showing how such lists compare with previous London Bloggers Meetups.

Well, I think I've set myself a new record, cheesy grins all round.

Titter, chortle, guffaw.

High end audio at Best Buy

As promised earlier, this weekend I made the epic journey to the new Best Buy store at the Lakeside retail park in Thurrock.

We made up a rhyme, "so much that I want to buy, that I cannot justify". Right now, at my stage in life I am skint and the only thing I can justify spending money is a mains lead for my old WD 500gb external hard drive. Alas modern drives of that capacity just run off usb, and have no additional power requirements. Best Buy had no spare mains lead department.

At home I currently have no broadband internet, I can only survive by going to a nearby friend's flat and using their wifi. If only there were a way to boost my friend's wifi, so I could use it from the other end of the corridor. At Best Buy I put this problem to their Geek Squad and as I'd previously predicted they sucked their teeth and said no.

With these issued addressed, I thought I'd have a look at their hi-fi and home cinema set ups as suggested at last week's bloggers meetup.

The first thing that struck me was their Loewe tv set up. It set my teeth on edge and made me sick a little in my mouth.

I've had dealings Loewe tvs before, in one of the setup menus there's some kind of image enhance setting that sounds great, but it fucks the picture. Its hard to describe how, but it does something to the lighting and motion that makes anything you watch look like it was done in a cheap American sit-com studio blue screen.

It doesn't matter what you're watch, James Bond or Avatar, it just looks crap, un-movie-like.

What pains me more is that people don't notice or object.

Its like when widescreen tellys and movies first came on the market, and in shops and home people would watch stuff with the wrong aspect ratio, so it was stretched or squashed - distorted, and folk would shrug, "its widescreen, its supposed to be like that"

No, its wrong. Its like you've broken the movie. Would you play a 33rpm record at 45rpm?

It amazes me that any shop anywhere manages to sell Loewe tvs.

At Best Buy they had several demonstration rooms for hi-fi, high end audio and home cinema.

A few times when I was young my pa took me to hi-fi shops, they were quiet, dusty places, lots of wood panelled speakers and turntables decked in smoked perspex. People studying specifications and quietly asking attendants if they could listen to certain systems.

When I worked at Linn Products and Roksan Audio, again, listening to things was a quiet and patient experience, setting up the system, listening to a piece of music, adjusting or changing the system, then listening again, comparing contrasting, adjusting and deciding.

Not so at Best Buy, demonstration rooms blasting out blockbuster movies, endless arrays of speakers blaring out whatever kids listen to these days.

My ears aren't delicate flowered but I couldn't bear to stand in the demoroom for more than a few seconds before retiring. It was just too stressful and unrelaxing.

Is a fight scene from Transformers 2 really the best thing for demonstration surround sound, or is it just designed to bewilder and confuse customers so they buy any old crap and escape as quickly as possible?

One of the demonstration room was kitted out with the walls decked with every single speaker they sold. Do you know how speakers work? They have a cone that moves in and out, to reproduce sound, how the cone moves is precisely controlled by the amplifier/ preamp playing whatever mp3/CD/record you're listening to. The waves of sound pressure come from the speaker, bouncing off walls and the floor and ceiling to varying degrees until they reach your ears. This is something people rarely need to consider, except if you work testing high end audio or if you are about to spend a lot of money on speakers. By a lot of money, I mean anything more than what you earn in a week.

Anyhoo, these waves of sound pressure will bounce off smooth surfaces and get absorbed by soft or furry surfaces, like carpets, curtains and sofas. Try listening to music with they curtains in your room open or closed, the music will sound different. Try standing in the corner and speaking and then moving into the middle of the room and doing the same, you'll sound very different. Imagine if the walls moved freely, this is essentially what happens if you have loads of speakers in one room and only listen to two at a time.

For each speaker for any room there will be a sweet setup, the distance its positioned from the walls, the angle it's toed in at, the distance it is from its partners.

In Best Buy you can't listen to any speakers or any sound system and make an accurate judgement about which sound better than others. No matter how much money you throw at them when you get those speakers home they're going to sound completely different to how they did at the store.

They may very likely sound better than they did in the store, they couldn't sound much worse. Best Buy's setup seems design to get the worst performance out speakers on the home cinema side of the store.

I might have got the wrong end of the stick with the speaker, mind, that in the demonstration room with hundreds decked out on the walls, you're not supposed to listen to them, and its merely just to see what they looked like. If that's the case then I apologise for the ranting of the previous few paragraphs.

Oddly though, on the other side of the building they get it right. In the games console demonstration room, the speakers are set up perfectly, the screen is set up great. They're doing it right. Pick any game you want to play, and you can have a go in the best gaming, video and audio environment I've seen in a long while.

It only half makes sense. In the gaming room, they're doing it right, but not trying to sell speakers or tvs, and in the home cinema/audio room, where they are trying to sell hardware, they're doing it wrong.

I fear there's nothing I can do to help them.
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Paul Chambers guilty and the twitter joke trial

Twitter just exploded a little bit.

Some months ago, a chap called Paul J Chambers was feeling frustrated that Robin Hood Airport in Nottingham was closed so he posted on Twitter the following message:-

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!

Someone forwarded it to the authorities, who investigated and after some degree of wrangling in the British justice system he's been found guilty and fined £1,000.

Twitter is one of the greatest broadcasting media of the century, it's unwise to piss off the hive mind.

After Jack of Kent blogged, Twitter went crazy, with messages such as this one being retweeted all over the shop.

@caitlinmoran: Christ, if people are being fined £1k for making bad jokes on Twitter, I might as well start wanking tramps for change now #twitterjoketrial

There were rumblings about setting up a donation fund to pay the fine and any other costs incurred by Paul, Old Holborn, the rebellious blogosphere's failed PPC is on the case. But it may not be enough to satisfy the twitterers, they want blood, This message seems to be exploding a wee bit too.

RT @davelength: Retweet this is if you believe Keir Starmer should resign as Director of Public Prosecutions. #twitterjoketrial

Gotta wonder though, if only the jury at the trial had heard of Jury Nullification, then all the fuss could have been missed. Just cos someone broke the law, doesn't mean they're guilty if the law is an ass. Wasn't a jury trial, merely before magistrates.

National Jury Nullification Awareness Day

I have just discovered the concept of 'Jury Nullification' and it sounds wonderful.

Over on BoingBoing, on of the most popular blogs on the web, Cory Doctorow has been covering a case where Peter Watts, a critically acclaimed sci-fi writer friend of his, ran into a bit of trouble returning to Canada from the USA. US border guards stopped his vehicle, started searching it, punched him in the face and ordered him to the ground, as he was in a bit of a daze he was too slow complying with their command, that's a felony offence in the US so he may be going to jail for two years.

Somewhere in comments someone mentioned the concept of Jury Nullification, whereby if the law is an ass, the jury can find the defendant innocent even though he broke the law. Apparently its an ancient legal tradition, on of the ways laws get adjusted and keep up to date with the times, except judges in the US aren't allowed to advise the juries on it's existence and its against the law to mention it.

Not so in the UK, judges just don't mention it as it diminishes their power, so its not in their interest for juries to know about it.

Anyhoo, its starts to appear in the comments section of more blogs in regards to the Peter Watts case, and the subsequent comments just highlight how little known it is.

There has been much talk of appeal, and of jury nullification. My understanding is that appeals are only considered on procedural grounds. I don’t know much about jury nullification, and the conflicting opinions I’ve seen here don’t leave me much the wiser.

From Tdawwg, a BoingBoing commenter

Jury nullification due to morally queasy jurors fills me with terror, honestly. Not nearly as much terror as what the guards did to Watts, but enough: anarchy is a horrible substitute for creeping totalitarianism.

Understandably, the fear being that regional prejudices and the voice of the mob could be bad, as commenter StrangeFriend says:-

I can see your point, though. Southern juries refused to convict white men for killing 'uppity' black men.

Its not perfect, but in the UK where the government are churning out so many new laws and we're slowly approaching living in a totalitarian state, it would be a useful too for the people to have at their disposal.

Blogger Avogadro's Number makes this point neatly

Zero tolerance: applying a law to every possible instance, and applying the maximum amount of force allowed, without regard to circumstances.

Jury nullification: negating the zero tolerance effect by considering circumstances and choosing not to enforce an outrageously applied law.

There is actually a precedence for Jury Nullification in the UK, as wikipedia informs us

In 1982, during the Falklands War, the British Royal Navy sank an Argentine Cruiser – the "ARA General Belgrano". A civil servant (government employee) named Clive Ponting leaked two government documents concerning the sinking of the cruiser to a Member of Parliament (Tam Dalyell) and was subsequently charged with breaching section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911. The judge in the case directed the jury to convict Ponting as he had clearly contravened the Act by leaking official information about the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War. His main defense, that it was in the public interest that this information be made available, was rejected on the grounds that "the public interest is what the government of the day says it is", but the jury nevertheless acquitted him, much to the consternation of the Government.

But that was the best part of thirty years ago. I fear there are too few more recent examples of 12 people knocking back a law they find unjust.

If the government and the courts aren't going to make people aware of the concept of Jury Nullification, then its up to the internet.

Give me my internet - part 7

- In which Vodafone cause pain to WIN -

Days and days have passed since the nice man from Vodafone called me up and promised to have a mobile broadband dongle delivered in 24 hours. A wee note slipped through my door of Friday, letting me know that they tried to deliver it, but failed, so I called the number on the card and arrange to pick up the dongle from a depot somewhere in darkest Park Royal.

I have it now before me, plugged into my Acer Aspire One netbook with Ubuntu running.

It blinks at me.

It taunts me.

It does not connect me to the internet, instead I must sneakily use my attractive young ladyfriend's net connection to find out how to get this damned thing to work.

Most people use Windows for their computing, it has a 92% market share. Mac has a 5.16% market share and Linux (upon which Ubuntu is based) has a 1% market share. The Vodafone dongle comes with Windows and Mac drivers on it. But for Ubuntu you have to get online, and via helpful posts from GreenHuges we discover the existence of Betavine, Vodafone's secret open-source software research and development facility. Further clicking and ploughing gets me to the page with instructions for getting it to work on Ubuntu Linux.

I got the Vodafone Mobile Connect application all right, but it doesn't find the K3675 dongle I've got plugged in to the right side of my netbook.

I'm not quite sure what information I can type in to get it recognised, It asks for "Device type:" and only gives me the option of Serial, this dongle is USB right, so that ain't gonna work.

Then "Data port device", "Control port device" and "Speed connection:" I got no idea.

Damn you Vodafone, why why why can't I get online?

Can't anyone help me?

Blogish Juxtaposition #2

Compare this from Mark Pack about the decline or not of wikipedia

and this from Boing Boing about Switzerland banning minarets

Wikipedia is great and democracy is great. Sometimes they both get a little soggy round the edges and you don't get the results you want, but they're both the least bad system compared to political systems that don't represent the views of the people and shut out outsiders from contributing.

Old Holborn is right on the money with the Swiss thing

Missed the point by a mile, the people of Switzerland have the direct right to say how their country is run, basically they told their Government this was a step too far. In this country we would have running fights in the street between the BNP and left hired thugs, plus the Government would give them a fifty per cent grant.

Me, no political party I've voted for has won an election I've voted in, that's part of democracy.

ill and ancient

I've been ill in bed for two days now, shivering, coughing, my fluids trying to escape from all facial orifices, and my head, it hurts so.

The keyboard on my wee laptop is too small to type on easily, I keep hitting caps lock or some other key that sends the cursor to the top of the screen or some other window or anywhere but where I want it.

Life goes on, the internet's still buzzing.

The latest story to hit the blogsphere is that CRU was hacked and so there are a load emails out there where climate change scientists conspire to keep the sceptics silent. Here's blogger Bishop Hill announcing the hack and here's confirmation that its for real.

And its getting a little coverage on the BBC but only on the hacking and computer security aspect of the story, rather than that the people advising world governments on climate change are a bunch of snakes.

I'm not that clued up on all the acronyms so I'll be building a glossary of them here

• AGU - The American Geophysical Union "A worldwide scientific community"
  
• CRU - The Climatic Research Unit based at the University of East Anglia
• FOIA - The Freedom Of Information Act the general right of access to information held by public authorities
  
• GRL - Geophysical Research Letters a research journal
• The Hadley Centre - The Met Office's climate change research lab
  
• IPCC - The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• IPCC TAR - The IPCC Third Assessment Report
• IPCC TAR SPM - The IPCC TAR Summary for Policy Makers
  

And I guess, just to be helpful, the main players in the emails:-

• Professor Phil Jones - Head of the CRU at the University of East Anglia, notable for maintaining of the time series of the instrumental temperature record; this work figured prominently in the IPCC TAR SPM. He is director of the Climatic Research Unit and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He holds a BA in Environmental Sciences from the University of Lancaster, and an MSc and PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne - thought that the death of climate change sceptic John L Daly is 'cheering news'
• Professor Ray Bradley - climatologist and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also research director of the Climate System Research Center. Also contributing author to IPCC TAR and IPCC TAR SPM
• Malcolm K Huges - a meso-climatologist and Regents' Professor of Dendrochronology in the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. He was born in Matlock, Derbyshire, England, and earned a Ph.D in ecology from the University of Durham. Since 1998, he is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union

And for completeist's sake here's a list of the crimes revealed in the emails

• Phil Jones saying John L Daly's death is 'cheering news'
• Phil Jones perpetuating Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
• Trying to get Saiers ousted from the GRL

And other blogs that have covered this story far better than I

• Bishop Hill with highlighting the magic emails here
• Watt's up with that
• An Englishman's Castle
• Devil's Kitchen and here and here
• Tom Nelson and here
  
• The Blackboard
• Climate Audit
• RealClimate (response from CRU)
  

wardro.be

I had this great idea for a website, and it'll make millions if it ever works or gets off the ground or anything. But being the sort of person who shoots himself int he foot as a matter of principle, rather than keeping quiet about it, doing a few years of development and beta testing, I'll just write about it here so someone else can do all the work.

My idea is last.fm for clothes!!!

Is that not a work of genius?

Last.fm is this website that tracks what music you listen to, it lists all your favourite artists and tracks, and recommends similar artists and you can look up what other people are listening to and join groups of fans and now you can stream music for free from last.fm and buy tickets and get regular email updates and all the usual social media sorts of things.

My idea for last.fm for clothes (or wardro.be as I'd call it if someone else hadn't alread parked the url) would be the same sort of thing. The first page for newbies would say "What are you wearing today?" and and on the left you click through different options.

• Hat
• Shirt
• T-shirt
• Plain
• Black
• Marks&Sparks
• 2008
• other
  
• H&M
• C&A
• other
  
• White
• Yellow
• other
  
• Pattern
• Print
• other
  
• Jeans
• Shoes
• other
  

And on the right it has this stylised fashiony picture that gets populated with your choices, and at the bottom of the page it updates with recommendation, like what shoes most people wear with the other clothes you've chosen, or what celebrities wear when they wear the same combinations, or what you already have in your wardrobe or other clothes tagged the same.

And for each full outfit you do, you can tag it, like 'work', 'goth', 'wedding', 'twee', 'incorrectly labelled twee'.

And its all so much fun that once you've done what you're wearing today, you had scurry away to your wardrobe and drawers and the go through and add all the clothes you own. And they it 'll do its database magic and say which celebrities your fashion tastes most closely match, or who you fashion buddies would be in the world.

And the the next day when you visit the site, and enter what you're wearing you can click from your own wardrobe, and it'll suggest what other people wear, or what matches based on some 'pants stealing gnome' algorithm, and if you click through, it'll have a wee stylised picture of what you could be looking like.

See last.fm is only for people who listen to music, but everyone in the office wears clothes. Heck, you don't even have to do yourself, you can map the girl sitting next to you, and then use wardro.be to say "I think some red shoes would really match that outfit you're wearing".

The gimps who run the website will spend hours and hours adding the clothes of whoever's in the gossip mags each week, building up profiles of celebs. Fashionists can check to see what the latest fashions are. My ma can check if I need any socks, and if I do, which ones will most likely fit my tastes. Gok Wan sponsorship to recommend you try different combinations you've never thought of before.

Advertisers can buy ads for specific types of clothes wearing people. Affiliate linky people let users of wardro.be click through to buy the clothes they most need.

Stats enthusiasts could see who owns the most shoes or the most band t-shirts or the complete range of levi jeans. Marks and Sparks could upload their barcode database, so you can just scan instead of click

So on the back end of things, you've got

• one table many columned for items of clothing
• one table for who owns which clothes
• one table for who wore what combinations when and what tags they have

Its all going to need a funky user interface to keep it fun, and neat pictures or approximations of every item of clothing, and then some kind of provacy options so you can chose whether or not to let your flatmates, sister or ma rummage through your stuff.

But it could work, it could be bigger than last.fm.

So if any computery folk read this and think its great and make it happen and end up being millionaires based on my idea, can you buy me an X-Box 360, cheers.

Been doing it for years

BBC reports on a new internet service from Virgin...

For a monthly fee, Virgin's broadband customers will be able to download or stream as many MP3 files as they want.

Hasn't everyone been doing that for years anyway?

Conforming feet

Dug from the depths of the internet, here's a photie of feet that have worn shoes for much of their life, like most people in the west.

And here's a photie of feet that have never worn shoes, natural feet, if you will.

Although its not like our feet are bound like chinese ladies, we're still a long way of the natural look.

21st Century Rave

Reading this on The Register about how a Facebook flashmob replay of the T-Mobile Ad got an order of magnitude more people.

Original T-Mobile ad


February re-make


I'm wondering whether this is the 21st centuries version of the M25 raves of last century. And although its all about the technology rather than the drugs, I guess the vibe and the kinship is the same. But what's going to emerge as the soundtrack?

Are the music press onto this? Is there even a music press anymore? Can it be a band or a group who make the music, or some kind of mysterious soundsystem?

If I were designing or engineering the sound, it would start with crowd noise and train announcements, but indistinct, no actual words, or twoo distorted to hear words, and there'd be some kind of shibboleth or countdown before conventional 'music' kicks in. Maybe the music would just start off bass-heavy, rhythmic trains before convoluting into something more danceable.

Your polis and security wouldn't be aware of what was happening until the dance music kicks in, but up until that point the rest of the crowd would all be picking up these triggers, these audio cues.

Local Crime

Favourite new websitey thing of the hour

Crime Mapping - The Met's crime map website thing, bang in your postcode and check out crime in your ward and subward. It seems there were only 12 reported crimes in my area in November, down from 13 in October. And of those only 1 in November was a burglary, down from 4 in October. Similar numbers for car thefts. I think I won't bother locking my car from now on.

Monetarising websites with threshold tax

Twitter's great, I love that microblogging instant messenger type service thing. I'm sceptical that anyone reads my tweets, and other people seem to have more fun lives than me. Who cares anyway, its free. Twitter's free.

For me following thirty people and having forty following me in return, it costs the same as @jakeandamir and @barackobama with 2,500 and 150,000 followers respectively.

If twitter needs funding, can't they just set a subscription threshold? Their venture capital funding is about $15million a year.
For example, folk who are following more than a thousand people need to pay $5 per month. Here, there's over a thousand folk with more than a two thousand friends on twitter. I reckon that there's four thousand more folk with more than one thousand. So, assuming that half of them give up if you try to charge that for what was previously a free service, you can make

2500 x $5 x 12 = $150,000

Well, they need ten times that, but its a start.

With a second subscription tier, for the two hundred or so folk with four thousand friends, priced at $25 per month, these chaps are less likely to stop tweeting, so you can get subs from all of them.

400 x $25 x 12 +
2300 x $5 x 12 = $258,000

Hmph, quarter of a million might cover running costs. But its still no where near the venture capital funding, maybe if the threshold was brought down to five hundred friends and the first subscription tier was $3. That would get $500,000. That about half as much as is needed to cover wages.

Ah well, I thought it was an interesting idea. I'd name my three subscription tiers beer, burger and dinner, so when the punters pay it, its comparable to stuff they pay for already.

Backlash against Andy Burnham

On several websites there's coverage and debate over UK Culture Secretary Andy Burnham's thing about having a cinema ratings system. here here and here

People who live and breath on the internet are generally a creative bunch, they shouldn't reject Andy Burnham out of hand as being some kind of crazed fascist technophobe, he is after all an elected politician. Instead the homebrew community should embrace his proposals rather than wait for the government to legislate.

What we need is some special version of Firefox that only shows websites that have been 'approved' as inoffensive, and then some site/plugin like Digg or Stumbleupon when special administrators can approve and age-rate websites. You can apply to be an administrator/approver by sending your passport/biometric ID to a government office and enrolling in a the appropriate training program for your certification.

Parents and politicians who are concerned about viewing offensive and inappropriate material will be free to use the special 'Approved site only' version of Firefox, and set their age / offense tolerance for surfing. Perhaps they will get a special warning page if they try to access unapproved or 'offensive' pages.

When Andy Burnham spouts this sort of thing we can just send him a link to the approveable site and browser and suggest he get approving or disapproving sites in his spare time.

This site has it that there are around 30 billion webpages out there and currently grows at 5 billion a year, so say each one takes 10 seconds to approve or age-rate, you'll need a department of 8,000 full time approvers to do it. The payroll will cost around £200 million. And don't forget, these people will be paid to surf the internet all day.

Hmm, actually that 10 seconds to approve a page, that's like the minimum time. Some pages will be somewhat debateable, is it a certificate 12 page or PG or 15 or something inbetween? It could take a few orders of magnitude of time to rate them. Maybe if the approval office manager restricted each page viewing to 10 seconds and was approved by three different people and go with the majority. So our highly trained approval clerk will have a screen in front of him/her, a slot reader for their ID card and a keyboard with about ten buttons (U, PG, 12, 15, 18, XXX, illegal, pass, flag up, play/pause). If it was my approvals department, every month I'd sack the clerks responsible for the most minority reports and also imprison those with appeals against them.

And what about the appeals process? That'll take about 1,000 people, at a higher wage, with some law training.

And that warning page you get when you try to surf to an unapproved page, that's going to need a button on it to flag it up for priority approval. Oh god, the priority approvals process, its going to require a department of size in rough proportion to the number of people surfing the internet in the UK at any one time.

Hmm, with these considerations that £200 million estimate seems a little low, £1 billion might be more appropriate, if the internet grows at a constant rate.

And after a year, no one uses the system, we can say we tried it and it failed, and it was Andy Burnham's idea, his track record may become a track record of FAIL.

Inspi

Incredibly frustrated by this netbook now, I thought that I could just install loads of neat and useful software to my Acer Aspire One wot I bought the other week as a replacement for my regular laptop when it died.

But alas, its not so simple.

I wanna do a really neat post-it note animation, I've been having 3D Monster Chase dreams it was this Doom-like game for the Amstrad CPC 464 twenty-five years ago, and my boredom tolerance has reached the point where I could draw the maze and animate running around it, but alas, my scanner doesnae work with this operating system, and besides I have no animation software or out that can stitch jpgs into mpgs.

I've got half a dozen songs in ma heid which I need to record and sling up, but there's no pre-loaded software to do it and I can't find owt that works with this variety of Linux. There's mic socket on the side, but thats no use, and the built in mic only seems to work for the webcam. Christ, it lets you record video from the webcam, but its impossible to do anything with the video.

I was talking to some musicy chap last night about the various music scenes and promoters around London, and after my mind boggled for a while I figured it would be neat to do some kind of hookup network diagram, linking bands to promoters, but its not to be with this OS.

Its been ages since I did any ill theatre drawings, my graphics tablet doesn't have drivers for this machine, and I can't just draw stuff on paper and scan it. I guess I could draw with biro, then take a photie then dick around with the gimp, but thats just too convoluted.

Playing MP3s is a bitch, the pre-loaded MP3 player is an ass, it takes forever to look at my removeable hard disc cos there's a few thousand more files than it can handle. I installed VLC which is some kind of free media player, but from the Acer website it appears to not have any codecs loaded, so its no good to anyone. What was the name of that open source media player, Songbird?

There's not IRC client easily available. I fear I may never enter the Bowlie chatroom again, my friends there long gone, lost into the ether. Truly this is the time Bowlie finally died.

Oh, and fucking hell, I have no CD burning facilities no more.

What happened? When did computers suddenly stop working? Its like we're back to 1993 technology where you never know if whatever you've bought, or downloaded is going to work, and you have to scrabble around for days trying to plug everything together and set ever thing up.

I have less than no money, can some PC company send me a computer that works, I promise I'll sing its praises from all of my websites and everything I can use it to create.

**UPDATE**
Oh and fucking hellski, I can't even watch The IT Crowd on Channel 4's catch up service cos it only supports Windows PCs. It's kind of like both of my legs and one of my arms have been tied behind my back and three of the fingers on my remaining hand are taped together, and my eyes, like I'm wearing some steampunk Cyberdog glasses with horns coming out.