Currently:
2003-08-20»
bill thompson: info-anarchy as cultural imperialism»
Bikinis
in Saudi Arabia: info-anarchy as cultural imperialism. Noted without
comment. I do wish Bill would come a bit more out into the fray. He keeps
punting out these ideas and then never replies to the criticisms (apart from
in this constrained environment of mind-tennis game with Siva Vaidhyanathan).
I'm sure he must read his detractors. Who is he talking to?
Siva says that "this issue is not about bikinis in Saudi Arabia", but
of course it is. It is about the ability of a government to assert
appropriate authority over online activity, whether it is in breach of
copyright law or against public standards of morality. Pushing for
information anarchy is just another way of endorsing US cultural
imperialism, with its stress on US values and free trade. When cultural
floodgates are opened - and abandoning any possibility of regulating the
net in favour of p2p-induced anarchy would open them - then US culture
comes to dominate. Look at the film industry or the games market.
Alright, noted without much comment.
2003-08-19»
a day of firsts»
Ups and downs. Ada got her first food and I got my first dunking in rice
cereal today. She's also a bit poorly with her first virus. She takes being
ill well: lots of pained half-smiles and plenty of sleep. I am completely
amazed that harmless childhood viruses really do result in red polka-dots. I
thought that only happened in cartoons. We carry some entertainingly visual
DNA fragments on our broad shoulders.
Hutton Inquiry no longer a frame-up»
We've been running a competition on NTK
to get people to redesign shit nebsites - literally, pulling the useful
content dynamically from the terrible sites and redisplaying it in something
close to usable form. Think of it as the paramilitary wing of the usability
movement. Anyway, the de facto leader of this practice, Matthew Somerville,
has just hacked together a marked
improvement on the laudable but javascript-o-frame-o-riffic official Hutton Inquiry
site.
2003-08-14»
junk dna, and bernard lietaer on money, community and social change»
Quinn told me two years ago that
the basic problem with the global economy was that the idea of money was
broken. Around the same time she announced that junk DNA had to have some sort
of function, despite what current theories indicated. I humour Quinn on these
and other theories, as long as she doesn't talk so loudly that the geneticists
and economics professors at the next table hear her speak that way.
Today I discover that a) some scientists are coming to the same
conclusion about junk DNA, and b) the guy who co-designed and
implemented the convergence mechanism for the Euro, and co-founded one of the
largest and most successful currency funds, Bernard Lietaer, agrees with her about money.
I can only conclude that those bastards were scribbling notes on their
napkins all along.
california recall confession»
Is it bad to secretly wish Schwarzenegger gets in, just because of the
excellent rewrites of California
Uber Alles it will encourage?
2003-08-13»
co-loco»
The co-location company that hosts a community server with which I'm
involved went bust - at 11am yesterday. Without telling anyone, including
their own tech support and hosting facility.
I suppose we could have predicted this. We've been trying to pay them for
for a few months now, with very little success. Hard fast rule of e-commerce:
if you make it impossible for people to pay you, and yet you are expecting to
be paid, something bad will happen.
We can tell the precise point at which the co-loc company ceased to co or
loc, because at that moment our machine vanished off the Net. A lot of
heavyweight sysadmin types run their mail from this box, so turning off the
packets is a bit like throwing up the BOFH-Signal into the sky. Heads
turn.
First step when a hosting company spontaneously bankrupts: get your box out
of there before the creditors mistakenly melt it down for slag. A fantastic
friend who runs her company from the box ran cross-town to airlift it out.
Serendipitously she bumped into a guy who is running a hosting outfit in the
racks upstairs. He's an ex-employee of our co-loc, and realising what is going
on, kindly takes us (and I'm guessing several other bedraggled servers) on
board and plugs us into his network.
He's given us a few days leeway to sort ourselves out, but - always
assuming this all hasn't been part of his evil masterplan - I think we'll go
with him. He's still at that phase where he knows all his customers and
answers the phone himself. I still have problems explaining to people why
little ISPs like this seem to work better than big ones. I guess, if I wasn't
so dog-tired, I'd say that the economies and diseconomies of Internet services
are shaped like a big mexican hat. You can scale up pretty quickly, and then
it all goes to shit until, if you're lucky, you sell out to someone big enough
to run matters properly again. You can either be Henry Ford or William
Morris, but you can't be Mr In-Between.
petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.
