2001-12-08»
Sat Dec 8 10:30:00 2001»
Clambering over the heavy folds of morning to bring you:
Boo-ya! At last, a critique of Web design I can get my teeth into. Also, a new determinating term: stylist. – A List Apart
Call me cranky, but contrast Nigo’s t-shirts and posters to the painstakingly worked-out, user-need-driven work of one of the creators featured in British Rail Design , say Jock Kinneir himself. Is this an unfair comparison, a sterling example of apples v. oranges? Absolutely. Because only one of the two works in the field of design.
The other is best described as a stylist.
Read the copyright fine print; win a car. – Boing Boing
Flash stylists for civil liberties! – Tom Paine
How to win at Rock, Stone, Scissors and therefore have cheaper sex in a Japanese whorehouse. – AccordionGuy
Two things about this XBox modders’ story (via Slashdot). First, that Microsoft asked him to take down the BIOS image *twelve hours* after it went up (that’ll be Google-as-limit-on-free-speech). Second: he’s got an MP3 up of the phone request.
Ever since I worked at the Guardian and we uploaded the Aitken/Ritz faxes, I’ve always wanted articles to include as footnotes the supporting evidence: MP3s of phone calls, the notes, the e-mails, the books read, the employees interviewed. Journalists say it’s hard to do because of legal implications and the difficulty of preserving anonymity. That’s often true, but not always. What is always true is that this paraphernalia is often halting, confused, and a bit amateurish. Few journalists can bare to listen to their interview tapes themselves, let alone hand them over to the public. One part of a journalists’ job is to polish and re-edit this mess until you have a coherent, lively, readable tale.
But the truth isn’t lively, readable or professional. And it’s coherent in a way that we can’t anticipate. I think the faster we learn to discriminate between storytelling and the universe, the better.
On which note, Seth has a piece on the stories we tell ourselves of crypto and usability.
Comments Off on Sat Dec 8 10:30:00 2001
2001-12-07»
Fri Dec 7 13:59:00 2001»
Post NTK reshuffle:
Welp, so much for the EC taking care of human rights: Europe succumbs to UK pressure on data retention – ZDNet
The editorials in the Hamas Weekly are fantastically lurid. The Daily Mail has nothing on this Ode To Anthrax, as translated by the pro-Israeli MEMRI:
“I swear that your story is peculiar. The Americans see you as an imminent attack that is about to shake the lady with the proboscises that suck the blood of the peoples? All [the rulers of Arab and Islamic countries] tell [the U.S.] ? every time she farts, ? “Allah bless you” ? Nevertheless, you have found your way to only eight American breasts so far?”
Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation spoke at Xerox Parc last night. Rose is quietly-spoken and seemed a little shy in front of the curmudgeonly, Waldorf-and-Statler crowd at Xerox. He won them over, of course. He ran through some of the features of the 10,000 year clock, but concentrated on the Rosetta Disk project. The disks contain examples of a 1000 languages, micro-encoded onto nickel plate and embedded into a sphere, one half tungsten, the other a domed magnifying glass.
A selection of the most popular languages are arranged in a spiral lines around the edge. Each spiral contains the first words of Genesis (the only text the Long Now could find which is translated into enough languages). Each letter grows smaller as the text spirals into the center. The last letter of the spiral is the same size as the rest of the thousand language texts encoded in the center of the disk.
We’ve reached the point of civilisation where we’re creating Mysterious Alien Artifacts™.
Comments Off on Fri Dec 7 13:59:00 2001
2001-12-06»
Thu Dec 6 10:05:00 2001»
Good Morning, East Ham:
When doing scientific research into the onset of seasons, don’t forget leap years. Science Daily
Writing a braille driver for Linux: Linux Weekly News
We were lucky – Dave Mielke wrote a new driver within only two days and it was working right out of the box.
It might have been easier for Dave Mielke, if he actually had the hardware in front of him. But as Dave Mielke lives in Canada and we in Denmark (Europe) and he had no device, he had to do it in blind – so to speak. Well, Dave Mielke is actually 100% blind, so the C program really was written in the blind.
Comments Off on Thu Dec 6 10:05:00 2001
2001-12-05»
Wed Dec 5 08:45:00 2001»
Morning rounds:
Audiences fascinate me. I went to see Robert Anton Wilson speak last night, and the mix – while pretty heavily tilted towards the LSD end of the culture pool – was fascinating. A smattering of sweet, awe-struck teenagers (“H-h-how did you even begin to th-th-think of Schrodinger’s Cat?”), a fistful of RAW contemporaries raucous at the back, serious twenty-somethings querying well-worn conspiracy trivia, a man who repeatedly asks in gentle voice about the nature of hyperspace, and a surprising number of couples, including us. Wilson himself spoke for three hours. He rarely flagged, never held back with the zinging Swiftian end-jokes, even as he relished retelling anecdotes for no doubt the billionth time. He made us all Discordian Popes, except Quinn, who has always refused the title, no matter how many times she’s been elected to it. He recommended Terry Southern. He told me whether Father Christmas exists or not.
Comments Off on Wed Dec 5 08:45:00 2001
2001-12-04»
Tue Dec 4 10:28:00 2001»
Morning genetically-modified roundup:
A look at Naked News Obscure Store – they want to introduce naked foreign correspondents.
“The tone was always to be news naked,” Pinckert says. “The nudity was a metaphor for getting down to the bare facts, the naked truth, if you will.” In other words, the nudity doesn’t undermine their credibility, it enhances it.
Fat has a taste. Science Daily – making it the sixth sense (after sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami.)
Just got the official announcement from AT&T that my Net connection is back up (it’s been up since yesterday lunchtime, but you can understand them waiting until everything cleared). I’ve been quite impressed by the switch-over. If the DHCP reconfig didn’t work, the AT&T engineers set up fake @home DNS and News servers that tell you to manually change your settings. The DNS hack is clever and the newsserver is a sign they were really paying attention. ISP’s never remember the newserver.
Comments Off on Tue Dec 4 10:28:00 2001
2001-12-03»
Mon Dec 3 17:12:00 2001»
Feh. Just when I promised myself to be a bit assiduous on the blogging, AT&T ceases to be @home. Back up now, thanks to some stealthy listening for ARP calls on the cable circuit.
Evening scan:
Blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah.
Journalist Thrown Off Flight for Taking Photos wartimeliberty.com
Appears to be more extenuated than first meets the eye (the paranoid Guard, it’s implied, is a undercover drugs officer). Worrying though – and I know someone is going to say “Well, serves the journalist right. He shouldn’t have been practicing Yoga”.
Al Qaeda Spokesman Abu Ghaith Seriously Wounded al jazeera
The laptops for schools pilot project mefi that lead to a general rollout of PCs to Maine’s kids says wireless networks made it a success:
“If they had to plug the laptops into a wall someplace to get Internet access I don’t think we would be seeing the impact we have,” said Priest. “Untethering the technology has been key, so that it is as easy as using a pencil and piece a paper.”
On the other hand, judging from another pilot project in VA, it’s not all beer and skittles
In the past four weeks, we have discovered that some students have been using the Internet excessively for personal use during school time. This has put a tremendous strain on the network, creating network traffic which is preventing the effective usage of iBooks for their intended educational purposes.
\. discussion on Cingular’s 2.5G mobile rollout. I was at the same 802.11 conference that GlennF blogged so finely, and I agree with him: it was eye-opening how the US mobile telcos are coming to the unlicensed side of the Force.
One speaker mentioned that telcos planning 2.5G/3G networks really didn’t want wandering desktop apps on laptops consuming large amounts of bandwidth over the cellular net. They want to charge by the packet on 3G, and applications that would require hours of data transfer would make those rates look ridiculous. Customers, the thinking goes, will be happy at paying a $1 for a minute long video clip, but would seriously balk at $60 an hour for file-sharing.
Somebody else I spoke to – again from a big mobile telco – mentioned that the cost-effectiveness of the 802.11 base stations compared to 3G. Even though the range is so crummy, 3G basestations currently cost >$100,000. “I’d much prefer to rollout an 802.11 based network.”, he said, unprompted. This fits in with a comment by Monica Paolini that real estate owners are the people who will determine the nature and cost of large scale 802.11 rollouts – with such short range, there’s a lot more negotiating and partnerships with the people living under your basestation to be done.
Comments Off on Mon Dec 3 17:12:00 2001
2001-11-28»
Thu Nov 29 07:01:00 2001»
The morning rounds:
Fancy schmancy Scandi wireless mag, with great wireless poster.
Despite being Mr Privacy Man a lot of the time, I’ve often wondered exactly how the “creeping loss of rights” game plays out. Do soft concessions like widespread CCTVs really lead to more pernicious abuses? I’d say this case might be a good litmus test of public reaction:
Litter louts to be filmed, have their pictures published.
London’s growing army of litter louts are to be named and shamed in a special “rogues gallery” as part of a groundbreaking new clean-up campaign.
Merton Council, in south London, plans to use its 60 CCTV surveillance cameras to zoom in on anybody dropping litter.
Comments Off on Thu Nov 29 07:01:00 2001
2001-11-19»
Mon Nov 19 16:46:00 2001»
I’m sure it’ll zoom up the charts but I do like Secret Santa
Comments Off on Mon Nov 19 16:46:00 2001
2001-11-07»
Wed Nov 7 21:13:00 2001»
Of course, it’s very easy for me to do this. But it’s just as easy if you live in the UK too: 
Comments Off on Wed Nov 7 21:13:00 2001
2001-11-06»
Tue Nov 6 20:28:00 2001»
A perfectly decent Flash program after Quinn’s finished with it:
Comments Off on Tue Nov 6 20:28:00 2001
