Oblomovka

2002-09-04»

I’m not sure, but I think Americans believe more fervently in the saving grace of the almighty Law than the British. I occasionally reel off dozens of fantastically repressive UK laws (including the one that forbids gatherings that include “the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”) to looks of perfect horror here. Then I end it all by saying “Of course, no one pays any attention! Ahahaha!”, and watch everybody fall off their seats. In the US, there’s a background buzz that nothing keeps your neighbour in check but the letter of the law and the iron force of the Constitution. Gotta keep the rule of law, or society will collapse in a hail of gunfire, trespassing, double-parking and moider. There’s no pity for those who break the law. In Britain it’s much more “Okay do what you want – but try not to get caught, alright?”

I’ve grown far more sympathetic to the American line over time, but I’ve never seen anyone state the alternative position quite as elegantly D² Digest. Bit too elegantly, in fact. If you read his work – including the entry on why Lessig is too damn sincere, and why drug laws don’t work, and why we should keep them – you could conclude that they’re the careful posings of a Economista Angry Young Arse. Not surprising – if you’re going to insist that bad laws can have good effects (or Antinomialism, as he calls it), it always helps to be nice young Oxonian who can probably talk your way out of a tight corner with a Christchurch-educated judge when the need arises. But at least he’s not a libertarian Angry Young Arse, right?

Comments Off on i fought the law and i won

2002-09-02»

“Kinda public beta”: official RSS feeds of the BBC News site.

RSS feed of the front page
RSS feed of technology news
RSS feed of UK news
RSS feed of World news

Comments Off on oho, dave’s going to like this.

Aha! Mozilla 1.1 supports LINK tags out of the box – try clicking on the “View…” menu option then “Show/Hide”, “Site Navigation Bar”, and finally “Show Only As Needed”. On sites that support it, a little mini-toolbar of navigation links will pop up at the top of the browser window whenever Mozilla spots them. You can also discover which sites have RSS feeds, thanks to Mark’s RSS link suggestion (they’ll be hiding under the “More” folder).

This feature’s been in Mozilla builds for a while, but they never had any GUI options for it because slowed down page loads. I wonder if that’s fixed? I’m still not sure I like it – ironically Mark’s addition means that it pops up on more sites than it’s really useful. In those cases it does eat a fair bit of real estate, and is a bit of a distraction.

Comments Off on dumb nav tricks

Stuck for what to say on your livejournal today? Just enter “girlfriend” into the automatic journal entry generator. Also available in Polish.

Even though she seemed much better she still wasnt sure how much longer shed be around-and this was something that we were all aware of but didnt dwell on. She has the gift of making you love her even though she drives you totally batshit :> It was totally cool to be able to provide so much pleasure even though im just lying there and enjoying the feeling and the show ;> Its pretty sad that this is the only way i seem to be able to get along with my supervisors… Everytime i try to get along with him he does or says something to piss me off. Nice boy and im glad he and jo are such good friends but we differ in too many ways to get along. You amaze me and im glad were both on the same level! Some are on the same page as my good ones.

Comments Off on everybody loves automatic text generators, briefly

2002-09-01»

I’ve spent the last few days at ConJose, the 60th World Science Fiction Convention. It’s like a bank-holiday weekend visiting relatives. Fandom is clearly closely allied to the people and sub-culture I know, but with its own rituals and relationships and strange, orthogonal paths. Like family, it’s been by turns exasperating, entertaining, informative, irritating, and a bit wonderful. So far, the best bits have been listening to Vernor Vinge‘s presentation on the Singularity; the panel on nerdcore sf writing with Cory, Eileen Gunn, James Patrick Kelly and Charlie Stross; and the Hugo Awards.

The Hugos go to show how witty an awards ceremony can be if most of your winners are writers. It also has the side effect – given the underappreciated lot of most of them – of creating almost infinite gratitude in the recipients, which is much more fun to watch than the usual self-grooming celebs. Neil Gaman seemed genuinely amazed and moved to win Best Novel. His fine acceptance speech ended with him trailing off, staring at the statue, and saying “Fuck. I got a Hugo.”.

The Hugo list, as I suppose is the plan, is now my reading list for the next few months. I’ve just read Ted Chiang’s award-winning short story “Hell is the Absence of God”, online at FictionWise. You can download it for free at that link. It’s fantastic – a great short story, sf or not. And if you haven’t already read Charlie Stross’ Lobsters (again free online), you’re missing a treat. Vinge’s novella “Fast Times at Fairmont High” is the next on the list.

I was also supposed to be at ConJose to meet a trade mission of publishers to brief them about the EUCD, but someone at the DTI nixed that when they found out I was a journalist. You see? Just days into accepting the description, and I’m already getting excluded from all the best parties.

It turned out okay: Seth covered the meeting better than any journalist would, and instead that evening, I shared a ride with the man who plays Mr Shake Hands on the American version of Banzai.

Comments Off on at home, at conjose

2002-08-29»

I haven’t seen this before (except from whence I stole the link, at web-graphics). It’s Edward Tufte on the uses and abuses of Flash. He likes praystation!

Comments Off on tufte on flash

2002-08-28»

Warren Ellis, comic author of the perfectly respectable Transmetropolitan, creator of the mighty hypercolumnist Spider Jerusalem, terrifyingly prolific prose writer, and unremitting booster of the comics economy now has a blog. As well as one the best domain names you can get these days, damn him.

die puny humans is my newsmine. I wanted a place to put my research that was accessible, searchable, and, crucially, not cluttering up my bloody computer. This is it. Means I can get to my stuff from anywhere with a web connection. Anything I find on my daily trawls around the web that interests me goes up here.

Via Technovia

Comments Off on ellisfeed

Tom “plasticbag” Coates just had his machine fixed by a friend, remotely via ssh for the first time, and does appropriate double-backflips of delight. Unix is so cool that way.

Comments Off on more advantages to remote access.

2002-08-27»

Doc says that I’m being a bit hard on Apple and Microsoft, both of whom sell similar applications to the home server idea.

That’s true – but they’re not very heavily encouraged among home users. The very fact that I can’t work out a way of explaining how to do this to Sunday Times readers is an indication of that. Running a PHP Webmail app, or a home iDisk, for instance, really isn’t rocket science: it just doesn’t fit either of these companies current business models.

One of the real albatrosses around the symmetrical net for now is that the principal big server apps for the computers on the edge of the Network is still file-sharing. Telcos feel they can legitimately complain about “bandwidth abuse” when it’s conducted by suspected copyright criminals. As Doc says, they’d find it a little harder to moan if it was baby photo album sharing.

(I’m beginning to see the big hole in both Apple and Microsoft’s thinking. Microsoft treats its customers as though they were businesses. Apple treats them as though they were consumers. What if we’re neither?)

Comments Off on update to the previous update

2002-08-26»

Recap: I’ve been looking for an all-in, no messing, Webmail app, file sharer, and Webserver that would run from my home machine – saving me from forking out on .NET, .mac, and .johncobblyandall services. Lots of people wrote in with partial suggestions. Nothing leapt out for me, although a couple of people wrote in to say that if I found what I was looking for, they’d buy a copy.

Barnaby James wrote to suggest Apache Tomcat with a fistful of java servlets. A nice, and integrated idea, but I’m not sure it’s the point-and-click solution I was looking for.

Dave, as you’d suspect, suggested 4Dmail Mail app.

Azeem suggested a cheapo NetApp style standalong box, perhaps integrated with your router. Bit pricey currently, and I think it’s the idea of linking directly to your desktop that makes this appealing. Still, it’d be nice if home routers let you set up at least a port 80 passthru to one machine on the home network.

Henry Minsky had a very profound suggestion, which he describes in detail on his Personal Virtual Server page. If I can horrifying cripple his thoughts by summary : your personal computer is boiled down to a portable state image, on which you can install different applications. You can move this image wherever you like. Keep it at home, or on a hosting service, or on your laptop or PDA. So you effectively run your PC and all its services wherever you go.

One thing I did thrash out over a few conversations was that you’d need at least one external Net service to get this working – DNS, probably with dyndns-like dynamic updating. Azeem also suggested an outgoing mail relay, but I’m not sure that’s necessary. Direct SMTP connections are hard, true – but sendmail and its simpler cousins, once configured, is a commodity. And this is a very trivial sendmail setup.

Does the need for dynamic DNS spoil the principle push of this idea? I’m not sure. I did originally conceive of this home-based server as a way of shaking off the shackle of unnecessary Web service subscriptions. With dynanamic DNS, we’re left with a single one-off sub. It’s less ideologically pure, but I still think it’s appealing. One of the things I dislike about all these other Web services is that while each of them is pretty cheap, it’d cost a huge amount to subscribe to all of them. And I hate the paying less for bundles when not everything in the bundle is the best in class. It’s an unnecessary compromise.

Oh, and Lloyd pointed out another advantage to working your Web services from home. When you don’t pay yours subs at a Webmail service, they suspend your access to your own e-mail.

I think there may be a market for a product here. That is, if Thomas C. Greene of the Register doesn’t convince us to turn off our broadband connections in terror.

Comments Off on brief summary of home server responses