Blog for April 2007
29/04/2007: Keen on Web 2.0
The Observer has an interesting article about Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. Although the book isn’t released until early June, according to the Observer article the basic premise is that:
bloggers and other evangelists for the web [are] destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into ‘digital narcissism’.
He points out that most of what you see on MySpace, YouTube and other such social networking sites is utterly banal; the information you read on Wikipedia has often not been edited by experts; and a disproportionate amount of information can be found on Pamela Anderson, compared with,…
23/04/2007: London Goes Wi-Fi
The square mile now has Wi-Fi. The Cloud, as it is called, is to be free for the first month, but after that there will be a charge.
Contrast this with the proposed San Francisco Municipal Wireless scheme, and the Cloud starts to look fairly weak. In contrast with London’s single square mile of coverage, the San Francisco scheme will cover a much larger area, and will be provided free of cost to the end user.
Compared to what they’re rolling out in San Francisco, and many other US cities for that matter, the Cloud is just a glorified version of what’s already running in every coffee house in South East England.
20/04/2007: Ogg Theora Support in Opera 9.5
In Hâkon Wium Lie’s latest missive on Opera Labs he details Opera’s upcoming support for the <video> element in HTML 5. He points out that it’s not much use without at least one defacto standard web video format (much like JPEG, GIF and PNG have become for the <img> element.
A preview release of Opera 9.5 includes native support for Ogg Theora (the free video format from the people that brought you Ogg Vorbis and Ogg FLAC) — which to me seems to be a step in the right direction. The current preview is Windows-only, but Theora’s LGPL library is widely supported cross-platform, so Linux and Mac previews are surely not too far away.
HTML 5 similarly includes a <audio> element. Will the other Ogg formats see native support in Opera?
In other news, Opera’s internal builds implement CSS text-shadow. See Rijk’s blog.
19/04/2007: The Importance of Software Testing
Most programmers, especially those who work on server software, will have been in a situation when we’ve been reconfiguring, upgrading, modifying or otherwise replacing some piece of vital software on a physically remote server, and things haven’t gone quite as expected.
Often, fixing it is a simple matter of logging into the server remotely (via, say, secure shell) and reversing the change. In some extreme cases, the problem is so severe though, that it can’t be fixed remotely — for example, you’ve managed to accidentally halt the machine, so you can’t log into it remotely and it needs a restart. In such a situation, you’ll need to physically go over to the server (or phone someone and have them do so) and fix the problem.
NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) was launched in November 1996. Fast forward almost a decade and a couple of bugs in a firmware update end up swivelling the antena further than the antenna was built to go. This led to the craft reorienting itself and exposing one of its batteries…
19/04/2007: The Difference
The difference between scientists and normal people…
16/04/2007: BoJo on MySpace
The BBC on Politicians with MySpace pages:
In the UK, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell has registered on MySpace — and has an unofficial fan club page, “Proud to be a Minger”, with 161 members.
Meanwhile, the Boris Johnson Appreciation Society, which recognises the shadow higher education minister as “the vital free agent of British politics”, has stacked up a very respectable 7,751 members.
16/04/2007: Create Your Own Dan Brown Novel
I put this together back in January 2006, but never mentioned it on my website — I just posted it on a couple of newsgroups. It’s pretty good fun and rather realistic.
15/04/2007: The Tao of HTML 5
On the 10th of June 1215, the a group of English barons invaded London and five days later forced King John to attach his seal to the Magna Carta in Runnymede, on the border of modern-day Sussex and Berkshire. (In those days it was customary to attach ones seal to an agreement rather than sign it. However the fact that it was not signed has led to a popular misconception that King John was illiterate, when in fact he was not.)
The Magna Carta was a key document in English constitutional law, establishing certain rights (such as habeas corpus) for the King’s subjects, and limiting the rights of the King; importantly, requiring the King to obey “the law of the land”. The Magna Carta is widely regarded as a major influence on world constitutional law, and in particular greatly influenced the “United States…
13/04/2007: BBC News Roundup
Scientists produce sperm from bone (no sniggering at the back) and teen trashes house.
12/04/2007: The Way Bureaucracies Work
- In 1950, publish a comprehensive set of rules.
- In 1974, publish a note which adds a few more rules and rescinds several of the old one.
- In 1981, publish a note which adjusts one of the conditions for the a particular rule given in the 1974 note but doesn’t otherwise rescind it.
- In 1987, publish a note which entirely replaces the 1974 note, not incorporating the changes of the 1981 note, although not rescinding it either.
- In 1992, publish a guidebook purporting to “summarise” the rules so far, but which actually contradicts the rules in several places. It must be full of pretty pictures.
- In 1993, an internal briefing establishes more rules, but these are never publically published.
- In 1994, publish a note that adjusts the conditions for rule #2 in last year’s internal briefing, but without restating what rule #2 was.
- In 1997, publish a note rescinding the 1981 note.
- In 1998, reprint the 1992 guide without edits.
- In 1999, compile a full and comprehensive set of all the rules so far. Only…
11/04/2007: Life on Mars
Well, the Life on Mars finale was last night, and I thought it came to a brilliant conclusion. Sentimental without being too cheesy. It seemed to make sense of the whole series, but upon reflection, the big question, “am I mad, in a coma or back in time?” was left open.
The BBC has news of a sequel, Ashes to Ashes that should see Gene Hunt return to our screens next year.
David E Kelly is planning an American remake. You’ve got to wonder whether it will end up as another Coupling or achieving the rare accomplishment that The Office: An American Workplace managed. (The latter is even shown on British television, although not achieving anything close to the ratings of the original series.)
Farewell Sam Tyler!
10/04/2007: THIS IS TRUE
PLEASE DON’T READ THIS.
In 1876, a young girl named Jenn was walking down a river, an insane man killed her by stabbing her in the back, raping her, and then hanging her in his closet. Then a she just dissapeared no one ever found her untill 2000 when a yoing girl called Mary found her body and markings on her chest saying: “I wasnt pretty enough”. Now that you have read this message, she will come to your house on a full moon and steal your soul unless you follow these directions: Paste this message into 3 comments and press ALT F4 and your crushes name will appear on the screen!!! its soo wierd
More insane ramblings here:
08/04/2007: How PHP programmers get things wrong
Firstly, three disclaimers: PHP is a great programming language, one of my favourites — this website is written in PHP; there are many great PHP programmers out there, some of whom probably never get things wrong; I probably get things wrong a lot of the time.
The majority of the database-backed Open Source PHP projects that I’ve used/examined make the same flaw again and again…
08/04/2007: Hurrah! A Blog for Toby!
At last, my new CMS is at a stage when I’m able to actually start publishing with it. Now that I have an easy-ish tool to publish with, you can expect that this website will be updated more frequently and with more and better content.
Updating this website in the past has been a major pain. I took a look at installing an off-the-shelf blogging engine to help me run the site, and after much research decided that Wordpress was the best of breed. After two days playing with it, I abandoned it — it didn’t do everything I wanted out of a blogging engine, and the mess of PHP code would have made modifications to Wordpress painful.
And so in early 2006, I decided to embark upon my own blogging engine. I posted my initial ideas to Usenet in February 2006 and asked for feedback. I got a few useful suggestions and started development later that month, calling the project…