Yes it was me, not Silver Birch. I made £32.50! I thought i’d lost too, but Liberthine came in 5th, which apparently still wins each way. Which I knew of course, being an expert gambler.
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
Trondheim has a great big hill, BBrubaken, which is too steep and long to cycle up. So, they built Trampe, the bicycle lift. You can see a brief description or some great pictures. What a great idea - why on earth don’t we see these on every steep hill?
Book of Dogma, The latest from The Black Dog. A collection of out of print EPs going back quite a way. Classic Black Dog, really good stuff.
Back to Mine, compiled by Royksopp. Obscure 70s noodling.
We are hiring. It’s a great place to work doing awesome things. Really. If you pass someone on to us who gets hired, then we’ll pay a tasty bounty too. More details on the jobs post.
Charlie Brooker is at it again, with a tirade about the talking CCTV cameras.
Of course I welcome our robot overlords as much as the next chap, but I do think Brooker has gone a bit far this time.
It seems pretty clear, to me at least, that at some point we’re going to have some serious technological augmentation available for people. This is already happening for those who have lost part of their bodily function, but I can see no reason why there won’t be technology available to augment the bodies of everyone. More interestingly, technology to augment our brains should be available too.
This article on NeuroLogica discusses the “continuity problem” - if we upload our minds into a computer, how do we know it’s really us? Maybe it’s just a good facsimile of the subject, and the subject himself is actually dead. He goes through a bunch of acrobatics to show that you could somehow perform an upload whilst retaining continuity.
What he doesn’t address is whether we have continuity now, which seems quite relevant to upload continuity. The more I think about it, the more I think continuity is a mirage, just like so much of our consciousness. In that article, the author discusses how we can suppress one hemisphere of the brain and still be “us”. This sounds like an excellent example for how much we rely on continuity (perhaps like consciousness itself) as a mental abstraction to help us understand ourselves, rather than that we really maintain continuity of our consciousness.
Oh for heaven’s sake. I wrote about this before, but I must admit I didn’t expect it to keep running, or to suck in some elevated members of the internets. Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales are drafting some sort of bloggers code of conduct (which doesn’t include “thou shalt write a load of vapid nonsense”) and it even has badges!
You see this image here? Tim O’Reilly thinks it indicates that someone is going to be enforcing civility. What he has missed is that this is the Internet and that really it is a bloody great big target drawn on your website. I can’t imagine a bigger red rag to the whole world of trolls out there.
So, if you want your site defaced, or to spend the rest of your natural moderating comments (and what the hell is this “I take responsibility for the comments on my website” crap too? Am I your Dad?), then sure go put a badge like that on it. I shall enjoy sitting back and watching the fun.
I’ve switched from Movable Type to WordPress. We’ve been evaluating WordPress at work for a project, and it pretty quickly became clear that WordPress is superior to MT. It does have some disadvantages - in common with most Open Source projects the documentation is awful; out of date, incorrect and generally almost worse that useless. In some ways I prefer the look and feel of the Movable Type admin interface too, and MT would be easier to scale. That said, scaling WP would mostly just involve an accelerating proxy like Squid.
Apart from those pretty minor complaints, everything else about WP seems to be better. It’s been a painless experience importing not just my old MT content, but stuff from the blog system before that, which I wrote myself. My largest complaint about WP now is that it’s in PHP, which is bad. MT is in Perl though, which is only marginally better. And it’s not often I have to dig into the code, so that’s kind of irrelevant.
I’ve gone to some effort to preserve links, but if anyone notices any dead ones please let me know. For the record, here’s a python script to fix your links after importing from MT:
import MySQLdb
db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost",
user="USERNAME", passwd="PASSWORD", db="DATABASE")
c = db.cursor()
c.execute("select ID, post_name from wp_posts")
for pid, post_name in c.fetchall():
post_name = post_name[:30].replace("-", "_")
print pid, post_name
c.execute("update wp_posts set post_name=%s where ID=%s", (post_name, pid))
The government is predicting that [15m people](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1626768.ece) will rebel over ID card legislation, by refusing to provide personal data or to show cards. I will certainly be one of them.
What on earth are they thinking bringing in a measure that *one quarter* of the population will risk gaol to protest? This could make Iraq look like a cake walk. Pillocks.
[Microsoft dropping DRM from Zune Music Store](http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=mobile_devices&articleId=9015898&taxonomyId=75). Microsoft have seen the writing on the wall for music DRM much faster than expected, and are [following Apple](http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-6172398.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news) into providing music files without DRM restrictions.
This probably really is the end for music DRM, something that is in the best interests of most music lovers and artists. The revolution that’s finally going to happen in music is going to change the shape of it, and is certainly going to make [some forms of music](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_Spears) uneconomic, but it will also make other forms feasible that once were not. It’s a whole new world out there and if I was an unsigned artist I would be very excited about the possibilities.
What this isn’t is the death of DRM. The impulse that made the music industry commit [such]( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050204-4587.html) [public](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3140160.stm) [hara-kiri](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060424-6662.html) wasn’t irrational, it was just very poorly judged against their market. In video and television I think we can expect the same behaviour, but with a lot more ferocity. The vast investments in the business models, not least the business models of their suppliers (think Windows Vista), will mean DRM hangs around for some while yet.
Transient content will probably always be advertising supported, since it’s easy and gives access to the most eyeballs. There’s a whole new arms race in there for advertising avoidance software, so the advertising will probably end up pretty subtle. It’ll be just as offensive as TV is now — but hey, go read a book or something.
The DVD market is the one that’s really going to hurt a lot of people. This stuff is being traded big-time on the P2P networks now, and it has become a vital market for a lot of media companies. A lot of series would not be produced without the DVD aftermarket, and the economics of video are, for the moment, different from a lot of music. It will be a few decades before you can make *The West Wing*, from scratch, on your own, in your bedroom, using only a computer. If there isn’t a business model that can support large scale drama with high production values, that would be a real shame.
Video is far less accessible on the move than music too, so being restricted to play your DVDs only on your home player is less of a restriction. I can see a lot of technological battles coming up to try to lock down every single digital and analogue hole in video reproduction. The recent [AACS Crack](http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/aacs-drm-cracked-by-backuphddvd-tool/) is only the beginning. Expect a few attempts, some successful, to change the law too.
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