Regardless of the religious aspects, I like the proliferation of bunnies and chocolate at this time of year. Hope everybody’s having a relaxing weekend, and don’t forget the new series of Doctor Who this evening
Above photo taken by doc18, who has a great ‘Toys’ set.

Best news item of the week:

A Bishop has used his Easter address to criticise comparisons between a mystical “ordering system” used by TV host Noel Edmonds and Christian prayer.

The Deal or No Deal presenter is said to put his TV comeback down to being granted wishes by “cosmic ordering”.

Wait for it.

But the Right Reverend Carl Cooper said people placing “an order with the cosmos” to be delivered was “nonsense”.

What more can I add?

At about 10:30 yesterday morning there was a knock on my front door. This was slightly weird, since the whole building has an intercom-buzzer system for the main entrance, so people can’t generally get to the front door without me knowing about it. Still, I answered, and straight away there was something about the guy that gave him away as a bailiff. I’d had a couple of called-while-you-were-out notes from the guy, and had previously phoned the council, whose debts he was chasing, to say that the man he was looking for moved out of the flat more than a year ago. They clearly hadn’t let bailiff-man know this.

Are you Mr McMillan?
No. I think he moved out early last year.

At this point his mobile phone rang, and he answered. I stood in the doorway for five seconds or so, feeling a little awkward. As something to do, I reached inside and grabbed my drink. The bailiff looked at me, looked at the drink, then at me again.

Sorry to have bothered you, bye.

As I walked back into the lounge I realised that I was holding a small glass tumbler, about 1/5th full of apple juice. I’m pretty sure he thought I was on the whisky at 1030 in the morning, and furthermore, that I couldn’t even go twenty seconds at the door without fetching it.

It was apple juice. Really.

From TUGW:

A Pension fund with a holding of over 4700 in class A Google stock, wants a change to eliminate a tow tier voting structure. This change would funnel the control of Google from its main three executives, Brin, Page, and Schmidt.

Yes, well. They would. I can’t see any way in which this is a good idea for anybody except the shareholders themselves.

A number of prominent bloggers have today launched The Euston Manifesto, a wide-ranging declaration of principle. They themselves describe it as a “declaration of intent” for a “current of opinion” flourishing on the Internet but “under-represented elsewhere”.

As well as being refreshingly well-written, as befits a collaboration of the blogosphere, I find the statements of principle to be unfailingly just. I like that intellectual copyright law extension is mentioned. I like that there is a clear rejection of the knee-jerk anti-Americanism that’s impossible to escape in daily life. I like that atheism is defined as separate from religious beliefs. I like that cultural relativism is wholeheartedly disavowed. I like that the separation of church and state is advocated. I like that there is a good attempt at a definition of the point at which human values trump sovereignty in international affairs. And most of all I like the commitment to a free and open exchange of ideas, on any subject.

Hell, I like it all. Its brevity is remarkable for a document of its scope - the elaborations are specific, rather than for clarification - and as such it requires only a few minutes’ attention to get the broad gist, while providing enough real-world examples to be more than merely abstract.

This kind of document has many advantages for those, like me, who sometimes become muddled by political arguments. It’s relatively easy to bamboozle me with statements which sound reasonable, yet contradict what I thought I believed. The principles so clearly elucidated in this document, which I know I agree with, can provide a bedrock against which to analyse disagreements without getting confused about what I believed in the first place
The big question, I suppose, is whether TEM will lead anywhere. Producing an excellent document is one thing, but taking that to the stage of actual change is obviously quite different. This is not to say that I doubt anybody’s conviction, and, in fact, given the background of its creators I would be not be surprised to witness consequences far wider than one may expect.

I hope it’s ok to make a few suggestions:

• Could it be published under a Creative Commons license, or similar? I have the PDF on my computer, but am unsure as to what I can do with it.
• A FAQ would be great, even if only to explain the word ‘Euston’…
• Some clarification on the signing process would be appreciated. Currently the signers are listed at the bottom of the document, and they are all well known, or representatives of large organisations. Are little individual bloggers like me welcome to sign, or is there a better way to express support?
• HTML anchors for each principle, for use during political rants

The long-awaited Google Calendar is apparently live, although as of this moment it’s down, as is Gmail. Annoying; I want to play! The Unofficial Google Weblog has an initial-impressions review:

Google Calendar is live, and it rocks. I’m not shy with my complaints of Google’s erratic launch quality during the past two years, but credit is due here. This thing is gorgeous, easy, flawless during my initial poking, lubricated with Web 2.0 juice, and brain-dead simple to use.

Sounds fun. Hopefully it’ll be working soon!

10 mins later: It’s back up.

Me: I have won.
Laptop: What is this? I am running smoothly and without issue? I bow to your greatness.
Me: Don’t say that. It’s not even true. It only took half an hour once I had access to IDE connectors. I’ll be putting this conversation on the website, and that kind of statement would just be tempting fate.
Laptop: Oh glorious master, I…
Me: Shut up.
Laptop: As you wish. By the way, did you dream of somebody wanting you to repair their dead horse?
Me: Yes I did. How could you know that?
Laptop: I am the devil.

Pootergeek:

One of the ads I saw on Tim’s site while reading this is for the “digital” version of the Guardian which seems to be a sort of online facsimile of the printed edition that you can browse for a fee. Yes, it includes the photos and layout, but for many of us it lacks an essential part of the appeal of the paper version: the option to throw it (three-or-four times a day) into the far corner of the room in which you are reading it, shouting, “Fuck off!”

The Guardian:

Of all the provocative passages in Catharine MacKinnon’s new book Are Women Human? the following hit me hardest. She writes: “[T]he fact that the law of rape protects rapists and is written from their point of view to guarantee impunity for most rapes is officially regarded as a violation of the law of sex equality, national or international, by virtually nobody.”

Are you suggesting that rape law enshrines rapists’ points of view, I ask MacKinnon? “Yes, in a couple of senses. The most obvious sense is that most rapists are men and most legislators are men and most judges are men and the law of rape was created when women weren’t even allowed to vote. So that means not that all the people who wrote it were rapists, but that they are a member of the group who do [rape] and who do for reasons that they share in common even with those who don’t, namely masculinity and their identification with masculine norms and in particular being the people who initiate sex and being the people who socially experience themselves as being affirmed by aggressive initiation of sexual interaction.”

Damian speaks the truth.

Nobody, but nobody, could resist linking to this. Why? Let me say only this: sex in an MRI machine.

Kinda like ’snakes on a plane’, only opposite. Btw, the comments are as entertaining as the article itself.

The Unofficial Google Weblog points toward the Maxim USA homepage, which details an image of Eva Longoria visible from space. If you open up this Google Earth file, you’ll zoom down onto a 22m x 32m¹ wire-mesh magazine cover created in the Las Vegas desert:

I wonder whether they could see it from the International Space Station.

Update: It seems that although the image is actually there, Google’s satellites haven’t got updated imagery of the area, so the Google Earth link just overlays an image on top. I suppose this is the same effect, but it feels like cheating.

1. GE’s measure tool comes in very handy in this case, although temptation to measure other dimensions should be resisted [↩]

I’m all for campaigns against Digital Rights Management - the systems which lock media to certain hardware with the aim of ‘protecting copyright’ - but I think that ‘activists’ need to do a better job of disassociating themselves from illegal behaviour.

The system being pushed for seems to be:

• No DRM. If I’ve purchased a DVD, I can copy it to my computer and put it onto my iPod without a problem. I can use any portable video player out there to play it back.
• Relaxed copyright. If I like a song, I can email it to some friends. I can lend people DVDs. I can swap the occasional CD and make a copy for myself.

Many people campaign on both of these issues, and on the whole I agree with them, but there’s a hint of anarchy that isn’t always clarified. I think it should be emphasised that the aim of removing DRM and relaxing copyright is not free media for all. People should still be prosecuted for public distribution of media, as they are now: it’s not fair for non-copyright-owners to put music/films online for anybody to download, just as it’s wrong to buy a DVD, make some copies and sell them for a profit. There’s a point at which sharing media is no longer reasonable, and although it’s difficult to define a particular boundary, I think that people roughly know where it lies. It’s ok to email the latest Oasis track to five friends, saying “have you heard this? It’s cool”, but it’s not ok to do the same to an office of 100 people (unless, say, you work for a music magazine).

For the above reasons I very much like the suggestions on this post, written in reaction to the half-baked movie downloads now offered by film studios. I was particularly drawn to this:

Skip the DRM limits. It’s called steganography [link mine - Andrew], people. I can’t believe this technology hasn’t caught up with video. For heaven’s sake, just embed a single-user license code somewhere into the video itself. If someone peers-to-peers it, look up the code and prosecute the guilty party. The code doesn’t have to permeate the entire video, just a few secret scenes will do it. Add this to the storefront fulfillment software and bob’s your uncle.

That seems like it would work well, and would allow for prosecution of unreasonable behaviour. Just as many current movies have occasional flashes of red dots that uniquely identify the film stock, and hence the cinema, a similar digital system would allow local distribution while helping to prosecute people who abuse the system. The copyright companies would have to monitor BitTorrent downloads and physical shipments as they always have, but my distributing five copies to friends isn’t going to sound any alarms. If my friend then puts it onto the internet for free then it wouldn’t be too hard for the authorities to track me, and then my ‘friend’, down.

What I particularly like about this is that it could be embraced by those who work to corrupt current protection systems. Rightly or wrongly, there’s a sense of fighting against authority and unreasonable restrictions that drives many to put huge amounts of effort into, for example, cracking the codes which prevent DVDs being copied to computers; these cracks are then put online for anybody to use. This shouldn’t happen to the same extent if you had a fair system. Sure, some people would try to find ways around it, but because this could only be for illegal (and unreasonable) purposes the perpetrators would be ostracised by the tech community. Hell, if you got it right there’d be plenty of people willing to create open-source systems of digital markers that could quickly adapt to any such attempts. I think most people would be happy with a ‘you play fair by us, we’ll play fair by you’ honour system, and would have no problem with punishing those who abuse it.

I think this could work for online downloads, anyway. I’m not sure whether it could be applied to DVDs - people would presumably have to supply their name and address when purchasing, which would send privacy campaigners into trademark fits of self-importance. Maybe you could configure it so people must register if they want to copy media - would that be acceptable?

What do you think? Does that make sense?

Look look look I have taken a photograph of a ghost. Looksie:

See the man in the top right? He only has 3/4 of a head! He is a ghost!

Pause for sanity. I’m guessing that he’s a painting on the back wall, or something, but I don’t remember seeing one at the time. Relative sizes suggest he would be something of a ginorminous fellow, were he to be real. End pause.

ARRGH A GHOST.

While standing at a newsagent’s counter yesterday I spotted this:

Sorry for the small copy - I couldn’t snap a photo at the time, and this is the largest image available online. On the right hand side is the headline:

WARNING!
The sexual-health parasites who prey on your fears

and then, directly underneath:

HOW NORMAL ARE YOUR BREASTS?
Find out how yours measure up in Cosmo’s great boob comparathon

All right, so ‘normality’ isn’t the same as ’sexual health’. But it’s the same kind of thing. I can’t believe nobody spotted the irony.

Far be it from me to encourage casual piracy, but if you were to happen to head over here and to download the latest episode (series 10, episode 3) of South Park via BitTorrent, you’d find a witty, incisive take on the Mo-toon controversy. When Family Guy demands to show Mohammed uncensored, America comes up with a plan. And it involves sand. Lots of sand. Will the South Park gang save the day? Will free speech prevail? The episode ends with an all out challenge to Comedy Central not to censor next week’s concluding part.

Just back from London. I went to see my uncle, and to replace the hard drive in his laptop. The task was:

Replace a hard drive, using only the surrounding laptop, a USB hard drive enclosure and a replacement drive, preferably without reinstalling Windows.

Not to be smug, but this is the kind of thing I can normally do with without much effort. It’s easy, especially when the drive is dying extremely slowly (chkdsk fixes it for a few days), and the whole process only takes a couple of hours. This time, however, my tech conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello, computer, I’d like to change your hard drive.
Computer: Dunno what you mean, I’m a plant.
Me: No, I think you’ll find you’re a computer. Look, see, you’ve a keyboard.
Computer: No I haven’t.
Me: Yes. Yes you do.
Computer: Don’t believe you NAA NAA NAAAAA NA.
Me: That’s as maybe, but, happily, I’m the one in control here, and I shall force you to my will.
Computer: Well, if you’re going to be like that, I’ll just break in mysterious and infuriating ways, until you either die of exhaustion or hurl me through the wall.
Me: I’ve faced stronger than you, my friend. Prepare for battle!

[three days later]

Me: See my white flag? I mean it. Give me a chance. Please. I’m begging you.

After three days, I had to give up and bring it back with me. I shall break its spirit. It will be vanquished. I feel like the various problems I had should be mentioned, although I’ll hide them from the front page…

Continue reading ‘Back, with a laptop’