Sliver

What has now become an almost Annual event

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 17:08:36 GMT

This blog that is. For many and varied reasons I dropped off writing in this. I may begin again, I may add new exciting content.

Or I may not.

Anyway, the blog itself though the same Zope software as before is now running on an entirely more reliable host. More reliable because it isn't mine and I'm not having to adminster to it and because its not throttled to death by MSN at 11am every morning the way the objective2k.com server is.

What probably isn't connected yet is the automatic post to the Livejournal original journal.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Examining the Joost Blog Widget

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:04:37 GMT

Without attempting to astro turf the product I work for I'm just seeing how the blogging widget works.

More Information about the program.

Title : Reuters Oddly Enough: And Finally... - June 15th 2007

Description : Purchasing fullfillment, baby tiger cuteness, brides chow down top this week's Oddly Enough video. Chad Ruble presents the best of this week's Oddly Enough video.

Belgium Man, Belgium!

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 07:48:46 GMT

Now I know why Douglas Adams coined Belgium as the worst swear word in the Universe.

I've just come back from Fosdem, which I think was my fourth and very pleasant and interesting it was meeting people again and for the first time.

But in travelling up from Leiden to Brussels on the train we stopped at Brussels North and a couple of guys (some said 4), came up the corridor, dropped change distracting everyone and made off with my laptop bag with the two laptops in it.

So thanks for that.

Belgium!

The original posting in the new journal is here

A walk in the woods

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 10:50:58 GMT

As I said, yesterday we went for a walk in the Wyre Forest. Given the nature of our winters now, the ground is still waterlogged and the churning of mountain bikes can make some of the paths off the wide limestone roads a thick chocolate cream. Its when you walk in the woods at this time of year that you really want it cold and the ground as hard as iron.

We didn't see any deer in the Forest, which given the number of dogs roaming around isnt that surprising. Sometimes its the owners that need putting on leads.

This is one of the photographs I took and I've messed it about a bit with Photoshop, the rest of the set are completely untouched apart from the addition of the watermark with Imagemagick. If you bother to go look at them, yes they are dark, it was fairly gloomy and I shot them at ASA 60. I'm still pondering whether to warm them up a little.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Five things

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 14:28:19 GMT

Pushed to do this by Andrea

I was a Student Union President at 16.

I have lived fewer days than I've been alive by the calendar.

I have one book published, too remote of interest to be of any interest.

My hair was, for a period during the reign of Pope Paul VI, longer than Sander Striker's, there are no known photographs to prove this.

There are other facts so little known about me that even I don't know them, like the size of my big toes but that's probably not what you're looking for.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Applications are now closed...

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:49:20 GMT

The form where you could apply yourself to join the Beta test for The Venice Project™ is now closed. Those that have already applied should either have received their invites now or will be in the very near future.

This doesn't mean you can't get to play with it, but you will need a direct invitation either from someone involved directly in the project or an existing beta test user that have been granted their own set of invitations. This is pretty much similar to the way that gmail was given wider exposure by Google.

So if you have already applied don't panic, you will get an invite. If you haven't then being nice to me probably isn't going to work (like that's a surprise). Yes I will invite people when I have spare invitations but I won't acknowledge it here and they're scarce even for me (for good reason).

I've seen pleadings for invites in a few places, JOS and one Ebay auction (nothing to do with us), which just goes to show that this method does work. Yes of course we want to create a buzz about The Venice Project but at the same time we do need to manage the ramp up.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Desire Lines

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 11:38:57 GMT

J taught me something yesterday. We went to Worcester to shop and have something to eat before going to the ballet and parked up in the car park towards Shrub Hill which is just by the canal. Its a relatively new car park and there's a path that runs from the bridge over the canal down onto the towpath that passes by at the lowest point and the most direct path to the road for the pedestrian. And its fenced off, there is no way round except by the planned entrance.

If it wasn't fenced off then there's no doubt that there would be a well worn, if muddy in the wet, path tramped by all the people that used their heads and worked out which was the best route for them.

In Planning these are called Desire Lines, the routes that people prefer over and above whatever it is that Planners would themselves prefer.

Which started me thinking as we trundled around Worcester how that applies to software and to the interfaces we allow people to use.

The original posting in the new journal is here

In the software I've written in the past and especially when I've been responsible for the interface I have explicitly included many routes through the interface. I've used menus, buttons on forms, keystrokes and toolbars to get to the same form, the same functionality from as many places as I could think of.

Sometimes those paths haven't been signified at all well and often some of the routes were suggested by users rather than myself after using the software and quite often I've found users navigating through software in ways that might seem to be less than optimal to myself but to them followed the internal map of the application that they'd formulated for themselves and which according to that map made it the most understandable route.

I can't claim any credit for doing this religiously, I follow my own Desire Lines in the creation of the software, I make well travelled paths that make sense to me. In designing interfaces, realising that other people have different Desire Lines even perhaps counter intuitive ones feels like it could be the difference between a well accepted application and one which is grudgingly used because it has some overriding requirement that makes using them necessary.

It feels as if making Desire Lines for individuals possible should make it easier for those individuals to fall in love with the application. At the same time signifying those Desire Lines could become very confusing in itself.

Falling in and out of love with products and applications is something I've been thinking a lot about recently.

And on the right...

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 01:08:04 GMT

I've added a new module thingy, which is the current collection of fellow travellers willing to be public about The Venice Project.

The chances are you'll find out different and probably more interesting things on these journals than mine (never did like that word blog), if only because they're all far friendlier than I am.

Oh, unfortunately, if you want the list of bloggers you'll have to go to the other journal.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Like a Virgin, seen for the very first time

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 12:08:25 GMT

In many ways I'm loathe to speak too much about The Venice Project as an application until it really is public and available and people can have their own virgin experience.

You'll see a lot of the blogs talking perhaps about it being TV the way you want it, ( no onion rings please ), and that's one of the aims as is the encouraging of community behaviour. That, for me, isn't the first impact that people will get and which I try and retain and make myself remember when the damn thing doesn't work.

Unlike any other video experience on the net its not about downloads, its not about having an account (though we'll have them but they'll still be optional) and its not about watching stuttery first time run throughs then playing it again so you get it with a full buffer.

Its about starting it, a few seconds of black, and then TV, all the time. The first time you see that, that's your virginity lost.

One of the challenges following the first time is to try and keep that initial reaction throughout the experience, not by people thinking 'hey, this is amazing its still running' (that's the experience we have in developing and QA'ing it so you shouldn't have to), but by it fulfilling that initial promise both in the content that we deliver and in the ways that we deliver it.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Letting comments flow

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 07:49:33 GMT

As I'll be keeping an eye on this more I'm letting the comments go through un moderated (comments, what comments?), so get your unrestricted medications here.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Being an idiot and causing people work

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 07:46:04 GMT

There used to be two things I was paranoid about when travelling, my passport and my air ticket. Now that air tickets are bits of paper or electrons and not gorgeous thick card with fare pay codes you could collect like a train spotter (Oh look I've got a K, oh a K is just a Y you can't change), I don't have to be paranoid about losing the ticket.

So all i have to take care of is the passport.

Which I've managed to do in over 20 odd years of travelling for work around the world.

Until Friday.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Somewhere between leaving passport control on Friday and going to get the flight for AMS on Tuesday my passport went to the great Biro planet in the sky. I do not know where or when it actually went, if you ask 'Where did you lose it?' I may just give you a withering look, though on the whole its more sheepish.

The knock on result is that J had done all the virtual PA stuff she does seemingly effortlessly and detailed all the steps I needed to take and the forms I needed to get by the time I returned from my fruitless trip to Birmingham Airport.

It also meant that L. and S. from work had to get together a letter declaring I needed to travel urgently (which is true) and fax that to J so I can take it today to the Passport Office in Newport. Oh and not forgetting M. who countersigned my photo and the form.

And now I'm about to drive to Newport, which is a pleasant drive over the Black Mountains, and hopefully get my passport today. After which I'll do a day trip on Friday.

No longer Super Secret, The Venice Project

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:50:02 GMT

So, the veil is lifting the image in the crystal ball is sharpening and now I can reveal.

That the Super Secret Project is....

So, this may or may not mean anything to you, so a short precis follows.

The Venice Project is a product development based on lots of open source projects, proprietary gubbins and whatchamacallits to provide TV across the Internet. A TV experience on your computer.

You can queue up for the invitational betas, tokens and such at http://www.theveniceproject.com

More later...

The original posting in the new journal is here

Static cling

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 19:26:37 GMT

For the past week or so the keyboard on my own silver 17" wide laptop has been dead, completely.

I got around to emailing Novatech support thinking I'd probably have to end up sending it back to get plugged in properly or that I'd not bother with that and open the thing up myself. But instead I got an email from them suggesting that I remove the battery and power cord and press the power button a few times to clear any static buildup.

And it worked.

In retrospect, like all these things, it seems eminently reasonable now. But I didn't think I'd have have static cling in my keyboard.

The original posting in the new journal is here

The Economics of Risk assessment

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 01:00:31 GMT

It was extremely interesting listening and from time to time watching to reactions to the Stern report on the radio and TV. It was like this long exhalation of breath from all these pundits and politicians. At last, they seemed to breathe, we can talk about it.

Not that the Vox Pop was all that welcoming, the general reaction being that its just government being government as it was only expressed to them in the form of taxes. The Stern report is more than just about taxes, indeed it barely mentions them and doesn't identify particular taxes. What it does do is cost the environment, or rather the risk assessment of cost if nothing or very little is done.

And for that Stern needs more than commending, since if for no other greater reason, governments around the world, the US government in particular will take it seriously, far more seriously than they take the science that underlies it. Because now it is a tangible risk with a tangible price tag.

1% Mr Pisspot or 40-60% for you in the future, choose now, yes I thought so.

There are other recommendations in the Stern report which are also heartening especially as I proposed them (in very small voice), more than ten years ago.

If poor countries with rich resources use up those resources then the likelyhood is that green house gas emission will increase and if those resources are largely rain forest the cost of renewal will be even greater as it takes 25 years to replace trees to clean the air.

More than ten years ago I suggested that we pay those countries with the scarce and important resources the exact value of those resources in rent for them to manage and not utliise them in any way. I called it marketingtheworld.com and it had a (very tatty) web site.

This is exactly the argument that Stern uses and he uses economic magic formulae to prove it works.

But I'll take no credit, other than the credit for being able to reason.

I must remember to take the recycling box to the pavement tomorrow morning...

The original posting in the new journal is here

Being brought to my knees

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 11:38:06 GMT

No this is nothing in the least bit salacious and there are no pictures of me on my knees, kindly pass on by.

Two events did bring me to my knees this week, my own personal virus which started at the top of my head and then made a semi permanent home in my throat and upper respiratory tract. It is currently still causing my nasal membranes to pump ever more quantities of mucus and I have no energy.

The other event, or series of events, was Microsoft's second Tuesday in the month which I forgot all about. I don't know why, perhaps its like your partner's monthly cycle that you manage to forget about it until it gets in the way of what you want to do or something.

The original posting in the new journal is here

I tend to leave everything switched on as 100% of all the hardware failures I've ever had in over 25 years have happened when I've switched something on (that's not true of course but it sounds good). That also gives Microsoft the opportunity to do the good which is known as updating the OS with the critical patches and rebooting the machine leaving it at the login prompt.

Mostly that's just the inconvenience of waiting for everything to be reloaded that infests the system taskbar and which seemed like a good thing to install at the time but now you've no idea where it is or whether its really uninstallable now. As an aside, this is where hard disk failures really come in handy they get you to clean up by starting from scratch.

On my enormously sinister and extremely fast Alpha Super Micro, called Bridge of Sighs and that's a clue Super Sekret Project fans, (now I'm beginning to sound like Jerry Pournelle for God's sake), that takes less time than my nose to fill up with mucus to reboot and get logged in but that doesn't help when rebooting screws up what you were doing.

I was in the middle of a very long SVN merge from trunk to the stable branch, actually I was in the middle of the third attempt. I was away (probably coughing or attempting sleep), when Microsoft stole the tiller and it was still in the middle of the merge.

The merge didn't complete so the stable branch was unaffected, which was good. My tree was foobarred, no that's too much of a euphemism, it was fucked. Reverting the tree did nothing at all and svnmerge was wrecked.

So that meant recreating a working copy of the branch and starting all over again since in the meantime of course there had been other checkins into the trunk that were needed.

So, given the sluggishness of my brain this week and the time it takes to merge, fix collisions and then commit, it took up the whole of Friday.

Then I could say something about build machines not being immune to the Microsoft reboot of joy, but I won't.

Scottish Power, the incompetence of billing

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 09:52:50 GMT

The capped agreement we had with Scottish Power ran out in June and we made a new one, the rate having doubled in the meantime, which we were expecting but its capped again anyway.

At the same time as the cap ended the direct debit per month was changed to £76 from £90 and then this month we get a notification that the direct debit was going to change to £156 per month.

That would make our costs for gas and electric around £1800 a year. In the past when they've changed it by some rate we've just rung them up and said we'll pay whatever seemed reasonable to us and that's been accepted.

So I rang them up this time to do the same thing...

The original posting in the new journal is here

After listening to the same 16 bars of the theme to Dr Finlay's Casebook (My little sutie), I finally got put through to a guy with a pleasant Scottish accent (one of their selling points is that their call centres are all in Scotland), and explained that we wanted to pay £90 a month as our electricity usage was fairly constant throughout the year.

First off we were asked for accurate readings of the meters and yes our current balance was still in credit (though that brought up a very interesting fact later on), but no according to their estimation we would use far more in the Winter and the rate has doubled you know and you were on a very cheap rate before.

Yes, I agreed that the rate had doubled, but it had been doubled for two thirds of the previous quarter and we were still in credit and at the rate at which we use electricity (all the damn computers and the tumble drier which is used all year round), we were going to be consuming at about the same rate (other than gas) in the future. Yes I agreed that because the gas would be higher we would pay more, £14 pounds more. We were not going to be paying £156 a month to them, period.

After around twenty minutes of me persistently plugging away and pointing out that their assumption was always that the winter quarter was far in excess of the middle of the year and that they didn't use previous years quarters to estimate against, he finally agreed to take to his manager my offer of £90 a month and if there were any shortfall at the end of the Winter Quarter we would pay it.

I get put on hold.

The phone comes off hold after a couple of minutes and I can hear a conversation in the background. At first I thought it was just another call in a different cubicle, but no it was the supervisor talking about how to handle our call. Essentially she said that the company was taking a firm line now and that they weren't allowing anyone to change their direct debits because of the rate change and that they had to nip this in the bud, etc, etc.

When he came back I immediately launched at him demanding that I get exactly the same treatment as previous customers had had and that I get to alter the direct debit as I saw fit in relation to rate at which we consumed gas and electricity. He was taken aback.

He then tried to convince me that when people did that, that at the end of the three months they were shocked at the amount by which they were in debt and that they weren't allowed to put people in debt. I countered by saying if they produced monthly statements people would know the rate at which they consumed and were owing and that problem would generally go away.

There was a bit of a conversation about how utility companies over estimate all usages and so overcharge everyone to cover those people who default and whose usage is abnormal. He didn't accept this of course.

I carried on pursuing my original position of paying only £90 a month and pointed out in their letter to us that we were allowed to reduce the direct debit by making a one off payment but that it didn't state when that one off payment had to be paid. We could, given the wording, reduce the direct debit now and make any required balancing payment at the end of the quarter.

This floored him and he admitted that that was what the wording said and again went off to his supervisor. This time he came back and said that if we were willing to pay £100 a month that this would be acceptable. I hummed and hawed, though I was always prepared to go to £100, and finally agreed.

I detected a certain amount of sympathy from him in all of this and so I asked him something which had been puzzling me since the beginning of the conversation.

"On the September bill we have a credit of £62, now we've given you the meter readings you say that the credit on the account is now £86. Does that mean the previous reading was wrong or what?"

"No, its the way the system works, it takes into account your next payment."

"But the next payment doesn't get taken till the 1st of October, probably the second as its a Sunday, but you're saying the account shows that money as having been taken?"

"Yes it is very odd", he said "but its the way the system works. When your account ends, say it ends on the 31st August and your direct debit is set for the 20th, the next payment in September is taken even though the account is closed. I had a customer yesterday with exactly that."

"But they got their money back?"

"Oh yes".

"You realise its a breach of the Direct Debit rules to take money on a mandate once the agreement is terminated?"

"I can pass you to ****** who can explain the terms of the Direct Debit".

"No, that's ok, I know the Direct Debit rules. But you are saying that your accounting system is recognising money that it hasn't yet received?".

"Yes".

On the face of it, this is recognising revenue before its been received and is fraudulent accounting, it can significantly inflate performance numbers and given that any Treasury scheme they have probably uses overnight funds without actual transfer they're probably making interest on money they've not yet received.

Other than that, if you do have an account with Scottish Power and you want to reduce the amount of your direct debit and save the hour long phone call I had with them to get that far, just quote the letter at them.

Of course no doubt this month any similar letters will be reworded, but I'd give them the same choice I did, accept my terms or lose me as a customer.

On how to close the show down

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 16:20:53 GMT

We had the unfortunate experience of watching Casualty on BBC 1 on Saturday night. Yes it had become hackneyed and the thinly veiled attacks on government policies on the Health Service and they'd pretty much run out of actors with liverpool accents. Oh no, they hadn't they'd moved to Holby City instead, I forgot that.

Anyway in one of these generational lurches that the BBC does from time to time they decided to give a new lease of life to the aged Casualty by sending it to Cambodia. ER in the Sudan this was not. Apart from the arthritic plot that had look now!, look here is this plot point!, yes here!, right this one! punctuating it it had some of the most grotesque acting I've seen since, well Eldorado.

It wasn't just the 'Charlie' guy waving his hand in front of his face and mouthing 'Phew' at the heat, when he wasn't sweating and it looked more like Chertsey than Cambodia; it was Simon Mc Corquindale who was acting as if melodrama had just been invented, the timing was bad, the words thrown on the floor.

In fact it was so bad I think it was on purpose. Not only was the script execrable and the acting paper thin but the cutting was clumsy, the timing between McCorquindale and the asian guy afraid of asians on the same phone was attrocious.

So, I think the entire production, the crew, the writers, the actors, their wives families and far flung aunties have all conspired in the face of a 48 week series to bring it to its knees and have it taken off.

It takes an awful lot for the Beeb to take a show off, but this time I think all those involved in Casualty have succeeded.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Getting there

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 16:11:55 GMT

Well the Super Secret Project trundles on. I still can't say what it is yet, but soon, very soon. But it will be worth it, honest.

And in anticipation of that I'm extending the fingers a little in waking this slumbering blog.

The original posting in the new journal is here

In which my Lap almost acquires a Bottom

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 11:11:47 GMT

In an extremely occasional, if not plainly almost abandoned series, of reviews and things found interesting last night we went to the opening night of the Ludlow Festival and saw A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This is around the third Dream put on at the Festival over the past 40 years and given the time of year and the setting, the sloping bank inside the ruined castle, that's no real surprise. It's also the second production for the same directory, Glen Walford, who happens to be local, born in Areley Kings, and shares the same hairdresser as J.

The set is really very good, a large gossamer oak tree with fairy lights, and a stepped stage around it.

We had seats right over on the right but in row C, with no one in front of me, which had repercussions that I'll explain later. Being over on the right meant we couldn't see the stage left entrances and exits but great care had been taken with the sight lines and there was very little that we missed.

The cast is the usual ensemble of young actors surrounding an experienced older actor, Matthew Devitt as Bottom. In an interesting juxtaposition Titania is played by a ballet dancer, Sarah Wildor, who has a reasonable repertoire in cattishness but her dancing is certainly more accomplished than her acting.

The one actor that stood out other than Matthew Devitt was Emily Watcher as Helena, she has this ability to be gauche and worldly at the same time and overwhelmed Emily Parker's Hermia. Helena is a difficult character to get right, the other three are set in their ambitions, Helena is the one that is really suffering as Lysander is as shallow as can be.

This is very much a director'r production, from the use of music, the Mechanicals all play instruments (or mime them very well), and there's an accompanist at the front of stage the entire time, each moment is punctuated by music; to the staging of the extended play on words about the relative height of Hermia and Helena with Helena at the top of the main stairs and Hermia on the stage itself allowing some sense to remain when the two actresses are almost of a size.

But it is Bottom that rules this Dream, as he should. Devitt makes Bottom a yeoman version of Falstaff, not so much a drunk perhaps but a jolly blowhard yet still amazed. During the final Act, the Mechanical's play (which has been often rushed through in other productions), drove the audience (and me), to fits of giggles and snorts of laughter. The amount of physical comedy and slapstick, including Bottom sinking into his breastplate such that his head disappeared and was left with his helmet wobbling on the top of it, underlining that this was never really a play but an entertainment.

At some stage during this byplay, Bottom stumbled down the stairs and towards me, he is not a small man, though short and I almost thought he'd collapse into me when he stopped and forged back on stage. Given where my seat was I'd been half expecting something of the sort. At the end the fairies went out into the audience and sprinkled 'fairy dust' around. S was covered.

The jarring details were the ludicrous flowers, looking like something a poor stage magician might employ.

The original posting in the new journal is here

I Just Heard Moves

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:00:09 GMT

Well I've bitten the bullet and moved http://www.ijustheard.com to the same server as http://ectopia.us in the hope that it will cope better than my server at the load.

It seems my half gig importing of the site caused problems though as I've just been slapped on the wrist and told not to import it again. When I did the import the first time Apache came back with a proxy error, so I did it again and got the same error but the content all seems to be there. I think it was the repeated attempt that irritated them. For which I can't blame them and have apologised.

Now to see if the traffic builds again as it did before Christmas.

The original posting in the new journal is here

MirrorMask

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 09:29:23 GMT

We finally got to see MirrorMask last night and it lived up to my very high expectations. Yes its a small film, a story about adolescence and revolt and its a film that could only be made with DV and CGI. But its exactly the kind of film that makes the most of both technologies.

Neil Gaiman's screenplay is both taut enough and with sufficient gaps for the art and imagination of Dave McKean to fill with doodles of brilliantly realised creatures and characters.

Stephen Fry and Lenny Henry fill their tiny roles and provide tremendous credibility, Rob Brydon shows that he's more than just a comic talent but an excellent actor and Gina McKee acts all of the parts of Mother, White Queen and Dark Queen with a huge sense of fun and menace in equal measure. The actor that best seems to fit his CGI body is Robert Llewellyn as the Gryphon but perhaps that's after so many years as a robot in Red Dwarf, Andy Hamilton runs him close as the small spiny creature though.

I forgot the most impressive performance of the film which was that of Stephanie Leonidas a remarkably assured delivery with that, probably, very real vulnerability of a 15 year old. She will be a star.

We had to go to Birmingham's Star City to go see it, which was a fairly surreal experience in itself. We were glad to slink back to the comfortable darkness of the country.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Lila, an Inquiry into Remebrance

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 12:29:46 GMT

I've just finished *The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana* by Umberto Eco and this even more than his other novels leaves me rolling it around in my head, probing it as you do a missing tooth.

It's a beautiful book, not just in translation but in that its an illustrated novel, illustrated from the comics, woodcuts and images of western civilisation available around before the War and during the 50's.

It's the interior experience of a man that awakes with no personal memory, no personal history but a complete and encyclopedic knowledge of all the books that have ever passed through his hands, which is pretty much all of Western culture since he's a dealer in rare books.

In his character Yambo's attempt to rediscover a personal history by following the trail of books and comics stored in an abandoned family residence Eco takes us through the popular culture of pre-war Italy how it lived with Fascism and even in the midst of the propaganda of war a curl of the truth of events can be disclosed.

In this process Yambo also learns that he was continually in pursuit of his first and unrequited love, Lila. All the women in his life, and he was not unsuccessful with women remind him of some quality of this unknown girl. Lila disappeared from his life and shortly afterwards died without him knowing and so his search was always going to be fruitless.

At almost the culmination of this recapitulation of his own unknown life he discovers a First Folio Shakespeare in some trunk and has a final stroke. In the midst of this stroke he recovers his personal memory and recapitulates the emotional history of his life. The book ends in darkness, whether a darkeness of sleep prior to waking out of a coma or a darkness of death we do not know. But the Broadway Melody feel of the final part of the book where all of the comic characters make a final and interconnected bow does imply a termination.

The use of the name Lila for his Beatrice, his unrequited and unmet love interested me, it reminded me of Lila by Robert Pirsig where he approaches Quality from degradation and the collision of pleasure and guilt. But Lila in that context was from the Hindu Lila, the play of shadows in the cave of Mara.

So, I'm left toying with the idea that that is what Eco meant that we inhabit our own solipsistic Universe in the end as Yambo does, not knowing what is real and what manufactured by him or that the novel itself is just playing with the ideas of idea.

The alternative is that Lila is Night, which is its Arabic/Phoenician meaning, and Delilah a version of it. Though Yambo is no Samson, even if he is eyeless in Gaza at the end.

Read it and see for yourself. It has lots of pretty pictures if nothing else, and there is a lot else.

The original posting in the new journal is here

FOSDEM IV and truncated visits

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:23:08 GMT

FOSDEM has been and gone, I have some photos on the camera to get off and occasional incidents that are worth remembering.

The original posting in the new journal is here

Special highlights included meeting a2800276 and other old friends and colleagues, including Finne and Ben. The latter didn't remember me at all which given the way the last contract ended might not be unsurprising but really he's just like that.

An honourable mention for Gerv Markham who had his luggage and computer stolen on the platform at the Centrum railway station, he had a deal more humour and relaxation about it than I would have.

Stallman was slightly less idiosyncratic in some ways this year and certainly seems tidier even if still obsessed with the temperature of his tea and his inability to hear non-English speakers without shouting at them to pronounce their consonants. The crying baby was the most precise of critics, though her removal from the hall enabled Stallman to thank the father by saying 'Thankyou for removing the cause of the noise.'.

After a lunch of hotdogs with sauerkraut and beer meeting a2800276 I was on my way over to the Mozilla room when Stallman came storming out of the hall, young acolytes at his shoulder, having put his shoes back on. He muttered 'persistent hostility' and I pushed the door open to let the whirlwind pass and down another corridor with the most gauche acolyte asking 'so do they give you your own room?' I gather that some of the questioning on GPL3 was less than complimentary after I left.

I was planning on being there on Sunday morning as well but both J and S came down with the same chest gripping virus that I had before I left, but J suffers from asthma and I thought it better to try and get back earlier. Unfortunately SN Brussels wouldn't change the ticket so I ended up bouncing around the airport for the afternoon.

Missing out

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 11:49:37 GMT

I've neglected this journal for a little while partly because of work and partly because of one of those occasional tidal waves within online communities where they are washed away and a certain amount of time has to be spent with the flotsam and jetsam and wondering where everyone else is.

Sort of.

The original posting in the new journal is here

I was peripherally involved in the Chris McKinstry suicide announcement and its fairly petty aftermath online. For those that don't know Chris (and those that do will be bored enough by now to close their eyes for the following paragraph or two), he was an AI researcher of varying degrees of reputation depending upon who was doing the repping. He had more than his fair share of peculiar ideas (so have I but I generally call them fiction and story ideas), and a significant appetite for self advertisement. All of which probably had nothing to do with prompting him to announce on his blog and a couple of discussion boards that he was in the midst of ending his life.

A number of people from various places attempted to get someone to him in Chile but failed and the Monday before last he was found by his cleaner, gassed.

I had no idea of most of this during that weekend, I'd seen a few postings on the Saturday but by then all the toing and froing between him and others on the board had finished.

The board that I was aware of was the Off Topic semi-detached annex to the Joel On Software Discussion Forums (I'll not bother doing a link you can find them if you like), and I was one of the moderators of that Off Topic annex.

Again I was away from the computer (just sleeping normally), when the next event happened which was that Joel Spolsky decided to close the ?off board completely for a set of reasons which, I think its safe to say, are at variance with the ones published on his blog.

Anyway, I woke on the Wednesday morning with a fairly neglected site of mine (Ectopia) fairly jumping with activity as a number of those normally on ?off clung to Ectopia as a life raft whilst an entirely similar craft to ?off was being built (Crazy on Tap). That clone site is now up and running.

It prompted me to clean up and fix some of the bugs that Ectopia did have to make it easier to use and I guess that was worthwhile. There's still the occasional flurry to make out that there is some kind of competition between the two sites but that was never really the case. If Ectopia continues to be used, that's all well and good, Crazy on Tap will be the one that has to suffer from being just like the previous place but different and that's a much harder task than simply starting from scratch.

As for what Ectopia is? Well its a kind of blog for anyone to make a posting without any real restrictions other than breach of copyright and attempts to monopolise it.

Police and State inextricably adjacent.

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 12:19:59 GMT

With the new Drugs Act one has to give written consent before a physical search of the person (and presumably inside the person), can take place. This sounds a step forward. In the same breath though the legislation adds, unless it is considered that consent is being withheld unreasonably in which case consent can be implied.

Implied.

So Mr Pisspot you are refusing to grant us written permission whilst lying prostrate on the floor with three beefy police officers pinning you down and my gloved finger about to invade your rectum, I have no alternative but to imply that you have given consent by unreasonably refusing to give that consent.

Under English Law the basis of being policed is that of consent from the public now even the implied consent of refusing it is no longer required. The principle of arrest was very clear in policing. A policeman has no more rights than anyone else in arresting someone, they are citizens whose job it is to protect life and property but do so under the same restrictions and controls as any other citizen.

Or rather they were. Under the new regulations that came into force in the New Year a policeman can now arrest someone for any offence whatsoever even if it be ever so minor. A citizen can now only arrest an individual for an indictable offence.

Since being arrested is sufficient cause for search and sufficient cause for search of premises and home there are now no controls on any fishing expedition mounted by the police on any individual. You truly can be arrested for stealing a sandwich from Pret a Manger and then have your gaff turned over for possession of drugs, arms, fertiliser and insecticide or whatever else it is that's high on the Chief Constable's list of undesirable products this day.

The Government has handed over the keys to the Police and now we must trust to their benificence in how they use those keys. Blair will undoubtedly wrinkle his eyes in disgust and simper simultaneously (a very peculiar performance and singularly performed by him) at the notion that we live in a Police State but the position is clear.

Police States are eminently safe and secure for those that the Police happen not to be interested in, we must individually pray now that we do not attract their interest.

The original posting in the new journal is here