Posted by Peter Morris Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:56:00 GMT
I pride myself on being able (in some little way) to put words down in roughly the right order. But I can’t do any better to express my outrage, disgust and horror.
Bankers are still a bunch of parasites
Nuff said.
Posted by Peter Morris Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:54:00 GMT
About three and a half years ago, I baught my first mac laptop. At the time I was sure I would regret it.
I am happy and a little surprised that I can look back and say I don’t regret the move to mac computing at all. Yes it is expensive but it is quite simply the best computing environment I have ever worked in.
Three and a half years is a long time and a little over a week ago, I ordered a new laptop. Another mac.
I have to say, I am still not remorseful. Nope, not a bit. Even though, this time, it is less of a revolution, more of a refinement and update. More memory, more hard disk, faster processor, better screen, better battery!
And again, it all just fits together, all just works.
Posted by Peter Morris Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:03:00 GMT
20 years ago, Apple tried to steal a march on the rest of the industry with the Newton. It was a groundbreaking promise that if it had worked would have reshaped the world. Sadly, while the ideas where groundbreaking, the prevailing technology just was not ‘there’ yet.
It provided plenty of fodder for comical news articles demonstrating the ineptitude of the handwriting recognition, and gave Apple the biggest black eye since the Apple III.
Now, Microsoft are lifting their skirts and showing us ‘Project Natal’. Have a look here .
If it works, it will as Cali says, be a life changer. If it doesn’t, it will (again) give the news services many a chortle.
Personally, I hope for the former, but fear for the latter.
Posted by Peter Morris Fri, 29 May 2009 09:06:00 GMT
I love my iphone, but mostly not for the phone. I love it because it means that wherever I go, I carry my world with me. I have amusements, music, diversion). So, far from being a device to connect me to people (as a phone should be) it is keeping me away from other people.
It’s not just me. In my late teens, I used to take a long bus journey to college (about 1.5 hours). In that time, I read, but also, over time I got to know the people I was travelling with every day. We would talk, and eventually got to know each other.
In my twenties I traveled by train a lot, and several times, I took my cat (ben, a short hair red tabby) with me. Those where amazing journeys. Ben was a great destroyer of boundaries. He would sleep in his box, on the table, lying across the open door of the cage, or would take note of my fellow passengers and introduce himself, and by association, me, to them.
Recently, I have started using public transport more, and have noticed that this opportunity no longer exists, we are all walled off from each other by our accompanying technology.
What we need is a ‘digital ben’. We need that something that breaks the ice, instead of thickening it.
Posted by Peter Morris Wed, 20 May 2009 08:38:00 GMT
Today, a friend linked me to this it is an scheme environment with extensions. It says it wants to be an environment for musicians and graphic artists to use for performance coding. There is an example here which is beautiful, haunting and inspiring.
But, watching that video, it reminds me soo much of “verse”“http://www.uni-verse.org/ and a project using it called Love . It reminds me not because the two projects are similar, but for another reason.
I spent a little time playing with verse, not really enough to get any results, but enough to get the feeling that I did not ‘get’ the programming model. But watching screencasts by the author of verse, I could see he was getting amazing results.
When I watched the impromptu demo, I was struck by the same feeling. The language has amazing promise. The author is obviously able to make use of it to create wonderful things. But, looking at what was being typed, it looked like giberish.
So, I started thinking about both projects. Both verse and impromptu are systems that their authors are able to use to make incredible results very quickly. I fear that others attempting to use them would not fare so well.
So, what are these? I think they are a class of system I would like to call ‘personal expansions’. They fit tightly and intimately to the person who has created them and they have the internal models and mindset which allows them to make use of the tools to do mind boggling things. But, that because of that intimacy, it is hard for others to use them with anywhere near the same level of productivity amplification.
This is a shame, and brings me to the ‘broken promises’.
Both these tools are being pushed as ‘look what you can do’, when really, they should be honest and say ‘look what I can do’.
I am most definitely not scornful of either project, I think they are wonderful and I look forward to playing with impromptu some time when I have a few hours to spare, but probably only once I have revisited my copies of ‘The little schemer’ and ‘The seasoned schemer’.
Posted by Peter Morris Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:01:00 GMT
SIGINT is Signal Intellegence. It is the art and science of extracting meaningful information from the fact of communications. Not the contents of communications, but the fact a particular set of communications took place.
Historically it has been an important branch of intelligence gathering. The problem is that the communications game has been changing.
Today the BBC tell us that European governments are attempting to make us all more secure by watching all our communications.
Set aside for a moment whether I think this is a good idea (Sorry, I can’t, I don’t think this is a good idea) and think about whether it is effective.
If we all HAD to use email for communications on the internet, or specific closely regulated websites, then sure, maybe this would help. But frankly, we don’t, it isn’t and they can’t.
There are soo many different ways to communicate and soo many ways of decoupling the sender of a message from the eventual recipient that no amount of sigint gathering of http endpoints or email traffic logs will help.
With Twitter, Facebook, IRC communications, not to mention TOR and SSH, steganography and bit torrent. There is just no way to effectively track communications from sufficiently motivated people.
So, there are several possible reasons for trying it.
So, what are we to do?
Who knows. I just fear this will not be the end of the attempts until people are reminded that some things just can’t be stopped.
Posted by Peter Morris Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:46:00 GMT
A friend linked me to Thru-You .
Absolutely fabulous. Some of it reminds me of Martin Denny, must listen to that again today.
But, in watching it I noticed that many of the contributors where using hardware sequencers, drum machines, synths etc.
So, I thought, ok, where did they get THOSE relics.
But then, I realised, they got them from junk sales, dumpsters etc as the music ‘industry’ moved over from expensive hardware to almost equally expensive software. In doing so, a whole raft of the physical hardware must have been liberated for the hobbyist.
And, this is one of the outcomes. Innovation, art, beauty. Wonderful.
Also, YOUTUBE, stop trying to limit people downloading! do you want to KILL the artform or foster it?!
Posted by Peter Morris Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:09:00 GMT
Posted by Peter Morris Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:39:00 GMT
A random link led me to a band called ‘New Buffalo’ and a google took me to a few of their videos. This is just amazing.
Posted by Peter Morris Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:57:00 GMT
I love this video.
