July 2005 Archives
July 31, 2005
Do yourself a favour - get a new phone
You've probably been looking for a nice new phone with a decent camera, bluetooth and all the other stuff. Here's the kiddie: a brand new, boxed and sealed, unlocked Sony Ericsson K700i. What are you waiting for? Go on. Click.
July 30, 2005
Photographs of London and Birmingham
Sorry to bang on about this but how come BBC Birmingham editors were able to find over 80 camphone pics of the tornado good enough for use on the web site in 24 hours and Helen Boaden's crack team in London found only 16 (of 'thousands' apparently submitted) from the 7/7 bombings in three weeks? Where are all those other photos? Isn't there some historic value in them? Shouldn't they be archived somewhere?
Broadband viewing habits
Trying not to gender-type my kids, tonight we watched the following videos on the Powerbook at bedtime (when we really should have been reading The Twits): Avril Lavigne's Sk8er Boy and Losing Grip; NASA's amazing, speeded-up video of Discovery spinning in orbit to provide astronauts aboard the space station with a good view of its heat-shield and an exciting video of the launch from a chase plane; the remarkable Birmingham tornado camphone footage from BBC Birmingham's site.
The tornado material is bizarre and scary and the NASA site produces genuine excitement – the long, dramatic videos are amazing (I guess they should be) but what is it, exactly, that stops Avril Lavigne's record label from providing something that might actually entertain my utterly smitten (5 year-old) daughter on their web site? All the videos are truncated to less than a minute and postage stamp-sized (even in best quality)... and don't get me started on navigation.
The photo gallery is pathetic and there is nothing else to look at (unless you pay an unmentionably large sum of money for 'membership' of this travesty of a web site – I wonder how many members they have). When you're a little girl and you type Avril Lavigne into Google, don't you have a right to expect something from the official site? How stupid is it to throw away your top fans' enthusiasm in return for... well... what exactly?
July 28, 2005
Digital Rights
Danny O'Brien thinks we might need a 'digital rights' organisation here in Britain. Something like the American EFF. He's put his money where his mouth is and started a pledge that requires 1,000 signups by Xmas (and is about halfway there).
I don't disagree. Liberty, as hazily defined by Britain's unwritten, common-law masterpiece of a constitution genuinely needs defending – here, now, in the time of bits – against a host of enemies, knowing and unknowing. The trouble is it's a strange beast and it's only nominally a constitution. In Danny's terrific, noisy and productive session at Open Tech 2005 Saturday, Cory Doctorow – a representative, apparently, from another planet (a planet where geeks are actually quite trendy and where they have a constitution) – fell on the European Court of Human Rights, with visible relief, as a sort of Euro-Supreme Court, a court of final recourse in which troubled Euro-techies might conduct 'impact litigation' of the kind the EFF specialises in.
Of course, he is wrong. An ancient and awkward nation like Britain is unlikely to ever provide a platform for the kind of expensive, showbiz litigation that produces new law in the US. The British EFF will need to be a very different creature and will need to be wired into our 'Constitution. Nein Danke' culture properly. Of course, I'd like to see the organisation that could actually do productive defensive work for liberty in digital Britain. I think a nicely-designed digital campaigning group could make a big difference and I admire Danny and his friends for getting the project going.
Liberty wasn't invented in Britain but its critical, open-minded, rational variant was. It's only right that Britain should produce a new kind of digital campaign group. I'm looking forward to it.
The picture shows Danny (on the right), actually creating the 'British EFF' pledge in real time straight after his session. How cool is that?
Update: Danny wrote about it in The Guardian" title="The right to digital freedom, The Guardian, 28 July 2005" and I haven't been able to figure out why this picture of Danny has been viewed over 600 times.
July 25, 2005
Fun
STAMPSTER - STAMP FUN ON YOUR PHONE |
|
|
John Risby has brought to my attention his clever new service Stampster, which allows you to do... well... the kind of thing I've just done to my picture at the top of the page and here in this entry (you can also send them to your mobile phone, of course, which is where I guess they're going to make their money). I think all that heavy copyright stuff and the big 'preview' watermark might cool people's interest in the idea a bit, though. A bolder, more open approach to promoting this idea might do the trick, I think.
July 20, 2005
Causality and Morality
I must be getting old. Don't try telling me the London bombings were 'caused' by the Iraq war or Blair's entrainment with the neo-cons or the lies about WMD or whatever. Those arguments – nicely wrapped in condemnation for the bombings themselves, of course – leave me cold. They're morally void. And an abuse of causality.
In fact, causality seems to be the problem here. The apologists (what else can I call them?) have an etiolated, mechanical concept of causality. A produces B (produces C). Blair's support for Bush produces disaffection in young Muslims (produces suicide bombings in London). As I said: morally void – and often accompanied by a sort of shrug: 'what did you expect? Of course they bombed London. Blair invaded Iraq'. In this way, the apologists deny the entire Islamic world moral agency, robbing Muslims of their human obligation to act well: 'how can you expect Muslims to behave morally? Blair invaded Iraq.'
The other side – the Government Ministers and their fellow travellers on the opposition benches – has an equally shaky idea of causality. Politics obliges them to cancel it all together in fact: 'I see no connection between the London bombs and British conduct in Iraq. 9/11 happened before the Iraq war. So did The USS Cole and the first WTC bombing. Those young men would have bombed London anyway.' The absurdity of this position is breathtaking.
Blair's wisdom here, though, is that he has no choice. The tiniest acknowledgement that he and his allies may have contributed to the change of climate that produced the bombings would be politically fatal. So, fact is denied. Reality distorted. Logic inverted.
The truth, as usual, lies elsewhere.
July 19, 2005
Sardar in the Statesman
You'll be wanting to read Ziauddin Sardar's excellent, really thought-provoking The struggle for Islam's soul about Islam's obligations after the London bombs and the religion's historic predisposition to violence from the New Statesman. You might need to pay for a 24 hours subscription to do so but I'd say it's worth it (and you can do it using your mobile phone).
July 17, 2005
This is how they make business myths in America
If I remember the sequence correctly, plucky little Pipex (Britain's first proper, commercial ISP) was bought by UUNet (America's first proper, commercial ISP). UUNet was subsequently bought by MCI (America's Maverick number 3 post-break-up telco), scouting round for an entry to the strange, new world of unmetered bits, which was subsequently bought by Worldcom (America's most dynamic, most Wild West telco) in a classical boom-era, equity-driven acquisition. This is how we, here in the British telecoms backwater, got a bit part in the amazing story of Bernie Ebbers, Worldcom's bouncer-turned-gutsy-entrepreneur-turned-desperate-fraud. Wow.
July 16, 2005
The lost leading the lost
The young men who attacked London last week are pitiable – profoundly lost to humanity. Theirs isn't a religion, nor a cause. It's a sacrifice cult, a bloody creed designed to glorify not God but a millionaire demagogue called Osama Bin Laden and a bankrupt, history-less ideology from the fringes of world culture. Five hundred years ago, the sophisticated and decadent Aztecs killed children to appease Gods they feared. The sad gang that killed 55 people in London nine days ago has as much in common with the complicated, enlightened tradition that produces big, resilient cities like London as those Aztec priests.
It's a vicious ideology and it's sustained by violence and by the pitiless conversion of its own adherents into dumb weapons. The logic of a fighting force dependent on the deliberate death of its soldiers for its success is so perfectly inverted as to defy rational thought. Suicidal Terror's only possible victory lies in the pointless self-murder of its last happy martyr. Only then will it be possible for those who lead these young men and women to their deaths – convince them of their destiny – to calculate the magnitude of their victory. The question is: what will they do if they conclude that they didn't win yet? That they need more martyrs?
40° coloureds/cottons
This is how you kill a Sony Ericsson K700i.
July 11, 2005
Citizens censored?
Helen Boaden, the BBC's head of news, quoted in The Guardian, says that:
"Within minutes of the first blast we had received images from the public," says Boaden. "We had 50 images within an hour. Now there are thousands. We had a gallery of still photographs from the public online, and they were incredibly powerful."
Thousands? You wouldn't know it from BBC News Online's coverage. I can find maybe 25 in several different places at news.bbc.co.uk, most of which have been there for several days. What have they done with them all? Are they all sub-standard? Too graphic? Faked? Out of focus? I'd really like to know if there's a flood of images from citizen reporters dammed up behind the BBC's editorial code of practice.
I suppose it was inevitable
The Daily Mail's RSS feed is up so, you'll be happy to know, you can now read all about tidal waves of dirty immigrants, neighbours from hell, meddling bureaucrats and interesting new diseases in an aggregator of your choice.
The wisdom of the mayor
Since Thursday's bombings, Ken Livingstone's been telling a story about London as open, tolerant and free – the opposite of the miserable theocratic monocultures advanced by the miserable bombers and their miserable egomaniac bosses. Of course, I like this story. It's what I (and millions of incomers before me) love about London. It's resilient, accepting, adaptable. A contemporary city rooted in a couple of millennia of immigration and assimilation.
Of course I couldn't help being a bit suspicious of Ken's motives – he's a politician to the bone and his story sounded, well, a bit too political for a moment like this. But then Juliet read me the names of the twelve people still missing – Laura Webb, Monika Suchocka, Shahera Akther Islam, Michelle Outto, Jamie Gordon, Neetu Jain, Rachelle Yuen, Philip Russell, Anthony Fataji Williams, Slimane Ihab, Philip Beer, Richard Ellery – and I suppose that was enough. The Mayor's right. Those names say it all. London is a city defined by its readiness to accommodate newcomers and its principal weapon against the nihilists is its openness.
Incidentally, Frank Gardner, the BBC's Security Correspondent, was on Start The Week this morning. He's an Arabic-speaker and an all-round Middle East expert (and he was paralysed by an Al-Qaeda gunman a year ago). He reckons the Arab press is full of rather surprised editorial about just how heterogeneous the population of London is.
July 08, 2005
7/7?
Looks like only the foreign press has adopted 7/7 as a name for yesterday's bombings. Seems crass to be worrying about labels but a unique tag for the events would be useful – it would make finding references (in the blogosphere, news, flickr and so on) much easier.
That terrible day was characterised by a flood of images from the thousands of people directly involved while the professional photographers hung around uselessly outside the expanding police cordon. Here's a deadly serious application for folksonomy: stitch together the historic record of the July 7th bombings. Update: a flickr pool for the bombings. A Technorati search for "london bomb" is also fairly useful.
The day after infamy
A big city is an amazing thing. It's obviously more than the sum of its parts. This city's history makes it wide open, accepting, perhaps incautious and that makes London a perfect target for the psychopathic criminal nihilists but it also makes it a robust and adaptable entity. Even an ingenious, distributed attack on the city's transport network can't break it.
The city continues to function today and will do so without significant pause. I'm very, very proud of London and the Londoners (and the honorary Londoners who work here) who came through yesterday's nightmare with such nobility. I'm also certain that no one can break the will of this city to remain an open, happy and productive place. London really can take it.
July 05, 2005
Things were different in the 1950s
My mother-in-law gave us a little bundle of gorgeous 1950s I-Spy books so I looked them up and found this nice memory of their production back in the Sixties and Seventies from Ralph Mills who was assistant to Big Chief I-SPY in an office above a hardware shop in Paddington.
July 04, 2005
What's wrong with Live 8?
Smug, patronising, reductive, counter-productive. Nauseating, clapped-out (McCartney? Sting? The Who?), bullying, sentimental, phoney, boring. Recycling twenty year-old images of suffering people. Providing no insight at all into African subjectivity – ambitions, desires, success stories. No new ideas at all (hold on: Sail 8. That was new) – at least nothing that other people hadn't spent years coming up with, without Sir Bob's help (like Oxfam's Make Poverty History campaign).
Clueless, egomaniac artists hugging random Africans. Witless celebrity liggers congratulating each other incoherently on the telly. An ugly, opportunistic media consensus that seems to embrace the entire mainstream media (enough pull-out-and-keep supplements to sink a battleship).
Africans insulted and demeaned – literally excluded by Geldof's arbitrary sales cut-off ("Welcome to Cornwall, losers!"). A continent reduced to yesterday's basket-case imagery projected behind yesterday's rock stars. I'm sorry. I can't help it. Does this make me a bad person?