June 2003 Archives

more pictures of Tuscany later in the week...

Last weekend I was climbing in Stanage and I climbed Hollybush Crack, tonight I found that RockFax had a decent picture of it and someone had described it as one of the top 10 climbs in the world... lovely 50 odd foot of fun.
I've discovered a new use for blogging too, Lucy and I have started a climbing blog, with a new entry per climb or training session and using keywords for the grade etc. It will hopefully be a useful way to track our progress.

Google released AdSense in the past few days for use on sites like this one. Scroll down a bit and on the right you'll see some AdWords, every click earns me a few cents. The Ad content is based on the content of this site. At the minute it is very and blogging heavy, when I first tried it the climbing article was at the top of the page and it was full of climbing things, it will be interesting to see how it changes. I can filter out certain sites, but at the minute it is unfiltered.

Today I've written about several different aspects of media and the aftermath of the war in Iraq. I still have an anti war stance, I don't think it was the right thing to have done. It is going to be a long running mess in Iraq and the previous warzone Afghanistan for several years. The "exit plan" just hasn't been thought through for either country.
The t-shirt campaign from Agit Properties is an amusing parody on the near blanket pro War on Iraq stance from the majority of US media organisations. Henry Norr is a victim of companies deciding that they own your free time, as well as your paid time and can decide what is the right way to behave. The BBC is different, it is a media organisation being attacked by the incumbent government because it is asking valid questions of the decisions and policy around the pre and post war plans.

It feels like the war is not over yet and will run for most of the year to come. Certainly it will take at least a year if not two to get the rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan even part way complete.

Henry Norr is a long time technology journalist who I have been happily reading for many years in Mac magazine, on Macintouch and occasionally on the SF Chronicle. That was until March through April, when Henry was dismissed for taking a day to go on an anti war protest. Google search for henry norr contains lots of different articles on his dismissal and reactions to it.
There is a support site for him, which has been setup by volunteers. The support site has a series of articles on what has happened in the case and some of the current proceedings. He was also part of a call to action from MoveOn.org, a US based citizens democracy organisation with over 2 million members which seeks to return some control to the people of America, rather than the current vested interests.

Today he emailed me and a thousand others who contacted him, I blogged about it a while back. Henry and others have organised a day off protest around the 4th of July. The plan is to boycott the mainstream media, the protest is focussed around the SF Chronicle, but people can participate world wide, by using independent media sources rather than the mainstream often advertiser swayed sources.

Click Read More to read the exended article and read the call to action.

Slightly scary interview with Alistair Campbell on Today this morning. My key take away words from the interview were his use of the almost soviet style "dissident" and the comment that Andrew Gilligan's file was getting larger. You could listen to the audio file and make your own mind up, but it is oddly not available from the today website, though Richard Sambrook's response is there. It is strange that Alistair Campbell's interview is not available, as viritually every other package from the programme is available.
Written coverage from the BBC new site main BBC response, Should Campbell go and Campbell makes WMD an issue of trust. Overview from The Guardian on the issue of No 10 and the BBC

Disclosure: I work for the BBC.

A detailed article from the BBC on the possibility of Belfast becoming a high tech "hot house", a sort of Silicon Lough. The article tracks the decline of the manufacturing industry in Northern Ireland and compares the province against a variety of averages for the UK, on education it performs best with nearly two thirds of the 16-19 year olds in college or training.

However the overall picture is not as bright as it could be. The future is seen to be technical companies acting as consultants and service companies. A good well researched article, which paints a possible bright future for Belfast at any rate. It mentions the large science park, I discussed earlier, which is closely linked to the Queen's University of Belfast.

I'd love to see a resurgence of Belfast, as it is great, sharp, funny and friendly place.

I've been working on a project for the past six months at the BBC. It is an instant messaging application linked to page content. The premise is that you can chat to people looking at the same page as you are. It is called Connector and is on the Radio1 website, look for the "talk live now 24/7 - click for connector" banners.
Have fun with it.

Agit Properties have attracted the attention of the Fox News lawyers by designing a Faux News t-shirt, with the amusing tag line "We distort, you comply". I think that this is a delightful parody and have ordered a t-shirt. Fox do not like it at all and have issued a cease and desist order. I found this via the Register, here is the original article.

I was reading on MacSlash that people in the US have found that iChatAV can send sms messages. Sadly this seems limited to the US phone networks only. I tried my uk mobile on the Orange network and iChatAV responded with
This is an illegal phone number
So it seems that the beta has hidden depths. To try this, use New chat with Person and then type in a mobile number, in the form ++ country code number eg ++447999123456. If you use a single plus, you get the error above, a double plus seems to vanish, with no error code. If it ever arrives, I'll update this post.

Lots of new interesting products from Apple yesterday. Some of my particular favourites are a final version of Safari, which is now set to be the dominant browser on the Mac platform. I really like Safari, it has been my dominant browser for months now, though as Francois notes it had become unstable under the recent Quicktime 6.3 update. Personally I have some issues with tabs, as it is close window is a very well learned habit, a "you have other tabs open" dialog would be great. Using iSync for sharing bookmarks, I blogged about back in Janurary, a few days after release, so it is nice to see it implemented.

Panther, MacOS X 10.3 looks really quite interesting. Exposé takes some of the best elements from unix window managers and integrates them in an elegant manner. I use hide all windows and hide everything except this application all the time, so this will be a great boon. The new iDisk has a local image of your iDisk on your own machine. This makes it really quick and means that you have access to your content even when not online. Lastly the new Finder views, with Labels again, look like quite a powerful metaphor for browsing content. Look at the animated gifs for an idea of how it works.

The new iChat will be great fun with audio and video. It also supports blocking of individual users and groups. Stating in the messaging window that it is AIM IM, might hint to integration with Jabber, maybe. The new camera, iSight is really lovely looking and has good functionality, it is quite pricey, but if the pictures are good from it, I'll want one...

I use Mail at the minute, as my main email application and it is okay. IMAP is great and it is pretty quick and deals well with spam. Making it quicker will be even better and improvements to the threading will help for mailing lists etc. I do wish it had a notification of what email was filtered where, like Eudora.

New fast machines are always good news, but I'm a dedicated Powerbook user, so whilst happy it is more of an also ran for me. Good to see get back to parity with Intel, given the Pentium snail adverts of the past, see snail poster.

Lastly and possibly best is the release of the Webkit rendering engine, pdf from Safari for use in other applications. I expect to see it in NetNewsWire 1.04 soon.

I went climbing at the weekend with Lucy and we had a great time, we even did our first lead climbs at Stanage. Climbing outside is a great experience, much more satisfying than at the climbing wall, good training though that is. There is a real feeling of becoming a small part of the history of the place, people have been climbing at Stanage for over 120 years, and many of the easier climbs were first climbed in the late 1800s / early 1900s. The difference moving to real rock is interesting, you have to make use of what is on the surface of the crag, rather than the artificial routes of coloured holds at the gym. This inspection and physical relationship with the rock is quite satisfying, if somewhat short lived, I have three or four sharp memories from the weekend and a haze of other moves and grey brown rockfaces.
UPDATE: I've added two pictures of Lucy and myself climbing. We went with Rockhoppers, a long established London based climbing club and were guided and taught by Charles and Shelia, who provided a good natured friendly weekend of climbing. END UPDATE
Fifty foot up there is a great view, but looking down can give you plenty of thoughtful moments. A climber the previous day fell and broke some bones. This leaves quite an impression on a novice lead climber, like Lucy and I. Sad for him, but reinforced the safety aspect of climbing very throughly. Some of the things that flow through your mind when you are leading range from the quality of the gear you just placed; what the next 3-4 moves will be; to many variations on "are we there yet", when looking for a rest spot. Climbing is one activity that really clears your mind, you just focus on the next move or setting the belay, the day to day worries vanish for a while. Climbing is a challenge on two levels it is partly physical, learning to move properly. Strength is part of it, but it is not all upper body power, balance is a key part of making your climbing successful. The other aspect is a mental challenge, using and dealing with the fear and adrenaline that climbing produces. Climbers often refer to this as a head thing, fear of heights is healthly, but you can then let doubt stop you from making a move than you are physically capable of. Finding balance between these two aspects is part of the game.
An amusing 100 things about climbing article, with a glossary to translate it. Explaining to my friends at work what I did is quite hard, they don't appreciate what a flake is or about gear or leading, yet they are the lingua franca of climbing. Another jargon to translate to and from, more than that really as there is a whole range of implicit knowledge in the process of climbing. I'll look for a better basic guide to climbing, as I'm sure I be writing more and want you, my readership, to follow things.

And finally, Lucy sent me this article on how cats manage not to hurt themselves when they fall, even from 32 stories up. They have this amazing ability to turn in mid air and then land on all four paws, a broken jaw is one of the more common injuries, if seldom occuring. Pity humans fare so badly in this respect, but then again I'm more likely to get injured driving up the M1 to Stanage than climbing there.

I've got lots of stuff backing up in my head, with things to write about and thoughts I've had whilst on holiday. I've even got a long entry on Venice to finally finish and several books to write about. Yet everything feels stuck in my head and going stale.
Euan links to an article about writing your blog, it is not a technical thing you learn, to improve you need to experience so that you have something to write about.
Peter Lindberg writes perfectly about my feeling, holding on to the ideas that you want to blog makes them ferment. Blogging is like breathing, if you hold your breath it isn't good for you. He follows up with a note on Chris Pirillo about not forcing it, if there is nothing to write about then don't. I think I agree, if I have nothing to say then I usually leave it or read something, I need some stimulus to have a reaction to. Though if I don't post for a while, like having come back from holiday it can take a while to get back into it. Hence I was back on late Thursday and only now am getting back into the swing of it.
Making time to write is something that many authors say is important, you need to get into the habit of it. I don't want to create a linklog, I want to actually have some of my own content on here, mainly to satisfy myself and track what I'm reading or thinking or doing. Today marks four months of my blog being public to the world and I think it might be taking its first steps and looking forward to being one.

From 2lmc/spool, there is a new fun wiki site, called London Geek tracking the who and what of the people who made the dotcom bubble in London. The aim is to get the story of the London new media experience from the people who did the work. Should be an interesting story to read given a summer's worth of contributions. If you were part of it, then go and add yourself...
Hopefully the very valid criticisms from 2lmc will be addressed soon, I like the idea of capturing the history of the bubble, but not in such a fragile manner.

Spencer Tunick, who did the installation at Selfridges, which I wrote about, has done another much larger event in Barcelona with 7000 people involved. BBC news have a short article about the event. It must have been quite an experience to have taken part in. Via Barcablog who writes about football, politics and bullfighting.

Spent yesterday cooking and eating mainly, we made icecream and tiramasu, an omlette and had a barbeque. Warm summer days are quite inspiring for cooking I think. Having been in Italy recently I have realised just how much of the food that we eat in the UK is inspired by Italy, Spain and France. We would not have olive oil or countless vegetables without the influence of the Mediterranean and North Africa. The UK is a great place to draw all of these influences together, without them our food might be quite dull. Classic british dishes do not really inspire me - roasts, fish and chips, vinegar instead of oil and our own snack food toast. Not quite pizza or bruschetta... I'm not damning our food, but realising that I do not really eat British food very much.

Back from Tuscany and listening to the Today programme (with a new website), as I lethargically got ready to go to work this morning. There was an interesting debate on the position of ethics in science and whether science can or has the right to answer moral questions. It made me think of some of the differences between Europe and the USA.

In Europe we tend to ask questions, whereas the US approach is to build solutions using technology. The debate looks at this issue against the background of some current scientific dilemmas, like global warming and genetic engineering.

There seems to be a bit of a blogger Radio 4 love in at the minute, with various people commenting on just how great R4 is. Maybe it is the equivalent of an radio book and many bloggers like to read, as much as write. Some thing that strikes me is that this might be why the active blogging community is relatively small at 2-300,000. People who read often have an opinion and this might encourage them to write, so are there two barriers to entry for the regular blogger. You need to be one of the small number of people who regularly read books and you need to have the time to think and write. More on this over the weekend, I think.

A delightful and interesting article from Andrew Losowsky on the notion of being an expat. I used to live in Belfast, but I'm now living in London. I was struck by how many of the things in this article reminded me that I'm really an expat too. I talk to new people from Belfast and try to make connections, I'll drink Guiness or eat soda farls. I miss the Belfast humor, which is so present in books like Divorcing Jack, also a film (DVD), which has an old friend Colin Murphy in it. I'm currently reading Eureka Street and it is making me laugh out loud on the train. Belfast humour is black, cynical and sharp, I've yet to meet anything that beats it. A charcter recovering from a hangover says to a mate "I'm dead, but I haven't the wit to stiffen", is one example, but they are on most pages
Tonight I'm off for dinner with an old friend George from Belfast, maybe I'm just being wistful about my old town. Or maybe I'm really an expat and hadn't realised it yet.

I've been reading Stu Hughes blog, he has some powerful images and thoughts on his site. I was particularly struck by the image of the discarded canon camera, with its gleaming lens barrel covered in drips of blood from the reporters who were killed and injured in the hotel in Baghdad. The shiny cream barrel is normally an object of desire, here it is relegated to a simple contrast to the blood red.
Recently he has been talking about the hyping of cluster bombs (of which I'm a bit guilty) and how this distracts from the real issue of un-exploded ordnance (uxo) and mines. More pictures of UXO and the results.
He has a separate weekly diary with the BBC too. Stu is also closely involved with Mine Action Group, who actually clear mines worldwide, they are keen for donations to support their work. I think it is a great cause to give too, it'll go on the Campaigns section of this blog tomorrow.

The Guardian have tracked down Salam Pax and he will be writing fortnightly for G2, starting this Wednesday. Via Joi Ito.
I hoped that someone would sign him up for a contract, either a book or a newspaper column. He wrote a very compelling account of the real experience of living in Baghdad, one of the more interesting opinions on the war in Iraq.