October 2003 Archives

At lunch today, I went to the London Food Lovers' Fair in Covent Garden. It is really quite good, with a wide range of tasty food to try. Lots of samples on offer and things to buy.
I had some sips of some lovely wines and whiskies plus a burger from Northfield Farm, who are a great butcher. The fair is on over Saturday and Sunday and I'd highly recommend a visit is you are in London over the weekend. I might see you there on Saturday if you are coming.

netObjects is an interesting series of eight objects that enable some sort of interaction with the internet via a specific device for that content area. One example is the cuckoo clock that tells the news or the umbrella which can tell you the weather.
They are a nice example of something that I think will be on the increase devices with internet, rather than devices for internet. So spreading the access to the internet amongst your devices rather than having a special internet access device. Just like the radio and digital clocks are found in many different shapes and formats. Thanks to Matt for finding this, you can come to see a presentation about netObjects at the AIGA event on the 6th November, you need to RVSP, see website for details.

I've changed the rss feed for this site to a full content feed with the text and images of every article. If you have any comments on this change, let me know.
I've made this change, as I use NetNewsWire Pro and find that weblogs that are excerpt only I find annoying when trying to read then on the train. However if you want the headlines only feed back, I'll make that available.

A quick comparison / review between the 12 inch portables that Apple has available now. The Powerbook is more expensive by about 400 pounds. This is based on approximately equivalent specs from the Apple store.

Powerbook G4 12 inch 1,497.98 pounds (Amazon.com)
1GHz PowerPC G4
512MB DDR266 SDRAM - 2 SO-DIMMs
60GB Ultra ATA drive (4200rpm)
DVD/CD-RW
12.1-inch TFT display
NVIDIA GeForce FX GO 5200 - 32MB DDR
AirPort Extreme Card

iBook G4 12 inch 1,063.00 pounds (Amazon.com)
800MHz PowerPC G4
384MB DDR266 SDRAM - 2 SO-DIMMs
60GB Ultra ATA drive
DVD/CD-RW
12-inch TFT display
ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 32MB video memory
Bluetooth Module
AirPort Extreme Card

So for your 400 quid you get a faster CPU and more opportunities for expansion. If you have no need for driving double monitors, then I'd get the iBook, as it seems a steal, Apple Store iBook link.

Build yourself an Origami Concorde, quite cool.
BBC news also have a flash guide to the cockpit of concorde and lots more stories and background on the BBC news site.

Amazon.com today lauched a full content search covering 33 million pages and 120,000 books. It is Amazon.com only at the minute, but is a really interesting idea.
Essentially it is a challenge to the dominance of Google in terms of an interface to the knowledge in the world. Google may be the webpage search engine of choice, but most of the world's knowledge is still in books. Now that is available from amazon.com, though only at a page at a time, but this might be sufficient to offer up some thing sufficiently different from Google. Certainly for something other than tech subjects Amazon might have cornered a market.
Thanks to Ben Hammersley for the pointer.

The BBC launched iCAN, the civic participation project that has been evolving beside me for most of this year, whilst I managed the database behind the registration system.
It is maybe hard to get it right now, as it is a bit empty, but go and see what campaigns and issues there are that interest you in you area, then register and start a local campaign. I think that it will be fascinating to watch it grow out of beta and through the next couple of iterations.

I have lots of half finished notes sitting as partly written entries on this blog, it would seem that I'm not alone, a quick peruse of other peoples' blogs in NetNewsWire confirms this. MT has become the equivalent of the notebook, sort of, it doesn't capture everything, as it is not always with me.
Earlier in the year I wrote about how I had replaced my palm pilot with a sheet of paper, well it has been upgraded to a Moleskine, which I bought whilst in Grenoble recently. I've started to use it for capturing the inital "I might write about X thoughts". Todo lists live on as scraps of paper folded inside, and some travel writing fills the front, though I usually spend too much time staring out the window on trains and not writing.
Maybe the choice of notebook was inspired by Bruce Chatwin, who I'm reading at the minute, or maybe practicality. Whatever it is a useful medium to have, of all the notebooks cluttering up my flat I find that this is the right size for me to want to carry and not regret the size of it.
Chatwin's writing feels like weblog articles, you can see the constraint of the page size in his writing, each chapter is a couple of pages from his moleskin, the standard paperback page size dwarfs the writing at times. His writing also has the same immediate style, capturing the sights and the experiences straight onto paper. It is the immediacy that feels like weblogging drawing you into the periodic snapshots of his travels in Patagonia. It might just be that I've read few literary diaries, but the parallel is too strong for that I think.
So, back to the drafts, I still have them sitting on my server and I'm not sure what to do with them, some of them are interesting, others dated. I'm tempted to delete them and more on. Yet there is something of interest in them, maybe I'll roughly edit them and dump them on here.
Bruce Chatwin may have had a similar experience or half finished entries, yet working the linear medium of the Moleskine, he was much more constrained in terms of returning to unfinished work, this might be a good discipline to learn. Often the more quickly written articles are more popular than the longer missives I labour over, like this one is turning into.
On Monday night I spent a while talking over some of this with Tom, Euan, Paul and Dan, amongst others. Stuart Hughes talked about his experience of blogging in Iraq, then recovering from his injuries. He also touched on the differences between his day job as a journalist and his writing on his weblog. They are not the same thing, but the news media are interested in the freshness of weblogs, but the randomness of them in terms of fact checking makes them wary. The mainstream media prepare news for consumption, those who read blogs make their own narrative.
This lead into a debate on the changes that happen to a weblog if you write for an audience, or to get traffic. There is a continuum from niche blogs like gawker or pvrblog, to the more personal weblogs like this one. I write pretty much what I want, occasionally being sensitive to being a BBC employee, in that I don't blab about non-public projects, but that is not a BBC specific thing. Once you have an audience however small, it is difficult to ignore them, hence the occaisional apology for not posting that appears on various blogs. There is also the passing desire for fame via google and affiliate income from amazon or such, mind you the rates of pay are pretty low in terms of pounds per entry, even NUJ basic rates are better.
This desire to capture the passing flow of information and distill it is quite powerful, hence the linklogs that people have, this is a good example. There is a part of me that wants to make a linklog, in fact I've started one, which I've yet to link in to the main page. Yet links without context make me feel a bit sad, as they are just like bookmarks, which I seem to have stopped using altogether. I feel that I'll loose the context in which I found the link in the first place, again I've talked about this before.
Finding time to write enough articles to capture the world as it passes you by is important, maybe having the moleskine and the linklog will let me focus on the more interesting articles and "bookmark" the rest. There is also a balance between work and play, though arguably this is both.
Weblogs increase the amount of information you can read, RSS readers enhance this ability even more. Maybe I'm saying that reading less and maybe writing less might be a good idea, or at least letting go of some of it.

I discovered today that the number one in the UK charts on the day I was born was Get It On, by T. Rex, which I was quite happy with… see how you fare, via this day in music.
Listen to audio clips, and read a biog from BBCi, read the lyrics to Get it on or buy T. Rex on amazon.

are selling 2-3 iPods a minute over the past few months. However these must be largely sales to new people. If you bought a first and second generation iPod, then the first generation 5Gig are upgrade candidates, but the 2nd generation one sold were largely 20G ones, you would not really upgrade for the capacity.
Apple are pushing the accessories from Belkin and Griffin, like the Voice Recorder and the Media Reader, but a new iPod and one of these is a non-trivial expense, around 3-500 quid.
So what do need to do to appeal to people like me with a 20G 2nd generation iPod. It has sufficent space for enough music and can more files around if I need to. The dock connector is an interesting idea, allowing for a range of cool addons, like the additional battery pack, which uses AA batteries.
On the new iPod the software is also the newer version 2, with games, notes and an alarm clock.
However some interesting new additions might be (as alluded to previously), a colour screen for photo preview. This might be combined with a higher resolution screen, which also might be a bit larger. Also of interest, but unlikely is line-in for ripping CDs in the wild, I can't see the cosy relationship of the iTunes music store standing for this.
Wireless access would also be interesting, given the availability of minute SD based wifi cards there is no reason not too, kind of like the Sony FSV-PGX1 wireless server, except with several hours battery life. It would make a great tool for private sharing to computers, though if over bluetooth, then you could share to phones, which might make for interesting bus train journeys, sort of like in work with everyones' iTunes shared over rendezvous.
The clamour for a full pda or phone integration, which started when the iPod was released I don't get, the iPod is a media device, there is not reason why it could not take DV video over the firewire cable, all it needs is sufficient speed hard drives, a capable screen and the right software.
It will be interesting to see where Apple take the 4th generation iPod, my bet is colour screen preview of photos, maybe wireless.

Lots of interesting announcements from Apple, late last week. iTunes for Windows has been released, which exposes a whole world of Windows users to the pleasure of iTunes. For an office environment the main excitement seems to be lots more people sharing music with one another and enjoying the music, rather than focussing on the technology, which is quite an way to do things.
They also announced some new accessories for the 3rd generation iPods. A mic for voice recording and a new photo reader for storing digital pictures on the iPod hard drive.
They have also posted an iTunes Music Store link maker, which could be the start of a wider affiliate store.
This made me think that how much of a change would it be to add colour screen to the iPod and thus allow preview of images on the iPod. Add in the battery backup system based on AA batteries from Belkin and you have a read and display device that also plays music. Quite a nice all in one media toy. Then I thought that the iPod is no longer read only via the new mic, though it is only as mono wavs, but it is a start towards the mobile ripping mp3 player that everyone wants. So are taking the iPod in interesting directions, maybe bluetooth or wifi based music sharing might be next... it will not be the pda people thought when it was first released, but it is becoming something very interesting, more a personal media store, enough to make me want a 3rd gen one at any rate.
Buy the Voice recorder and the media reader from the Apple Store or buy an iPod from Amazon.co.uk, personally I think that the 20Gig one is the sweet spot this time, unless you have stacks of music, then you'll want the 40GB, which can act as a backup device too.

One of my favourite films of the past few years is on BBC4 this Saturday. They have a short preview of the film on their site, which is part of their regular international film season on Saturday evenings.
I really enjoyed time-out, or L'emploi du temps as it was known in France. I think the french title is better, the emphasis on filling in time is more apt. I have found that has continually returned to my thoughts. The essence of the film is the balance of your identity versus the identity you gain from having a job. The main character of the film loses his job and attempts to cover by doing the same things each day. He has always enjoyed the driving and this starts to become his solice. He pretends that everything is fine and gradually he drifts into a different more desperate world, yet the parallels with his business man existance are still there, which is the disturbing undercurrent of the film. It is maybe a different take on the fragility of routine and civilization explored in Lord of the Flies. The mood of the film is quite empty and dark, but dramtically scored and shot, this seems to make his isolation even more stark.
Elements of the film keep coming back to me from time to time, around travelling and the question of what am I doing when things seem interminable. How much of you is your job is an interesting question, especially given the number of people who I know who have been made redundant over the past few years, including myself. Through the film you can start to see how people end up long term unemployed, being unemployed becomes your job.
If you miss the film on Saturday, you can always buy it from Amazon, Time Out (L'Emploi du temps), in French, with English sub-titles.

It has been an interesting few weeks, with each of the political parties in the UK having their conferences. The Liberal Democrats went in on a high and came out lower, Labour initially interesting, then back to "good old Tony". The Conservatives started rocky and ended rocky and are now looking like they might lose their leader, due to the current investigations.
Conference review from BBC and aftermath on the conference season. Main conference overviews for LibDems BBC and Guardian; Conservatives BBC and Guardian; Labour BBC and Guardian.
Charles Kennedy comes across as a bit tame really, I think that given the new found support for the LibDems, as I discussed earlier in the year, they could be making more of it. I think that they are sidelining Simon Hughes towards the London Mayor election. I think he might well replace Ken, but I'd rather see him running the party. If he fails to win the mayoral election, then he'll end up without a role to play.
The Tories are a sad sight, they may have some interesting policies, but the biggest cheer was still for bringing back hanging. I think that they are stuck for another term out of office, they are unable to settle on a leader for more than a couple of years at most and they need to decide now, as if IDS rides out the current furore, then he'll somehow sit tight until the election. Replacing your leader close to an election is unlikely, the questions around the employment of his wife do look set to push that decision.
Finally there is Labour, Tony pulled it out of the hat again, all questions of his grip on the leadership seem to have disappeared, though Mr Brown's speech will not have gone unnoticed.
Mr Blair's quote "I can only go one way, I've not got a reverse gear" is depressingly close to Thatcher's "This lady is not for turning", but then as was commented on last week the Tories do not know where to place themselves, as twenty years ago the speeches at the New Labour 2003 conference would have come from the Tory conference platform.
Like many people I'm thinking about whether I'll vote Labour again quite hard at the minute, the Iraq war weighs heavily in my mind and I'm unsure if I believe in the current Government. They have lied to us over the war and ignored public opinion on Foundation hospitals and ID cards. Tony has become a fervent conviction politician, he believes he is right, I'd prefer someone who listened to his public a bit more.
I might give a Brown led New Labour a chance, but might well be voting LibDem next time round.

This week, on Radio 4, Tony Benn is reading extracts from his diaries 1991-2001, entitled Free at Last. They are a joy to listen to and full of interesting political history and tidbit. Monday's programme is here, until the 20th and you can get the rest of the programmes from the Book of the Week website. The programme is on at 9.45-10.00am and repeated 12.30-12.45am, so you can catch Tuesday's programme this evening. You can also buy the book, Free at Last as a CD, which would work well mp3'd.
Either it is about getting older or I'm developing an interest in political history, I certainly enjoyed This Sceptred Isle, 1959-1979, covering the years before I was born and my first few years. I think that 1901-1919 and 1837-1900 would be an interesting part of history to learn more about. A time when big radical discoveries where being made and the main political parties in the UK defined themselves. Europe was also in turmoil and British power was at its height. See the notes on the BBC Sceptred Isle site for the late 1800s and the early 20th century. From this period Disraeli (biography from Victorianweb and Wikipedia) stands out as probably the most interesting political figure, certainly the most quotable. I particularily liked "It is much easier to be critical than to be correct" and "It destroys one's nerve to be amiable every day to the same human being".

Lucy was on Radio1 last night, listen to Sunday Surgery (Real Audio), about 37 minutes into the programme, amongst the people talking about their various problems is Lucy talking about mental health treatment. Audio file valid until Sunday 19th.
Read more of what Lucy wrote on the OneLife site, on depression and anxiety. The package from the Sunday Surgery show came from a longer interview, which Lucy did for OneLife.

I'm off to the London Film Festival later this month, having fought with the ticket booking website last Thursday to get some tickets bought. There should be tickets left for many films, but we were being allocated edge seats already.
I'm going to see five films, including the Surprise film, Strayed, One for the Road, Northfolk and A Real Man. Short reviews of each film after I've seen them.
There are so many films that this literally is a mere scrape of the surface. If you are in London, then go see some films. Again, like Borough Market this is something I should have been to years ago.

I've maybe found a reason to buy a gps unit.... from the newish BBC News magazine. An article on confluence mapping, which is an odd, but very intriguing idea. Essentially you use a GPS unit to get to the point were the latitude and longitude lines intersect and then take a picture of the gps unit screen to prove you got there and take pictures of the view. There are thousands of confluence points around the world and many have already been photographed. It creates a magical picture of the world, giving images of the countryside across the globe.
There are some rules that mean that every intersection does not count, but essentially there is one within 150 miles of you right now. Lots more information is at confluence.org and there is a country by country listing of possible nodes. Virtually every point in Western Europe has been done, but there are plenty left in South America
If you think that this is sounding a bit geeky and dull, the look at the pictures,
map of world, showing thumbnails of pictures taken at confluence points. It is also an interesting narrative reading the stories of people trying to get there and how they managed it.
So I just need a gps unit and then I'm heading back to Chile...

Delightful article from the SF Chronicle, by Mark Morford, entitled
Lick Me, I'm A Macintosh - What the hell is wrong with that they still give a damn about design and packaging and "feel"?. Wherein he describes the shopping experience. They really do care about your initial experience. Opening a PowerBook box or an iPod is an almost magical experience. I'll admit that I still have several bits of packaging around my flat, on the off chance that I might need them again. Really I think it a pity to part with them.
Both Lucy and I have computers, an iBook and PowerBook. We carry them about and use them in cafes, on trains and generally in public. About one time in five or six, I'll get someone asking me what kind of machine I have, usually commenting on how elegant they are and well designed.
Other people think so and like the mixture of decent applications and unix underpinnings too. I've been a daily mac user for over 13 years and now have owned 4 personally and am a very happy PowerBook owner, even if my old 9 month old 15 inch PB does creak a bit. I think that for the money there is little other choice.
are pushing forward what is possible within the computing industry and I've even renewed my .Mac subs to see how they progress their internet offering.
have an extremely powerful brand and are positioned to take advantage of the renewed interest in their products from the geek sector. This will give them access to new technologies early and ensure that they have an influence from the sidelines, like they did in the 80s and early 90s. Products like the iPod will help to broaden out their appeal to others and provide them with a decent revenue stream too. All they have to do is manage not to upset their developer community and not ship a clanger.
It is a powerful experience being part of the club, though I suppose that many minority interests have this in common, but there is a sense that you belong and have made a decision to be different. People recommend to others, just like they do for Linux. People end up using Windows as it is what everyone else uses, or because there is a particular game available. Choosing does I think make most common things easier and better looking. If you want a computer for digital photography, video work or general internet use and some office work, then I'd suggest a Mac, probably an iBook or a PowerBook.
If you want to join in, then head to the store.
Thanks to blech from 2lmc for the SF Chronicle article, which it has taken me days to write up about.

Quite one of the most beautiful mountains in the world I think. If you look carefully you can just pick out the Refuge Soreiller at the base of the spire, at about 2700m high. The face rises 400m behind it, quite lovely. This picture was taken from the floor of the high alpine valley below it. To get to the refuge is a long 1200m climb, but the views are absolutely magnificent. I'll come back and climb it some day.

My friend Nick has a band, the CatDesigners. They are kind of like early Bowie, with a variety of other influences.
They have released a new first album Chemical Jazz, you can buy it here. If you need convincing, listen to these two tracks from the album Gravity means and Dizzy Q.
The album is really pretty good, a variety of different styles, but not a disparate collection. Nick has a good voice and the mood moves from guitar led to more sparse pieces. The two tracks give a good impression of the album. One thing to note though the website is broken in Safari.

London in a crisis is an interesting microcosm of society. I've just been at London Bridge where there was a track fire at platform 4, at around about 7ish this evening. firstly most people ignored the warning signs, as if they didn't really apply to them, then some louder none recorded announcements encouraged people to actually leave the station. People are split, some hang around and watch the fire engines and the flashing blue lights. Others just loiter about, as if the crisis has taken their initative away and all they can do is stay at the closest point to completing their journey, maybe out of comforts sake. The rest including myself head swiftly to the pub to grab a pint, some food and watch the lights.
An hour or so later and things are resolving themselves, the firemen calmly telling what they know, the police arriving to manage the crowds and Railtrack Network Rail staff nowhere to be seen… I escape on a train. running from the other bit of London Bridge. home to write this on the train.

Following up on the previous post, I've extended how I think that this third party notification system should operate. Euan comments on the edge of blogosphere, hopefully a mechanism such as this will blur the edge a bit.
I think that the correct mechanism would be to have each post within MT optionally have a series of email addresses associated with it which form a notification list for incoming comments and trackbacks.
eg I write an article about X, based on thoughts by my friend Igor. When someone writes a comment on the article or send a trackback ping, then Igor gets the same email notification that I do.
I think that this would be a great feature for a new Movable Type release and also with TypePad, as not everyone will want to have a weblog. This mechanism gives non-webloggers an ability to at least participate in the conversation, though it does not offer a clickable hyperlinked name. Thus there is no way for the non-weblogger to gain in reputation, except as a comment author on another's weblog.
UPDATE: Of course it is possible to add this to the normal commenting system. So that people could opt into being notified about further responses to a topic that they have already commented on. A sort of "notify me of further comments" checkbox.