February 2004 Archives

I was going to write about this, then noticed an avid and interesting conversation on flambingo.net, where Anno was writing about this over a month ago.
Some other points of view - Guardian interview with Ms Gun, BBC coverage, Independent - questions case for war; full text of email from the Observer.
Then this morning, there was that interview with Clare Short, revealing spying on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, on the Today programme. The Today programme site has audio files and further coverage. Channel 4 news tonight have an interview with Clare Short tonight, which sounds electric.

Years ago I used to play Paranoia, an excellent role-playing game, set in the not so distant future, fan sites (1, 2). An insane computer runs the lifes of a city, obsessed with commies everywhere, secret societies and exploding rocket boots. Very good fun to play and enjoyable world to just read about. It was 1950s american paranoia set in a 1980s context, with a huge amount of in jokes.
Well Paranoia is about to be released again in an updated version, Paranoia XP. Revised for this century and currently in development, there is a weblog for game development, (rss feed)hosted by Greg Costikyan, who runs an interesting weblog on Games, Design, Art and Culture. He describes how the weblog will be run to determine the eventual style of the game, imagine open source, but with a pay for outcome, more like commercial beta testing.
Looks like it will be great fun.

Lovely weather and some nice snow, as you can see in Lucy's picture above.

According to The Times, Apple are opening a retail store in London in time for Christmas this year. The location is suggested to be on Regents Street, just down from Oxford Circus. It will be a large store of around 20,000 sq ft and the first retail Apple Store in Europe.
This will be quite fun I think, there is reasonable support for Apple in London, but support is often not that brilliant. Having an Apple store in the centre of London will hopefully mean that it is easier to get spare parts and on site repairs, plus a great place to see the latest stuff. A venue for all things Apple.

Collected and commented mountain weather forecasts for the Aviemore area with some webcams, here is a map of area.
Webcams
View of the ski base station
View of Ptarmigan Bowl area
View of Cairngorm from Glenmore Lodge
Thanks to OutdoorsMagic for some of these links.

Weather forecasts
Ptarmigan level weather forecast, approx 1000m
Mid level ski forecast, approx 850m
Aviemore general forecast on the BBC
Geoff Monk and Associates have an Eastern Highlands forecast, as a PDF.
This is good and very useful, especially when combined with the snow conditions in the SAIS forecast below.
SAIS Avalanche forecast, in case you are unsure Aviemore is in the northern cairngorms.
Finally a overview of the Snow condditions on CairnGorm from winterhighland.com.

I'm off next week with Mountain Innovations, who are based in Boat of Garten, home of the ospreys. Hopefully you'll see the webcam pictures full of snow next week.

I got paid by amazon and google recently and at the weekend I bought myself some things with the cash. The google cheque, being in US dollars will be a faff to cash and the exchange rate is rubbish at the minute. Still, all in all, I have covered the hosting costs of last year, so there is something to the google ads and the amazon links. I decided to ignore that sunk cost and instead bought myself something I have wanted for a long, long time, an ice axe.
All this is in preparation for a Scottish Winter mountaineering trip next week, see scary picture of me all kitted out for the highlands. More in subsequent posts.

One of the stars of ETCON so far has been Flickr, social software by Ludicorp, who created Game Never Ending.
Sitting in London yesterday morning I read plasticbag.org, where Tom cites Cory Doctorow.
It seems like the usual friend making website like Friendster etc, but there is a lot of depth to it and the focus is photography. I've spent less than an hour playing about with it so far, but it seems quite addictive. The basic concept of joining and inviting your friends is there, but people added to your people list start as acquaintances, then you can promote them to friends, which is a much better match to how we operate in real life.
There are other nice touches in the user interface, which is a work in progress, but it feels right in many ways. A lot of it is written in quite informal spoken English, so there is a rapport or a personality to the system.
There is a group system for running message boards around and these are used in the communal image sharing and IM application. I think that it is going to be fascinating to see how it gets used, it might become a focal point for photographic collaboration and lots of other things besides
Paul describes how it might evolve based on the APIs available, but maybe Ben sums it up best.
Come and say hello, I'm GavinBell

Absolute Power is a truely delightful and funny political comedy, I saw several of the episodes being recorded before christmas. It reminds me of the Yes, Minister series, DVD - Series 1, 2, 3.
Also it has been quite an issue this week. Regardless, it is required listening.

Listening to Hoon this morning on the Today programme had me shouting at the radio again. The sheer cheek of the man to claim that he did not know the headline of the highest circulation news paper in the country, was unbelievable. He must have a media department in his ministry and the Sun is a reckoner for the mood of the nation, for better or worse.
"The first time I saw that (Sun newspaper 45-minute) headline was very recently watching a Panorama programme": Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon talks to John at 0810. Also, Reeta Chakrabarti at 0856 on what Mr Hoon told the Hutton Inquiry."
He claimed that the 45 minute claim and the delivery mechanism was essentially immaterial "not a matter of great public contravercy" to the case for war and tried unsuccessfully to connect the conventional ballistic missiles that were found to the case for war, they were a contravention of 1441, but are not WMD. Then tried to claim that a battlefield mortar was a WMD.
Just as the programme was closing, his words in reference to a question about the banner headlines on the day of publication of the dossier from the Hutton Inquiry were played on air, "I can recall, yes".

Sometimes it feels like I'm building fragile things that are difficult for other people to get a sense of the complexity therein. I get a sense of being a doozer from Fraggle Rock, building delicate creations that the Fraggles of this world will come along and consume without a thought to the intricacies of what has been created. You need to carefully explain and show the beauty in what you are doing, as the Fraggles see it as food.
UCD work, as delightfully expounded upon by Ant is often in this category, as is data modelling. I think it might be something to do with the abstract nature of the work, it is easier to engage with editorial or visual design.
Product Development is hard work, as it is much easier to get on and make something without sitting down and defining what and why you are building something first. Methodologies such as UCD and Scrum help you once you know what you are building and help you to build something that users will want and understand. However getting to the core of what you are creating is hard. the iPod is a successful digital music player, but look how many also rans there are in the world. One of the principles by the design team for the iPod was what is the minumum functionality needed, this is often a good starting point.

This leaked last week, early onto the French Canon website, see specs in French, from the days after the leaks. Now there is a full blown Canon microsite for the EOS 1-D Mark 2.
Personally I am more interested in the new lenses, the EF 28-300L F3.5-5.6 IS USM
and also the EF70-300DO F4.5-5.6 IS USM. Full press releases are on the PhotographyBLOG website, 28-300 and 70-300.
I am a big fan of the existing 28-135 IS lense, which I wrote about a while ago as the perfect travel lense. The 28-300 looks like it could be the replacement for both it and a 70-300 for the travelling photographer. It does weigh in at 1670 grammes though, so it is not exactly light. However it is dust and waterproof and has a modern IS system. My one gripe about the 28-135IS is that is not a fixed length lense, so the body moves which can allow dust to enter the body of the lense. It is really a replacement for the now aging 35-350L, which was always a little too expensive and too wide for my liking.
The new lenses are said to be available in May 2004, though no word on pricing, yet. It will inevitably be for sale from Jessops.

UPDATE:
Following on from the comment below, I checked EOS magazine and the prices are quite a bit higher than the US equivalent might lead you to believe.
£1049UKP for the 70-300DO IS and as Christopher notes £2049 for the 28-300L IS. This leads me to a thought that the current market price for the 70-200 F4 L at just over 500 is great value. It will be interesting to see what price the two new lenses settle down to, the 28-300 is quite expensive.