January 2005 Archives
I'm reading Old London Bridge at the minute, it is a history of the bridge and its inhabitants over the 900 odd years of its life. It was the longest inhabited bridge in Europe until about 1760, then it was turned into a lump of concrete about 30-40 years ago, to widen it.
It is quite an enjoyable book, but I noticed one quote today which caught my eye "There were only two plagues . . . the immoderate drinking of fools and the fires", William FitzStephen, 1170AD, eight hundred and thirty years ago and only the fires have died down. Twenty four hour licensing will hopefully change the drinking culture in the UK, but I think it will be a slow change, given the history.
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how many different types of poetry did you think there were, notes for a future with more free time
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old URI document for television
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squared circle message thread on flickr towards reuse of the squared circle images in posters, some beautiful images
Having lived in London for now my eighth year, I have been a bit lax at exploring as much of it as I might have. For an example I only ventured into Borough market last year, despite getting the train to London Bridge for the past four years. In the autumn I finally made it to Camden market, I'd always thought of it as a place of junkies and the Gibsonian peoples crusade, but it is an interesting fun place, full of good and not so good clothes shops, food, jewellery, books and music.
I've now worked in four different places in London, five if you include my occasional visits to Broadcasting House. I'm moving back to White City in February, which I'm not looking forward to hugely, W12 does not compare to WC2 by any possible stretch of the imagination. I'll join some old friends though which is good.
Over the past years I have found lots of interesting places to shop, eat and drink in London. I have been planning to write up local restaurants near where I live, or cool shops I found whilst hunting for presents. The posts never quite get written, so a monster post is growing. If I get time I'll finish it over the next few days. hopefully I can share some of the great places Lucy and I have found. London is a dirty, noisy, fun, messy, tiring and expensive place, but at the minute I quite like it. I never expected to live here for as long as I have, but it kind of grows on you, then you fall out with it, then it surprises you again and you make up.
I just wish it had some decent mountains nearby.
I went to the Fabian Annual Conference on Saturday and had a very stimulating and enjoyable day. It turned out to be much more exciting than I had expected, two plenary session questions and a brush with TV stardom...
Opening keynote was Alan Millburn setting out the position for Labour for the coming election. Then a good session on the global role for Britain and Europe, plus a session on local government, which was informative, if very focused on the role of the local council, rather than the activities of it.
Highlight of the day had to be twofold, asking Alan Millburn why choice is a necessity for modern Britain. I asked him a question in the opening keynote, "Why do we need choice, does this mean the choice between a poor school and a good school, a poor hospital and a good hospital, can we not have a good level of basic provision for everyone?" I felt he dodged the question by saying that the rich have had choice for decades and it was time for the poor to have this choice, but I think they'd rather know that the local hospital or primary was up to scratch. I then got voxpopped by Channel 4, but it wasn't broadcast. Questions about choice were a theme of the conference, as noted in this Guardian article on schools.
Then I managed to get a question pulled out the of hat in the final plenary on what would happen to Europe if Britain or France voted no to the constitution. This got good replies from David Aaronovitch, Ed Balls and Sunder Katwala, plus the question was featured in this Observer article, paraphrasing the response from Ed Balls.
Lots more coverage linked to from the Fabian site.
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British Association for the Advancement of Science poetry competition for National Science Week 2005An example of how not to have your url read out on the radio, as happened on the Today programme this morning, interesting competition though
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permanence and why it is important on the web for media companies, good article that espouses principles I firmly believe in. The commentry is interesting too.
Time for a change of look, things may go awry for a while...
Dust continues to settle, if the page background is not white, then please reload the page. For those of you on Windows Internet Expolorer you might need to quit. Any problems with layout, please let me know.
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NASA - Iceberg B-15A to crash into the Drygalski ice tongue, Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica B-15A is 1200 square miles in size...
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SLOCCountcounting lines of code to measure rate of delivery, interesting reading and usually better for small or single person teams, eg NetNewsWire
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Joel Spolsky on the delights of making products in languages other than english I spent two and a half years working in multimedia locatization and this is a good overview of the complexities of the field(categories: internationalization localization l10n i18n foreign acsii unicode utf-8 double-byte latin-1 character_set glyph)
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History of plumbing curiously fascinating
One Christmas present from Lucy was an hour's ice climbing. Amazing fun, but very tiring. The sense of climbing on nothing is incredible, just the tips of the axes and the points of the crampons.
Highly recommended !
Prompted by reading that the new Mac mini does not have a graphics card that will support the Core Image features so heavily promoted in yesterday's Apple Keynote at Macworld. I have done some hunting to see what is supported. The new ish Tiger site on Apple.com has no requirements for Tiger, only promotion of the new features.
The graphics cards supported are, quoting from the Hong Kong Apple site
The performance gains and features supported by Core Image ultimately depend on the graphics card. Graphics cards capable of pixel-level programming deliver the best performance. But Core Image automatically scales as appropriate for systems with older graphics cards, for compatibility with any Tiger-compatible Mac.
Supported graphics cards:
ATI Radeon 9800 XT; ATI Radeon 9800 Pro; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro; ATI Radeon 9600 XT; ATI Radeon 9600 Pro; ATI Mobility Radeon 9700; ATI Mobility Radeon 9600; NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200; NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 Ultra.
These cards are available in today’s PowerBooks, Power Mac G5s and both the 17-inch and 20-inch iMacs
End Quote
So who misses out then, well all the current iBook purchasers (ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM), older PowerBooks and the Mac mini (ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM with AGP 4X support), not that surprising, given price points, but sure to cause some upset when it isn't quite like the glossy demos. Core Image will scale back to function on these slower cards however. The quote above may change, but it is something to bear in mind if you are getting the bargain that is the iBook 12inch or indeed the Mac mini.
Mac mini was the highlight, but Pages and the new Keynote look interesting, iLife 05 is fine, I'm unsure of the HD dominance, DV is still mainstream, but it may catch on, though 2700 pounds for a HD camera is a lot of money, not prosumer, yet.
Mac mini may well put paid to the mini-itx dreams of quite a few of the hackers I know, 339 pounds plays well against the possible costs of the M1000/EPIA based linux boxes and you get iLife instead of unix toys. I can see them flying off the shelves, yet in hindsight an old retired iBook is quite accomplished, for the minute at least. Adding memory or the wireless adaptors, keyboard and mouse etc, soon pushes the price over 500 quid.
To return to Keynote, the new presenter tools with next slide preview, timings, a clock and elapsed times look very nice indeed. Masking images is a nice touch too. Pages has less to recommend it, but it seems aimed at those people who need colour in documents. There are many of them, schools, small businesses, restaurants, voluntary organisations etc. Pages strikes me as something like a cheap Word; cut down Quark; MS Publisher done right; though I would not want to write a long document with other people in it I think. SubEthaEdit springs to mind for that, but I digress. The pair for 50 quid is a bargain.
So finally onto the iPod Shuffle, initally I was against this, thinking it a bad thing, I mean only 120 tracks. Then I saw a picture and the price. It is 69 quid, half gig usb thumb drives are 45 quid from no-name people on dabs.com. Perfect for running with and it acts as a flash drive too. I'm now in fact quite sold on the idea, music machine for running with and a bigger flash drive, though, as I mentioned to Tom, it is not edible. I think they got the words the wrong way around, eat is British English and chew is American, see footnote 2 on the iPod Shuffle page to understand what we are going on about, images saved for posterity on Tom's site.
All of these exciting toys are available on the Apple Store UK.
Since writing the earlier entry about medium format cameras in the summer, I discovered what captivated me about medium format. It is not the resolution, it is the aspect ratios. I made this discovery shortly after writing the previous article, but it has taken me a few months to finish this new article.
After a while looking through a 3:2 35mm viewfinder or looking at 4:3 monitor images, seeing square or dramatic panoramic images is exciting. So the 6x6 format of Bronica SQAi or Hasselblad intrigues me. So does the 6x12 or even the unaffordable 6x17 of medium format panoramic cameras, see this gallery of panoramic images. The X-pan with its double frame 35mm panoramic ability is interesting too, some reviews, more reviews. The delights of 6x9 or 645 are not appealing as they are too close to the format I use most days. Only the 6x6 is really affordable via a Lomo 120 or posssibly a second hand Bronica SQ. Photo.net has a good overview of Medium format cameras. Robert White in Dorset and Teamwork in London stock a wide range of panoramic cameras. The Xpan, the Bronica SQAi and the Hasselblad 501CM, 503CW kits are available from Jessops, too.
Looking at the different formats, see overlaid and vertical representations of the aspect ratios below, gives an idea of the image size and relative aspect ratios. The normal ratios of 4:3 and 3:2 are very close to another. The panoramic images are closer to widescreen tv displays. The panoramic format and the square medium format stand out in strong contrast to the more common formats.
Panoramic really appeals to me, I am often tempted by wide angle images, to the point of getting a 24mm prime lens for my Canon 35mm SLR, last summer. The ability to represent the world as I see it with both eyes, rather than with one shut, makes it easier to visualise the world. Panoramic offers this ability, but in a manner even more suited to landscapes. Working with a 35mm lens with the 3:2 format, means trying to get foreground interest to make the image work and avoiding acres of sky in your images. I can image that a wider view makes this more natural, as you do not see with only one eye.
Going against this, slightly, is the desire to shoot square. Rectangles invite a vertical and horizontal choice, with a square image then this choice disappears and one can concentrate on composition. This removes some of the cognitive load from creating the picture. A friend a few days ago described photography as the art of representing the 3d as 2d. Square images allow you to concentrate on the spatial relationships and the exposure, not the shape of the frame.
Lastly these mainly medium format cameras have higher cost per picture, so you tend to be more thoughtful, rather than assuming that a ratio of 1 or 2 good from 36 is fine. Getting the same 1 or 2 good shots from the 12 - 18 you get in the cameras above doubles the success rate. There is also a tendancy for using a tripod and an external light meter, so working each image is slowed down, from the almost point and shoot that auto SLRs encourage.
So once the light improves I'm borrowing a medium format camera to experiment, whilst I still can. Medium format is a dying format so it seems, Bronica have stopped making them and the film is getting harder to get outside London, according to AP.
Flat / house as a user interface - I like it, management of clutter by optomizing clutter reducing activities. My difficulty is with piles of paper, there are never enough shelves. Yet most available shelves are filled with read books. To take your methodology I'd sacrifice space for utility, but in a London flat this is hard. Vertical space is easier, but we have eight bookcases already.
I need surfaces that afford assessment rather than storage, so a contained space for clutter will result in a full space and the need to assess the clutter, interesting. I already have a good system for recycling all waste paper, it is the other paper that collects.
I read this article a couple of months ago and it is gradually seeping into my life, things are organised around their proximity to usage more and the less used things do not get the prime spots. eg near my desk where my technical books sat, from O'Reilly etc, they are now slightly further away on a different shelf. This is for two reasons, the first that I can use the space for books that I have not yet read, the second that when I need them I get an inforced break and a moment to stretch..
Over the Christmas and New Year period, I've been pretty quiet, one of the reasons has been a small battle with weblog spam. I was at my wife's parents having a lovely time for much of the Christmas period and occasionally checking email on their adsl line, much of it was weblog spam. Even on Christmas and Boxing day, this depressed me, but as everything on here has been in premod for a month or so, it was fine, 6000 of them in the end...
Then I got thinking about how sad and empty some peoples' lifes are that the best thing they can think of doing was to send thousands of weblog spam on the day when most people are celebrating with friends and family. I'm assuming a few things here, most spam orignates from the USA and they celebrate Christmas there, I know countless thousands do not. The spam continued right through, day in day out, not a break for the disaster in the Indian Ocean. Donate to Disaster Emergency Committee in the UK or Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders worldwide (donations to MSF). MSF were first on the scene in Sri Lanka, as they are in many countries, Lucy and I donated to them.
That people are hunkered down over their machines trying to use others' good will, time and server space to make a buck is a sad state of affairs. Potentially the frequency of disasters like the Tsunami and other earthquakes, like Bam or the crisis in Darfur will slowly turn people away from this empty activity and on to something that cares more about the wider world, some small hope I know.
Building Social Web Applications by Gavin Bell.
