Author: andy

Hard disks getting smaller: This week its 5GB in a credit-card-size form-factor, which is smaller than last week. #

Meanwhile, Cambridge University re-invents the X Terminal. Actually, the statelessness idea is quite neat. #

There is no escape: 3Mbps broadband becoming available on aircraft. You have to use an airline-supplied laptop, though. #

Latvia hosts phone throwing championship. This actually seems to be genuine.

Another bad week in the global village war. Ricin in North London, Bush is running out of patience, Blair can’t make up his mind, Fylingdales gets to work for the man for a couple more decades, and over on the other side of the city that I live in, an ordinary policeman dies with a knife in his chest.

I lived in Crumpsall for three years. I must have walked, biked, or drove past that house hundreds of times. I’ve also walked on the moors surrounding Fylingdales many times. And we’re driving down to North London tomorrow to visit Debra’s family. This is getting horribly close to my little life.

Maybe this is how it starts: a few little events, getting closer. And then, if you’re us, buildings are falling and people drop in the streets. And if you’re them, you get to watch B52s carving contrails across your sky while the bombs fall and the food and medicine run out and the rats grow fat. #

“A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre” – The United States of America has gone mad, by John Le Carre.

Personally, I’ve never met an American that I didn’t like. And I’ve met quite a few. I like their sense of fairness and justice, their pride in individuality and self-reliance, and their sense of optimism. I like Americans. But I’m starting to suspect that this is because I’ve only ever met the minority who are open-minded enough to travel abroad. #

“We have about 60 per cent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population. Our real task in the coming period (will be) to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction … the day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered then by idealistic slogans the better.“
– George Kennan, head of U.S. State Department Planning, February 24, 1948. #

Surfing the Apocalypse. Cool video from the Guerrilla News Network.

Consumer hardware news: Dirt-cheap, removable, hell-even-disposable, 2.5″ and 1.6″ hard disks using the new iVDR and Serial ATA standards. Also, Microsoft’s is announcing a new portable media player called “Media2Go”. Press release here and speculation from HardwareGeeks here. Presumably this is to compete with the iPod, which is rumoured to be getting multimedia capability soon. 

I sense a great disturbance in the blogosphere. An informative – but also quite amusing – blog-mediated Java vs .NET flame-war seems to be starting between some guy called Carlos Perez and Developmentor’s Jason Whittington. It seems to have started over at javalobby.org and Carlos’s blog. Jason posts some pro-dotnet responses, and the comments hit the fan. Worth a read.

For what its worth, I definitely side with the .NET camp on this one. The technology’s advantages over Java are just too compelling: in particular, language neutrality, the superb toolset, the ability to write rich, responsive client apps, and support for legacy COM components. Even if Microsoft is forced to ship Sun’s Java runtime with its future OS’s, I think Java’s days are numbered.

Hiplogs – the new new thing. A bit like FoneBlogs, but hopefully with less pictures of pissed people in bars. #

Apple’s new Safari browser looks very cool. No windows version, so I won’t get to try the impressive-looking bookmark management – the only thing I dislike about Mozilla. #

Anyone who’s worked in the tech industry has met at least one of these people.

I sense a great disturbance in the blogosphere. An informative – but also quite amusing – blog-mediated Java vs .NET flame-war seems to be starting between some guy called Carlos Perez and Developmentor’s Jason Whittington. It seems to have started over at javalobby.org and Carlos’s blog. Jason posts some pro-dotnet responses, and the comments hit the fan. Worth a read.

For what its worth, I definitely side with the .NET camp on this one. The technology’s advantages over Java are just too compelling: in particular, language neutrality, the superb toolset, the ability to write rich, responsive client apps, and support for legacy COM components. Even if Microsoft is forced to ship Sun’s Java runtime with its future OS’s, I think Java’s days are numbered.

Hey… William Gibson’s just got himself a weblog. Yes, that William Gibson – the one who coined the tern ‘cyberspace’. Well-designed though it undoubtedly is, its still not quite what we were promised:

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” –William Gibson, Neuromancer

Maybe next next version?

The Burden: a thoughtful piece by Michael Ignatieff on the US’s apparent moves (drift?) towards being a de facto imperial power. Among other points, he argues that, in trying to be the “worlds policeman”, the US may acquire an empire in the same way that Britain did. That is, accidentally and without really considering the consequences. Lets hope not. It took us a long time, and a lot of deaths, to get rid of the British empire  #

Keith Brown of Developmentor fame is writing a free, online book called Essential .net Security. He currently has only a couple of chapters posted, but if the rest are going to be as good as this chapter then it’ll be well worth keeping an eye on. #

Business2.0 has a good business-oriented article on Miguel de Icaza’s Mono project. #

Tool of the day is Steve Miller’s PureText. Nice and simple, this one. Clicking on the icon that it adds to the system tray causes all formatting information to be stripped from the text in the clipboard. Very useful for copying and pasting text between applications without carrying-over the formatting as well. I use this a lot. #

Alan Adla’s advice to President Shrub on the pressing scrientific issues for the world and the USA.  Wonderful, clear, concise writing – I wish I could express myself like this:

“The problem is that, although we’re all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe this is because it’s easier to believe something?anything?than not to know.” #

Infiltration.org has some intriguing stories (and pictures) of people going where they shouldn’t. And, on the subject of unashamed trespass on corporate space, those wacky funsters the Yes Men (creators of the spoof gatt.org site) are demonstrating their “employee visualisation appendage” over at The Ecologist. I read this in the print version of the mag and it nearly reduced me to hysterics.

We’ve both got winter colds: so just surfing and reading and sleeping and watching old films on TV… #

Ooh look… another flash animation. #

Tricorder-style A-Life avalanche transceiver that transmits victims “vital signs” through snow. Apparently it can prioritize multiple buried victims according to whether they have air-pockets and are breathing. I Like this bit: “A-Life also lists the victims anonymously … so that rescuers’ emotions and personal attachments don’t get in the way.” So that’s all right then. #

Captcha: generating tests to distinguish humans from computers.

XML & Web Services magazine has a quite detailed article about Microsoft’s structured document editor – “XDocs”. Its nice to see Microsoft’s product-naming committee abandoning all this trendy “.net” nonsense and reverting to the tradition, dating back to when ActiveX was introduced in … well a long time ago, of simply sticking an ‘X’ on the name. The idea of subsuming Word, Excel, etc. into one super-app is also vaguely remenicient of the OLE idea of “compound documents” a la Cairo.

Anyway, the product seems pretty good. Quite a lot of the Word documents I read seem to be written with just a single style-tag, so anything that encourages structure and proper semantics gets my vote. #

Searching for answers to those niggling quiestions At the Tomb of the IUnknown Interface. #

The world’s first age simulator. This is a very good idea, but people’s experience of older age seems to vary a lot. My father will be seventy in March, but he still cycles and is one of the most active people I know. #

Looks like Eric Raymond is at it again. Not quite as mind-boggling as this, mind, but still pretty worrying for us elitist Euro-commies. Probably best not to make any sudden movements when that guy’s nearby…