29/5/2006
The Irrepressible campaign, from Amnesty International, has been set up to oppose internet censorship worldwide. You can pop along and sign their petition, to be handed to the UN in November, and can get whichever format of the above box you like, to spite the censors by spreading a the content that Amnesty've found to have been blocked. [So if you suddenly find you cant get to my site, then your government, ISP or some other fun organisation is censoring what you read... or of course the server might be down ;-)].
26/5/2006
It's taken a while, but google have finally recognised that operating systems other than windows exist :-D. With a public beta version released yesterday, picasa for Linux is (as far as I know) the first of Google's various offline programs to be available for us free software geeks, and there's talk of google earth and google chat coming along at some point in the future.
Picasa has been made to work using Wine (a cunning project to make windows programs run on linux), in the process some 225 patches being added to the wine project (which must now be getting perliously close to a 1.0 release). Apparently other projects to follow from Google may use other methods, which is probably a good thing since using Wine always carries the implication that one accepts windows as being superior - as tho we have to accommodate its peculiarities.
The only slightly worrying thing to report is this: both Newsforge and the news story on WineHQ link to http://picasa.google.com/linux but as of now (13:00 BST, 26/5/2006) this link is dead. I suspect that, since it's the same link on both wine and newsforge, there used to be a page there so the question is: "why did it disappear?". Perhaps google pulled the page, which implies that they changed their minds about the release (at least for now), or perpetrated another cock-up (you may remember that they recently deleted their own blog, which (given that they own blogger) is pretty poor). The only other thing I could think of would be some sort of malicious damage by an external entity - essentially someone might have cracked google's site - no, I'm sure microsoft aren't that desperate ;-)
Update: the story has also been posted on Slashdot, the ubiquitous geek news site, which gets so many visitors that many sites featured on it suffer the slashdot effect, where the sites linked to by /. get so much traffic that their servers can't take it. It seems very unlikely that google would have suffered that, but they might have decided that the traffic was too great to be worth their while? Just a theory...
Update the second: The page is working again(?) now (May 27th 2006 at 17:00 BST). I dunno what happened... one of life's mysteries
13/5/2006
If I haven't already suggested it to you, please have a look at Improv Everywhere. They're a wondefully insane group of chaps in New York that go around creating something between street theatre and plain straightforward pranks, in order to "bring excitement to otherwise unexciting locales and give strangers a story they can tell for the rest of their lives". They have stories from their past exploits on the "missions" page, of which some of my favourites (heavily edited - I enjoy them all) are these:
- The gig they staged on top of a four storey apartment building as "U2" on the day that the real U2 (who've themselves played on rooftops in the past, most memorably in the video to "where the streets have no name") were about to play at Madison Square Garden, just across the street. The marvellous thing about this is that hundreds of people believe that they've seen U2 live, and it doesn't really matter that, strictly speaking, they didn't.
- The recent "Best Buy" escapade: after noting that all the employees in the US electronics chain Best buy wear a uniform anyone can simply immitate - a blue polo shirt and khaki trousers - they decided to invade a local store en-masse in appropriate dress and, while never claiming to be employees, simply be as helpful as possible to anyone who asked them for help. It's a sad reflection on society that the store felt threatened enough by this to call the police (tho to be fair there were around 80 people there).
- The mp3 experiment (especially version 2.0): anyone who wants to is invited to download an mp3 to a portable player or burn it to CD and bring a walkman, then come to a local park and follow the instructions on the recording. Unbeknownst to them, four different mp3s have been made, so various people are following different sets of instructions, including dancing as zombies, playing with beachballs, and following the commands of their respective leaders: the astronaut, bumblebee, dolphin and sea captain...
I'd better stop now, as I dont want to ruin your own discovery, but I really do love this. I was smiling all day after I discovered them, simply because of that principle of doing insane things for fun (both your own and that of those who, by chance, are the "audience" for the event).
On a more personal note, I had my first AS exam yesterday (if someone outside the UK has stumbled upon this site it might be helpful to know that AS levels are the exams we take in the penultimate year of school). Twas a history exam, on Otto von Bismarck and the Unification of Germany, and went quite ell, I think - we were fairly fortunate on which questions came up, so nothing major to complain about.
Bye now
13/5/2006
I do believe I've managed to create a couple of pics of me which aren't so repulsive as to make small children cry.
While playing around with some fairy lights a few days ago I discovered that, at least when reflected in a window after a beer, it looked quite good. So I get the camera and try to find somewhere level at the right height so I can stand it up and get some pics on the auto-timer. I never quite managed to recreate the original image I had in my head (life is never as good in practice as it is in your mind), but I'm quite pleased with the end result anyway: they have the double advantage of looking cool because of the lights, but keeping most of me in darkness :-).
This post is quite weird, because on the one hand I'm taking the oportunity to be as rude to myself as I can be, but on the other I'm doing the most vain thing one possibly could, in that I've created this post solely to publish pictures of myself. That feels really horrible. I'd better stop this post before any worse befalls...
4/5/2006
There are twelve hugely wise, honest and beautiful humans smewhere in Virginia. I was hugely joyous to discover that Zacharias Moussaoui was given a life, rather than a death sentence for his minimal involvement in the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks of 5 years ago. Despite what must have been unimaginable pressure from the right wing of America, which seems to have large swathes of both church and media allied to it, these fine people realised two things. Firstly that Moussaoui really didn't deserve a death sentence for his actions - essentially all he really did (as I understand it) was try to get involved in the plots and cock up his attempt. And secondly, they saw that the life sentence was by far the worse punishment: Moussaoui wants to be a matyr, so locking him away from public attention is in everyone's interest.
And I was all ready to end hapily there, with the American justice system at its best, until I read of George W's Palace. The only rebuilding project on schedule in Iraq, and its for a US embassy that'll be bigger than the vatican, just so that they can sit in safety and with reliable electricity and water while they accumulate massive profits from the ruin of a country. Makes me feel kinda dirty for living in the country that kisses such an enormous quantity of the US govts. ass. And I'm quite sure that wasnt a balanced or fair appraisal of the situation, but dammit I'm angry.