Scripting News: 5/1/2005

Happy 50th Birthday Dave. In the last 10 years, you've been a big factor in turning RSS, Blogging and XMLRPC into mainstream tools[1]. This changed our world, and for that, thanks.

Dave also talks about the effects of a lifespan of three score years and ten on the species. "Every seventy or eighty years we do a complete refresh of the species." It's an interesting meditation to consider what life would be like if we lived to 150 instead of 70. If you think that people don't really become mature adults until 30, that's like 120 years of being an active adult instead of 40. Consider also that it takes about 10 years to become an expert in whatever field you choose. So if we lived to 150 we could easily fit in 4 or 5 careers where now it's hard to manage two and most people only manage one. Quite apart from the extra time, I think the world might be a better place with more respect for age and experience. But we'd have to put against that the increased frustration of the relatively young. Ever since I started reading Heinlein, I thought that life extension technologies that allowed an average lifespan of 150 would appear in my lifetime. Now I'm not so sure.

As I think Rucker said, everyone has to face the same Koan. "I was not, I am now, I will not be", so what are you going to do when you get up in the morning? This time around.

[1]I'm not going to get into whether you invented these and other technologies or not. It's not important.

The Bush-Kerry election was a big deal all round the world but especially in the UK as the Blair-Bush link was seen to be important. There were many UK commentators on the USA elections.

Well now it's our turn. In a few days time, the UK elections happen. And the process is throwing up all sorts of information that ought to directly affect Bush's position, mostly around the Iraq war.

So why have I seen almost nothing from US commentators about the UK elections? I know we're just this piddling little archaic nation with a Queen somewhere off the coast of New York but we're also Airstrip One and one of the few nations that will side with the USA almost regardless. Don't you care even a little bit what we're up to?

Solipsis: Official release
P2P MMPRPG [from: del.icio.us]

Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets
[from: del.icio.us]

del.cio.us meets Google Maps meets Urban Tapestries in FoundCity.

Use your cellphone to post an email with Tags : StreetName : Comment Later browse tags near you.

It's JustOuttaAlpha

This desperately needs photos in the mix as well.

Is Iraq an issue or not? The Polls all still say not.



Good grief people. If he had the nerve to do that what do you think he'll have the nerve to do in the next 5 years? Just look at a few of the things Blunkett had lined up for us all. Imprisonment without trial, ID cards, trial without jury, and on and on. The current cover up of the "Ricin Ring" debacle is yet more proof that they'll fabricate evidence in order to achieve their aims. And then hide the evidence when they're found out. And then there's the impending postal vote crisis.

In that sense Iraq is not in the past. It's an indication of the future.

Oh and by the way, we're still in Iraq. Remember?

Labour in - Blair out

Now whatever the polls tell you, every seat is a marginal seat this time around. Even if the Lib-Dems fail to get many more seats, every vote will encourage them. And if the Tories and Labour end up neck and neck with a small Labour majority, as Simon Jenkins says in today's Times, the Lib-Dems will hold the balance of power. So vote early and vote often.

Did I mention Iraq?

Re Ricin Ring, it gets worse. That report from Duncan Campbell is being progressively removed from the BBC, Guardian and others. The problem is in these days of Google caches, the internet archive and suchlike, it's a lot harder to hide the truth. It keeps popping up in the most awkward of places.

The most interesting question about the Attorney General's advice document is "who leaked it?" And Cui Bono?

Did you hear Tam Dayell on the R4 One o'clock news? He claimed Blair would get in and then the Labour party would throw him out.

This one bothers me and I wonder why it doesn't get more press. We're supposed to be voting for a leader who has said he will resign at some unspecified time in the future. A much reduced Labour majority and all the personal negative press against Blair could lead to a very quick leadership crisis in the Labour party. I'm not at all convinced that Gordon is a straight shoe in. I think it's much more likely that several other challengers appear and the whole process gets messy and bloody.

This looks increasingly like Thatcher's third election. So who's going to play the roles of Heseltine and Major?

I think that process is potentially very bad for this country. Almost as bad as another huge Labour majority. So can we all please get it over with quickly.

Did you all watch the BBC debate last night? Interesting that the audience gave Kennedy a pretty easy time, but wanted blood from Howard and Blair. And Blair looked like Nixon in 1960. Sweating like a pig and squirming. But there's that certain arrogance that still lets him argue like a barrister, make the schoolmasterly jokes and asides and use that (mock) sincerity with the bared teeth and raised eyebrows. "Of course you would say that but this will hurt me more than it will hurt you and I did it for the best reasons and I'm going to do it anyway because I know best and I'm Prime Minister and you're not." I think this comes to almost all people when they stay in power for too long. And this one's been in power for too long.



Parts extracted from quite a sensible thread on Ecademy.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Online music lovers 'frustrated' : UK music lovers are getting frustrated with restrictions placed on digital music tracks once they buy them from online stores, says PC Pro magazine.

- Consumers don't like DRM on online downloads of music.
- Consumers don't like being told where they can use their purchase
- Consumers don't like paying the same for a track on a CD as they do for the "near CD Quality" they get from online downloads.

What a surprise. As another poster said "Pretty much, the effect of DRM is not endearing nor encouraging people to purchase online. For one the quality is not on par with the price. There is no reason beyond the mandate that a song cost x amount that it should be so high. In this you see the majors are still practicing price fixing, even after being convicted of such. The DRM basically restricts the buyer and there is no trade off of any sort to make it worth the money."

Just Say No To DRM[1].

[1]DRM = Digital Rights Management. It's the software controls that prevent you the consumer from doing what you want with the product you bought. [from: JB Ecademy]

Skype Journal: Using Skype for a POTS Denial of Service Attack
Nasty and evil. And inevitable. [from: del.icio.us]

What if there was a system like del.icio.us to bookmark people instead of web pages?

I really like this idea but we're back into the digital identity sphere because people don't have URIs. Which pretty much means that it could only be done inside a YASN.

Marc's Voice: The elite insider's blogging scene : For those of us who have been paying attention - Joi Ito hasn't attended one of the 'mainstream' power elite A-list blogger thingies in over a year and a half. Neither SuperNova, Etech, Web 2.0, Always On Innovation, BloggerCon, BBS, DIDW, PC Forum, SXSW, blah blah blah - none of them have nee graced with Joi's presence.

This reminded me of something I'd thought at Etech. Almost everyone there was broke! Very roughly you could fit the ETech audience into 4 or 5 stereotypes.
- Employees (often BBC). Salarymen, and like almost all salarymen, underpaid.
- Industry Commentators. Scratching a living from speaking tours and articles.
- Startups. The days of VC funded apartments in NY are over. Especially at Etech, the entrepreneurs were in bootstrap, moonlighting mode.
- Unemployable geeks. You know who you are. Too bright (and sometimes too old) to play well with others.
- Post-Exit serial entrepreneurs. The few people who'd struck gold. These were the only moderately (or sometimes fabulously) rich. And most of those were on the podium. You can include in here the very few who had made a fortune from options along the way.

We've thought at times that Business Networking is psychotherapy for the recently (or soon to be) redundant. Which perhaps explains the large number of life coaches and freelance consultants that haunt business network sites. Perhaps the Blogger - A-list - Tech conferences are psychotherapy for unemployable geeks.

Then each went to his own home » Tags: Database schemas
A view into the data model for del.icio.us [from: del.icio.us]

Longhorn is big - no, this time we mean it | The Register : Ballmer claimed Longhorn would take 70 per cent fewer reboots than previous versions of Windows.

So that's 7 times a week instead of 10 then. Tada!

Google Maps Standalone Mode
hmmm, much to ponder here [from: del.icio.us]

The very wonderful Google Maps now covers the UK. Some interesting points.
- Zoom all the way out and the world appears to consist of N America, UK and Ireland. With the UK a litle south of Iceland in the middle of the Atlantic. The rest of the world seems to have shrunk. And Mexico is alarmingly empty.
- Google's idea of what constitutes a road (or rather navteq) is rather different to everyone else's I've spotted several "roads" that are little more than cart tracks and may or may not be RUPPs or BOATs.
- Sad that the UK has much less satellite data than the US. The Zoom level fades very early. There's actually more detail of Iceland than the UK.

Daily Wireless - Belair Does London Hot Zone

Islington council have covered Upper street in free WiFi apparently running from the Angel to Highbury corner. Now I wonder if I can get it from my favourite cafe in Torrens St [from: JB Ecademy]

Wanted: Good Windows programmers to work on the Skype API

Because it's there. There's no money involved. Probably.

I have some projects in ascending difficulty involving the Skype API.

1) A toolbar App that watched the Skype presence status of the logged in person and their contacts and called a simple web service whenever it changed.

2) A toolbar App that watched the Skype status of the logged in person and their contacts and FTPed a GIF to a web site whenever it changed.

3) An App and web site to enable a professional to charge by the minute for time spent providing their service via Skype, Skype-In and Skype-Out

4) A distributed call centre where call centre operators worked at home via Skype, Skype-in and Skype-out.

I have a prototype for the first and second but I'm not good enough at Windows programming to finish it with out a lot more research.

Drop me an email at julian_bond at voidstar.com

A VC: del.icio.us : The question everyone asks is "what is the business model". To be completely and totally honest, we don't yet know.

Lovely!

PBS | I, Cringely . April 14, 2005 - A Cup of Bandwidth : By Robert X. Cringely

Bob describes connecting to three neighbour's WiFi simultaneously to get fast reliable internet access. In each case he's borrowing a cup of bandwidth! Now to do this he says he's got three patch antennas on a pole on the roof connected to three Linksys WRT54G running Sveasoft firmware and set to client on 3 channels. Then there's a proxy server/router with three ethernet cards linked to those and running on an old Mac G4. Finally there's a local DNS server also running on the mac.

I can't help thinking that there's some potential shortcuts here. What you need is an OS like Linux that can support multiple connections to multiple networks with multiple DNS. And a box with 3 USB ports for USB wifi cards and one ethernet connection to the local network. In fact a baby Soekris box or perhaps a MeshBox from Locustworld could do this. Or any old Intel based PC running Knoppix as long as it's got the USB connectors.

Hidden in here is what I think is the holy grail USP for local mesh networks. It's not to extend internet connectivity off the edge of the broadband network, but to aggregate internet connections for a whole street. Let's say that my street has 5 houses with a broadband connection from multiple vendors. Another 5 houses have networks but no internet. We should be able to create a local WiFi cloud so that anyone in any of the 10 houses can get a connection. And if one of us needs short term high bandwidth (like a big bittorrent download in the middle of the night) we should be able to get 5 times the normal speed. [from: JB Ecademy]

Daily Wireless - T-Mobile Brings WiMax to Trains is a good roundup of T-Mobiles experiments with providing WiFi on trains from Brighton to Watford. It also covers the work GNER are doing with providing WiFi on the London to Edinburgh line. [from: JB Ecademy]

Bloggerheads (UK) - A way forward gave me pause for thought.

There's something I don't really get about the current Election campaign from Labour. And I don't understand why the opposition parties aren't making more of it. It goes like this.

Why should we vote for, and how can we vote for, someone who has already announced they are going to resign?

Let's say Labour get into power. Some time during the course of the next parliament, Tony Blair is going to resign. If past history is anything to go by the leadership challenge and change will be bloody and messy. And there's no guarantee that it will be in 5 years or 3 years or even one month.

So Labour is asking us to vote for something that we have no hope of predicting and with an uncertain outcome. This makes no sense to me. So wouldn't it be better if Tony resigns now, the election is called off until Labour can agree on a new leader and we start again? Which is all about as likely as Veritas forming the next government.

Blair Out - Labour In.