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Oct 22 2003
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Will current PC’s be the digital contraband of the future

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Cory Doctorow points out the real story on Broadcast Flag: “it makes a whole class of general-purpose open source software illegal, including code that’s already in the market, and that it will give the companies who called home taping and peeing during commercials theft a veto over the design over DTV devices, including parts of your PC.” Copying digital media will always be possible since human beings respond to analogue signals, whether they are air-pressure fluctuations or lights that shine on our retina. Any hi-fidelity analog signal can be reconverted to digital without copy protection. However… as more and more protection schemes are embedded in the devices we use to manipulate and transfer digital files I wonder whether there will be a market for obsolete uncompromised hardware in the future. Ebay in ten years: “Clean” PC from 2003.

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Oct 22 2003
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Is Calatrava a geek architect?

Posted by | architecture | No Comments

Calatrava’s Vision for a Trade Center Transit Hub via Anil Architecture is like computer programming in that the details suck you in, and its sometimes difficult to see the big picture, the overall design. In fact ability to see the wood from the trees is the principal skill that architects have to offer when they use their skills in other disciplines. Detailing has become a fetish in architecture as projects follow where the money is. Corporate buildings are designed like Porsches, but there are still architects like Rem Koolhaas that don’t get drawn into details at the expense of the space they are trying to create. Even Corbusier’s detailing wasn’t that great. Calatrava is undoubtedly a master builder, but sometimes the overall form is dictated by impressive structures rather than the space they create, and as such shows the difference between great engineering and great architecture.

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Oct 22 2003
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Aliens to be discovered by 2025?

Posted by | science | No Comments

“‘There are two figures you need to know. One is what our estimate of how many civilisations there are in the universe that are sending out signals into space [about 10,000] and the second is how long will it take to search through enough stars in the universe to statistically have a chance of picking up those signals.’ Put these numbers together, she claims, and we will encounter aliens by 2025.” I’ll put it in my diary. EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | Aliens are out there, say scientists

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Oct 21 2003
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Hitch Cock and Bull

Posted by | religion | No Comments

I am an atheist, and pro-choice, but unlike Hitchens, Mother Theresa is a personal heroine of mine and her views on abortion had integrity. Despite being a non-Christian, I voyeuristically attended a church service in the Tenderloin this Sunday where the sermon was on the subject of making actions out of your convictions. This church spends $25,000 feeding poor people each week. I don’t think I need to believe in god for this to make sense. The singing was also a whole lot better than other places of worship I’ve been to. Because I don’t believe that there is a spiritual moment of conception I think you have to choose at what point a life is a life and until birth the interests of the person carrying a child are paramount. The necessity to let women choose seems sensible to me. Two weeks ago the House approved a partial anti-abortion…

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Oct 20 2003
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Conspiracy Planet names Diana’s killer.

Posted by | media | No Comments

My Diana conspiracy theory is that Dodi Fayed never existed because his father is too preposterous to be real. Even if he were, Siegfried and Roy’s stylists already have all their work cut out to have time to cultivate such an entity. Today, the UK tabloids are all a flutter with the publication of a note written by Princess Diana that predicts someone would try and bump her off by tampering with the brakes on her car. In this note, she names the person but the press are refusing to reveal who it is. Only a matter of time before someone blogs it – but until then, Conspiracy Planet have a large picture of Prince Phillip under the headline” Princess Diana Names Her Killer“. Diana conspiracies are particularly entertaining due to the aforementioned weirdness of her partner, Dodi Fayed’s father, Al Fayed, who is often to be found fueling them….

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Oct 17 2003
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Robert Hughes to write book about Norman Foster

Posted by | architecture | No Comments

Great Independent interview with maverick, Robert Hughes, the worlds most renowned art critic who has just written a book about Goya. “I think he [Goya] is genuinely anti-war, anti- the degradation caused by war, which is a function of human desire for cruelty, which is at least as deep-rooted as mankind’s desire for sex”. Hughes is a superb writer and a no-bullshit critic, with a distaste for the fashion driven whims of the art world, so I can’t wait for Hughes’ next book which is about my old boss, Norman Foster.

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Oct 17 2003
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Will Epinions’ reviews move to weblogs

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Web fosters prolific product reviewers: “I’m rethinking things,” says the prolific 43-year-old Epinions.com free-lance writer. “I’ve written 664 reviews. It’s a book, and I didn’t really get paid for producing it. I should really be getting royalties for all that work.” If product reviewers all had weblogs, and a weblog tool that had forms for posting information specifically for product reviews that syndicated review metadata, then you would have the same functionality as Epinions, in decentralized form. The difference would be that traffic would go back to the reviewers’ site where they could control things like ad revenue. Weblogs allow all the social advantages of a distributed system: control over individual identity, branding and revenue. Pings to central servers and metadata enriched RSS syndication allow for all the technological advantages of a centralized system – real-time updated search and structured querying. Isn’t this decentralizing of publishing and centralizing of aggregation,…

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Oct 15 2003
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RSS for enterprises

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Phil Wainewright has a very thorough and thoughtful piece on Loosely Coupled. Phil looks at Webmethods’ recent acquisitions within the broader context of what happens when enterprise software all starts to communicate through standardized web services based API’s, rendering a whole industry (EAI) obsolete.

Its an interesting mirror of what is happening at a grass roots level with syndicated content and standardized API’s for weblog style publishing systems. RSS aggregators beware – the future is not in aggregating or aggregation tools, but services building value-add on top.

Oct 13 2003
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New Google conversion tracking

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

One of the benefits of ‘CPC’ based online advertising, where you pay for clicks rather than impressions, is that if the advertiser works out the average number of clicks that result in a sale she knows how much a click is worth for it to be profitable. Tracking this kind of ‘conversion’ used to require custom code, or use of a third party service such as GoToast, but now that Google have built it into Adwords, things should be a lot simpler. In theory, if you have an ecommerce site you should be able to setup Adwords so that you are guaranteed not to lose money. Google Adwords: Conversion Tracking FAQ

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Oct 10 2003
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Text ads as hyperlinks within posts

Posted by | technology | No Comments

PC Advisor has an interesting use of text ads – certain keywords are green, underlined and show text ad boxes when moused over. Rather like the defunct MS Office contextual links system but for paid for links. This would be very interesting in the blog context as it would allow ads that are correspond to individual posts. On the downside it breaks the church and state separation of ads and content. PC Advisor

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