readme

Capturing links and tasks from a browser using Emacs/Org

2011-11-01T13:16:00.003Z

This: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-protocol.html

Plus this: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/34060

:)

Sunday playlist

2011-03-20T13:28:00.000Z

flashvars="hostname=cowbell.grooveshark.com&playlistID=50637854&style=metal&p=0" allowScriptAccess="always" wmode="window" />

Prayer in school

2010-08-22T22:03:00.001Z

I recently read The Slow, Whiny Death of British Christianity byJohann Hari. There are a lot of issues discussed briefly in thearticle, but the one that really shocked me was the legal requirementfor prayer in schools.

A few searches later and this is what I find: School Standards and Framework Act 1998 (c. 31)

The key section is this one:

70. Requirements relating to collective worship
1. Subject to section 71, each pupil in attendance at acommunity, foundation or voluntary school shall on each schoolday take part in an act of collective worship.
2. Subject to section 71, in relation to any community,foundation or voluntary school
  - the local education authority and the governing bodyshall exercise their functions with a view to securing,and
  - the head teacher shall secure,that subsection (1) is complied with.
3. Schedule 20 makes further provision with respect to thecollective worship required by this section, includingprovision relating to-
  - the arrangements which are to be made in connection withsuch worship, and
  - the nature of such worship.

Section 71 goes on to explain that to be exempt from collectiveworship, the parents of a child have to request that it happens.

This seems ridiculous. I personally feel that this is an assault onchildren - young impressionable minds being systematically given, asfact, a bunch of fairy tales by the most authoritative adults thechild has met yet. Is it any wonder they grow up playing the lottery,allowing money to be wasted on homoeopathy (Homeopathy remains on NHS)and taking advice from the likes of Mystic Meg?

It's not that clear-cut for everyone, though.

A colleague told me about Faith School Menace? (watch it on 4OD quickbefore it's gone), a program on More4 last week in which RichardDawkins presents his arguments against faith schools. This is aslightly different subject, but there was a sentiment that came upmore than once in the programme and has come up while I've beendiscussing this topic with my family. It goes something like this: ifkids don't get to experience faith, how will they make a balancedjudgement when they grow up?

And this is where I hit a barrier. I can't understand the idea thatpeople should be allowed to "choose to believe" at the expense oftheir ability to tell truth from fiction.

So I can only think about religion - not faith. I don't really knowwhat people mean by "faith". They can't mean what I think it means,because surely they'd want to get rid of it.

If there is a god, it's possibly reasonable behaviour to worship him.If you look at the world and it seems to point to the existence of agod, well OK. I don't see it myself, but go ahead and pray. Theimportant thing is that you made a decision based on the evidence youhad.

The problem is that someone who has been brought up being told,regularly, that there is a god has a big disadvantage when it comes totheir own personal calculation on the probability of the existence ofa supreme being. The mind that is doing the analysis has beenconditioned to at least consider the magical hypothesis.

This, I think, is why so many atheists need proof of the non-existenceof god - discrepancies between the bible and real evidence, forexample. Most people have some kind of religion as default and ittakes some energy to get out of it.

And we can't pretend that we're a devoutly Christian country in,either. Here's some data from an Ipsos MORI poll in 2007. Thequestion asked "If you had to choose just one of the statements whichone best matches your view?"


	%
Scientific and other evidence provides the best way to understand the universe	62
Religious beliefs are needed for a complete understanding of the universe	22
Neither of these	10
Don't Know	6

So, most of the country pick science over religion for explaining theworld. And from the same survey, 42% of people think the governmentpays too much attention to religious groups and leaders.

Only 38% of Britons believe in God yet nearly every child is supposedto be told that they should.

I'm just thankful that schools aren't dong too well at meeting the requirement. From an Ofsted secondry schol report 2002/3

"138: Governing bodies are effective in fulfilling theirresponsibilities in two thirds of schools. This is reflected intheir contribution to shaping the direction of the school andtheir understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. A third ofgoverning bodies do not fulfil their statutory duties adequately,sometimes because of a failure to pursue thoroughly enough suchmatters as arranging a daily act of collective worship."
"141: Compliance with statutory requirements relating to thecurriculum has improved, but in over two fifths of schools thisremains unsatisfactory. Examples of non-compliance include failureto implement parts of the National Curriculum programmes of study,or provide religious education for all pupils. Four fifths ofschools do not hold a daily act of collective worship for allpupils."

So we have a rule that says we should tell kids something most of usdon't believe and don't believe is useful and we don't actually obeythe rule anyway.

Maye we should fix that?

People aren't that mean after all

2010-07-21T18:22:00.002Z

The "pay what you want" scheme sells well, but with low average price. Fixed price with charity donation has little effect. But "pay what you like" with 50% going to charity works really well: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/07/15/caring-with-cash-or-how-radiohead-could-have-made-more-money/

New org-mode first impression

2010-07-19T22:59:00.001Z

OK, I've got my pop-up org-remember, oops, org-capture working again. I'm also using the new feature that allows me to drop items into a table. This is just perfect. I use an org file containing a table of numbered files in my cabinet. Combine that with a couple of local evals in the header that deals with magically incremental numbering and I'm a filing ninja.

New org! Remember mode out, org-capture in.

2010-07-19T20:55:00.002Z

Yup. New org. Babel is integrated, org-capture replaces remember. It can show symbols in-line nicely. Happy day!

See here. And don't forget to use org-track to make it all nice and easy.

Mind blown

2010-06-24T16:22:00.001Z

http://www.ymacs.org/demo/

Pop-up emacs twitter posting

2010-05-24T11:32:00.003Z

Mostly just taken from the remember-mode popup, but here it is:

(add-hook 'twitter-status-edit-mode-hook    
    'delete-other-windows)

(defadvice twitter-kill-status-buffer (after delete-twitter-frame activate)   
    "Advise to close the frame if it is the twitter frame"   
    (if (equal "twitter" (frame-parameter nil 'name))       
    (delete-frame)))

(defadvice twitter-status-post (after delete-twitter-frame activate)   
    "Advise to close the frame if it is the twitter frame"   
    (if (equal "twitter" (frame-parameter nil 'name))       
    (delete-frame)))

(defun make-twitter-frame ()   
       "Create a new frame and run twitter post."   
       (interactive)   (make-frame '((name . "twitter") (width . 80) (height . 15)))   
       (select-frame-by-name "twitter")   
       (twitter-status-edit))

I have it bound to Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T in gnome

Smoke and Mirrors

2010-05-17T11:55:00.001Z

Smoke and Mirrors 2010 showcase documentary record from Peter Every on Vimeo.

Pie

2010-05-03T18:02:00.001Z

Pie
Originally uploaded by digehode

I made pie. Because cake is a lie.

My Wanderlust setup

2010-04-28T10:48:00.003Z

Wanderlust is a pain to set up, but the flexibility you get is worth it. I've been using it for a month now and (thanks to various posts and trawling through the cutomisation groups for wl, bbdb, mu-cite) this is what my wanderlust setup has grown to:

;; mode:-*-emacs-lisp-*-
;; wanderlust

(setq wl-summary-always-sticky-folder-list t)
(setq wl-summary-line-format "%n%T%P %D/%M (%W) %h:%m %t%[%25(%c %f%) %] %s")
(setq wl-summary-width 150)
(setq wl-user-mail-address-list (quote ("j.shuttleworth@coventry.ac.uk" "csx239@coventry.ac.uk")))

(setq bbdb-use-pop-up nil)

;;Initial Wanderlust setup
;; autoload configuration
(autoload 'wl "wl" "Wanderlust" t)
(autoload 'wl-other-frame "wl" "Wanderlust on new frame." t)
(autoload 'wl-draft "wl-draft" "Write draft with Wanderlust." t)

;; If we wanted to we can set the init file to be something different
;; (setq wl-init-file "~/.emacs.d/wl.el")

;; This should allow us to compose mail using C-x m
(autoload 'wl-user-agent-compose "wl-draft" nil t)
(if (boundp 'mail-user-agent)
(setq mail-user-agent 'wl-user-agent))
(if (fboundp 'define-mail-user-agent)
(define-mail-user-agent
'wl-user-agent
'wl-user-agent-compose
'wl-draft-send
'wl-draft-kill
'mail-send-hook))

;; BBDB for harvesting Email addresses.
;; THe rest in in my WL file
(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/emacs23/site-lisp/bbdb/")
(setq bbdb-file "~/Documents/portables/bbdb") ;; keep ~/ clean; set before loading
(require 'bbdb)
(bbdb-initialize)

(setq
bbdb-offer-save 1 ;; 1 means save-without-asking

bbdb-use-pop-up t ;; allow popups for addresses
bbdb-electric-p t ;; be disposable with SPC
bbdb-popup-target-lines 1 ;; very small

bbdb-dwim-net-address-allow-redundancy t ;; always use full name
bbdb-quiet-about-name-mismatches 2 ;; show name-mismatches 2 secs

bbdb-always-add-address t ;; add new addresses to existing...
;; ...contacts automatically
bbdb-canonicalize-redundant-nets-p t ;; x@foo.bar.cx => x@bar.cx

bbdb-completion-type nil ;; complete on anything

bbdb-complete-name-allow-cycling t ;; cycle through matches
;; this only works partially

bbbd-message-caching-enabled t ;; be fast
bbdb-use-alternate-names t ;; use AKA

bbdb-elided-display t ;; single-line addresses

;; auto-create addresses from mail
bbdb/mail-auto-create-p 'bbdb-ignore-some-messages-hook
;; bbdb-ignore-some-messages-alist ;; don't ask about fake addresses
;; NOTE: there can be only one entry per header (such as To, From)
;; http://flex.ee.uec.ac.jp/texi/bbdb/bbdb_11.html

;; '(( "From" . "no.?reply\\|DAEMON\\|daemon\\|facebookmail\\|twitter")))

)

(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/emacs23/site-lisp/mu-cite/")
(require 'mu-cite)
(add-hook 'mail-citation-hook 'mu-cite-original)
(setq mu-cite-top-format
'("On " date "," full-name " spake thus:\n"))

(setq signature-file-name "~/.signature"
signature-insert-at-eof t
signature-delete-blank-lines-at-eof t
mu-cite-prefix-format (quote ("> ")) ; default to >, no questions asked, rather than name
)

(add-hook
'wl-init-hook
'(lambda ()
;; Add support for (signature . "filename")
(unless (assq 'signature wl-draft-config-sub-func-alist)
(wl-append wl-draft-config-sub-func-alist
'((signature . wl-draft-config-sub-signature))))

(defun mime-edit-insert-signature (&optional arg)
"Redefine to insert a signature file directly, not as a tag."
(interactive "P")
(insert-signature arg))

;; Keep track of recently used Email addresses
;;(recent-addresses-mode 1)
))

(defun wl-draft-config-sub-signature (content)
"Insert the signature at the end of the MIME message."
(let ((signature-insert-at-eof nil)
(signature-file-name content))
(goto-char (mime-edit-content-end))
(insert-signature)))

(setq
elmo-maildir-folder-path "~/Maildir" ;; where i store my mail

wl-stay-folder-window t ;; show the folder pane (left)
wl-folder-window-width 25 ;; toggle on/off with 'i'

wl-smtp-posting-server "mail.coventry.ac.uk" ;; put the smtp server here

;wl-smtp-posting-server
;The initial setting is nil. This is the SMTP server name for mail transmission.
;wl-smtp-posting-port
;The initial setting is nil. This is the SMTP port number for mail transmission. If nil, default SMTP port number (25) is used.
wl-smtp-posting-user "csx239"
;The initial setting is nil. This is the user name for SMTP AUTH authentication.
wl-smtp-authenticate-type "login"
;The initial setting is nil. This string-valued variable specifies the authentication method for SMTP AUTH authentication. You may specify plain, cram-md5, digest-md5, login, etc. If nil, authentication will not be carried out.

wl-local-domain "ng43-1.coventry.ac.uk" ;; put something here...
wl-message-id-domain "coventry.ac.uk" ;; ...

wl-from "James Shuttleworth " ;; my From:

;; note: all below are dirs (Maildirs) under elmo-maildir-folder-path
;; the '.'-prefix is for marking them as maildirs
wl-fcc ".sent" ;; sent msgs go to the "sent"-folder
wl-fcc-force-as-read t ;; mark sent messages as read
wl-default-folder ".inbox" ;; my main inbox
wl-draft-folder ".drafts" ;; store drafts in 'postponed'
wl-trash-folder ".trash" ;; put trash in 'trash'
wl-spam-folder ".trash" ;; ...spam as well
wl-queue-folder ".queue" ;; we don't use this

;; check this folder periodically, and update modeline
wl-biff-check-folder-list '(".todo") ;; check every 180 seconds
;; (default: wl-biff-check-interval)

;; hide many fields from message buffers
wl-message-ignored-field-list '("^.*:")
wl-message-visible-field-list
'("^\$To\\|Cc\$:"

"^Subject:"
"^\$From\\|Reply-To\$:"
"^Organization:"
"^Message-Id:"
"^\$Posted\\|Date\$:"
"^[xX]-[Ff]ace:"
)
wl-message-sort-field-list
'("^From"

"^Organization:"
"^X-Attribution:"
"^Subject"
"^Date"
"^To"
"^Cc")
)

;;Get BBDB workiing
(require 'bbdb-wl)
(bbdb-wl-setup)
(define-key wl-draft-mode-map (kbd "") 'bbdb-complete-name)

(setq
wl-forward-subject-prefix "Fwd: " ) ;; use "Fwd: " not "Forward: "

;; Invert behaviour of with and without argument replies.
;; just the author
(setq wl-draft-reply-without-argument-list
'(("Reply-To" ("Reply-To") nil nil)
("Mail-Reply-To" ("Mail-Reply-To") nil nil)
("From" ("From") nil nil)))

;; bombard the world
(setq wl-draft-reply-with-argument-list
'(("Followup-To" nil nil ("Followup-To"))
("Mail-Followup-To" ("Mail-Followup-To") nil ("Newsgroups"))
("Reply-To" ("Reply-To") ("To" "Cc" "From") ("Newsgroups"))
("From" ("From") ("To" "Cc") ("Newsgroups"))))

(defun djcb-wl-draft-subject-check ()
"check whether the message has a subject before sending"
(if (and (< (length (std11-field-body "Subject")) 1)
(null (y-or-n-p "No subject! Send current draft?")))
(error "Abort.")))

;; note, this check could cause some false positives; anyway, better
;; safe than sorry...
(defun djcb-wl-draft-attachment-check ()
"if attachment is mention but none included, warn the the user"
(save-excursion
(goto-char 0)
(unless ;; don't we have an attachment?

(re-search-forward "^Content-Disposition: attachment" nil t)
(when ;; no attachment; did we mention an attachment?
(re-search-forward "attach" nil t)
(unless (y-or-n-p "Possibly missing an attachment. Send current draft?")
(error "Abort."))))))

(add-hook 'wl-mail-send-pre-hook 'djcb-wl-draft-subject-check)
(add-hook 'wl-mail-send-pre-hook 'djcb-wl-draft-attachment-check)

;; don't ****ing split large messages
(setq mime-edit-split-message nil)

;For printing on black and white printer...
(setq wl-ps-print-buffer-function 'ps-print-buffer)

;Auto add signature on draft edit
(remove-hook 'wl-draft-send-hook 'wl-draft-config-exec)
(add-hook 'wl-mail-setup-hook 'wl-draft-config-exec)
(setq wl-draft-config-alist
'(((string-match "1" "1")
(bottom . "\n--\n") (bottom-file . "~/.signature"))
))

;; Wanderlust compose becomes bound to C-x m
(autoload 'wl-user-agent-compose "wl-draft" nil t)
(if (boundp 'mail-user-agent)
(setq mail-user-agent 'wl-user-agent))
(if (fboundp 'define-mail-user-agent)
(define-mail-user-agent
'wl-user-agent
'wl-user-agent-compose
'wl-draft-send
'wl-draft-kill
'mail-send-hook))

;; Fetchmail bount to C-x M-m

(defun fetchmail-fetch ()
(interactive)
(shell-command "fetchmail")
)
(global-set-key "\C-x\M-m" 'fetchmail-fetch)

;Stop mime errors when sending to AOL/others?
; osdir.com/ml/mail.wanderlust.general/2006-10/msg00007.html
;(setq-default mime-transfer-level 8)
(setq smtp-use-8bitmime nil)

;Swap a and A in summary mode, so citing original message is on a and no-cite on A.
;I want the most common action (for me) to be the one with fewer keypresses
(define-key wl-summary-mode-map (kbd "A") 'wl-summary-reply)
(define-key wl-summary-mode-map (kbd "a") 'wl-summary-reply-with-citation)

This blog has moved

2010-04-11T21:05:00.001Z

This blog is now located at http://dis-dot-dat.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://dis-dot-dat.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Customising Wanderlust

2010-04-07T09:37:00.003Z

I've used a combination of Mutt, Emacs, Fetchmail, Procmail and Nullmailer for a long time now. Nearly a decade. But since most of the rest of my computer life is spentfi inside Emacs and I've swapped from paper-based task tracking to remember-mode, I thought I'd give Wanderlust a try.

The articles on getting started with Wanderlust at emacs-fu are great (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3) and left me with a working mail client. Unfortunately, it worked in a way I didn't quite like as much as Mutt.

Here's how I fixed it.

All of the lisp bits in this post can go in your .wl file, so you don't have to pollute your .emacs.

Summary lines

The first thing that bothered me about Wanderlust was the short summary lines. I have a fairly high-resolution monitor, and there was a lot of wasted space in the summary buffer. Even on my low-resolution laptop, I had empty space to the right of the truncated subjects. Here's the solution:

I was also a bit miffed by the date format and spacing of the elements in the summary lines, so I swapped those around to be correct (that is, British):


 (setq wl-summary-line-format "%n%T%P %D/%M (%W) %h:%m %t%[%25(%c %f%) %] %s")
 (setq wl-summary-width 150)

Stickiness

Being used to Mutt, I kept pressing "q" to close the message preview. In Wanderlust, when shoeing an e-mail, you don't actually jump into its buffer, so all this kept doing was closing the summary. If you had any marks on messages or operations that hadn't been executed, this could be a real pain because they were all forgotten. I found that you could make a summary "sticky" with M-s, which makes the contents of the summary persistent in a Wanderlust session, but you have to remember to actually do that when you open a summary buffer. Then I found out how to make all summaries sticky by default:

 (setq wl-summary-always-sticky-folder-list t)

Virtual Folders

One of the things I liked most about Mutt was the powerful searching functions. Wanderlust has something even better: virtual folders.

Use V to create one. You can search by body, from, to, etc., but also by Flag, so a search for Flag of Unread shows all new mails. You can also use ! to invert the search: !Flag, for example.

V can be used in a summary or from the Folders buffer. If you press it at your Desktop item, the virtual folder pulls mails from everything beneath it.

Even better, if you use "m f" to make a virtual folder in the folders view, it becomes a new mailbox. And, if you save the folder buffer, it updates your .folders file. You can put nicer names on them, too. I have these two items in my .folders:

 /flag:unread/.inbox    "Unread/inbox"
 /!flag:unread/.inbox   "Read/inbox"

Which got me out of the habit of moving read mail into a separate mailbox, as I used to have done automagically in Mutt - in-box zero makes me feel good. This is a good thing, because if you're using the brilliant remember-mode, the e-mails don't move around after you've added to-do items that link to them.

Automatic signature

I know you can press a few keystrokes and insert your signature in a draft e-mail, but I don't like it. Mutt used to append the signature automatically.

Using mu-cite, I added this behaviour again. Notice how bad at lisp I am - I cobbled this together from bits I found on the Internet. 1=1 /is/ true, though :)


 (require 'mu-cite)
 (add-hook 'mail-citation-hook 'mu-cite-original)
 
 (setq  signature-file-name "~/.signature"
       signature-insert-at-eof t
       signature-delete-blank-lines-at-eof t)
 
 
 (add-hook
  'wl-init-hook
  '(lambda ()
     ;; Add support for (signature . "filename")
     (unless (assq 'signature wl-draft-config-sub-func-alist)
       (wl-append wl-draft-config-sub-func-alist
                  '((signature . wl-draft-config-sub-signature))))
 
     (defun mime-edit-insert-signature (&optional arg)
       "Redefine to insert a signature file directly, not as a tag."
       (interactive "P")
       (insert-signature arg))
 
     ;; Keep track of recently used Email addresses
     ;;(recent-addresses-mode 1)
     ))
 
 
 (defun wl-draft-config-sub-signature (content)
   "Insert the signature at the end of the MIME message."
   (let ((signature-insert-at-eof nil)
         (signature-file-name content))
     (goto-char (mime-edit-content-end))
     (insert-signature)))

Cite the way I like it

I also always had a custom line at the start of any replies/forwards. Here's how to do that in Wanderlust.

 (setq mu-cite-top-format '("On " date "," from " spake thus:\n"))

Black and white printing

I haven't tried this yet, but I found a note in the Wanderlust docs about printing to a black and white printer.

 (setq wl-ps-print-buffer-function 'ps-print-buffer)

Calling fetchmail

At first I was doing this in an eshell buffer. I don't like to have it run automatically, because sometimes I want to read my mail on the web, but ultimately like to download my mail to local Maildirs. You'd understand if you had to live with the regular mail service fubars here at Coventry University :)

I've bound it to C-x M-m, so it matches up with C-x m (write e-mail).

 (defun fetchmail-fetch ()
  (interactive)  
  (shell-command "fetchmail")
  )
 (global-set-key "\C-x\M-m" 'fetchmail-fetch)

X-Face

Just for the fun of it, I have X-Face support. I've checked my e-mail for the past month and not a single other person inserts an X-Face header line, so there's not much point other than to see my own grinning face when I look in my sent mail folder. Still, that's enough reason for me.

First add X-Face to the visible field list:

 (setq  wl-message-visible-field-list
   '("^\\(To\\|Cc\\):"
     "^Subject:"
     "^\\(From\\|Reply-To\\):"
     "^Organization:"
     "^Message-Id:"
     "^\\(Posted\\|Date\\):"
     "^[xX]-[Ff]ace:"
     ))

And then just make sure you have a suitable ~/.xface file. By default, wl-auto-insert-x-face is set to t, so it should just work.

Feel free to e-mail me at csx239 AT coventry DOT ac DOT uk if you want to have someone to e-mail that uses x-face. It would make my day.

eshell

2010-04-01T09:51:00.001Z

Why didn't someone tell me about this a long time ago? I've been using shell or ansi-term for years - all that time, I could have been using eshell. World: try harder.

I might get emacs pinky

2010-03-30T09:20:00.001Z

I tried switching capslock and control. I even tried using control on the capslock key and removing capslock altogether - I never use it anyway.

But it doesn't work. If it wasn't for the double quote being above 2, it would probably be OK. With a US layout, I don't suppose it's a problem, but with a UK keyboard it seems the easiest way to get a double quote is to use left-shift-2, which is all just a bit too close when I now also have my little finger hovering over capslock.

Now I need to unlearn the past week of this layout and insure my fingers.

My left pinky is slightly curved from heave eamcs use already.

org mode reading rss

2010-02-08T09:11:00.001Z

This is great. org mode can read from my toodledo rss feed and the toodle-droid app lets me post on the move.

I also have a script to sync my Google calendar with emacs' diary.

I'm going to try letting go of my paper-based task list and day plan...

Python + emacs + Android

2010-02-05T03:10:00.001Z

I'm writing Python in emacs and using just C-c C-c (interpret buffer) to execute it instantly on my phone.

I can hardly see through tears of joy.

Code in the cloud

2010-02-02T20:38:00.001Z

I wasn't particularly bothered by Mozilla's Bespin until I read that it's extensible and inspired by emacs. And some other, rather evil editor. Now I just need to wait 20 years and It will be surely be perfect.

3rd of February is new phone day

2010-01-22T23:13:00.001Z

And look: Processing for android. I'm now about as excited as I used to get just before Christmas at age 15. I mean 7.

Are you knowledge-hungry?

2010-01-22T22:19:00.001Z

It looks like there's proof that learning because you want to know something is much better than learning because you want to pass a test. http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/12/15/this-is-your-brain-on-a-test.aspx. More reason than ever to find interesting exercises then, I suppose.

iPhone app development sounds like fun

2010-01-22T21:53:00.001Z

After seeing this, anyway: Eugene Lin – iPhoning My Way to Retirement

I wish I'd thought of this

2010-01-21T13:33:00.001Z

Christmas decorations created to represent the on-line statistics of the person they're given to. http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2010/01/data-decs.html

Small worlds

2010-01-17T14:40:00.001Z

Small Worlds - the best game I've ever played that has a 3-pixel player character.

DropBox

2009-12-21T22:11:00.001Z

I love dropbox. It keeps me in sync across multiple machines and multiple operating systems. If you sign up, I can love it even more thanks to the free space I'll get when you do.

Films this week

2009-12-14T21:51:00.001Z

I always forget to tell people that there are good films coming up on Film4. I like to check the coming week and use my V+ box to set recordings. That way, there's always something worth watching if I can't sleep or just fancy a film.

This week, we have:

Pan's Labyrinth (You missed it. It's on now. I got carried away with modding e-blog.el)
Laputa (Tomorrow 15/12/09, 4:05pm)
Night Watch (Tomorrow 15/12/09 11:20pm)
Big Trouble in Little China(Thursday 17/12/09 9:00)

Emacs posting

2009-12-10T09:44:00.001Z

This is from e-blog. Seems better than weblogger.el

Test

2009-12-10T09:41:00.001Z

Test

Posting from emacs (title set in blogger sadness)

2009-12-10T09:13:00.001Z

<p>This is a test. If it works, it will be the first post I've made completely from emacs. I really hope it does work.</p><p>Do I write text or html? Let's put a link to weblogger.el to see what happens: <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WebloggerMode">weblogger.el</a> I don't seem to be able to set the title, though. Revising posts israther amazing, though. Just save and it uploads.</p>

Making pulseaudio work sensibly

2009-11-14T12:44:00.001Z

Pulseaudio on my laptop has been giving me trouble since updating to Karmic. It thinks the PCM, LFE and master mixers should be mixed together like RGB. Turning up the volume first maxes out PCM and LFE and then starts on Master, so when you do get to what PA thinks is arounf 50%, it goes from silence to LOUD.

This fixed it nicely and at least I now know where the configuation is.

It's great that I have more control now - I have the behaviour I ideally wanted before (changing PCM rather than Master when using the media keys) but why is it not in /etc?

Writing to-do lists

2009-09-04T20:49:00.002Z

This might surpirse anyone that knows me and my habit of writing things on my hands, but I've written down how I do my to-do list. It's in response to an article on LifeHacker describing a radical purging routine.

Emacs: goto last edit

2009-08-02T07:13:00.001Z

Finally, it's back. Sort of.

I once knew a binding for Emacs that would jump to the last edited location in a buffer. It was great while writing my thesis, because I could go and check on something (like what I'd called a label for a \pageref).

But then I created scripts that grepped, awked and seded my thesis to produce lists of labels, which I then ran in watch inside a transparent xterm on another desktop, for easy look-ups. Simple and pleasingly distracting for the half and hour it took to set up. I'm a master procrastinator.

So I forgot the binding and have never managed to find it again.

I have now found something that does the same, though. Here's how to get it working:

Download goto-last-change.el from http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/goto-last-change.el
Put it in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/, or in your personal scripts directory if you have one.

Next, add something like the following in your .emacs:

;;go to last edit point
(require 'goto-last-change)
(global-set-key [(meta p)(u)] 'goto-last-change)

And now M-p u will allow you to jump back to the last place you edited.

I still wish I could remember the old binding. I know it's in there somewhere. I think it uses M-# somewhere…

Sunday night playlist

2009-06-21T20:26:00.001Z

Stealing Peter's great idea

How could I have lived for so long without this?

2009-04-15T14:16:00.001Z

Oxysilver. "OXYSILVER™ includes unique molecular structuring, atomic resonance energetics, and polarity electrochemistry".

That's proper science, that is. And it's only just over $500 for 18 bottles.

Film show

2009-03-27T07:10:00.001Z

2009 Creative Computing Film Show Trailer from Peter Every on Vimeo.

Hooray for gears

2009-03-25T07:49:00.004Z

Finally, Google are using their own gears technology in the services I love the most: gmail, calendar, and reader.

Remember the milk uses it too - not Google, but something I use a lot, especially since it integrates so well with Google's mail, calendar and start-page.

I wish more things tasted like bacon

2009-02-10T06:53:00.001Z

Wish granted.

I didn't know...

2009-01-21T22:38:00.001Z

If you want to insert the same bit of text in many places you can store it in a place called a register. Here's how:- 1. Move the point to the beginning of the section you wish to delete. 2. Press "C-space" to set the mark there. 3. Move the point to the end of the section you wish to store The region (the section between the point and mark) is now the section you wish to store. 4. Press "C-x r s" and then a letter. The text will now be stored in the register with the name of the letter you type. You can insert the text in the register with named "letter" using "C-x r i" and then the "letter".

From From here

Paranoid cameras

2009-01-18T08:43:00.001Z

Film, anyway. Now, where can I get a camera between now and 2010?

OMG dolls

2009-01-17T14:52:00.000Z

*scared* Pukipuki

A great find

2009-01-02T08:17:00.002Z

I just found a creative commons artist I really like and, thanks to Jamendo, here she is:

Oh, and happy new year.

Wow

2008-08-29T23:26:00.001Z

Embedded Video

Blogged with the Flock Browser

If the wind changes...

2008-08-24T13:36:00.001Z

...you'll stick like it.

And maybe then you'd need help smiling without all that straining, gagging, wretching (sic, double gag - no triple!) and whatnot.

I didn't actually click this ad in gmail. Reality was sure to be less fun than what I imagined.

Flickr Photo Download: smile

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Colouring Books

2008-08-24T13:30:00.001Z

I've only just realised how much fun colouring books can be for an adult. Whole volumes of completely random imagery to flick through. Fish wearing hats. People with manic grins standing on toadstools. An apple. Some of it seems a little inappropriate or suggestive, though.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Someone's patented scrolling

2008-08-11T08:57:00.002Z

"Graphical information having a full extent not displayable at once on a low-resolution display of a hand-held electronic device is displayed over a limited extent thereof at a variable resolution less than or equal to the highest resolution inherently available within the graphical information. The varying portion of the full image to be displayed is selected by a user windowing signal actuated by a user input device such as a button, roller, joystick or by simply moving the hand-held electronic device in space and having that movement sensed by a sensor such as an accelerometer."

From: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP1255186.html

Surely most websites (for example) are not visible on most screens. Does low-resolution mean anything lower than a very expensive monitor? And even if we only look at portable devices, my phone and PDA both allow me to scroll around images. It's the obvious thing to do.

garfield minus garfield

2008-08-09T11:32:00.001Z

"Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."

garfield minus garfield

Blogged with the Flock Browser

LIghtning

2008-08-08T22:38:00.001Z

http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2008/08/07

Blogged with the Flock Browser

New camera

2008-08-03T23:44:00.001Z

I've only just had a chance to play with the new camera (Fuji Finepix f50) and although it's annoyingly noisy in bad light unless you play with the settings, it does take some very nice outdoor shots. This is of the railing on one of the piers in Weymouth.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Music: Dogenzaka

2008-05-24T14:30:00.003Z

It's been a while. This is one of a few tracks that have been lying on my HD, getting attention only occasionally, for something like a year. I'll try and find the energy and time to finish some more. I've been playing "The World Ends With You" on the train, so this track is named after, Dogenzaka, a district in Shibuya, Japan.

Download: [ogg|mp3]

Putting a name to things

2008-05-05T21:32:00.002Z

I saw an interesting comment on slashdot where the author argues that the behaviour of entities like the RIAA, who manage to have the law bent around them, is leaning towards fascism.

It reminded me of an article I read a while ago (and now can't find - anyone?) that talked about names and labels and how they can be used to sway people's opinion of things. Un-american, communist, flip-flop, and so on. Names that, once they stick, are lethal.

When I saw the fascism post, my first thought was that it would be great to have this stick. Now I'm just wondering if wrapping up everything within the label, no matter how useful, is still just a dirty trick. Shouldn't we argue about specifics instead? Or do we need to simplify? I'd like to think that everyone can listen to the argument and make an informed decision, but is that just wishful thinking? I can't count the amount of times I've been stumped in arguments about the ID card issue because someone just spouts "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear". Not because I can't point out that this just isn't true, but because I don't have anything pithy enough or slogan-like to trump it with.

So, it comes down to a choice between assuming people are stupid or getting nowhere because nobody wants to know the details.

Robots get scarier

2008-04-20T16:36:00.002Z

Here's another robot that you can't kick to the ground. This is not looking good. Sci-fi has lead me to believe we would always have robots with a major flaw that could be exploited should they rise up against us. This one looks pretty hard to stop already.

I'm going to start having dreams like those I had as a kid and Tripods was on the telly - running and hiding from malevolent machines, never being safe.

Bessies

2008-03-20T23:51:00.001Z

The people on 313CR, 348CS and M04CR know about my love of razor adverts.

http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/2008/03/the-bessies-awards.html

Earthquake

2008-02-27T07:53:00.000Z

There was an earthquake last night. I was able to report it, see a map and watch other reports come in straight away here.

Favourite Lyrics #2

2008-02-17T11:53:00.002Z

I'm batch-posting blog posts today because I'm avoiding doing the work I really should be doing.

Plus, I really wanted to post the next lyric. It's from Push The Button, by the Sugababes, a track that will not die and leave room on the radio for something more deserving. My favourite lyric is just two lines:

My sexy ass has got him in a new dimension

I'm ready to do something to relieve this mission

Brilliant! Trans-dimensional asses! Followed by utter gibberish! Lovely.

Attached: an artist's impression of the ass in question, as seen in the middle of a jump between dimensions.

Favourite Lyrics #1

2008-02-17T11:42:00.003Z

There are lots of song lyrics I really like for all the wrong reasons. I'm going to post them as I remember/hear them. Partly because I think more people should appreciate them and partly so I don't forget how hilariously bad some of the pop music lyrics are before they disappear into our embarrassing musical history.

My first lyrical post is quite new to the radio: When the Sun Goes Down by the Arctic Monkeys. The Arctic Monkeys are one of those bands that annoy me. I really wanted them to be good because I liked the way the buzz built up and I did like the first track into the charts (possibly because I like dancing to electro-pop, like a robot from 1984), but after listening to a whole album of the same track, I'm just not getting it. I feel like they owe me. So does Amy Winehouse. I won't start on Amy Winehouse and how she ruins some pretty nice tracks by opening her trap, or how she really ought to be better at the artist half of "tortured artist".

But back to the lyric:

Look, here comes a Ford Mondeo

Isn't he Mr. Inconspicuous

And he doesn't even have to say owt

She's in the stance ready to get picked up

Why do I like it so much? Rhyming "mondeo" with "say nothing". Amazing.

Lasers

2008-02-17T11:31:00.003Z

If, like me, you've been put off having laser eye surgery because you just aren't sure that the laser might not be powerful enough, a new laser built by UMI might be enough to tempt you.

The image, and the great AdSense item, are snipped from this Physorg article.

Please note that at no point in this post have I used the word "frickin'".

Good, better, betterer

2008-01-14T08:25:00.000Z

This:

Is better than this:

Even if it hasn't got so many tributes, like these.

Games under fire

2007-12-11T15:52:00.000Z

I've been hearing a lot on the news over the past two days about "abuse" in on-line console games. The investigation by reporters highlighted the kind of verbal abuse possible with on-line games, especially those that allow voice communication.

Interviews with gamers give more specific examples of the abuse. One person tells us that he has heard people talking about his family, other people's families and "the N word".

When asked about it, Sony say that they have no way of stopping such behaviour in their games and much was made by the reporters about the games and consoles using the Internet, facilitating and enabling such abuse and also that it could be directed at children.

My own research has found even more worrying evidence of such abuse. Using an even more prevalent medium than the internet, some games [1,2] have no control at all. Many games rely on the common method of air compression and rarification to allow communication between players, offering absolutely no control over content. I have even experienced such "abuse" not only about my family, but often by my family.

More worrying still are games that reward such abuse. One game in particular [3] awards 8 points for using "the N word", while giving a player only 7 points for the word "love" and a measly 5 points for "God".

Even worse, this game and many others are regularly sold to children. This Christmas, many parents will be giving these games as gifts to their children, unaware of the total lack of control exercised by the creators when it comes to player-to-player communication.

I think it's clear that we need much more rigorous regulation of such communications. If the games companies admit to having no control, have no desire to implement it and wilfully allow this kind of abuse to be directed at the public and it's children, the government should step in to enforce it. If the government won't step in and control what we say, who will? Who's responsible?

Please, won't somebody think of the children?

References:

Possibly the best thing that's ever been or ever could be

2007-11-22T23:07:00.000Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By-cF0W2JLw.

It's not embeddable, unfortunately.

Black Magic in video games programming

2007-11-21T00:41:00.000Z

This is a nice, short, easily understood article about Carmack's voodo sqrt function in the Q3 engine.

Worth a read even if it's just to pinch the magic number.

Context-aware image resizing

2007-10-22T22:43:00.001Z

We looked briefly at the context-aware image resizing video today and a few students wondered if there was an application or plugin around that implemented the algorithm.

I found a few, but only one complete one that includes the object removal and protection facilities. Have a go. It's written in Java and needs the 1.6 java run-time.

A very nice resizing trick

2007-08-22T10:56:00.001Z

This is a great video. It explains the algorithm clearly and shows it in action.

Blimps

2007-08-20T23:29:00.001Z

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2943767&postcount=1

The killer app

2007-06-06T16:56:00.000Z

This is what computers, image analysis and the internet are for. We can stop now, the killer app has been found.

Something Quite Interesting

2007-05-28T22:13:00.000Z

I was watching QI, one of my favourite TV programmes, a few days ago using my shiny new Virgin media plus box doodah.

There was a great piece about a letter from Charles Babbage to Alfred Tennyson. Here's the bit of interest...

"In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads,

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

... If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next edition of your poem should read]:"

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one and one sixteenth is born.

Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

Googling brings up a slightly different version:

"Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;" I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born." I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.

I'm not sure which is correct. Maybe both, if Babbage was trying to fill two blogs and decided to re-use a post he found quite funny.

This is clever

2007-05-24T09:43:00.000Z

A Google Maps mashup that shows you a panoramic view from a given point. The really clever part is the way it uses the terrain height to occlude things that you would be unable to see. It's hard to explain, so play with it and see.

Callington Cordley

2007-05-16T13:50:00.000Z

Callington Cordley: overly maudly,
skittering quickly and sniggering baud'ly.
Patter-mouth pies, kitten's-teeth ties,
Buffs up his soul and shine-strikingly lies.

Interesting pants

2007-05-10T11:21:00.000Z

Due to a laundry incident, I'm wearing novelty underwear.

DSC00004

2007-05-08T22:27:00.001Z

Metaphor-oriented programming

2007-03-31T12:47:00.000Z

Read the article that will change your programming experience forever.

Art, code, music

2007-03-05T12:58:00.000Z

If I had infinite amounts of free time, this is the kind of thing I'd like to use it for.

Long time no blog

2007-01-31T10:32:00.000Z

Lots of things have kept me from blogging (baby, thesis, viva, work, research, nintendo). I'm still busy, but this video is so good, I had to spread it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7h8qkMBE_E

Or embedded:

Photo editing

2006-10-17T07:41:00.000Z

This video is great. It shows a model arriving for a photo shoot and then the entire process of makeup to photoshopping in high speed.

It's really surprising how much editing goes on in the video. You'd expect just the removal of a few blemishes, but not neck-stretching, eye enlarging and shoulder-shaping. I have no idea if this is the kind of thing that really happens, or if Dove are showing us an extreme example, but it's worth watching to see how easy it is to alter reality in an image editor

Banana Guards!

2006-09-21T12:59:00.000Z

Every so often, someone comes up with a new idea that totally changes people's lives. This one, for example, will totally solve all of my banana transportation problems.

I give you: The Banana Guard!

And so cheap too...

Images taken from the Mini Marvellous product catalogue

How to cheat

2006-09-10T18:10:00.000Z

Sarah explains how to cheat successfully at computer science assessments. It's a good read. While you smile, though, bear in mind that this is all drawn from experience and at least once a year, a single student will try almost all of these in one go. Honest. Of course, we do also get the ones that come in and say "It's a fair cop, guv" before you've told them what you wanted them for.

Woo-hoo! I'm on cc:365!

2006-09-08T22:40:00.000Z

Chris Campbell (of Bad Metaphor) writes for the CC:365 portion of Indieish.com, and has posted one of my tracks for day 251.

The article is here

Why I love the CLI

2006-09-03T23:39:00.000Z

I'm printing, binding and submitting my thesis tomorrow, so I've been making eleventh hour (make that forty-five minutes past the eleventh hour) changes. This has involved making cross-references explicit. No problem in LaTeX, of course, but when you have a tonne of labels, remembering the name you gave to a particular one can be tricky, and if you go and look for it, you have to search for where you were editing once you've found it.

So, in an xterm, I've been running this command:

watch "cat *.tex|grep -o \\label\{[^}]*\} |grep \{.*\} -o |sort|grep -v tab:|grep -v fig:|column "

Now I have a nice list of labels I can reference, updated every 2 seconds.

Even better, running it in yakuake means I can press F12 to toggle a drop-down list of labels without tabbing in and out of Emacs.

Another thing that's handy is my "spell" makefile directive, which checks all LaTeX files in the current directory:

ind . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.tex" -exec aspell check --key-mapping=ispell --mode=tex --don't-backup --sug-mode=slow '{}' ';'

I've never made the effort to learn aspell key bindings, so I always ask it to behave like ispell.

And for the people that scoff and mumble about how they don't have to do this in Windows: it's because you can't do this in Windows.

Latex, emacs, subversion, ediff

2006-09-01T13:46:00.000Z

Thanks to XSteve, editing svn-controlled files in Emacs is a lot more fun than you might expect.

His subversion interface for emacs, psvn.el, is amazing. It keeps track of changes, takes check-in messages through the current emacs instance and, my favourite bit so far, makes diffing against the repository version really simple using ediff. Almost all svn operations can be performed simply and the way the file list is used as the interface is really neat.

Earth from space

2006-09-01T09:33:00.000Z

Some great photographs of Earth from space: http://home.att.net/~hideaway_fun/442/planet.htm

On the one showing the the red sea, look at the line of green flowing up through Egypt and fanning out. It's the route of the Nile, with all the fertile land that borders it. Then, look at the second night-time photo, and you can see the Nile again, this time because of the lights along it. The rest of Egypt is fairly dark, but the Nile is a solid bright line.

Exciting news from ebuyer!

2006-08-29T19:44:00.000Z

I got an interesting e-mail from ebuyer today. In fact, I got two identical ones. Here it is:

Tuesday August 29th 2006


Dear Customer,

Enter your text here!


Regards,
E-Deals@ebuyer.com

Reading the funnies

2006-08-28T17:08:00.000Z

I normally avoid on-line comics because I'm easily distracted. More truthfully, I can easily distract myself. I'm a master procrastinator.

Anyway, I'm making an exception for this one (xkcd), because the latest strip made me laugh so much and this one made me laugh even harder:

By the way, anyone that uses aspell should try out aspellfox, which lets you spell-check text boxes in firefox.

More on toxoplasma

2006-08-11T14:04:00.000Z

I've talked about toxoplasma, the behaviour changing microbe, before. This article gives a better idea of how prevalent it is in humans, and hints that it might have quite a large effect on our culture.

Free tools make Free music

2006-07-31T23:24:00.000Z

Kanskje No is an absolutely beautiful track from DJ Auto, of Ringheims Auto. It's CC licensed and made with Free software.

A cheap post on Dijkstra

2006-07-31T22:38:00.000Z

I said I'd find some more things Dijkstra said about different languages. This turned out to be easier than expected, because Wikipedia already has a list. And, of course, there's no reason to do any more research if you've read a Wikipedia article, is there?

Anyway, here are some of them:

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
And everybody's favourite: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Angst

2006-07-31T14:27:00.000Z

From slashdot: People expect technology to just work, with no effort on their part, and any failure in the execution of technology MUST be on the part of the technologist or the tool, never the user. People have been taught for the last 40 years that causality is just a conceit, that logic is optional, that feeling good about yourself is better than getting good grades, that fashion trumps form, and basically that brains are for losers. The able must serve the unable in our culture, so where's the benefit to being one of the able?

Gothmolly expressing something better than I could.

We officially rock

2006-07-31T12:25:00.000Z

Creative Computing (the department I'm in at at Coventry University), just had the feedback from the external examiner.

It's all good. Our teaching of programming, especially, was praised. I won't copy sections of the report verbatim, but it did include words like "acclaim", "innovative", "motivated", "superior" (of results, deservedly and in comparison to similar institutions), "novel" and "successful". :)

It's good to get some external feedback, to be honest. Although the other members of the department have been very supportive and positive of the way we've taught programming this year, you can't help wondering if they're just too polite to say "WTF are you doing?".

The key features of our approach aren't particularly strange, really. We used Python (after many years of Java), objects late (shock!), did graphics and games in the first half of the academic year (and saw some great student work because of it), etc.

Perhaps the biggest difference from previous years, though, was the number of exercises we gave to the students. They did lots of programming, but thanks to our studio system, they had plenty of supported time to do them in.

Oh, and we walked into each lecture with no slides. Just a Knoppix CD and the intention of rolling up our sleeves and coding in front of a live audience. The ability to modify the examples, fix the occasional intentional typo (and more than occasional unintentional one) and generally respond to queries made a difference to the way lectures worked. They were more relaxed, more interactive and I think the students got a lot more out of them. I know I did - it was a lot of fun.

I found some lecture notes worth stealing

2006-07-25T11:30:00.000Z

These slides are great! And to think I always hated VB.

Prey

2006-07-24T23:45:00.000Z

Wow! It looks like Prey really is coming out after all! This has been talked about for a long long time.
Slashdot talks about it being demo'd nine years ago, but I remember talking about screenshots of this when I was at school, which is more like eleven years ago.
I don't even care if it's any good. It's just nice seeing vaporware condense for a change.

Kondencuotas Pienas - Lazy Bastard

2006-07-11T10:17:00.000Z

Another great track brought to my attention by CC:365.

Indieish : Your Free Music Daily » Day 189: Chenard Walcker - Our Father with Yellow Eyes

2006-07-09T23:53:00.000Z

Indieish : Your Free Music Daily » Day 189: Chenard Walcker - Our Father with Yellow Eyes
This is a great track. CC:365 is my new favourite site. A new CC'd track every day.

A touch of something random

2006-07-09T07:43:00.000Z

Bad Metaphor is a blog slash series of podcasts by Chris Campbell and his son, John. The latest podcast (number 7) begins with John reciting Jaberwocky over my tracks, Dark in Here.

Take a listen to this and the other podcasts. It's one of those things that shouldn't really be as interesting as it is.

Pink Tentacle

2006-07-07T00:37:00.000Z

This blog post explains and links this amazing Japanese site in English.

How to sleep properly

2006-07-01T23:53:00.000Z

Powernap is a simple replacement for Python's time.sleep() on Linux systems that uses the real-time clock.

I got fed up with bad timing.

Who cares where Wally (or Waldo) is?

2006-06-13T22:42:00.000Z

Just find some vodka, damnit.

This is what happens...

2006-06-12T10:21:00.000Z

... when you play SSX for too long.

Amen

2006-06-04T18:46:00.000Z

Everyone's heard the Amen break. Go and watch this video to learn more about it.

monome

2006-06-01T14:25:00.000Z

The monome controller is damn cool. Watch the video. I love the physical interaction with samples.

Now, how hard would it be to do this with just a PC keyboard and on-screen feedback? How much niceness would that lose? Do I have time?

Persona Grata fixed a bit

2006-05-30T14:48:00.000Z

I finally got around to fixind the duff note in Persona Grata. I've also stressed the distorted start, since people thought it was a glitch in the last version.

Download or preview on my music page. For some reason, the previews aren't playing at quite full speed. I think there's a samplerate problem with theplayer and the preview tracks. Maybe I need to re-encode them :(.

Website graphs

2006-05-28T17:32:00.000Z

They're pretty. They might possibly be useful.

This is what my site looks like:

See more or make your own here.

Free downloadable Camera

2006-05-22T20:58:00.000Z

Not the most feature-rich, but still it's nice to know that there is such a thing as a downloadable free and easily disposable camera.

In my mailbox

2006-05-09T23:11:00.000Z

It's been a while since I posted anything at all, and I still don't really have time to write anything worth reading. Luckily for me, an old and politically aware friend left me something interesting in my inbox (mbox, by the way - none of this maildir or outlook stuff).

He's given me permission to copy it here, with a bit of editing to ease the change of medium - which I've neglected to do.

Dear all,

My usual disclaimer applies: anyone afraid of politics should press delete now. For everyone else, read on! As some of you may be aware, the Identity Cards Act became law earlier this year, despite fierce and justified resistance from all main opposition parties, the House of Lords, campaign groups, academics, and hundreds of thousands of members of the public.

This means, sadly, that the government can start to create the machinery for forcing us all to have identity cards, and to store our information on a centralised identity database. The government have decided to issue ID cards with new passport applications, as they know that if they had required us all to attend compulsory registration centres from the outset, they'd have a protest on their hands the size of the Poll Tax riots.

Briefly, this is what will happen. From 1 October 2006, people wishing to obtain a passport (or wanting to renew one) will have to attend an Identity Authentication Interview at a passport office. They will be asked a series of questions to see if they should be allowed to have a passport. At some point after October 2006 - no-one knows exactly when - citizens obtaining a passport will also have to agree to be fingerprinted and have their faces and irises scanned electronically, and for a wide range of personal data to be gathered on them, and for all these things to be stored on the National Identity Register database. People who refuse on principle will not be allowed to travel abroad.

For some of us, this is just plain wrong. We object to being tagged like cattle, fingerprinted like criminals, and filed by number. Governments, as we keep reminding them, exist by invitation of the electorate, not the other way around. And yet a reversal is now happening: it is now the default position of this government to install new surveillance systems to keep an eye on a populace, especially given the civil unrest caused by the ongoing occupation of Iraq, support for the US regime, complicity with torture, and detention without trial (amongst many other things).

This is the important bit:

Anti-card campaigners NO2ID point out that you are allowed to renew your passport early, and that if you do, you will get up to ten years without needing to register for an identity card (unless, of course, they change the law in this regard - we believe this is unlikely before the 2009/2010 general election). This campaign is called "Renew For Freedom" and recommends renewing this month (May) in order to send a message to the government that we strongly object to their authoritarian scheme.

Doing this will also avoid the hassle of interviews with faceless bureaucrats who will have to assume we are all crooks. What's more, the cost of a new passport will rise from £51 to at least £93, so early renewers stand to save themselves some cash too (when this price rise will occur is unknown - maybe in October 2006, or maybe when the new database system is built and the interviewing facilities are ready with fingerprint, face and iris scanners).

Read more about the campaign here: www.renewforfreedom.org.

If you are concerned about being fingerprinted and charged for an expensive card you didn't ask for, go and dust down your passport and consider renewing it! I am doing mine this week and I hope that some of you will do yours too. And to save your eyes, you can stop reading now if you wish (though the rest of the message may throw some more light onto this subject).

Thanks for reading my email. These days I admit that I hesitate to send out political messages such as this, since politics has never been as unfashionable as it is now, or Westminister as out-of-touch. However, in this particular case, I have been encouraged by speaking to a number of you, and finding that the majority are frustrated at this latest example of state authoritarianism and wholesale citizen control. Some of the folks I've chatted to are committed to active (non-violent) resistance if, or when, identity cards are made fully compulsory.

For anyone still reading (thank you :o), here is some information about the identity card scheme in the UK, and some of these points provide excellent reasons why so many people, including myself, are massively opposed to it.

The government held two public consultations that were so badly advertised they were virtually a secret. The proposals were defeated twice, by significantly more people writing to the home office in opposition than in support. And the government ignored the results and went ahead anyway. That's democracy for you.
The London School of Economics (LSE) brought together sixty of their academic staff and a dozen professors, and wrote several lengthy reports about the project. They concluded that the ID card proposals are 'too complex, technically unsafe ... and lack a foundation of public trust and confidence'. The government has responded with vitriolic statements intended to discredit the authors of this thorough and thoughtful research.
The LSE staff suggested that the costs could go up to £19bn over ten years - this is over three times the government estimate. Citizens can expect that if costs are not fully covered by the card purchase value, the remainder will have to come out of substantially increased taxes.
Surely we can think of better ways to spend up to £19,000,000,000 over ten years? Hospitals are in a critical financial state, education can always do with a boost, there are many disadvantaged areas that desperately need a cash injection, the public would prefer to see more bobbies on the beat - and this government instead wants to go ahead with an extortionately priced project regardless of whether anyone agrees with them.
Much of the detail of the costs of the project are hidden behind "commercial confidentiality" clauses - making it impossible to see exactly how this government intends to spend our money. Public sector technology projects have a disastrous record of successful implementation within budget.
At some point after the next general election (2009 or 2010), identity cards may well become a compulsory document (unless the project is defeated first). This means that anyone who still doesn't have one will be legally compelled to get one, or they will face a fine of £2,500. People will be legally compelled to change their address details every time they move house, and should they not do so, they could face a fine of £1,000 for not "notifying the authorities".
The government has made a lot of noise about how ID cards will "combat terrorism", but quietly admitted several times that they would not have stopped the July bombings last year. Home Office officials are still using strong anti-terror rhetoric in the hope that this scares people into accepting identity cards.
The government were so confident they could bully the legislation onto the statue books, they spent £32,000,000 on the project before the Act came into law. I suggest that this is remarkably dishonest.
The proposals have been criticised by civil liberty groups, human rights organisations, unions, immigrant representatives, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and many of the Lords. The Information Commissioner (who oversees the use of personal data processing in the UK) has expressed public concerns about our "sleep-walking towards a surveillance society". A security professional for Microsoft UK warns that the scheme could trigger "massive identity fraud on a scale beyond anything we have seen before".
Although there is technically an "opt-out" for people renewing their passports before January 2010, in fact this offer is worthless. Even if an individual opts out, they will still pay full whack (£93+) and will still go on the invasive National Identity Register. They will still have their face/fingerprints/iris scans taken and recorded. They just don't get the little bit of plastic at the end (and they'll get one anyway when the scheme is made compulsory).

Thanks for reading this far. If you are interested in this campaign, or would like to get more involved, then get in touch. I shall be only too pleased to introduce you to NO2ID (who are doing some essential campaigning) or, if you wish, to help you get involved in anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy campaigns like this.

Go and read it on-line at http://elephantintheroom.info/.

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