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I'm a bit of a linguistic conservative – my objection to neologisms like "squee" and "woot" is well-documented. But I'm also in firm agreement with Mr Fry here, even if my method of expressing it would be 180 degrees from his own. But then, that's why he's a national treasure and I'm not.
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I know fuck all about engineering, electronics, or most of the tools this might be useful for. And yet still, I want one.
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Some staggeringly beautiful shots of my hometown. There is a small, mean part of me whispering that anyone who was half competant with the right kit and a helicopter could produce these. This is untrue, because he has (I assume) put time, effort and work into getting to a point in his career where it is economically viable for him to do so.
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More shots by the same photographer. And I know that small mean part of me is dead fucking wrong. These are superbly composed, beautifully shot exposures that evoke feeling and mood, that betray a really bloody good eye. Even were I up there with the right kit, I'm sure I'd miss most of the more interesting shots here.
Cocoa: First Impressions
Sod me, this is a bit easy. Which is not to appear smug, or anything, but I’ve just knocked a really basic web browser together in about ten minutes. OK, that’s not much more than the OS X equivalent version of your usual “Hello World” beastie, but on the other hand, I’ve never build a “Hello World” app I could post to my blog from before.
Right, back to work. Now for the tricky stuff.
Links For Wednesday 28th January 2009
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"Stars nearly aligned" says Professor Angell. On the other hand, maybe this will finally give us a leg up all becoming young and thin and energetic again. Or turn us into a race of degenerate fish-men, I guess. Either's good by me. Ia! Etc…
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Ding! Correct! This, right here, is why I have never played an ARG. And why I would love to get paid to write one.
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Former colleague's JS graph library. Looks handy.
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About to start an Objective C/Cocoa spare time project. Don't know if I'll need any of these tools, but it can't hurt to have a reference to find them.
Links For Tuesday 27th January 2009
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90% of my job is like this. The *other* 90% is making the black triangle look like something pretty.
Bridge of Sighs
Golgonooza
Links For Friday 23rd January 2009
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I shall pick this thing apart at some point over the weekend, see if there's anything I can splice into/shortcut as part of my own efforts.
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Yes, I know everyone and their badger has been linking to this. Tough. These are just superb. I think #44, the picture of all the cellphones and cameras is particular telling.
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This will be incomprehensible to non developers in the audience, but oh god, this is so painfully, painfully true.
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This idea set off fireworks in my head, and I think I've got a spare-time tech project for the foreseeable (I got a proof of concept lashed together in about an hour, but it needs a *lot* more work before it's useable.) I love the idea of being able to get up in the morning and have the overnight reading ready for me to hop on the bus with. Hell, even if I don't ever make the mailbox public, all I have to do is lash it to some RSS-to-email functionality, and presto – a custom POD newspaper every morning.
The Hobgoblin Of A Small Mind
In conversation with some friends tonight, it was pointed out to me that I am logically inconsistent. We started out with a conversation about BDSM over noodles, as one so often does. My position on this is that of a reasonable human being: “your kink is not my kink, but your kink is OK”. Provided of course, that your kink has one, two, or more consenting adult humans involved.
But then we got onto the issue of what it is possible to consent to (the context, of course, being that there are certain acts that law says it is not possible to consent to, and that list will get broader in a week or two). Now, as I say, if you want to let someone at your reproductive bits with any sort of implement, then that’s fine by me. All parties around the noodles were definitely agreed on that. But I do, for example, believe that it should not be possible to give your consent to being killed. (I am of course, thinking of the case of Armin Meiwes in German a few years back.)
Except that I believe in assisted suicide. My friends picked me up on this. And my response was that well, I believe in assisted suicide when someone’s quality of life is so awful as to be unbearable, and, in the opinion of a trained medical third party, is unlikely to improve. But if there’s a chance someone’s life could get back to bearable state, then they ought to keep going and that the urge of a person with a reasonable quailty of life (or a reasonable hope of same in the view of a third party) to simply end was the product of an abberant mental state that could be reasonably held in invalidate consent. (I should make it clear: this is not a judgement on people who feel like this, I simply feel that it is society’s duty to help people who feel like this to not feel like this, rather than to help them to shuffle off.)
“Why?” I was not unreasonably asked. Because, when you get down to it, I am a big communist hippy. Someone dying for no other reason than “just because they wish to right now” removes not just themselves, but all that they might ever be, from the world, and I think we owe it to our fellow man to hang about in case we can be useful later.
“Ah!” my friends then said: “So you’re pro-life?”
But I am not. I’m a good pro-choice boy, thanks. But, of course the death of a foetus deprives our fellow man of all they might be.
Bollocks. So, how do I reconcile this? Honestly, I think it has something to do with sentience. But I don’t seem to be able to nail it down very well, because, well, a foetus in sentience in potentia, isn’t it?
So, either I need to reconcile these views somehow, or I need to admit that it’s OK to help someone top themselves just because they’re having a bit of a bad day. But then, so does our justice system, so I’m hardly alone. But while I’m mulling it over, I wondered if anyone had any clever thoughts on how these positions could be made to fit together?
A Commercial Interlude
For some years now, my friend Lee “Budgie” Barnett has been running an ongoing writing challenge on his blog, and producing some truly excellent pieces of short fiction as a result. He has finally collected the results into a book format, available for £6.50, which I believe works out at around ten of your yanqui dollars, for 180 perfectly formed little bombs of fiction calculated to appeal to even the most stunted of attention spans.
You need to go and buy this book. At once, if not sooner.
Links For Friday 16th January 2009
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Also known as the Stoke Newington Eight. Middle-class anarchist terrorists on the early 70s, who are (reportedly) now a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. Making a note of it, because it's a superb name, and I want to remember they existed, because it's bound to be useful one day.