My apologies to those of you with ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
als_workblog on your friends lists. I finally got around to making the RSS on my workblog work again, but it does mean you’ve all just been slapped with 10 posts. I forgot about that. It should be more normal from now on.
Vox Website, Vox Deorum
There’s a project I’ve had in the back of my head for a while now, and I’ve kind of been spinning my wheels on it a bit.
This isn’t what I intend as it’s final form, but If you visit http://alasdair.vox.com/, you’ll find the first of a collection of works tentatively entitled “Fables and Photomancy”.
I make no promises about how often I’ll update it, but I’m aiming for between 12 and 25 rough cuts at the moment, before I start trying to get them into their final forms. Think of them as first drafts.
Magic and Loss
Daybreak, and in the wires, the angels scream. Pulled from the higher planes, down into our engines of business and communication. People forget, now that modem technology is old and out of date, and they no longer hear the shrieking that accompanies their email. I don’t suppose it’s much of a coincidence that the digital revolution really kicked off just after we managed to make things run silent. Easier on the conscience.
Me, I haven’t forgotten. I keep a bank of old modems set up by my machines. I could use them for all sorts of things, but these days, they’re mostly just a reminder.
Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a sadist, or anything. No more than you are. Just because I can hear them when I want, that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Quite the reverse. I only turn them on when I can’t stand it any more.
It all started with Dee, of course. His strange mathematical formulae, taught to him by his angel. His angle. Who showed him that everything that is can be reduced to mathematical information, and then thereby changed. Yes, everyone knows that he was the father of cryptography, but who really stops to think about what that means?
Does anyone care what the distinction between encyphering information, and calling down protective spirits to hide it from prying eyes is? Does anyone really care that there are angels shrieking in the stratosphere, at registers beyond hearing, bounced from cellphone to cellphone, carrying our tedious reminders, idle questions and momentary flirtations?
Does anyone even notice the price? That as magic becomes everyday, the world becomes smaller? Starker? As if the soul was leeching from it, being bound away somewhere else?
That’s why I keep my bank of modems. It’s insulation, of a sort, and maybe, just maybe, a little insurance. The planet fills up with violence, with creeping convenience, as it becomes world of desires sated as soon as they’re conceived. Every day, things get just a little worse, as more and more of our better nature is strung out down wires, and spread oh-so-thinly across the globe. And I fear that one day, there won’t be enough left of our higher selves.
So I hide here, with my bank of angels, carefully preserved. I husband them, against this apocalypse of spirit, in the faint hope that one day, they’ll preserve me, as I have them.
One last flight of angels, trapped in cages of wire and diode, waiting for the end.
On The American Dream
Every so often, Livejournal justifies it’s own existence. This dissection of modern culture, backpacking, and life in the USA is one of the more interesting bits of writing I’ve read recently.
Copyright and Code
Oh for fuck’s sake. It turns out that writing code is now something you can be held liable for. (I am, I admit, putting the cart before the horse. It is possible that the case will get thrown out. Except that the US courts have not shown an appetite to do that in recent years.)
In short: in addition to suing the a company that made P2P software, it’s suing two of the developers individually. If it succeeds, it means that developers can be held personally liable for the use that their code is put to. Suddenly, the open source movement would be in serious trouble. Hell, I personally would have reservations about releasing software to clients, since there is a remote possibility that their use of it might break laws. There’s nothing in any CMS I’ve written that would prevent a client using it to distribute copyright material, and there’s no practical way to make sure there is. And it’s not just their business, or even my employer that’s liable. It’d be me, personally, as the bloke that wrote the code.
Apparently is this case it is the guns that kill people, and not people.
Can anyone please explain to me how this might considered a decent thing to do? I mean, I know there are lawyers reading this journal. And while I understand that they have a responsibility to their employer, do they not, as humans, have a much fucking broader responsibility to not file suits that have the potential to fuck *everyone* in the ear?
I’m not being rhetorical here – somebody, please, answer the question, because I’m utterly fucking stumped. I honestly don’t know how someone can possibly thing that holding developers personally liable for the uses to which the code is put can be a good idea. Can frankly, be anything other that mind-numbingly malevolent stupidity.
Third hand
Via a link on stu_n‘s journal, one for the West Wing fans: the complete first episode of Sorkin and Schlamme’s new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on YouTube. (In several parts, but it’s all there…)
Ubuntu!
Ubuntu, as we all know, means “scared of this linux stuff that the big kids talk about” in the langauge of some tribe or other.
Still, I’m a bit impressed with it thus far. It’s taken me something under an hour and half to go from “knackered windows box” to something the appears to go like shit off a shovel (or at least, boots in a tiny fraction of the time that my windows gaming rig boots in), is connected to the electrical internet, has had half a dozen new apps intalled, and is generally showing every sign that by this time tomorrow, I’ll have a working development server, with version control and everything set up for my use.
And what’s most impressive about it, is that I’ve got it up and running while drunk.
I could get used to this linux stuff, if it keeps on like this.
Over
So, that’s it for The West Wing. A slow shuffle off to the end. There were a couple of lovely moments in the last episodes, but that’s all they were, lovely moments. As much as seasons six and most of seven were a marked recovery from the awful fifth season, the last few episodes had nothing in them. A function of the drama – this isn’t the sort of fiction you can build to an explosive climax, because we all know how it has to end – exactly as it did, with a wind down.
It never got back to the days of seasons one and two when it won all those awards for a damn good reason, but still: this is the first and only TV show that I can make any sort of claim to have watched end to end (I joined in at the back end of season one, but I got the DVDs as damn fast as I could…). I’ve never actually had a TV show end that I really genuinely was sorry to see go before. It’s an odd feeling. I suspect it’ll be a long time before it happens to me again.
What To Do In Dublin?
ewa and I are off to Dublin in September. We’ve never been. If you have, then recommend us things to do, and places to eat and drink, please…
Music in brief.
Lilly Allen is a bloody scattershot artist. Most of her stuff leaves me cold, but when she hits the mark, she’s spot fucking on. I still love “LDN”, and now I’ve got to say, her cover of The Kaiser Chiefs “Oh My God” is also bloody fine.
If you haven’t heard of The Pipettes, then you may have been under a rock, so once you’ve checked that you’re not pinnned down by extraneous minerals, you really should educate yourself. One of the current wave of Spector-pop revivalists, head and shoulders above most of the others I’ve heard, as they reach for other touches to it, both contemporary with Spector, and more modern. Top stuff. Must get to a live gig.
Disturbingly, Andrew W.K.’s latest, “Pushing Drugs” is quite a lot of fun, too. (Via NYUB.)