Category: general

Michael Jackson dead at 50

26/6/2009 / / 2 Comments
Michael Jackson Graffiti, Berlin, by stylespion (Flickr)

Michael Jackson suffered a heart attack last night (European time), and could not be resuscitated. Wacko Jacko he may have been, but it’s the end of an era. Love or hate him or his music, he’s the biggest selling album artist of all time. His music, his pop videos and his dancing have influenced pop forever, just like the Beatles and Elvis before him. His collaborations with Paul McCartney (Say Say Say, The Girl is Mine) are among my favourites.

I had a copy of Thriller on vinyl, and I’ll always remember the day I was at Auntie Val’s and we put on the first side. The needle dropped on the record and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” started up… I must have been about 8 years old at the time. There goes another part of my childhood.

[update] There are a few articles around now that are covering the story of Michael’s life and death with a bit more depth; notably the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman with “This is not a Diana Moment” and an excellent article over at Urban Semiotic, “The Veneration of Michael Jackson begins“. As for the cause of death (direct or indirect) news is emerging that he may have been addicted to Demerol or Morphine.

Image credit: stylespion

Take the Kitchen Sink

4/6/2009 / / 0 Comments
Folding Camping Kitchen Sink

Now you can really take the kitchen sink with you. This amazing folding kitchen sink is from Sea to Summit, a camping and outdoor equipment supplier. It comes in 5, 10 and 20 litre sizes and can hold hot water and detergent. Full marks to Sea to Summit for the segue between a sink and “small size makes a great dog bowl!”

It’s actually easier to pack than most other things you might take when travelling. Perhaps the good old English expression “taking everything but the kitchen sink” could be endangered. Just like the expressions “I’ll lend you the CD” or “I’ll call you when I get home”.

Bringing it all Together

23/5/2009 / / 0 Comments
Twitter + Facebook + Netvibes = fruey 2009

On Facebook, you have a status which is limited to something along the lines of 140 characters, rather like a tweet in Twitter, which has a similar character limit. I often update this with a link, a story I have read in the press, or a mundane observation about how awful the weather is lately. Having already linked Facebook and Twitter with the official Twitter Facebook app, anything I post to Twitter (a “tweet”) is now published to my Facebook status and will also appear in the sidebar of this blog.

I spend most of my spare minutes on Netvibes and Facebook these days. Netvibes allows me to follow – in one place – the news (The Guardian, BBC News, New Scientist…), Geek sites (Slashdot, Metafilter…), French bloggers (Fred Cavazza, Stratégie Interactive…), podcasts (Guardian Science Weekly, BBC Material World), comments on my stuff (Flickr, Twitter, this blog…) and my own work projects (Basecamp RSS feed). From a total of 44 feeds loaded on there I may go off to different sites, or spot posts in blogs that I otherwise would never have the time to visit. Facebook allows me to keep in touch with friends – at least those that actualy use Facebook to publish and share things – and its value is in the ease with which you can react to news by commenting on things whether they be status updates, photos, videos or posted links.

While surfing around I used to find more time to post fully here, perhaps with an article on Flickr or something I had heard on a podcast. That being said it’s not like blog posts have ever come thick and fast.

So I’ve decided to activate a weekly tweet digest, which means there should be something going on here most weeks. Visitors may have noticed that updates have dried up in 2009, mainly because it’s just so hard to find time to write a good article. There’s stuff worth reading in the archives though, but it doesn’t always get the exposure it should. So now by combining the blog with the latest internet fads, I should be able to keep things up to date a bit more often just by having Twitter radiate out my comments to all the places people catch up with me :-).

p.s. Sorry for the awful diagram.

Follow the Twitter Feed

22/5/2009 / / 5 Comments

Lately, I have been mostly microblogging via Twitter. It updates my blog (see the sidebar on the right), my Twitter followers (all two of them) and my Facebook status. Having changed job recently I have precious little free time to write full blog articles.

I’m thinking about directly adding my tweets to the blog as articles – it may make more sense that way as updates will be more regular. Happy to hear your thoughts.

Woolies is going, going, gone

23/12/2008 / / 5 Comments
Woolworths closing down by Fred Dawson

Tomorrow may be the last day you can shop at Woolworths, a high street chain that has existed for nearly 100 years in Britain. It caused quite a stir at the time of the launch, with a clever marketing tactic – everything was sixpence. It opened in the UK in Liverpool in 1909 but the first stores were nickel & dime (everything 5¢ or 10¢) shops in the US which had been going since 1879.

Local mid to large-size towns where I grew up all had a Woolies, and I remember it for pick ‘n’ mix, 45s (singles), tapes, CDs and stationery. Letchworth had a Woolworths which was closed down in the late 80s, only to come back many years later, now closing again.

Possibly a victim of e-Commerce, the stores have no major draw for impulse purchases compared to stock that is increasingly available at hypermarkets. They always had a low quality, low cost aspect and the chain has perhaps had its day – indeed town centre shops in general have really changed since the 1980s when I grew up.

A visit to Woolies – in Hitchin in particular – used to be a regular thing for me when I was at school. I remember browsing records and later CDs, buying sweets and occasionally looking at the back of the shop for other household items and the occasional gadget or Christmas present. Bye bye Woolworths, my childhood shopping days are now truly gone.

If you have any Woolie(s) memories, why not share them by commenting on this post.

Better Workspace, and an Ubuntu Linux Install

23/11/2008 / / 4 Comments
ubuntu logo

I have finally found a better place for my desktop PC which has been underused for some time. Ever since I got my laptop, I’ve tended to use that instead of my nice home machine with a 19″ LCD flat screen, wireless keyboard and faster processor. So I’m rather glad to now be able to use the better PC when I want, sitting at a new desk upstairs in the lounge / kitchen area rather than in a rather cramped spot downstairs near the bedrooms.

Having a better working environment has meant I’ve been spending time on the machine, so I’ve been updating a lot of stuff to latest versions. Having an LCD screen made me think about sub-pixel rendering options. The desktop still has Windows 2000 installed, but you can only get sub-pixel rendered (smoothed) fonts with Windows XP or Vista. I’m rather loath to go through another Windows install, particularly with having to pay another upgrade. The old machine couldn’t handle Vista anyway, so I’d have had to hunt around a bit for an XP licence. So I decided I’d try the new version [8.10] of Ubuntu, a version of Linux which seems to dominate the market currently. I got the previous version [7.x] running on the laptop, but I think a modern Linux desktop has higher requirements than my poor laptop can handle, though it does run reasonably with a bit of tweaking.

Installation was easy; download the CD image, burn it and boot from it. Everything was recognised, even my brand new USB WiFi key, and I was up and running very quickly. Installation options included automatic suggestions on resizing current disk partitions, and the base desktop install includes everything you need to get started using Linux – Office tools, Internet software, good control panels for configuration, CD burners, graphics tools and some fun games. There’s loads more stuff available by using the Add/Remove applications panel.

The first Linux I installed at home was RedHat 6.2, which was a long time ago (back at the very start of the century). Back then, partitioning the hard drive and getting Linux installed was not for the faint hearted. Resizing disk partitions wasn’t possible on NTFS filesystems used by Windows NT, 2000 and XP, so you had to work around that by copying to another disk and back again. Today, Linux is arguably easier than Windows to install. The only issue is that you have to get used to a few new ways of doing things. But you do get the latest software from the open source catalogue, and free smooth fonts without having to fork out a single penny.

Prebiotic Soup and Organic Change

21/10/2008 / / 4 Comments
Stanley Miller with Experiment, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Miller1999.jpg

In the 1950s, Stanley Miller did some experiments which aimed to simulate atmospheric conditions on a lifeless primordial Earth. His theory was that organic compounds could come from inorganic processes, and he was mostly right. His experiments with boiling water, gases and electricity (simulating lightning) created amino acids which are commonly found in proteins. Miller died last year, and a former student of his Jeffrey Bada inherited some of his belongings.

Bada has just published findings, using current techniques, that even more types of amino acids at higher yields were created by these experiments. So the experiment shows that basic abundant gases (methane, ammonia, hydrogen), heat, water and electricity are enough to create compounds that may be the origin of life on Earth.

I always found Miller’s experiments fascinating, and this is a new twist. It’s tempting to think that over thousands or even millions of years, life gradually emerged from specific chemical conditions on early Earth. Many more millions of years of evolution took single celled bacteria to multicellular lifeforms to more complex aquatic life, and so on. Each step very simple, but the overall result over very long time periods gives rise to breathtaking complexity.

In my work too, I believe in gradual improvement and building up over time rather than in sudden radical overhaul, sudden gain, and spurious complexity that just doesn’t add up. Complexity cannot come quickly and be natural and sustainable too. How many websites just don’t make sense because there is no simplicity behind all those complex options, offers and links to click? I liked the approach described by the Stack Overflow team on a recent podcast: Jeff Atwood said that if he didn’t do a little something to improve the site every day, he didn’t feel like he’d got anything done that day.

Credit Crunching

21/10/2008 /

Seen on Slashdot, talking about the credit crunch:

“People are not buying bullshit anymore. Not because they don’t believe the bullshit; they never did. They are not buying it because they can not sell it on to someone else.”