james holden

A few weeks back, we went to a friends wedding. The band were excellent, and I took some pictures:

This is our latest addition, born four and a half hours ago:

There are some photos from the PHPNW meeting last night on my flickr stream.

A guy called Robbie shot 3038 photos whilst going about his daily business over three days, set them to music, and used them to make a video showing a slice of his life. The result is awesome:
3038 Photos in Three Days

The old Loud Truth webzine has been reactivated at http://www.loudtruth.org.

Neil’s done a sterling job of picking it up, dusting it down, and bringing it into the world wide web of 2008 complete with RSS feed. I’m sure interesting links will be gratefully accepted.

Well, I’m back off holiday - almost!

I’m currently writing this from the runway at Manchester Airport. Yes, on the plane. The problem is that we landed over an hour ago after a bumpy landing due to landing gear failure. The wheels went down, but the steering was b0rked and we needed to be towed.

That was only the first problem though, because we only got 200 yards before the tow truck broke down. A replacement was sent, but, incredibly, that broke down too!

We’re currently sat waiting for a replacement truck to tow us across the main runway - two hours after we landed.

Here’s the current view:

Some sad news had just come to my attention. The science fiction author and futurist, most well known for his 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey has passed away at the age of 90 in Sri Lanka after suffering breathing difficulties.

As well as his writing and film making, he was known for his scientific writings, including his proposal of geosynchronous communication satellites, which orbit at an altitude now known as the Clarke Belt.

He will be missed by a great many film and sci-fi fans and scientists the world over.

Arthur C Clarke - 1917 to 2008

Link

As of a few minutes ago, the BBC has gone live with it’s new homepage.

The new site is an iGoogle type affair with re-positionable content blocks, location specific content and, rather quirkily, a flash rendition of the old BBC clock, which will only be recognisable to those over a certain age.

There was a beta version of the new homepage floating around for a while which garnered somewhat mixed opinion, but it appear that they have launched with pretty much what was on the table then.

Most encouragingly it degrades very gracefully with JavaScript switched off. Also, at the HTML level the page is mostly composed of headings and lists with the layout being entirely derived by CSS.

Apparently having two mobile phones now counts a suspicious behaviour, and people are being encouraged to report anyone they see with two phones to the police.

A new counter-terrorism poster campaign operating in London, West Yorkshire and other areas of the UK urges the public to rat on their fellow citizens for “odd” behaviour such as photographing CCTV cameras. The intent is to “let experienced officers” decide what action to take.

“Terrorists often need communications. They often collect and use many anonymous pay-as-you-go phones, as well as swapping SIM cards and handsets.” - Peter Clarke, Metropolitan Police

Photographers are also singled out, with the public being encouraged to report anything beyond the normal tourist snapping away. For example, there are many fascinating and detailed bridges in the world, but if you photograph them you risk being reported for photographing transport infrastructure.

At the weekend, I was participating in the OpenStreetMap project, which meant I was methodically walking the streets in my neighbourhood carrying a GPS. Of course, to the general public, it wasn’t immediately obvious what I was doing, and although nobody challenged me (indeed on what grounds could they), I got a few odd looks.

The call for the public to notify the authorities of any suspicious behavior so that the police can decide for themselves can only be counter-productive as it will surely result in a sludge of useless intelligence, in which any genuine causes for concern would be lost.

Met Police Press Release

Lady with mobiles image credit: bruceley at flickr

Having mis-spent a significant part of my youth tinkering with electronics, I was the 10 year old boy who wanted, and got an oscilloscope for my birthday. With the scope in X-Y mode and a couple of function generators, you could produce Lissajous figures by sending different waveforms to the X and Y inputs.

These talented hackers used the stereo output from a PC sound card to drive a scope and did some amazing tricks. It’s all still done on the X and Y inputs though.