Bouncing messages off the moon

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Radio nerds celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings this week by bouncing radio waves off the moon. It’s a five second round-trip, even for a radio wave, so the conversations were rather stilted. But what an interesting tribute it was.

Will other technological milestones be celebrated in similar ways, I wonder?

Will the 40th anniversary of the internet’s creation be honoured by people bouncing emails off of Tim Berners-Lee’s laptop? Will we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GSM network by routing SMS messages through Friedhelm Hillebrand’s mobile?

No, probably not.

Is it right to censor Wikipedia to save a life?

Monday, June 29th, 2009

David Rhode is a double Pulitzer-winning journalist with the New York Times who just escaped seven months as a captive of the Taliban – yet you won’t have heard about it.

It’s extremely newsworthy, but coverage of the kidnapping would have made Rhode a more valuable hostage. The higher profile the captive, the more attention the captors and their demands get – and the lower the chance of a happy ending.

In situations like this, news organisations often agree to hold off on reporting certain events. They lose a story in the short term, but a reporter gets a better chance at coming home.

In any case, for better or worse, everyone gets their story eventually.

This mutual cooperation used to be relatively straightforward to organise – journalists, especially war correspondents, are a pretty cliquey bunch – but it is one of the long list of things that have received a thorough shaking-up in the internet revolution.

Wikipedia, in particular, was a major problem.

(more…)

How Habitat annoyed the Tweeting masses

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Yes, it makes extremely comfortable and effortlessly trendy furniture, but it doesn’t get social media.

Habitat is in the middle of a disapproval-a-thon on Twitter right now, after the company, or someone acting on its behalf, added Iranian election hashtags to tweets about its “totally desirable Spring collection”.

Well, the idea was to attract attention, so it worked. In a way.

(more…)

Folding up the humble three-pin plug

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Processors, memory and hard disks go through numerous iterations each year; faster, smaller and shinier, while the humble plug remains as defiantly chunky as it is painful to accidentally step on.

The problem is one of scale; they’re on the end of every lead attached to every gadget, and built into every room across the country.

It would take so much effort and money to upgrade the standard that any politician would be mad to go anywhere near the idea of suggesting that maybe we think about upgrading. Wars and bank bailouts are much less contentious. (more…)

First look: Firefox 3.5

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Firefox 3.5 is out as a Release Candidate – as close to a final version as you can get without being a final version – so I’ve taken a look to see how it compares to its competitors.

Porn/Private Browsing

Most other browsers already had this feature, and now Firefox does too. With nothing more than a quick Ctrl+Shift+P your tabs will be whisked away and stored safely, leaving you with a fresh window for your… personal research.

When you’re all finished up, the same shortcut will bring back all your previous tabs and send all trace of your secret session into oblivion (it does not erase feelings of guilt). (more…)

Swearing, blasphemy and pranks: why Facebook shouldn’t trust its users

Monday, June 15th, 2009

The Great Facebook Rush occured over the weekend, as the site opened the floodgates for unique username registrations.

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, bad luck. Get used to being facebook.com/827430mvmhd9mdleek3.

I briefly considered waking up at the crack of dawn to snag matthew.sparkes, but I opted instead for a few hours more sleep.

To the man with the well-trimmed beard who got there first, enjoy. I certainly enjoyed my lay-in.

“Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it,” warned Facebook.

Well, people did think carefuly. And the results were chaotic, stupid and entertaining in equal measure. Here are some of the high/lowlights. (more…)

Gay marriage and the Y2Gay bug

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Unsurprisingly, Holland was the first country to legalise gay marriage, all the way back in 2001. Since then, another six countries have taken the plunge, and there are plenty more sitting on the fence (but at least facing the right way) by allowing “civil partnerships”, or some other stupidly-named approximation of holy matrimony.

Sure, there have been some backward steps, too – such as the outrageous display of bigotry that was California’s Proposition 8 – but on the whole, things are getting better. Personally, the prospect of marriage in any form is terrifying, but if it’s available at all, then it should be available to all.

Besides narrow-minded folk, there is another group of people that may have a problem with the whole thing: database designers. I don’t mean to imply that they’re homophobic (although I can’t guarantee that some aren’t), but only that gay marriage is going to cause them a lot of headaches. (more…)

Creationism versus Artificial Intelligence

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

I’m well acquainted with the presence of the creationism/evolution debate in the classroom and in politics, but I never thought it would dare to bother computer science, Mecca of all things logical, provable and reproducible. Still, I read a blog post today that boiled my blood. (more…)

Why my desktop is like a space station and other assorted thoughts

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Way back in 2001 I set off for university armed only with a rudimentary grasp of the object-orientated programming model and my trusty desktop computer. Actually, that’s a slight misnomer; my PC at the time was a reclaimed, bright blue server case that stood nearly as tall as me.

It weighed an absolute ton, and virtually no desk could support it. Inside were 4 or 5 hard disks, of random size and origin, a bizarre selection of scrounged components and enough fans to build a quite effective hovercraft, all linked to a controller that I’d built myself.

Needless to say, it wasn’t the most stable PC ever created. It fell over, a lot – very often because a screw had been worked loose by the vibration from all those fans and landed on a circuit board. In the halls of residence we used to hold regular movie nights, with media streamed all over the super-fast campus network. If the film stopped, I would have to run back to my room to find the offending screw, remove it and reboot. (more…)

Do you get paid for booting?

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Do you get paid while your PC boots up? I hope for your sake that you’ve never even had to think about it; an office where that’s an issue sounds like an awful place to work.

Unfortunately, these offices do seem to exist, though. In fact, several companies in the US have been sued by employees in the last year over claims that they lose hours a week to startup and shutdowns, for which they aren’t paid a penny. (more…)