Year: 2005

Random

Links for 2005-05-24

Unions announce BBC strike dates “BBC staff are to strike for 24 hours on 23 May and 48 hours on 31 May and 1 June in a row over job cuts”
I, Cringely on the Inflection Point – “So Apple takes over video and movies while Yahoo threatens with a low-priced music subscription service and Google threatens to take control of, well, everything.” Interesting article – but I wonder about Microsoft and Apple directly competing in the home entertainment appliance market. It still seems plausible to me that might happen.
After Hours Drinks Company Will deliver booze to your door in London at any time between 11pm and 7am. For those of you who drink…
Podcast support in next version of iTunes “He was slightly dismissive of populist podcasting, describing it as Wayne’s World for radio and celebrating the arrival of professional radio stations into the market…”
Wormhole ‘no use’ for time travel (says the BBC) “For budding time travellers, the future (or should that be the past?) is starting to look bleak.”
Resume normal service, says The Guardian “It is difficult not to have mixed feelings about today’s strike at the BBC”
First I was B-list, but they realised their error pretty quickly when I told them dirty stories about Anil Dash I mean I won a bloody lifetime achievement award already. It’s only fair. Right? Right?
Channel 4 documentary lifts lid on Labour PR machine “Undercover in New Labour, a documentary to be broadcast on Monday, includes footage shot by Jenny Kleeman, a reporter who volunteered to work on the party’s election campaign and ended up being drafted in to work at its national PR headquarters”

Random

Links for 2005-05-23

Lecturer censored in Spanish University (UPV) for defending P2P networks This is a terrible story where someone talking about what is legal is forced out of his job by organisations putting pressure on the University. This is not an intellectually free environment. Terrible.
4815162342 – “Lost” Numbers Reference Guide A big page collating the incidence of the important numbers in the awesome TV series “Lost”
Fossil of Ice Age Armadillo Found in Peru It’s huge and awesome! Size of a Volkswagen Beetle! I want one!
The essential books a programmer or designer should have… Being banal for a moment, I’d really recommend the O’Reilly “Web Design in a Nutshell” as a back-up reference work for emergencies…
I may have to get this carefully weighted blank keyboard for work if only so I can look unbelievably posey when touch-typing and to stop other people using my desk when I’m out…
Locket is a custom iChat widget that shows you when your special someone is online It’s kind of neat. It’s kind of dumb. He’s charging for it, which seems a bit OTT. But he’s also distributing unsexy versions for free…
NASA science uncovers texts of Trojan Wars, early Gospel More on the use of multispectral imaging to read the hoard of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus
The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects Lovely, lyrical, flavourful and fun categorisation system for tiny little things

Random

The New York Times can just sod right off…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date May 22, 2005
4 Comments on The New York Times can just sod right off…

Eurgh. I am so bored of following other people’s links to something on the New York Times and finding it all login-required and password-protected. I cannot be bothered any more. I. can. not. be. both. ered. So as of now I’m not going to link to them any more. And I’m not going to follow any link that goes to them. And I’m not going to engage in any debates they allegedly start behind their blanket of white. Can’t be arsed. Better things to do with my time. And before you start, I know all about this and I still don’t care.

Radio & Music

The podcasting and download trial commences…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date May 22, 2005
6 Comments on The podcasting and download trial commences…

A few weeks ago I talked about the upcoming BBC Download and Podcast trial and everyone got terribly excited even though it hadn’t started yet. But now it has! Actually it started last Monday, but I’ve been pretty distracted with all the other guff going on to really go into any detail about it.

First off, you can read all about it at the Download and Podcast trial page on BBC Radio’s site. One of the BBC’s major missions is to get people up to speed with these new technologies as they emerge, so a large number of people have put in a substantial amount of work to try and really explain downloading and podcasting in ways that will even make sense to people who don’t spend all day on the internet. I think they’ve done pretty well, but I’m sure people out there might have comments. There’s a feedback box at the bottom of the page if you want to make any suggestions or have any problems.

The Programmes that you can currently subscribe to include: TX Documentaries from 1Xtra, From Our Own Correspondent, In Business, In Our Time, The Today Programme’s 8.10am interview, Mark Kermode’s Film Reviews and Litir do Luchd-Ionnsachaidh with more to come.

I genuinely can’t recommend In Our Time enough, by the way. I’ve written about it before, but it bears repeating – where else each week can you hear some of the greatest experts on any given subject talking about The Roman Republic or the development of the Alphabet or Cryptography or Modernist Utopias. This is ultimate geek (radio) programming – exposing listeners to people working from an enormous range of perspectives. Absolutely stunning, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone who is stuck with some kind of tedious commute every day. Life-saving. (And if you’re particularly interested there’s a slightly cheesy Greatest Philosopher Smackdown going on as well.)

The other thing I’d like to talk about while I have your attention is some of the design work around the delivery of podcasts. At the moment, the whole experience of podcasting is unfortunately fairly clunky and forbidding for people who aren’t terribly technical. Having spent some considerable time playing with a beta of Odeo, I think I can say that this is going to change dramatically in the near future. But in the meantime, the work that the Radio and Music team have done with the presentation of the podcast URLs is really sweet.

This move towards ‘three ways of listening’ really excited me and I love the fact that the XML button is clickable and you have a form input box where you can select and copy the URL without accidentally clicking on the XML link and getting a page full of mark-up. I’m not totally convinced that this is a use of input boxes that everyone will get, but it’s certainly the most elegant solution I’ve seen so far.

Design

A life portrait for a business card…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date May 22, 2005
7 Comments on A life portrait for a business card…

Awesome – after posting up my business card side effects of the plasticbag.org redesign, I got sent this terrific e-mail from Siobhan Curran of Tranniefesto:

A while back, I purloined a couple of images from your Flickr photostream, ran them through the processes that I use to make my photographic work, and ended up with what (in my mind anyway) is a portrait of you. Now, I hardly *ever* do this, but I thought, maybe, it would make n appropriate background for the business cards you mentioned today. You’ll most likely hate it – it has none of the transparency that you were aiming for – but I thought I’d send it to you anyway. Can’t blame a girl for trying…

Well I don’t hate it, I think it rocks, and I’m absolutely delighted that Siobhan sent it to me. And so I’m going to share it with the rest of you:

Random

Links for 2005-05-22

R2D2 made in Italy “A prototype of R2D2 has been built by researched at the MediaLab from the University of Pisa who wanted to build a … companion robot with a friendly interface.”
A History of the Graphical User Interface It’s been everywhere, but I never linked to it. I can thoroughly recommend it if you haven’t read it yet though…
A re-presentation of the Adobe Photoshop interface within 3-dimensional space It looks like a microwave that cooks software, but is also intriguing in that 3d metaphors appear to be taking a step forward in OSX and Longhorn…

Family

In which time passes too quick, too slow…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date May 21, 2005

So it’s been four days since I had the conversations with the people at the various finding-family agencies. It’s been three days since I filled in the Traceline form and sent it off. I think it’s only been two days since the form from the stroppy self-involved Salvation Army people arrived and I tore it up into little pieces. It’s probably now in one of the many take-out boxes around my sitting room. So it’s only then really been one day since I last made a decision about this whole finding father project, and already it feels like an eternity. And how weird is that – after all I’ve only been circling these decisions for the last fifteen years.

When you fast-track an application with Traceline they’ll let you know if the person is alive very quickly – within five days, I think. But you need to have a full date of birth for that, and unfortunately I don’t have it. They don’t tell you how long the process takes otherwise, so it could be anything up to a month. And when a conclusion comes, it’s quite possible that it won’t be one I’m happy with. Traceline (weirdly for government) don’t have access to an enormous amount of data – just births, deaths and GP registrations. I don’t know how I’ll react to an abortive search. The prospect slightly scares me, even though there’s data even in that scenario. After all, if they can’t find him that means that he’s not registered at a GP or died within England or Wales. In that circumstance, I’d have to work on the principle that he’s probably still alive, just somewhere else in the world.

Of course it’s questionable that I’ll have the energy to take it much further if this particular search fails. Each step towards this point over the last five years has been incremental, difficult and slow to reach. That’s not to say that the mind has been willing but the system weak – quite the opposite. The inertia is all self-inflicted. In some ways, the whole process feels like tonguing a bad tooth when you’re too scared of going to the dentist. Your solution for years? You just don’t eat on that side of your mouth. But the tooth doesn’t get any better and it never will.

On the other hand, I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with any information I do get. What’s the next stage if the guy has been dead for years? Will it be worse if he died last week or ten years ago? Will there be anyone else I can contact? What effect will it have on them if I do so? And if he’s alive – what the hell do I have to say to him? I have one question which I tell myself is the reason for doing all of this. It’s a simple, blunt question for a person who felt like a changeling in someone else’s family. It is: why am I the way I am? But as I think about it, it seems like it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Design

Some side effects of the plasticbag.org redesign…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date May 21, 2005
4 Comments on Some side effects of the plasticbag.org redesign…

While I was doing the redesign for this site, I was trying to find an aesthetic that I could use in all kinds of other places as well. I experimented a bit during the process with some business card stuff that kind of didn’t come out too badly. As you can see, they’re a good deal more flowery than the rest of the site eventually became, but you have to strip back to rebuild (in design as in life). I think when I was doing these I was still pretty keen on acetate as a printing substrate of some kind. I hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to accomplish it though.

Random

Links for 2005-05-21

Newsmap – it’s not new, but it is classic and brilliantly executed and I see no reason why I shouldn’t link to it again… I wonder whether something like this could be done with BBC News feeds through the Backstage project, I wonder what the size could represent…
Awesome interview with a guy who works at Gosh comics in Bloomsbury It’s the best comic shop in London, even though it’s far from the largest. It’s just classier than everywhere else…
Awesome Daily Show clip featuring Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist Gloriously entertaining, subtle, elegant piece about GW Bush…
The film US TV networks dare not show The Power of Nightmares (remade as a film) is unlikely to be broadcast on American television because it questions the threat of terrorist attack
Kerry Bailey voices the thoughts of a thousand dweebie early-thirty-somethings all around the world about Star Wars Episode III I want to see it now if it’s good. I want to have seen it already and be putting the whole thing behind me if it’s not…

Random

Links for 2005-05-19

A fascinating graph shows the relative daily traffic of two major international websites Dear God are Flickr doing well. That looks like exponential growth. Or logarithmic growth. wow.
Awesome real-world installation built with Flickr that does interesting things with mobile phones and tags… “Mobile phone or internet social networks by means of visual communication linked through mob tags and or keywords… what?!”
The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth “America’s entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe’s biggest broadcasters — the BBC — is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.”