I’ll admit it. Even though I love Apple, I still thought that the iTari pisstake was funny. It’s not as good as the iBrator though…
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Author: Tom Coates
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On background gifs in Netscape…
I’ve been inside all day, on one of the nicest days of the year, and why? Because I’m finally getting some redesigning done – getting some code together which isn’t completely awful. Picture the scene – I’ve got a mock-up in Photoshop of what I want to achieve, I have worked out how I should go about achieving it, I set to work, and gradually (very gradually) it comes together. I’m quite proud of it – I’m using a rather clever table structure (or at least I think I am), when suddenly I decide to check it in Netscape.
Of course the structure is all completely in place, and working perfectly. Except that the cell background, which is fundamental to the design of the page, is suddenly replicated in every cell of the nested tables within it. I slap my head in horror. “Of course”, I say, (scream?) ” I had completely forgotten that Netscape 4.x cannot handle images as cell backgrounds very well. But if I make it a page background, it’s going to make the page slow to download. Damn it! I wonder if anyone has any ideas as to how I can get around this problem without using a background image? Hmmm.”
This story seemed more interesting when I started writing it.
Weblogs (at least those with online diary content) are strange things. They force you to make decisions about which parts of your life are open to everyone and which parts of your life should remain discreetly behind closed doors. Even more so, they force you to decide (at some level) which parts of your life are entertaining enough to be open to everyone.
With a few exceptions (28th birthday, the Yell Awards, Mark and Vance in the UK, Groucho Club), I have hardly been writing about my life at all recently – and when I look back over my archive I can see that this trend started when I last saw Max. [cross referenced for your pleasure: 11 June, 17 June] For a long time after the last disaster, it was almost like excised my personal life completely. I just got on with business. As a direct result of being gutted, I felt I had no inside left to write about…
But over the last couple of weeks it has all been seeping back. The run-up to my birthday was very much one of those times when you look around you and think to yourself – “what have I achieved?”, “why do I bother?”. This is pretty much run of the mill stuff, except that this year I started thinking about questions like – “why am I alone?”. A few years ago I pretty much made peace with being single – it seemed to me that my life was going pretty well without the additional luxury of actually going out with people. After all, if you want fantasy, romance and love you can rent a trashy video. And there’s very little else that a relationship can provide that you can’t find somewhere else.
And yet in the background now, I feel the questions still lurking, unanswered. I don’t really know what’s caused their reappearance – I went to see High Fidelity last weekend, and that compounded the anxieties of my birthday. I had some unromantic, but highly enjoyable … fun. Then I watched Dawson’s Creek with Mella, and watched her invest huge amounts of energy in the burgeoning relationship of Pacey and Joey. We got incredibly drunk on vodka and talked. She put her finger on part of the problem almost immediately – she said that getting older would be fine if it came with all the trappings it is supposed to. The late twenty-something should have a reasonable job with career prospects, a relationship that has lasted a while and should be thinking about things like mortgages and making some kind of long-term committment. To be that age without those things – well it’s like some kind of cruel joke.
Anyway. I’ve decided to let you in on the joke, I think. I think that’s what this posts about – it’s about getting some personal content out there again – picking up my guts from off the floor and putting them onto the web. It may not be entertaining, but it’s as real as you can get. And maybe that’s more important.
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On TV Go Home…
It’s a site that has been all around the British media, praised almost without exception for its biting wit and foul mouth. It’s a site that takes a bastion of British life – the Radio Times – and then rips it to shreds, exposing the hypocrisy and pointessness of television in the UK and television in general. It’s a site that probably 9/10s of all British people have already seen, and which only 1% of the world outside the country will even vaguely understand. So why am I mentioning it? Because it’s bloody bloody funny…
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On Duncan, Designer…
So there’s this guy at work called Duncan, and he’s a designer with this large consultancy firm, but the poor love hasn’t had a web site for ages, which I thought was a bit lame really, because if you are a web-designer you really should have something that you can show people, or that demonstrates that you are committed to the medium etc etc. So I come in today, and he’s compiled this interesting interface to a small directory of interesting design sites.
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On trustworthy opinions…
You can always trust the opinions of someone who likes Hunky Dory.
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On MP3 and Napster…
Further to yesterday’s post, there is more about the legal difficulties of mp3.com and napster over at Wired news at the moment. I’m in the middle of discussing it with people over at alt.security.pgp as well at the moment. I don’t think it is necessarily the ideal place to have the discussion, but I needed to know if it was technically possible, and it looked like the best place to start…
I’ve been reading this really interesting article at Hack the Planet: “Route around the labels”, which describes a form of voluntary payment scheme for MP3s. To be honest, I’ve read it a couple of times and some of the technical aspects escape me (I’m tired, OK?).
Anyway, I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t see why this system couldn’t be adapted to preserve copyright integrity and get people to pay for music. I know a lot of people don’t like this idea, but in the whole Napster vs Metallica debate, I have to confess I think I’m somewhere in the middle.
Let me go into a little detail about my idea (which isn’t that different from the one at Hack the Planet, I fear). Imagine a company that sells/distributes decent, trusted encryption software – say for example PGP. If they wanted to, they could produce a PGP enabled MP3 player, which decrypted on the fly. The individual puts their public “PGMP3” key into a PGMP3 server. Then when they select an MP3 they want to download, it is encrypted according to their public key, sent to them and can only be listened to on the PGMP3 player which contains their private key.
FAQs
- What if you want to listen to them on more than one computer?
As long as you have your own private key, you can put it on whatever piece of software/players you like. However since the MP3 is encoded using your public key, ONLY software/players with your private key in them will be able to play it. - What’s to stop people disseminating private keys?
You make the private key like the PIN number of a bank account – the private key is generated for you when you sign up to buy music from a record company. This is attached to your user name, which uses that 1-Click nonsense to allow you to buy the music you want. The crucial part is that you have to give a credit card number when you get the private key and you can only buy stuff using it as well. Thus if your private key is gone, anyone can buy music using your credit card. That’ll discourage people.
I mean – there are probably considerable technical issues I’ve neglected here, but it seems like a pretty reasonable and basic idea to me. Opinions?
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On other people's travelling…
My parents always used to go on really boring holidays. Their idea of a great holiday was to find a house with a pool two miles down a dirt track, which was itself 2 miles away from the nearest village. So, while I travelled quite a bit when I was a kid, it wasn’t until I was 15 that I actually went somewhere to see things. I went to Turkey with school. I was 16 when I went to Greece. I was 18 when I went to America, and 21 before I went back and did the parts of Europe I’d missed the first time. Mark’s done them all already. And he’s only 15. Bastard.
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On Romantic Love?
I’ve been really slack the last few days. I’ve been trying to recover from huge work stresses last week which set up shop in my mind and wouldn’t leave, no matter how many times I tried to evict them. I’m thinking of declaring this a themed week and going for that old stalwart, romantic love, as an appropriate subject matter – particularly after seeing High Fidelity over the weekend (interesting but slightly depressing). I don’t know, though. The whole thing seems a little cheesy.