Thursday, August 14th, 2008
One thing that charities often seem to like to do is give you discounts on things they sell or events they run. This is a nice way of saying thank you but if you’re trying to give them money it’s not always something you want to take advantage of. Sometimes it’s surprisingly difficult to convince them if this which always seemed counterproductive on their part - “You’re a charity. This is a fundraising event. I want to give you money - why are you making this hard?”.
Of course, that’s less of a problem than the magazines most insist on sending you - pretty much all of the ones I get go straight to recycling, serving nobody, while you can always donate some other way. I can see the argument that they keep you in touch with what the organization is doing and so on but I’m happy to do that via other means (like the Internet) or, often, not at all. Honestly, I’m really not that interested in the details of the new RNLI lifeboats but I do think they’re a jolly good idea.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
Please, folks, when emailing the same question to multiple people or places send a single email with multiple recipients. Don’t send separate mails to each destination - at best you’ll waste people’s time, at worst you’ll irritate them. There are a few exceptions, mostly to do with confidentiality, but they really are pretty rare - especially for free software.
Not that this should be in any way news or non-obvious.
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
Recently I’ve been watching the first season of The Wire. I now see exactly why it comes so highly recommended - the best TV I’ve seen in years. The comparison with a novel is spot on, as much as Babylon 5 was but without any of the weak spots on the acting front. Arc plot and characterization all the way, it’s blown me away.
With perfect timing it just ended. Such a shame it never got a terrestrial airing in the UK. Never mind, four more seasons for me to get through.
One of the best films that I saw at the EIFF this year was Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure about Abu Ghraib. It takes his usual approach: a series of interviews with those involved with limited narration. Here the most prominent interviewees are Lynndie England and Sabrina Harmann, together others who were either directly involved or around the camp at the time. The images are all very cinematic - blow ups of the photos, half-seen reenactments and very simple face on shots of the interviewees.
This is obviously a subject that has been gone over in the media but not in this form - as ever, Morris mostly just lets his subjects talk and leaves it up to the viewer to put their own intepretation on what is being said, foregrounded even more here by the presence of the person responsible for sifting through the images describing going through exactly this process with the images. The effect is much more chilling than the condemnation of the media - the body language and the words of the soldiers speak volumes but nothing gives you enough distance to simply switch off and say “I’m not like them.”
The people in the film who feel they can say that do not always appear as morally distinct as they might hope to. The title comes from one of the things that had to be done when examining the images during the investigation - the investigator had to decide which of the images showed things that were perfectly normal interrogation techniques (the standard operating procedure) and which were crimes. His verdicts aren’t always what you might expect.
The 2.6.27 pull request for ALSA was something of a surprise to read - a large proportion of the changes in there are for ASoC. Not what I was expecting given how many ASoC changes there are still to be merged, but it’s nice to see, especially given the general problems with embedded users contributing code back.
In other kernel release news, I’m glad to see some of my other work is making people happy.
One of the things I keep noticing in Q&A sessions for documentary films is that some people seem to have a hard time relating to the people they see on screen as being actual people.
Today I watched The Order of Myths at the EIFF. The film is a documentary about the Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama which are currently racially segregated, though one of the major themes of the film is the ways in which people are gradually changing things for the better. It’s a very good film - lots to think about and I recommend seeing it. I imagine it will at least appear on one of the documentary strands on terrestrial TV in the UK.
During the Q&A session several of the people who appear in the film were present, including Helen Meaher who had been the white Mardi Gras queen and who is a descendant of the last person to bring a slave ship to the US. Someone in the audience had been very angered by what she’d seen in the film, including the fact that Meaher had been given that role. What struck me most of all about this was the way it was expressed: Meaher was not named or addressed in a way that acknowledged her presence (she was referred to as “the white queen” if I remember correctly) in spite of the fact that she was standing only a few meters away. It was as though this was an actress in a fictional film.
This was a striking example, but the general failure to connect with an actual person surprised me less than it should. Obviously, people in documentary films do play parts (as we all do in the various roles we fulfil) and the film may choose to represent them in a particular way but still there’s always at least some connection with the person depicted. I find it very distrurbing when that appears to get lost.
As I wrote previously, my first impressions of Wii Fit were good. A month and a half on and I’m still using it - at this point I’m fairly happy to say that it’s not just novelty value that I’m getting from it. Of course, one way or another I do spend an awful lot of my time doing exercise of some kind so I’m right in the target audience for something like like this. Using the very broad definition that it uses for exercise I’m having a slothful day if I only spend an hour “exercising”.
Mostly I’ve been playing some of the balance games and doing yoga poses. The games are silly party game style things - it’s a bit of a shame that the interface is set up for lengthy sessions with an individual Mii rather than allowing you to easily switch between them or set up competitions. The yoga I find relaxing - something physical and meditative to focus on - and it seems to be having a bit of a positive impact but it’s hard to say for sure with these things. The balance board works fairly well with both - with the games it’s the control method and with the yoga most of the poses use it to provide feedback on how stably you’re maintaining the pose. I’ve also been doing the body test daily; it’s fun if you’re in the mood for it and the feedback mechanism is useful.
The strength exercises are less successful. Most of this seems to be due to the difficulty in constructing things that do much for the upper body and can be monitored by the balance board (some things do try to use the remote but aren’t able to offer the same kind of detailed feedback that the balance board gives). The aerobics I can take or leave - it’s all fairly low intensity so good for a bit of a warm up. Again, the things that work best are those were there is an appropriate controller like the Dance Dance Revolution knockoff and rhythm boxing.
There does seem to be an odd variation in the difficulty levels of the activities it offers - much of it is targeted at people who are totally sedentary and don’t get much more challenging than that, making the inclusion of yoga poses like shoulder stands with no obvious differentiation strange. There’s also a tendency to praise you for things that aren’t actually being directly monitored (like form) which is annoying when you know you’ve actually done badly. There’s also rather a lot of prompts one has to click through every time, which get more than a bit wearing after a few iterations.
Overall, it’s a useful tool but I’m not sure it’ll appeal to people who don’t enjoy exercise.
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
Recently I bought a PS3, partly because there are a few games due out shortly that I’m rather looking forward to (mostly GTA and Civilization Revolutions) but mostly for the Blu-Ray DVD player and the Linux support. I’d been hoping to also use it as, for example, a MythTV front end. First impressions are that the gaming side of things is fairly nice, as is the UI for DVD playback. The down side is that I’ve not been able to convince the system to run quiet or fully muffle the fans. When my fridge and central heating aren’t running there is no noise at all in my living room. It’s quite usable but it’s not ideal for quiet things - I’ll have to experiment a bit with placing of the system to see if I can improve matters.
On a brighter note, Wii Fit (which I got yesterday) is a lot of fun - the balance board works surprisingly well. I’d not been sure how well it would work in practice but it’s effective, especially for tracking stretching and balance style exercises. Some of the activities would probably work quite well in as the standard Nintendo party style games, though that’s not really what it’s good at.
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
Apparently the use of the terms describing free software as organic or non-organic depending on the extent to which the piece of software concerned is controlled or driven by a single company wound a few people up, partly due to the strong value judgements that the terms tend to imply. The terms I found myself using in a conversation about web frameworks with some Scotland on Rails attendees were commercial and corporate. These apply better in the web sphere where the business side of things is much more to the fore than it is in most free software work but the principle is there. Money floating around isn’t an issue, it’s the extent to which you have to deal with a particular company to get things done that makes the difference.
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
Last weekend I was mostly relying on handheld devices while visiting the wilds of Stockport, trying to decide what Ii want to do when I move off Orange soon (terrible customer service and poor data plans). For this sort of use while travelling my main need is web access and mail reading with IM and SSH access both very desirable too. So, what did I find?
- Sony Ericsson P990: This works very well as a web client and 3G modem. Opera is very good at rendering standard pages onto small screens and the jog wheel is a really good interface for selecting and following links - accurate and intuitive. The e-mail client is more of an issue - charitably, it.’s been designed for text messages. No support for IMAP folders and it’s got little hope of rendering 80 column text (due to the screen size) but it does a reasonable job with flowed and HTML text. Battery life is an issue in heavy use, too.
- N800: This is slightly too large to use as a secondary device - but the screen size means that it is a spectacularly good web client. It benefits a lot from a Bluetooth keyboard (the N810 has one built in), but without one it’s workable unless entering large quanities of text. It also works well for e-mail when using Modest, which has good support for IMAP (including folders) and renders e-mails well. Unfortunately Modest is still quite obviously pre-release software, having issues with spotty connectivity, but that’ll change. The generally high level of freeness is an obvious win, too, and part of the reason for SSH, Jabber and Skype support. The major wishlist would obviously be a 3G modem on board.
- iPod Touch: The same software as the iPhone. The email client is very nice for “standard buisness” e-mails but it toils badly with anything else. Safari is OK for most pages but the zoom based operation can fail badly and finger operation isn’t quite reliable enough - it’s far too easy to either accidentally select links or have it fail to register taps. In the iPhone this would be OK if it were able to act as a bluetooth modem but that’s not supported and the device is totally non-free so you’re stuck with the built in feature set. Obviously, the major selling point is that it is an MP3 player with a reasonably large amount of space but this doesn’t really offset the drawbacks.
So, nothing that’s quite satisfactory in itself. The N800 or an N810 plus a phone that can act as a 3G modem currently seems to meet my needs best.