So today apparently the G8 have moved “forward” with agreements on Climate Change as Mr Blair put it. All I can see is continued attempts to sweep aside the rising media and public noise urging more action on climate change. I think I should be forgiven for missing what they have achieved, I still find it incredible how childish an attitude is displayed by these the figures who are controlling this planets immediate future. The attitude that we won’t do anything if person/group x won’t is surely more reminiscent of a playground or a child’s response to a parents request when their sibling is not expected to follow the same request. It is important that climate change is a world wide effort, but whilst the G8 argue and fail to take any sort of credible or actionable stand, many smaller countries are getting on with it. Maybe something that they should consider, lead by example and all that!
Big Brother is the other point, something which I highly detest and only picked up on via the radio. Channel 4, worried over possible head bashing from Ofcom have evicted a contestant for referring in what appears to be a none-aggressive manner to another as a ‘nigger’. Yet Channel 4′s E4 flagship entertainment channel plays music during the day which should surely be considered just as, if not more derogatory. Double standards?
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Technorati : Big Brother, E4, G8, blair, climate change
I’ve found a couple of apps in the last week which have in different ways changed the way I use my computer (these are Windows only, sorry others!):
Maxivista
I have three computers on my desk when I’m at home, my laptop and two desktops (one recent aquisition which I’m not entirely sure what to do with at the moment). I’m writing this on the screen connected to the second desktop, however the mouse and keyboard are connected to the first desktop. If I want to control the laptop or the other desktop I just move the mouse over from one screen to the other. Maxivista does two things, it either allows you to turn any spare PC into a second monitor for the first or to remote control the second computer by simply moving the mouse to that screen as I am at the moment.
Its easily the coolest program I’ve found this year and has changed the way I use the computers, no more messing around with KVM’s, Maxivista only needs the network connection, wireless or wired it working fine for me over both. I found this via Stefan Didak’s website, a guy who has a comupter setup which rivals anything I’ve seen anywhere else and is well worth a look at.
There is also an open source version of this called Synergy2 which will work across platforms, I discovered this after finding and purchasing Maxivista, however after both myself and Tom used it we both found it to be a bit buggy but it might work for you.
Novell Netdrive
Not as interesting as the above one but non the less very useful. Novell Netdrive can connect to HTTP and FTP servers, Webdav and iFolder’s and add these as drives in My Computer. Fairly simple in many ways but very useful for website editing etc when having multple files open simultaneously and live on the website can be useful. This is unfortunatly something which isn’t available on the Novell website for copyright reasons, but a look around on Google will find you a download site. And no, this is not the same as mapping a drive in Windows XP as was mentioned when engadget covered this a couple of years ago (yup its not a new app by any means), the functionality it offers especially for doing backups is much improved on what Windows can do on its own.
On another note I’ve removed Lifehacker from my bloglist, it got rather boring to read their ‘inside tips’ etc which I read a few hours earlier off the actual authors blog whether it be Google’s, TechCrunch or any of the many others, also incredibly annoying to find a blog which doesn’t allow people to comment unless they’re a member.
Descriptive Signage Hosted on
ZooomrI’ve walked past it a thousand times whilst in Bromely but had never looked at it, possibly one of the worst examples of directions I’ve seen. Why bother putting something like this up!
Well this morning I woke up as did almost 1.8 million others to find an email from Tony Blair in my inbox regarding the governments proposed road charging scheme. If you didn’t sign it, the full email is now on the BBC news website as well as the petitions.pm.gov.uk website, the PM’s website doesn’t seem to be able to handle the current demand and so reading it on the BBC website is certainly a better choice unless you wish to be reminded of what 28k dial-up internet was like.
I couldn’t’ help but laugh at the start of the fourth paragraph in the reply “But let me be clear straight away”, you can just see his gesticulations and the well practiced frank expression on his face when reading that (yes I’m typically a critic of the government). Without me picking it apart any more the reply makes for useful reading, the key point made throughout which I’m sure all would agree with is the fact that congestion is an issue and one that needs to be dealt with. Unfortunately in my view, public transport is really not at a stage where it offers a credible alternative for most people.
The continued increases in price for bus and rail tickets above and beyond inflation as well as infrequent and inflexible travel options mean it is hardly surprising that many people choose the car. More investment in public transport infrastructure with the capacity for long term growth would be a major step in the right direction. From my own point of view I’d be happy to take public transport for most of the work I do, suffice to say driving home at 2 in the morning is not preferable but unavoidable.
I do in many ways resent that fact that the governments only response to most major problems is to tax said problem until use of it abates. It would be interesting to see a graph of general taxation level against public opinion of government, would be nice to see how it correlates. From my point of view as a ‘young voter’ the increased taxation alongside the pathetic level of insult throwing which takes place across the house of commons on a daily basis is what frustrates me most about the political climate in this country. Watching PM’s question time is a prime example of how childish the entire thing is, dialogue from one speaker is typically rebuffed with a response starting with “But under the previous government…”, which is usually followed with a list of carefully selected statistics chosen to better reflect the respondents party and belittle the opponents, whilst having little or no relevance to the wider and more important picture. At the point when I see a lead politician who takes a genuine and grown-up approach to politics, and who’s interests are genuinely those of the voters then politics may become more than the farce it appears to be to so many younger voters.
I suppose on the positive side if the PM is going to ignore petitions like this as I’m sure he will at least he’s emailing people to tell them he’s ignoring them!
I picked up on an article today from New Media Knowledge via the RSS feed I knocked together for them a while ago. Its about the Digital Dialogues study released into the use of online technologies between government and the people and is well worth a look at, err have a look at the comment from Ian below about the author! the author isn’t given but I’m assuming its Ian Delaney. I won’t go into the details on it as its perfectly readable on the NMK website but the thing that really got my attention was the cost of David Milibands blog. The figure quoted in the report is around £6000……and for that money we have…..a blog, no there’s nothing else, £6k well spent according to the government.
I took a look at this a little more to try and understand how they spent this much on a blog, the first thing of note is that from looking at the source code of one of the pages it appears to run on Community Server. This ranges from $0 to $1900, for that you get ummm a blog package, and in the case of David’s blog you deploy it with half the features such as trackbacks disabled!
I still struggle to see why they spent that much money, the top of the range software package with gold support equates to £976 in todays money. The domain itself I think we can ignore, the blog resides on a subdomain of the government website defra.gov.uk so this isn’t really relevant. However community server does have fairly hefty server requirement in terms of cost, Microsoft Windows Server 2000 or higher, Ms SQL Server etc aside from the hardware which will add a fair bit onto the total. Its just incredible that they went for this route, the team behind it apparently wanted flexibility, manageability and security, whats wrong with one of the free alternatives? Many of which support multiple blogs etc, far more features than community server offers and better integration into larger systems. My old college has just deployed a Blojsom system for 1200+ students, its feature packed, extensible and uses the same login as the rest of the college system, its impressive in many ways to say the least. But thats on another level, we’re talking in this context about a blog for one person, I don’t know if it actually has dedicated servers or not but it sure as hell doesn’t need it for one blog! I’ll finish this rant now as I’ve gone off on one a bit but this is something that could have been carried off perfectly well on a standard LAMP server config with WordPress or similar installed for £500 or so at the most. Its just sad that it seems justified to spend that sort of money on setting up what is a fairly bland blog.
Well my desktop has been running a little slowly the last couple of weeks, there’s me assuming its a result of me fiddling with registry settings etc in the name of curiosity when
Tuesday morning it refuses to power up full stop. A bit of fiddling inside with Tom’s assistance and then a bright flash from the power supply and nothing… So its now running in peices using a power supply nicked from the house file server and one urgent order to ebuyer placed for a new supply. Nevermind, its been runnning for three years and has been on for a fair proportion of that so its done its time as it were!
It’ll at least teach me to do more frequent backups in future! Having been very lax with this recently I stood to severly inconvenience myself by loosing that data, as my data drives currently run as a stripe set (I can see an end to that!), extracting the data would not of been amusing and had me quite worried while bodging in the temporary power supply.
As usual, finding myself on a computer toy website I find a Lightscribe capable DVD/CD burner as well, it is completly over the top but might reduce the number of discs floating around my
desk with dodgy labels (if at all).
Reporters Without Borders have released a list of the top 13 “enemies of the internet”, a list of countries which aims to draw attention to those who suppress freedom of speech and expression on the internet.
Unsurprisingly, China and North Korea are on the list along with various others including Egypt who allegedly arrested three bloggers in June, not that I don’t trust RSF its just that I can’t find any major references anywhere else! This isn’t by any means the first time RSF have released the list but the first time they have included an online petition of sorts which also contains an attack on Yahoo for their involvement in censorship in China, quite surprising they didn’t go after Google in the same manner during this online protest after Google restricted searches within the communist state.
Freedom of Speech on the internet seems to have become a particularly big topic in recent months, Amnesty International launched the Irrepressible.info campaign a while ago which shares many of the same ideals as the RSF campaign but in a broader sense. The UN Internet Bill of Rights workshop for which the amnesty campaign was aimed at, took place in athens recently and reading from the workshops wiki, it aims to address:
- What rights are fundamental to freedom in a digital world?
- What obligations are necessary to create a digital society based on rule of law and civil liberty?
- Who are the appropriate stake-holders in making policy determinations for the Internet and what is the role of government?
- How to negotiate between conflicting values in setting policy for the online environment?
- What special challenges and opportunities does the Internet provide in the quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
It will be very interesting to see what the final document contains, the wiki makes for some interesting reading on what has already been done. Notably this was a topic raised in France as early as 1998 as a issue for discussion, and brought up by others in various forms earlier still. The United Nations is a large organisation with many of the worlds major powers involved heavily in it. In the same way that the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor went, the influence of the UN has arguably been diminished in recent years most prominently through the coalition invasion of Iraq. Is the publication of an Internet bill of Rights going to have any noticeable impact on the internets standing within individual world states. As the prime example: both online and diplomatic pressure have not yielded any major results with China over large scale censorship of the internet, and companies such as Google who by their motto should known better have been keen to boost their share prices through cooperation with China on this point. There is also have the issue of where to draw the line, where does the bill fit in and how much governance should it contain?
We all have very different ideas on what should be allowed on the internet, in the UK recently Channel 4 aired ‘Dispatches Debate – Muslims and Free Speech’. This has been described as “sensationalist” in some places and others have gone further and I would agree with points raised that the audience selected did not reflect the average british ethnic percentages, so creating a potential bias in the audience poll results. Anyway, I digress, the key point I saw throughout was that different people had as can be expected different views on what is and what isn’t offensive, Jon Snow presenting summed up at the end by saying “The freedom not to be offended should be enjoyed by allâ€?. As was the case here the same is true for the internet, who gets to decide what is and what isn’t offensive, what is and what isn’t permitted on the internet. Whilst any decent person will say that child pornography for example should not be permitted, there are not many other examples of where a clear line can be drawn. China for one will of course not share the same views held by western democratic nations.
Iif we cannot find common international ground on what is and what isn’t a persons right offline, how can we find it online without dividing up the internet?
Its one of those things I think we’ve all seen and experienced at some point, the street preachers found increasingly on high streets etc in busy towns proclaiming the value of their chosen religious stance. Walking through Bromley high street this afternoon there were a group of christians doing exactly this, personally I don’t mind it that much, of course many others equally find objection to it. As I was walking past I overheard a fellow passerby commenting to his partner something along the lines of I wish they woudn’t do that. Of course the actual phrasing was a little bit more crude but that can be ignored. It got me thinking and the first thing I thought was yes I agree, I wish they woudn’t do it either, certainly my views on religion have a lot in common with Ben Metcalfe’s statement a little while ago on the subject of religion and in some ways I might go a little further down this line.
‘it’s always been the number one cause for segregation and conflict in, and is used ultimately as a control/influence mechanism for society’
At the same time I’m thankful for the fact that they are doing it and are able to do it. I think something we take for granted is the remarkable level of freedom of speech we have in this country compared to what many others have to live under. That said, I suppose there comes a point when it becomes a little over the top as was the case of Philip Howard. All the same, I find it amusing that he simply moved down the road to Piccadilly Circus to circumvent the ASBO placed on him, another shining example of ineffective and ill thought out government legislation in action.
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