Albums
10:57am CET, 27 Oct 2009
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One of the perils of having the entire smorgasbord of a music collection available on your computer (or music playing device) is the shuffle button. I almost unconsciously end up setting the player on random and just hitting skip when a track that doesn't quite fit my mood comes on. Sometimes I use my last.fm account and set some tag parameters for what I'd like to listen to however the experience is still a disjointed one. During a conversation with Arwel about the relative merits of Last.Fm vs Spotify he cited the ability to listen to whole albums as a key selling point of the service. While I'm not ready to sign up to Spotify yet I have started taking more care to listen to the many many albums I already own. For the last few weeks I've made a conscious effort to set my player up to play an entire album first thing in the morning before it switches back to the usual eclectic sampling of the some 10,000 tracks I have in my collection.
So what albums would my readers recommend as a good start to the day?
LUG Radio Live and OggCamp
01:03pm CET, 26 Oct 2009
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I spent the weekend in the company of fellow geeks in Wolverhampton at LugRadio Live and OggCamp. As can be expected the ratio of connected devices to attendees was over 1 and we successfully saturated several WiFi routers to death.
While LugRadio was a more typical conference type event with scheduled speakers OggCamp was a more informal BarCamp style affair. Both had a number of interesting speakers and discussions including presentations made by the Open Street Map people discussing their ambitions to map the world in an open and re-usable way. An interesting suggestion made for the Free the Postcode campaign was to skip adding postcodes to Christmas mail replacing them with FREE THE POSTCODE on the last line. It was suggested it would get the Royal Mails attention very quickly as it would increase their cost of routing mail by more than the money they make selling the database. Other people pointed out making lives harder for the workers on the ground was not the right way to campaign. I'm in two minds about the idea but I suspect the Royal Mail have other concerns higher up their agenda at the moment.
I finally signed up with cold hard cash to the Open Rights Group who I've had plenty of warm words for recently. I even volunteered some time for one of their projects which I shall talk about more when I have something to show. However it was pleasing to find out that the plans to widen electronic voting and counting have been effectively abolished although slightly worrying to hear some of the stories from our brief flirtation with the technology. Their report on voting can be found on their website. For now their current campaigns include petitioning against the 3 strikes proposals and the mass surveillance of peoples electronic communication.
Some people who were following my Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook status feeds may have been confused by the preponderance of #lrl2009 and #oggcamp hash tags in my updates over the last few days. These were the conference tags which were being followed by attendees as well as several live projectors which were displaying messages posted with the tag. This was the source of much hilarity to people at the conference although probably made less sense to people following the stream from the outside world. It seems that micro-blogging is quickly overtaking communal IRC channels as the way to keep in touch with conferences.
I came home on Sunday evening tired but having enjoyed a lovely weekend of geeking out and looking forward to a 2 day OggCamp sometime next year!
Question Time
12:48pm CEST, 23 Oct 2009
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Well the reaction quotes are in from last nights Question Time, as are the viewing figures (7.9m, easily beating the previous 3.8m water mark at the height of the MPs expenses scandal). I'm not sure I'm cynical enough to accuse the BBC of engineering the media storm on the run up to boost ratings but it certainly promised to be a media circus.
I have no problem with allowing the BNP (now they have national representation) to come onto programmes like Question Time. Free speech is not a privilege that can only extend to the right-on. Nothing from last night has changed my view that when exposed to questioning the facade of respectability quickly falls away to expose their true colours. I was a little disappointed that the odds where obviously stacked against Griffin and will probably re-enforce the idea he was brow beaten in the minds of some. While I don't think Dimbleby was totally biased as the chair he certainly wanted to make sure Griffin was pinned down on some of the things he has said in the past. Unfortunately the whole thing degenerated into a bit of an unstructured clusterf**k. This meant many opportunities for Griffin to hang himself on the rope he'd been supplied with got lost in the interruption and barracking.
The questions were all focused on the few areas where the BNP have a political view namely immigration and Islam. It was obvious members of the audience wanted to ask wider questions to expose them as a one trick pony they are, however it was not to be.
It was disappointing to see the failure of most of the other politicians to deal with the issues the BNP so obviously play on. There is unease about radical Islam and the level of immigration out there but it seems people are worried about being labelled a racist for even questioning the current received opinion. I was impressed with Baroness Warsi who seemed to be the only one willing to tackle the subject of immigration.
I'll just add a brief aside to the new interactivity offered by micro-blogging sites like Twitter. No longer is interactivity gated by sending text messages to the BBC in the hope it gets published on some red button feed. Now everyone can join in by tagging their posts (in this case #bbcqt), truly a democratising technology. I'm sure there will be analysis of the trends in the next day or so but it does seem the twitterati are generally anti-BNP and that view didn't change over the program.
Finding Open Source Android applications
07:00pm CEST, 21 Oct 2009
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I love my HTC Hero and growing number of applications that are available for it. However the marketplace really doesn't make cleat the difference between free (as in beer) and free (as in freedom). For all sorts of reasons I'd like to be sure the code running on my new favourite device is Open Source. I've been scratching my head about the best way to find a decent applications and had been throwing all sorts of queries at Google and generally getting lost in a sea of links. A lot were irrelevant as proprietary apps get mentioned on news sites with Open Source sections.
Then I had a slight brainwave (you wondered what the burning smell was?). Seeing as the most important thing is having available source code I skipped the main Google index and used their excellent code search. As every Android application contains an XML file called "AndroidManifest.xml" every thing else is a process of refinement.
Bad Ankles
01:34pm CEST, 21 Oct 2009
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On my way into work I popped into the local primary school (via the non-CRB cleared entrance naturally) to drop of the measuring trundle thing Fliss borrowed. My suggestion that I could have used the MyTracks GPS trace and walked around the allotment had been met with a raised eyebrow.
There is something wrong with my right ankle, specifically how it fits into my rather fine walking boots. If I don't carefully place the tongue on the right and secure it tightly it tends to migrate across and rub rather painfully on the mutant prominence on the left. Any advice on better solutions gratefully received.
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