Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2005

  • Orb – Too Good to be True?

    Mike Torres, over at his Torres Talking blog gushes about Orb – a new application that enables media streaming from your home PC to any web-based device – a remote PC, a mobile phone, a PDA, etc.
     
    I have to admit, it does sound intriguing, and it’s free (what on earth is the business model of Orb?). I suppose one area of concern is the security issue – what are the points of weakness about the mechanisms used? I think I’ll let others kick the tyres for a little longer on this.
     
    The other issue would be about using it to stream to mobile phones. Mike claims that it turns his mobile phone into an iPod on steroids. Well, yes, I would have access to a vast vault of media sitting at home – far more than on an iPod slung around my neck. But, ahem, what are the costs of streaming all that to the mobile phone? I speak as someone who refuses to get a monthly subscription, preferring to pay as I go. So far it’s cost me all of 20 euros for 18 months usage. The phone companies clearly aren’t going to get rich through people like me. They need people like Mike.

  • 17 Days To Go…

    … 1st December is World AIDS Day. Don’t forget to wear your red ribbon.
     

    Support World AIDS Day

     

  • Dubai – Building Boom or Bubble?

    There’s an interesting series of programmes (Dubai Dreams) on the BBC at the moment that centre around the building boom currently underway in Dubai. Today’s entry on BLDGBLOG is a pair of "before and after" photos that really bring home the scale of the building boom. There’s also a pointer to the Pruned blog, where the "is it all going to end in tears" question is raised. In some ways, Dubai is only Shanghai, but with the volume control turned up even higher. But I can’t help feeling that the whole edifice is constructed on the notion of cheap oil. I see no evidence that the skyscrapers and other buildings are being constructed to be energy efficient. What are the air-conditioning bills like now, and what happens when the cost of energy rises as it inevitably must?

  • Happy Birthday, Wendy!

    Today is the birthday of Wendy Carlos. A musician and composer who brought the attention of the emerging electronic synthesiser to the public with her "Switched-On Bach" I think I almost wore out my copy with constant replaying, and it fired me up to construct my own synthesiser from a kit.

  • Tinfoil Research Rebuttal

    Last Friday, I wrote about research that had been done in MIT to show that tinfoil hats did not work. Now a member of the conspiracy community has hit back with a rebuttal, done in fine style. Nice one, Zapato.

  • Not Jaws, But Claws…

    I mentioned that we’ve discovered that we have crayfish living under the house. Today’s Observer carries a story about the American Red signal crayfish that is apparently ravaging the riverbeds of the UK. Oo-er. Looking again at the photo I took of the crayfish, it does appear to be red. Oo-er again… The final quote in the story sounds rather worrying:
    ‘They’re on the increase. They can live for months out of water and I can see a time when people will be beating them away from their back door with a stick,’ she said. ‘If nothing is done, they may become as common as rats in some areas.’
    Yet again, ooo-errr… Methinks I need to put crayfish on the menu pretty damn quick.

  • Gay Culture

    I see that the Vatican is about to release its document that will explicitly bar gay men (women obviously can’t apply anyway) from entering the priesthood. Apparently it will also bar those who "support ‘the so-called gay culture’" as well. Um, what is this ‘gay culture’ of which they speak? It seems to me that it is one of those silly phrases that apparently has meaning, but which, when examined closely, disappears up its own rhetoric. It’s like that other fabulous beast: the ‘gay community’. Both phrases conjure up an image of a monolithic club to which all gay people are automatically members. Message to the Vatican: gay people come in all shapes and sizes, with all sorts of beliefs and behaviours. In short, we are indistinguishable from the rest of humanity because, shock, horror, we are humans too.
     
    No-one in their right minds talks about "the left-handed culture" or the "redhead community" as though the group of people that are left-handed or the group of people that are redheads share anything other than the attribute that defines their group. A group is not the same as a community or a culture – but this is clearly a concept that has escaped the authors of the Vatican’s document.

  • Gravity Tugboats

    The WorldChanging blog has an entry on an interesting new idea: using gravitational attraction to deflect asteroids. The Hollywood scenario of blowing up an asteroid that is on course to hit earth is not a good idea. Somewhat better might be to use rockets to nudge the asteroid out of the way. But now, a new idea has been proposed: simply park a large mass (say 20 tons or so) next to the asteroid for a year or two. The slight gravitational attraction between the asteroid and the large mass would be sufficient to alter the asteroid’s orbit. The catch is that to get a big enough change in orbit, you would have to do it 20 years ahead of when the asteroid would otherwise hit the earth. Still, NASA does have the NEO programme, which tracks asteroids that have a chance of hitting earth.
     
    And if you want to find out for yourself what the effect would be of an asteroid hitting your neighbourhood, then the University of Arizona has a handy-dandy computer program for you. Simply feed in your chosen parameters and find out whether you would be vaporised or merely treated to an impressive fireworks display.

  • USB Gloves

    Do you suffer from cold hands? Find it difficult to blog on a cold day? Here’s just the thing for you.

  • Pile of Pants

    God, I love Steve Bell.

  • The Salami Slice

    Justin, over at Chicken Yoghurt, dissects the hypocrisy of Blair and the media in a piece of barely contained fury. Can’t say I blame him. He also refers to the article written by John Tulloch in yesterday’s Guardian. That’s worth reading too.
     
    Oh, and in particular, read this piece by Rachel – she was caught in the bombing, but she eloquently demonstrates why Blair and Clarke are posturing, not thinking.

  • Eyes To The Right, Nose To The Left…

    Today’s ScaryDuck is a classic. My schooldays were never such fun…

  • The Highs and the Lows

    There’s a nice opinion piece by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian. He asks how it is possible that the same institution – the BBC – can simultaneously release work that is superior and perfect in every way (Bleak House), and work that can best be likened to a great steaming pile of horse ordure (Rome). It’s a question that has been occurring to me also with depressing frequency of late.
     
    Oh, and last night I watched the final episode (in this series, at least) of Spooks. I haven’t been watching it, but how could I pass up on a plot that suggested that Princess Diana was in fact murdered by British security forces, as tinfoil hat-wearers have suspected all along. It was a wonderful MacGuffin, and a cracking good episode. And I don’t think that I’ve seen a better cliffhanger of an ending since the end of the first series of House of Cards.

  • Foil Hats Don’t Foil

    Distressing news for paranoiacs everywhere. Wearing of tinfoil hats – long believed to be efficacious in blocking the government’s secret radio waves aimed at brainwashing a compliant populace – don’t in fact block the waves. Indeed, they may even increase the effect…Is nothing sacred?

  • Ministry of Silly Jumps

    This week’s New Scientist reports that a new species of lemur has been named after John Cleese – the Avahi cleesei. The John Cleese franchise is taking over the world, I tell you. I see that after his successful appearance as Dr. Twain Weck in the Institute of Backup Trauma, he appears to be coming back in a new webinar to be launched in five days time…

  • Cerf’s Up

    I see that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom today – the highest civilian honour in the US. It’s being awarded for their work on the TCP/IP protocols – the core networking protocols of the Internet.
     
    Interestingly, the award comes on the day when the US Congress is debating a bill that could fundamentally alter the way in which the Internet is run, giving rise to concerns that broadband operators will govern the nature of activity on the Internet. Cerf shares those concerns, so he has written to Congress about them. Here’s hoping that Congress pays him some attention.

  • Library Thing

    I’ve just come across Library Thing, and I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s an online catalogue for your personal book collection. The buzz page is full of quotes saying how exciting this is, but it leaves me feeling that I’ve obviously missed something. Or perhaps I’m just the little boy looking at the naked emperor.
     
    I already have a catalogue of my library, built with a very flexible application: BookCat. This has more bells and whistles than frankly I know what to do with, but at its core it does what I want in a straightforward and satisfying manner. So I’m scratching my head trying to think why I would want to do something similar using an online service (one that has far, far less flexibility than BookCat). I mean, I can understand it with photos – Flickr is an online photo cataloging and photo-sharing service that I do use. It’s easy to share an image (after all, what you see is what you get) – but all you can share about a book is metadata, not the book itself. So what is the point?
     
    I expect I am missing something, so I’ll play with Library Thing for a little while and see if the penny drops…

  • Suffer From Vertigo?

    Then I take it that you won’t be queuing up to experience the Skywalk when it opens next January. I don’t suffer from vertigo, but do feel slightly queasy when in high places. I get this odd feeling that I want to jump into the empty space…

  • Flickr + Google Maps

    Kai Yung has built a website that integrates photos held in Flickr with Google Maps. It shows the power of what can be done using the APIs of the two services.
     
    One thing I find somewhat amusing is that on this site, the navigation of the mouse scrollwheel is consistent with Yahoo and Microsoft maps. Yet one more datapoint to show that the scrollwheel navigation on Google Earth is out of step with the rest of the world…

  • Guilty As Charged

    I see that Diamond Geezer characterises me as a serial blogger. At first, I wasn’t exactly sure what the term meant, and I can’t seem to find a definition anywhere. I’m assuming that it means someone who regularly adds entries to his or her blog. If that’s the case, then yep, I guess I’m guilty as charged. But I thought that that was the whole purpose of keeping a blog? It seems to me that the term "serial blogger" is, in that case, tautological – just the simple "blogger" would be sufficient, surely?