London, 7 July, 2005

Posted on 7 July, 2005 by adrian

There isn’t much to say which hasn’t already been said umpteen times.

Of course, we’d been told that a major terrorist attack on London was inevitable, but when it’s just a possibility, even just an *inevitability*, it’s always going to be tomorrow. It only becomes tangible and believable when it’s today.

With the initial flush of information and statistics now over, the media are still in full flow, desperately trying to fill the extended news slots they feel obliged to dedicate to the tragedy. TV reporters are standing in the rain outside every London hospital, gamely parroting everything they’ve learned about the number of patients, the type of injuries, the determined faces of the staff. The red bus and faithful tube train have already been described as precious icons of London. No doubt the newspapers are trying to decide just how many pages to dedicate to the disaster in tomorrow’s edition. The royal wedding got 16 pages? Then no less than 19 will do! Of the terrestrial TV channels, ITV impressed me by managing to establish a few real facts much more quickly than the BBC this morning, but then spoiled it all with their ridiculous “TARGET LONDON” logo on the evening bulletin. I really don’t want to see the tabloids tomorrow.

But at the end of it all, the important points can be covered in just one line. People, just like you and me, were killed on their way to work by other people stupid enough to think they’re following their religion.

Life goes on, though, and Jeremy has the best description…

There is carnage, chaos, destruction and death. The radio schedules have been thrown into confusion. The 6pm news coverage on Radio 4 was suspended when a suspicious vehicle was spotted outside Broadcasting House. Bad Times.

Then, at 7pm, it was all put on hold for The Archers. I cannot think of a more succinct and elegant way to say to those involved, “F**k you, we’re still British and we’re still here”.

Posted in Local, London | Leave a comment

First experiment in podcasting

Posted on 4 July, 2005 by adrian

Based on a suggestion I remembered someone making ages ago, I decided to have a go at making up a little blow-by-blow account of how I recorded a piece of music.

First of all, here’s the piece of music. The original blog post where I announced its completion has mysteriously vanished, but anyway… it’s called ‘Monochorduroy’ and I made it in response to a Guitar Collective task. The task specified that each guitar part could only involve single notes along a single string. Here’s what it sounds like…

Monochorduroy (3.6MB mp3)

And here’s the podcast explaining how I made the tune…

The Making of Monochorduroy (20MB mp3)

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Turner Whistler Monet

Posted on 18 May, 2005 by adrian

Ebay is rapidly becoming a universal solution for 21st century life, and it can only be a matter of time before they launch their own superfast network independent from the rest of the Internet. With a terminal in every room of your house. And a special wireless receiver implanted into your brain.

But anyway. I’d previously only used Ebay for buying and selling CDs, books, software and hi-fi/recording gear, but another cool use became apparent last week. As usual, we’d been totally disorganised and forgotten to get tickets for the Turner Whistler Monet exhibition at the Tate Britain. With only a few days to go, the £10 time-specific tickets were only available for quite inconvenient times. Ebay to the rescue… we managed to non-timed tickets for only a fiver each, and made our way up to Millbank early on Saturday morning.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Monet, to be honest… too many memories of ubiquitous lily pads designed to cover student walls as inoffensively as possible. However, this three-pronged exhibition was designed to focus on the artists’ interpretations of city scenes, particularly in London, and I gained a better understanding (and liking) for old Claude. The views of Charing Cross Bridge (now the combined Hungerford and Golden Jubilee bridges) are limpid and impressionistic, yet full of big city movement, and the multiple views (1 and 2) of the Houses of Parliament are astonishing.

Still, though, the major highlights for me were probably by the other two artists. What was apparent from the whole exhibition was how much of what we now call “impressionism” was already part of JMW Turner’s style several decades earlier. Whistler, staying in London around the same time as Monet, was a huge fan of Turner, and his series of Nocturnes seem like the logical conclusion of everything the other two artists were doing… almost monochromatic impressions of the Thames at night. I found one particular Whistler work very striking, a small painting of a moonlit scene with a luminosity which grabbed my attention from the opposite side of the room… but I can’t find the damn thing online.

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Shiira Scores!

Posted on 14 May, 2005 by adrian

Mac users who, for whatever reason, are still using Panther rather than Tiger (like me) might be interested in the Shiira Project.

Shiira is a web browser built using the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari, but its designers aim to make it better than Safari. Based on my quick test, it’s certainly every bit as good as Safari, but there are a few little differences which may be enough to tempt you to switch…

1. All open tabs can be shown in tiled layout on the screen (using the F8 key) in a fashion similar to the OS X Exposé feature.

2. As soon as you have two tabs open, a little “+” button appears… you can click on this to open further tabs instead of hitting command-T. If you have the “always show tab bar” option selected, this button will always be visible.

3. The navigation buttons are nice. And there are several designs to choose from. Yeah, so that’s only a cosmetic feature, but I do like the default fruit pastille-style buttons.

4. Source code is shown in four (customisable) colours for easy navigation.

5. Downloads can be shown in a separate window (like Safari, Firefox, IE) or in the sidebar.

6. Clicking the pull-down menu in the search box gives a list of alternative (to Google) search sites (does Firefox do this? I can’t remember). In Safari, you get the list of previous searches… these are also available in Shiira, via the last item on the menu. I prefer the Safari approach, but YMMV.

7. Shiira supports bookmarklets.

8. There doesn’t seem to be a progress display at the bottom, unlike in Safari. Shame.

9. You can have your current memory and disk cache usage shown in a small window (no keyboard shortcut, though).

10. Choice of Aqua or Metal appearance.

The browsers are so similar that there’s no need to import your Safari bookmarks at the moment (although the Shiira site implies this is a temporary thing). All I had to do was download and unpack the 2.9MB disk image, launch the application, select “use Safari bookmark bar” and there it was… a fully functional, tweaked version of Safari. The main difference is the lack of RSS capability, even in the Tiger-compatible Shiira, but I imagine that’s going to follow soon. However, the real challenge will be to invent some totally new features. Most of the current differences are the sort of things that Apple could easily incorporate into Safari at the drop of a hat; it’d be nice to see the Shiira team really pushing the design, if only to generate a healthy sense of competition at Apple.

Posted in Apple, Technology | Leave a comment

THE RABBIT HAS A SHORT-WAVE RADIO

Posted on 14 May, 2005 by adrian

THIS IS FUN TO MAKE A BLOG ON THE COMPUTER WEBSITE

Thanks to Rick for pointing out this quirky blog. I just love the overall tone… it’s that “world through a child’s eyes via an adult’s mind” kind of thing. There’s a certain similarity to Arlington Hynes’ bogol and to the lyrics of Tim Smith (Cardiacs).

Come to think of it, the pictures of animals in bits of human clothing also remind me of the work of artist Donald Roller Wilson.

Posted in Drivel | Leave a comment

Briefly Burning Bright

Posted on 11 May, 2005 by adrian

The latest big news for Mac users is the release of Tiger, the fourth incarnation of the OS X operating system. Reviews, on the whole, seem to have been good, with the inevitable caveats (Apple x.x.0 versions are always too buggy; ninety quid is a lot for what’s becoming an annual major upgrade routine). Attention is, quite justifiably, focused on the latest additions to the GUI, particularly Dashboard. Called up with a simple mouseclick or keystroke, Dashboard is a temporary, transparent layer, superimposed over the Desktop and containing a (customisable) selection of small utilities known as Widgets… anything from train timetables or dictionaries to live stock market statistics or the latest uploads to Flickr.

Well, being something of a hopeless OS X fan, I was bound to grab my copy of Tiger sooner or later. In the interests of responsible personal finance, though, I didn’t just go out and spazz the full £89 on the first day of release. No, I waited *eight days* and then bought it. HA! EVEN THE MIGHT OF THE APPLE CORPORATION IS POWERLESS AGAINST MY CUNNING AND DEVIOUS MIND.

Ahem.

Anyway, I got the thing installed, using the safe and sensible “archive and install” method rather than the more paranoid “erase and install” option. And all was good. It’s a beautiful OS, just like its predecessors… to be honest, there seems less of a general improvement than there has been with previous upgrades (particularly compared with the huge boost in speed from 10.1 to 10.2) but the new apps are the big difference this time. Dashboard looks great and will, I’m sure, become part of my instinctive Mac use in the future, as will Automator, while the RSS capability in Safari makes me realise I need to learn more about what I can do with RSS. Spotlight… well, that one seems a bit “er, whatever” to me, but then searching my hard drive isn’t something I do regularly. I just know where things are. As for the newly redesigned Mail… unlike (seemingly) a lot of people, I love the new design, but I’d definitely like to see some sort of progress display in the main window, without having to open the ugly Activity Window.

So, a triumph overall, but there’s one big problem.

Much of my Mac’s work involves music. I record all of my music on here, using Logic and Reason, and I spend a lot of time listening to music on iTunes, both upstairs in the “work room” and downstairs (via an AirPort Express). For maximum sound quality (rather than using the minijack output on the back of my G4) all of these programs run through Apple’s Core Audio system and out via my Digidesign Digi 001 interface/soundcard. And here’s the problem…

Digidesign’s Core Audio drivers haven’t supported the Digi 001 (itself EOL’ed a good year or so ago) since version 6.4 (they’re now up to 6.9) and even then, there’s a couple of features which don’t seem to work under OS X. Nonetheless, it works sufficiently for my purposes, offering 8-in/8-out PCI audio and MIDI in/out, compatible with Logic, Reason and iTunes. But… not with Tiger. None of the current Panther-compatible versions of the Digidesign driver work under Tiger, and according to the Digidesign tech support people, there won’t be anything Tiger-compatible for 8-10 weeks. Given the gradual erosion of official support, I seriously doubt whether there’ll be any way of getting the Digi 001 to work under Tiger *at all*. Damn. This leaves me in a sticky situation… do I stick with Panther (which is, after all, a superb OS… just not Tiger) for the foreseeable future, or do I spend money on a new recording interface? Gah!

This isn’t really a rant at Digidesign… the £700 I spent on the Digi 001 back in late 2000 was one of the smartest purchases I’ve ever made. I just wish there wasn’t such a gulf in compatibility between products, especially over a period of only five years.

Posted in Apple, Technology | Leave a comment

Election Reflection

Posted on 6 May, 2005 by adrian

So there we go… it’s all over.

It’s difficult to tell how many people are putting on brave faces, but judging by radio interviews this morning, all three parties are happy in their own ways. Labour have their third term while both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have improved their standings in the House of Commons. And being pragmatic, I’m fairly satisfied with the outcome. Although a (recently rather disillusioned) Labour person, I was keen for the party’s majority to be substantially reduced; partly as a reminder to the Dear Leader of how atrociously he’s behaved over the whole Iraq thing, and partly just to restore an element of competition and debate to the Commons.

Of course, it would have been fun to see a Lib Dem government, but that was never really going to happen. They’ve made some gains, and although Wee Charlie is proclaiming a new era of three-party politics, closer inspection reveals a more mixed picture. Of 16 gains, 12 were in previously Labour-held seats, while their 5 losses were all in favour of the Tories. The overall share of the votes matches this pattern… the Lib Dems have done exceptionally well in Labour seats, where, in the aftermath of the Iraq and ID card debates, their “more left than Labour” stance has won them plenty of protest votes. But everywhere else, they’ve seen their vote significantly eroded by the Tories. They should not be complacent about this… if the Tories continue their revival, and if Gordon Brown eventually leads Labour, regaining the dissatisfied lefties, the Lib Dems could find themselves back in the doldrums again.

Complacency certainly seemed to be the problem here in Sutton and Cheam where a fairly unlikely Tory target has now slipped back to being a fairly dramatic marginal seat once again. Apart from a smattering of leaflets from all three major parties, I’ve seen no electioneering here whatsoever. A couple of Labour people wandered past yesterday, clearly on their way to somewhere else, and I saw a sole Conservative activist at the train station last night, although he seemed to be waiting for someone, rather than doing any actual campaigning!

One of the main talking points this time has been the potential security risk of postal voting. I’m just not keen on the idea of postal voting; even less so on the suggestion of SMS voting. If I’m going to trust the security of my vote to anyone, it’s not going to be the Post Office or the mobile phone networks!

Seriously, though, I think the scandals in the run-up to this election have provided enough ammunition for a reversal of postal voting facilities… when the mighty John Humphrys finds that someone else has fraudulently used his vote, you know things are bad. As far as I’m concerned, any form of remote or proxy voting should only be used in the most desperate circumstances. Polls suggest that young people would vote in greater numbers if it was easier to vote… well, tough luck. How much easier does it need to be than spending a couple of minutes down at your local polling station? If you can’t manage that little effort, I don’t want you playing a part in deciding my future, okay?

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Electoral Burblings

Posted on 4 May, 2005 by adrian

Pete pointed out my blog silence, especially in relation to the election, on IRC earlier…

I haven’t been struck by the galloping political apathy that sweeps our nation… well, maybe I have. Except I’m not apathetic about voting, I’m apathetic about *talking about* voting. I just have so many confusing and muddled opinions, it’s impossible to summarise everything in a few pithy comments.

I’ll be voting Liberal Democrat in my constituency, simply because we have a great MP and because it’s the best way of keeping the Tories out. I’m basically a “Labour person” deep down, because most of their core ideologies match mine. However, several of those ideologies are being eroded with the new-Labour movement, and of course there’s the small matter of a war I totally disagreed with. Still, even the worst of Tony’s rightward shifts are far preferable (to me) than any Tory government I can imagine, so one of my primary wishes is that the Conservative party is never elected again. As I think I mentioned before, I grew up in a country that was governed for the benefit of the rich, the greedy and the unprincipled. I don’t want to see that happen again. But without a numerically strong opposition, the worst of Tony’s “reforms” can still go unchecked, so it’d be good to see that huge majority reduced… preferably to the benefit of the Lib Dems.

See? It’s all about “if”, “but” and “however”. Just like tactical voting, except on a national scale.

More specifically, though, I’d like to ask favours of the voters in a couple of constituencies out there…

The most notable thing about Erewash in Derbyshire is that it’s where that severely ludicrous man Robert Kilroy-Silk is standing for his Vanitas Veritas party. Now, if you live in that constituency, I’ll be happy for you to make up your own minds, but if you do feel the urge to vote for one of the “other” parties, please make sure it’s not Kilroy. As Jeremy said earlier… for the love of GOD vote Militant Elvis!

And down in Folkestone we have a very interesting situation. In 2001, the combined Labour and Lib Dem voters could have beaten Michael Howard by over 7% if they’d all tactically voted one way or the other. Now, wouldn’t it be great if they could get it right this time? Here’s a hint… Maureen Tomison, the Labour candidate, has a rather shady past as a lobbyist with some very important Tory friends and even as a Tory election candidate. Go on, people of Kent!

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Most inappropriately named building ever

Posted on 25 April, 2005 by adrian

Yeah, so it was named after his father, who I assume is marginally less of an imbecile, but it still makes me laugh… the CIA’s George Bush Center for Intelligence.

Imagine the architects’ brief for the building…

- All important rooms on the ground floor; not much going on upstairs
- Lights must always be on, even when there’s no one home
- All closets to have built-in skeletons

etc…

Whatever next? The Margaret Thatcher Benevolent Fund?

Posted in Drivel, Politics | Leave a comment

Marathon running without tears

Posted on 18 April, 2005 by adrian

Taking advantage of the great weather yesterday, we spent a few hours soaking up the atmosphere around the London Marathon. One reason for going was that Nicola’s sister Judith is a keen runner, but I was also hoping to spot my pal Nick. I didn’t, but then have you ever tried to spot a person wearing a “Bumlasers” t-shirt in a crowd of 50000?

There’s a small collection of photos on my Flickr site.

Posted in Local, London | Leave a comment