A big red button

From the Grauniad website:

One version of the report, which was shown in various forms between March 31 and April 2, ends with a close-up of a finger pushing a red button marked “Fire”. But the BBC documentary shows that Splendid’s missiles are fired by computer.

One HMS Splendid crew member tells the BBC: “A left mouse push fires it. Kinda crazy really. We actually asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn’t give us one.”

That’s up there with amplifiers that go to 11, and power showers with emergency stops. I want one.

Wading through treacle wearing snowshoes

I’m down at the Large Retailer for three days this week, (supposedly) working on the project. I say supposedly, because working on the project is a little like wading backwards through treacle while wearing snowshoes - bureaucracy doesn’t even come close to describing the process. For starters, it’s an outsourced environment which means that in any given situation there’ll be the agendas of three separate organisations, let alone the usual internal politics. Add to that the impending redundancies, a major reorganisation at board level and a New Very Senior Person about to arrive, and you’ve got a witch’s brew of competing agendas - half the organisation is jockeying for position and trying to shoehorn some high profile achievements into the time left between now and the arrival of the New Very Senior Person; while the other half are keeping their heads down hoping to escape the gaze of the Redundancy Fairy.

So the routine for getting anything done is for the request go up one side of the organisation chart as high as it can get, hop across to the other functional silo and then down that side to the point in the organisation chart that I’d normally deal with by wandering over to the other side of the office and talking to them directly. This would work (almost) if it wasn’t for the fact that the individuals at the top of the organisation where the request hops from one silo to the other spend about 7 hours and 59 minutes of every 8 hour working day in meetings - and not with each other, needless to say.

I’m not sure which is more awe-inspiring - the fact that the organisation has got to the size and scale that it has with this level of internal bureaucracy; or the size and scale that it could be if it was kept under control…

View from the office

For all the frustrations of working on the project for the Large Retailer, the view from the office is one of the consolations. It’s a long, low building which is slightly below ground level - and on this side of the office there’s a view out over the grounds. Lawns, trees and the occasional item of wildlife. And from where I’m sitting there’s a perfect eye-level view of the heat haze radiating up from the grass, which means that it must be hot out there - this being an air-conditioned glass palace, it’s a constant 21 degrees inside. It reminds me a bit of the view that I used to get from an aircraft window taxiing into somewhere like Madrid or Taipei - sitting in shirtsleeves looking out of the window, watching the scenery shimmering as the sun blasted down onto the concrete hard enough to cause cracks.

I hate summer nights

I hate summer nights like tonight - it must be at least 20 degrees outside, and it’s too hot and sticky to sleep. There was a haze of smog on the horizon, and it’s turned the moon bright yellow - at the moment it’s hanging over the Armouries and seems to be twice the size it should be. Unfortunately the camera on a P800 isn’t really up to the job of capturing the detail, but you get the general idea. At least half the flats have their balcony doors hanging open, so it looks like I’m not the only one suffering. It’s at times like this that I really hanker after a terrace - I like the idea of being able to sleep outside in a hammock on a night like this, even if the white noise of the weir in the background would probably make sleep difficult.

Why RSS gives me Julie Birchall at my beck and call

Yet another reason why RSS is A Bloody Good Idea. Byliner (which is a Bloody Good Idea in itself) is a site which tracks and aggregates articles written by your favourite journos and columnists. So if you’re a Julie Burchill fan (although I’m convinced most people only read her as a means to get themselves annoyed about something, which is a little like pricking a blister - not a pleasant action in itself, but calculated to bring about some form of relief) you can use Byliner as a way of tracking down la Burchill’s latest deathless prose.

The clever bit on top of this is that through the joys of RSS and Newsgator, I can have Julie’s ramblings delivered directly to Outlook whenever I click on the ‘Get News’ button.

Hot, hot, hot

It’s a bit - well, British - to be blogging on about the weather, but fuck, it’s hot. I’m stuck in a hotel without air conditioning, and the window opens about two inches onto the street. I get the feeling it’s going to be a choice between breathing and sleeping. Thunderstorms are forecast for Thursday - I can’t wait…

How to legally infuriate the RIAA

The RIAA makes me sure there’s another fundemental law of physics out there to be discovered. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction - except in the case of the RIAA, when the reaction is opposite and greater. Leaving aside the commercial questionability of attempting to alienate every last one of your customers by suing the pants off them for operating a search engine, it seems that every move the RIAA makes is followed by some geek cobbling together a counter-move. Start trawling the web with a search spider looking for *.mp3 and it’s matter of minutes before someone builds a tarpit for the RIAA spider and sues them for trespass. Start trawling the file sharing networks looking for the IP addresses of sharers, and they disappear behind proxies and into closed networks.

The latest is this idea of how to legally infuriate the RIAA by subverting their webcasting royalty terms to create a network of one-on-one web radio broadcasters, thinly disguising the fact that it’s basically a novel way of file sharing. But this time, it’s perfectly legal.

The basic problem that the RIAA has is that it’s staffed by and takes its lead from the lawyers. While I’m sure they’re the finest that money can buy in terms of their legal knowledge and know-how, their ability to read the likely reactions of the filesharing public at large seems questionable at best. It’s like squeezing a balloon - every handful that’s compressed pops out the other side. Or possibly like chasing soap in the shower - the harder you squeeze, the further across the bathroom the soap flies from your grasp. And if there are other soap-in-showers metaphors that come to mind, well, they’re probably equally applicable here.

So it is with chasing down the filesharers with legal or technical means. For every smart lawyer in LA, there’s a hundred geeks with the knowledge and the inclination to respond to the latest legal move by exploiting the open nature of the internet and the web to work around whatever manoevure the music business is trying to make. If the RIAA had had the foresight to see the opportunities, precious little of this would have happened - but their response was pure “fight or flight”, with the result that they’ve been dragged into a fight which it’s very difficult to see them winning without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As concepts like fair use are whittled away in an attempt to slam the file sharing stable door shut, legalistic overkill becomes more and more commonplace. Instead of affecting only the perpetrators of the acts that the RIAA is attempting to stop, it starts to affect everyone in ways that noone could have anticipated. Using the DCMA to shut down the market for non-branded inkjet cartridges for example - or preventing future generations from being able to read obscelescent file formats by nailing them legally shut.

There seems to be a vicious circle developing of ever more reactionary attempts to prop up a business model that’s being rendered irrelevant by technological progress. The problem for bodies like the RIAA is that they’re being drawn into a legal and technical arms race that they’re ill-equipped to win.

Intelligent spam

One of the aspects of spam that has always mystified me is why it’s generally written in such a semi-literate way, with normal rules of grammar and punctuation suspended in the hope of getting those elusive click-throughs. In fact I’ve occasionally wondered if using the Word grammar checker and bouncing anything that splits its infinitives would be a far more effective way of filtering spam than searching for ‘herbal viagra’ or ‘enlargement pills’.

Then this morning I received this:

From: Helen Adams [helen.adams@ukonline.co.uk]
Sent: 12 July 2003 15:44
To: Friends Group
Subject: FW: Useful information this time of year

Hiya,
With most of you all going on holiday soon, I just thought this website my boyfriend emailed me about would be useful! Looks like you can save loads on international phone calls.
Helen
x

Disney dress code

I misread this at first, and found myself wondering about the logic of an organisation banning female customers for wearing hoop earrings. Then I read it again, and I’d got it wrong - customers are off the hook, it’s employees that are enjoying their new-found freedom…

Good grief

What a surprise!.

Not.