Following on from the previous post about switching to typepad, it now seems very unlikely it will happen – you have to pay for type pad… Bah.

It looks like the quest for a WordPress-LifeBlog plugin / work around will have to continue.

I just picked this up from the god-like archives of the god-like Register. In 2003, a school was planning retinal scans before parting with school dinners and library books.

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/08/uk_school_plans_retinal_scans/

The article says that tens of thousands of kids had already been fingerprinted then. However, a resourceful chap has found there are serious flaws in biometric iD.

“c’t gave biometrics a resounding thumbs down, after fooling a large number of devices with simple tricks and finding some unusable.

In its attempts at outfoxing the protective programs and devices, c’t concentrated on deceiving the systems with the aid of simple procedures (such as the reactivation of latent images) and forgeries, such as silicon fingerprints. It also achieved some success in eavesdropping on the communication (via the USB port) between a computer and the sensor and using this information in replay attacks to fool recognition systems. It didn’t try to hack into biometric data directly, though this might be another fruitful avenue of attack.”

It seesm that we are going to have to rely on the skills of a few eccentric hackers to keep some of the personal freedoms that used to be considered the essential benefit of democracy.

Democracy, hmm? Do you remember seeing anything in the voting materials at the last general or council elections that said

“By the way, we know you think jury trials and a professionally trained  police force and free movement are so 20th century.  We intend to replace the police with low-paid vigilantes wearing armbands and applying civil A-Social Bastard Orders that don’t requiire proof of actually breaking laws.

Oh, and we know you feel that 25 hour surveillance of everyone’s public activities  is the way to go. We are sure you feel uncomfortable when your biological identifiers,  credit record, medical history and address and telephone number and many other details or rumours about you aren’t held all over the place. We know you want these things to be collated at will by anyone with access to them – that is, more or less any public body or private company. 

We know that you are worried about toddlers wearing hoodies and veils, so we’ll make them our big priority.  Just let them try keeping a library book over the allotted 14 days!  We bet that you are furious that people can just walk into pubs without showing a biomentric passport. Well, we promise to sort all that out for you. Vote for us.”

On a similar theme- i.e. this country is fast approaching the repression levels previously associated with Nazi germany - a teacher who I know was told that the teaching staff in the archetypal ####  Comprehensive where he works would be fined £2,500 if caught smoking on the premises.  Get caught smoking more than a cigarette a month and he would obviously be having to pay to teach.  Even more insidiously, heads of department who know that a member of their staff has smoked on the premises but haven’t grassed him or her to the authorities will be fined a few hundred.

I suspect I couldn’t make this stuff up.

I was going to do the usual thing and keep my mouth shut about the £200 fine for not recycling accurately, as there is a very good blog further down about that. However, hard as that is to believe, there’s much worse.

A Register article just blew away my residual sanity:- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/20/pub_fingerprints/  The title is

Beer fingerprints to go UK-wide

That is, pubs are to get money to fingerprint customers. Seriously.   Pubs in Yeovil are already doing it. There is a nicely understated piece in the Register article that points out quite how voluntary the pubs entrance into this scheme is- they won’t get a licence if tehy don’t and they can open late if they do.

This reminded me of another article in the Register a few days ago that had already pushed the proverbial envelope of calm too far for me to express an opinion on it in moderate language . That was http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/17/mps_on_kiddyprinting/  Schools are apparently fingerprinting kids – allegedly so they can issue library books….  A simple rubber stamp used to suffice.

These articles are apparently genuine. I’ve found lots of other references to the schools one. Does anyone feel more secure with this stuff. I can sleep easy in my bed knowing that the local publican and school librarian are carrying out ad hoc surveillance at a level that George Orwell would never have dared present in his fiction.

 

Titchfield Abbey 2,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

I found a collection of old photos on my PC hard disk. These were taken about three years ago and look much better at smaller resolution.

Still – while flickr will allow me to host them, I may as well share them 🙂

Right, generally speaking, I much prefer Word Press as a blogging tool over Blogger and Typepad – however it seems a typepad account is on the cards.

Why?

It is the only one which works with the Lifeblog software on my Nokia phone. Bah. The Lifeblog software was itself a comedy of errors as despite Nokia saying “it comes installed (N73 phone)” the one I was supplied with by 3 didn’t have it. Would Nokia provide it as a download? No. I had to (after much web searching) get the version supplied for the N80 and then install it. Typical wonder of todays modern world.

Anyway, as I was saying, the Lifeblog software will only “talk” to Typepad. There is an interesting thing on the Nokia site:

Interested in Partnering with Lifeblog?
Lifeblog has an open posting protocol so anyone can make their blog service compatible with our software. To find out more, download our blogging specification document:

However, call me old fashioned but isn’t it the job of the “new software” to be able to talk to the old ones not the other way round. I can post to Wordpad from Flickr, Deepest Sender, Performancing even MS packages. What is so special about Nokia? Bah.

Well at least it being an open protocol means I can either see what chances I have of writing a connector between wordpress and Lifeblog or finding out some one else has already done it.

If not – you will soon see a typepad blog supporting this 🙂

I have spent a few days talking (on and offline) to quite a few people who have “fallen out” with Google. Most of these people have been at one end of the Google Advertising empire and end up getting stung.

People build websites, serve google ads and then when it comes to a payout Google back off (claiming things like “invalid clicks” or similar). Not a major problem normally but with google there are no ground for redress or process in which legitimate complaints can be investigated. This is wrong and certainly falls foul of the “do no evil” mantra. A similar thing (in reverse) has happened to a few people I know who advertise with google, they have been getting lots of machine generated clicks and although google has since suspended the accounts which appear to have sent the clicks (very hard one to tell at this end), the people have not had any money recredited to their adsense account, despite the claims made by google in their account termination message.

Because of the way google works there is no way to verify their business practices. Neither party has grounds for redress or verification.

Shocking.

There is something which can be done about it though. A few years ago when Yahoo, MSN et al., were obsessed with becoming portals and making money, Google snuck in the back door and was fantastic. Times have changed. Although I am a die hard, anti-MS, Linux fan, the search engine at MSN is now pretty good. Often returning better quality hits than google. Same with Yahoo. Same with Ask. For the last two weeks almost all my searches have been done on MSN and Google. Google is not better. Often MSN is actually better and it is never worse.
The solution to Google is simple. Use a different search engine.

Go MSN.

Now that a fair bit of the latest Wire series has been on, it’s due for another fanatic reassessment. This series has been less immediately engaging but demanding immediate engagement from the Wire seems oddly immoral, given its depth.

Hence, this will be the start of a more serious appraisal of the Wire. Basically, it is magical in the way it looks at every level of an American city with perfect clarity, while still being totally successful as standard tv narrative. It’s not exactly escapist, though. You have to have a clear head to watch it. You’ll still miss half the things it’s saying. Or more, in my case, as I feel the need for subtitles in some parts.

One of the themes of the Wire has always been the way formal and informal societies mirror each other. For instance, Stringer Bell had a sales conference for his street dealers with a tedious presentation and yes men asking flattering questions. (If you’ve ever worked anywhere, you’ve been there.) In Series 4, they are making these points (maybe a little too obviously) in terms of education and politics.

The opening titles always turn out to have surprising resonances in any case, but, in this series, the opening titles scream circularity – with a circular image in almost every scene. There are lots of circular themes, among them, the way that culture is transmitted across generations. The school is a focus of a few well meaning attempts to rescue the kids. This is achieved partly by the University project fronted by the legalising ex-police chief – which is building on the knowledge that the corner kids have – and partly by the teacher – who was a crazed nerd policeman – providing food and clothes and interesting maths lessons. The ex-con with a boxing gym is trying to become a good role model as well as save some of the kids from trouble. Their small successes are trapped in a context of test-driven educational policies that run counter to real education, lack of resources and the overwhelmingly sordeid environment.

The efforts of the good police chief and the ex-policeman teacher and the ex-con boxer are mirrored in the lessons in killing that are provided by Marlowe’s minions to kids barely old enough to tie their own shoelaces. Marlowe’s two sidekicks are an apparently himocidal little girl and an older cold and psychopathic man. They make the Barksdales seem like choirboys. Omar clearly has the high moral ground, not least when Marlowe fits him up by killing a shop assistant (collateral damage in pursuit of a goal) and threatening the shop owner to claim he wittnessed Omar.

(In the most recent episode, they have been instructed to kill the would-be New York intruders on the Baltimore turf and leave bodies, contrary to their current success in disappearing any signs of their murders. They devise a bizarre test, based on intimate knowledge of local music, that even one of them is unable to pass. The first person in the street who refuses to provide the right answer is shot, seemingly at random, with his body left to be discovered and supposedly send a message to the New York gangs. The utter pointlessness and stupidity of this typifies Marlowe’s rule.)

The political stuff is very good, but less interesting as narrative than the street stuff, partly because it has telegraphed its message too much. Throughout his journey to becoming Mayor-elect, Carcetti has been as slimy as he always appeared. however, he seems to be about to do something right, for once, by choosing the old Wire boss as a Colonel. But, of course, he is putting the truly evil Rawls in as the police chief. The circularity theme suggests that it will be no time before the former levels of corruption and political manoeuvring are restored with a new cast in power.

The titles are themselves worthy of a fair bit of study. Each series has the same song sung in a different style (are you getting the resonance, here?) There is always a collection of images that crop up in the series and are both beautifully shot and subtly significant to the story lines. Each is followed by a quote from a character in the episode, which gathers resonance when you finally hear it and understand the concept.

In fact, the Wire is a true masterwork of television. US tv is getting better and better, while British tv is descending ever deeper into a reality celebrity home improvement swamp that is so far beneath the lowest common denominator that you would need an IQ in single digits to watch it some nights. If any tv series ever gets better than the Wire, there should really be a nobel prize for it.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/6058952.stm

Magistrates have fined a man £200 after finding him guilty of putting paper in a recycling sack for bottles and cans only – breaking council rules.

What is the United Kingdom coming to. £200 fine for putting junk mail into the wrong sack (and the write up gets confused over if it was the wrong sack) as part of a VOLUNTARY recycling scheme.

Sheer madness. But it seems the council had issues with this gentleman.

Mr Reeves was served with a warning notice in April this year when he put his bins out a day early because he was going on holiday.

Then in June a green recycling bag was found outside his ground floor flat in the Mount Pleasant area of the city containing both paper and bottles and cans.

Being a bit curious about this, I had a further look and these two paragraphs intrique me (emphasis is mine):

Swansea Council enforcement officer Martin Lemon said: “There is a recycling scheme available in which paper can put into a green recycling sack and glass bottles and tins can be put into a separate sack.”

And

“My colleague informed me that he had opened a green recycling sack and that he found a piece of junk mail with Mr Reeve’s name and address.”

Now call me old fasioned but what is wrong with paper being in a green recycling sack? I hope it was a mistake with the BBC reporting or the council really are insane.

As promised, every now and then I will post links to interesting pages:

• http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/stelling/268883168/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/e_phots/255744397/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/e_phots/250795098/
• http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/3004
• http://www.fiftyfoureleven.com / weblog / web-development / random-web-design- advice-and-good-practices
• http://designdelineations.com/
• http://david.davies.name/weblog/ 2006 / 08 / 24 / nokia-n73-lifeblog-posting-via-flickr/

More soon. I know you can’t wait… 🙂

Not to be spoken of in the same category as the Wire (official Best TV Series Ever) still Numb3rs new series (in the States) is also pretty good as entertainment. 

Sadly, they are almost at the limits of how they can bring maths into the crime-solving arena, so we seem to be getting less Math and more standard crime series stuff. (Which at least avoids the issue of how it is that experienced FBI agents need a maths – sorry, Math – professor to develop complex algorithms to point out some crime-solving things that would be glaringly obvious to the newest recruit with an ounce of common sense.)

Good stuff in the first programs includes – a pursuit algorithm. The use of maths to detect forged artwork, though I found the idea you could do it from a jpeg of a scanned photo to be unconvincing. Their scanner must be better than any I’ve ever seen by several orders of magnitude.

Bad stuff – the level of family values propaganda crammed into each episode is verging on the comical. Get rid of the guy who used to be in Taxi, please.

Odd stuff – the way they say “provenance” in the art theft episode. The first FBI art expert pronounces it as  “pro” (as in sports) “ven arnts.”  A few others do the same. You just think ‘Ok, this must be like saying “rowt” for route and “baysil” for basil. It’s just an American thing.’ Then, confusingly, someone says it as an English person would.

The Best TV Series Ever is on series 4 in the States. So far – the Wire is still the best tv series ever, etc, but, just as in each of the other series, it’s taken a completely different tack. At the moment it’s a little bit too overt with the social commentary. The action and dialogue are toned down a bit. The brilliance of it was largely the way it managed to have all the social stuff and still be completely successful on the standard TV cop show level. But, as was pointed out to me, the other series were always slow to get going.

I can’t do it justice but I’m still going to try to give a brief introduction to some of the plot strands for other afficionados.

This one is mainly down with the kids and up with the politicians. The Wire group is well nigh disbanded for tricking its caretaker boss into subpoenaing all the mayor’s financial backers. A hatchet boss is put in and the senior people all manage to get transfers to Homicide. The baldhead one from the early series was made sergeant after catching the mayor misbehaving (when he was his driver) but, when he gets to the Wire team, finds out the others have gone and he’s working to the team-killer.

The slimeball politician, Carcetti, is making slow progress against the Mayor but the Mayor’s money machine is winning so far.

The lame nervous policeman with the Polish name who went uncharacteristically ape and got kicked out of the force (in series 3) is a trainee teacher. (“Lambs to the slaughter” according to the headmistress) The kids run rings round him, until a girl in his class slashes another one. The police chief who legalised just before retirement has been employed by the University’s social science department, as a sort of street translator on a project that aims to reach the kids before they are utterly destroyed by gang warfare. He gets the researcher to realise they have to go for pretty young kids if they want to find any that aren’t already damaged and dangerous. They end up in the same Junior High as the trainee teacher. The central street-level gang characters in this series are pupils at the same school, in between dealing on street corners and living in conditions so bad they would be remarked on in the poorest Rio favela. The lads have some pretty funny scenes in the first episode, one involving pouring urine on bullies, but getting themselves soaked.

The ireedeemable Marlow is in control of the neighbourhood. He makes Stringer Bell seem to have been moderately benign and Avon Barksdale positively beneficent (though I still haven’t forgiven him for offing the charming de Angelo in series 2) . His only halfway human trait is keeping pigeons. The other gang leaders try to reach some accomodation with him but he’s not interested. Thanks to his approximately 11-year-old utterly psychopathic henchman (/henchgirl, it’s hard to tell) he is burying bodies so successfully that the police chiefs can claim there aren’t any and more or less shut down the Wire.

Because of Marlow’s intransigence, the fat older gang leader persuades Omar to rob a poker game in which Marlow’s winning. This promises to lead to a war against Omar that will make the previous one with Stringer seem like a mild disagreement between gentlemen. Omar is as over-the-top as ever. Although his appearance is generally more moderate than in previous series, he still goes to the shop for cereal (and to collect his tribute) wearing a comically lurid but expensive silk pyjama ensemble.

Obviously this is just a taste. There are too many plot strands, of course, to bring up more than a few here and I’ve done it in a way that makes it seem dull. It isn’t. It’s still great. It has got to go on mainstream TV here in the UK sometime. Then you’ll understand what I mean.

Well, it seems every blog has a list of interesting websites, so starting today I will “share” with you some of the sites I visit. This will not be daily but it will be fairly regular. (Yes this is going to be somewhat like looking over my favourites folder…. Never mind… :-))

• http://www.morguefile.com/
• http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=show&page=Anniversaries
• http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
• http://www.nokia.com/nseries/index.html
• http://www.lulu.com/uk
• http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/007327.html
• http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/06-09-19-01.all.html
• http://service.compuskills.co.uk/
• http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp

In time I may be tempted to present these link in a nicer manner (titles and descriptions for example). Let me know what you think.

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Spending a rainy Sunday afternoon surfing has it’s advantages. I came across Robert Cringely’s excellent site (I, Cringely) and reading through it I found an interesting article about “unlimited broadband.”

In the post, Robert Cringely discusses Verizon’s broad band deal – opening with:

How much Internet service is “unlimited” Internet service? If you are a user of Verizon Wireless’s Broadband Access wireless Internet service, “unlimited” means five gigabytes per month or less. The company is quite specific in its advertisements that the service is for unlimited e-mail, web surfing, and corporate intranet use, but not for downloading music or videos or running servers. (read more)

Sadly, this redefinition of English is not confined to American advertisements. Is it possible to get Advertising Standards to take action?