Amazingly there are only two blogs listed with Technorati tags about the Wire (This isn’t one of them) After a fair bit of searching i found the Wire bits on http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/09/different-voices-diversity-in-wires.html and there is some interesting stuff there.

Such as the idea that the Wire isn’t very popular because most of its characters are black (with some % estimates by various people, suchas Vance Cureton, from something called the Reading Post) or that its characters are all violent and hostile. Uh? The Wire characters cross every level of society and exhibit every shade of moral failing and virtue.

Anyway, it’s a very good blog post, with a quotation from sociology professor that I want to copy here, but, in fear of committing a double plagiarism, I’ve linked to the source.

It tells you that producer Ed Burns, “served both as a homicide detective in the real Baltimore police department and as a teacher in the city’s public schools” No surprise there but informative. It supports the feeling that its realiism is well founded in someone’s experience.

And it provides the fantastic fact that Stringer Bell is played by a British actor. Wow.

Oddly, technorati is updating its database with records from other sites(*), so the only thing I can conclude is that either Technorati doesn’t like this site or the WordPress/RPC/Ping Form/Pingomatic things aren’t working.

What are the odds of all four ping methods failing?

(*) Even a site which has no content and is updated once every blue moon has been indexed faster than this one – and it links here!

By the way – this seems to be a recurring theme:

http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/10/28/technorati-missing-posts/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/10/28/technorati-bad-as-ever/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/09/30/blog-search-with-blogger/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/07/25/technorati-update-time/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/07/25/technorati-oddness/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/06/19/is-technorati-pointless/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/06/14/technorati-ranking/

Well, in this bizzaro world where I am singing the praise of Microsoft products and falling over in the face of a “Web 2.0” package (i.e. Technorati being terrible), it should come as no surprise my feelings toward iTunes change on an hourly basis.

Normally I like iTunes and my iPod is heavily used – however when I had a crazy idea to update all my files with the proper album artwork things went heavily down hill.

iTunes does this almost automatically – however this means when the system cant find the album it leaves you with a blank space. Now, call me old fashioned but “Manic Monday” from The Bangles should not be hard to find – yet it is no where in the iTunes database. Shocking really.

Still, this is the 21st century so I should expect all technology to be pervasive and random.

Despite my complaints about Technorati recently and MS generally, this is really interesting Blog software. It actually does make it easy to include a variety of things – for example, I am going to search Flickr for some pictures of Stonehenge and so that people can be aware of the place, I have put in an overhead shot from MS Virtual Earth. (Below).

In addition to the overhead shot, in case people don’t know how to get to Stonehenge, I can also add a map

This is pretty cool as you can see – the map works, although confusingly the pushpin is centred on the object, not pointing to it. Instinct would say the bottom of the pin is where the place should be, but this is only the case if you massively zoom in.

As would be expected from a Microsoft package there are some glitches with layout and rendering (especially if you try to use complex CSS in your blog) but for about 90% of the blogs I have read Live Writer is perfect.

I will continue to see what else it does and try and identify where it will go wrong…

del.icio.us tags: Stonehenge, Megaliths, Microsoft, Live Writer, Virtual Earth

As previously mentioned, there are now 16 posts since last Friday (which is currently the last time Technorati thinks this blog was updated) and none have been registered. This is despite the blog software running the rpc-ping protocols as suggested by Technorati.

Seems like a space in the market for a replacement service.

I am still playing with Windows Live Writer and, as I have now installed the Flickr plug in, I thought I would put it to some good use. So a quick search on Flickr produced this image of Corfe Castle. Overall it looks pretty good, the search facilities are brilliant but there seems to be no easy way of showing attribution of the images, which may be a problem down the line.

How do other people solve this? Do they skip the attributions?

Well, despite my recent surprised happiness with MS products the shocking issues with Technorati remain.

Almost two hours after the last post on this blog was made (the one linked above), the technorati entry says the blog was last updated six days ago. Shocking. Even after running the ping service here, at Pingomatic and at Technorati, the last weeks worth of posts seem to not exist.

Using the Technorati Ping I got this reply:

Ping Us

Thanks for the Ping!

Technorati will now check www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog for new content. You can bookmark this page and return to it to notify Technorati of updates.

Seems like barefaced lies to me. So much for the Blogosphere making everyones opinions equal.

Loathe though I am to admit it, there is little chance I can continue to deny Microsoft are actually capable of producing some good, free, software.

Wow.

Yes. I had to sit down after that as well.

The good bit of software is Windows Live Writer – it is designed to be used with MSN Spaces (Microsoft’s version of blogging software, late and playing catch up seems pretty routine for MS).

Despite it’s Microsoft pedigree, this is actually a good bit of beta software. This post is being written with it, so it certainly connects to rival blog software easily enough.

Without raving about it too much, it makes posting to the blog somewhat like a MS Office experience – easy and feels “familiar.” It comes with plug ins for flickr and tagging protocols. It allows you insert Windows Live maps, pictures and the like. So far, I cant fault it. Hopefully this will change with time…

Well worth the cost of downloading this bit of software. 🙂

Neu Rathaus Turm,
originally uploaded by cerqueirat.

Very impressive photo of a town hall in Munich. Excellent angles. Almost makes me wish I had a Fujifilm digital camera. As this was taken on a Fuji camera, it is odd that it made it into the Nikon Stunning Gallery…

Old-Sarum-26-Jul-06,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

For some reason, this picture has by far the most hits of all the ones I have uploaded onto Flickr. At the time of writing it has had 560 views.

The next most popular has 340, yet this is still not an “interesting” picture according to Flickr’s system. I have no idea what criteria they use…

If anyone knows why this picture was getting so many hits before the blog entry, please let me know.

Another round of some interesting links on the web, this time the Register provides the bulk of information:

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/25/pedantic_passport/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/25/security_workforce_survey/
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6083840.stm
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/e_phots/114836886/
• http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/008189.html

More soon 🙂

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.