Category Archives: personal

Local images – mixing memories and maps

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I just came across a really nice part of the BBC web site for Cardiff called Streets of Cardiff. It allows anyone to upload (moderated, this is the BBC!) stories, pictures, or videos about different areas and these are presented as points on a map. Below is the Roath Park and Penylan page … where I grew up:

Roath Park map @ BBC
[ screen shot ] [ BBC web page ]
Given it is the BBC no google mashup, but a little flash app! But a very nice bit of webbery, community content etc. … pity they don’t have it for everywhere. For years now I have kept thinking it would be really nice to have a coherent location-based portal of everywhere and even got a domain for it! Whilst google maps and related things are getting close to that dream, still it is hard to find things by location … maybe one day …

This also reminded me of some pictures of Roath Park I took a short while back for a keynote I gave a few years ago “Paths and Patches – patterns of geonosy and gnosis“, so I have just added them as a Roath Park flickr set.
… and now I really must get back to work.

Torchlight Carnival

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Last night was at the Kendal Torchlight Carnival [web site, flickr]. Floats, shire horses, caribean-style dancers, old steam vehicles and a vintage fire engine to die for … how cool to drive to work in that!

dancer at Kendal Torchlight I remembered summer holidays as a child, where the seaside villages and those nearby would often have street processions, a different village each week, carefully timed for tourist season. I even recall one on the Isle of White the year of the Isle of Wight Festival … but no I was a little too small to go to that!

Like, I would guess, most of the seaside processions, Kendal Torchlight is not an ancient festival, but only goes back less than 40 years, and apart from a fun fair does not include much beyond the procession itself. However, it was a slightly eerie feeling walking down towards the town through street empty of traffic and so quiet with families buggies and old ladies with fold-up chars all going in the same direction, almost like one of those zombie-style sci-fi films where everyone is drawn towards some unseen force.

I don’t go to football matches or other sports, so it was unusual that sense of all streaming together towards an event, the shared anticipation waiting together lined along the roadside and experiencing the lights, sounds and movements with so many at the same time (especially the enthusiastic lady next to us who cheered waved and shouted at every passing lorry and dancer). In a world dominated by the individual, from on-demand TV to corner yogurt pots, things that bring us together, whether ancient or modern, seem no bad thing.

after the ball is over …

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Last week’s HCI2007 conference and the Physicality workshop now all finished (except sorting out the the final finances for HCI … but I’ll forget that for now!)

Being part of the organisation of things you always see so many things that are not as planned (like going wrong), but for the delegates it all seems a well-oiled machine. In this as in many other domains, the mark of a rubust system is not whether or not it fails, but how it copes with failure. This is the heart of my principles for appropriate intelligence when designing ‘intelligent’ user interfaces and also ‘fail fast programming’1 when designing and debugging critical computer systems.

Great to see so many old friends … and meet new people … and after able to show Nad2 the glories of the Lake District.

windermere lake district mountains lake district in winter

  1. I must make web pages for this some day … but see debugging notes I did for a software engineering course a few years ago[back]
  2. see his blog on arriving at the conference and his Flickr photos of the Lake District[back]

face to face with myself – Nad’s blog on Live Search

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Nad has been blogging about Live Search‘s new features for searching for images of different kinds (see Finding Faces with Live Search). he used me as an example and it was weird both the images it found of me, but also the occasional images that also showed up that were not of me, including a golden Budda (!). There is something quite poignant about the near random associations that come with the ‘mistakes’ on the search. One image was of a national guardsman about to leave for Iraq. the link was tenuous, his name was Alan and he was at Fort Dix, but seeing the photos of his children and his going away cake (stars and stripes and plastic tanks), gave me a very odd feeling of connection to someone far away and in so different circumstances.

one aim, one business, one desire

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My Macintosh has a list of recently accessed files, but when I want to re-visit a file I have used earlier in the day it is never there. I have many folder windows open, but again the folder I was earlier working on is never one of them. This seems a sad measure of not multi-tasking but over-tasking, too many interruptions upon interupptions, too many disparate things and a singular lack of single purpose.

When I was in school we studied the Scholar Gypsy by Matthew Arnold. It is a tale of an Oxford scholar who foresakes his studies and joins the gypsies. As I always admired and desired the gypsy life this combination of the intellectual and nomadic appealed immediately. When Arnold writes it is 200 years since the scholar started his wanderings, but there are still occasional reports of sightings and Arnold concludes that his longevity is the result of his singleness of purpose, he has “one aim, one business, one desire”.

The stanza I still recall almost word perfect comes near the end as Arnold expresses his wish for this simpler life … and remember he is writing in 1850, not the days of email and IM:

O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife

film – waking life

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Last night watched ‘Waking Life‘ a strange film all about dreaming

We ordered it from amazon video (their subscription lending library), but not quite sure how we managed to do it. Certainly when it arrived and I read the description it sounded a little too arty … I of course like James Bond and Famous Five!

However, it was very enjoyable and has most stunning animation. It looked as if it had been filmed live, but then, either by hand or using computer, reduced to comic book effect. It chronicles a young man’s day or dream as he discusses (mainly listens) to various people talking about the philosophy of dreams and reality – I assume taken from lots of real philosophers, but I’m not well read enough to recognise many! All of this in a constantly shifting animation as if each object were half floating. Sort of Disney meets Derrida.

Two things struck me … well actually many more, loads of lovely quirky asides, but I forget most already 🙁

First is how lacking in grounding so many of the philosophical ideas are; sitting somewhere between mysticism and reason. I’ve recently been reading Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis and got a similar feel there – lovely stuff for a novel, almost poetic … but without solid ground. An age that has forgotten or rejected God and lost faith in rationality, but struggling to find something in the void.

The other thing was a point when one of the characters said to the protagonist (I misquote!) “your sneakers aren’t real, your feet inside your sneakers aren’t real, you are a mental model” … the character is referring to the fact you are not real in a dream, but to some extent this is precisely the self we experience, my mental model of me is the ‘I’ I know, so (and this was said elsewhere in the film), to some extent aspects of dreams are as real as anything in waking life.

toes in the mediterranean

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I am in Tirrenia, one of the resorts on the Mediterranean outside Pisa. February is not the normal tourist month and the palm trees are all wrapped in sacking or plastic to protect them from the rain.

It was overcast when I arrived and yesterday was bleak with heavy rain, but this morning the sky was open from edge to edge, the unfettered wind blowing the waves clear from the coasts of Spain.

Dabbling my toes in the waters edge, or wading deeper having to run as the larger waves threatened to wash me clear to my waist. Icy feeling, but I’m sure still just the chill of cool water, air thrown through the night, no Arctic currents penetrate here.

To my back are the shuttered beach buildings, and tall rectangular pillars of plywood I assume enclosing the summer showers. Also sprinklers along the beach edges. I’d wondered at these when I’d walked at dusk when I’d first arrived, but not realised they were along every beach side – presumably to dampen the sand and keep it from blowing and burying the resort.

The sand slopes steeply towards the sea, and on the water’s edge a huge driftwood log, like a seat deliberately placed to watch the sea, but now periodically half covered then left stranded by the flow of waves.

On the map it is an contained sea, the Mediterranean, but here I see open sea – if there are boundaries they are far away and the waves long enough to build and be as terrible and awesome as those that had crossed the whole atlantic a few months ago when I was in Brazil. These waves though are less uniform, not the slowly growing and breaking of surf beaches, but more a tumbling boiling ferment.

To the north the jagged edges of snow flecked mountains mirror the wave crests, sharp edged against the clear morning sky. Further north they will become the marble-shot mountains of Carrera from which the best stone in the world is quarried. Marble not unlike the frozen surface of these surf flecked seas.

The sun just breaks over the land. It must be a marvelous place for sunsets over the sea. Slowly as the orange edge rises over the beach buildings the first rays touch the white wave crests, shining above the grey troughs between, then gradually the grey surface turns slate green.

I retrieve my sandals from under the pile of flotsam where I’d left them earlier, then reluctantly turn my back to the sea.

keeping track of history (Blair, Iraq, and all of us)

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I had been struck by Blair’s long-awaited statement about the manner of the execution of saddam, that he belatedely made last Tuesday evening. However, I wanted to be suer of what he said, so yesterday evening attempted to find out. Perhaps I am just too poor a web-user, but I found it incredibly difficult. Google seraches fund many earelier news articles about the fact that he hadnlt said anthing at that stage, and ones from earelier last week saying what he was about to say something and what it would be (now-a-days it seems news is written before the event), but nothing reporting what he said or when he said it (I couldn’t recall the exect day either).Having found earlier or later articles in newspapers and on the BBC I thought it should be easy to trace from them to related ones and hence the statement I was after … but no. While most seem to offer long term “most important stories in 2005” archives, there does not appear to be an easy way (or possibly any way) to say “what was the BBC online stories for Wednesday January 12th 2007?”.

I did find the ‘number 10‘ site that does have a list of the prime minister’s speaches and statements, but of course not all his statements, just the ones they want you to read!

Eventually yahoo! news came to the rescue (albeit found through Google!) with a more recent article, but with links to background including a guardian online article from last wednesday … which yes! did have the full text of the relevant part of the statement:

As has been very obvious from the comments of other ministers and indeed from my own official spokesman, the manner of the execution of Saddam was completely wrong. But that should not blind us to the crimes he committed against his own people, including the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, one million casualties in the Iran/Iraq war and the use of chemical weapons against his own people, wiping out entire villages.

So the crimes that Saddam committed does not excuse the manner of his execution but the manner of his execution does not excuse the crimes.

Now to be fair, knowing this was accessible I tried an alternative tack and searched inside the guardian site using keywords and was able to find the article that way. Having realised this and did some searches on the bbc site and got the video of the statement. (Once I’d found suitable serach terms!)

So on newspaper and the bbc sites it seems you can do google-style searches, but not (unless I’m still missing something) ask “what was on the news last Wednesday” or (reasonably completely) what are the related articles to this one.

Obviously in a pre-web world I would not expect to be able to do this. I could (and still could) visit the British Library for old copies of newspapers (I assume they keep them) and for the last week possibly the local library. But of course when information is available it is not what you could find that counts, but what is easiest. The information that is available is the information that gets seen. Even in university our students are reluctant to read books as they believe they can find all they need on the web.

Now the reason I wanted to find the Blair statement was the reference to “one million casualties in the Iran/Iraq war”. He was rightly pointing out that the failings of the legal process of his execution should not blind us to the horror of his crimes. Now given the delay I assume the words were well prepared, and yet of three crimes things he noted one was this.

I guess the figure of 1 million sounded good (big numbers always impress), but to mention this without also noting that that war was waged with the complicit and explicit support of many countries including the UK and US seems at best amnesiac and at worst deceptive. Does he really not know this? Or is he simply hoping most who hear it won’t?

I can recall the Iran-Iraq war as a young adult, but those younger will have been in school and even for those around at the time I’m sure the memories get a little fuzzy, so perhaps he can get away with this type of manipulation. Or perhaps it is tht he only partly recalls the events and honestly presents this?

The US involvement is well documented, both in terms of miltary presence in the Gulf at the time, officially neutrally, but with minimal pretense acting against Iran who was then the ‘evil power’. Indeed (recalling my own and Nad’s earlier posts about the execution), in looking for this I found George Washington University’s National Security Archive of declaissified documents. In this there is a photograph of Donald Rumsfeld, then a special envoy from President Reagan, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. This is not surprising, diplomatc have to do this all the time. Significantly though this meeting was, as the national secturity archives show, shortly after US intelligence had confirmed Iraq’s use of chemical weapons (Blair’s point 3) and discussed this at a presidential level. The US (in full knowledge) then went on to block UN resolutions deploring Iraq use of chemical weapons … initially with UK support. the ful story of UK support, I’m sure is there, but even harder to find … I seem to recall British warships in the gulf, but it was more than 20 years ago!
I an age of instant information, it is amazing that getting the basic facts of ongoing news items is so difficult. I recall a year or so back there was a call for journalists to give more context in theor reporting. However, when interviews a respected journalist insisted that theor job was the news, the changes not the backgrund … but without the background the interpretation of what we hear is different.

If journalists do not see it as their job to give such background and it is still so hard to find elsewhere, then politicians can go on deceiving themselves and their people.

paying the tax

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tax collectors get a bad press, but we have just got to the end of filling in our annual tax returns online and is an amazingly trouble free process … I can still remember when it was paper forms and 2 days before the final deadline we’d discover we needed extra green pages for this thing or other. Now-a-days you just fill in the boxes on the web form, if you haven’t got the figures it just remembers it all for later, then at the end you press the button and it works out everything. And even better, they said they owed me £80 🙂

If only every online service was as good. A short while ago we tried to open a savings account with the Northern Rock and gave up as the applet-based system they use is not compatable with Apple Macs … other banks seem to be able to use SSL for security and browser-independent HTML, so why not them! Suffice to say we went elsewhere.

Even worse was an experience early last year. I’d given a seminar at another university and submitted an expense claim. The university sent me payment advice as an email, but it displayed oddly when I viewed it and got a high spamassassin rating. A bit of digging and I found that the high spam rating was due to the fact that there was not a closing body tag in the HTML. I was going to mail the university IT support and then saw that the company who supplied the software, Albany Software, was named in the email and decided to mail them directly to avoid embarassing them to their client.

So I went to their web site … but it didn’t display properly in Firefox, I tried Safari … even worse! Eventually I got their ‘support’ contact email by using view source and mailed them, mentioning both the broken HTML in the email and the broken website.

The reply from their ‘support’ email:

“Try using Microsoft Internet Explorer. Though Firefox is vastely superior, most websites/applications are only compatible with Internet Explorer.”

Who said the days of the old sys admins had gone!

The happy end to the last story is that I just revisited their site, they have at last got it working cross browser … well I guess better late than never.

Anyway thumbs up for Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, even if others need to catch up a little.