We're into the last few weeks before the General Election. At least, I assume we are, our Glorious Leader having apparently neglected to officially call one, and seeming to want to hang on until the last possible minute. And who can blame him, frankly? The poll numbers have been showing the Conservative lead evaporating recently, going down from a lead of around 18% last July to a mere 7% or so. The Budget seems to have pushed it back in their favour (not unusually, given how people don't tend to like being told they're going to pay more), but whether that's the start of a new trend back towards the blue end of the scale or a mere blip on the way to the great British public being completely undecided is something we just won't know for a little while longer.
Either way, it's an exciting time in politics, and the pollsters are having a lovely time. But how do we interpret the poll results? Well, I've been letting my geeky side (which is, I must admit, pretty enormous compared to my non-geeky side) run riot a little more than usual, with the result that I'm now in a position to put forward a tentative projection.
There's two main ways of predicting Parliamentary results based on poll figures. The first is the Uniform Swing Projection. In a nutshell, this method compares the vote share predicted by a poll with the vote share at the previous election to calculate the swing towards or away from each party, then applies that swing to the vote share in each separate constituency.
It's not the most sophisticated way of doing predictions, and suffers from a few limitations. For example, a strong negative swing can result in a prediction of zero votes for a party, which is fairly unlikely. It also fails to take into account boundary changes and the size of a constituency, and is likely to hit particular problems in an election like this one where a number of MPs have resigned or have had their reputations tarnished by the expenses scandal. It's a good place to start, though, and gives you a reasonable idea of the general trend of the election.
So, what's the prediction? Well, based on the most recent YouGov poll listed on the UK Polling Report, which gives figures of 38% Conservative, 31% Labour, 19% Lib Dem, 12% other, I'm projecting a Hung Parliament with the Conservative Party short of a majority by 51 seats. That's not far off UK Polling Report's current projection of a Conservative shortfall of 19, so I think I'm in the right neck of the woods.
Of course, that's only one poll, and I've heard bad things about YouGov (it's an online outfit, which does make them susceptible to outside influence). So let's see some more recent results, with my projections.
29th March (YouGov), Con 39% Lab 32% LD 18%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 35
29th March (Opinium), Con 38%, Lab 28%, LD 18%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 3
28th March (ComRes), Con 37%, Lab 30%, LD 20%. Projection: Hung Parliament, Con down by 59
27th March (BPIX), same results as ComRes above
All of which seems to suggest that there may be quite a bit of variability, but the Conservatives have a lot of work to do if they want to form a majority government.
I've got some more work to do on my projection model, and I've had some ideas for getting it a bit more accurate, so watch this space for more details (I'm also going to open-source my code shortly so you can play around with it for yourself). Until then, I'm going to leave the parties to frantically scrabble for those extra few votes...
An amazing piece of technological achievement, unrivalled in the history of the Internet, or:
Terrifyingly creepy?
Answer: Yes.
Let's be clear on a couple of points. Google undoubtedly has every right in the world to take photos in public spaces, and to make those photos freely available to anyone who wants to see them. It's a right that photographers have enjoyed pretty much since photography was invented, and it is an important part of our freedom of expression that we can photograph those things that some people would rather we not photograph. Inconvenient it may sometimes be, but that's part of the price of a free society.
What's more, the technological advances that have made Street View possible are nothing short of stunning. Digital cameras have been around in some form since the '70s, GPS since the '90s, and 360-degree photographs since at least 1980. Yet all these elements only came together in 2007, when Google launched Street View in the States and allowed thousands of people to walk haltingly along rather pixelated virtual streets, gawking at their surroundings in a way that previously they could have done only by, well, actually going there. So Street View is undoubtedly a good thing in those respects. But — and this is important — although something might be legal, and although it might be cool, that does not necessarily make it a sensible thing to do. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Google may have something to learn from Facebook here.
Facebook has the capability to simultaneously stir deep, virulent rage and fanatical loyalty within the hearts of its users. They may log in every day to tirelessly check their status, but change the layout by a single pixel and they will have no mercy. You'd have thought that the site's owners would notice this, but apparently not — back in 2006, they seemed genuinely surprised that their proud unveiling of the News Feed feature, which gathered data from all of a user's friends and presented it in a very information-rich format, was greeted with sheer horror by thousands of users.
Facebook's response to the unprecedented amounts of bile pouring towards them was simply "But you put this information here in the first place! Why are you angry that people can see it?" On the face of it, that's not unreasonable. What they failed to take into account, though, was that the context in which that information had been put onto the site was very different to the context in which it was now being presented, perhaps to the point that users would not have entered that information had they known it would be broadcast to everyone they vaguely knew.
It was an easy mistake to make, to be fair. Cultural standards are frequently illogical and inflexible — clothing styles that would be seen as modest on a Hawaiian beach would be taken as a sign of disgusting immorality in conservative Middle Eastern countries, for example — and on the Internet, cultures spring up, clash and meld at terrifying rates. Facebook's owners had spent years in an environment where they were dealing every day with tons of personal information, and they had lost sight of the value that their users put on it.
In the same way, Google, caught up in their excitement at this Really Cool Thing, didn't realise that there are some things that people simply would not have done if they knew they'd be visible to anyone and everyone. That doesn't need to imply that these things are embarrassing or immoral in themselves — if I were, for instance, going out with someone but hadn't told anyone because I wasn't sure whether it would work out, I wouldn't necessarily want pictures of me at a romantic candlelit dinner being splashed onto the Internet where certain rather excitable members of my family could see them. (Yes, that example is entirely hypothetical. Calm down.) Privacy isn't something that is required only when you're doing something questionable, it's something that we can and should be able to expect at all times.
It's not a new concept — if I may go all Scriptural for a second, Paul says in 1 Corinthians that "everything is permissible for me — but not everything is beneficial." Street View is immensely cool (hey, look, you can even see the bike racks we installed on the house in Oxford where I lived in 2007!) and it's also legal. It's just not necessarily a very good idea, and I really hope they can work out the kinks so that it can be another classic Google product: awesome, and only a tiny bit evil.
In our modern technologically-connected world — of which you're seeing evidence right now, seeing as this content is being delivered to you from Google's servers in LA, despite the fact that I wrote it in a flat in Enfield — information is the new currency. That's really not much of an exaggeration. Especially now that the economy is imploding spectacularly, any edge that a company can get over its rivals is going to be ruthlessly exploited. And if they can dress up such an edge as actually being for the benefit of their customers, all the better.
Supermarket loyalty cards are a great example. These schemes started off as something of a white elephant for the supermarkets — although they're a big draw for customers, they cost a lot to keep going and probably offer little tangible benefit to the retailer (anyone who shops in a particular place often enough to want a loyalty card is unlikely to be regularly shopping elsewhere anyway) — but once one of them started offering the scheme, everyone else jumped on board in an attempt not to get left behind. That means that supermarkets have desperately floundered to make money out of it ever since, and one of the ways they can do that is to use the information they gather.
Consider what information the supermarket has about you. If they know everything that you buy in their shops, they can estimate the size and composition of your family, your average alcohol consumption, your waistline (those pizzas add up), your social schedule (so how often are you buying multi-packs of Doritos?) and your general economic situation. And that means that they can, in theory, target their marketing very accurately. For example, if they work out that, statistically speaking, it's a likely week for you to buy ice-cream, they can draw your attention to the special offers they have on the expensive brands. If you haven't bought chocolate in the last three weeks, they might push Weight Watchers products.
We almost certainly will never see the exact information held about us, although I suppose a Data Protection Act request might be interesting. There's one time when you get to see the conclusions drawn by the supermarket very clearly, though, and that's when they send you money-off vouchers. This is the most precise form of marketing that they can produce, so it'll always be the most information-rich time in your relationship with your local retailer.
Obviously, I find this concept slightly creepy, but at the same time I'm an absolute sucker for finding out interesting stuff about myself. That's why I like last.fm, despite it having almost no practical use — being able to point to a summary ofeverything I've ever listened to when connected to their service is kind of fun, and tells me a lot about my music taste. So I had a rather enjoyable little moment the other week, when I found some of the coupons Tesco had sent me in the past few months.
One of the things that always staggers me about the current state of technology is how quickly it changes. (And people who know me well are probably sick to death of me banging on about it. To those people, I apologise. Go and look at pretty photos of London while I talk to everyone who hasn't got bored.) Ten years ago, the Internet was slow, video was available only in postage-stamp sized RealVideo clips, Google was little more than a gleam in its founders' eyes, message forums and Java-based chatrooms were about as far as interactivity went, and the concept of MMORPGs was limited to text-based MUDs.
Nowadays, the web is growing faster than ever before, hosting costs are tumbling (my total costs for Ballpoint Banana currently come in at under £10 per year), and speeds are soaring. However, some aspects have not changed that much, and one of them is the physical infrastructure used to deliver all this shiny content into our vastly overpowered computers. Despite valiant efforts by Virgin (among others) to get optical fibres deployed on a major scale, pretty much everyone in the UK uses existing cables – either their phone lines or their TV cables. Well, apart from the 9% who are still on dialup for some unfathomable reason.
Wireless may be gaining popularity among home users, but it's only once the cable has made it into the user's home that this can happen. To some extent, that's a good thing, as it means the user has complete control over the hardware they have, instead of the ISP saying that customers need a specific type of wireless access. However, it is dramatically stifling the growth of public wireless.
"Public wireless", in this case, means access to the Internet that you can get anywhere (or anywhere reasonably urban, anyway). It's something of a niche at the moment, its use generally limited to people who carry laptops with them. However, with the entry into the market of ultraportable laptops like the Asus Eee, or phone-sized devices like my Nokia N800, people are starting to want to get access to the web wherever they are. Oh, and they don't really want to have to squint at it, either.
There's been two main attempts to bring public wireless to reality, and again, both of them are based on existing technology. The first uses the extensive mobile phone network, along with GPRS data transfer technology, to get the web onto phones, and the second uses the standard wired internet access technology and sticks wireless broadcasters on the end.
The mobile phone camp has the advantage that the mobile phone network already covers something like 95-99% of populated areas (that's a guess, but it's probably not far wrong), and has the secondary advantage that if you're the type of person who wants to browse the internet on the move, it's a near certainty that you already have a mobile. Apple and O2 have grabbed this opportunity with both hands, and are flogging the iPhone to customers on its Internet capabilities like there's no tomorrow.
However, there are disadvantages too, the main one being that mobile Internet access is still slow (GPRS just can't compare to ADSL or cable) and expensive. Let's not forget either that the screen size to which mobile users are accustomed was designed for showing phone numbers, not websites, and manufacturers are having a hard time cramming an entire web page into a screen and keeping the phone a reasonable size.
This is where the "extended wired access" camp can score highly. Wi-fi is now an accepted technological standard, to the extent that almost all laptops now come with it by default, and it works so fast that the limiting factor in the connection speed will almost always be at the service provider's end, not the device. It's also not restricted to any one type of device, so desktops, laptops and ultra-mobile devices can all use it (and talk to each other) equally well. Its disadvantage is that it's primarily been sold as a home or office technology, rather than for public places, so if you can pick up a wireless signal in the street or in a train station, it will either be very weak, or it will be...
...oh dear...
...a subscription service. There's a couple of these, notably The Cloud and BT Openzone. They show up on a wireless device as an unsecured wireless network, but if you connect to them they will deliver nothing except a "please pay us money" splash page until you pay inordinately expensive rates. (£4.50 for an hour? What is this, 1995?) Now, if I were using the internet for business purposes on the move, I can see that this might be a good deal. For the casual user, though, it's a horrifically bad deal, and you're much better off just wandering around until you can find someone who's left their network unlocked so you can nick access off them.
The way around this, I reckon, is for these service providers to recognise that when people are accessing the web on the move, for the most part they only want it for a few minutes. Maybe they're in a pub and want to identify the singer currently warbling on the sound system, or they're in a train station trying to get to the National Rail website, or they've just thought of a hilariously witty comment to post on their blog which they will definitely forget by the time they reach a net-connected computer. (And yes, all three of these situations have happened to me within the last few weeks. Apart from the whole "hilariously witty" thing.) They certainly don't want to pay for an entire hour – anything that will take that long can almost certainly wait until they get home.
This means that the way to get massive public uptake of public wireless access is, quite simply, to drop the prices for intermittent access incredibly low or even free. There should be a way to buy longer-term access (perhaps on a subscription basis), for people who actually need to use the web for hours when on the move), and this could come with other benefits such as higher speeds or prioritised traffic.
(Quick note - no, that doesn't violate Net Neutrality, because it gives priority to users, not websites. The network in this case doesn't care what you're looking at, only how you're looking at it.)
If that's how it should happen, will it? Basically, no. BT and others have sunk a lot of money into their infrastructure, and they're going to want to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, even if it doesn't build up future markets as fast as it could. The problem is the one that I touched on above – the underlying internet infrastructure hasn't changed much, so there's a lot invested in it, and the change that would be required to easily provide widely available public net access (like Wi-MAX) is slow, expensive and riskier than just using the current technology.
There is a bright side, and it's the fact I pointed out right up at the top of this piece: technology develops ridiculously fast. Pretty much every prediction made about how technology is going to develop has turned out to be wrong in some way, so it really wouldn't surprise me if some ingenious entrepreneur suddenly changed the face of wireless internet in much the same way that Freeserve did for dialup ten years ago. We can but hope. Type the rest of your post here.
It's amazing how wide the definition of "geek" can really be. Just this last weekend, I was with some of my old friends from school, most of whom have gone down the "Magic: The Gathering" and/or D&D geek route. At work, it's much more the "I've reprogrammed my washing machine to cook a three-course meal" type.
And me? I like shiny gadgets.
That's the newest addition to my selection of shiny things. (Incidentally, if you got the reference in that photo you're another kind of geek altogether.) The N800 is a strange beast, not quite a phone, not quite an ultraportable laptop, certainly not the size it appears to be in that photo. It's larger than an iPhone, smaller than a paperback book, has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth but no phone communications, gets a better wireless internet connection than my laptop, and manages to demonstrate effectively just how badly Facebook have screwed up their page layout.
Because it's based on Linux, the open source operating system (called Maemo) is very open and extensible. Indeed, if I were the Linux brand of geek, I'd be happily rewriting the kernel right now and tweaking various options. As it is, I've been happily downloading programs that other people have made, so I now have two bits of mapping software, two media players, an FM radio (which uses the headphone cable as an antenna - nifty bit of design there), a couple of games, and all manner of other things.
Although I could be writing this blog post on it, I'm not. That's because, cute and powerful though the N800 is, its text input does leave something to be desired. It's not really their fault - entering text on a touchscreen is difficult at the best of times, and on a tiny touchscreen it's even harder. They've done the best they could; the handwriting recognition is better than most I've seen, and the full-screen finger keyboard is superb. That said, if I was going to be writing anything of any length – like this post – I'd probably either write on another computer (like I'm doing) or SSH or VNC onto the N800 and use another computer's keyboard.
That's the other thing that makes it such a powerful little machine: its openness means it can interoperate with other machines very easily. With a USB cable in the side, it talks to my Windows machine perfectly well (it simply shows up as a USB drive); any type of server with a Linux implementation can be run on it, so it can communicate in practically any way. I nearly installed an FTP server on it the other day before seeing sense.
And, of course, because it has Linux it also comes with Python, the only programming language I'm remotely good at. I haven't done any coding for a while now (when it's your job to test bits of code, doing it in your free time loses its appeal somewhat), but I have several ideas on the table. Keep an eye out for new stuff soon.
I appreciate that this entire post has seemed like something of an advert for Nokia, but you can probably tell that I'm rather excited by this new and pretty thing. Normal service will be resumed as soon as I've stopped giggling.
It was with great reluctance, about a year and a half ago, that I bought a mobile phone. I just don't like being reachable at every hour of every day, and it really is such a drain on your bank balance if you use it more than the very slightest bit. What's more, having never really liked answering machines either (if it's that important they'll call back, for goodness' sakes), I've ended up with one of those too, thanks to the miracles of voicemail.
It is, however, sometimes worth it. This morning, when I switched on my mobile (having left it to charge overnight), I was greeted immediately by the strains of The Who's "Baba O'Riley" as my voicemail called me (what? It makes a great ringtone) to let me know what I'd missed. And what had I missed? Click the play button below to find out.
(If you don't have Flash installed, that won't work - right-click here to download the MP3 instead.)
Sorry about the interference, by the way - my laptop didn't enjoy trying to record that.
Bear in mind that my voicemail message is not just a standard "I'm not here, leave a message." Oh, no. For in a rather poor attempt at comedy, I had recorded a long and rambling message in which I claimed to be my own personal assistant, eager to take down any message that the caller might give me. That means that this confused woman, whoever she is, had plenty of time in which to realise that actually I wasn't who she was expecting, and to hang up.
But no. Instead, I got what might well be one of the strangest ways to start the day, when a woman you don't know starts speaking into your ear, telling you that she's going mad. So, Nicky Bailey, if you happen to be reading this:
Have you ever noticed that, in a news story about some new and tiny piece of electronics or other technology, the expression "the width of a human hair" is almost guaranteed to appear? It seems to be the standard comparison for anything smaller than a millimetre, and yet it's not that good a comparison. Yes, we can see our own hairs, but because their length is by far the more obvious property, we just can't really process the idea.
However, we can process comparisons with bigger things. If you tell someone that an object is the width of a matchstick, or a Routemaster double-decker bus, or an Olympic swimming pool, then it's much easier. So, I reckon that what we need is an easy comparison between these different objects. (This idea's already partly been done by Chrico, with the Double Decker Bus Calculator; I'm going to try to do something a little different.)
First, we need to know how long or wide each of these things are. Below is a table of several objects, the approximate size of which everyone knows, but I've also included their actual size, using the best data I could find. To make the calculations easier, I've included the equivalent in metres.
Object
Size
Equivalent (m)
Human hair (width)
50 μm
0.00005
Matchstick (width)
2 mm
0.002
Mobile phone (Nokia 5310, length)
104 mm
0.104
A4 paper (length)
297 mm
0.297
Office chair (height)
93 cm
0.93
Volkswagen Beetle 1500 (length)
4026 mm
4.026
Routemaster double-decker bus (length)
8.4 m
8.4
Olympic-size swimming pool (length)
50 m
50
International rugby union pitch (length)
100 m
100
Wembley Stadium's arch (span)
315 m
315
Distance from London to Edinburgh
404 miles
650175
Diameter of the Earth
7926.28 miles
12756111
Hopefully, that was instructive. (Could be worse...I almost included the parsec as a unit, except that a) no-one knows what it is, and b) I don't think I could handle the calculations involved.) Now, all we need to do is set up an easy way of converting between these units...
Oh look, I appear to have found one. Type the distance you wish to convert into various other things in the box (in metres), then click "Go!". Alternatively, click one of the object names to fill in the box automatically.
There's something oddly pleasing about a huge amount of nicely-sorted data. This obviously doesn't hold if you have to sort through the data manually (I have very bad memories of the weeks I spent on Excel analysing my research project this time last year), but being able to pull up complex-looking summaries from a vast body of data is basically the geek equivalent of performing a perfect violin concerto.
The people behind Audioscrobbler - the database on which Last.fm runs - understand this principle extremely well, and have incorporated some extremely easy ways of grabbing all sorts of statistics out of their database. For starters, they have a huge page of automatically-updating XML files, which you can download and use pretty much however you like.
Just to see how easy it was to do this, I spent an hour or so this afternoon hacking together a little Python script that looks at any Last.fm user's most-listened-to artists, then compares that list to the most-listened-to artists in an entire country. The result is that you get a rough-and-ready comparison of your music taste as compared to, say, the entire United States. If you have a Last.fm account and want to have a go, I've hosted it on the (somewhat rickety but still pretty good) Utility Mill site. Enjoy yourselves - and if you're curious, my username's "zsige". (Utility Mill restricts scripts to just 2 seconds of run time, which is often not really enough - try again if it doesn't work for you the first time.)
Given that I'm by no means an excellent programmer - and that therefore someone who was could do some considerably more exciting things with this technology - Audioscrobbler is clearly onto a winner. Sadly, their generosity doesn't seem to be typical. A quick Google search only turns up a couple of similar services (notably the BBC, which doesn't surprise me in the least), and most of the people who are putting their databases online are charging for it. That's understandable, but seeing the potential that Audioscrobbler has - just by limiting users to, on average, one hit of the database every second - I wish that we saw more people doing this.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to see what I can do with the BBC data...
The use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in films has come a hugely long way since it was first introduced. Obviously, that was a long time ago - the first use (according to Wikipedia) was in 1973's Westworld. Given the general speed of development in the computing industry, a hypothetical alien who has just landed on our planet might assume that by now, CGI has advanced to being completely perfect and realistic. (Whether such an alien exists, and why he'd be particularly interested in technological advances in film and TV, are questions that are somewhat beyond me right now).
Sadly, our alien friend would be disappointed. Although CGI has been enthusiastically taken up by studios throughout the industry, it can be just as unconvincing as it was back in the day. So why is this? To find out, let's look at some examples of good and bad practice in CGI use.
Jurassic Park (1993) - The T-Rex attack
For my money, this is not only the best scene in the movie, it's one of the best scenes in any film that I've ever seen. Notice how the scene isn't about the T-Rex - it's shot almost entirely from the perspective of Alan (Sam Neill) and the children (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello), meaning that they're the characters we focus on. The scene is also completely unscored, letting the rain and the thunder do all the work that music might otherwise ruin. (The sudden crash of thunder right after the goat's leg hits the jeep is far more effective than the orchestra hit you might expect.)
Understatement of this type is the main reason why this scene works so well, and the same thing is true of the CGI. A lot of the work is done with puppets - despite several shots of the T-Rex being completely synthetic, these shots are short and don't require much in the way of movement. The result is a completely convincing scene that still gives me goosebumps 15 years on. The Abyss (1989) - Trailer
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) - Fleeing through Moria
Watching the first 30 seconds of this clip will be enough for our purposes, but feel free to watch the rest if you like a bit of silly yet epic cinema. Now, if you're going to have your characters run across a gigantic underground hall, the likes of which has never been seen in this world, it might be tempting to spend a lot of time on the hall itself. This is, apparently, what the film makers chose to do. Unfortunately, this means that they were not concentrating on less grand things, such as good motion animation of the main characters. And as all eyes at this point are on the main characters, it becomes really rather obvious that they are waddling at high speed with exaggerated arm movements. Maybe this sequence was actually an extended advert for Lord of the Rings Action Figures.
Constantine (2005) - Demon-slaying
The weird thing about this scene (apologies for the awful quality, by the way) is that it would have been superb as a cut-scene in a videogame of Constantine. For all I know, maybe it was. As it is, the use of a CGI Keanu Reeves almost all the way through, even in little shots where they could easily have used bluescreen, produces an oddly shiny and rubbery look to the scene. Especially at the moment (at about 0:25) where "Reeves" spins the magazine on his shotgun, there's something very wrong about his hands - I think it's that they look too solid and meaty. I saw this movie at the cinema, and I think I was laughing all the way through this scene; even in a film where plot consistency, theology and even basic physics go right out the window, you just can't get away with vastly over-egging the CGI pudding and expect the audience not to notice.
Casino Royale (2006) - Final scene
Don't play this clip unless you've already seen the film! It spoils the ending, and whoever stuck it on Youtube has also inexplicably put the Pirates of the Caribbean music on top of it. If you have seen the film and don't mind inexplicable piratey music, read on.
I wouldn't normally say anything bad about Casino Royale, because not only is it a brilliant film, it's also excellent when it comes to CGI use. When Bond drives a JCB through a fence and his enemy has to run up a wall to evade him? They actually did that. When they jump from crane to crane 200 feet up? They did that too, with safety harnesses but no other tricks.
The CGI in this sequence is fairly subtle, and you may not have noticed it. Watch it again if you didn't. For those too bored or lazy to keep guessing, I'll tell you - the house on the lakeshore is entirely built in CGI. Even though it's not obvious unless you're looking for it, as soon as you realise that it's not real, you start to notice the flaws. The motion of the car is too perfect. The camera movement is too smooth. The lighting is too crisp. All of these little things, hardly noticeable in their own right, add up to an effect that just spoils the scene for me. It's entirely possible to do buildings successfully in CGI, and in fact Batman Begins, another film which generally does everything for real, pulls it off extremely successfully. I'm not sure why Casino Royale doesn't manage it, but for me it's an annoyance that detracts from an otherwise brilliant film.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - Legolas vs Huge Elephant Thingy
Now, this one is just silly. While it was obviously great fun to script (and would have made a supremely fun addition to Tolkien's original writing, had he been given to writing awesome stunt sequences), it was just too much for the special effects boys to handle. Once again, we're stuck with a sequence that looks like a cut scene from a videogame, complete with unconvincing movement, plastic-like skin tone and a synthetic actor that manages to be even more wooden than Orlando Bloom. I have to admit, it does still look fantastic; there is a definite problem, though, with any sequence that causes you to say "well, for an entirely impossible action it looked good". The whole point of special effects is to make you believe the impossible; this doesn't.
There are several other scenes and films that I could have mentioned here (the unconvincing wolves from The Day After Tomorrow, the unbelievably poorly done Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars Episodes I & II, the excellent motion-captured Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and so on), but I think you get the picture already. So what makes a good CGI scene? I think we can list some ideas...
Understated. You want the audience to notice the story, not the effects. If they come out of the cinema going "the effects were AMAZING!" rather than "I loved the scene where...", you're doing it wrong.
Plausible. The reason we don't believe that Legolas couldn't take down the elephant-type thingy isn't so much to do with the effects - it's more that we had never seen Legolas do anything as ridiculous throughout the rest of the trilogy. If you build up a character slowly (eg. Spider-Man), you can get away with a whole lot more than if you suddenly give him completely stupid powers that no-one has ever done before. Of course, stunning new effects can work (Bullet-Time in The Matrix, for example), but only if they are done really well.
Within the bounds of current technology. Right now, a fully CGI human is just not plausible. The skin, the muscle movement and the way each part interacts with all the others is far too complex to pull off in any kind of sustained fashion - stick to what works.
Willingness not to use it. The rooftop chase scene in The Bourne Ultimatum works as well as it does because every shot was done by a stuntman. Yes, CGI probably could have been used - but it looked a whole lot better done for real.
That's a list that could be extended enormously, but I think I'll leave it up to you to do so. In the meantime, I'll leave you with one of the most shockingly brilliant stunts in the history of cinema - Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Copyright notice: All video clips, with the exception of the Steamboat Bill, Jr. clip (which is public domain), are copyright their respective owners. I believe that their use in this context - comment and research - constitutes fair dealing, but in other contexts this might not apply. None of the clips are released under my Creative Commons licence.
I mentioned some time back that I'd been searching for a decent free music player and library program, and that I was having some severe problems with this task. In fact, I may even have been so rash as to say that Windows Media Player 10 was the best that I could find.
Not any more.
I may as well state at this point that I have freakishly stringent requirements for music players. This can seem rather ridiculous, given that I'm more than happy to just use a CD player if I have the disc to hand, but then the old factor of "I never knew this product existed and now I must have the best version of it possible" kicks in. Anyway, here are the features that WMP10 had, and why they were important to me...
Two-pane flexible library view. This may seem like an odd requirement, but once I'd seen the ability to list and sort all artists and albums in one pane, then bring up all relevant tracks in the other, I couldn't do without it. This, by the way, is why I can't stand WMP11 - keeping in line with the trend in Microsoft's latest products of removing useful and standard functionality, it severely restricts what you can do with the left-hand pane and turns it into a crippled version of iTunes.
(And makes the menu bar extremely difficult to find. The menu bar. Possibly the most standard feature in computing over the past 15 years, and they try to get rid of it. Complete insanity.)
The mini-player. Having all the controls on the taskbar, the one place on the desktop where they will never be in the way and yet always be accessible, was a stroke of genius.
Sorting by Album Artist. Sorting tracks only by Artist means that the list of artists gets incredibly cluttered, with separate entries for anyone who contributed to a single track. I'm something of a purist when it comes to listening to whole albums as the artists intended (get behind me, shuffle function!), so I particularly like being able to see only an artist's albums.
WMA functionality. I don't like the WMA format much - it's locked and proprietary, and often includes DRM - but because much of my music is from CDs owned by other members of my family, and they ripped it using WMP, the ability to play WMA files was important.
Strange as it may seem, for months I couldn't find anything other than WMP10 that could do all of these things. Winamp can play WMAs, but has a truly bizarre library layout (or it did last time I tried it, anyway); iTunes is just as locked as WMP and lacks the right kind of 2-pane layout; RealPlayer is simply ugly (and who uses RealAudio any more?); and the simpler options like foobar2000 and VLC don't have adequate library functions.
This was unfortunate, as what I was really looking for was something that could also do the following things.
Index Ogg Vorbis files. Ogg is a free and open music format, and I've been meaning to re-rip my CDs into that format for a while now. Although WMP can be patched to play Ogg files, it steadfastly refuses to put them in the library.
Receive and index podcasts. Especially now that Radio 4 has started offering The Now Show as an unrestricted MP3 podcast, making long train journeys much more pleasant. If only they would use a similar strategy for TV, rather than the heavily restricted iPlayer.
I've been keeping an eye open for players with this functionality for quite a while now, but had almost always been disappointed. So when, fairly recently, I heard about the beta version of MediaMonkey 3, it was almost unreasonably exciting. I tried MediaMonkey back when it was in version 2.something, but didn't like it much. It got many things right, but it was ugly and difficult to use. The mini-player, in particular, took up much of the system tray and constantly got in the way. So when I downloaded the beta and found that not only had they added several functions, they had also overhauled the entire interface and made it much sleeker, it was a good sign.
And then, at the end of December, it came out of beta. I downloaded it a couple of days ago, and have yet to see any major bugs. It's fast, clean, functional and (mostly) free - the functions that you have to pay to unlock aren't those I'd want anyway. I haven't yet tried to rip or burn CDs with it, but WMP was never all that reliable for those functions anyway. The design is good - in particular, nothing on the mini-player takes more than one click. Flexibility is found throughout, letting you resize and reorder practically everything. It's built on much of the same basis as Winamp, so plugins and extensions for Winamp will usually work on MediaMonkey too. I think my quest is at an end.
My debit card expired the other week. I know, I know...this isn't really the most fascinating of topics ever addressed. However, due to a lucky combination of circumstances (1. I didn't put it into an ATM after it expired, so it didn't get eaten; 2. I tend to take almost anything to pieces), I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to dissect the old card. I'm not certain what I hoped to achieve with this activity, but no matter - it successfully wasted several hours, and hopefully you'll find it entertaining too!
A couple of quick notes before we start. First, this post is full of photos. The files aren't huge, but they do load at 800x600 resolution (I'm using the cheater's version of thumbnailing, I'm afraid), so I'm putting all of them behind the cut. If you're on dialup, you may wish to wait until you've found some broadband, or you might be here some time!
Secondly, for goodness' sake don't try this at home unless a) you're using one of your own cards, b) you are absolutely certain you won't need it any more, and c) you completely destroy it afterwards. Identity theft is a major problem nowadays; you'll be able to see what steps I've taken against it later in the post. If that's all OK, on we go with the dissection! The only things that you'll need for this operation are:
An expired credit or debit card
A pair of ordinary kitchen scissors
A penknife, or Stanley knife, or at a pinch just very strong fingernails
The first thing that I did was to make three horizontal cuts across the card, making sure one of them went through the card number.
This not only helps to make the card number illegible, it also makes it much easier to peel off the card's layers. As far as I can make out, the card is made of at least 7 layers; a central white core, with one hard coloured layer and two layers of transparent film on either side. The two transparent layers are pretty much impossible to separate except by accident, so you can treat them as one; they carry most of the important bits of the card. Specifically, the magnetic strip is part of them, so that's what I tried to remove next.
Scoring a line with the penknife didn't work too well near the edge... ...but it did work right in the middle, making it easy to peel off the magnetic strip in both directions. There was much more resistance at the edges, so I reckon either the glue is stronger there or the layers are sealed more closely.
The text under the strip reads "3 Track HiCo Black Magnetic Tape"; for those who are wondering what that means, scan through the FAQs from Intercard.co.uk. I had no way of reading the contents of the tape itself, but I imagine it holds just the card number.
With the magnetic tape's possibilities exhausted, I moved on to the middle segment of the card, and removed the film carrying the hologram. This produced the only completely unexpected aspect of the card...
There's a bird hiding under the film! It's etched into it somehow, making it entirely invisible until the film is removed; I think it's probably a security measure, as it would be fairly obvious that the card's now been tampered with. That's supported by the fact that the bird looks very much like the one on the hologram. It's also visible on the film itself: The code numbers under the hologram (0 C E 2) return no meaningful hits in a Google search, so they're probably an internal reference to the type of hologram required.
The next thing to come off the card was the film from the bottom segment: No great revelations here, although it's interesting to notice what's been removed; most of the Visa logo is intact, but everything silvery has gone. Much of the metallic shimmering effect on the card's surface remained, so that must be part of the coloured layer.
Here's the card with most of the transparent film removed from the front. It looks like there might be something drawn on the top segment... ...but on closer examination I think it got there while I was peeling off the film; it does look rather like a fingerprint. Incidentally, this photo shows more clearly how all the silver colouring has come off with the film; the two layers of film are also apparent.
The last bit of film-peeling took me back to the middle segment, in order to remove the signature strip. This was very much like the magnetic strip, especially in that there was something underneath... In amongst the "VOID"s (I think it's fairly obvious by now that the card's void for purchases, really) there's a line of text reading "Oberthur C.S.3 89302 12/04". (The same text as appears above the magnetic strip and to the right, in fact...have a look at the third photo in this post.) While this produces no Google hits, there is a company called Oberthur Card Systems. So now we know who made the card; what the "3" means is anyone's guess, as is the "89302 12/04". (I got the card in 2006, and I doubt it was sitting in a warehouse somewhere for two years; it's also not a patent, as US Patent No. 89302 is for an "Improvement in Felt Suspender-End".)
Moving on, then, we come to the chip, of Chip&Pin fame. It popped out of its recess with very little force, leaving nothing behind and remaining remarkably intact. I find it a little worrying that the chip came out quite so easily; the fact that it's the only component which is obviously glued in also seems strange. The film was held on to the plastic very strongly, so what's stopping the chip from being held in the same way? Anyway, it does mean that we can get a good look at the chip itself. It's very, very tiny, with the vast majority of the recess being taken up by the contacts. Each one of these connects to a gold wire (probably gold, anyway), which in turn connects to the chip.
I peeled off the contacts fairly easily, although the central one was much more troublesome, and in fact left a lot of residue on the chip itself. That made it difficult to see properly, and obviously with something so tiny it's difficult to see any details anyway. Time, then, to dig out my dad's old microscope! The chip's very blurry because we're looking through the glue, although the wires are clearly visible. I'm not certain whether the little circle is a feature of the chip or merely an air bubble. By zooming in, we can see it more closely (along with some of the chip's surface). We can also see a close-up of the joint between the chip and the wire... ...and part of the circuit on the chip's surface... ...and the (surprisingly detailed and pretty) surface of the glue... ...and the joint between the wire and the contact pad (or where it used to be, anyway)... Either there was no joint at all between the contact and the wire (and contact was made through pressure alone), or the contacts were created already attached to the wire. I have no idea how that could have been done.
That's all the dissection that I carried out. The only thing left to do was to provide a bit of scale, so you can see just how tiny the chip is...
Here's the final dissected card with its components around it.
Remember I talked about identity theft at the beginning of the post? Here's where you find out how to avoid it...
Nice and simple!
So what does all of this mean? Well, it's clear that credit and debit cards are certainly very sophisticated little bits of plastic - I was surprised at how many different bits go into them, and how much of the visible detail has clearly been assembled rather than simply printed. The chip, in particular, is a beautiful little piece of engineering, and even things like the glue have unexpected details. On the whole, it's a great demonstration of one of the rules of life, as brought to us by the wonderful xkcd: "You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think 'some engineer was frustrated while designing this.' It's a little human connection."
Ever since Multimap arrived on the Internet, with its ability to switch into grainy aerial photos, looking at familiar things from the unfamiliar perspective of directly above has become startlingly popular. Google jumped on the bandwagon nice and early, and drove it relentlessly forwards with Google Earth and Google Maps. (Which included images of the Moon, for some reason.)
Microsoft, in a burst of originality (by which they seem to mean "let's do what Google are doing right now, but do it with a slightly shinier interface and with less cross-platform compatibility"), came up with a similar offering, Microsoft Virtual Earth. Presumably this was so-named because it was "virtually" their idea. Anyway, this means that the online map and image service is booming, so it wasn't really surprising that eventually the same obsession was going to capitalise on Google's moon photos and go off-planet.
All of which brings us neatly to today's NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day. The APOD is usually a visual feast anyway - this one is quite a good example, but this famous one is even better, not to mention this one. Today's offering, however, rather than being beautiful, is a little scary.
Obviously, we know that there's nothing down there. Yeah, it's a huge dark hole with immensely sharp edges that reveal the crust at that point to be so thin you could nearly put your finger through it, and you can't see what might be hiding just below the surface because it's dark, so dark, so incredibly dark that anything might be lurking down there, it might be about to creep out of the hole and we'd never know what was there, never, right up until the potential future missions to Mars go ahead, and our astronauts may be sitting in their spacecraft, congratulating each other as it touches down, and never have any idea of the horrors that lie just beneath their feet, ready to take them down, down into the dark silent hellish interior of that frozen, barren planet...
Hmm? Oh, sorry, I got sidetracked for a moment there. Nice picture, though, isn't it?
I use Microsoft Outlook to check my email at the moment, mainly because it was already on my laptop when I got it, and I've inherited a World War II-style mentality from my parents which means that I never, ever waste anything that could be remotely useful. (It was only relatively recently that my mother disposed of her collection of deodorant bottle lids. I wish I was joking.) More recently, the definition of "remotely useful" that I use has shifted slightly, based on how frequently I use different programs or utilities - for example, I use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, despite having a copy of IE, because I spend a lot of time on the Internet and Firefox is noticeably better for a number of tasks.
The chances that I'll drop Outlook, then, increase as I use email more often, but haven't yet reached the point at which it's worth switching to Thunderbird or something similar. That point did get much, much closer today, however, when Outlook decided to crash while carrying out the extremely arduous task of connecting to my Hotmail account. I sent in an error report (because I have also inherited boundless and indefatigable optimism from my parents) and got a link back for more information, which I dutifully followed.
Below is the complete text of the page that I reached.
Problem caused by Microsoft Office Outlook 2002: consider upgrading
The problem was caused by Microsoft Office Outlook 2002, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft Office Outlook 2002 is in its "Extended Support" phase. This phase of support for Microsoft Office Outlook 2002 began on July 11, 2006. Only security-related solutions are created by Microsoft for this version of Microsoft Office.
Recommendation
Consider upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Office to receive full support. Go online to learn how to upgrade.
We also recommend that you periodically go to the Office Update website. This will help to ensure that your computer stays updated with the latest updates to Microsoft Office.
After staring at this text for a moment, with my mouth hanging open most untidily, I then moved on to the "Was this information helpful?" section, clicked "No" as forcefully as I could manage, and entered the following text in the "How can we improve this information?" box:
How about including, you know, maybe some information beyond "give us more money so we can give you the next version of our software which will also crash at inopportune moments"? The advice "upgrade to the new version" is spectacularly unhelpful, and seems to give the impression that it is somehow normal for your software to spontaneously stop working once a new version comes out.
Of course, I made a mistake in writing this - I forgot that it is, in fact, completely normal for most software (not only that written by Microsoft, although they're one of the most notable offenders in this regard) to spontaneously stop working at any and all moments. I was enormously entertained to read this story recently, in which we discover that the usual way of dealing with computer problems on board the International Space Station is to switch it off and switch it on again. I have no doubt that in the future, when we're all using flying cars and linking up our cybernetic implants with the Internet in order to have video clips of robotic cats doing cute things projected onto our eyeballs, the same problems are going to keep on coming up, time after time. Any bets on when the Blue Retina of Death is first going to appear?
Youtube has just announced that they have created a number of country-specific versions of their service, so now it's possible to visit Youtube UK (for example) instead of the main US site. While I don't have any problems with this in principle, I am completely mystified by their explanation for going international in this way.
From their blog post linked above: "Video is universal, and the incredible variety of the international content that we see on YouTube confirms just that!" They then go on to announce that they are "looking forward to seeing communities develop between people in their local communities as well as among people around the world".
Err...surely that means that they've basically just corralled everyone into their own country-specific areas, reducing international interaction?
(In other news: at some point recently Google Account holders gained the ability to log into Youtube. I did not know this, but I am now honing my skills at typing the words "FAKE" and "lol this sux" into comment boxes.)
Microsoft has produced a website for their new product concept, called "Surface". Essentially, it's a touchscreen interface that lets you work with documents and media directly, with intuitive gestures to manipulate them on the screen, rather than having to use a mouse or keyboard to get in the way.
So why am I bothering to mention this? Because, despite Microsoft's extremely flashy site (which, incidentally, is running as slowly as a snail in a bowl of treacle on this connection, and includes interestingly frustrating little design flaws like the inability to close a video until it's fully running), this concept is not remotely new. Jeff Han demonstrated such a device last year (do follow that link - the video is immensely cool), and the technology for doing it is fairly well established. All that Microsoft are doing is trying to produce a consumer-level device building on this same technology.
To be honest, I think they'll have difficulty. The mouse-and-keyboard combination is so fully integrated into computing at the moment that change is going to be difficult, especially for those sectors of IT which need to be able to type fast (read: every sector except pure graphical design). For some purposes, I don't doubt that this technology will be useful, and I definitely want one.
Just not from Microsoft. Especially as the intro to their flashy website gives you this absolutely priceless screenshot, complete with dodgy colour gradients...
Yep, buffering definitely does feel familiar coming from these people.
If you've had your head in a bucket for the past few days, you won't have heard about the HD-DVD Title Key fiasco. Essentially, a keycode that allows you to break the copy-protection on the new high-definition DVD standard was found by a hacker going by the name of "muslix64". Even if your intention is to back up an HD-DVD that you have legally purchased, or even to watch it on your equipment rather than the equipment that the technology producers want you to use, it is technically illegal to break copy protection in this way.
(Incidentally, it is also illegal in this country to copy a CD to your computer's hard drive. I expect dawn raids on everyone with a copy of Windows Media Player within the next couple of days.)
That's more or less where the whole issue would have ended - HD-DVD isn't a particularly widespread technology yet, and in any case you need to have a certain degree of technical knowledge to use the keycode - but for the fact that the AACSLA, founded by a whole bunch of big tech companies, started sending out takedown notices under the US's incredibly flawed Digital Millennium Copyright Act in an attempt to stop the key from getting out into the public awareness.
If the material that they had been trying to stop had been, say, a 50-page PDF detailing complicated instructions, this strategy might have worked. When it's a number, though, that makes things rather trickier. You simply can't stop a 16-digit number from being transmitted across the internet, especially if you're a large technology consortium with a poor reputation for concern for customers who's made it very clear that you don't want it transmitted. This leaves us in the situation where knowledge of the number is growing by the minute - BoingBoing reported at 3am this morning that 368,000 sites were listed on Google as containing the keycode, up from only a couple of thousand the day before.
And what of the AACSLA? They've resorted to the only option available to them - they're changing the keycode and making everyone who's bought one of their players download an update so that it won't work with the code that's currently being copied at lightning speed. Of course, the fact that they're not changing anything else means that muslix64, or one of the many, many other intelligent young people with computers who now knows about this whole issue, can now extract the new keycode and start the whole business off again.
Oh, and the other option that they've also taken is to spin the issue to a ludicrous extent - go to their homepage (linked earlier) and count the number of times they use the word "attack" in reference to the code. This isn't an attack on their players - it adds functionality to them, rather than taking it away. All that it does is remove a restriction that was never going to stop serious hackers anyway, but does seriously inconvenience the general public (and you'll note that their solution will inconvenience the public even more). This kind of thing really does give the technology industry a bad name.
And by the way, Uncle Phil is about to Make Arithmetic Fun again. Multiply the entire population of the world by the number of pigs it would take to give everyone a ham sandwich. Then multiply your answer by the land area of the Isle of Skye (in square km). Lastly, multiply your result by the magic number 23.01122527.
It seems like more and more websites are trying to become Myspace these days. I've just found the official user page of Eels on Youtube, which bears more than a passing resemblance to your average Myspace artist page. In fact, Eels already have such a page (warning: autoplaying music, one of the most annoying aspects of any webpage ever implemented), which does make one wonder just what the point is. Facebook, too, is becoming ever more Myspace-like.
This trend towards internet homogeneity is probably not a good thing in the long run, as it makes it harder for new and interesting ideas to break through - they'll end up thinking that they have to be like Myspace, in the same way that certaincompanies decided that losing the penultimate vowel from your name meant that you were down with the kids. (Funny, I assumed that many more than 2 companies had done that. Weird how stereotypes spread so much faster than reality.)
In the short term, though, we get more content. In this particular case, it means that it's easier to get hold of Eels' videos quickly. Not that they weren't already available in some form, of course, but before, you couldn't let your blog readers watch a man in pyjamas perform a drum solo on a dustbin. Now, though...
I know none of you would be so stupid as to assume that I had the right to release this video under my usual CC licence, but just in case, this video has not been released under my CC licence.
