Planet Afterlife @ Seldo.Net

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I have very little idea who TV on the Radio are. I know they don’t make stonky electro-pop though, so it’s a bit of a woop woop to discover 1/3 of the band, David Sitek, has popped off to make just that with solo project Maximum Balloon.

The forthcoming album is 10 songs described as ‘thick, noisy and funky, with glam’ by Spin with each featuring vocals from different artists, including Little Dragon, Karen O and David Byrne.

Two tracks are out there so far: ‘Tiger’, whose funky afrobeat sound, you might have heard on the Daisy Lowe for Esquire pant moistening promo; and the Little Dragon featured ‘If You Return’ which combines a stuttering drumbeat with some chilly electronica. I’m really looking forward to the album, but for now here’s the pretty promo for ‘If You Return’. I’m assuming it’s a teaser rather than the whole thing?

By trixie at 08:32AM

There are certain songs I’ve heard so many times that I feel like I never need to hear again in my life. This might change when the burn has healed but Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ is certainly one of them. Or at least her version.

Now there’s a new version of the single being released in a few weeks by The Jolly Boys, a mento band from Jamaica who’ve been making music for over 60 years. Back in the 1940s they used to be quite the name on the Hollywood party circuit playing in particular for Errol Flynn after he bougth Port Antonio’s Navy Island and turned it into a party zone. His wife, Patrice, is the lady in the red hat in the video.

Just how much fun were they having making this video. there’s no way you can’t break into a grin watching the hugely charmismatic 72 year old lead singer Albert. He’s even the youngest member of the band. Brilliant.

‘Rehab’ is out 20th September on Wall of Sound and they’re playing a couple of live dates in the UK next week.

By trixie at 17:57PM

If this title does not interest you, here are some alternative, linkbait titles:

• Why ORM is the Dumbest Idea Ever
• Why NoSQL is a Terrible Idea
• OMADS: the future of data storage
• Why SQL Will Eventually Conquer The World

A little history

SQL was invented in the 1970s at the same time that "large-scale" (read: millions of rows) data stores came into existence. It triumphed over other query languages not because it was particularly great (though it was easier to read), but because it was standard. Everybody building a data store could write to the SQL standard without having to re-train all their clients and customers. It reduced friction all round. It was a huge success.

SQL is awkward

There's no escaping that SQL, as we use it day to day, is not pretty.

Keep in mind that what SQL is really designed to express is relational algebra, a type of logic essentially invented by the ridiculously clever E.F. Codd (along with nearly all the other theoretical underpinnings of relational databases). If you're not familiar with it, I find it helps to think about relational algebra as Venn diagrams: it's about sets intersecting with, unioning with, subtracting from, joining with each other. Find all the fruits in set A, with prices in set B, farmed by the farmer in set C. That kind of thing.

What it's not really for is collating, aggregating, and most especially filtering of data sets. The reason count(*) is so awkward is because that's not really what the language was designed to do. GROUP BY and ORDER BY clauses look tacked-on because they are (HAVING is an even more grievous hack, UNIQUE is a disaster, and let's not get started on LIMIT). Of course, in regular use of a data set, you nearly always want to do these things, which is why SQL provides them. SQL, loyal workhorse that it is, is nothing if not willing. But it might not be terribly quick.

So you're right. SQL -- the kind you write every day -- is ugly and awkward. In fact, it looks like hell on legs. And it's often pretty slow. And that's all because you're asking it to do something it, the language, is not really designed to do (whether the engine is designed to do it is another question). But it works, and in forty years since its invention we have come up with very little in the way of improvements and nothing close to powerful enough to be a replacement.

What about ORM?

I want to be very, very clear about this: ORM is a stupid idea.

The birth of ORM lies in the fact that SQL is ugly and intimidating (because relational algebra is pretty hard, and very different to most other types of programming). Our programs already have an object-oriented model, and we already know one programming language -- why learn a second language, and a second model? Let's just throw an abstraction layer on top of this baby and forget there's even an RDBMS down there.

This is obviously silly. You've stored your data in a way that doesn't match your primary use-case, accessible via a language that you are not willing to learn. Your solution is to keep the store and the language and just wrap them in abstraction? Maybe you'd do that if your data were in a legacy system and you needed to write a new front-end, but people slap ORM on new projects. Why the hell would you do that?

ORM is slower than just using SQL, because abstraction layers always are. But unlike other abstraction layers, which make up for their performance hit with faster development, ORM layers add almost nothing. In fact, often, if you need to do anything more complicated then a SELECT, you end up writing fragments of SQL or pseudo-SQL languages in order to tell the underlying RDBMS what you're trying to really do.

OMADS: data stores that match the application

ORM is dumb, and people noticed. So clever programmers looked at this ridiculous edifice and realized the real problem: the data store and the use-case were mismatched. So they threw away ORM, SQL, and RDBMS, and wrote lovely new key-value stores, or object stores, or document stores, or searchable indexes, or any of a half-dozen other data structures that more closely matched what they were trying to do. And because these data stores all turned up at a time when nearly all data stores were SQL-interfaced RDBMS, they got the name "NoSQL", even though the actual problem was the Relational model, not SQL itself. And because "Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores", or OMADS, is not catchy enough I guess.*

So I love NoSQL stores. My startup would literally be unable to function without memcache. I think Cassandra is nifty even if Twitter found it not worth the trouble of switching from MySQL. I think Redis is cool if a little buggy. MongoDB is awesome, and I'm probably going to be building a production system based on it quite soon. HDFS I use in production every day, and it still blows my tiny little mind. Really, the only think I dislike about them is the label "NoSQL", which as many people have already pointed out doesn't really say anything about what they are, just what they are not. And also because it makes people unfamiliar with the details of the situation think there's something Wrong, Bad or Old Fashioned about SQL. And programmers hate using anything that is any of those things.

What is the relational data model good for anyway?

So if your data store should always match your application, what application is it that RDBMS are perfect for? The answer is: all, and none.

We take this for granted these days, but the relational model is pretty magical. Set up a model of your entities, pour data into it, and get answers. How many teachers at the university earn over $100k but teach less than 20 students? How many customers who bought our newest product had never bought anything before? What were sales like on Tuesdays over the last 30 months? You don't have to know in advance what your questions will be; you don't have to write any special code to examine all the rows, or work out the most efficient strategy for combining the results: you just need to know how the data relate each other, and then you can ask ad-hoc questions and the database knows the answer. I remember the first time I really grokked that concept, and it filled me with nerdy joy.

If you pick the wrong data structure for your store when you're first writing your application, you can end up -- as happened to a team at my last job -- running crazy, days-long depth-first searches across distributed document stores in order to perform elementary operations like getting a total count of objects. So if you don't know all the questions you might need to ask about your data, the safest thing to do is put them in an RDBMS. And when you first start a project, you almost never know all the questions you're going to need to ask. So my advice: always use an RDBMS. Just don't only use an RDBMS.

Optimize, but be prepared for ad-hoc queries

Is your data really just a giant hash lookup? Then a key-value store is what you want. Do you primarily access your related data via a single key? Then a document store is for you. Do you need full-text searching? Then, dear god, use a text-indexing engine, not an RDBMS. Do you need to answer questions about your data that you can't predict in advance? Then make sure your data also ends up in an RDBMS. Maybe not in real-time, maybe summarized rather than in raw form, but somehow. Then when your co-founder asks "how many Xs happened in Y?" your answer won't be "uh, let me spend half a day writing code to find that out". Just throw down some SQL, and it'll give you an answer -- it'll take 5 minutes to return a single number, but that's a lot faster than half a day.

Because that's what SQL is for.

Post-SQL

If you scroll back to the top you'll see the description of the circumstances that gave birth to SQL: a whole bunch of new data stores came into existence at once, and the lack of a common language created friction and fragmentation. The same thing is happening again with the NoSQL crowd. If you decide to write your app using Cassandra, you better be sure it's what you want, because if you change stores you have to change all your code. It's the ultimate lock-in, and it's not the plan of an evil monopolist corporation, it's just an unfortunate side-effect.

Pretty soon, the same sort of clever people who noticed that ORM was a ridiculous hack will notice an opening for an actually useful abstraction layer: a single common API that can access all the NoSQL stores. Maybe it will be Thrift or Avro, but I'm not sure. I'd say the chance is about 50-50 that it will be SQL again.

SQL triumphant

And why not? Awkward it may be, but SQL is a lot more succint and readable than multiple lines of API calls or crazy, math-like relational algebra languages. And there's nothing intrinsically slow about the language itself. If you could run "SELECT * FROM table WHERE ..." on Cassandra, it would be no slower than specifying the same conditions via API calls. In fact, when trying to explain how to use its API, the MongoDB documentation lists the equivalent SQL queries. That's a pretty clear vote for the usability of SQL.

Computer programmers really like new, cool things. So when something like SQL hangs around for nearly 40 years, it either means nobody really cares about it -- I think we're clear that's not the case -- or that there's really nothing else that can do the job quite as well.

So go forth, use your OMADS, keep an RDBMS in your back pocket, and stop being so mean to poor old SQL.

* On the off-chance that anybody starts calling these things OMADS, remember: you heard it here first.

Updated 2010-07-13 to fix link to E.F. Codd; thank you Sordina!

By at 12:17PM

I've already posted this letter from the mother of a gay son to her local newspaper in Vermont to delicious, but it's worth putting in as many places as possible. It's really brilliantly written. The phrase in particular that I wish every anti-gay religionist in America was required to read before opening their mouths ever again:

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you.

I want this on a t-shirt. And a billboard. And written in the sky.

By at 21:41PM

Homemade videos need to have that special something to make you filter them out from your everyday norm. Hurts had the eyebrow raising dancing lady on their first £20 video and now Lana Del Ray weaves together old movies, bottles of drink and herself wearing a movie star wig in black & white.

The movie star image is what Lana’s rocking. Her real name is plain old Lizzy Grant and according to her press release she’s been roaming the musical world for a little while. Who hasn’t though? Here’s an old interview with plain old Lizzy from a couple of years ago. Now though she’s in London and spending time songwriting with pop legend Biffco. There’s a slight hint of Paloma in her voice, but an altogether much darker, sometimes sulkier, sometimes realer sound. ‘Kinda Outta Luck’ sounds like it belongs straight on a Tarantino soundtrack and the sinister elements to her voice remind me a lot of The Pierces. This one could go anywhere from chilling, sexy acoustic to sultry pop. Exciting.

Download Lana Del Ray – Diet MTN Dew for free.

By trixie at 12:57PM

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs certainly have their google technique nailed with that name. This is the video for their new, totally huge sounding, single ‘Garden’.

Louise of jaunty folksters Lulu & the Lampshades probably makes music I’d never listen to but sounds great here as the female vocalist. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs is though just one man – the brilliantly named Orlando Higginbottom – who I’m told does ridiculously fantastic things live.

It totally rips of this though, no?

By trixie at 10:30AM

The new Horse Meat Disco album is out, but I’m still massively enjoying edition 1. The ultimate disco floor-filler moment on it comes from Sheryl Lee Ralph with ‘In The Evening’.

The lyrics are brilliant and make me do all kinds of inside my hair music video construction. Who cannot relate to, “In the evening, the real me comes alive.” Maybe my current weary nature can’t, but me at 19 definitely can.

Best of all though is the music video. It’s full of totally mental face pulling. I could watch it again and again open-mouthed at the mass insanity of it.

Warning : serious amounts of ‘acting’ follow.

[For non London people - Horse Meat Disco is a gay club night in Vauxhall where men, primarily ranging from the slightly hairy to very hairy style, dance about to disco music in a dark room. It is amazing.]

By trixie at 06:25AM

If you’re bored of shouting ONCE, ONCE, ONCE, YEEEEHAH – Vickers style (only me is doing this), then button up, refresh and start shouting ONE, ONE, ONE, ONE, ONE Ferriera stylee.

‘One’ is almost the same song as ‘I Need Air’ in terms of lovely twinkly electronica. Produced by Bloodshy & Avant it is also the most Swedish sounding song of the year. I bet Kleerup is thinking he missed out on this one.

Amazing.

N.B. Works better if you just listen rather than watch. She seems to be a bit annoying (SAYS I!)

By trixie at 19:02PM

I don’t know a huge amount, in fact not even a tiny amount, about dubstep. I know when I hear it, I tend to like it and I know that Skream’s remix of La Roux’s ‘In For The Kill’ was a bit of a tipping point last summer. I’d not paid much attention though to the news of a ‘dubstep supergroup’ coming out of Columbia records.

Magnetic Man consist of Skream, Benga and Artwork (no idea) and you’d probably expect them to make full on raving it up noise. Their first real attack on the mainstream however is instead a twinkly electronic pop song. It’s probably total disgusting to their old school, hardcore fans, but as far as I go it’s almost perfectly tailored.

I Need Air by pigeonsandplanes

The vocals (and presumably top-line) come from American singer-songwriter Angela Hunte who not only sounds delightfully robotic and cold here, but, FACT FANS, is the writer behind ‘Empire State of Mind’, ‘Do Somethin” and best of all, various Mis-Teeq album tracks.

‘I Need Air’ is out on July 26.

By trixie at 18:50PM

When I was a little girl I used to bang about on the piano at my Auntie Agnes’ house in Burscough. All her family were musical and there are plenty of photos of me looking adorable at various pianos aged about 4.

Then when I was 7 or 8 I actually had piano lessons from a very old (or so she seemed) lady in Blackpool called Gladys Jolly. I didn’t find her or the music particularly exciting so after doing a couple of grades packed it in. I can’t actually remember who taught me to read music, whether it was school or Miss Jolly but it’s always been a skill I’ve cherished.

I wish I’d stuck with the piano though. I have one at home home and can quite happily sit down with a piece of music and very slowly bash my way through it but I’d love to be able to do it properly. My cousin Lorilee is a music teacher and plays piano to concert pianist level. She can play anything after hearing it and we’ve spent many fun nights together playing and singing our way through musicals, or brilliantly me playing her a Pet Shop Boys song on Spotify and her transforming it into a wildly detailed piano piece instantly. A couple of years ago she started playing a piano in a hotel lobby and I love the idea that one day I’d be able to just see a piano and pounce on it.

So I was super excited (and very jealous I can’t really get involved) by the Play Me, I’m Yours project that’s currently running in London. The idea of British artist Luke Jerram, 21 pianos have been placed with London’s Square Mile with the intention that anyone can sit down at them and do whatever they like. It’s interesting to think about the very British reserved nature and whether they’ll actually dare to try them, but I’m sure if you see someone do it then you’ll want to get involved.

I love the idea of a ‘public space’ and don’t think there’s enough of them in London. This idea demands a space become one and enables everyone to be creative, regardless of their personal situation, and express themselves through the power of music. You might not know how to play, have played for years, or ever had the chance to own your own piano, but this enables every single one of us to get involved. Also it’s brilliantly not just a bloody London centric thing – it’ll be hitting Belfast, Burnley and Blackburn later in the year.

I’m hoping to find one to tinkle out a little Cole Porter on this weekend.

By trixie at 18:46PM

French DJ Martin Solveig has just released a new video, the first from his brand new, slightly secret, project. It is totally insane but perfect for the current Wimbledon frenzied lifestyle.

Starring the vocals of Dragonette’s Martina, the song is nice enough, but it’s worth watching regardless. The one and only Bob Sinclar stars as Martin’s opponent in a tennis match where the players seeds are determined by their DJ Mag rankings and real life tennis man Nocak Djokovic does a comedy turn.

Fingers crossed for a Solveig vs Gaga rematch soon.

By trixie at 16:07PM

So finally to two down and out pop moments. Shakira wowed the Glastonbury audience on Saturday afternoon with her perfect blend of pop and world music. From the off it was an incredible sexual performance with fun moments where we howled along to She-Wolf and tried out the Waka Waka dance to emotionally intense ones like my favourite Shakira song ‘Underneath Your Clothes’. In the perfect sunshine, this was pretty special. Shakira later humped a speaker so violently we were all driven to staring at the floor.

Shakira was always on my Glastonbury to do list but the other amazing highlight for me wasn’t. I’ve seen the current Pet Shop Boys show twice now, and was seriously tempted to head to the Pyramid for Muse as I hadn’t seen them in about 5 years. In the end though, the PSB won out and I had the immense joy of the show totally converting some of my hating friends into total PSB lovers and felt like I was cheating on Colin going to see them with Daniel.

Annoyingly the moment isn’t on YouTube so I can’t show it, but ‘It’s A Sin’ hit me hard during this show. It somehow transformed from AMAZING pop song to BLOODY INTENSE EMOTIONALLY DISTRAUGHT UP GAY RIGHTS pop song. I know it always was that, but I hadn’t quite got it until standing about in the cold with lots of people off their face while Neil was bathed in demonic red lights.

CHE GUEVARA AND DEBUSSY TO A DISCO BEAT INDEED.

p.s. amazing (AMAZING) pop fact – Helena from ‘Frank’ is one of the PSB’s dancers. I thought it was her, then I chastised myself for being racist by assuming a girl with an afro who I could only see from far away was another girl with an afro, for no other reason than she had an afro. BUT THEN, it was her. So there.

By trixie at 15:49PM

The ongoing oil spill from BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico is a tragedy. A human one -- 11 lives were lost in the initial explosion -- and an environmental one; the heartbreaking pictures (via) are already emerging, and there will be more.

There's a lot of public anger over the spill, mostly directed at BP itself, brilliantly captured by the BP Global PR Twitter feed. And there's a lot to blame them for. As the New York Times reports, BP officials knew weeks in advance that there were problems with the rig and had deliberately scaled back the rigorousness of the federally-mandated testing they were doing on the rig -- a very unusual practice; usually the tests get more and more strenuous. They knew something was up.

The Wall Street Journal (free article) has a lot more detail: they chose an inherently risky well design, skipped a lot of standard safety checks, ignored best practices, and were in an almighty hurry to get things finished. Furthermore, they might even have avoided loss of life: there's unsubstantiated rumours on the internet that a subcontractor on Deepwater Horizon ordered all their personnel off the rig 6 hours prior to the explosion because they believed it to be unsafe. If BP had listened to them, they could have evacuated. It's a scandal.

But as I started saying in this thread on Hacker News, it's not really BP we should be angry at. It's not their scandal. BP, Transocean, even Halliburton, were all just doing what was in their best interests. Relief wells such as the one they are hurriedly drilling are enormously expensive, and skipping them makes the cost of drilling the many unsuccessful wells necessary to get a profitable well going much less. Even the enormous costs of cleanup of this leak will probably not outweigh all the money they saved over years of risky practices.

The real problem here is political. The only way to get the oil companies to take the externalities of drilling into account is to force them to do so; economic self-interest is in favour of destroying the environment. The Minerals Management Service, the regulator in charge, was obviously corrupt and completely in the thrall of the oil companies.

So when the leak is plugged, and the decades-long task* of oil cleanup is underway, remember to direct your anger prudently and productively at the politicians in charge, the ones capable of pushing legislation forward that will create a stronger and more independent regulator. Yelling at BP and taking their money is emotionally satisfying, but will not fix the real problem. Destroying the environment must become more than merely expensive; it must be criminalized. Oil executives will think twice about approving risky drilling practices if they know they will personally go to jail if it fails.

* Cleanup of the Exxon Valdez spill, which happened in 1989, is still ongoing.

By at 02:52AM

Last week Facebook announced its Open Graph Protocol. It sounds exciting, but is unfortunately a completely misleading name, being neither open, nor a graph, nor a protocol. Instead it is a Facebook Social Data API, but since they already had one of those and it was broken you can see why they felt the need to re-brand. Elsewhere on the web Google and others are working on the OpenSocial APIs, which are at least accurately named. But they are just a standard way of accessing everybody's isolated walled gardens. Neither effort do anything to achieve the inter-operation of social networks that I imagine when I hear the names.

What would an open graph protocol really look like?

The reason the web works is because it is independent, decentralized, and simple. There is no prescribed ideal for the way web pages should fit together. Indexing is independent of representation, and indexing is open to anyone. The web is a graph, a real graph, where no node is more important and any path is possible, and the protocol is a true protocol, defining only the most basic forms of interaction and leaving semantics to the application layer.

So at first glance, it seems a social graph protocol would need the same properties:

• a permanent, independent representation of entities
• vertices available and explorable by any individual or robot
• no hidden links or metadata
• no assumptions as to the shape of the graph

For the first part, I think a lot of people assume that a true social graph would unify identity. The WWW* is itself; it represents only itself and it contains all of its own information. But the social web isn't like that; the online representation of a person is a proxy. And I think for reasons of privacy, security, and practicality, a total representation of our social graph would be undesirable. Such a graph would consist of everyone you've ever met, and for completeness would have to indicate how strong your connection was to them. That in itself is information we keep socially very private. In addition, we keep our social and professional lives to some degree separated. Our friends are not interested in our business contacts and vice versa.

A graph of graphs

A true, complete, open social graph is socially undesirable; it's not what we want. So what do we want? The answer is already emerging: we like our social graphs partitioned by intention: professional networks (LinkedIn), personal networks (Facebook), "social" networks (in the sense of "socializing" -- people we like to talk to or hear from) like Twitter, romantic networks (an infinity of dating sites). Then there are less well-established, niche networks built around personal history (alumni networks, mailing lists) or interests (forums and online groups).

For individuals who exist in multiple of these circles, we already accept duplication readily. Many recent attempts have been made to find ways keep all your social networks in sync and related. This is not a particularly complex technical problem (though scaling it would be nontrivial), and yet no-one has succeeded. I think this is not because we've not worked out how to do it. It's because nobody wants it -- nobody except nerds who like graph data, and marketers who dream of the giant rewards to be reaped from owning that data.

This changes things for the designer of the proverbial Open Graph. The shape of the graph we are expecting changes, as do the nature of the nodes. The nodes become facets of personality rather than single true representations of people, and the vertices become somewhat simpler: type of connection, and probably directionality, but without the degree of strength that would be so tricky to judge relatively in a unified graph -- is your business partner closer to you than your girlfriend? It's an impossible -- and largely pointless -- question. The graph ceases to be a single unified graph and instead becomes hundreds of graphs, occasionally connected but in ad-hoc and inconsistent. This is already sounding much more like reality -- and much more like the web as we know it.

No more honeypots

Furthermore, the openness is still a problem. Professional networks are closely-guarded secrets. Personal networks if open can be exploited for identity theft and social engineering. Privacy is paramount. We trusted Facebook with it and they pulled the rug out from under us, to monetize better. We trusted Google with it and they broke it by accident with Buzz. We never, ever trusted Microsoft with it. A central commercial repository for all our data is clearly the wrong way, and even a cental repository for each facet -- one for professional, one for personal, one for romantic -- seems flawed. What's the webby way to do this?

If we don't trust a single company with our data, if any single repository would be too much of an attraction, then we need instead dozens, hundreds of repositories: we need domains and servers, just as we have web sites and web servers, or email addresses and email servers. Each server will hold our social connections -- not a single true representation, but whatever facet of our personality we wish to represent via that identity. In fact, using an ID like name@domain.com -- similar to email addresses -- would not be a bad start.

To free us from the giant honeypots of isolated, centralized social networks, what we need is the protocol that would allow these systems to communicate -- in the same way that we each have an email address on a different server, but all email addresses can contact each other, we need distributed identity that can communicate via a protocol. In the early days of the Internet, services like AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve overcame the lack of a unified protocol by building rich walled gardens. In the evolution of the social web, it is time to make that same leap. Social Network A must be able to talk to Social Network B as a peer.

The basics of a true open graph protocol

What are the actions this protocol must allow? The same things networks right now allow:

• rich identity representation
• network activity updates
• private one-to-few messaging
• in-network searching
• ad-hoc group communication
• events (essentially just specialized metadata attached to private or group messaging)

I learned a lot about ActivityStreams at their StreamCamp event last week, and it is an interesting solution to the second problem I listed: standardized, federated, and open, it doesn't care what network an update comes from, it just aggregates them and passes them along. It's the right direction. But we need something grander.

Imagine a set of servers. You can create an account on any server and invent an identity, or even several different identities. Duplication is expected and even encouraged. Now create connections between entities. They can be within the domain, or they can be between domains. For a unidirectional link, only the originating server knows the connection; for a bidirectional server, both do. If the originating and destination server are the same domain, it stores both. It doesn't matter; external and internal connections are equal citizens, wrapped around some central standardized metadata that is extensible at will: richer networks can share more, simple networks are not required to do so.

Handling OGP requirements

Rich identity

Each domain holds a single unique key: username@domain, possibly with a short, more human-readable label (very short, to avoid spam -- see later). Around that they can wrap as much metadata as they like. Secondary standards will emerge to define larger sets of metadata with suggested keys, which networks can adopt from each other in order to more richly represent entities on external networks. But the protocol itself says nothing.

The protocol should also make no assumptions about the nature of an entity. Some entities will be people, but others might be companies, or groups, or even events -- the difference lying merely in the metadata that might be attached to the entity rather than a fundamental protocol-level difference.

Network activity updates

These can be handled via a pub/sub mechanism like PuSH. When an entity performs an action it distributes that action to any subscribers. They can further syndicate within their own network according to their domain-specific rules. ActivityStreams are the way forward here.

Private messaging

At the protocol level, the creation of a connection allows messaging to flow backwards from the subscribed party to the originating server; a pair of connections therefore allows bidirectional messaging. The connection is created simply by exchanging keys: when A connects with B it offers a key, signed with the identity of B and a timestamp. If B accepts the connection, it can thereafter use that key as authentication to send messages. A can revoke the key according to its own logic at any time, and re-issue a new key with a new stamp. B is expected but not required to cease communication attempts after its key is rejected. This solves a fundamental problem of email, which is that possession of an address is sufficient for communication; instead, possession of an address is merely sufficient to request communication.

Obviously the mechanism by which the connection is created is the weak link: there must be a very small, extremely proscribed set of allowed metadata in the connection request. There could also be an optional "connection password": if the request contains the password (which might be transmitted independently via IM, word of mouth, or attached to a business card) then the metadata accepted as part of the request might be expanded.

Spam is much easier to handle in this model. Communication attempts from entities with no connection would be ignored -- no more AI-level intelligence required to determine whether a message was solicited or not. There would still be connection spam, but the protocol would allow only one or two connection requests -- subsequent attempts would be ignored by default, and blacklisting an entire domain would be simple, possibly even automatic after a sufficient number of ignored requests. Some nets might even maintain a whitelist of trusted social networks, and only allow unlisted networks to send requests at all if they contained the "connection password". Simple heuristics would allow automatic blacklisting of a domain that generated hundreds of rejected or ignored requests.

In-network searching

A thornier problem, but an interesting solution presents itself: a search within your social network would become, by default, a distributed operation. A search request would be broadcast to all the domains to which you have connections, asynchronously, and they would be permitted a time window in which to respond. The search request would be in an open format related to the identity metadata: domains receiving a search request they do not understand or do not allow would be permitted to ignore the request, either silently or sending a specific HTTP response to allow the searching server to efficiently skip that request in future.

Thus indexing becomes a simpler problem. Instead of a single global index owned by any one company, each domain is its own index. Simply by being a smaller network, the problem becomes simpler -- the global social database is, in effect, sharded across hundreds of domains; the searching is distributed ("mapped") to hundreds of domains, and the originating server needs only to perform an aggregation operation (a "reduction").

Depending on the rules of the domains, some searches might be forwarded, to allow for 2nd and 3rd-degree searches. This would allow for an even more powerful distributed search; a multi-stage map/reduce as each network rolls up its own results for the next. The network latency issues here are considerable; some degree of caching should probably be permitted on the originating server side. The degree to which searching is effective is entirely dependent on both the user and the domain. Professional networks might allow two degrees of search; dating networks** might allow four or five; strictly personal ones might ignore searches entirely.

Ad-hoc group communication

Another pub/sub mechanism. A group would be just another entity: one user would create group.identity@example.com, and other users would provide that entity with a key to join the group, and revoke it when they left.

Events and Invitations

An extension to the metadata of either a private or personal message, containing the identity of a new entity. An RSVP simply becomes a connection request; you subscribe to the event just like you subscribe to a group, and leave it by revoking the key.

Next steps

This is the seed of this idea, dreamed up while flying back from Chicago. Clearly there are holes, edge-cases, and more. But this is the right shape of the idea, and it's pretty exciting, I think. Do let me know what you think.

Some areas that need work:

• Peer identities: if bob@yahoo.com and bob@hotmail.com are the same, just disconnected for historical reasons, a connection type should exist to indicate that they are the same.
• Search: I'm painting in really broad strokes here. Presumably peer-to-peer file-sharing networks already have this problem solved to some degree.
• Oh hell, all of it.

* I'm using WWW here not to be old-fashioned, but to distinguish between the web of pages (the true WWW) and the secondary web of entities, people and objects that some of those pages represent.

** Note that the protocol doesn't know if a network is social, professional, or romantic -- that's defined ad-hoc by the entities that make up the graph. By using professional.identity@example1.com and making connections to professional.identity@example2.com, you are creating a de-facto professional network. If you start making connections to your romantic identity at the same time, that's up to you -- or possibly to the rules defined by your domain.

By at 11:39AM

Dear web developers hoping to build apps for the iPhone: we're fucked. But Apple is shooting itself in the foot.

Some background

There's a big fuss right now because as part of the iPhone OS 4.0 release, Apple has explicitly banned the use of intermediate platforms to create iPhone apps (and hence presumably iPad apps, since they run the same operating system).

Their motivations for doing so are the subject of debate. The supremely well-informed Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball thinks Apple is doing it to lock in iPhone as the de facto standard for mobile development, in the same way that Microsoft managed to get a lock on the PC market despite the many flaws of Windows -- by attracting critical mass of developers, and hence apps, and hence users, and hence developers, in a virtuous, monopoly-creating feedback loop.

This interpretation has been tacitly acknowledged by Steve Jobs himself. However, Jobs placed the emphasis on another aspect of the post, saying

intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.

This spins it as a user-friendly decision rather than a ruthless business one, but there's no reason it can't be both, and one imagines it being both would be just fine with Mr. Jobs.

Whether or not Apple is correctly positioned to dominate mobile apps a la Microsoft is a subject for another post. But right now, I think the idea that intermediate platforms are unwelcome on the iPhone raises an important question for web-native developers, such as myself.

Does the web count as an intermediate platform?

When iPhone first launched, Apple announced that apps will be web apps. They were supposed to be first-class citizens and in fact were the only way of producing apps for the phone. There is even still a web apps directory, a neglected, poor man's App Store for web apps.

Since then the real SDK was introduced. It's unclear whether it was planned all along, or if it was a strategy adopted after Apple saw the enthusiasm and creativity going into jailbreaking, which allowed developers to run custom apps on iPhone before that was officially allowed. Meanwhile, the APIs web developers were promised for iPhone never materialized: location is now available, but a hundred others are not, and with the release of iPhone OS 4.0 that list has grown.

And now the official word is that intermediate platforms are not welcome to make apps for iPhone. I can't think of a more obvious and widespread intermediate platform than the browser environment, and whether you believe the motivation is a better user experience or a hard-nosed attempt to monopolize mobile development, web apps lose.

Because there's no denying it: web apps provide worse user experiences than native apps on the iPhone right now. They don't have to -- Apple could expose all the APIs via the web, and add extensions and libraries to Safari that would allow the beautiful, fine-grained UI controls currently available to native apps. In fact, they already built one, called PastryKit. Its non-release, despite being high quality and inclusion-ready, is another indicator that Apple is deliberately ignoring web apps as a platform for the iPhone.

Our one hope as web developers for developing on iPhone with full APIs was being able to build web apps that would get compiled down to native code (or, on clever platforms like Appcelerator Titanium, run as WebKit instances inside a customized, lightweight native app). With this change of the rules, the future of platforms like these looks very uncertain, and the door has been slammed in our faces.

The illustrious ppk thinks all iPhone apps should be web apps. I think the chances are slim, and getting slimmer all the time.

It's a damn shame. And the wrong call.

Everyone knows the largest development platform in the world isn't Windows, or Mac, or desktop or mobile: it's the web, the only platform that runs on all of those, plus nearly everywhere else. Ignoring the giant and ever-growing contingent of web-native developers -- people who grew up writing apps for the web, have never written apps for anything else, and see little reason to start -- is to ignore the tide of history.

The unstoppable march of technology has taught me that what ten years ago seemed like a ludicrously inefficient idea soon becomes standard practice. Running an entire IDE as a Java app, for instance, or installing each major component of my development environment in its own separate virtual machine. Computational efficiency is repeatedly sacrificed for speed of development, because computers are cheap and getting faster all the time, while developers remain expensive and oh-so-slow.

So it doesn't matter if, right now, native mobile apps are faster. That advantage is momentary. It does matter that the experience is better, but that just means there's an opening in the market for a platform that really does treat web apps like first-class citizens. Android or, perhaps, Palm, if they get acquired by somebody more capable of building out a platform.

At no point will web apps be faster than native apps. And the experience might never be quite as good. But one day it will be "good enough". The desktop hit that tipping point more than five years ago -- what's the last really exciting new desktop app you installed? In my case it was Chrome, and that was because it was a better browser. To pretend that won't ever happen on mobile devices is silly.

Once it happens, the web will win again. Attempts to lock web apps to your platform with useful but proprietary extensions will fail, as Microsoft failed with ActiveX. Developers will put up with building simpler apps because they run everywhere, really everywhere. Developers go where the users are, and the users, no matter who made their hardware or wrote their software, are always on the web.

The web will win, eventually. But in the meantime, find somebody who knows Objective-C.

By at 18:30PM

A few weeks ago the Trinidad Express, one of Trinidad and Tobago's major national newspapers, redesigned its website. The result is an unreadable mess of tiny fonts and hundreds of blinking, flashing ads. Literally unable to read it myself, I quickly hacked-up a script that reformatted the front page. Some friends liked it, so I expanded it a bit.

So now, after a few weeks of tweaking, I give you Re-Expressed: the Trinidad Express, made readable. I hope you find it useful.

By at 14:39PM

It was March 18th, 2007 when Barack Obama visited Oakland and I went to see him speak in person for the first time. It was there I first heard him promise universal healthcare by the end of his first term in office. "And I want to be accountable for this," he said. Of his speech that day, I said:

Above all, it was a message of optimism: yes, the system is broken, but it can be fixed, by us, right now. And this funny, sincere, incredibly, hypnotically charismatic man seems like just the right guy to do it

Today, the trust he inspired has been validated, and the promise he made has been -- as far as I am concerned -- kept. Sure, the coverage is not quite universal. And lots of things won't kick in until 2014, after the end of his first term. But that's politics. It's a business of compromise, and incremental advance. But he promised the biggest change to healthcare in a generation, and here it is.

Good going, Barry.

By at 00:27AM

I registered this domain ten years ago today, sitting in the chair by the window in my brother's apartment in Clapham South -- I had just moved to the UK from Trinidad, and hadn't found my own apartment yet.

The 10th anniversary of this blog is a little further away -- the site was mostly static until March 2001. This morning I grabbed a quick set of screenshots of some of the oldest designs of the site; they are pretty funky.

By at 14:04PM

Today is my last day at Yahoo!. It's been four years -- more than twice as long as I've held any other job.

I remember very clearly, when I was fifteen and had had Internet access for only a few weeks, building my first web page and thinking "wow! This is fun! I wish I could get a job doing this!" Then I tried to think of big, web companies I'd really want to work for, and the first one was Yahoo!. "But they've already built their website", I thought to myself, "They don't need another web developer. Plus, I don't know Perl."

So nine years later, when Yahoo! contacted me and offered me a job in the London office, it was a dream come true. I sent excited emails to friends and family, I printed out a huge "I WORK FOR YAHOO" banner above my desk at home (in a stolen copy of the Yahoo! font). I know it sounds terribly cheesy, but I really did.

Joining Yahoo! was amazing. We're so *big*! We have our own fork of Apache, our own version of PHP, dozens and dozens of our own specialized products and plugins (I love yinst!). In my very first week, I was already making changes to websites seen by millions of people (the FIFA world cup site). And the resources we can draw on! The devel-frontend list taught me volumes about CSS and Javascript, as did internal training for YUI.

For a young web developer, there is absolutely no better place to work than here. I got to build not just big sites but great sites, working with people who are absolutely at the top of their game in every department -- design, engineering, ops, and QA. Plus there are hack days -- I love hack days! You get to build the coolest thing you can think of, as fast as you can, and show it off to hundreds of appreciative engineers. There's very few places in the world where you can do that.

Yahoo! has made me a better web developer, a better engineer, and a better teammate. I have learned so much from this company, and for that I am deeply, truly grateful. Being a Yahoo has been a big part of my life -- and I know, from seeing it in others, that you never really stop being a Yahoo, even when you're working somewhere else.

So then, why am I leaving? Because I have grown as much as I can. In my first year I grew as a web developer, in JS and CSS. In my second I grew as an engineer, architecting a whole website from scratch. In my third I grew as a database developer -- I became "the database guy" to some of you, which I still think is funny. I'm a web guy! But in this last year I have mostly grown frustrated. I'm not saying I have nothing more to learn, but I need to go somewhere else to learn it.

By at 13:58PM

Last Thursday, I informed my managers at Yahoo! that I will be leaving the company. I have a lot of thoughts about leaving Yahoo!, and I'm going to assemble them into another post later. For now I want to talk about the new gig.

A while back, Jonathan invited me out to dinner. We'd worked together for a year on the dream team that was Yahoo! Widgets before it got mothballed, and he wanted to talk about some ideas he had around entertainment, social media and the Internet.

In a way that is characteristic of him, he started speaking fluently, passionately, and with all the focus of a terminal ADD sufferer about friends of his who are media types who make web content. About how they use blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and sites like those -- what he collectively termed "social media", a buzzwordy phrase, but usefully short.

Mostly, content creators use social media haphazardly at best. Not because they're dumb, but because there are so many sites for them to use, each with different use-cases and conventions and tools. Knowing about and using more than a fraction of their capability is a full-time job, and most media organizations aren't big enough to dedicate a full person to that role.

He also talked about metrics, and "closing the loop" on social media. At the moment people who pump content into these various sites get only the most basic idea of how successful they're being. They see view counts on YouTube, basic stats on Flickr, and on Twitter they can kinda-sorta track your retweets (except when you can't), or you can search for links to your content, except when you can't. The stats aren't always there, and even when they are it's hard to get the big picture.

There is, he said, a business opportunity here. I agreed, and said I wish I could help him out -- but, being on an L-1 visa at the time, I knew I couldn't. I also have another post in store about that.

Today Jonathan has taken that idea and gotten a lot further with it: he has founded a company called Snowball Factory (we're going to work on that logo), and with the able assistance of Cloudspace it's launched three products -- the flagship awe.sm, as well as two smaller tools, TweetPo.st and fbShare.me. Collectively, they're helping tame the beast of social media -- making it easier to use, more measurable, and more effective.

This is a hard, hard problem. In fact, it's five or six hard problems. It involves taking enormous amounts of data and boiling them down to simple conclusions, and wrapping complex APIs into simple, usable user interfaces. It involves making websites that scale, and APIs that are powerful but easy to use. And the result is that the web, as a whole, gets better. In short, it's not just building a website; it's developing the web. It's what I'm all about.

Jonathan has a lot more ideas, and I've got more than a few of my own. And starting next week, I will be joining Snowball Factory as employee #1 and technical lead (and co-founder, and janitor, and CTO, and tea boy, and sysadmin -- when you're employee #1, you get a lot of job titles, but I'm sticking with "technical lead" for now).

I'm extremely excited. Joining a startup is what I came to the bay area hoping to do, and after three years at Yahoo!, I'm doing it, and I'm in pretty much as early as you can be. It's going to be hard -- expect a lot of annoyed tweets about technical difficulties -- and the hours will be long, and there will be setbacks as well as triumphs. But it's going to be an awesome (and awe.sm) ride.

By at 12:34PM

Last year Christian think-tank Theos argued that because most of us know the Easter story, therefore most of us literally believe in the Easter story.

From the same people who brought you this unfathomably crap interpretation of their own, agenda-ridden research, now comes a sparkly new survey on the public attitude to evolution.

Or so say rubbish science journalists who didn’t even bother to look at the research, blindly trotting out their own version of the Theos press release all round the internet today.  (You’d think science journalists would be the one kind of journalist most likely to do their fucking job and go and look at the so-called science, but no.)

The research never actually asked people a fair, balanced question about their belief in evolution, defined simply as a process of natural selection.  Oh no.  Do you want to know what it actually asked them?
What the actual survey actually asked about evolution was two separate questions, one on “theistic evolution” and one on “atheistic evolution”.  The latter definition and question read:

Atheistic evolution is the idea that evolution makes belief in God unnecessary and absurd.  In your opinion is Atheistic evolution: [and then the choices]

Just confusing the two separate issues of a/theism and evolution was obviously going to result in weird answers from the start, especially since they don’t even bother to spell out simply what the actual theory of natural selection says or associate it with either view.

Moreover, when people were being asked to assent to “atheistic evolution” they weren’t just being asked to assent to evolution-minus-God, they were being asked to assent to the view that evolution necessarily implies that there was no God.

Now, I think that evolution is true and I think that belief in God is unnecessary and absurd, but I still might well have said that “Atheistic evolution” as defined in this survey was probably not true, because I don’t think that one does necessitate the other.  Evolution has nothing to say about the origin of the world, for example.

Answering this survey, I might well have been waiting for a third, good, neutral statement of evolution before I plumped for it.

Worse still is the interpretation which Theos then puts on this already flawed data.  Having found probably even lower levels of general assent to the theory of evolution than we should want and expect – and would get if we asked better questions – they go on to conclude (in their press release) that the hopeless confusion we’re all is the fault of atheists:

Unfortunately, he [Darwin] is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause. The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.

“Darwin has become caught up in the crossfire between creationists on one side and certain public atheists on the other. It’s a battle in which everybody suffers.”

That’s right.  Who’s to blame for Creationism and ID?  Is it the proponents of Creationism and ID?  No.  It’s atheists!  And why should we blame the atheists, Theos?  Well, because they conflate Darwinism and atheism giving people a false choice between the two, says Theos. Oh, right, I get it, exactly like your survey cleverly demonstrates by doing exactly that?  Um, yes, yes that’s what we, um, intended, says Theos.

Of course, there are a whole bunch of reasons why Darwinian evolution is associated with atheism.  This isn’t a story about evolution getting “caught in the crossfire” between warring fundamentalist theists on one hand and marauding atheists on the other, as if Richard Dawkins (doubtless the intended ring-leader of the “public atheists” mentioned) has single-handedly warped a theory which was otherwise neutral with regard to God.  The reason evolution is associated with atheism is because prior to Darwin the church said quite emphatically that God created the Earth and all living things in seven days.  During the bronze age!  Religion got caught with its panda’s thumb up its giant red arse on this issue, forcing them ever since to either dig in and become full blown fundamentalists, or to pass off centuries of previous heretic-burning as a crazy, mistaken, drunken game, because they didn’t really literally believe in Genesis, no, no, it was an allegory all along.  For something.

The dawn of evolutionary theory is the great naturalizing moment of the last two centuries.  It completely reversed the way we had to think when trying to explain the construction of living forms.  It blew away the need for design, and a designer, previously the greatest single argument for the existence of God, with an idea of simple beauty and devastating cogency.  Atheists didn’t manufacture a wargame here – if anything it was the vicious response of religionists in Darwin’s own time which show exactly why so many people regard evolution as literally bringing the riddle of life back “down to earth”.

But none of this means that when you ask people about evolution you should imply that they have a choice between “theistic evolution” and “atheistic evolution”.  That’s just bollocks.

Theos is basically attempting to do exactly what it pretends not to be doing.  They are accepting that it’s not okay to be a biblical literalist, but also trying to blame anyone who expresses both atheism and evolution for other people’s confusion and ignorance, thereby leaving “theistic evolution” as the only option on the table.

Well, no, damn it!  We must be free to express the fact that evolution leads us to thinking about life in a naturalistic way, without being branded some kind of intellectual warmongers.  Being free to say that evolution is part of our atheism is like saying that Galileon cosmology leads us to thinking less anthropocentrically about the nature of the universe; and like saying that Newton leads us to think that maybe there is a coherent underlying structure to the universe, which is not interfered with by capricious deities.

Theos point the finger.  But they are the ones shamelessly playing games with science.

By Bob at 16:17PM

So, I have now moved to London.  I started moving in a few weeks before Christmas, and now I live here in Highbury, just round the corner from Boris Johnson apparently, and right in the corner of Highbury Fields.  Which makes my flat sound grander than it is.  I live in just one room.  But it’s a nice room with wooden floors and I have a large kitchen (big enough to have a dining table and sofa in it) which I share with three friendly housemates.  My own room is too hot.  The stupid underfloor heating seems to be on all the time whatever I do with the thermostat.  There’s a door right onto the kitchen so I sometimes get disturbed at night if someone wants to make a curry at three o’clock in the morning.  And there’s something else.

There’s something else lurking.  Like a living thing.  But alien. There’s something else in the room.

It is electricity.  Static electricity everywhere.  Far, far too often I become a sort of involuntary, miniature Thor.  In a particularly powerful shock which I was half-prepared for I could actually see the white bolt of electrons discharging as I touched my chair leg.  I get shocked from the wardrobe door handles and the door into the room and from my chair.  The other day I somehow even took the charge with me all the way to work and electrocuted a colleague.  But by and large it only happens in the room, and only this side of Christmas, not before.
So I am trying to solve the puzzle like a sort of rubbish, less-motivated Columbo.  I have done careful research by reading the page “Static electricity?? HELP” – a veritable compedium of advice compiled by the delightful Mamasource.com (”Connecting  moms in your community”.  Don’t laugh. This is a valid source of scientific advice.  And getting electorcuted every five minutes isn’t unique to child-bearing women.)

Now, according to “Static electricity?? HELP”, multiple factors may come into play in the build up of electrons about my person. Footwear, synthetic clothing, synthetic carpets, dry air, dry skin…

The first thing I thought was that possibly the slippers I got for Christmas were causing the problem, perhaps rubbing on the carpet;, except that I don’t have a carpet, I have a wooden floor, and even when I remove the slippers and walk barefoot I still get shocked.  I thought perhaps that the wheels on my chair were generating static somehow as I slid about the room; but switching to a stationary chair has not helped – in fact I just seem to ground myself on its metal legs all the time.

I have not tried rubbing my clothes with a damp cloth ever half hour!  But then, I change my clothes on, well, almost a daily basis, and this seems to have no effect.  The fact that the heating is on all the time means the room is hot and therefore presumably too dry — and I’m sure this must be exacerbating the problem.  But I have tried drinking lots and lots of water to keep my skin hydrated, but this just means that I get shocked on my way to the bathroom.

I have been wracking my brains to think what else is new, what else could have started the static build-up since Christmas.  And only one thing remains.

Over the Christmas break I got lazy and let my facial hair grow.  My goatee has expanded into a face-girdling bear mask.  It’s still quite stubbley, but this means it’s all bristles and fur, not unlike a synthetic carpet!

Could it be that the furriness spreading outward from my chin is somehow rubbing on, like, the really dry air and generating all the static?  Every bristle a miniature lightning rod?

As Sherlock Holmes wrongly said, ”When you eliminate the impossible, whatever you have left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Anyway, I need to solve this riddle soon before I accidentally discharge my unwanted superpower into my computer and wipe out my harddisk.

By Bob at 11:01AM

The most amazing thing about the Atheist Bus Campaign is that, by and large, the internet has responded good-naturedly.  Obviously, there are lots of critical comments, and even outright nasty comments.  But given the topic (religion versus atheism) the ratio of good comments to bad comments is astoundingly positive.  You’d expect the nasty to comments overwhelm the pro comments, but they really don’t.

What is the case, though, is that – both back in October when the British Humanist Association re-launched the Atheist Bus fundraising appeal, and today now the buses have officially hit the roads – many, many people comment on use of the word ‘probably’ in the phrase “There’s probably no God”.

A few people comment that they like the ‘probably’, because it’s a bit funny-sounding and casual and not quite as churlish as the alternative: “Fuck off, there’s obviously no God”.  However, most of web 2.0 commenters are critically-thinking freethinkers and (god bless ‘em, I’m one of them) we’ll stick our two penneth in whether you like it or not, and there’s a valid philosophical point to be raised that since all knowledge is ultimately conjectural anyway, we shouldn’t have to qualify every metaphysical statement…  Yadda yadda yadda.
But there’s another category of ‘probably’ criticism, perhaps even the most dominant strain in the Atheist Bus-commenting culture-virus.

Numerous articles (just one example) are not merely offering a philosophical objection to ‘probably’, but outright crowing over it, implying that anyone who supports the campaign must be a wavering, quavering agnostic of the most wishy-washy variety.  Journo bloggers and commenters all over the place are writing to the effect that use of the word ‘probably’ beams a glaring light through the thin veil of our bravado; even as the slogan was concocted somewhere behind Ariane Sherine’s omni-smiling face, she must have been telepathically absorbing the doubt and existential angst of every hedging heretic and every iffy infidel up and down the land.  So the detractors argue.
This is of course tosh.

As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, if he uses language – with reference to religion – which is less harsh, less personal, less cutting, less rhetorical, than the kind of language you can read all the time in trashy magazines, restaurant critics’ reviews, political debates and so on, then he is nevertheless reprimanded for being a hateful miser who doesn’t understand basic human emotion. He regularly receives far harsher, more personal, more cutting, more rhetorical counter-attack against his relatively nuanced criticisms than his words could possibly deserve.  Religion engenders a peculiar kind of wailing pedantry against us (happy millions of) non-conformists.

Snide attacks against the word ‘probably’ in the Atheist Bus Campaign are another example of this language which – because it happens to be remotely critical of religion – is held to an absurd, pedantic standard, by people who know better under almost any other circumstances.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Imagine, for example, an analogous criticism made against the Alpha Course’s latest adverts.  These were run all through 2008, at least across London, far more widely than the Atheist Bus Campaign will ever reach.  These adverts asked, “If God did exist what would you ask?”
Now, I can imagine lots of criticisms of these adverts.  Like “Why did you leave a big, white, empty space underneath which was ripe for hilarious graffiti, you muppets?”

But imagine for a moment that someone, somewhere, made the following criticism of this advert.  Imagine (it will be difficult, but try) that they might mean this criticism seriously:

“Ooh, looks like they don’t really believe after all!  Ha ha, their faith must be fading away.  Look! – their slogan is in the interrogative form!  They must be seriously doubting themselves.  Ha ha… I am so clever.”

I think everyone – whether inclined toward being an atheist bus passenger or an Alpha Course attendee or anywhere in between – would recognise such a criticism, immediately, for the infantile, pointless pedantry that it was.

“If God did exist…” is conditional.  “There’s probably no God…” is qualified.  Other than this the entirely comparable in terms of being a kind of staged equivocation.  Given the context of mass-appeal marketing, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone why that is the case.  Only the latter slogan, though, is lumbered with the cuckcoo criticism that it is actually a signal of failing confidence.
Not that the bus campaign should really need defending from the rather sad, weird criticisms of ‘probably’ that have dogged it, nevertheless here’s the best statement I’ve seen – from Ariane Sherine herself – of why ‘probably’ makes sense, and what might be hoped for from greater public understanding of the humanist position.

By Bob at 18:16PM

My third blog at the Worcester News is all about how daft the annual spate of new stories on the topic of Christmas being banned is.  How this myth persists and gets re-invented every single December — despite the millions of fairy lights bedecking thousands of buildings, the tons of wrapping paper taped around billions of pounds worth of presents, the millions of Christmas turkeys consumed around most dinner tables in the UK — is beyond me.

By Bob at 08:14AM

America

Britain

In triumph, and redeemed, American has united behind a president whose race differs from the majority of Americans, a president who promises change, and who does not hide his intelligence or his power. Inspiring.

We, in Britain, have got behind an old man who can’t dance.

The legend that is John Sergeant rivals Robin Hood for his anti-authoritarian riposte to Aunty Beeb.  Armed only with his lack of coordination and an expression perpetually hovering between bemusement and curmudgeonliness, Sergeant has single-handedly (or two-left-footedly - haha) unmasked the charade that Strictly Come Dancing is strictly about dancing.

It has actually been quite a success story.  A warm story.  The public conspired, depending on your view, in order to support the weaker contestant, or because they recongised something of their own flawed dance steps in the old duffer, or even because they wanted to make a national TV program less saccharine by forcing upon it an arse-backwards plotline so surreal that Monty Python could have invented it.

But there are always left-fielders, and some commentators are just more lateral-thinking than others.  One in particular has been lateral-thinking about the John Sergeant voting pattern so long and hard, that his opinion now originates from somewhere near the planet Mercury.

According to Justin Thacker, “Head of Theology” at the Evangelical Alliance, if you voted for little Johnny, then you are a selfish egotistical relativist who hates God and rejects the whole concept of objective truth!

“How does Justin Thacker know my innermost secret motivations?”, I hear you ask.  Well, Justin Thacker has a very good argument.  First he asks why people would possibly vote for Sergeant.  Justin Thacker knows it can’t be because Sergeant is a “soap star” nor because he’s “good looking”, because Sergeant is neither. (Bloody nice of you, Justin.)  Justin Thacker rejects that it could be Sergeant’s “wry sense of humour” or his “certain charm” or even “the great British tradition of supporting the underdog”.  No.  It can’t be any of those things.  Justin Thacker knows the best theory is that people wanted to “spite the judges”.  Okay… And do they want to spite the judges because the judges were mean to people?  Or because it would be a bit of a joke to get one over on them?  Oh no, Joe-public, I’m afraid not.  Your spite runs much deeper than that, and you know it.  And Justin Thacker knows it.  Listen to Justin Thacker.  Justin Thacker has privileged access to what you were really thinking:

The reality is that in our individualistic, consumer-driven age, the reigning Zeitgeist loves individual autonomy over public authority. We can’t bear the notion that there exists some external, objective standard against which things should be measured – whether in respect of dancing or morality or anything really. Rather, we want to be King, and all authority must rest with us. So, we get to be the arbiters of what’s true or false, good or bad. The idea of being held to account by some absolute standard is one that rails deeply against our current mode of thinking. Hence, we reject it whenever we can. It’s not necessarily that we think the standard is a bad one, we just hate the idea of there being one at all.

Watching TV with Justin Thacker must be a really fun night in.

Sounds about right, though, doesn’t it. You probably didn’t realise at the time, but you voted for John Sergeant because you hate the concept of truth! It’s so obvious now.  When you picked up the phone you were thinking; “Objectivity? Correspondence theory of truth? Pah! I’m going to vote for John Sergeant.  That’ll show them theologians, trying to force their concept of a mind-independent external reality on me.”

Justin Thacker’s most wise inferences know no bounds.  Believe it or not, the following sentence directly follows the above quoted passage:

Given this, it’s no wonder that the Christian gospel has a hard time being heard.

Yep, God hates the nation getting together to watch people doing lovely dances, because it exacerbates their hatred of objective truth, and the Bible is objectively true, and if they stay in watching light entertainment together as a family then people will miss their Saturday night Bible classes, damn it.

If Bruce Forsyth would only lead us in prayers at the start of each episode that would be fine, I reckon - but every week Justin Thacker tunes in and… no, still no worshipful obedience to the Lord.  Who does Bruce Forsyth think he is, an entertainer?  All this light-hearted community of enjoyment is antithetical to Justin Thacker’s God.  God would rather you read Leviticus at the weekend. Because it’s objectively true. Justin Thacker knows.

There’s no build up to this next complete non sequitur by the way.  You might not be able to see how it follows from the previous statements, but Justin Thacker is better able to grasp the subtle logical connections between things than you are:

For whatever else it is, it [the gospel] involves humbling ourselves before the creator of the universe and acknowledging that he is Lord, not us, that he is the only Rightful Judge. The problem for us, though, is that on that day when we stand before him there won’t be any public popularity vote to rescue us. Simply the Judge and us.

Is it me, or does the leap from Stictly Come Dancing to the FEAR OF GOD THAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE ON YOUR OWN PERSONAL JUDGEMENT DAY BEFORE BEING CAST INTO THE FIRES OF HELL, imply that Justin Thacker might be taking it all a little bit seriously?

Justin Thacker obviously knows all about “public popularity contests”, of course.  Himself a true fisher of men, he insults pretty much the entire country. You don’t like Justin Thacker’s Truth? Then you must hate all truth! And this abstract philosophical hatred of truth controls you even when you’re watching Strictly Come Dancing.  Next you’ll be telling Justin Thacker you liked Bagpuss when you were young!!!  Justin Thacker won’t like that.  Justin Thacker is horrified.  There were no cats in the Bible, you bloody infidel.  And that means that every time you watched Bagpuss, that was another nail in Baby Jesus’s crucifix.

This whole pile of crock, coming from the “Head of Theology” at anywhere, is insane.  I mean actually mad.  I mean, just for starters you have to admire the take-out-my-brain-and-mash-it-into-a-loaf-of-unleavened-bread craziness of the twin line of reasoning that Thacker’s argument is based on. Firstly, that the judges on Strictly Come Dancing are in themselves comparable to The Literal Arbiters of Objective Truth, and the British public (consciously or unconsciously) think of them exactly that way.  Secondly, that the Lord God is merely the divine analogue of a judge on a Saturday night entertainment show, basically just passing out aesthetic condemnations on the inhabitants of His universe (”Hmm, your day was quite productive, mortal, I really believed your heart was in it, but you only managed one small charitable act, and hardly a pirouette in sight the whole day. 3 out of 10.”)

Some people just hate a feel-good story — in this case about how the public can unite behind a bumbling old man — if that story doesn’t even remotely involve Baby Jesus.  Justin Thacker’s mind boggles; however comical or warm the story may be, if it doesn’t have Baby Jesus in it then how could it possibly not be EVIL?  (I wonder, by the way, how many of the Sergeant-voters were Christian?  On Thacker’s argument you’d expect the good Christians, who all value truth so much unlike the rest of us, to vote diligently only for the best dancer. Because of course it would be un-Christian to feel, you know, what’s that word, compassion, for the contestant who dances like someone’s inebriated granddad.)

Judgement Day:  For your atrocious theology, your plain bad manners, and for having no sense of rhythm, Justin Thacker you are awarded… 1 out of 10. You are the weakest theologian, now please leave the house.

By Bob at 08:12AM

So, I’m technically homeless.

Well that’s not quite true.  In fact, it’s even worse.

I am now “living with my parents”.  It’s just like Failure to Launch, except my version is called Limping Back to Port.

Actually that makes it sound much worse than it is.  Housemate Suzie and I were both looking to move out, so we ended the tenancy in Worcester and I simply haven’t found some place to actually go and live, yet, so I’m only temporarily at the ‘rents.  Also, when I’m at home, I’m cooked for and mum does all my laundry.  So it’s pretty nice really.  Well done, mum.

Anyway, I’ve been commuting from Worcester to London at the start of each working week for eleven months now.  So despite the return into my life of the pleasant homecooking and the big TV in the nice middleclass village, I’m still scrabbling through the online services looking for a livable-in room in London.  I’ve seen a place with a carpet so stained it looked like a colony of rabbits had been left to breed and urinate all over it, before being individually crushed, their corpses subseqently rubbed into the threadbare weave.

I also found another place which was lovely (no dead-rabbit carpets), occupied by the live-in landlady and her sixth former son, and I decided to accept it.  But then the live-in landlady said she had reconsidered the situation; I would have been their first male lodger and she felt anxious about it.  On hearing news of this disappointing retraction, my temporary housemate/mother tried to console me.  She said:  “Oh.  Never mind.  She was probably just worried about paedophiles.”

There are no words.

In other news… Shortly before all this, 10 days before our year one anniversary, in fact, the girlfriend and I broke up.  Not for any of the normal boring reasons (loss of love, irreconcilable future plans, having an affair with some other woman’s avatar in Second Life, etc etc) but because she went travelling, and — part of me still can’t believe this is even true — she is now somewhere in the lower reaches of the Himalayas.  A lot of friends have said how sad or difficult this must be and how they can’t even imagine how horrible and tragic it must be.  You know, helpful things like that.  But I think — I hope — that we both have something of a bit of a “humanist” attitude toward it.  We only have so much time on the earth and being oriented towards an impossible goal — trying to pretend that a relationship is a relationship when you’re thousands of miles apart for months on end — probably isn’t going to help anyone.  We were great.  Things were good.  And there is always change.

Anyway, this all adds to an overriding feeling of the surreal I have at the moment.  Two weeks ago I was personally ranted at by a B-list celebrity (a household name) who said some awful things I can’t repeat.  It wasn’t a nice experience, but it was a fairly unique experience!  Yesterday I gave a talk to the South Place Ethical Society telling them rationalism isn’t what they think it is.  It felt great to dig out some of my Karl Popper, and tell them that in trying to justify what they believe they were actually terrible rationalists.  I love confronting people with the counter-intuitive consequences of Popperian rationalism.  And I’ve been living on couches and in “pods” half the week for nearly a year.  I’m more comfortable living out of my rucksack than most people are sitting in their front rooms.

Life is strange, is what I think I’m saying.  But I’m sure it will settle down a bit once I find a place to live down here and actually go back to the same place in the evening once in a while.  I love change, but if everything changes all the time it’s very difficult to focus on anything.

By Bob at 13:25PM

There’s nothing intrinsically sinister about the title above, but probably a lot of people would interpret it somewhat negatively.  It illustrates the point that too much fear can make harmless situations overly suspect.

Last week a self-described “old man” wrote a letter to the Worcester News about how he felt about being suspicious in the park.

When my wife Joan died in the spring of 2006 we had been together for more than 62 years. One of our joys since moving to Barbourne was a stroll in Ghelevelt Park looking at wildlife and children playing on swings or splashing around in the paddling pool enjoying innocent fun.However, since becoming a widower, the park has now become out of bounds for old men like me. Why?

It has become very uncomfortable to sit in the park and enjoy the ambience of the place, owing to the weird knowing looks I get from young mothers with children.

I wrote back.

H A Kendall’s story is very sad (September 29) and he is honest and brave for speaking out.

Obviously, we must accept that diligence is due whenever we consider adults with responsibilities over children, and anyone taking advantage of any vulnerable person is to be abhorred.

But due diligence has been greatly over-inflated if a widower cannot sit in a park without receiving accusing looks. If the parents Mr Kendall mentions cannot imagine any reason beside sexual predation for why an old man might want to sit in a park, then their imaginations have been horribly warped. There is a climate of fear which affects not just old men in parks, but younger men, teachers, passers-by, even relatives of young people.

On a train last week a girl of about five started talking to me. I think the presence of my Nintendo DS broke down the social barrier!

Perhaps some of the looks we received across the carriage were, in part, due to surprise that two strangers should hold an open conversation on the tube at all, let alone an adult male returning polite enquiries from a child who is unknown to him. But that doesn’t fully explain the prolonged glares and my own absurd, fleeting sensations of danger.

Parents should worry about their children, yes.  Concern is understandable, yes, especially in a climate where sexual predation and sexual abuse are discussed more openly.

But people should realise that, in a sense, nothing sexualises children more than if we are constantly thinking of them as the potential victims of sexual predation.

Also… the music debate rumbles on, in the hideous form it has reached.

By Bob at 08:41AM

This increasingly unfocused, largely-syndicated-from-the-Worcester-News, hotchpotch mind-dump of a blog that I call Bob: Popper’s Troll-man Thing, now has a little brother over at — you guessed it — the Worcester News website.

See Bob’s Worcester News profile which should come complete with a short bio some time soon. My first post is “At Somerset House” and here’s a short extract:

I’ve never liked crowds. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic. I just hear “crowd” and I picture grey-faced suits stacked up on escalators closer than dominoes. Or I feel the crushing collective narrow-mindedness of a Nazi rally. And there’s something so sycophantic about a throng of gig-goers gyrating at the feet of some short-burning star, something so obsequious even about fans at a public lecture gushing as they line up to get their hardbacks John-Hancocked by the latest, greatest celebrity intellectual.

I had wanted to coin the term ‘celebrillectual’ for the end of that sentence but it didn’t quite fit.  There were no other hits on google for it though, so I really did invent it.  So I’ll coin it here instead: ‘Celebrillectual’. There, I just coined it.  It means anyone a bit famous for being at least a bit clever, but how famous/clever are two cumulative factors so that if you were really clever but only a celebrity to a particular niche then you could still be a celebrillectual, while if you were very famous but not really very clever then that could count, too.  But obviously some times these thigns go up and down together, where people are only a bit famous (for exampel if they’re only famous in the UK but not the US then that’s rubbish) and also they’re only clever in a narrow or not very academic way.  So at one end of the scale you’d have, like, Carol Voderman, Trevor McDonald, and Johnny Ball. Then up the top there’s folks like Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky.

It will probably be quite a long time before my Worcester News blog has anyone classify me as a celebrillectual.  In fact it probably disqualifies me because even if I was really, really famous in Worcester, I’d have to be very, very clever to compensate for my relative lack of fame.

By Bob at 08:10AM

By M at 21:11PM

The vivisection debate rumbles on.

Obviously, in between trying to develop medical technology via vivisection, scientists should wherever possible work toward replacement development processes.  There is a complex cost-benefit equation, here.  How much time can we spend speculatively developing new ways of testing and developing medicines without non-human animal test subjects, when any such effort may be at the cost of actually developing cures right here and now?  Assuming that greater and greater theoretical understanding, computer modelling and so on, could eventually replace all animal testing, that’s great.  But right now that’s not the reality, and I don’t want to die of something potentially curable, because rather than using vivisection now we held off in order to develop a theoretical model, when actually tests which killed some mice might have achieved the same results.

I don’t get how people who are against vivisection can cite, as someone in this ongoing newspaper debate has cited, the study of human corpses as one of the viable alternatives to testing on animals.  I’m not denying that autopsy is sometimes a good way of understanding a disease.  But the point is that there would be many more human corpses to study if animal testing was stopped today.

Anyway, here’s today’s letter in the Worcester News, unedited text below.

Apparently, despite being subject to continual assessments of efficacy and benefit, and despite being conducted under multifarious laws and codes of ethics ensuring rigorous review, the truth is obvious to H Handy (Letters, 8th September).  Vivisection is “archaic” and completely unnecessary.

In saying so, Handy contradicts three independent enquiries in the last five years (the House of Lords Select Committee, the Parliamentary Animal Procedures Committee and the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics) which all found that animal testing was scientifically sound and worthwhile.  (Despite this, anti-vivisectionists continue to call for “an independent enquiry” as if none had ever taken place.)

The Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to researchers who used animals 71 times in the last 103 years.  Is the Nobel Prize committee hellbent on rewarding fruitless and unethical research?  H Handy must think that they are.

Handy asks us to imagine all the pain that laboratory research animals endure.  And allow me to agree that we must indeed accept this.  Just as surely as we should thank the veterans of just wars, just as we should be aware that each turn of the ignition key brings flooding and destruction ever closer, we should be aware that many of our medicines and medical procedures come to us at a terrible price.

But if H Handy can ask us to imagine the animal suffering again, I must ask one more time that we summon in our minds the would-have-been suffering and deaths of millions of people from, for example, smallpox if it had not been eradicated by 1979 (300-500 million died before 1979 in the 20th century alone).  Multiply out that hypothetical unnecessary suffering by the numerous other diseases and conditions cured or alleviated through animal research, far sooner than they could have been by conducting all research via human autopsy and the like.

No one said animal research was an intrinsic good in its own right.  No one said it was flawless (no research is). But vivisection is, by far, the lesser of two evils.  And that makes its pursuit an ethical imperative.

One final point.  H Handy is right that research animals themselves never (or only very rarely) benefit by the research.  However, it is worth pointing out that animal testing has resulted in numerous drugs and procedures which are used routinely by veterinary surgeons, day in and day out, to the benefit of pets, farm stock and wild animals the world over.

By Bob at 07:24AM

Remember the Bishop of Worcester basically saying that music pretty much gets its power from his favourite god?

Apparently, “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

Which is of course true - he is entitled to say that.  But that’s completely besides the point, isn’t it.

Some people can’t stand any criticism [Worcester News, 3 September 2008, unedited version]

At the moment it seems like every time someone hears a criticism they don’t like, rather than either taking it on board or offering a counter-argument, they instead react as if someone is trying to actually ban them from holding their view.  It seems to be a defence mechanism.  People would rather say, “Hey, I have every right to my opinion,” than to actually think about the criticism offered against their opinion.

John E Iebole (August 22) notes that “the Bishop of Worcester is perfectly entitled to state that music (especially the one [sic] played in cathedrals) brings us closer to God.”

I didn’t say the Bishop wasn’t “entitled” to say anything he likes.  I’m not a censor.

But there is a world of difference between having the right to say something on the one hand, and being right in saying it on the other!

The Bishop had said (August 13) that “music has the power to move human beings deeply because it speaks … of the God who created us.”  I expressed that his statement felt to me like an over-confident gardener erecting a fence across a public footpath.  Music is a near-universal aspect of the human condition and associating it with monotheistic beliefs which we do not all share is a kind of metaphysical territorialism.  In other words, I said I didn’t like what the Bishop said.  In didn’t say he wasn’t “entitled” to say it.  Basically, Mr Iebole simply failed to address my points in any way.  Rather (probably without realising it) he simply threw up a completely irrelevant decoy about “entitlement”.

One further point, Iebole says he sensed “some anti-Christian barbs” in my letter, then he points me at the Bible!  Again, this kind of attitude seems to be nothing more than an attempt to shut down honest debate.  Just because I make a criticism of something a Bishop said, does not mean I’m “anti-Christian” in some kind of prejudicial way.  We hear much worse, much more personal criticisms than mine made in other domains (politics, theatre reviews, school playgrounds) all the time.  It is only the domain of religion which is so protected from debate that even a mild rejoinder is insinuated as a kind of hate speech.

That’s one thing I’m afraid you’re really not entitled to: you have no right to be protected from perfectly legitimate criticism.

This prompted a reply from one Linda Roberts who, frankly, I think just didn’t really read what I said.  So I wrote back again, published today.

Misunderstood for the second time [Worcester News, 15 September 2008, unedited version]

For the second time I am misrepresented with reference to the Bishop of Worcester’s comments on music.

Linda Roberts (10 September) believes “the Bishop of Worcester is correct in saying the playing of sacred music in church brings us closer to God.”  Well, okay, but this was very clearly not the part I objected to.

What I objected to was the further implication that all music, whether designated “sacred” or otherwise, derived its power from God.

Roberts also says I should “temper my views” and my “ways of expressing them”.  This is unfair.  Yes I was voicing a criticism (a mild philosophical criticism at that!) but unless you think religious representatives are exempt from criticism this shouldn’t be a problem in itself.  And if my words seem harsh, it’s probably just that religion is so often protected from normal standards of commentary.

Finally, Roberts expresses sadness that I “cannot experience” mystical feelings induced by church music.  Ms Roberts, there’s really no need to feel sad for me. Different musical genres appeal to different people, and there is probably plenty of music that I appreciate, even profoundly, which you would appreciate less.

By Bob at 13:15PM

Various reasons. I’ve been busy at work, busy at Glastonbury, busy flying around various European countries. The usual. My absence from the blogosphere has not helped by the fact that Facebook has recently been giving me that quick fix of Internet-based broadcast expression but with a lot less effort than is required to actually sit down and write something. But it’s time to stop the rot.

For once, I’ve had a weekend that I actually want to pen something about - and enough time on a slightly grey-looking Sunday evening to do so. Last weekend was all about G’s birthday weekend, too much Pimms and recovering from the effects whilst paddling around Chichester harbour and beyond in a vessel clearly not designed for such purposes but which worked surprisingly well.

This weekend has been similar, but with the Saturday festivities and socialising having been moved 40 miles south down to Brighton and the Sunday paddle consisting of the slightly more challenging 18 mile Maidstone to Tonbridge marathon, the latter having been completed in 2 hours, 48 minutes and 26 seconds (though estimated to be some three and a half minutes short due to the closure of the river at the last portage ).

Brighton was good. Sufficiently different from the last time round, a scary five years ago. There was still plenty of Park-based fun, the rather gusty yet still utterly fantastic beach - where fish and chips were eaten - a little bit of drinking, and plenty of meeting new people. My pictures are about to go on FB, which though no doubt missing a large part of the evening after I trundled back off to London I must say I’m still rather happy with.

Next time it won’t be so long

By Will at 12:51PM

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

By will at 10:58AM

People often ask me: "Rik, why on earth do you buy all that rubbish from the Oxfam bargain bin?" But that's another story.

What I want to talk about is when people ask me "Rik, where does a guy like you listen to music from these days?" After all, when you're an ex-teenage rave freak, used to work as a student DJ, have more than a passing interest in all things synth, and own a Jive Bunny album without shame, where do you go to satisfy that nagging urge for new music?

Well, the answer is that for a while, I didn't. Instead, I revelled in the warm neon glow of Radio Nigel. With the help of Nigel (run by a bloke called - wait for it - Steve), I rediscovered the 80s.  Contrary to those "party classics" that immediately spring to mind, there's actually a lot of "forgotten" 80s music out there that's actually not terrible. Martika, anyone? The Other Ones, New Order, Wang Chung, Murray Head, The Assembly? I could go on, but I'd rather you tune in.

And slowly but surely, you make your way back into the land of the living, to find artists like Rex The Dog, Tepr, datA and Trademark keeping the dream alive, albeit with a 21st Century twist. (Who knew that the Human League were still touring, by the way? Blimey.) But where can you, the poor impoverished reader, find and listen to all these people before buying an album or three? Simple. Pig Radio is your friend. Merely visiting their website will guarantee your face is flushed magenta with excitement, and that's even before you wrap your ears around the eclectic mix of new new things that burst forth from their playlist.

Finally, I know I'm about a year late, but this has been making me smile all week. Whatever happened to the Hardcore Cleaning Sensation?

By at 18:24PM

(This isn't the blog post I was planning to post, but I thought I'd throw this up while it was fresh in my brain.)

This is the second time recently that someone I know has remarked about how Thunderbird is worse than Outlook Express. It was an odd enough coincidence that I thought it worth a quick mention.

Now, I've used a fair few mail clients in the past - Pine (mmmm) and Netsc(r)ape Messenger, for example - and I used to be an Outlook user, of both the Express and "proper" flavours,. Conversely, I was glad to see the back of it. The Express version felt fragile and flaky (not to mention its Swiss cheese-like nature), and the full version was too enterprisey. I just wanted to do email - surely it's not too much to ask! (Eudora at the time wasn't free.)

Mozilla Mail was my next stop of choice, and it struck the balance far better for me. It was, however - like the Mozilla Suite in general - suffering a bit from the all-in-one clunkathon syndrome, and you did get the impression that it could have been more, well, alert, and generally a bit better than Netscape Messenger. Mozilla had the same idea, and smashed it all into bits, which brings us circuitously to Thunderbird.

I like Thunderbird mainly due to it's Ronseal-like qualities. Simply, it's a solid, no-nonsense mail client. It reads mail and newsgroups*, and it does it well. Since version 2 in particular, it's had decent filtering and search capabilities, and it's uncluttered and responsive. It even integrates with Google Mail so you can avoid using their hideous web interface.

What is Thunderbird "actually quite poor" at, then? Well, it's not crap at reading mail, that's for sure. It is quite poor at having flowery email templates. (As a rule, I don't use HTML email, so that's fine by me.) Against Outlook, integration with other services is poor. There is an integrated Calendar plugin, but it's not finished yet. But then again, the same goes for the free version of Outlook, and there's no changing that at all.

Steve mentions a "memory leak" which I thought sounded interesting, so I left my copy of Thunderbird running for a while. It's been sitting there for quite some time at around 82MB (I've got some big .msf files), and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Thunderbird for sure has a larger memory footprint than Outlook Express, but I'm not yet convinced it leaks memory in the same sieve-like fashion that Firefox does**.

So... thoughts? What else is Thunderbird rubbish at? No doubt there's more, but I'm not awake enough to remember. Comments appreciated!

*If anyone does that any more, that is.

**Yes, I know that's not really a memory leak; it's the tab caching being enthusiastic.

By at 22:31PM

It's going to be a busy month, really. Turnmills is closing down, so I'm off to see Mr Ferry Corsten play there in a couple of weekends time, accompanied by a plethora of people named Steve. It should be pretty good, but there's always the problem that the headliner DJ is always on at about 4am, by which time you're invariably too shagged out to stay awake, let alone dance enthusiastically like a loon.

Also, I'm going to be leaving these urban shores to head back to the balmy rural paradise of home during the Easter weekend, which should make for a nice break. I have a fair inkling that what I'll be doing will include at least this:

Mix in some Six Nations matches, a birthday lunch or two and some mates visiting from back home, and suddenly the old Moleskine is practically brimming with appointments.

Right, I'm off to do some late-night flat-scrubbing. If I get back in time, I'll blog about some of the software stuff that I've been looking/hacking/swearing at recently.

By at 19:32PM

I'm writing this blog entry from something really quite shiny. Yes, after all this time, I've finally bitten the bullet and bought a new home PC. A completely new one, rather than my usual tactic of cobbling together any old electronics to produce some semblance of a working system, replacing any item that's completely knackered with one that's merely slightly broken.

Now, for the first time in a long while, I'm the proud owner of a PC that:

• Has a PS/2 keyboard socket that's not inexplicably broken and doesn't prevent the mouse from working when anything's plugged into it
  
• Has a soundcard that doesn't arbitrarily stop playing sound and crash the whole system
  
• Is running an Operating System that doesn't date from 1999
• Doesn't have all of its drives held upside-down in using gaffer tape
• Can reboot without randomly losing at least one harddrive when starting back up
• Doesn't have a non-working floppy drive stuck in it because it won't come out
• Has a proper case that's not fallen to pieces, or been dropped countless times
  
• Doesn't have the speed and urgency of a snail in treacle
  

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.

By at 13:52PM

After all this time, I've finally got past the stage of just thinking about blogging something here to actually doing it. Quite an achievement, considering the size of the interim period in which I've done, frankly, bugger all.

For the first time ever since this site started, for example, I didn't wish all my friends Merry Christmas from here on Shinypixel. So for that I apologise, but then again given the amount of texts that I sent out over Xmas and New Year, I don't think I missed many people. (If I did, then... bugger.)

To continue in the usual vein of posting stuff that I've knocked up, here's an extremely rushed flyer for something that I produced in December:

Now, the more astute among you might have noticed that the 14th December wasn't on a Saturday, nor the 15th on a Sunday. How could a stickler for perfection such as myself make such a stupidly obvious mistake (and not notice until a whole day afterwards, no less)? Cast your eyes toward the right-hand side of the flyer, and squint a bit. If you still can't read it, then here's a translation: Flyer whipped up the morning after the office party by a seriously hungover DJHC.

And damn, was it a good party.

Before I bid you adieu, with fleeting yet teasing promises about exciting events to write about in future - that flashy-looking CD compilation in the top-right corner of the page, for example - here's an excerpt from some code which I'd written last week late at night, forgotten, and found again just moments ago before deciding to write this blog:

// Any one X needs at least 7 Ys to work as my extremely
// dodgy code doesn't seem to work with less. No idea why.
// Maybe it's because I'm coding it at 2 in the morning while
// listening to Phil Collins.

// *sigh*

See ya around!

By at 17:20PM

I've finally managed to get some free time. Well, free enough to start blogging again anyway. As luck would have it, there's another Hardcore Lives! day-long online beats-fest on to keep me company. I'd recommend that you tune in too if breakbeats are anywhere near your cup of tea.

The pbligatory lovely flyer - as designed by PennyCrayon alter-ego - is spammed below.

Click for a larger flyer, and here's that link to tune in again, just to rub it in a bit.

By at 08:13AM

Am I the only person not to have picked up on this already? Suddenly half of that last book makes a lot more sense.

JK - you’ve surprised me. And I certainly don’t agree that Harry Potter is “ruined forever”. What terrible views to have.

By Will at 11:20AM

Found on the bottom of a pack of Salmon fillets this evening:

Allergy advice: Contains fish

Sometimes I wonder what the world is coming to…

By Will at 14:58PM

This is a great example of why I love free software - with the latest version of GNOME out the door, Evolution now helpfully warns you if you try to send an e-mail containing the word “attached” or similar but neglect to actually attach a file to the message.

Is that not the kind of simple, yet brilliant feature that when you hear about it makes you wonder why nobody’s thought of it before? Amazing.

By Will at 16:22PM

The irony that when you have lots of blog-worthy things to write about you never seem to find time to do just that has been commented on many times before in conversations with friends. More worrying though is when you don’t even seem to be able to find the time to read other peoples’ musings anymore. And I guess I’ve kinda got out of the habit of doing both of those lately.

So yesterday I invested some of my remaining time off in setting up a whole bunch of subscriptions on my Google account. Their Reader has a few too many bevels and waaay too much baby blue for my liking, but at least I can access it from any of the three computer accounts I regularly use and should I get that fed up of it I figure I can always export the feed list list to something else - so long as it can read an OPML file.

I haven’t even added half the feeds I want to yet (since the process is a little cubersome in Firefox), but I’ve already managed to get back into quite a few blogs that I haven’t read regularly in a little while.

It’s nice to catch up. So today I’ve discovered (via John Dale) that Warwick’s new VC seems much more down-to-earth that the last guy, and that Amazon’s MP3 download service is apparently open for business - with pricing particularly attractive to those of us lucky enough to be living in a country that’s not headed straight for a recession ;-).

Who knows - at this rate I might even have Planet Afterlife working again soon. But don’t hold your breath.

By Will at 16:39PM

I read this evening that Apple have once again resorted to blocking third party software from accessing the song databases build into every iPod.

Last time it was over Real cracking their DRM and I didn’t care so much given that I can’t use most of their proprietary-ware anyway, but now Apple have completely broken the main Linux-based library used by the fabulous Rhythmbox and Banshee, amongst others.

What I find most sad is the fact that the changes they’ve made - involving some kind of checksumming built into the latest iPod firmware - serve no useful purpose whatsoever other than to limit the ways in which consumers can use their own players.

That Apple would spend engineering dollars in order to make iPods less useful - arguably completely useless to anyone using Linux - is appalling. But not surprising to anyone who’s followed their moves in recent years.

I was seriously considering buying an iPod up until yesterday. I’m certainly not any more.

By Will at 17:55PM

Keeping the Photoshop fingers in business in my spare time, here's the latest Hardcore Breaks/Old Skool/Jungle night I've done a flyer for:

By at 10:03AM

Like the infamous Norwegian Blue, I'm only sleeping.   Summer's traditionally that time where you're meant to be outside enjoying things rather than sitting inside plumbing the depths, pouring your innermost thoughts into some tiny text box and its perpetually blinking cursor.

So yeah, maybe next week when I've got some free time I'll wipe off the dust and clear out that backlog of blog drafts I've got lying around.  

In the meantime, these guys are great. 

By at 05:37AM

I'm going to be spending some time listening to this all-day old-skool and nu-skool extravaganza today. It features some of the most popular DJs from the new hardcore breaks underground scene that I've mentioned before, and is likelt to be more exciting than most Sunday afternoons, for sure.

If any like-minded individuals fancy stopping by and joining me on IRC or just the stream, please do!

(Click image for a bigger version)

By at 08:14AM

Glastonbury flew by. I have to go to work tomorrow but my mind is still stuck there in that rain-soaked field. I can’t describe what happened there in words - it was just magic.

Specific Things That Were Good included:

• The rain - I’ve not seen that much water drop out of the sky in a very long time. It really started teeming down as The Who played last night, but I don’t think anybody really cared
• The wonderful Dame Shirley Bassey - proving that she very much still has what it takes.
• Making a flag! And making sure that Ricky from the Kaisers noticed it when he came down to meet-and-greet the crowd. That’s mine in the middle of the shot!
• The food - we’re not talking gourmet by any stretch, but all things considered I’ve not eaten badly at all over the last five days.
• Cider, beer, vodka and coke and G&Ts. Not that pear cider though - I’m staying away from that one in future.
• The people. And their unrelenting determination to keep on going despite everything.

I am officially no longer a music festival virgin. Go me.

By Will at 15:27PM

On Apple.com’s new look-and-feel, discovered via Laurie.

First thoughts: it looks like someone’s just found the Colors > Invert menu item in Photoshop. Is black really back in again? I thought we’d seen the end of back of white-on-black text, banished along with circa-1998 websites and MS-DOS windows. Sure, it looks different from the old design, but not vastly so and I’d actually say it’s a step back in terms of the nice minimalistic look they previously had going on.

Their news ticker is neat, although it looks rather similar to our own.

Overall I give them seven out of ten - but only because it was so good before, they haven’t changed it that much and their small army of graphic designers seem to be able to make anything look good. Even if it is in black.

By Will at 18:35PM

As Seldo noted last night (and I was too tired to blog about), Safari has been released for WIndows. Shame it doesn't work - it does this on both of the PCs I've tested it on...

Ideas? 

By at 04:59AM

Well done Mr. Eavis - this year’s line-up looks amazing. Now can I have my tickets please?

By Will at 02:34AM

I hate having colds. That is all.

By at 06:09AM

By at 07:12AM

Today we posted the details of two new openings that we have at Alfresco up on the web site. We’re looking for a web manager to take over my current role managing the main site and associated infrastructure, and other person to look after our various internal systems. Both great opportunities, but admittedly I’m kinda biased there.

If you’re interested, send us a copy of your CV and a short blurb to careers at alfresco dot com.

By Will at 12:29PM

By at 08:18AM

Here's a little something that I've had a small hand in (full credits are here, though I'm not on them). It's a fanzine that's currently being distributed with new releases and orders being taken in the burgeoning Hardcore Breaks music scene.

"Hardcore Breaks? Whazzat?" I hear you cry. Basically, it's a revival of the breakbeat-lead hardcore sound of '93-'95 (before it went all 4-to-the-floor and descended into shitness), except with 21st Century production values, a huge sack full of Old Skool samples and a friendly scene attitude.

Apologies for image size, but as a bonus you can read it straight from the blog.

Some related links if the idea of nu-old-skool gets you pumped:

• Hardcore Lives!
• hardcorebreaks.com
• nu-rave.com (yes, I know... but it's not that nu-rave... don't mention it)

By at 09:10AM

Last night I dreamt that I was singing All Around My Hat with Maddy Prior (from Steeleye Span) while chasing her runaway shopping trolley around a Sainsbury's car park.

Just as the shopping trolley disappeared under a car (!), Cliff Richard appeared from the sidelines and began singing a song entitled Knickers Between Us. It's probably just as well that I woke up as he started.

What could it all mean?

By at 08:33AM

On the front cover of his recent, bringing-sexy-back album, Justin Timberlake is pictured, foot through mirrorball. On Sunday morning, I went one better, actually discovering parts of such a mirrorball implanted in my forehead.

It was Will’s birthday this weekend, and it all started with the vodka soup. Vodka soup is what happens when you don’t leave vodka jelly long enough for it to actually become, well, jelly, and when said soup is additionally approaching 50% proof. Anyway, it started there, and continued with the cheap wine, and the Bacardi, and gin. But despite at one point there being nearly every conceivable alcohol type in attendance - we managed to spot Baileys as being absent - this wasn’t one of those get-mashed-and-fall-in-a-ditch parties so beloved of students and tramps everywhere. This was much more classy: there was granny racing and impromptu karaoke.

It was excellent to see everyone, and on Sunday, there were bacon sandwiches and a walk in the park. But not before the glitterball / forehead incident: I dimly remember a game of gay disco catch, before falling asleep surrounded by vodka soup.

By Matt Elton at 10:15AM

I haven’t written about music for a long time, but not because I’ve stopped liking it or stopped listening to it or whatever (although my boss did take the stereo away from my office, the fiend.) I’ve become addicted to a number of new and exciting things instead.

Firstly, David Bowie. No, seriously, David Bowie. Despite growing up around a lot of 1970s music - parents’ generation, natch - it all tends towards the classic / prog rock end of the spectrum, which I always found kind of clunky. So I’ve always wanted to get into Bowie, because it’s one of those things I was sure I’d like. Y’know, all artful and electronic and atmospheric.

The one Bowie song that I’d heard - other than the obvious standards - was a bizarre, downbeat number called “Art Decade”. It was a track on a magazine covermount around the time ‘chill-out’ music was the new black, and I remember it standing out (along with “Solid Air” by John Martyn). It’s entirely instrumental, and pretty much all in a single key. But it’s incredibly atmospheric - nocturnal and brooding with just the right amount of creepiness. Inevitably, because I love my music to be both atmospheric and creepy, it stuck with me, so last month I finally got around to buying “Low“, the album it was taken from.

The album itself is intentionally this huge dichotomy - the first half’s a series of perky, succinct rock numbers, which whilst I’m sure sounded cutting edge at the time, now sound dated. (Still, some are still pretty striking - “Sound and Vision” is one of the most catchy songs I’ve heard for a long time.)

The second half consists of four pretty much entirely instrumental songs, including “Art Decade”. What’s really interesting about this ’side’ of the album is that you can really hear the origins of a lot of contemporary electronic music - particularly bands like Goldfrapp. And I don’t know whether it’s because I knew Bowie recorded them in East Germany before I heard them, but they are definitely evocative of some kind of grinding, impoverished state. Hurrah. Now I can go to art school.

The second thing I’ve really got into recently is The Flaming Lips. I already owned Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, but if possible I like the follow-up, At War With The Mystics, more. Initially, I wasn’t sure - it seemed a little less tuneful, and kind of all over the place - but the more you listen to it, the more you get out of it. There’s actually a whole load going on you don’t realise at first, and once you make sense of that, it all starts to blossom and expand in your head. The album contains a staggering amount of memorable tunes - often one after another in the same song. I also bought an earlier album, “The Soft Bulletin” which, whilst not quite in the same league, does have “Waitin’ For A Superman”, possibly one of my favourite songs ever. This month.

In the next month: John Mayer, Justin Timberlake, and the Scissor Sisters. Hurrah!

By Matt Elton at 11:16AM

Today, brain empty, stomach full, has been a lot like many other days in the past.

If a day is so similar to another that it’s just a Xerox, that you’re just circling, is there any point it having existed? Else you’re just filling time. Wasting heartbeats.

A clever man recently told me to get a pen, write on the nearest available surface where you want to be. I mean, really really want to be. Less physically than emotionally, though I’ve seen no evidence to say that the two aren’t intricately linked. This man went on to say that you have to write that at the top of the surface and then, very near down the bottom, you write where you are today.

Today I’m just circling. Today, I worry that people think I have lost direction.

And then, on this nearby surface, you have to draw in the stages from the bottom to the top. Work out conceptual ladders. Move from point A to point B. Connectthedots.

And then, on this nearby surface, you have to stop your life sliding into shit. You have to provide yourself with structure, and discipline. You have to forget the past and reason with the future.

By Matt Elton at 08:29AM

So here’s what’s scaring me this week.

The way I see it, the gap between how we see the world and what it’s really like is getting wider all the time. All the people that predicted the world would carry getting on ever smaller as people talked on mobile phones, watched each other over the internet and then flew out for visits, well, they were only part right.

Thing is, I know a lot about the world. I only have to turn on the TV or look at a newspaper and it’s right there, all the poverty and the fundamentalism and the madness. I know it exists, and I know what my opinion of it is. But my ability to interact with any of it - to do something about it - well, that hasn’t got any greater. So I have a good deal of theory, but very little practice.

So there’s other things I turn to. There’s the lifestyles of the rich and famous to keep me occupied, to keep my mind busy. I’m every bit as much a noise-aholic as the next person: fill my brain with static, white noise, and hopefully it’ll shut out the other stuff that’s going on. We make our own celebrities for sport: we entertain them just as they entertain us. When we’re done with them, we discard them. Pete and Nikki on chatshows, talking about their relationship: aaw, that’s sweet. They’re part of our little media-generated society — and bored now.

So stuck in the void between not being able to help and aware that much of the rest of it is inconsequential distraction, what’s the best thing to do? Buy into the entertainment, or go mad feeling inconsequential outside of it?

By Matt Elton at 11:05AM