Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Andy Gates' LiveJournal:

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Saturday, February 6th, 2010
4:44 pm	DRM Rage: Hulk Smash Puny Encryption Against my better judgment, I was so tempted by Norse Code and Boneshaker (sci-fi vikings in Rangarok LA, and gold-rush steampunk zombies respectively) that I bought some DRM'd ebooks from the lovely BooksOnBoard.com.  You can tell this won't end well, can't you? The executive summary: Buy books, download books, move books to reader. Book-managey software says it needs an update: comply. Books no longer work, managey-software no longer sees reader, books on reader say "no".  Sundry reinstalls and re-registration does nothing. Gamma flash, rampage! From a customer viewpoint, I just spent good book money on broken things.  I have been ripped off.  I am angry. If I'd downloaded skeezy ripoffs from Bittorrent, I would have got working books.  It's like the publishers are giving their products to an idiot child and asking me to trust that they'll get here and not get used for toilet paper.  Ignoring the insult implicit in publisher's use of DRM ("We think you're a thief, just shut up and pay us"), this is an enormous amount of trust.  It's the publisher and the retailer that get my anger because it is them with whom I have dealings.  Adobe's just some crap I need to makey worky. As it happens, Adobe Digital Editions - the sinner in this little play - has junk key management and there have been DRM-cracking scripts available for months.  A bit of nerdy hoop jumping and lo, I have un-DRM'd versions of both books, and that is good.  So please, Random House, Barnes & Noble, ditch the DRM, it hurts paying customers.  BooksOnBoard, and the rest of the industry, put some pressure up the pipe to get rid of the DRM, because I'm not buying any more when I have to go through all this frakkin' hassle. Current Mood: angry (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
1:17 pm	Fairy Leaves: DRM and Trust I have a dilemma: I want to spend money and I don't know how. The problem is good old DRM.  Ebooks outside the Kindleverse* are mostly EPUBs with optional DRM from Adobe Digital Editions (ADE).  As DRM goes, this is pretty sophisticated, allowing you to register multiple devices to your ADE ID and handling device recovery and even some lending (gasp!).  But the key to my book is still in the hands of Adobe.  And that means that there's a trust issue: Will Adobe honour that key in perpetuity?  Hell, will Adobe exist in perpetuity?  ( tl;dr ) This untrustworthy hint of the ephemeral -- the threat, however small, that the pages of an ebook will turn into so much dust ten years from now -- that makes me unwilling to spend money.  Books last.  Cracked downloads last too. That's why the industry needs to sort this: there needs to be a non-profit universal key service, supported by all actors, used by all actors, so that when a private service dies it goes into escrow heaven there to serve ad perpetuum.  It needs to be as universal and as infrastructural as DNS.  Until then, DRM'd ebooks are a rental with an uncertain return date. * Inside the Kindleverse the DRM is all handled by Amazon: the trust issue is the same, it's just more contained - like Apple, the whole shebang of content, reader and DRM is handled by one organization.  It makes things slick and easy (and therefore popular) but doesn't addresss my fears.  (22 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 1st, 2010
8:10 pm	Papal Bull So the Pope is visiting to remind British lawmakers that the Equality Bill is scary, in that it may remove the Church's ability to discriminate against people. What's wrong with that picture?  *facepalm* (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
9:19 pm	Can you hear me now? Last week my phone went for a swim.  Immersion in diet coke killed the screen, or so it seems, and strand one of the response is to order tools and parts for the trusty Nokia 6230i which was doing sterling service.  One torx driver later and the boards are scrubbed and still the screen is sad, so, given that the screen's baby-PCB had grot on it, I'm assuming the grot was death-grot and ordering a replacement from the magic flea market. Strand two looks for a replacement.  It turns out that you can get a phone for utter bobbins - Phones4U actually have one for a fiver -  but these phones are as basic as cheap phones always were.  As soon as you get up to camera + video + expandable memory + rudimentary stub of internet, there's a jump from bobbins to real money.  If you want robust or bling, the real money gets real enough that you need a contract or a rich uncle.  I was vaguely expecting to see something akin to the 6230i - a noble steed in phone lineages - at the £30-£40 mark.  Apparently not (at least, there is one, but it's got the Samsung special slow interface and is styled for a teenager's bedroom, faux carbon and all).  So it's worth repairing, because the replacements are twice that.  Meanwhile, I'm playing silly buggers with the on-call phone.  Ssh, don't tell.  Anyone got a builderphone going spare? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
11:01 pm	Lying liars: Wakefield and Rose I'm filled with smiles today to see that the BMA are heartily spanking Andrew Wakefield, the doctor whose bogus - knowingly bogus - research started the whole stupid false MMR flap and gave credibility to a whole generation of vaccine-phobic woo-mongers telling people that a shot will turn their kids into Rain Man, (here, buy this crochet spiral chicken liver instead, it'll purge toxins and align your native reiki chakras).  Wakefield, you are a lying liar.  And I'm filled with weary to see that the latest Final Nail in the coffin of global warming, yes, there are so many final nails that you have to wonder whether there's any wood at all or, for that matter, room for a body (alas, it aten't ded and aten't dying: eppur si riscalda no matter what the lying liars write) -- *breathe* that this latest Final Nail, Rose's piece in the Daily Mail about Himalaya glaciers, is a big fat lying lie.  The boffin at the heart of the story, Murari Lal, was heinously misquoted and fibbed over; the story pretty much made up out of whole cloth.  Rose, you are a lying liar. Current Mood: angry (32 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
7:58 pm	Ebay WTF I know Ebay WTFs are usually ankaret 's bailiwick but I can't resist posting this one: a Puming Iron Fashion Doll Crochet Pattern.  You get patterns for a little singlet and baggy sweatpants, a bench, barbell and dumbbells!  I cannot express how batshit this is: the Cosmic 'Wut?' drapes over it like spray cheese topping. Current Mood: amused (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 17th, 2010
10:05 pm	Rubble and Tents Part of the OSM Haiti response has been to pick over fresh satellite images and mark stuff.  Half of that is map-tarting, the other half is looking for interesting places: collapsed buildings and bridges, landslides, campsites.  This phase is more or less done now, with the relief agencies rolling that data into the other crisis sources and using it as they will. I've been staring into sat photos (DigitalGlobe and GeoEye have been utter stars in making their data widely) available all week, and wondering if the process could be automated.  Collapsed buildings visible from space go into two patterns, it seems: the roof falls in leaving a tic-tac-toe grid of walls, or the whole thing turns to rubble (many buildings have pancaked instead, with the walls failing and the roof falling intact: these aren't easily visible from directly above).  Campsites are erratic splats of tent colours in otherwise plain areas.  So some rules could be drawn up: If in a block of edge-detected buildings there is an area of high noise and it's not green, it's probably rubble. If edge-detection finds a cluster of boxes about a factor or two smaller than their neighbours, it's probably the rooms inside a house. If in an area of otherwise plain detail there are spots of noise in telltale colours - tarp blue and tent orange, particularly - it's likely to be a campsite. This is especially true if the site is already geotagged as a park, playing field, car-park, etc (ie an open flat space). It would need higher resolution imagery, but not by much. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 15th, 2010
5:25 pm	Haiti and disaster mapping I must confess, there's a part of me that worried about the prurience of scrambling to update a map of a disaster zone.  That's what I and scads of others have been doing on OpenStreetMap since the Haiti quake struck.  On its own, as just another map, that might be true, but OSM's not on its own like that. It took about twelve hours to get the coverage in Port-au-Prince (PAP) up to best in breed, and at the same time the amazing flexibility of wikis was coming into play.  GeoEye provided a Bourne-style high-res satellite image of the day after the quake; it was deployed as a traceable background layer.  A tagging schema was agreed in IRC and mailing lists and wikispace for refugee camps, damaged buildings and blocked roads; the OSM deep nerds set regular extracts running so fresh maps are always available for agency GIS, routing, satnav and so on.  In parallel, the map was amped up in detail and at the same time the disaster-specific information was sourced, implemented, distributed.  "Please tag camps and graveyards".  Grim. It could still be prurience: zooming in to see, is that rubble or a crowd? tents or tin roofs? collapsed buildings or just shanty neighbourhoods? - it has the fun of a resource-management computer game -- until one of the search and rescue teams said thanks for the Garmin extract.  And then the kid on the news is shown camped in a football pitch you spotted earlier.  Then it all gets a little bit real. Medicin sans Frontiers will be in with an inflatable hospital soon, and the USS Carl Vinson just arrived with the USNS Comfort en route.  They'll get marked up once they lay anchor.  The system is insanely agile, the wiki mantra "assume good faith" paying off in spades. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
10:53 am	Celebrity Talent We need another celebrity talent show.  No, wait, put down that taser, I'm serious.  We need Celebrity So You Think You Can Fight? Imagine it: Z-list celebs cage-fighting in the octagon.  No butting, gouging or biting.  Russell Brand getting pwned by wee Jimmy Krankie because wee Jimmy's secretly been doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for the last twenty years.  Middle-aged soap stars squaring off against pop producers.  The WAGapocalypse: Two WAGs enter, one WAG leaves.  Lembit Opik and George Galloway in tight shorts all tangled up and bloody. It's a golden win.  And it would franchise across the world (except Russia, maybe, where Putin would enter wearing the skin of a bear he killed himself and the opposing celeb would tap out as soon as the first bell rang).  Current Mood: giggly (24 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 1st, 2010
10:44 pm	2010! 2009 was long, wow, seems like I did a lot of stuff and it took a lot of time but I'm exactly where I was this time last year.  But hey, 2010 is the Future.  Dude, where's my jetpack? 2010 to-do: Bring buff back.  Learn to kayak.  Couple of sea triathlons, hopefully an adventure race.  Finish my bathroom.  Fix the pennyfarthing. 2010 to-avoid: Bleak.  Really, that is so done.  And I really need to stop setting fire to my beard. Also, anyone know any seven-headed fox women?  Just asking... (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
4:06 pm	Ebook musings Since I've had my reader for a while, and gorged on half a dozen novels and a pile of science PDFs, here's some bearded sagacity for the future: The successful vendor must be format-agnostic.  Offer the book as a download, then give the customer a choice.  Write a little app to detect the platform, rememer it in their profile, and offer the best option, otherwise give a pick of the standard (EPUB) and the proprietory (Kindle, Mobi, Spaceflaps).  If your store doesn't allow me to buy an ebook, I'll go elsewhere to buy books in general, and then you've lost my treebook sales too. PDF blows goats.  Seriously.  Make it reflowable and resizeable or go home.  If you think your page layout matters more than being readable, you're dead wrong.  E-newspaper subscriptions are dead.  C'mon, it's a crippled version of a feed aggregator (there's a market niche there for an "RSS-to-EPUB" converter in there - Feedbooks, Zinepal, TeleRead et al come close but it hasn't had its ipod moment yet).  Definitely not worth the premium, on which note... Downloads are worth less than paper.  I can't give a download as a present, I can't hug a download and remember its smell, I can't find a blade of grass from that camping holiday in a download, a download isn't bent by my lover's hands.  Downloads are commodity pap: it is ridiculous to charge as much or more for them.  Tenner for the book, fiver for the download, that's about right.  DRM makes a download worth even less, because it can't be shared and is subject to the whim of technical gremlins.   Let me down and I go to BitTorrent.  Why isn't your full catalogue available online?  Don't pad it with the Gutenberg stuff, you big fakers.  If it's out there, you should be selling it.  If the vendor gets in the way, it's torrentin' time. Trilogies and partworks rock.  Without the bulk of treebooks, downloads are perfect for epic series.  Bundle 'em up: all the Harry Potters in one go?  An easy sale.  And if you want to keep readers coming back, the partwork format is super-easy to do without all the physical overheads (and stock risk on series that tank).  A fresh Glass Books or Dark Tower novella every couple of months?  Fat Zines.  Paper zines and current electronic zines are choked on layout and limited in size.  There's nothing to stop fat zines from rolling up big chunks of material.  A monthly Nanowrimo 'reader's digest' with half a dozen of the best novels, along a theme?  Technically trivial. Current Mood: contemplative (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
8:12 pm	Kneehab Guess what?  I CAN RUN AGAIN!  A wardrobe malfunction meant I missed the gym, so when I got in I suited up for a little easy jog - 17 minutes with a few dashes.  Knees: GOLDEN.  Calves cramping, feet aching, glutes startled, shins tweaking, but that's just conditioning.  The bad knee is not bad! Jack's back, baby, Jack's back. :D So for reference that's 8 weeks off running, most of that time off the bike as well, for running through an obvious Something Wrong for several hours.  I've put on over half a stone too.  Let that be a lesson to any macho types - when it goes sproing you stop.  It might have healed a bit faster if I'd been a tad more religious about the physio, too... Now to re-learn to run with lots more medial glute action.  But hey, the gym is 2km from work, perfect warm-up and warm-down distance (on nice days!). Current Mood: happy (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
7:38 pm	That 'Russian Analysis' and a Plea for Honesty Busted over at Deltoid. It's another cherry-pick and misquote by a politically-motivated organization, repeated in the sympathetic press without fact-checking.  James Dellingpole, have you no shame? Again, it'd be great to see honesty from the right: Some Russians who said "yes, it's happening and we think it's great! Farming! Resource exploitation! Enough for all - you get flooded, come here, work a Siberian vineyard and show us your wacky indigenous dishes: everyone wins!" Alas no. The "Russian Analysis" is a selective sample that doesn't even say what they say it says, and by name-dropping they give it that fake gleam of state support. It's just some suits talking crap. Current Mood: vexed (2 Comments |Comment on this)
9:34 am	Exe Valley Triathlon Just a reminder, if you're thinking about entering the Exe Valley Tri on 9th May 2010, entries are filling up. It's a nice pool sprint with a mostly flat out-and-back valley bike, then an onroad rolling run. Good little start to the season. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
11:58 am	100 Reasons Analyzed The breadth and sheer cheek of the bogosity in that 100 Reasons article took my breath away. After tearing it apart yesterday, I thought I'd do a bit of analysis: Fully a quarter of the arguments are ideological, completely unrelated to the natural world or to science; they're "kyoto sucks" or "obama sucks" or "windmills suck". Next largest are the lies. Straight-out deception. A fifth of the document is just plain lies. What next? Attacks on the credibility of the IPCC, and 'climategate' smears: these aren't challenges to the science, but snarks at the people. This is what happens when ideologues go after scientists, and it's ugly. Next is crank references. I'm including some fringey references that may pan out in that, because they're being spun as cranks who will tear down the lie - some honest work may be misquoted by the authors, and I apologise if that's the case. And then we're down into the usual denier crap: cherry-picking (you can prove anything that way; one node is not a keystone, it is an outlier); it's the sun; the CO2 lag canard; baffling people with numbers (mixing up rates and values is a classic obfuscation trick); obsolete science and finally crumbs of logical fallacies, stuff that just doesn't make sense. How did this rubbish get past the fact-checking apparatus of the national press? This has all the credibility of "Elvis Sighted on Moon". (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
3:24 pm	100 Reasons Climate-Change Deniers Are Talking Crap Some bunch of jokers calling themselves the European Federation put this collection of tired canards among the right-wing pigeons, who have dutifully published it as a great and mighty scoop. This from the Express and the Mail, mind you, the "MI5 Killed Diana" and "Hooray for the Blackshirts" papers. Caveat lector. Anyway, as it's slow, I'm going to see how many I can whack without breaking a sweat. (Later) Wow, that was easy. Is this the best they can do? Note the massive logical inconsistency (it's happening! it's not! it's the sun! it's the clouds! it's Obama!) and the use of repetition to fake up a hundred points, the use of all manner of logical falseness, and especially the treatment of science as ideologically, rather than observationally driven. Frankly, this is all crap. ( Epic 100-Reasons whac-a-mole under the cut ) (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 14th, 2009
8:54 pm	How to make decarbonizing sexy? In discussion today, "why does everyone have to agree before cutting emissions? Why not just do it?" As I see it, this is because they all view "it" as a painful thing, and so the whole Prisoner's Dilemma / competition thing kicks in. Untrustworthy actors are expected to welch; trustworthy actors don't want to be the schmuck. The whole thing would be a metric ton easier if someone had the chutzpah to present decarbonizing as a short term economic and social good. Any suggestions? despaer , economics is your bag. How'd you sell it? The current best sell, the Stern report, is about a 500% ROI but on a century timescale, which clearly means not you, not me and not the current governments (possibly not the current nations). (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 11th, 2009
5:52 pm	New Weather Well Def Jeff over at Weather Underground has a detailed post on a new weather pattern that's been identified over the Arctic: The old atmospheric patterns that controlled Arctic weather--the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO), which featured air flow that tended to circle the pole, now alternate with the new Arctic Dipole pattern. The Arctic Dipole pattern features anomalous high pressure on the North American side of the Arctic, and low pressure on the Eurasian side. This results in winds blowing more from south to north, increasing transport of heat into the central Arctic Ocean. This is fascinating - we knew there would be these large-scale changes, but not really what they'd be until they happened. The heat transport possibly explains the excess melting that has occurred in recent years: it wasn't in the current crop of ice prediction models, so they've been conservative. The Arctic is switching from swirling jetstreams around the pole to winds from the South slurping warm air, so "fascinating" should be accompanied with a generous side of "oh crap". (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
5:49 pm	Feeling guilty about not feeling guilty There's a new Tesco in town - a full-fat jobbie, no less, with frocks and pills and a 24-hour garage. I'm delighted, and I'm also impressed with the building, which uses lots of wood and glass instead of concrete and steel. But we're supposed to be down on Tesco, aren't we? I mean, yes, they built on a greenfield flood plain site and that's evil, but they've got everything non-specialist I need under one roof with long opening hours. I can ride over with the trailer in the evening and not face silly little shops that close at five; the local catchment is up to fifteen miles for this store, because mid Devon is a retail desert. The local lampposts are full of grumble about the eebil Tescopoly... but they and the Council have laid on two new looping bus services that go all over town, and there is no damn room for a bike lane (ptui!) on the A377, and there is a whole new no-through access road that's ideal for A-road-hating bike wusses. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
11:41 pm	One-line reviews: Ministry Of Space Warren Ellis is a magnificent bastard. Ministry of Space is a delicously sly suckerpunch of a three-volume Future Shock. Current Mood: snotty and sleepless (Comment on this)