Comment here

I could get arrested if I leave my power hungry iPhone charging and forget to pick it up?

Plus integrating credit cards and ID cards is being thought of at the moment too.

In Franco’s Spain you had to show ID when you bought anything. I once heard an ex-policeperson say that we should emulate a fascist state and do the same here. It’s already arrived in all but name. Maybe buy a SIM from a car boot sale?

Have a read of Doctorow’s Little Brother, particularly the bit about data mining false positives. You need a data mining technique that is as reliable as the thing you are trying to find, or you will waste a huge amount of time and resources chasing the innocent. No, wait …

Don’t they do that already?

I left this comment in response to some naive comments here (but they deleted it for some reason):

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/06/dna_deletion/comments/

“My utterly unique fingerprint will be on a database that police can use to exclude me from suspicio”

… and all the members of your family?

… and get you a £60 fine for that fag end you dropped?

… deport you when a Nazi group gets in power and decides it does’t like your racial background?

… and, of course, the old false positive. One in a hundred thousand means there are (60m/100k) 600 people that might have the same match (not counting shared genes with the family). The more non-“perps” in the DB, the greater the likelihood.

and don’t forget they quite often have to “multiply” the DNA to get a usable sample, very easy to “multiply” contamination too.

Plus, personally, I’m just sick to death of the useless gits wasting tons of my money on crap like this and ID cards. SORT OUT THE FUCKING ECONOMY and OBEY INTERNATIONAL LAW – IT’S WRITTEN THAT WAY FOR A REASON, or do we have to another genocide like world war II before they finally understand that no-one cares if they can be trusted, it’s more that can unknown the people in the future can be trusted? Not that we trust them anyway.

Not hard, eh?

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IBM managed to make money from Java, and Sun never really did

So, there’s an irony here. IBM picked Java up, wrote better tools, more popular (although horrible to code against) J2EE server.

It does make sense for everyone, the engineers married to the people who can actually sell things and still understand engineering.

Fiorina destroyed the innovative base at HP and Hurd would’t know innovation if it bit his bits off.

Here we have two competent innovators, a great sales team, a consultancy arm with a reasonable rep. I’d be scared if I were HP or Microsoft. very scared.

I would like to see some proper reporting of the carbon phobia debate.

I would like to see some reporting of the Japanese contention that “climate change” is on a par with astrology. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/25/jstor_climate_report_translation/

Also it changed its name from global warming (which could’t be proved) to climate change – that’s the inconvenient truth – I want science not religion from scientific publications.

I don’t want to see the bogus “hockey stick” curve on the cover of your reputable magazine ever again, I was going to renew my sub after a long time without reading it regularly except certain editions bought from the news stand and decided not to. It was ill-advised and totally innumerate.

Humans add about 10% to the global amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s reported like we make all of it. Some sense of proportion would be useful. It makes all of your other reporting suspect.

I honestly don’t know what the real issues with CO2 are – but you are’t helping me find out, are you?

Bootnote

I did some digging on the web and discovered that we actually contribute less than 5% of the annual CO2 production. There are other greeenhouse gases that are produced in much bigger proportions by humans, but we need some properly funded, peer-reviewed research with evidence. No more anti-technology, screw-the-poor-we-can’t-do-anything dystopian nonsense.

I go for a walk every day. This involves crossing a two bar fence that is made of very thick wood. I have done this for the best part of two years.

As I was walking long I got some aggressive busybody having a go at me, and asking me if I would pay to have the fence repaired if I broke it. I’m afraid I was very rude to him and told him to leave me alone. Then he stared bleating about private land and as far as I am aware the land is owned by the local Council. I told him to grow up and left him to it.

Why am I still angry with him?

Bootnote

24 hours later I’m still angry and did’t sleep properly. This is very boring.

Bootnote 2

Now the council have painted the fence with some kind of grease. I’m going to find out who to complain to if someone’s clothes are damaged or they slip and hurt themselves and get a sign printed saying who to contact. The other thing about Jobsworths is their anonymity.

Bootenote 3

I mentioned this to my Lama because I was a little ashamed at my behaviour and also very surprised at how it had affected me so much. He pointed out that spending a lot of energy opening up your mind and heart to others and then clamping down on it so hard will cause all kinds of mental problems. I need to learn the lesson and not allow my anger to rise. Still does’t mean I have to behave like a doormat or tolerate being shouted at, but the way I deal with it in my mind needs some attention.

Comment here.

Well, yes, but. You also need an idea that’s worth bothering with. Paul Graham points out (at some length) that you need to go for something painful that other people think is too hard or difficult and then find a novel and easy way of doing it.

There are millions of “me too” “Web 2.0” “social networking” sites that do nothing and eat VCap cash that could have been spent on something that sucked less.

So yes, ignore the nay sayers, good! But make sure you’re doing something original enough to make money too (even if original means cheaper and better).

So, that old anger, chomped down from years ago

Some kind of decayed corpse

Drag round again (and again)

Once a stinking albatross but now some bones and feathers, dried sinew, inedible

How they hurt you then (when you were small, when you were standing in that queue so long ago, when the world stopped being your playground, when …)

You squint up from your down place into bright sunlight

Blinded

Pulling that old thing from far ago with your frayed, ratty, furry tramp’s string retied forever a faded parcel blue

More important than anything

Then

Now?

Everybody knows all sorts of things

Everybody knows you should leave the past behind

Everybody knows the stumps of fingers worn away digging for yesterday

Prove me right if I could only change that thing

Fix the unfix

Unthrow that insult, rock, clever remark, eternal regret

That old thing takes your breath one day

Hands hold shimmering dust of what you have, were, would be

Just dust, that old thing, just dust

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I don’t develop on Windows any more.

Last time I used VS it ate the machine and installed a ton of services running SQL Server and other .Net stuff without even asking or explaining what it was doing. It’s just a fancy editor with a ton of macros built in that integrates with these services once you’ve understood how to use it. So what?

On Linux gedit is fully customisable with little bits of python code (most of which you can get from elsewhere so you don’t have to write them yourself). One of my colleagues has managed to get it looking like his beloved TextMate. Emacs runs on all platforms including windows and is more customisable than any other editor I’ve ever used (but you need to buy the O’Reilly book to get anywhere with it IMO).

I dunno, VS is heavy, slow and invasive, as is Windows. Mind you, so are most of the Java platforms too – but they don’t install a load of crap that slow your boot down even more …

I installed Wubi so I can switch back to Windows if I have to, but very rarely do. The machine looked like it needed to be upgraded because it was so slow. It’s like I’ve got a new machine. So why would I run windows and VS?

I’m in the middle of moving my blog to francisfish.com. I’ve been looking for a Rails-based solution and decided on typepad.

I’ve bee variously ill or stressed for most of the last month which was’t a lot of fun. Made some really silly and expensive mistakes at work that did’t help either. Nothing I can do about that now.

We’re off to the Redemption con this weekend which I am really looking forward to. R is trying to raise £2000 so that Deb can go on a guide-sponsored trip to Eastern Siberia to teach English and help run a summer camp. R is doing a “slot” and having a stall at the zocalo fair.

The new blog site will also feature my novel Archive Fragments. I’m going to set up a way of remixing it using random numbers, plus add your own content. To that end I’ve decided to release it under the CC non commercial licence. I’ve been reading Corey Doctrow’s Content and understand his arguments. Still confused about copyright – I need to think about it some more.

Still getting the site together – so I thought I’d post here to prove I have’t died.

I already put this on the forum, but here it is. Useful if you want to work out how to make other console programs run properly from cygwin. Note that is uses Bash shell arrays:

 #!/bin/bash

args=(“$&quot;)<br /><br />for (( i = 0 ; i &lt; ${#args[]} ; i++ ))
do
    x=”${args[$i]}”
    x=”${x///cygdrive/c/c:}”
    x=”${x////\}”
    new_args[$i]=”$x”
    echo “${args[$i]} -> ${new_args[$i]}”
done

#echo “/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Prince/Engine/bin/prince.exe” “${new_args]}&quot; 1&gt;&amp;2<br />&quot;/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Prince/Engine/bin/prince.exe&quot; &quot;${new_args[}”