So I took my stupid damn idea off to the stupid ideas club. When we got there, guess who? Spyblog was waiting at the rendezvous with some Dutchmen and an Argentine documentarist and half the No2ID members not currently in hospital. And after we made our way through Jock McZanu’s EU Maddie monsoon (GOOD HERE…
Read More Organise, and a very wet 2600I’ve been reading the oohing and aahing about the Obama web operation (for example, here at the Linux Journal); all those individual pages and RSS feeds and iCals for every event. It strikes me that some of this can be generalised, and that we can probably improve on it. After all, as LJ points out,…
Read More OrganiseYou rock. It’s interesting that blockade-running is a lasting technique of protest; Joseph Conrad did a spot on behalf of the Spanish Carlists, Erskine Childers for the IRA (although he thought he was doing it for the other side), and then, there was the saga off Bilbao in the Spanish Civil War. It’s always worth…
Read More Outside the three mile limit in ’65…Here is the presentation I delivered at OpenTech 2008: | View | Upload your own I’d publish the text, but I didn’t prepare a text:-) Anyway, the ViktorFeed is a development of basic python scripts I’ve been using for some time to collect data on certain aircraft movements through Sharjah and Dubai Airports. Both of…
Read More The ViktorFeed: DocumentationLess blogging than usual due to OpenTech 2008 preparations. Must keep hacking, the clowns are gaining. Anyone know much about GeoRSS? I’m on in track 2 (the Upper Hall), sometime after 1.30pm.
Read More Reduced BlogHa. Ha. Ha. Looks like Kelvin McFuck won’t be standing after all. Too risky, eh? There we were, thinking he was a heroic fighter for all he thought was right, not to mention a formidable enterpreneur, and a man confident in the backing of the deadliest nonkinetic weapon system on the planet. After all, heroism…
Read More fully recyclable cellulosic macro-feline predatorSaid Sir Michael Rose, speaking at the SAS passing-out parade in 1979: One intelligent soldier can achieve more than a fleet of B-52s. There’s some debate as to whether that statement could be applied to Rose himself, but I doubt many would disagree with it. David Davis apparently agrees. His resignation from Parliament should be…
Read More one intelligent soldierHere’s a visualisation of today’s output from the Viktor Bout script, version 2.5, with the help of IBM ManyEyes‘s network graph function. Unfortunately the flight number data in there has somehow been filtered, and there should be arrowheads. Why can’t I have arrowheads? Rest assured the definitive version is coming…
Read More Political Pathetic Python AgainSo, after the Phorm evilhood, and the weird brokenness detailed here, and the 30-odd hour no-notice outage they dropped on me just after I started working from home, literally driving me to drink (the nearest operational open WLAN I found was in a pub), now Virgin Media comes up with this. It’s not just the…
Read More You Say Virgin, We Say Die!Well, I never imagined Robert Mugabe’s new survival gambit would be just to pretend it wasn’t happening. But it does permit us to answer the question of just how small a state can get and still function; to be clear, I don’t mean a state in the juridical/diplomatic sense, but rather in the political, realist…
Read More The real minimal state