Monthly Archives: February 2007

John Reid: Raising stupidity to an art form …

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I was alarmed to read that after three men were jailed for this plot to assault two young sisters, the home office announced it’s plan to get paedophiles to register their web names. Just how out of touch with reality is the home office under John Reid? Not only this totally impractical its smacks of yet another misguided knee-jerk reaction designed more to garner headlines than do anything to protect anyone.

According to a home office spokesman this idea would mean that sex offenders would have to register their online identity with the police, the notion that “online identities would be treated in exactly the same was their real name” is ridiculous given that it takes about five seconds to register a new email address, and even ip addresses can be faked – i cant see how this could be enforced and it seems to me to be a monumental waste of money.

After reading Bruce Schneier’s piece on the Psychology of Security I can’t help but feel this is a move to make people feel more secure when the reality is that they are far from it.

The wider issue of everyone having a single Internet Identity that uniquely identifies them (like a National Insurance number), is interesting. I need to give it a bit more thought before I comment on it.

Movie: Blood Diamond

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Left the office at 5:20 ish but realised pretty quickly that we weren’t going to get to the station on time due to the excess traffic caused by a show going on at the NEC. So Amanda and I decided to walk to the station, and we made it in just under half an hour. When Amanda realised she wasn’t going to be make it on time for her Kung fu class she suggested watching a movie – Blood Diamond. I normally hate anything with Leonardo Di Caprio in it – I’m the guy who cheered in a packed cinema when he drowned at the end of Titanic :p


Image source Wikipedia

The film is set against the backdrop of the civil war in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, it follows former mercenary Danny Archer’s efforts to recover a rare pink diamond. The only man who knows the whereabouts of the priceless jewel is fisherman Solomon Vandy, and Archer is forced to help him find his family before he will lead him to the spoils of war

Vandy is played by Djimon Hounsou who gives an excellent performance. Infuriatingly I have to admit Di Caprio was also exceptional in the movie. It’s a very grim tale, and the film is quite grisly in parts as you might expect given the story is set against the back drop of the brutal civil war in Sierra Leone.

Its a great movie, the cinematography is exceptional, the locations in Africa were beautifully filmed. The scenes in South Africa brought back some wonderful and even painful memories for me, there’s a part of me that will always believe there’s a big part of me still there, I loved all the time I spent in Cape Town … sometimes I wish … never mind … if wishes were horses beggars would ride!

Anyway go watch the movie, its excellent – great pick Amanda!.

Google Tech Talk: Fixing Electronic Literature … with Transclusion

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Fascinating Tech Talk by Ted Nelson. For those who haven’t heard of him Nelson is the man who coined the phrase hypertext all the way back in 1963. Nelson has spent several decades trying to make computers easily accessible to ordinary people. He’s been working towards finding ways to improve web structure, arguing that as it stands the web is actually very limited by browsers we use and that the one-way links that appear on pages actually limit connectivity. In part he attributes this to the fact that the web imitates paper … watch the talk to understand why I wont delve into that here.

He’s an advocate of Transclusion based hypertext, the idea of including parts of documents within other documents by reference, so you aren’t storing the same bits of information twice.

After listening to the tech talk what strikes me is that this kind of approach will work well when the transcluded sections of text are actually self contained and that the meaning and the validity of the text is independent of the context in which it is transcluded into other documents. I don’t know how well that would work since context forms an important part of any document, and its very difficult to write documents without forming some kind of context, that’s why there’s always an inherent danger when you tug in a quote that you might mis-represent it or use it in a context it was never intended to ( just ask the Pope!). I know Nelson says that you can compare the context side by side, yet this doesn’t seem intuitive to me.

I know the man is the genius who is credited for inventing hypertext so why am I not convinced, am I missing something? Any thoughts anyone?

Actually thinking about it the Xanadu document browser Nelson shows off in the tech talk, is very similar to a Document Hyper browser developed at Xerox Research that Alan once showed me. I cant find any reference to it … but I’m seeing him tomorrow so I’ll ask him.