Some input from a friend of mine (Thanks Rob) got me to this page on Realitime HDRI.
For those of you not in the know, HDRI stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging, and a much more verbose explaination that I can give you can be found here
I picked up on something from an EMail newsletter I’m on and tracked back to this article at Slashdot.
The thing that boils my blood is Microsoft’s statement:
“an excess in freedom of speech and freedom of thought, by means of the dissemination of information.”
What the HELL (Sorry young readers, but I’m really mad) is that supposed to mean? The American Police State is out of control. Who are they to try and push for legal action against someone who decides that they don’t want to pay through the nose for some software?
Illegal to use it without paying, I can follow.
Illegal to annnounce you’re going to use Linux instead? Jeebers.
They are, of course, trying to dress the lawsuit up as a libel action, saying that Sergio Amadeu likened them to drug dealers and “oh mommy it hurt us”, but what I really think they’re trying to do is clamp down hard and fast before public acts of large-scale Microsoft Bashing really do start to make an impact.
Mr Sergio Amadeu was bang on the money and his decision is one I hope the rest of the developing nations will follow. I just hope he isn’t intimidated by the legal move against him, or is assasinated in a “car accident” and replaced with a Microsoft-Bought lackey.
One wonders if I’ll get a letter from Microsoft about this blog post, for an “excess of free speech” on my part. Facists.
Quick one from the BBC here, with a fingerprint reader added to a handbag.
Surely any street thief will see to defeat this doesn’t require a Charlie’s Angels level of complexity? Perhaps it can also only be compromised with a biometric Stanley knife or DNA sensitive scissors?
I’m being too cynical for my own good.
Don’t worry about the post title, I’m just seeing if Google picks me up.
Mobile phones have wrecked peoples’ ability to co-ordinate a plan. It is true. 10 years ago when I was riding around on a wee BMX, no more than 1 phonecall to each friend was required to bring them, without fail, to the designated meeting point for whatever reason. Try the same thing tomorrow and you’ll have consumed £5 in phone credit before everyone has even agreed to go in the first place and that’s before people actually get underway.
Admit it, you’ve been there. You call, you get a maybe, they’ll “text” you back (Oh my how I hate that turn of phrase…), you get a message a little while later saying “Sure, where?”. You call or “text” them to give them the details. This continues until all parties have been notified.
Shortly before you depart yourself you will have dealt with several calls confirming the location, that someone can’t make it even though they said they could, someone can’t come as they’ve had a better offer and someone has forgotten if it was this Tuesday or next week. Oh and you get a wrong number from Romania and a robot voice promising that you’ve won “One of the following great prizes”.
En route to the destination more calls flood in though you’re not sure why and upon arriving, half of the people are late, some are lost, some turn up next Tuesday and there’s a Romanian at the restaurant who’s voice you swear blind you recognise.
Why? I have reason to believe it’s got something to do with how humans respond to pressure and deadlines. See, if the first phonecall is your last and from that point on you have no way of contacting the organiser, then the details become concrete. Only if something disasterous happens will you seek further contact with the guy organising the event. However, the ubiquitous nature of the mobile means that you think in the back of your mind that you can get hold of the guy instantly, regardless, so there is no motivation to remember the details and also, to stick to them. You’re running late? Just call, it’ll be OK. Can’t remember where you’re meeting? No worries, just “text” them. Etc etc etc.
I wonder how far things will have to go before people other than me start to find this annoying ? Maybe they won’t, maybe most people will begin to accept that a simple trip to the cinema should require 4 phonecalls, 3 SMS messages and a 2 hour meeting window? My mobile only receives calls, I’m too cheap to put credit on it, perhaps this is why I’m not taking the slide into the disorganised world of the mobile masses. My aim is to remain punctual, afterall, I am British 😉
You may or may not know that I used WordPress to power the blog section of my site. I use 1.0.1 which is now old and cranky. Version 1.2 has been released but I’m in the middle of re-writing my gallery backend so won’t be upgrading for a few weeks until the gallery is finished. When I finally do upgrade, expect things not to work for another good few weeks whilst I hack and tweak things back to normal and then and only then will I re-code the Amazon Media Manager to work with WP1.2.
I’m just about to start investigating WP1.2 offline, though I heard 1.3 is in the pipeline and will be another major update, so I may skip 1.2 all together if I’m too slow getting round to the upgrade.
Some of you may recall the rather bizarre phonecall that prompted me to count out 60 days of my existence. Well, it expired little over 48 hours ago if my timing is right and lo, last night, I get another call from the same agency asking me if I wished to participate in a free 60 day free insurance scheme, this time to cover private medical insurance covering cancer, organ faliure, heart disease and a multitude of other nasties.
I kindly informed the lady on the telephone, who was awfully friendly, that I had begun to suspect that someone, somewhere, has designs on my wellbeing and attractive though the offer sounded, I wasn’t interested because after the 60 days I would be unable to afford to pay for the coverplan anyway.
So ladies and gentlemen, start your clocks and countdowns, I have another 60 days to survive.
Well, looks like I’d have wasted my time with the 60-day life insurance “trial”, I made it through without a scr…
…atch.
If I had taken up the offer my beneficiaries would be no richer and I would now be locked into a direct debit scheme designed to sap away the last few pounds (Sterling) that I don’t have.
We’ve not yet been visited by the TVLA and people keep asking me what I’m using for my gallery to which I reply “I use a custom script that’s not ready for release.”
I should work on it and release it but I can’t find the energy.
As some of you who know me will know, I don’t own a TV. For those of you who don’t know me, I don’t own a TV. I don’t want one, quite frankly because it’s a drain on my life I can do without. Time flies past fast enough without me wasting even more of it slumped infront of a random picture generator designed to sedate the intellect. Ok where was I? people in the UK have to pay the TV Licensing Authority if they want to own a television. For those of you in the “free world” this might seem bizarre and in this day and age, it is. It stems from the days when TV’s were a new invention and the government required some way to fund the programs being broadcast. This was of course in the heady days of “BBC1″, no adverts, no independent stations, just the good old BBC. Then along came the other channels who funded their cause with infuriating, intellect-sapping adverts. It wasn’t their fault though, they didn’t get a cut of the license money so they had to pay their way my making a pact with the Devil. Next up, Sky TV, Cable and a whole host of providers from places where TV Licenses never existed who also used the Devil-Pact method of fund raising. Ok where am I going with this? Ahh yes…
See we don’t own a TV, so we didn’t buy a TV license. This meant that for the last 8 months we’ve been receiving threat-letters from the Licensing Authority. I say “Threat” because they start out accusational then apologise just in case you haven’t got a TV and then move on to tell you how you can pay for one., they don’t for a second acknowledge the notion of “Innocent until proven guilty”, nono. You see everyone owns a television. Those who don’t are liars who “will be caught”.
Frankly I find that quite offensive, I mean I know not to take the threat letters personally, but their approach is still despicable. It gets better too.
Deciding I’d had enough of the threats, I called the TVLA and informed them ever so politely (As is my nature) that we didn’t infact own a brain-numbing device and they could stop sending us letters. Two days later, another letter! This one was slightly different however, this one was a subtley veiled threat without the bold red type of the last one. “Dear so and so, you admitted to not owning a TV and we find this highly irregular, so we’re going to send the hit-squad to search your premesis because, frankly, we don’t believe you.”
Naturally, that’s the condensed version.
I had in my hands a letter telling me, quite plainly, that they outright did not believe me and would be sending some government spooks to search my house. Hello? Human rights? Respect of privacy? If the drug dealers next door aren’t having their house searched then I’m damned if we should. I wasn’t privvy to a vote on TV licensing so the system in place is not part of my “free choice” as a citizen in an allegedly democratic country, it seems the moment I was born I was automatically opted-in to the damned thing.
We can’t afford to pay the protection money that our government demands to keep its henchmen out of our home, so if they do call we are compelled by law and a search warrant to let them poke around our house. We have nothing to hide, sure, but that’s not the point. Personally the mechanism which gives them the right to invade peoples’ property on a whim seems as immoral as it does insulting. Not only that but the blind assumption that everyone owns a TV and anyone who says otherwise is a liar is bloody annoying.
What next? Compulsary drug rehab for everyone, just because they don’t believe anyone can survive in the UK without being inebriated beyond sensibility?
