Beercan

I'm building a new office (more on this later) and am currently at the optimistic stage where one believes anything to be possible. Before reality hits home and I find myself short of engineering talent I'm reading a lot of books for inspiration. More accurately, I'm looking at a lot of pictures, some of which happen to be in books.

One resource my wife bought me to look at was this:

It's rather good and has some interesting ideas for making funky furnishings out of, well, junk. Now one thing my new office definitely requires is a room divider. I simply can't cut awesome rockstar code whilst staring at a pile of broken synthesizers and cables, nor can I fix broken synthesizers or be inspired to write any music on them whilst staring at a pile of unfinished awesome rockstar code.

This book appears to have the perfect solution. A beer-can room divider! All I need to do now is drink 216 cans of beer.

I also like the look of the RealMac offices, which NikF posted on flickr recently. You can see the full set here.

Technology is the rise of communicating less more

When people ask me why I don't have an account on Twitter I give them the look I usually reserve for people who ask me why I don't watch Ready, Steady Cook. Why would I have an account on Twitter? I just don't get it and neither it seems, does anyone I know.

Before writing this post I asked all of my IM contacts who were on-line to tell me in ten words or less what they thought of Twitter. Some were more effusive than others and were unable to restrain themselves to the arbritrary word limit.

Here are a few of their responses:

"Pointless wankery for people who think their opinions matter." - Senior software developer

"Some people seem to like it - I don't see point (would have preferred 11 words...)" - Software Architect

"I don't even know what Twitter is." - Musician

"What the fuck is twitter? That's what I think." - Digital Photographer

"Maybe it should be called Twatter. A word lacking from the English language which should mean the banal mutterings of people that believe they are part of the digital ecosphere as they reach out for similarly socially retarded wastrels in a quest for mutual justification." - Software Developer

Interestingly not a single one (of those that had heard of it) thought that Twitter was a good idea, not that this alone proves it isn't. The last comment also raises a good point, it's about 'group-think' isn't it? Communicating without actually saying anything, symptomatic of today's feeling without thinking mindset. Twitter, at least to me, appears to be the epoch of knee-jerk reactionism - a sure sign that we're turning into a world of attention defecit infovores. Quick! I've been Twittered @, best think up (or better still copy) someone's opinion and broadcast it to anyone that cares, which fortunately, doesn't appear to be many.

Twitter is reasonably popular, it has 959,558 users worldwide today which in UK terms gives it about as many users as the Daily Telegraph has readers - multiply that by 7 and you're getting close the readership for The Sun which can just about influence an election in the UK on a good day.

Of course, 7 million users scattered across the globe are unlikely to influence much - if Facebook, with 39 million users, is anything to go by they will most likely spend their time pretending to be virtual zombies or playing Scrabble. What's more, most of Twitter's users are likely ultra-hip, web 2.0 types who spend a large portion of their time celebrating themselves, perhaps as the comment puts it "in a quest for mutual justification". I like to imagine Twitter as the virtual equivalent of a sports hall full of Nathan Barley's shouting at each other.

Years ago I used to work with live news feeds and I'll admit that the constant gratification of knowing something before almost anyone else can be a rush. I watched tickertape wars break out, tickertape oil tankers crash slowly into sandy, puffin infested beaches and tickertape commercial jets nosedive into tower blocks. I suspect, Twitter in part, fulfils this role by constantly alerting people (to web 2.0 micro-events) and keeping them connected. I'm also sure it has it's own heirarchies and communities and people like to be in those (particularly at the top).

But how useful a resource is peer generated news after all? Does anyone still look at Digg these days? I still frequently read reddit, but more for diversion in times of boredom and most certainly not for news. Much like Reality TV left people gasping for salaried actors and scriptwriters, I predict Reality News will leave us sorely missing real editors and chain-smoking, drunken, opinionated columnists.

So, what else does Twitter achieve? Well, it doesn't have any apparent way of making a profit. I use the word apparent because it's not always immediately obvious how these kind of ventures plan to make a profit. I'm sure that if they can solve the problem of adding more users without their servers falling over then there are plenty of ways to sell the user database they're creating. There have been rumous that the US Central Intelligence Agency uses (and possibly sponsors) Facebook and vast databases of 'who's who' and 'who knows who' will almost certainly be of interest to someone.

Collecting data seems to be one of the passions of our age, however if Twitter posts were Java fields I'd probably mark them @Transient (@Best).

The title for this post was taken from a piece of art made by an old friend of mine Mr. Captain Wardrobe.

CCC publishes the fingerprints of Wolfgang Schauble

Lifted from a glass he drank from the Chaos Computer Club managed to get a copy of the German Secretary of the Interiors fingerprint and make biometric device fooling molds.

Original article - translated by Google

How to fake fingerprints (CCC)

So, what does this mean for biometric security? It demonstrates one of the biggest flaws with the 'something you are' approach to authentication, if it's copied or taken how to you change it? Generate some new fingerprints and make molds perhaps?

Also, I'd like to thank the CCC for continuing with this and other efforts. It is only by exposing flaws such as this that we can all profit from increased security and privacy.

Book Club

Since I've moved my life and business over to France I've been making an effort to learn the language. So far je me débrouille bien (I get by pretty well) but, you know, it's quite humbling to be stuck at the linguistic level of perhaps a ten year old (on a good day!).

So I've decided that from this day forth, I'll only be reading fiction books in French (I'm not quite prepared to swap all my cocoa/java books over just yet...)

The first one I've decided to wrestle with is Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- mostly because it's something I've always meant to read in English and never managed to get around to it. I'm not sure wether it being a translation of an english book will help or hinder my progress, however they do note in the preface that a bad translation is just another form of book burning, so I'm remaining optimistic.

Korg DS-10 Pocket Synth

I really, really, need to get me one of these for my Nintendo DS :)

(For those of you that didn't know, I've been a synth fanatic for a long time and when I'm not hacking out software for fun and profit I'm often fixing up old Moogs and Rolands for fun and profit.

Electric String

Once upon a long ago, I worked in a 2nd hand hi-fi shop and did my best to uphold the tradition of being a miserable bastard who knew more than the customer, although my rather unique position was to declare a lot of expensive equipment as junk and push the customers towards quality value stuff which performed just as good if not better most of the time.

Anyway, turns out the internet has come out in force against Monster cables and declared it impossible to identify the difference between them and coat hanger wire in A/B tests. Although I don't think the method of testing was scientifically valid, they're probably right.

I did, however, find this interesting article on wire which explains what makes a good speaker wire.

http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm

Oh, the picture for those of you old enough to remember is from Not The Nine O'Clock News (Gramophone Sketch)

Playmobil Security Check Point

This initially filled me with sadness, however upon reading the comments and tags my faith in humanity has been restored.

Playmobil Security Check point via. Amazon.com