glastoblog 2009

so the glastonbury festival of the contemporary performing arts for 2009 was really quite good- but contrast with previous years ,where headline acts were dull and obscure bands from nowhere were good, this time around, headliners were all pretty godo and some of the obscurities should stay so (imho - of course with 11 stages and other venues, and only seeing 1 at a time, i surely couldn't speak for the whole shebang)

some pix

what did I see (hear)?
In order
Mr Hudson & the librarians - excellent (fine sunger with very sharp lyrics)
John smith - awesome guitar player - version of Winter was staggering
Regina Spektor - pretending to be animals in NY zoo as a kid, was amazing! very Tori Amos
NERD - excellent , except when the plug got pulled due to them running over (coz of late start:(
Fleet Foxes - stand out performance - truly gladstock! and then they all hung at the back of
Fairport convention - superb cover of sandy denny song and some serious mad dancing!
Lily allen - even better than last time - her voice is really pretty good!
The specials - turned up drums and bass, and did that ghostown song justice rightously
neil young - what can i say - cinnamon girl and day in the life were just stellar

VV brown - suprtb
warsaw village band - scarily good poolish dervish folk
bombay bicycle club - disappointing (bad mix didnt help tho
spinal tap - did what it says on the box.
jamie cullum - cover of MJ song was very very well done
CSN - missed coz we were watchign Paulo Nutini who was sick (as in good)
maximo park (dont like kasabian:) were extreemly amusing and fun
baaba maal was beautiful - senegal came to south west england
The Boss- now I am not a springsteen fan, but this was some band - very strong...

woke up and it was sunday morning with the quo and tony christie - someone should put them out of their misery:-)

Amadou & Mariam - mali came to south west england - very charming!
Bon Iver - superb - very spooky too...
Imelda may - absolutely stonking set from a brill singer - had the roof blown away
i'd not have been surprised

madness - good (not quite up to the specials for me ) but everyone was skanking so must have hit the right buttons...

blur - graham coxson seemed to be crying but that was probably the other 200,000 people...simply awesome...

oh, a bunch of stuff in chai wallah's was really great (jamie woon, gentleman's dub club etc)....so I spose there was some good indie things

emily the great (in queen's head, not the other set) was ok...sharp * observant I guess...

?can you imagine a worse death than that?

i was reading some grisly literature recently (actually have been for a few years) about torture and mayhem...and that's just on the croquet pitch

anyhow, i set to, trying to imagine a worse death....and, unfortunately, now, have succeeded several times...

do not ask...

short book proposal

first line:

The day that I died had started in such an ordinary way.

last line:

And so we all repaired to the gazebo to break our fast once again.

more bbc bogus p2p reportage

bbc report repeats the canard that file sharing is "lost revenue" - right now there's a recession -do they really believe people would spend the money they suggest in this report ? what a bunch of morons. we already spent it all bailing out the banks

Bad Science does a straightforward analysis of some more basic flaws in the original report from UCL:(

time for a google maps of UK MP's expensies

why not draw the UK with constituencies and colour them the traditional party colours and then draw a column as high as the MPs expenses (could compare with the council tax rate and number of kids below poverty line)
oh, no wait someone has done (half of) it already - viz
hayes map by distance
reported in the guradian online

the beeb has a very good graph of distribution of income with where MPs are with expenses or not (top 9 or 5%)

millenium trilogy part trois (stieg larsson)

so as i have he attention span of a popup ad,
i decided i couldn't wait til october for the english tranlsation of the swedish masterpiece by stieg larsson about the intrepid Mieke and Lisbeth, and
bought the french translation of part 3

typical phraes

il francer ses sourcils,
hausser les epaules,
hocher la tete, et dit
"desole"

what a language
frowns, shrugs, nods, "sorry"
[apols, cannot say what the original swedish said as I don't have a copy:)

mid-flight crisis phobia

i hate flying
but it is a tiny bit comforting to know that so do a lot of people

after years of sitting in airports seeing people nattering on their mobile phones up to the last possible moment (and after in many cases) it is clear to me that most people have a built in fear of imminent mortality destructive testing...

this is added to by the number of people in UK airports who go up to those fancy fast car lotteries - it is clear no-one in their right mind would buy a 20 quid lottery ticket for a car they could never really drive - but many people in air ports behave like
men in the middle age (male meno-pausal) crisis who need to test their testosterone (when, by the way, do we get issued with proper osterone that has passed all the tests?:)


ayeee - human frailty, thy name is frequent traveller

a touch of class finally...sort of ...comes to "internet experts"

off your face, booked

two kinds of mutable things

so the cool thing about the interweb is that stuff is mutable - if i dont like what I wrote (or somone else wrote) it can be changed

the bad thing about twitter, fb updates, and rss is that it isn't mutable - i can't get it to shut up and go away

journalism, security and mexicans

so in a discussion (you can guess where easily) last night, we wondered about new definitions for a
Mexican Wave (stay away from US - we're all ok)

Mexican Hat (keeping the infected at arms length)

Mexican standoff (sneeze at me & I sneeze at you)

etc etc - ah, Tequila Mockingbird, you may say...

meanwhile, why do the media (sorry, Ben Goldacre, you are right again as is Nick Davies
always cite security companies when reporting items about cyber-security threats eh?

do you really expect a security company to be moderate when discussing this? they have products (and shares) to sell....

it'd be like asking Big Pharma their opinion on Pandemics... ...

(c.f. Davies comments on the Millenium Bug)

more biased sampling of sources about botnets....

The Internet has a Great Future Behind it

I'm sitting here in Brussels listening to talks about the EU FIRE projects.
While there's lots of useful work going on, I am having a very hard time finding a
possible Future Internet in any of it.

The idea that is common and cool as a research experiment is the notion of a Living Lab.
The idea that's probably least useful is the Public Private Partnership as a vehicle to fund such a thing.

oh well.

A simple model of tussel spaces

if you have apolyadic op
x op y
such that there is also an inverse op, po
such that op aggregates, and po de-aggregates
a resource (where a resource can be an identifier space such as names
or a transmission resource such as links or a processor resource etc etc)
then obviously op and po aren't information hiding in some sense, but they may be land grabs

when are they land grabs? when the ag-op or de-ag-op stat mux, or
(essentially) do anything that is sub-linear (superlinear in the de-agg op case)
then there is an economic advantage going on (scaling, in internet terms)
so then you have a tussel...

qed

truly, the internet was for sharing moustache pictures

taches of distincion

they all look gay

truly, this is what the internet was invented for...

http://www.juliensauctions.com/auctions/2009/michael-jackson/catalog-list.html

making botnets out of voip pieces

I seem to recall saying something about this a few years back - now slashdot links to a
story about abuse of skype and google voice tech to do bad things...

anathematica

so thinking about neal stephenson's last tome, Anathem, it is a paeon to
science - the point of the story (spoiler alert:) Is that
the best people to communicate with aliens are scientists
because the "language" of science is (quite literally) universal (actually, it is meta-universal) so even if aliens show up from (several) parallel Universes
then we (scientists, or "avout" steeped in "theorics") can communicate with them - indeed, the aliens have a helpful clue (much as voyager does) which is they have a diagram of the geometric proof of Pythagoras (of coruse, neither they nor the folks
on the planet (arbre) call it Pythagoras) on the outside of their "ship"

one discussion about meta-theory centers on whether the metaverse is ordered (DAG) or random, and whether there is some "higher" versus "lower" plane; another discussion is about Hemn (quantum state) spaces....another is about cross breeding plants to grow a simulation of a part of history....still another is about time

most religions are given fairly short shrift in the book (though not all) and of course there are (as in snow crash) some cool dudes who do marshal arts quite well...

digital signatures in a mixed reality world

so here's an idea (this is because increasingly I am asked for PDFs of references to include a signature - this is annoying since I have to print out a PDF, sign it, scan i in then email the resulting (larger therefore network and storage wasteful, as well as waste of paperful) file.

so if printers had a robot arm on them, this could be used for 3 things

1. I could have a remote control for it, so I send them the plain reference, but then SIGN it remotely using a haptic interface at my end - this has the added benefit that they witness the signature re as well as me

2. if I decie (too late) that I've sent something to the printer that is private, but I wont get too the physical device's outtray soon enough, I could tell the robot arm to
take the printout up and tear it up

3. if someone is printing way too much stuff ahead of me, I could tell the robot arm to beath them soundly about the ears as a lesson.

figures of squeech

as lazy as a simile

as slippery as a metaphor

as onomatopoeic as a thump

as lyrical as a lyre

A telecom Engineer explaisn the credit crunch

1. black swan events are just rare events in a heavy tailed self similar arrival process - using large deviation theory from admission control algorithms is fine for explaining this.

2. instability and cascades happen when you don't implement feedback controls and damping (regulation, in old steam engine terms)

employing both of these would be necessary and sufficient for non divergent, stable, non cascading markets.

people that don't get this should be fired.

putting out the fire...

with gasoline

FIRE is a "me too" european programme to do next gen internet infrastructure

time for a rant - putting out the FIRE with GASOLINE...

Generally
Architectures are
Simple-minded
Obsession.
Let the
Internet
Nonetheless
Evolve.

I cannot see ANY work going on in Fire that's actually delivering something real, relevant or not just redundent.