In which I fail to find a tweet...

OK, I'm sure I saw a tweet today which said that some Government services may go on-line only. And I know that Lord Voldemort is trying to push 'three strikes' through in the new Digital Economy bill.

Guys, you can't have both these things. If some services are on-line only, then I need to be on-line to access those services. And, if for some reason, I'm denied a connection under three strikes, then I'm out of luck, without a trial.

How long before my democratic vote can't be accepted because of a misfiled allegation that I downloaded Jedward's latest set of whinings?

Fringe Benefits

It turns out that one of the many benefits of being married to Pink Goddess is that hairdressers get all the gossip.

I don't need to watch soaps, I just turn up to collect her from work a little early, and earwig all the stories. No curtain-twitching required.

Now if you'll excuse me, apparently someone just up the road's found her husband in bed with a sheep dressed as a milkman...

"Save for Web" didn't work

I was trying to do some graphic design work. Now, my qualification in graphic design comes from the King Herod School of Babysitting and Social Work, so I wasn't expecting much. And, when I don't expect much from myself, I rarely disappoint. Anyway, Photoshop Elements 6 handed me a large container of fail at the end of the process. There's a "Save for Web" option, which simply wouldn't appear.

In the end, I saved the file in my Dropbox account, then opened it in PE 3 on my laptop. There, did what I wanted, and saved the resulting ugliness back. Woo. It was done.

But I still wondered what was going on. It turns out to be related to something else. I'm not an admin on this machine, and I never have been. I originally set the computer up with one account, which was an Admin, then created normal accounts for me and the other users.

If you do this, then Photoshop can't load the 'Save for Web' option. What you need to do to fix it is to log on as the admin user, and use the Save for Web option once. Then, log out and log in as yourself, and it should work. Well, it worked for me.

So, that's another fail removed.

In which the lovely Pink Goddess eloquently describes the target market for "Greatest Hits" compilation CDs

"People too dumb to use an iPod"

Government Push on Technology

Earlier today, I spotted a tweet by Richard Wallis, our Technology Evangelist and thoroughly decent chap. He'd retweeted @dejand, who was asking questions based on Online 09. It's really good to see Online 09 getting so much love, as Talis is heavily involved in it.

As you'll see, @dejand asked:

Back from #online09 and semantic web update, trying to think of other Internet advances that happened because governments gave them a boost?

Well, the point's already made that what we know as the Internet grew out of the ARPANET, which was a project by the American Department of Defense (what a fantastically Orwellian name that is).

But the are many more Internet innovations that various governments have helped along. For instance, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). That one's good for stopping the government reading your email. However, they're still able to do traffic analysis, to see who you've been swapping packets with. Thus they've encouraged onion routing, which reaches its peak with Tor untraceable routing (and friends).

Governments also like to work on filtering web requests, so that's driven networks of anonymous proxies, which let you route around "approved" networks, and access the unfiltered Internet.

Of course, now that three strikes is almost here, they're just driving trackerless BitTorrent. (If you haven't already, please sign the petition.)

So there you have it. That's how governments really drive technology forward.

Data vs. Information

There's been much discussion recently at work about the difference between data and information. Much of this discussion is based around people opening up data, publishing it as linked data in a suitable place, and allowing people to mash it up.

Information is added value. Data without organisation is useless, because the organisation is all. I recall a horror story about people who'd promised not to delete a single word from a library - so they destroyed it by sorting all the words in the library into alphabetical order.

None of this is a decent soundbite. And I like a decent soundbite as much as the next person. So, here's my soundbite:

Data wants to be linked, and free. Information, on the other hand, wants to be really, really, expensive. Unfortunately it hasn't figured out how to do that yet.

Bodies Revealed

Pink Goddess and I went to see 'Bodies Revealed' at the Custard Factory the other day.

From a point of view of learning about biology, it was amazing. Did you know that your lungs have the surface area of about half a football pitch, spread across twenty lobes? I did not know that. Oh, if you smoke, your lungs stop being these cute pale pink triangles, and turn into something that looks more like a small chunk of the M6, as your half a football pitch shrinks to less than a quarter of a football pitch as the cigarettes destroy your lungs. It is simultaneously thrilling and horrifying to see a section of blackened lung, with a small label saying 'Cancer'. Next to this is a display case with a small section of discarded cigarette packets, lighters, and so on. And bus tickets, this being Birmingham, after all.

It was all new to me. I struggled with some odd feelings as I stood, peering into someone's half-empty chest. I found it oddly recursive looking at slices of someone else's brain, trying to understand them with chunks of my own brain. I found myself looking at my own body in a different way, as it sunk in that all this weird wobbly stuff was in there, as well.

And yet, something seemed somehow familiar. Propped-up dead bodies? Eerie and lifeless glassy stares from fake-looking eyeballs? A day trip to the Uncanny Valley? Where have I seen all these things before?

Ah yes. Huddersfield.