Zimbabwe | A rogue state with charm
ROBERT MUGABE glowers as I walk into the arrivals hall at Harare International. His official stare through his trademark spectacles—part sneer, part aloof school teacher—can seem comical. There’s something about the president, those Elton John glasses, the camp flicking of his wrists, the moustache that recalls both Chaplin and Hitler, that makes him as much a caricature as a real man.
http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth/
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined with Google in an unprecedented online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.
A few years ago, when I needed to sort out a query with my bank, I’d phone the branch number and speak to a person. This person was able to put me in touch with the correct authority to help me with my problem. The thing is that this way of doing things is so old-school – actually phoning somewhere and speaking to a person – it needs improvement, it needs to be streamlined, it needs a technological solution.
When Standard Bank decentralised their telephone numbers recently they put in the wizzy solution and here is my experience with progress.
Old school
time taken 3 minutes
After Technological Intervention
time taken 23 minutes
Don’t you love progress.
The rebirth of the future from the ashes of the past…A young boy named Agito enters a forbidden sanctuary where a glowing machine resides. This machine preserves a young girl named Toola, who has a mission entrusted to her from the past. Three-hundred years into the future, the Earth’s environment has been ruined by the interference of mankind, and in between the 300 years, the forest has come to life and is at constant war with man.
It is an unsteady peace in an unnatural time. Only by searching their souls and examining the past will Toola and Agito realize the origin of all things and unite mankind with the forest.
A post apocalyptic vision of humanity, having lost the grace their past technological achievements, and caught within an uneasy truce with the forces of nature is a common theme in anime Studio Ghibli made these themes famous in Nausicaä and later in Princess Mononoki. Final Fantasy took the theme of Gaia to a new level and now Origin makes its début in a world where nature is so much more than just nature.
Origins, Spirits of the Past is a gritty and beautifully animated movie in the spirit of the classics that have gone before and although some themes are now familiar – even a little cliché- this movie somehow makes it fresh and takes an original spin on the genre. In a way it is sad that movies like this have such big boots to fill, Nausicaä is a classic, it breadth of storyline and visual scope are mind-blowing even by today’s standards and like all that follow in the footsteps of legends Origins will be compared to Nausicaä and found lacking. In its own right however Origins is a superbly made movie and will not disappoint anime fans of the ‘nature vs technology’ genre.
South African’s can buy Origins at animeworx, Australian’s at Madman Entertainment
Official Origins site: http://funimation.com/origin/
Wikipedia stub: Origin
Away, away, to flee the rat-race
I am going on much needed leave until the 26th February. This is where you can find me. Take care, see you when I get back.
A ubiquitous and highly frustrating feature in Windows Vista is their UAC (user account control) nag. It asks you all the time, incessantly for the most pointless and idiotic things – are you really really really sure you want to delete that empty text file?
Here’s a little screen-shot to disable the warning Grinch.
Achtung!: If you took your computer back to the shop to be fixed and were told you needed to plug it in for it to work, don’t do this.
Ahhh, administrator quietitude!
This week has come and gone in a flash. Work saw the installation of a new system six months in development and all the little (and some not so little) niggles that come with that. Saturday morning saw me sit a four hour competency test with Brainbench that was both gruelling and terrible frustrating. The gremlins of the machine saw to it that every answer I gave had to be entered twice – the first time just didn’t take. The seeds are planted, a little time and luck should yield good things.
The weekend was a breath of fresh air – spent time with the family at the stables and in the fresh air. ‘C’ and I also got time to sit and relax, watching two Hayao Miyazaki movies I’d ordered, the anime is unbelievable and so very different – if you were a fan of his other animated masterpiece ‘Spirited Away’ then ‘Laputa: Castle in the Sky’ and ‘Howl’s moving castle’ are definitely not to be missed.
The stresses seem to be clearing and I can take a breath of fresh air for a bit. Our annual holiday is a mere two weeks away, nothing to worry about but sand, surf and fresh air.
I can’t wait.
A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA “help information” [local] trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.
The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA.
Computer security specialists have been aware for two years that unusual features are contained inside a standard Windows software “driver” used for security and encryption functions. The driver, called ADVAPI.DLL, enables and controls a range of security functions. If you use Windows, you will find it in the C:\Windows\system directory of your computer.
ADVAPI.DLL works closely with Microsoft Internet Explorer, but will only run crypographic functions that the US governments allows Microsoft to export. That information is bad enough news, from a European point of view. Now, it turns out that ADVAPI will run special programmes inserted and controlled by NSA. As yet, no-one knows what these programmes are, or what they do.
Dr Nicko van Someren reported at last year’s Crypto 98 conference that he had disassembled the ADVADPI driver. He found it contained two different keys. One was used by Microsoft to control the cryptographic functions enabled in Windows, in compliance with US export regulations. But the reason for building in a second key, or who owned it, remained a mystery.
The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces. This was an opportunity to set the world a good example of civilized behaviour in dealing with a barbarically uncivilized man. In any case, revenge is an ignoble motive. The usual arguments against the death penalty in general apply. If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged. But I want to add another and less obvious reason why we should not have executed Saddam Hussein. His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars.
continued at:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,482,n,n
Trees are something special to me. I photograph them, draw them and care for them in the form of bonsai. I am subscribed to a number of tree blogs and to the wonderful tree photo groups on Flickr. Today, 155 years ago, Henry David Thoreau witnessed the death of a tree to feller and saw. It is a wonderful, poetic and poignant piece of writing and although I will share only the closing of this journal entry I encourage you to read it in it’s entirety.
Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.
And so it ends.
I am a little ashamed however by the reaction to the death of Saddam Hussein. I agree that he was a terrible dictator (and puppet of the west) who dealt death and suffering to many innocent people but the media circus of his trial and subsequent execution leave a lot to be desired in my book.
The site the made my bile rise was a CNN article entitled ‘Saddam executed with fear on his face‘:
Rubaie, who witnessed the execution, said the former leader was “strangely submissive” to the process. (Watch Rubaie describe Hussein’s final moments
) “He was a broken man,” he said. “He was afraid. You could see fear in his face.” (Watch what a witness said about the fear on Hussein’s face
I am uncomfortably aware that we are becoming a generation of gratuitous reality TV – but to have little clickables where you can have described in intimate details the fear of a man (even a monster) as he faces his end and perhaps for him the repurcussions of his actions is deplorable.
It appears we have not come very far from the tomato throwing crowds that thronged the gallows in medieval times.
I yearn for the days when people I know – friends and work colleagues – didn’t know about my blog, in fact many of them probably thought a blog had something to do with roto-rooter especially once you hear of the even sillier term ‘blog roll’. A certain amount of anonymity affords a huge degree of freedom of expression – which as most people who keep an online journal of sorts will understand. I am not talking about the myspace like journals describing the incessant bodily eructations of some sex starved dorm teenager, but rather a place to express a passion, a mood, a feeling, a theme , a piece of who you are … or aren’t.
I have had to encrypt some of my postings which is such a cramp as I was warned that they may be perceived by some who read my blog from time to time as having some link or relevance to recent events, the problem is that this poem is really about something that happened a long time ago .. almost another life lived by a different person. The parallels in the wording could be misconstrued and misinterpreted which – due to a quirk of bad timing – would just cause trouble for me in the short term. I feel a little lost in this ability to have to censor my own work, it seems unfair in a way as self expression should not supplicate to caution.
I apologise to any who come here from time to time, it is a pain – but in order to protect myself (again in the short term) it must be done. Drop me an email and I will sent you the password if you are interested.
Some men make their due impression upon their generation, because a petty occasion is enough to call forth all their energies; but are there not others who would rise to much higher levels, whom the world has never provoked to make the effort? I believe there are men now living who have never opened their mouths in a public assembly, in whom nevertheless there is such a well of eloquence that the appetite of any age could never exhaust it; who pine for an occasion worthy of them, and will pine till they are dead; who can admire, as well as the rest, at the flowing speech of the orator, but do not yet miss the thunder and lightning and visible sympathy of the elements which would garnish their own utterance.
If in any strait I see a man fluttered and his ballast gone, then I lose all hope of him, he is undone; but if he reposes still, though he do nothing else worthy of him, if he is still a man in reserve, then is there everything to hope of him. The age may well go pine itself that it cannot put to use this gift of the gods. He lives on, still unconcerned, not needing to be used. The greatest occasion will be the slowest to come.
http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/2006/12/thoreaus-journal-18-dec-1841.html
More and more, the things I need to do on a computer, I do online. I am tied in to the operating system and installed software far less and this freedom and flexibility I believe is a portent of the future of computing. Google knows it and if you spend any amount of time online then the reasoning becomes quite clear. As online applications become more flexible and powerful, the need for specific software installed on computers diminishes, as does the need for backups, disks, software versioning and the horrible occurrence of losing days of work through hard drive failures, viruses or any number of unspeakable malware. I reached a point where I was sick of having to try and keep various computers up to date and in sync allowing me a semi-consistent user experience. If I was on holiday I wanted access to more than basic email, why shouldn’t I be able to blog about what I was doing or write a document or put together a quick expense spreadsheet.
The trick to a happy online experience is finding tools that are not only at the top of their game, but also able to perform multiple functions and interact with other tools. For the purpose of this article I will define an application as a piece of software that performs a function I require – I will not differentiate between computer bound applications that are installed locally (like MS Word) and online applications like Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Aside from writing software as a job, computers have and will continue to hold a fascination for me and are tools with which I am able to express myself. I use computers for email, writing and blogging, managing my photo collections, listening to music, keeping up to date with world news and a cornucopia of other functions. Here are my recommendations for an online experience, accessible almost anywhere, from any computer running virtually any software.
Once software to rule them all, the browser …
Aside from having good Internet, the only other requirement for a happy online experience is your browser. Give IE7 a miss, Firefox is the way. If you do a lot of photosharing with flickr or like to clip articles or pictures to your blog then try Flock. Flock is Firefox under the hood but comes with nifty tools to upload to Flickr, sync with del.icio.us or shadows and has an integrated blog editor. Flock has become my browser of choice because it hooks into so many of the things I do daily.
email is Gmail:
There is only one application for email, I use it for my personal email and for my work email. Gmail has incredible searching ability and conversation threading. Virus checking and spam is taken care of for you automatically without having to keep local machines up to date with the latest antivirus or spam signatures. It has an integrated chat client, extensive contact and group management, vacation notification and a host of other features. I am able to use my Gmail as a launch point for a number of other applications. I can for example blog straight from my email or I am able to start a document by sending my Google Documents an email. How to use Gmail with these various applications will be looked at more closely under the application itself. Get Gmail here: www.gmail.com
Documents and Spreadsheets:
I am told that there is a lot more hidden under the hood of the MS Office suite. That is very nice but I am a minimalist and really have no need for a V8 gas guzzling spreadsheet programs. Microsoft has released a new version of their office suite with new formats that current systems cannot read yet without conversion software installed. Just fork over the $$$$$$$ for the new version …. mmmhh …. perhaps not. Free *gasp* with your Gmail account comes the amazing Google Docs (Writely) and Spreadsheet software. I am composing this post in Google docs and will post it to my blog for your perusing pleasure shortly – this makes it my blog editor of choice when it comes to complex posts that need a little polishing and refining. It comes with pretty much everything I need – formatting, layout, revisions, export to multiple formats including pdf, posting to my blog, inserting pictures/content and all online – no expensive office software, no need to make backups, no need to remember where I saved my document – it’s all taken care of for me. I am also able to share my documents/spreadsheets with others anywhere in the world, get them to make changes and collaborate in a number of innovative ways. I am able to upload existing docs and spreadsheets to my online area or I can just email existing documents to my online area – I have already typed them in once so no reinventing the wheel here. This online application can accept a number of formats for upload including all the Microsoft flavours and the new open document standards used by awesome alternatives like Open Office .
Bookmarks or Favourites: A number of online companies save your bookmarks to share with others or just for your personal use. I have tried shadows, blinklist and del.icio.us – Delicious is by far my favourite. If you run Flock, you can get your browser to automatically sync your local bookmarks with your bookmarking site. Del.icio.us has a nice Firefox plugin available here .
Flickr: Flickr is a photo sharing website – even if you have nothing to share, it is worth visiting often just to admire the incredible photography there. Explore some random photography from the last 7 days. For the bloggers, Flickr has a nice ability to post straight to your blog and the ability to tweak the posting templates and CSS to suit your style.
News and RSS: My pick for this category is Google Reader . Add feeds from your favourite blogs or news sites and stay in touch and up to date. Google reader can be set up to post to your blog or email articles of interest.
FlowCharts and Diagrams: Before you fork over $$$$ for Visio, have a peek at Gliffy.
The beauty of all of these applications is that you only need a browser and the Internet – this means that you can pick up where you left off even if you are sitting in an Internet cafe in Cambodia. You are not tied into installed proprietary software. These applications are constantly improving without the need to re-purchase them every few years. If you aren’t already using some of these online tools then give them a try, you may be surprised by how much you like them.
This list is by no means definitive, these are a few applications that make my day to day work easier and more enjoyable. If you have any others that I don’t know about, please comment and let me know – I will do an update piece to this article which includes all the apps that slipped under my radar.
A work colleague sent this to me today, it is the "disclaimer" on the new Microsoft Defender (anti-spyware) software.
"Personal Information Might Unintentionally Be Sent To Microsoft"
What an absolute joke, how do you unintentionally send personal information?
Oops … sorry, sent on your name and surfing habits …..
Oops … sorry, was carrying your credit card information too close to the network cable and it fell in … sorry bout that!
For those following the tech reviews, my brief flirtation with Google Blogger Beta is now officially over.
There are things I really like about Blogger:
Things that didn’t fair as well
I feel that with time blogger will catch up to the more professional platforms – it is a great place to start though, especially when platforms like WordPress make the migration so easy. In spite of the speed niggles at times, WordPress is by far the best blogging platform for me and I will be sticking with it until that changes.
What on earth are New Line Cinemas thinking? To pull Peter Jackson off the Hobbit is like …. like … well similes fail here – it is just plain unbelievable. To those of us who grew up reading Tolkien, we were horrified when it was announced that The Lord of The Rings was to be made into a movie. Hollywood is notoriously reliable for taking wonderful stories and books and completely screwing them up. It was thus with a sense of disbelief and awe when Jackson managed to take the essence of the story and render it reliably to those who loved it best.
New Line declined to comment on “The Hobbit,” but said in a statement to The Times that the situation was complicated by the lawsuit of Mr. Jackson’s company, Wingnut Films, against the studio over revenues from the “Lord of the Rings,” which New Line produced. “We are in litigation with Wingnut Films, and have been unsuccessful despite a formal mediation, as well as discussions with Wingnut directly to settle the matter; therefore, we cannot comment at this point,” the studio said this week.
Source …It appears since the announcement New Line has been deluged with emails and phone calls by horrified fans. There is a light at the end of the tunnel though.
It was left to another studio entirely, MGM, which owns the distribution rights to “The Hobbit,” to step in and calm the raging waters — and the Web sites. “We expect to partner with New Line in financing ‘The Hobbit,’ ” a spokesman for MGM said. “We support Peter Jackson as a filmmaker, and believe that when the dust settles, he’ll be making the movie. We can’t imagine any other result.”
Peter Jackson is the only person, in my opinion, who should be allowed anywhere near the Hobbit movie. Although he has become wealthy and famous from the trilogy, his accurate portrayal was due to his love for the original story. I for one cannot see myself supporting the attempt by another director, those aren’t Hobbit sized shoes to fill.
How depressing, how utterly unjust, to be the one in your social circle who is aging least gracefully. In a laboratory at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, Matthias is learning about time’s caprice the hard way. At 28, getting on for a rhesus monkey, Matthias is losing his hair, lugging a paunch and getting a face full of wrinkles.
Yet in the cage next to his, gleefully hooting at strangers, one of Matthias’s lab mates, Rudy, is the picture of monkey vitality, although he is slightly older. Thin and feisty, Rudy stops grooming his smooth coat just long enough to pirouette toward a proffered piece of fruit.
Tempted with the same treat, Matthias rises wearily and extends a frail hand. “You can really see the difference,” said Dr. Ricki Colman, an associate scientist at the center who cares for the animals.
…snip…
calorie restriction, involves eating about 30 percent fewer calories than normal while still getting adequate amounts of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. Aside from direct genetic manipulation, calorie restriction is the only strategy known to extend life consistently in a variety of animal species.
New York Times, more…
The world’s first Creationist museum – dedicated to the idea that the creation of the world, as told in Genesis, is factually correct – will soon open. Stephen Bates is given a sneak preview and asks: was there really a tyrannosaurus in the Bible?
Just off the interstate, a couple of junctions down from Cincinnati’s international airport, over the state line in rural Kentucky, the finishing touches are being put to an impressive-looking building. When it is finished and open to the public next summer, it may, quite possibly, be one of the weirdest museums in the world.
The Creation Museum – motto: “Prepare to Believe!” – will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its mission is to convince visitors through a mixture of animatronic models, tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story.
Its designer, Patrick Marsh, used to work at Universal Studios in Los Angeles and then in Japan before he saw the light, opened his soul to Jesus, and was born anew. “The Bible is the only thing that gives you the full picture,” he says. “Other religions don’t have that, and, as for scientists, so much of what they believe is pretty fuzzy about life and its origins … oh, this is a great place to work, I will tell you that.”
I hope Richard Dawkins has a poke at this, by the way I think I will join his posse officially to stand against human lunacy … There done. Count me in.
I am keeping my options open, I have been very happy with WordPress barring a few niggly complaints that have to do mostly with speed and lack of flexibility. I find the WordPress back-end clunky and unwieldy when compared to the Blogger online posting area. This poor posting area of WordPress left me having to rely on external tools initially (painful) and then the wonders of BlogMailr (enlightening) allowed me to post to my blog from my email. I found out today that Blogger has this email to posting ability in their new offering but it is a little limited at the moment and must have something to do with the ‘beta’ status. That being said, only the ability to post images and labels are missing and these can be rectified very quickly in the very intuitive and nifty admin area.
So what to do, this is a bit of a dilemma! It seems that Blogger has had a lot of bad press especially by the blog refugees of the early days. Incredulity often follows any posting that hints you may be moving back to the Blogger fold, incredulity by the same people that wax lyrical about GMail and Google’s other offerings. That being said, I am probably more liable to trust Google to advance the cause of blogging over WordPress and believe in time Blogger may just be the cool place to be once more.
Until I have fully made up my mind on one platform or the other, the ability to email both my respective blogs means I needn’t have to hedge my bets and jump to any hasty conclusions too quickly.
StuartForsyth.com
Recent Comments