Nice profile of Tim Berners-Lee, ‘inventor’ of the World Wide Web, in today’s Guardian:

There are, according to recent figures, more than 35 million web users in the UK today. More than 15 million British homes have internet connections and, thanks to faster broadband technologies, we are living in a radically different world from that which was predicted.
The world wide web has changed millions of lives in little more than a decade. For some it has changed fortunes as well: this week was the 10th anniversary of what is widely acknowledged as the beginning of the dotcom boom – when the web browser firm Netscape floated on the US stock market before ever turning a profit. That sparked a technology goldrush that has transformed modern communication. And while much of the boom was hyperbole, one rock solid fact remains: none of it would have happened if it was not for Tim Berners-Lee.

Sir Tim, named last year as the greatest living Briton, is rightly heralded as the godfather of the web. It was he who, as a physicist working in Switzerland, turned the internet from a disparate collection of academic and military computer systems into an international network. Without his input, arguably, the world would be a far duller place. The global village would still be under construction, technology would still be the preserve of an elite, and revolutionary companies such as Google, Amazon – and even easyJet – would not exist.

Links:

• Tim Berners-Lee page at w3.org
• Wikipedia entry

Went on a course today (in Bristol! 3 hours drive! Still, beautiful scenery) to have a look at Snap, a piece of survey (as in questionnaires) software.

It was a good course, and introduced all the various elements pretty quickly. A couple of things annoyed me though. Firstly, the fact that the tutor had to go through the rigmarole of informing us that when using the software, ‘variables’ mean ‘questions’ and ‘code labels’ (or something) mean answers. How ridiculous. Why not just call them questions and answers in the first place? I mean, I know what those names mean, but it doesn’t really matter.

Secondly, it’s the fact that it completely ignores loads of the keyboard shortcuts many of us take for granted. Fair enough, ctrl-c, -x and -v do as you would expect, but then these are almost written in stone. But what about inserting a page-break? Ctrl-enter, as in Word and about a billion other apps? No way. Ctrl-S it is, I think. Barmy. Does Ctrl-A select the whole document? Nope. It inserts a frigging column break! Gah. Delete a whole question? I would go for ctrl-backspace, but no (that doesn’t seem to do anything). Ctrl-Y does the trick. Eh? And while I am at it, while they use the standard Microsoft icon set for the various toolbars, why did they decide to use a green tick sign for save, rather than the little disk everyone else uses?

Overall, though, apart from these things, Snap seems fairly competent. Being survey software, it is effectively a stripped down database attached to a stripped down stats package. But it works.

This from BBC News:

A South Korean man has died after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks.

The 28-year-old man collapsed after playing the game Starcraft at an internet cafe in the city of Taegu, according to South Korean authorities.

The man had not slept properly, and had eaten very little during his marathon session, said police.

Online gaming in South Korea is extremely popular thanks to its fast and widespread broadband network.

Games are televised and professional players are treated, as well as paid, like sports stars.

Professional gamers there attract huge sums in sponsorship and can make more than $100,000 a year.

The man, identified by his family name, Lee, started playing Starcraft on 3 August. He only paused playing to go to the toilet and for short periods of sleep, said the police.

“We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion,” a Taegu provincial police official told the Reuters news agency.

He was taken to hospital following his collapse, but died shortly after, according to the police. It is not known whether he suffered from any previous health conditions.

They added that he had recently been fired from his job because he kept missing work to play computer games.

Good grief.

This piece from today’s Guardian:

If you’re up to date, podcasting – an automated way of making audio files (such as radio shows) available to download – should be old hat. The latest spin-off from this technology, said Ellen Lee in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, is Godcasting.

According to Lee, Godcasts – “religious and spiritually themed podcasts” – have become “the most popular use of the new online technology since it debuted less than a year ago”. They “range from a daily dose of Scripture to a weekly dose of the Bible translated into Klingon”, continued Lee, who explained that “the vast majority are Christian-based, but they also include New Age, Jewish and Buddhist podcasts.”

is along rather similar lines to this entry on the BBC News site, last Wednesday:

Thousands of people have downloaded a Suffolk vicar’s sermons after he posted them on the internet last month.

The Rev Leonard Payne, Vicar of St Nicholas’ Church in Wrentham, said the response had been overwhelming after he posted them on the Apple iTune store.

“We were stunned. Within a short period of time, over 2,000 people had downloaded one of them,” he said.

At one point demand for the sermons was so great they had to change servers, Mr Payne said.

The church in the small rural parish first developed its own website where the sermons could be accessed.

It was set up so people who could not attend church could download and listen to sermons at home.

Have put in a new photo to the header – one from my trip to Cambridge, squashed, filtered and generally fiddled with. Still a little way to go, so forgive me for it looking, er, a bit shit at the moment…

Finally got a desk for the laptop to go on last weekend, which meant that I could get a mouse at long last too – after all, there isn’t much point in having on if the thing is on your knees all the time.

It has made using the PC a far, far more enjoyable experience. Touchpads are alright, but they do get pretty tiresome after a while… Eight quid well spent!

Am upgrading to version 1.5.1.3 of WordPress at the moment, so sorry if anyone encounters any bother…

Interesting interview with Adams Curry just posted on Naked Conversations:

Interview: Adam Curry

From the BBC:

The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati.
In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March.

It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months.

Blogs, the homepages of the 21st Century, are free and easy to set up and use. They are popular with people who want to share thoughts online.

They allow for the instant publication of ideas and for interactive conversations, through comments, with friends or strangers.

Great quote from William Golding just popped up on ‘Quote of the Day’ on my customised Google homepage:

Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.

A Good Day to Die is Kernick‘s fourth book, and it brings back the anti-hero of the first, disgraced ex-copper Dennis Milne.

(Clicking the book cover takes you to Amazon – the commission helps fund Palimpsest)

Kernick’s books are a real strange mix, and I haven’t come across anything quite like them before. On one level, they are pretty standard thrillers, written with plot and pace in mind and conciously without any kind of literary embellishments.

But there are two things which set these apart from other books in the genre. Firstly, a rich vein of black humour runs throughout the book, and the numerous sarcastic asides do raise a smile on the face of the reader; which is all the more surprising given the second standout feature of Kernick’s work which is the sheer grimness of the subject matter. It really is heard to imagine a light-hearted romp involving murderous paedophile gangs, but that really is what this book is (kind of). So you have this real contradiction between style and content, but somehow it just works. I breezed through it in the space of a few hours reading time, I would say, and it’s a clear improvement on the earlier books and a good, no-nonsense read.

The BBC are running a trial offering some of their radio programmes as downloads, effectively making them podcasts. Might give this a go for some of the more interesting stuff.

Mark Kermode‘s film reviews might well become a regular listen.

Palimpsest has a book group, discussing books read by all the members in a topic on the forum. It has worked really well in the past, but recently has fallen behind a little.

To try and perk things up a bit it was decided that instead of choosing books month-by-month, 6 books should be chosen to cover half a year’s group reading, meaning that everyone knows where they stand. After various discussions and slightly complicated voting systems, the final selection looks like this:

• 1 September 2005: The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Gustave Flaubert
• 1 October 2005: No One Writes to the Colonel, Gabriel García Márquez
• 1 November 2005: The First Men in the Moon/The Sleeper Awakes, H.G. Wells
• 1 December 2005: Dance, Dance, Dance, Haruki Murakami
• 1 January 2006: Virtual Light, William Gibson
• 1 February 2006: The Three-Arched Bridge, Ismail Kadare

Some pretty challenging stuff there!

Go to a personaliseable (!) version of Google at www.google.com/ig. It’s actually pretty good. You have to log in with your Google ID and password, for example your gmail username, and you can set out various bits of info to have on your screen, as well as the Google search box.

The screen is split into 3 columns. On the left I have a list of favourite links, a preview of my Gmail inbox, a ‘Word of the Day’ thing and the latest feed from Slashdot. In the centre I have a few blogs which I like to monitor regularly. The latest 3 posts in each appear here. Any RSS feed can be subscribed to. On the rightermost (!) column I have various news site feeds, including the BBC and Google News.

When I get home I will stick an image of what my screen looks like. It makes for an excellent homepage.

Great quote from H.G. Wells in amner’s review of The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells.

An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

One of the great things about Palimpsest is the way it throws up quality discussions about authors I have never heard of. And it brings together fans of that author that might not otherwise ever get to discuss his (or her) work with a fellow devotee.

This happened most recently with Richard Yates. Follow this link to the thread and enjoy. I am certainly going to invest in some Yates in the near future.

Interesting profile of the Austrailian philosopher Peter Singer in last Saturday’s Guardian Review. I remember reading a book of his for an essay on Practical Ethics for A-Level R.E.

George W Bush and Peter Singer were born on the same day – July 6 1946. But there the similarity ends. Only one is an Australian vegetarian who campaigns against animal cruelty and does not believe in the Judaeo-Christian nostrum of the sanctity of life. Only one supports abortion and infanticide in some cases and backs stem-cell research that uses genetic material from embryos. Only one thinks the world would be better if the US were subject to UN sanctions for emitting more than its fair share of greenhouse gases.

And yet there are parallels. In his 2003 book The President of Good and Evil: Taking George W Bush Seriously, Singer quoted from one of Bush’s speeches: “Some people think it’s inappropriate to make moral judgments anymore. Not me.” To which Singer added: “Well, not me either, so that is one view about morality on which the president and I agree.” Both men, in an age of seeming moral relativism and selfishness, insist on the overwhelming importance of moral renewal.

That book nonetheless argued that Bush’s ethics consisted mostly of hypocrisy and intellectual confusion. By contrast, Singer stresses that his moral philosophy is the product of cold logic. Singer concedes his views are often upsetting for Bush supporters. “In a Christian society we have views about the sanctity of life that were formed in a totally different period when we didn’t have to make decisions about embryos or whether you should keep people alive who are irrevocably unconscious. People get stuck with this ethic from the past, which has not been able to adapt itself to other circumstances because it has been encapsulated in a set of religious beliefs.”

Went camping this weekend in Montford Bridge. Here’s a few photos we took. Comments below each one.

Here’s the inside view of the middle living area of our tent.

The outside view of our ridiculously large tent.

This might well be the bridge that gives Montford Bridge its name.

At last! Sean Wright receives the honour of having his own page on Wikipedia!