<![CDATA[rothwell.im]]>

<![CDATA[rothwell.im]]> 2013-05-19T18:13:05+01:00 http://rothwell.im/ Octopress <![CDATA[[LINK] Yahoo almost certain to snap up Tumblr]]> 2013-05-19T18:15:00+01:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/05/19/yahoo-almost-certain-to-snap-up-tumblr The Verge:

According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo's board of directors has approved the company's widely-rumored acquisition of Tumblr in an all-cash deal worth $1.1 billion. Assuming the terms are accepted by Tumblr, CEO Marissa Mayer is all but certain to announce Yahoo's latest pickup — easily its largest to date in a spree of acquisitions and content deals — at a media event tomorrow in New York City.
Chris Welch The Verge

Although I am confident that Marissa Meyer knows what she is doing, it is impossible not to draw parallels between Tumblr and GeoCities. Both have a relatively young, non-techie userbase. Both are full of GIFs, gaudy backgrounds and auto-playing music. Tumblr simply has more of a social-privilege brigade bent to it.

Jason Scott of ArchiveTeam famously said that he would not trust Yahoo with a backup of his own nutsack. Although the deal is seen as “mutually beneficial,” the road to a buyout and shutdown may well be paved with good intentions.

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]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Easy tables-of-contents in Octopress]]> 2013-05-09T22:15:00+01:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/05/09/easy-tables-of-contents-in-octopress In an attempt to clean up the Doctor Who guide, I discovered Robert Reimann’s excellent post to using kramdown’s HTML converter to achieve tables of contents in Octopress. (This blog, in its current incarnation, has pretty much always used kramdown—it’s how I do footnotes.)

Ultimately, I needed around five lines of code and a little bit of fiddling with the source file to get it to work.¹ It was exceptionally easy. The biggest fuss was the styling. If you’re looking to implement a table of contents in your Octopress site—or any static site that uses kramdown as its generator—this is the method you should use.

A lot of the guide is still copy-and-pasted from my old site, and was raw HTML: my understanding is that kramdown will not generate header IDs, and therefore anchor tags, unless the header was in Markdown as opposed to being in pure HTML.↩

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] New story (finally): Random Access]]> 2013-04-23T03:55:00+01:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/04/23/new-story-finally-random-access This ~~week’s~~ month’s short story, like the last one, has been similarly tough. It’s also pretty grim, by my own standards.

It’s called Random Access, and tells the story of an AWOL soldier returning from the dead, some time in the not-too-distant future, to find out what really happened at a traumatic event in his past. If you could look back into your own memories, and find out conclusively what happened—or what you remember to have happened—would you?

]]> <![CDATA[An experiment in blog-writing]]> 2013-04-19T09:00:00+01:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/04/19/an-experiment-in-blog-writing Those of you with long memories will remember that, for a while, my old blog had a plugin installed called Odiogo. This plugin would feed the content of each post through a text-to-speech synthesiser and spat out a rudimentary ‘podcast’.

My own experiments with this service did not last too long. Each post included an embedded Odiogo player, which added significantly to the load times; furthermore, it ended up just highlighting flaws in my own writing that I chose to ignore.

The idea of providing spoken-word versions of articles is not entirely original: Wikipedia has an ongoing project to provide versions of certain articles read aloud. The rationale is simple: while blind and visually impaired readers can use screen-readers, many would prefer a human voice, with a good grasp of punctuation and speaking with an appropriate tone.

With this in mind, I’m going to attempt an experiment. From this point on—at least, probably, until I grow tired of it, and provided of course that I remember to do so—if I write any kind of long-form article, I will also record me reading it aloud and provide a link to that on the page. (You should see an “audio version” link in the header of this page.)

At present, they’re MP3 only. At present, there’s no podcast feed of any kind because it’s a crudely hacked extension to Octopress. This is genuinely nothing more than experimental.

Nevertheless, I am interested to see if people find it useful. Enforcing the idea of reading what I write aloud, in my own voice, might encourage me to keep my big mouth shut on occasion: who knows, it might even catch on!

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Microsoft rolls out two-stage authentication]]> 2013-04-17T23:07:00+01:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/04/17/microsoft-rolls-out-two-stage-authentication Microsoft is deploying two-step authentication for its Microsoft Account/Windows Live .NET Passport things. They (along with Apple, Twitter, and many others) should’ve done it years ago—but, as always, it’s better (much better) late than never.

We’ll verify that you have at least two pieces of security information on file (it’s always good to have a second in case you lose the first). If you have a smartphone, we’ll help you set up an authenticator app, which allows you to receive two-step verification codes even while offline (very useful on vacation and to avoid messaging fees). The next time you sign on, you’ll be prompted for a code.
Eric Doerr Microsoft Account Gets More Secure

Impressively, Microsoft’s implementation seems identical to Google’s: that is, it implements RFC 6238 and is therefore standards-compliant, which is more than can be said for Apple’s and Facebook’s implementations. Although two-stage authentication hasn’t been deployed to my Microsoft account yet, their Windows Phone Authenticator app works perfectly with my Google accounts with minimum fuss, and vice versa.¹

I’m pleased. And it’s about damned time.

Although Google doesn’t provide a specific option to link a Windows Phone with your account, you won’t run into any issues if you just lie and say it’s an Android, iPhone or BlackBerry. Both Microsoft’s and Google’s authenticators implement the same standard.↩

]]> <![CDATA[Love (2011) film review]]> 2013-04-10T16:20:00+01:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/04/10/love-2011-film-review Gunner Wright in handsome-but-broody-spaceman mode

Gunner Wright in handsome-but-broody-spaceman mode

At first glance, you might think that Love, a movie produced by alternative rock band Angels and Airwaves, is a 2001 rip-off disguised as something merely very similar.

It turns out this isn’t too inaccurate as a description, although it has elements of homage to Moon as well. Filmed on a home-made recreation of the International Space Station, it stars Gunner Wright (of Dead Space fame) as Lee Miller, an astronaut stranded on the station, alone, by a cataclysmic war on Earth.

Of course, being a tie-in film for an alternative-rock concept album (and exec-produced by Tom DeLonge, famous for his views on UFOs) this was never going to be a revolution in storytelling. It was always going to be an art film, an acquired taste to say the least.

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Pathways Into Darkness ported to OS X]]> 2013-04-10T07:52:00+01:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/04/10/pathways-into-darkness-ported-to-os-x Bungie’s first attempt at a first-person shooter game was Pathways into Darkness, a survival horror-cum-adventure game in which you must activate a nuclear device in the bowels of an ancient Mesoamerican pyramid. It was released for the ‘old world’ MacOS in 1993.

There are pre-echoes of Bungie’s later work in Marathon and Halo, and you have to search the corpses of your enemies for ammunition and health, which makes it just like BioShock Infinite¹. Unusually, it had a user interface with widgets, and looks just like any other Macintosh application from its time period.

Now, Pathways has been ported to OS X by Bruce Morrison. It’s not going to be gracing any ‘game of the year’ awards any time soon, but it’s worth playing for a fascinating piece of gaming history. (Also, it’s fiendishly difficult.)

OK, that’s exaggerating a little.↩

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Lara and I: the new Tomb Raider]]> 2013-03-28T15:30:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/03/28/lara-and-i-the-new-tomb-raider Gwen Gilman discusses how the new Tomb Raider is an excellent step in the right direction for the franchise, reinventing Lara Croft as an adventurer rather than incidental eye candy:

In the concept art Lara stands face-on, looking directly out at the viewer with a face-off stare. She looks determined, and desperately in need of a bath. All this and the bow slung over her shoulder, she looks positively adventurous[...] I didn’t feel, as I did as a young girl, that she was made for someone else to ogle any more. This Lara, with her badass glare, adventure-worn appearance and confident stance, this Lara was made for me.
Gwen Gilman Lara and I, Then and Now

It’s a good look at the odd area of Tomb Raider’s marketing, and how virtually all of these tropes are eliminated in the game proper. There are some interesting comparisons between survival horror games such as Dead Space, and the odd disparity between Tomb Raider’s guttural, visceral marketing and the absence of the Eye-Poke Machine™ in Dead Space 2’s marketing or paraphernalia.

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Shamefully awful statistics guff from Pocket]]> 2013-03-21T07:00:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/03/21/critically-awful-statistics-guff-from-pocket Glenn Fleishman tweeted a link to the read-it-later service formerly known as Readability and now known as Pocket, which has posted an article on its blog, claiming that Pocket helps to extend the ‘life span’ of articles which it saves.

It provides some graphs to this effect, seeming to show that Pocket’s activity curve is shallower. All well and good.

Except it’s not. The x-axis of the graph is labelled simply ‘activity.’ No units. There is an asterisk stating that the two curves are on separate scales—naturally, given that BuzzFeed gets much, much more traffic than Pocket—but there’s no indication as to what these scales are, and therefore it’s impossible to check Pocket’s maths and validate their reasoning.

This is disappointing. Pocket is a well-engineered read-it-later service, and one of the best: it is allegedly run by adults working in computing, who should therefore have at least some grasp of statistics. Unless they consider the number of ‘opens’ something has in Pocket to be a trade secret, there is no excuse not to release this data when using a graph to advertise your product. Otherwise, your graph has about as much validity as this one, discussing the lifespan of statistical guff on blogs in terms of watermelons:

Lifespan of statistical guff in terms of watermelons.

I don’t think Pocket set out to deceive the publishers their blog post is aimed at, but this sort of cowboy statistics sets a dangerous precedent.

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] A look at computer science in Vietnam]]> 2013-03-20T09:45:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/03/20/a-look-at-computer-science-in-vietnam Neil Fraser, a Google employee, visited Vietnam and visited a few schools to learn how computing was taught there. There some things you’d expect (Windows XP monoculture, they still teach you how to take care of your floppy disks¹) but there are many surprises—in many ways, it’s better than how we teach IT in schools in Western countries.

One particular gem stands out:

By grade 5 they are writing procedures containing loops calling procedures containing loops.
At this point a quick comparison with the United States is in order. A couple of visits to San Francisco's magnet school for science and technology (Galileo Academy) revealed grade 11 and 12 students struggling with HTML's image tag. Loops and conditionals were poorly understood. Computer Science homework was banned by the school board.
Neil Fraser CS in VN

Having donated enough to the school to pay another CS teacher for a year, Mr Fraser went to a high school and discovered that around half of year 11 students would pass Google’s interview process with flying colours.

What does this say? Vietnam is doing something right—and we, in the UK and the US, are doing something very wrong indeed.

I’ll confess I was taught at school how to handle floppy disks, but that’s only because that was how our work was stored. I was also taught basic programming at primary school: everything took a nosedive in secondary school.↩

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] New story, finally: Spacehopper]]> 2013-03-16T06:05:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/03/16/new-story The more attentive amongst you will have noticed that despite trying to do one fresh science-fiction short story per week, I haven’t posted one since the 21st last month. Unfortunately, as then, life got in the way.

This one has been tough, but it’s finally done. It’s called Spacehopper and it’s about migrant travellers of the future—interstellar hobos, if you will—who travel around on sub-lightspeed cryonic barges. Specifically, it’s about one born in Southend in 2007.

Enjoy!

]]> <![CDATA[Google Reader to be suns^H^H^H^Htaken outside and shot]]> 2013-03-14T01:30:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/03/14/google-reader-to-be-killed It should come as a surprise to nobody that Google Reader’s usage has declined so spectacularly that Google is now looking to retire it in July.

When it started, it was a novel way of keeping RSS, and later Atom, feeds in sync between systems (before the days when we all generally had a laptop and a non-PC internet device such as a smartphone, or an iPad-style tablet which hadn’t really been invented yet.) It also killed the market for desktop RSS readers: Google Reader was a killer app. Syncing was such a useful feature that it became a de facto standard.

Alas, Reader was not to be. Half a decade led to an awful lot of bloat in our RSS feed lists, and a horrible new UI (derived, no doubt, from Gmail’s and Google+’s) only served to compound the idea that I did not want to spend a large amount of my life rifling through things in the Reader list, marking them as read, and mostly ignoring them.

Of course, today, we have plenty of syncing systems available. We have Dropbox. We have iCloud. We have SkyDrive. We have App.Net. We can roll our own personal ‘cloud’ with S3 or an EC2 instance.

I believe that RSS/Atom (or whatever their successors may be) still have a future. There is a place for an application that can provide a digest of long-form articles, without the noise and distraction of something like Twitter. However, the one thing that will inevitably rise out of this is a ton of Google Reader clones—this is not how it should be done.

Google Reader quickly became bloated. It was like an email inbox from 1999, complete with sluggish access (albeit down to poor JS, rather than dial-up nets.) What we need is a feed aggregator that chucks out everything Google Reader invented, and starts fresh.¹

And no, Flipboard is not the answer. It’s fine if you only follow blogs featuring photographs. Otherwise, it quickly becomes as bloated as Reader, except with more page-turning animations.↩

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] O2 and BE to be assimilated by BSkyB]]> 2013-03-01T11:30:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/03/01/o2-and-be-to-be-assimilated-by-bskyb

We have made the decision to sell our O2 consumer Home Broadband and Home Phone business to Sky.

This arrangement with Sky lets us focus on giving our customers the best mobile experience, including next generation (4G) services. And helps you get high-quality home broadband from one of the leading companies in the market.

This is disappointing. BE/Teléfonica’s ADSL operation was one of the first (and is still one of the few) broadband operations in the UK not to be openly customer-hostile: it’s a good deal, they don’t treat their customers like idiots, and it is, overall, a good service.

With this sale to Sky, it’s a shame that when my fixed-line contract finishes in October, I doubt I’ll be looking to renew.

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Programming is a life skill, not a shortcut to success]]> 2013-03-01T05:00:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/03/01/programming-is-a-life-skill I’m pleased, and somewhat heartened, to see the campaign for programming to be taught in schools spreading to the United States.

One does wonder, though, why it’s deemed necessary for celebrities such as Ashton Kutchtchstcher, will.i.am and rapping musician Mr Snoop L. Dogg to become involved. What, exactly, is gained from guff such as this?

support tha american dream n make coding available to EVERYONE!!
Snoop Dogg

There’s a video attached, too, that describes coding as a ‘superpower.’ It’s not.

In the twenty-first century, where PCs are exceptionally widespread and we are approaching ubiquitous computing, programming is a basic life-skill. It is not a superpower any more than basic literacy, numeracy or general social skills are a superpower. We shouldn’t risk undermining the message—especially to certain members of the general public, who still conflate “hacking” with monstrosities such as the movie Swordfish—by trying to make programming appear ‘sexy.’

Computer literacy and basic algorithmic logic are key skills. Learning to code can improve your career prospects, and will almost certainly improve your life when it comes to computers. It won’t make you a hero (nor a watchful protector, a Dark Knight, nor indeed a Quiet Bat-Person.)

Read on...

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]]> <![CDATA[New story: I Am A Train]]> 2013-02-21T01:30:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/02/21/new-story-i-am-a-train This¹ week’s short story is called I Am A Train. It is a topical story of technoparanoia, driverless trains, and Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.

Well, last week’s: life, unfortunately, got in the way.↩

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Dell's Linux ultrabook becomes more enticing]]> 2013-02-18T21:55:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/02/18/dells-linux-ultrabook-becomes-more-enticing Dell’s XPS 13 Developer Edition, formerly an interesting but not particularly tempting Ubuntu 12.04-powered Ultrabook, is now a much more reasonable proposition.

Ars reports that the D™XPS™13LDE will now come with a 1920×1080 flat panel, which may well be an IPS display (it’s not quite at HiDPI/retina levels, but it’s slowly getting there: I hope it won’t be too long before Apple’s monopoly on HiDPI PCs is broken.) Availability has also been announced for Europe (including the UK), which means there’ll be a substantial increase in the number of people who’ll be able to buy one.

If I didn’t already have a notebook (MacBook Pro 13) which I was very happy with, I’d be giving the D™XPS™13LDE a serious look.

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Source code for w.rothwell.im]]> 2013-02-18T11:15:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/02/18/source-code-for-w-dot-rothwell-dot-im I’ve provided the source code for w.rothwell.im for your convenience, if you’d like to reappropriate it when building a similar web site.

I’m also aware that I haven’t published this week’s story yet (so much for one story per week!) I’ve had a busy weekend, but it’s coming. Watch this space.

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] ARG for Bungie's new game]]> 2013-02-12T06:05:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/02/12/arg-for-bungies-new-game Bungie, creators of Marathon and Halo, appear to be unveiling their new game next week. Bits of it have already leaked.

They have a tradition, by now, of doing extraordinarily elaborate alternate-reality games (ARGs) surrounding their product announcements and launches. It started prior to the announcement of the first Halo at Macworld 1999, with the Cortana Letters, sent from a mysterious email address to a Marathon fan site.

These things are great. They’re more subtle than traditional publicity stunts, and since they’re usually done by people involved in the creation of the product, they’re usually more tightly-intertwined with in-universe lore. Moreover, they’re the closest you and I, as mere mortals, will ever get to being Batman defeating the Riddler.

Being a massive commercial tease has its advantages.

]]> <![CDATA[Scheduled fun]]> 2013-02-09T15:47:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/02/09/scheduled-fun I enjoy writing stories. Regular readers will already know this: those who are not will no doubt think, “oh Christ, this is another one of those ‘struggling writer’ posts. ABANDON BLOG.”

Fear not. I’m not about to go all NaNoWriMo¹ on here.

I don’t tend to make New Year resolutions, but I made myself a promise, about the time I started at university, that from some arbitrary point I would write on a regular schedule. One short story a week.

Now is as good a time as any, so I’m very pleased to announce the release of The Ladies Who Fell to Earth, the story of a young boy, his senile Nan and two very strange lodgers in the run-up to the 1999 solar eclipse.

From this point on, I am going to try to write at least one short story every week, and post it at w.rothwell.im every Friday or Saturday. I don’t expect all of them will be good (indeed, some of them will probably be terrible!) but I hope that I’ll at least have fun writing them, and that you’ll have fun reading them.

I did actually make a third(?) attempt at NaNoWriMo last year (2012.) It failed magnificently at something like thirty thousand words, mostly because all of the characters were the most hateful people you could possibly conceive—I had more empathy for the row of function keys on my computer than for them.↩

]]> <![CDATA[[LINK] Newell: 'Don't lie to the Internet']]> 2013-02-01T09:53:00+00:00 http://rothwell.im/blog/2013/02/01/newell-dont-lie-to-the-internet Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, gave a presentation at the University of Texas on all sorts of aspects of his company’s business: Steam, his dislike of closed platforms such as consoles and walled-garden app stores, and so on.

The point that I make to people of your generation is that you can't lie to reddit. It's remarkable how many people try, but they don't understand that reddit's ability to detect bullshit is insanely high.
Gabe Newell Reflections of a Video Game Maker

It’s worth watching the whole thing all the way through. Valve is, as stands, probably one of the most exciting and innovative companies that almost no-one outside the gaming or technology circles has heard of: Newell effectively states that his company has its fingers in a lot of pies. Valve has an entire category on its blog devoted to the economics of Team Fortress microtransactions and hat-trading.

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