End of the day on the Dingle peninsula. The view from the surfing beach on the Maharees.
Larger version here.
Glenteenassig Lake
On the Dingle peninsula, this morning. Panorama made with the Pano app on an iPhone4.
There’s an amazing boardwalk right round the lake. Entrancing spot — except (I’m told) on a Summer evening, when there are a lot of midges.
James Murdoch’s dilemma
Very sharp comment by Damien Tambini of LSE.
His latest testimony in front of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee showed that James Murdoch is in an impossible situation. To Parliament he basically has to say he knew very little of the industrial scale illegal intrusions on privacy that we now know were going on at News International. To his shareholders however, he has to maintain that he and his executives were in control of the company. In his testimony he has now had to repeatedly claim that he forgot meetings, did not follow up on information given to him and in particular that he appears to have had a ‘cavalier’ approach to in signing off a number of out of court settlements that cost the company a total of several million pounds. The allegation is that the payments were knowingly made at such high levels in order to close down the story, but Murdoch has claimed throughout that he approved the astronomical payments without any knowledge of the wider implications of these cases to the company.
Given the situation he finds himself in, James Murdoch gave a reasonable performance. But Murdoch is not an elected politician, and the performance itself is a secondary issue for shareholders. They have to ask a range of questions: whether the testimony demonstrates that James Murdoch was in effective control of the company and continues to be and in particular whether his testimony makes it likely that there will be a significant change to the business and regulatory environment for the company.
Our elusive technological future
My Keynote Address to this year’s ALT-C conference.
Warning: it’s long — 51 mins.
Geeky delights
This is why (a) I love geeks and (b) the rest of the world wonders what they’ve been smoking!
Er, full disclosure. I have a fancy piece of software that takes my digital photographs and processes them to mimic the grain pattern of, say, Tri-X B&W (i.e. analogue) film. When I demonstrate it to normal, rational people they shake their heads in wonderment and talk about leading-edge uselessness.
Textual perversions
I’ve been testing the Dragon dictation App on the iPad and iPhone. Here’s the test passage with the corrections/omissions encased in square brackets.
Dear I [iPad] this is a most interesting development, and one that I hope we will be able to build on. If I can master [it] adequately I think it would make me more efficient. [On] The other hand, it might seem very strange to others to watch somebody talking to the screen. But if the fish is the games [efficiency gains] were worthwhile then I think I would be able to overcome my embarrassment.
I really like the way it interpreted “efficiency gains” and “fish is the games”! But for short passages (e.g. SMS) it’s often accurate enough — especially given the way iPhone/iPad autocorrect creatively garbles what I type.
Picture this
Lovely cover on this week’s Economist.
In memoriam
American Cemetery, Madingley, late Autumn 2011. Photographed with a 90mm f2 Summicron, which is a revelation to use.
British diplomacy
I’m writing about last week’s London Confererence on Cyberspace and while doing some background research came on a splendid YouTube video made by the British Ambassador to Mexico — in both English and flawless Spanish. But — you know how it is with YouTube — what should appear on the side but this wonderful Monty Python sketch about the British Embassy in Smolensk.
The result of this serendipitous discovery is that I have been unable to write for at least five minutes on account of a severe outbreak of uncontrollable laughter. You have been warned.
‘Security’ = Microsoft control
From the Canonical Blog.
Any new Windows 8 PC will have Secure Boot switched “ON” when it leaves the shop and will be able to boot Microsoft approved software only. However, you will most likely find that your new PC has no option for you to add your own list of approved software. So to install Linux (or any other operating system), you will need to turn Secure Boot “OFF”.
Hmmm… I wonder how many computer users will know how to do that — or understand why it might be necessary to do it. Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) wonders about that too:
Even with the ability for users to configure Secure Boot, it will become harder for non-techie users to install, or even try, any other operating system besides the one that was loaded on the PC when you bought it. For this reason, we recommend that PCs include a User Interface to easily enable or disable Secure Boot and allow the user to chose to change their operating system.