edging forward

I've had to upgrade the network security at rashbre central again. There's been someone attempting to tamper with one of the lesser known rashbre web-sites and trying to add some code into a directory. It didn't work and I think they will have burnt fingers. I've got a log record, IP address and bizarrely a phone number for this errant stranger so 'matters are in hand', as they say.

The web-site is actually hosted in Germany, although at least part of their internet journey passed through America. So like the recent reports about PRISM, it's probably fair game to provide a small notification about it to NCCIC or CERT.

It's annoying having to spend time on dealing with these negative activities. It's big business of course. There's one set of people selling pointless search engine optimisations by attempting to drop links of their client's products sneakily into other peoples' websites.

Then there's the other group (or parts of the same group?) selling the antidote products.

Facebook and twitter create another market. I'm sure I'm not the only one to get spammed by people offering packs of 'friends' to bump up the numbers. It all sounds quite saddo, were it not for the 'number of friends/followers' being used to create indices of social weighting. Of course, Google and similar systems are wise to it all and eliminate most of the spurious counts from their calculations.

It's all quite topical with the discussions of government-based spyware at the moment, but I can't help wondering how they'd have the horsepower to make it all work for more than a group of targeted individuals. There must be a lot of Chloe O'Brians around to save the day.

And of course, judging by the person attempting to fiddle with one of my web-sites, the perpetrators try to hide behind various masking technologies.

Annoyingly, it means we are all encouraged to spend time adding those defensive layers like complicated frequently changing passwords, Captcha codes, moderation for comments, firewalls, firetraps, sandboxes and so on.

So no wonder we need ever bigger computers to write our documents. It's all the edge activity.

approved for release

It looks as if I'll have a couple of weeks gap in my schedule ahead. This will be useful to help me round out a few partially completed projects.

I've also been on a couple of courses recently and it should give me a chance to put some of it into action. One was linked to side project screenplay activities, which I don't think have received much blogging coverage.

I met some excellent and experienced folk who gave great pointers about commercial storytelling.

We also picked through interesting modern material and it's given further avenues to explore. For example, changes based around modern audience sophistication and the storytelling shorthand used. Like text messages. I happen to think SMS based story progressions are overused. Check out any soap. Although, I suppose ideas travel fast and today's connectedness only accelerates that process.

As an example, yesterday there was that egg-throwing incident on a tacky television show. I idly looked at the perpetrator's twitter feed a few minutes after it occurred. She had about 350 followers. By the end of the show it was 10 times that number and by this morning it was around 10,000. She hadn't posted since Christmas Eve, so we may need to hold our breath for anything interesting.

Similar with the great spy interception PRISM expose. Guess what? Email is being monitored by government agencies. The charts (Victoria Nece redesign here) showed monitoring actions from around 2007 through to nowadays.

We've all watched some of the movies Enemy of the State, Bourne, Body of Lies, or episodes of Spooks or 24. That's where the screenplays exhibit a slickness around these technologies that I'm less convinced work so well in practice. All that on-demand repositioning of satellites in realtime and remote accessing of security pin numbers in a warehouse depot. Maybe it wouldn't work so well in practice. The wrong plug? the wrong software driver? System re-boot?

I'm not saying there isn't stuff out there. They've been launching surveillance satellites since the Gambit project in the 1960s. Back then the satellites had a short mission life, sometimes fuzzy corduroy striping cameras and a little better than 50% success rate.

The technology improved by the simple expedient of 'I think we'd better get a bigger dish' and then 'I think we'd better get a bigger rocket'.

A quick hint when trying to spot big stuff being fired into surveillance orbit is to look for the biggest rockets. Some of the next size down ones didn't quite make it.

The biggest currently seems to be the Delta IV-Heavy which is one rocket, with two more strapped onto it. There is a brilliant new design in discussion which is fundamentally the same, but with four extra rockets strapped on.

The biggest surveillance satellite on the biggest rocket so far is NROL-32 on the Delta IV-Heavy. It's still classified, so we can only guess that it's an astromesh construction, like a 100 metre wide TV satellite dish pointing back to earth. It was only obliquely referenced when it was launched back in November 2010.

I wonder how it is getting on? What it's looking at? And what else is planned?



Maybe after tidying up my current projects, there's an opportunity to practice some screenplay here? Spies and rockets instead of genre versions of folk tales? Hansel and Gretel's already been done. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, anyone?

rolling fog paint decisions

Now we've got the new sofa upstairs to go into the 'music room' we can start to work out the accompanying paint scheme.

Some might think that we'd have decorated the room before the sofa arrived, but it proved better to cross check the colour in-situ.

I didn't realise there were so many versions of a single paint colour, like "Rolling Fog", which has four variants.

That's before we add on the matt, silk, gloss and not forgetting the "Intelligent Matt", "Traditional Oil Gloss" and Floor Paint. Actually, there's 11 finishes for this colour in total, and 4 different shades.

Decision, decisions.

art everywhere

I like the idea of the Art Everywhere plans for Great Britain this summer.

It's along the lines of making the whole country into an art gallery by buying space on poster sites during August.

VVS vertical video syndrome

I saw this at Lady Banana's and it made me laugh.

blippar in the cupboards

A small post-twitter experiment for the weekend.

I decided to try that Blippar application by pointing it into a kitchen cupboard.

Blippar is one of those augmented reality applications that pings up extra information when it recognises the right content. You sometimes see Blippar enabled adverts for cars, on platform hoardings.

My casual iPhone scan of the cupboard struck Blippar gold straight away, when it's camera identified a bottle of barbecue sauce and pinged up a series of recipes. Okay, the recipes were along the lines of 'make something and squirt Heinz product into it', but it proved the point.

Then it spotted Marmite, which asked for a vote about Like or Hate (Like, obv). And a packet of crisps which seemed to offer a mini weather forecast. The iPhone knew where in the world the crisp packet was located and whether the conditions were suitable for outdoor consumption.

Companies are tentatively experimenting with this at the moment, but I suppose it won't be long before we start to see more; there's already AR bus stop advertisements for pizza and a certain charity.

derivative antifragility?

I've just been reading that newish AntiFragile book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's about how adaptive behaviour can strengthen systems, although ex-derivatives trader Taleb's pompous style requires a reader's mental machete to hack to the main points.

The book's core message takes a kind of Nietsche theme of 'what does not kill me makes me stronger' and expands it out to several hundred pages. When you think you've finished reading an idea, another whole section of the same theme appears, like the doubling regrowth of a severed Hydra's head.

I'll summarise it. We know if we shake a box marked 'Fragile' we break the contents. People don't mark boxes 'Robust' and if we were to shake them then nothing inside changes. A box marked 'Antifragile', when shaken, could reconfigure its components into something better. A bit like evolution. Yes, that's the main riff of the book. Things that gain from disorder.

The Mr Bombastic style insults as many people as possible on the way to this conclusion, whilst hinting that the self-aggrandising author dead lifts 330lbs, so we'd better not insult him. As a burly ranter fond of Malbec in Michelin restarants, his good lines are flashes spread across oft-times repetitive and self-justifying pages. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as Taleb would surely state it. Several times. Cross referenced. And maybe in Latin.

Taleb previously wrote the Black Swan book about 'one off' events that can't be predicted but have big effects. If that book identified the randomness of some key events, this one tries to turn the events and interconnectedness to advantage.

There's some good ideas in the book, which I found only started to lock in after 15% read and by treaing his asides as humorous. There's plenty of other people quoting Taleb's brilliance, although I wonder how they have suppressed their irritation of his style to get to the end of the book?

Instead I'll be reminded of Kanye West, whose oft-played stadium lyrics sampling Daft Punk and quoting Twilight of the False Gods, make a similar point to the book.

(Work it, make it, do it,
Makes us harder, better, faster, stronger!)

(Work it harder make it better,
do it faster makes us stronger,
more than ever, never over,
Our work here is never over)

N-now th-th-that that don't kill me
Can only make me stronger
I need you to hurry up now
'Cause I can't wait much longer
I know I got to be right now

rocking to the rhythm in the ice cream van

Two Polish guys with a big box arrived today.

I asked them to carry it upstairs, half expecting that it wouldn't go around the bend in the stairs.

It didn't.

That's not the first time this has happened and previously I've had to make a hole in the wall to get the offending item upstairs.

These guys were on a schedule and after the five minutes they'd budgeted for drop-off they were on their way to the next place. "Call customer services," they explained as they ran back to their truck.

Something like a reverse robbery really.

I then had a three dimensional geometry puzzle to get the large item upstairs. Unpack it from the cardboard, measure it and work out that I'd got about 2 cm of clearance if I jigged it at various tortuous angles.

It was also deceptively heavy and a very warm afternoon. I think it took about half an hour, at the end of which at least a replacement tee-shirt would be a good idea.

Maybe after a celebratory an ice-cream.

power trip

I've been out on the road again for the last couple of days, although not as a part of my day job. This has been more of a foray into media-world a part of one of my side projects.

The short term pit-stop back home was enough time to jettison one set of luggage and move to a carry bag for my subsequent stopover.

For the shorter trip I don't need all the power chargers in the illustration above, which is from last week. Eagle eyed may spot the UK power strip which I take on longer trips and which serves two purposes. 1) It provides more sockets than the average hotel room 2) It means I don't carry a whole set of those country adapters. Just one for the power strip.

Some may notice that the above could be rationalised for USB charging, but as soon as there's cameras, the various little chargers appear.

So the power strip only goes on longer journeys with checked luggage. Not exactly power trips, but you know what I mean.

sun along the south bank

The blue sky and sunshine seems to be working here in London too. The grassed areas are beginning to fill up, although around this area it is the tourists taking the space at the moment, ahead of the office workers.

The South Bank also has its miniature beach re-instated, without any bathing huts this year. Instead there's a kind of neighbourhood exhibition along with some ecological looking structures that I haven't had time to investigate.

Although I did find time for a coffee alone the Thames, early enough to miss the crowds and before the power drills in the mysterious construction site under the bridge had started up for the day.

dawn

I think it was the blackbirds that woke me this morning. They started before the yappy dog in the distance. I didn't mind either sound effect, whilst morning crept in and early cloud gave way to clear blue skies.

We'll make today's plans over breakfast, before zig-zagging our way back across the island.

stalactite and stalagmite

Instead of reporting from today's scenic beach/harbour/cafe, I thought I'd go underground. We'd decided to head for some nearby caves.

I was genuinely surprised at the scale and quantity of stalactites and stalagmites, almost from the moment we entered. I always think that stalactites have to hold on Tight - because they are the ones that hang down and stalagmites Grow upward. But that's just me*.

From the start when we were hardly a few metres below ground, we were already in vast chambers dating five or more million years ago into the miocene period. That's proper 'Planet of the Apes' territory. And I can't remember seeing real stalactites before - although I've been into other caves and mines and seen them on telly.

It wasn't just a handful. There were millions of them. All sizes and shapes, including some that looked almost like paper or cloth. The caves were around a kilometre long and descended to around 25 metres - I gather they have been formed by the pounding of the Mediterranean into the rocks.

Our guide was quite helpful, but I decided that my Spanish/German and his English didn't quite transfer the information, so I'll spend some quiet time checking the facts later.

For now, I'll just be amazed.

* others use 'c' for ceiling and 'g' for ground