The English Guy Web Design

Ha! Isn’t it funny that something as unique and increasingly ubiquitous these days, as a blog, could be considered an equalizer of humanity. What on earth am I talking about? This - King Sihanouk (the ex-King of Cambodia) has a blog! (I found this on CNN and Dan Gillmor’s blog) I am unaware of other Royal figures blogging, so is he the first? That’s a good sign, friends! Truly an equalizer of men (and women), blogging has done something politics and culture has been trying to do for centuries.

I had been thinking of something deep and meaningful to write for days now, and I had started a post about political blogging and my opinion on it, and one on the morphing computer industry, but this was something that really caught my eye and for the right reasons.

This is a guy who came over from the UK and decided to travel around NY using just blogs. His post is called, Block by Blog, and rightly so. How did he achieve this? He used a Blackberry and a mobile phone. What does this teach us? That the world of blogs is not as detached as we might believe. You can navigate around a city using blogs, or rather, people’s opinions of places.

What should people learn from this other than the navigation lesson? Well now, real places, restaurants, monuments, tiny off-the-beaten-path tourist attractions, are all now receiving reviews in real-time and you can instantly attract people to them. No more the preserve of fancy magazines or travel guides, or even that NY food guide (whatever it’s called). Funny little facts like Salman Rushdie eating at a pizza joint called Otto’s in Greenwich Village - to the soup-like Bloody Mary at Fifty Seven Fifty Seven - are now seared in my mind!

And perhaps more importantly in terms of human connection - is the individuals that are written up in these blogs that you can now move through the world to and from. One person’s individual experience can now be passed along not from generation to generation but from blogger to surfer to blogger. It is a wider world of connection no longer limited by writing it down, some publisher cleaning it of personality, bleaching it of any colour, but more of a personal bond from humanity to electronic.

I doubt we could travel in the more beaten path locations in the world no matter how famous - could you say the same with say, Lagos? No, I doubt it. But this is dependant on the blogosphere so for now, this is something to try out where the blogosphere is concentrated. I don’t have the blackberry or mobile phone (yet) but it’s something I AM going to try. Thank you Mike Hodgkinson for your article!

This is a story that for one reason or another, seemingly hasn’t merited a mention on the news - which is a shame because it DID when the charges were pending… The marine 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano was cleared of murder charges, and he did not deny killing the two Iraqis, because they made a menacing move towards him. To be fair, I need to mention that he DID empty 2 magazines into their bodies (60 bullets), to act as a deterrent to other insurgents. He left a note on their bodies, “No better friend, no worse enemy”, a Marine slogan. It is a sad day when we start to charge our soldiers with murder for defending themselves.

And I thought I was a lush at University, this retired computer consultant is certainly spending his retirement in style! His aim? To visit 1000 bars in one year! Think about that for a minute, that’s on average, 3 bars a day. I’m guessing he moves from town to town and walks from bar to bar, or he might end up in trouble with the law for drink driving - this assumes he drinks alcohol of course. Anyway, Bar Man, good luck on your quest!

Just in on the news: a “disturbing” (I’m using their word) link between Viagra and potential blindness. FDA is investigating 43 reports of vision loss. Now excuse me, but out of 23 million men taking the little blue pill, 43 reports is miniscule, and it’s “disturbing”? What’s DISTURBING is that 80 year old men are [...]

I am stumped for theme ideas right now, Diane suggested one to me earlier which I am going to work on, I think I am calling it Coffee Time. So if anyone has any ideas for themes, just post a comment or two.

This is a funny one, I had to write something about it. British medical experts are pushing for knives to be redesigned with rounded blunt tips, citing murder and violence rate increases of 18% in 2003-2004, due to knives. Since guns are illegal in the UK it seems obvious that people will use other implements to kill or maim each other (a third of all murder victims are stabbed to death). The article in the NYTimes quoted various US Senators and some people’s humorous quips about what comes next, banning sharp sticks No matter what they do reducing violence is a matter of behaviour and ingrained instinct, we are the most dangerous of predators on this planet, and inside all of us is the capacity to kill.

Thank GOD! Brandy (the young female Afghan) is over her heat, and the boys are no longer whining and howling and crying all night long. We may be able to remove the barricade now, and let them back into the house. Peace and quiet once more reigns (well, relatively).

That cardinal is no longer waking me up at 6am whacking his beak into the large plate glass window in my bedroom, but he still has a yearning to do so down here. I can hear him futilely smashing into the kitchen window hour after hour. Poor guy, surely he must have bent his beak so much so that he can’t even eat by now!?

And at least, the new theme I’ve been working on for the past couple of days, Sunset, is finished and working. You can find the page I wrote up about it here, and see the theme in action here. It’s a three column theme, based on the main masthead graphic. I liked making it, quite pretty to look at.

I write this because I had read about Microsoft’s Jesper Johansson post about letting employees write their passwords down to avoid them using simple easy-to-guess passwords. I think he has a great point, but there is an even better method of having passwords that can even defeat Trojans! Here’s how:

Let’s assume you have this password: 9nh$tt-12 Ok that’s a tough password, it uses letters and numbers and odd characters, very few people have this kind of password. So, remembering it might be difficult right? Well if all you do is follow Jesper’s advice and write it down on a piece of paper, and then just type it in when the password prompt asks you, Trojans have you by the short and curlies. Why? Well, first of all, the word you typed before the password was your username. So someone disseminating Trojan logs can find recurring bits of data, your username and password, and voila with only a tiny bit of effort someone can get into your computer.

The solution? Here’s how. Open up notepad. Do the 4-year old thing and just hammer away on the keyboard and get a few lines of nonsense text up there, then carefully, at the very end of it, or even somewhere in the middle if you’re adventurous, type in the password. Save that text as a file and put it somewhere accessible.

You can open that up anytime you want now, and if you use it a lot it will be a permanent resident in your Recent Documents>. Now, when it comes time to type in your password, don’t. Open up that file, and using your mouse, select the password, copy (CTRL-c) then paste (CTRL-v) it into the password input box.

So what’s so special about that? Well for one, you haven’t TYPED it in. The Trojan, if you have one, won’t register it since it only copies typed text. You have defeated one of the worst scourges of the digital age, and with only a tiny bit of effort. If you are a bright person, you will have chosen a nice long (and difficult) password and in this day and age, you have just saved your entire life, given that most people have bank details and ongoing work on their computer.

So the past few years, being a scientific type, I have been fascinated by our attempts to achieve fusion. Unlike fission which we have already mastered, fusion seems to elude us, or rather, sustainable “energy-out” fusion seems to elude us. Cold fusion has bombed, sonoluminescence seems to be a possibility, Tokamak reactors rarely get more energy out, but now we’re trying something different.

The National Ignition Facility will focus 192 lasers on a Deuterium-Tritium pellet to compress it to 1000 grams per cubic centimetre to attain “ignition” (fusion). Fascinating stuff eh? Also, going to cost you an arm and a leg, current costs are at $4-5B, intended to be competed by the mid 2010s (so you can imagine what the costs will overrun to by then).

What are the upsides to fusion? Well for one - no radioactive waste. If it IS self-sustainable, there is very little energy input required apart from the initial “ignition”. The fuel? Well it’s not exactly rare, deuterium and tritium are easy enough to extract from sea water. The downsides? Well for one, 192 lasers and the sheer cost of this setup. But remember, this is a prototype. If it DOES work, they’ll probably find easier ways as they progress, just like with fission power.

Security risks? No more than any other power generation facility. Perhaps a little more security to protect the chamber and a way is needed to quench the reaction but other than that, no. As mentioned, there is no radioactive waste so there is no need to protect it, or have huge cooling pools for control rods, or disposal/burial facilities to rid ourselves of any waste. The other risk? Well the pressures and temperatures will be greater than that at the centre of the sun, that might be a little bit of a risk.

So is this all part of Bush’s doctrine to find clean power? No. He had nothing to do with this. This was started long before him and more than anything seems to be an extension of the nuclear industry in general. They have always been interested in fusion anyway, master one discipline and try to master similar ones …

Is this better than wind power, or wave power? Well in terms of sheer energy generation yes. In terms of getting energy NOW, no. You could put up wind farms quickly, and we know they work. They be an eyesore but hey, what would you rather have - a bit of wasteland dotted with windmills, or tons of nuclear waste, or tons of SO₂ spewed into the air? Easy choice for me. But honestly I think with our technical innovation and genius we should be able to figure out fusion/sonoluminescence if we put enough resources into it. Wind/Wave/Solar is good but they don’t generate near what we need.