Pete's Eats

Number of UK parliamentary hours devoted to a ban on fox hunting:

700 hours



Number of UK parliamentary hours devoted to the decision to go to war in Iraq:

7 hours



You have to wonder…

(seen in the Eye)

Just got back from walking the dog. I was using my shiny iPod (60gb of pure white) and at one point when jumping around to Marillion’s ‘He know’s you know’, I accidentally pulled out the earphone cable – the iPod paused! How cool is that!? How long has the iPod done that!?

heyblog: Design Engaged Presentations

A list of presentations from last weekend’s Design Engaged event in Amsterdam. I shall add my (rather more technical than conceptual) presentation sometime this week too…

Thanks again to Andrew who put the whole thing together. I think maybe the model is the future of conferencing… Seriously…

Perhaps, this is why Macromedia doesn’t yet seem to have a cohesive approach to mobile. Juha Christensen is leaving Macromedia to find start-up opportunities in the mobile content space. That boy is like a space-hopper when it comes to jobs it seems…

I’ve blatted on about Flash-Lite and the licensing model a fair bit here in the past, so I won’t do that again now (not much anyway). But, I have never seen a company with a product that holds so much potential simply ‘not get it’ this badly. By the time they get themselves sorted they’ll probably have been beaten to a good market share by the alternatives that are in current production. Simply pointing to Japan and T-Mobile as supreme examples of the licensing model succeeding is not good enough. The Japanese mobile content market is totally different to here and T-Mobile’s closed use of the platform is, well, closed (don’t start me on that particular sell-out).

The player should be free. The development tool should cost decent money – separate from Flash MX 2004 even. Macromedia should stop trying to make everything an enterprise-level product and take a close look at the models that got them where they are today.

Perhaps they should also hire someone to head this up who won’t be looking out of the window at the greener grass it seems. Stephen Elop expanding his role as COO to take this on as well seems like a stretch too far – and doubly shows the ‘not getting it’ thing to me. (I’m not doubting Mr Elop, just the company’s awareness of the importance of their mobile product(s))

Macromedia’s inability to even talk licensing costs has already cost me one major Flash-Lite project. We approached Macromedia to discuss the licensing costs for a major entertainment company who was prepared to test the Flash-Lite waters and despite the European team’s best efforts no-one got back to me about it. The job was to a deadline and we didn’t even clear the first hurdle. There are a couple more potential jobs in the pipeline though, and I am seriously looking at the alternatives to Flash-Lite to deliver them.

Every time I write stuff like this I’m obviously damaging my relationship with Macromedia which has been very close since 1997 and I don’t take that lightly. I wish I could write how great they were and evangelise them to everyone; just like I used to…

There was a three part documentary series aired on BBC a short while ago called ‘The Power of Nightmares’. It was about the politics behind fear of terrorism and how it is being used by governments to control our everyday lives. It provided excellent documented evidence about the truth behind al-Qaida and it’s organisation and compared it to the frightening myth that has been promoted by the ‘usual suspects’ in the form of the US and UK governments. If you feel anything about the so-called ‘war on terror’ either way then I urge you to take the time out to watch this documentary. I really do believe that it presents a fair and just view of the current situation in the world and it does it without conspiracy theories or sensationalism by presenting evidence from independent witnesses and experts. I’m really pleased that I found it online and available for everyone to watch.

I’ve given a lot of thought to the difference between al-Qaida and other well known terrorist groups recently. It’s very unfashionable to refer to the IRA as terrorists these days and you rarely hear about other groups such as ETA either. To my mind the IRA are real terrorists who have presented a clear danger to anyone who gets in their way on many occasions in the past. Some say this danger is still present today and I have to say I find it doubtful that it was easy for people who’d known nothing but a life of violence to have given up just because a few politicians were getting rich off the back of the NI ‘troubles’ and said, “stop now”. I understand that internal violence is as rife as ever from people who work there in various capacities and I still can’t quite understand why the IRA weapons haven’t yet been decommissioned as set down in the various agreements – agreements which were openly signed up to by all parties. Yet, there is little press or concern given to this today because we’re all being led into a world which is scared of Muslims and people of middle eastern origin in general. They are the new fashionable terrorists it seems, and whilst the IRA had a long list of actions behind it that warranted fear, the Muslim community does not, bar the actions of a few isolated groups of extremists which our governments refer to under the umbrella term – al-Qaida.

There is no doubt that ‘al-Qaida’ has committed a number of atrocities but they are novices when it comes to other more established groups and the documentary does a good job of putting things into perspective. In fact, they could hardly be described as a ‘group’ at all, being, as they are, a series of people who share some extremist ideals so far as it benefits their own cause. Each individual ‘cell’ seems to have various causes – some with common ground, some not.

So please watch the documentary. All 3 hours of it if you can…

Web helped armed gang’s 30 raids (apparently).

As an experiment, I just tried to plan a heist on my local Indian takeaway (I’ve been out with Ben this evening and I’ve got the munchies…) and I couldn’t find a map of their building anywhere. The criminals in the above referenced article apparently learned about the, “layout of premises from the web then struck late at night”.

Further research (OK, I’d settle for Chinese takeaway) also resulted in nothing resembling a good enough map for a robbery.

Maybe the takeaways around here have gotten wise to the Internet bandits and taken their maps offline… Now, that’s smart…

A couple of months ago, I got laid and, before you all go and congratulate me on that particular achievement, you should know that as a direct result we’re having another baby. Nete will claim to anyone who’ll listen that it had nothing to do with me and it was all her own work, but that isn’t the case. I worked bloody hard during that shag I can tell you…

On a more serious and grown-up note, we’re due in about May/June time next year and the little critter (from here on in known as ‘rat’) is doing very well apparently. We had a big, complicated scan up in London yesterday and rat was bouncing around like a bouncy thing. Nete, as some of you know, has been on some pretty scary drugs for her rheumatoid arthritis in recent years and there was a possibility that this may have had an adverse effect on the whole thing. We had to wait until yesterday to find out if that was the case or not, which is why I’ve only really mentioned this to a few people so far.

So, that will make four. Nete, Pip, Rat and me. Apart from the ever increasing cost of airfare due to more bums, we couldn’t be happier

Matt Jones gave an excellent presentation today. At one point he was describing the interaction between people who wanted to share a photograph over a bluetooth connection. It isn’t that easy because firstly you need to ask the person’s bluetooth name, then find the photo you want to send them etc. – all in all that equates to 10′s of clicks.

He described the discussion needed to make this all happen as output from ‘the human modem’ – clever bastard.

Timo Arnell just gave a really fantastic talk about space. location and art. He showed us a video that someone had made.

Someone broke down an animated walk cycle and printed out each phase. They then made posters and placed them in various public places and photographed them. Finally, they made a video of them all which put the walk-cycle back together again.

It’s bloody fantastic..