Author: Jim O'Donnell

“Make me watch TV”

This American bloke has never seen a Dalek before. However, he says he will watch any TV programme which the wise (and beautiful) people of the internet ask him to watch by voting on his website. So vote for him to watch Dr. Who (8pm on Fridays).

On the subject of Daleks – I watched Face again last week. A decent gangster film, but not as good as I remembered it being the first time I saw it. That said, it does have Ray Winstone, Robert Carlyle and Phil Davis all playing villains and Ray Winstone gets to be Very Hard Indeed, running up and down a street in Haringey, shooting at coppers, all the while wearing a t-shirt bearing a big picture of a Dalek and the slogan ‘Exterminate!’ Nice one.

Last.fm album charts

Only discovered this recently – last.fm user profiles include a page that lists your favourite albums by showing the covers. I like this. I like it a lot. Records are about the cover art as much as the music. Ask me if I’ve got a certain album by mentioning the name and I’ll have to think about it. Show me the cover and I’ll know instantly, yes or no, because I’ll more likely remember what they look like than what they’re called.

Anyway, by mysterious digital interweb magic, here are pictures of a large chunk of my album collection. The only disappointing thing about the internet is how small the pictures are. No wonderful 12-inch LP sleeves.

Linkage for March 2006

Stuff that’s proved handy/fun/vaguely interesting recently.

Bubblr
Add speech bubbles to photos from flickr. Tell little stories, then save them and e-mail them to friends.
Carson workshops podcast
MP3s of the talks from the Future of Web Apps thing. I’m particularly interested in Tom Coates’ and Cal Henderson’s talks, since I’m working on a large-ish image archive at the moment. All the talks are worth listening to. Why no MP3 from the Adobe/Macromedia guy?
The more-or-less complete Boiled in Lead
Gypsy violins. Electric guitars. Long hair. Tattoos. How can you go wrong with that combination? I was going through a box of old CDs that I haven’t listened to for years. I found four discs by Boiled in Lead – mementos of my time living in the Midwest. The early stuff is mostly English folk and Irish reels. Later stuff brings in Eastern European, Turkish and African tunes – even a venture into Thai music. The sort of band that could say “we found a kaen in a shop, so we sat down and recorded something with it”. Good stuff.
More trees and hierarchies in SQL
One of those articles I keep going back to, so I thought it worth mentioning. Plus it’s something to read if you find yourself stuck with insomnia in the middle of the night. Current project involves pictures classified with keywords along the lines of “crime: piracy” or “water transport: sailing vessel: pirate ship” so I’m parsing the text and using the adjacency table model to store it in a relational database.
Decommissioned FA2 Sea Harrier
We have a new toy at work. I wish we could let people sit in the cockpit and pretend to fly it. It would be like those little rides you find outside supermarkets. But larger. And with air-to-air missiles.
Royal Observatory circa. 2002
My first ever venture into CSS layouts. Since merged into the table-based Maritime Museum site but preserved by the magic of the Wayback Machine. It brings a nostalgic tear to my eye. I wish I’d pushed harder on sticking with tableless layouts too. Oh well, c’est la vie.

Yahoo! Hong Kong provides data to the Chinese government

From the Associated Press, via Boing Boing – Yahoo! Hong Kong provided evidence which was used against Shi Tao. Interesting, since Yahoo’s defence of their actions had been that they were complying with mainland Chinese laws, which don’t apply in Hong Kong. Their letter to Amnesty International (173K PDF) explicitly states that Yahoo! Hong Kong was not involved in the release of information to the Chinese goverment.

Shi Tao was jailed in April 2005, for ten years, after sending an e-mail from his Yahoo account regarding the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Amnesty International considers Shi Tao a prisoner of conscience. If you would like to take action in support of Shi Tao, Amnesty has further details on their website.

If you’re local, and interested in corporate human rights, we will be having a workshop about the Business and Human Rights campaign at the next meeting of Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty – 11th April, 8pm, at St Margaret’s Church in Lee Terrace.

Guns for sale

Amnesty have produced a video in support of the Control Arms Campaign. It’s a home shopping ad extolling the virtues, and ease of purchase, of the AK-47 assault rifle. There’s a number to text if you’d like to join the petition and support the control of sales of small arms.

The ad’s running in cinemas nationwide, so yours truly will be up in the Vue cinema in Leicester Square on Saturday trying to sign people up to the petition.

UPDATE: 92 photos for the petition in a couple of hours! We rock! But not as much as those people who kindly gave their support to the campaign.