Not having visited Paris for many years I was still surprised at how familiar the backdrops to the terrorist attacks of the past Friday appeared. For those who have lost their lives, sustained injuries or find themselves fearful the events of Friday are a very real tragedy but what response should we offer?
The French could take Friday off and still produce more than Britons do in a week. The Economist, Mar 14th 2015
With the presence of the SNP and now the Corbyn led Labour party within parliament once again the issue of the Trident replacement is becoming front page news. I have always found the discussion very interesting as while I understand the arguments for Trident as a deterrent and granting the UK a permanent security council position I still fail to understand on what circumstances it would be usable. Could we not strap a whole load of explosive to the various reactors around the UK to achieve a similar end of life of earth result at a significant finical saving. An austerity era deterrent!
With the powerful images of Alan Kurdi body saturating the press the ongoing humanitarian disaster gripping the various dysfunctional nations surrounding Europe seams to have taken a welcome step towards an engaged response.
Recently I was bought an Apple TV which I intended to use primarily for Airplay mirroring. However, as I am also a Netflix subscriber I thought I might as well use it for that as well.
An interesting article in the The Independent today illustrating ‘left-wing’ policy positions held by Jeremy Corbyn that perhaps have a majority public support. Many commentators over the last few weeks have suggest that Jeremy Corbyn becoming the leader of the Labour would be great for the Conservatives arguing that such an appointment would make the Labour party un-electable.
The Guardian has an interesting piece entitled, The end of capitalism has begun.
The Huffington Post reports that the upcoming budget will see the BBC acquire responsibility for the every growing number of free TV licenses in exchange for inflation linked increase in the TV license and the extension of the license onto on demand services, iPlayer services. The current settlement has always been problematic and while the extension to the license fee to on-demand services makes sense it only does so with a refocusing of the materials it covers. Yes its crazy that you can watch Dr. Who an hour later without needing a TV license on iPlayer. Its also crazy that you need a TV license to watch Eurosport Player delivered over IP.
The Greek people, eligible to vote, have voted to reject the bailout offer. This presents a clear clash between democracy and capitalism essentially the root of the last few months of turmoil.
An interesting press conference in which Yanis Varoufakis discuss the government action in calling a referendum due to his lack of mandate to except the then current (27/6/15) proposal but also interestingly responding to the fact while he may not have a mandate to except it the nation could choose to do so.
So Greece will go to a referendum to decided if it will accept a proposal its government does not have a mandate to accept on its peoples behalf and of course people start to panic.
While certainly America focused, Joseph Stiglitz offers an interpretation of current finical inequalities in relationship to Trickle Down Theory.
The Innovation in Music 2015 Conference hosted by Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.was a refreshing conference rich in discussion between industry and academic interested parties. With a discernible grounding in applicable practice the conference has definitely helped with clarify a number of lines of interests and offer a number of historical insights which will help to inform my future practice.
On Monday this week I am presenting the outcome of my collaboration with Adam Jansch exploring the possible future of the music album, The Locative Album System- The Early Experiments.
Prior to working within the HE education sector I had a number of jobs and roles one of which involved working on IT tenders for government departments.
While travelling yesterday a poster at one of the train stations I was travelling through caught my eye. At the time I was working on a lecture about user interface and am currently very interested in the misinterpretation of instructions.
for my God knew that manmade words would never do
In the UK General election tomorrow I intended to vote Green for two reasons,
So I have always loved phones and especially smart phones.
While in the process of setting up a Dokuwiki install I came across a problem with generating clean URLs using Apache rewriting.
We have an election in the UK soon and here are my flippant questions to ask of the candidates;
Congrautlations to Leo Leporte and the TWIT team on their tenth anniversary of This Week in Tech.
From the 2015 Paris–Roubaix
An excerpt of John Oliver interview with Edward Snowden where they discuss the need to shift away from the idea of passwords towards the idea of pass-phrases.
Last night I had the opportunity to play Carcassonne including the Hills and Sheep expansion and now the almost ubiquitous River 2 starting expansion.
Last night after completing the frequent task of applying application and system updates I discovered that notmuch mode within emacs which I use to read email was broken.
In the process of developing a method of automatically build the numerous Jekyll based sites I am now running I came across a couple of problems to do with deploying with git, through shell scripts launched by crontab.
I have been exploring using sed to achieve a number of text manipulations in the course of rolling out a number of new Jekyll based websites.
After a number of weeks of work I have finally completed the move of scotthewitt.co.uk away from the wordpress site of the last few years and onto a Jekyll built static site.
This past February half term, Susanna and I spent some of the holiday with friends at Rydal Hall just north of Ambleside in the Lake District. Rydal Hall has a variety of accommodation available but Susanna and I decided to camp which was a lot of fun but not without its challenges.