Blog of Hamlesh

I really should start blogging again… been insanely busy lately, so much to write about, just no time

Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he’s come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.

This was presented to TED (http://www.ted.com) a little while ago.

I’ve just been watching a presentation (”The future of the internet and how to stop it”) given by Jonathan Zittrain a professor at Harvard, and he mentioned something that I’d not come across before that I found quite interesting.

Anyone that has a blog or any other website where visitors can feeback information / comments etc know the problem with comment spam. A “captcha” (the funny little image you get asked to type in) is one of the common ways to protect against this. Spammers are now overcoming this by setting up free p**n sites (i’ve censored this out as to not upset the google bots). So on these sites, before seeing the picture, they ask you to validate a captcha, which is pulled in real time from a blog, and feeds the right response back. Now thats kinda clever

The presentation is on youtube, and if you have over an hour to spare, I recommend you check it out (if geekery interests you, which if you’re reading my blog, it does).

As per a recent tweet of mine;

@BarackObama is following 30,599 with 30,012 followers on Twitter while @hilaryclinton follows *ZERO* with 3,822 followers.

Obviously there are some people on Obama’s campaign with a serious understanding of web based, and dare I say it web 2.0/3.0 technologies. They have no doubt implemented the twitter API in a very effective way - but think about the effect this has on the perceptions of people. They’ve even improved his visibility by capitalizing the first characters of his name.

Obama FTW.

The last BarCamp I attended (BarCampLondon3) at Google’s London HQ, I was chatting to one of the girlies from Google about the concept of “land grabbing” occurring in the social networking (socweb) space. Well actually, she brought it up, and it all started by me requesting an invite to Jaiku. “Sure, whats your email address?”, so I handed over my gmail address, which I prefer for socweb type stuff, may as well keep it all Web 2.0 - plus I don’t like having that stuff come through on my hosted exchange email (it gets BACN‘d anyway). She was absolutely gob smacked that my email addy was hamlesh@gmail.com, so essentially my firstname@, keep in mind she works for Google. Which led us onto why I was wanting the Jaiku invite, not to actively use the system, sure I poked around for a little while to see what its all about, my main reason for joining though was simply to secure my name.

David Hinson recently introduced me to friendfeed.com, its a socweb aggregation platform, and its built very cleanly and has support for a large number of what we would call web 2.0 socwebs. I signed up (to actually use it), and created my various associations with different platforms.

The result made me actually laugh out loud!

On every single major platform, my nick is “hamlesh”. Its frigging annoying that Spock decides to add some random characters after you nick/name (stupid thing, I’m god damn unique damn it!).

If you are using freindfeed, please add me, unsuprisingly, yes, my nick is “hamlesh” on there too Friendfeed is an important step to the emergence of a unified socweb platform, much like the work Google are doing with opensocial, the space is looking very exciting at present - damn it, I should live in SV!

So, as these platforms grow do you think we’ll start seeing the emergence of socweb “camper”/”squatter” type operations? Much like with domain names, where the desired (and in a lot of cases random!) socweb nicknames will be grabbed, held on to, and then sold on to whomever wants them… people do all sorts of crazy things for a few bucks.

Hopefully I haven’t just given birth to a pain in the ass idea! I guess the major deterent will be the actually AUP of these platforms, then again, this will cause more work as they’ll have to enforce these things.

Anyway, thats all for now, queue the “you utter barstard” comments from some of my geekier mates

I’ve never really liked Porsche’s, never seen the point, overpriced, no passion, yada yada yada. Sorry, bored thinking of something to say about them…

My views of our Fuhrer; over tax the car, cars are bad although short haul flights are worse for the environment, congestion tax is about reducing congestion and not about revenue generation, yes you should use public transport, although its more expensive than driving, even with my brilliant congestion taxing policy/revenue generation/tax, and I use taxis to get around, use public transport, not for me thanks, Ken Livingston… *breath*

The car park I use on Park Lane is also a transit location where cars that have been evading the congestion tax are clamped, picked up and taken to. Walking from the car park to the office this morning, this made me feel all warm inside.

Begs the question… is the Westminster council on a mission to rid our streets of crappy Porsche “cars”… I feel ill even associating the word “car” with P…

RSPCA murder protected Hindu cow without allowing Hindu’s to perform last rights and prayers!

It is a widely known fact that within the Hindu faith, the cow is a revered and sacred animal.  I say widely known, but apparently the Secretary of State, and the RSPCA are unaware of this.

I have written what follows with great care to maintain the facts, and to put my personal feelings aside.

Bhativedanta Manor, the Hare Krishna temple in Watford is home to many Cows under the ISKCON Cow Protection Programme.  The temple has a number of working cows and bulls, who are well looked after, work the land, and provide milk used in the day to day worship and food preparations.

A year and a half ago, one of the cows was injured when a bull jumped on her back, vets and animal welfare professionals were called, and their professional advise followed.  The prognosis was that the cow would pass away naturally in a few days due to the nature of her injuries.  However she has been making a slow and steady recovery for the last year and a half, well cared for by the temple monks, and visited regularly by a number of vets and animal welfare professionals.

Last week a vet from the State Veterinary Service came to conduct a test (presumably for foot and mouth) on a number of cows at the temple and assed the injured cow’s position.  The vet was informed on the Hindu faiths position on cow care, and the progress in recovery she has made over the last year.  He indicated on his departure that nothing further would probably come of his visit, given the manner in which the temple has continued to care for and nurse the cow back to health.

On the 12th of December the temple was visited by senior members of the RSPCA, escorted by the police, they were served a warrant, stating that the cow would have to be euthanised in due course (not immediately).  During the visit the temple monks were given the impression that they would have the opportunity of taking legal action to stop the murder of the cow, or at the very least have their say.

This morning the RSPCA and police visited the temple barn with a warrant, without due notice the cow was murdered.  The senior RSPCA officers had delayed and distracted the monk caring for the cow, to allow his colleague to murder the cow.

My thoughts

I struggled while writing the “article” above, and it is constructed so that the average member of the public can read it and understand what follows.

I am, what most would understand as a Hare Krishna, a member of the Hindu faith.  Frankly, and simply put, I am angry, very very angry, and as this disseminates throughout the Hindu community, everyone else will be getting angry too.  It is one thing to put down an animal that is infected, and proves a threat to other animals and the human populous at large.  But to sneak around and murder a cow who’s condition and health had been steadily improving, who had been well cared for, regularly visited and assessed by independent (not of the Hindu faith) vets, this, this despicable action will not stand.

Our faith and beliefs have been completely disregarded by the authorities, had they followed the correct legal channels, and given us the chance of representation, this would have been a different matter entirely.  The temple devotees were not even given the right (given by law in this country!) to perform “the last rights”, or any other prayers for the soul of one of Krishna’s sacred cows.

Given my affiliations, I am refraining from voicing much of what I really feel, but this will not stand!

Well its been a while since I posted anything, things have been very hectic, lots going on everyday, meeting to meeting, but its what I love doing
I’ve found a few gems over the last few weeks, here we have Dean Evans on his opening lap of a 2005 Lotus Trophy race at Bathurst. Want to be impressed? Dean climbs from 14th to first before he reaches the last corner. The most amazing thing of all is how he manages to avoid the wall and the 13 other Lotuses at the same time.

Enjoy!

This past weekend has seen a lot of change for me, so nows a good time to take stock. Some small changes in my perceptions and way of thinking were challenged on Mike Southon’s Beermat training course. It was a very interesting and useful weekend, met a lot of like minded people and additionally learnt a lot about the sales cycle (my primary reason for attending). This next week will be hard work implementing these changes, hints and tips.

The real major change of the weekend past is that I have moved back from Reading to St.Albans. This has made me a little sad, although the move itself was stressful (training course during the day, frantic packing and moving at night, very little sleep), the hardest part was moving away from my housemates that I’ve lived with for just under 3 years. You really start to feel like a family after that much time.

Righto, enough nostalgia for now, time to head to the office

An interesting video I came across, “Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook”. It must be taken, as with all these things, with a pinch of salt, check it out and let me know your thoughts