Blog of Hamlesh

Yesterday, the Open Rights Group organised a protest outside the houses of Parliament against the Digital Economy Bill (aka DEBILL). I went along and took a few pictures.

So whats the big deal about the debill, and why are seemingly so many “techies” and “nerds” getting their knickers in a twist about it?

Consumers and companies (including Google, Facebook and ISPs – your broadband provider!) alike are up in arms about the Bill, which proposes that an Internet connection could be cut off if there is suspicion that it is being used for the downloading of copyrighted content.

This is very disturbing:

• Although proof is required before disconnection, the evidence does not have to relate to you: you can be punished for the actions of a friend or even a neighbour who has used your Internet connection.
• Rights holders could have the power to demand that sites they believe to contravene copyright law be blocked by ISPs. Right now, we don’t know what the govrnment will propose, as they have yet to draft their new proposal
• As it is not the perpetrator that is punished, as you might expect, but the owner of the connection, and others using it, cafés and bars may have to stop providing wifi, no more BTOpenZone, FON, etc!

Regardless of what you do or don’t do, you could be punished for the actions of others because of laws put in place by the Digital Economy Bill: if you have unsecured wifi in your home, you could be punished; if you use the Internet at your local coffee shop or library, you could lose access to that connection.

Justice would not be completely out of reach: you could appeal, but you would have to pay for the privilege, and you wouldn’t be eligible for any legal aid.  Reasons for appeal are limited, and unlike in a trial, the onus would not be on rights holders to prove your guilt: you would be responsible for proving your innocence.

This is another example of badly thought-out government policy, pushed through by lobbyists, and constructed by people who just don’t know what they are doing, or what they are talking about.

There are better solutions to the internet download problem, including the record industry evolving its business models to keep up with changes in technology (think Apple iTunes).  Funnily enough, the music industry is thriving with downloads, its the record labels that are suffering – aww the poor “big machine”, its in pain as power shifts to “the little people”.

Those of you that know me, know that I am very much not a tree hugging hippy that believes the government is out to get us; I believe in free markets, I believe in capitalism, and I believe in equality for all.  It is possible for all of those to coexist, anyone that doesn’t think so, is, well, just wrong (and stupid).

If you want to know more about this stuff, I strongly recommend you watch the Panorama documentary recently released, titled “Are the net police coming for you“.

This post is a little on the ranty side, but there is a solution at the bottom

I really really really hate voicemail, I can’t even begin to find the words to describe how much I hate voicemail.  To me, voicemail is one of those technological advancements that should have remained in the last century, let alone the last decade.  Its an old solution to a common problem that still exists today.

This little extract from the Dilbert cartoons should explain part of how the whole “voicemail experience” makes me feel;

(All rights reserved Scott Adams, Dilbert.com)

This really does happen to me, people call me up and either;

1.  Leave long messages – which are better off conveyed in email.

2.  Leave short messages telling me that they’ve sent me an email or to check my email and call them back.

3.  Normal people leave short messages with their details and ask me to call them back.

Ok, so now you’re thinking leaving a short message can’t be a bad thing, and thats surely the point of voicemail… well its not.  Perhaps it used to be, but thats no longer the case.  There are much better ways to convey the information that I have missed your call and need to give you a call back – yep, a text message.  One would also be able to read the sms message and process the information in a much shorter time frame than dialing into voicemail and listening to the message.  Inefficient and stupid, simple as.

So i’ve tried a number of different things over the years;

1.  Turn off voicemail completely – only to get people whine that “oh, I tried to leave you a message but there was no voicemail”… thanks for informing me of what I already knew… yes, I turned my voicemail off, yes it was on purpose, and yes, if it was important enough, you’d have found SOME OTHER WAY to get the message to me.

2.  Explicit asking people to leave a “SHORT MESSAGE” – this worked initially, but people soon reverted back to leaving long messages.

I had pretty much given up trying to find a solution.  Then one day, salvation came, unexpectedly.  I was calling a customer and they were busy, but instead of getting asked to leave a voicemail message (which I don’t tend to do either!) a little recording started to play “this person cannot take your call, please try again later or send a text message”, on repeat.

Finally, there was a solution out there!  The bad news is that its a setting/option provided by their network operator.  A facility which my provider, Orange, does not.

No matter, I found another way.  This works on Orange, it may be different for your service provider.  Using AT&T’s text to speech demo I created this wav file recording “The person you are calling cannot take your call, please try again later or send a text message”.

Then within the Orange voicemail, there is the option for an “extended absence” greeting, now the major difference between this and a normal greeting is that you can opt to not accept voicemail messages while your extended absence greeting is active.  So using a pair of headphones right infront of the mic pickup on my mobile and some careful timing; now whenever someone calls and I am otherwise occupied they hear the synthised voice of Crystal, asking them to try again later or send a text.

Win   Finally!

Download the wav file: here

Or create your own: here

PS: Yes I know Google Voice would be the other solution to this problem, but its not available outside of the US, and I doubt they will bring the service to the UK, not for a while anyway.

I’ve heard from a few of my friends/readers in Canada that they’ve all been finding the UK’s total inability to cope with the recent “snow storms” absolutely hilarious, of course, looking beyond the mockery at our expense, thanks to the UK mainstream media, calling the recent snow a “storm”.

A lot of people have been enjoying the snow, and its the first time in many years that we may actually stand a chance of celebrating a “White Christmas” in the UK… although currently, its looking like the weather in yee old Blighty will return to its normal programming, ie, rain, and we’ll all enjoy a nice gray and slushy Christmas. It remains to be seen.

Personally I’ve not enjoyed the snow, beyond my initial school boy excitement, which lasted a whole 5 minutes, a long time considering. The snow “storm” has caused havoc on the roads, journeys that normally take 15 minutes have taken near on 4 hours recently. Apparently the warnings that the UK MET office had been issuing for weeks never reached the highways agency, and yet again they were “caught unaware”… as my girlfriend keeps asking, upon observing the competition ice rink style road conditions, “so why exactly do we bother paying taxes?”.

Humbug I say!

Ah well, on the bright side the snow did give me something to shoot.

If you are reading this post on a syndicated site, you’ll need to view the slideshow directly on flickr, here.

Well I know its been a long time, and I don’t seem very active – I have been working on a few projects, and hopefully they’ll come to fruition soon and I can talk about them… well at least blog about them.

You can always keep up or engage with me on twitter

On another note, I’ve had a few blog comments complaining about some broken download links, so those have been fixed.

CISCO Lab Software – PacketTracer: now available for download again. Please post a comment, it helps with my page rank (shows activity and relevance), and takes about 2 seconds to do.

Photo Booth (for osx): my solution/fix to the common problem of photo booth not initializing the inbuilt camera is available once more for download.

Enjoys

For a while I’ve been thinking about the importance and relevance of sounds in our daily lives, the sounds we notice, and the bulk of sounds we simply pay no active attention to. Like many geeks and techies out there I can sleep with computers whirring and beeping in the background, amongst my techie friends I am known for my very weird ability of sleeping in a loud datacentre environment. For most people this isn’t normal, they need quiet to have a good restful night sleep – perhaps all of these sounds are affecting me in my sleep somehow, that was the thinking, so I started to research.

I came across this TED lecture by Julian Treasure on the 4 ways sound affects us, its worth a watch as a starting point.

My office (like many others) has lots of servers and computers running in it, and lots of background noise.  According to Julian this kills productivity by 60+%… very worrying!  So I started to look for ambient sounds that can play in the background while I work, this was harder than I thought it would be.  Finding high quality both in terms of bit rate (audiophile that I am) and in terms of content was quite difficult.

This is a very nice MP3 and long enough to have in a constant loop without becoming mechanical and repetitive.

Download Ocean Sound (8.16Mb – 5:56 length).

I also came across this podcast on iTunes (iTunes link), which is a regularly updated podcast of bird songs.  One of the issues I found with podcasts and iTunes, is that although there are many ambient sounds and relaxing sounds podcasts listed in the directory, many are no longer updated, and many have broken links within them.

MakeUseOf.com (a blog I enjoy reading regularly) have also detailed some nice free iPhone/iPod touch soundscape applications.  Although they’ve taken a slightly different slant on it, by looking at applications that can help you fall asleep, but still worth a read, and a good resource for direct links to the apps.  My personal favorite, after having tried all the listed free apps, for its sheer simplicity is Naturespace (iTunes link).

Its been two weeks now, and while working, rather than having the news or music on in the background, I am mainly using the ocean mp3 listed above.  Its working well for me, and as long as it does, I’ll continue to do it

Well, Windows 7 has launched, so no doubt they’ll be a few Windows 7 related posts from me over the next few days.  Firstly, and very surprisingly I haven’t kept up with all the hype, I haven’t tried out the new OS from the boys and girls at MS, and honestly, I’m not all that bothered.

I find that I’ve evolved past a state of caring about the “mac vs pc”, and “windows vs linux” arguements, or paying much attention to what OS I’m running or how its configured.  These days, all I want is for things to work properly, very quickly, without stalling, and with absolutely zero drama.  So yes, I’ve ditched all my PCs (and millions of screens) with XP, linux, and BSD and exclusively work on my Macbook running OSX – why?  It ticks all those boxes for me.  Don’t get me wrong, I have XP on here too, running virtualiased under Parallels – whatever gets the job done

Anyway, here is some fun from the boys and girls on Apple’s “get a mac” campaign – brilliant as always

Enjoys

Following on from “twitter is” earlier;

I particularly like the last one

Made me laugh