Tim Hardy

It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

Das Kapital, Karl Marx

A DVD player I bought from amazon developed a fault.

I called them on Monday at lunchtime to report the problem.

Tuesday morning, they delivered a replacement before 8am. Tuesday evening a second courier came round to collect the faulty one and return it to amazon.

I’ve long been impressed by amazon but this time they have surpassed themselves.

“Je peux dire que la lecture, en 1953, de “Jules et Jim”, premier roman d’un vieillard de 74 ans, a déterminé ma vocation de cinéaste. J’avais 21 ans et j’étais critique de cinéma. J’ai eu le coup de foudre pour ce livre et j’ai pensé: si un jour je réussis à faire des films, je tournerai “Jules et Jim”. J’ai peu après rencontré l’auteur du livre, que l’idée d’un contact avec le cinéma enchantait. Au début 61, j’ai pensé que le moment était venu de concrétiser ce vieux rêve. J’ai essayé de transposer fidèlement ce beau livre que l’éditeur Gallimard présentait ainsi : “Un pur amour à trois”. Jean Gruault et moi avons adapté ce livre méconnu avec le même amour et le même respect que s’il se fût agi de “Le Rouge et le Noir” de Stendhal, car pour nous le roman d’Henri-Pierre Roché est un chef-d’oeuvre digne des plus belles oeuvres classiques. Si ce film est réussi, il doit ressembler au livre dont il s’inspire et constituer ainsi un hymne à l’amour, peut-être même un hymne à la vie.”

François Truffaut

Main Entry: prof·i·teer
Pronunciation: “prä-f&-’tir
Function: noun
: one who makes what is considered an unreasonable profit especially on the sale of essential goods during times of emergency
- profiteer intransitive verb

Properteer
Main Entry: prop·er·teer
Pronunciation: “prä-p&-’tir
Function: noun
: one who drives up the prices of a limited, essential resource by treating homes as an investment
- properteer intransitive verb

The google personalised homepage is back up with a new feature. The search giant has added themes to the pages, a charming series of bright, cartoonish skins that change depending on the time or weather.

To enable themes, you need to have modified your page already otherwise the option is not triggered. The impatient might consider adding random widgets until the option “Select Theme” appears to the left of “Add Stuff” at the top right of the page.

Mac users may have difficulty viewing themes (and/or the option to view themes) on their default home page, http://www.google.com/ig.

If you are using a Mac - Safari or Firefox - and themes are not showing on the google personalised home page - you should instead try the following url: http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en.

Again, if the option is not there yet, try adding some widgets and adjusting their settings (you can always delete them later).

Starting with Bjarne Stroustrup’s observation “our civilization runs on software”, Grady Booch offered a thought provoking overview of the history and promise of software at this year’s BCS Turing lecture, taking listeners from the austere beauty of Alan Turing’s 1930s thought experiments through to “the rise of the machines” in 2030.

Booch is an interesting, relaxed and witty speaker, whose asides on the superiority of OS X to Windows, George Bush and Google (”Am I the only one who thinks there’s a company in desperate need of some adult supervision?”) provided comic relief in an at times informationally dense speech.

One point that intrigued me was his observation that much of the history of computing is unrecorded, existing only in the “tribal memory” of the greybeards. He foresees the emergence of both software artists and historians who might translate and record some of the strange beauty of code for non-programmers as well as formally archiving a form of communication in danger of vanishing with the death of its authors.

The full lecture is available as a recording from the link below and is well worth watching.

Now anyone with $2400 (£1200) can build a machine at home capable of generating 3D objects from plastics.

Hod Lipson from Carnegie Mellon and PhD student Evan Malone have developed a desktop fabricator as detailed in this week’s New Scientist: Desktop fabricator may kick-start home revolution.

The developers define fabbing on the project’s main page:

Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefully depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer. Slowly but surely, with the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques.

The design is open source enabling anyone to download the blueprints and build their own.

I’ve been fascinated by the potential of home fabrication ever since I read Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop - From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication a couple of years ago. It’s coming out in paperback in the UK early February and offers an inspiring if slightly breathless tour of the potential of giving the power of manufacturing to people. If you enjoyed Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat you may well like this too.

Over 90% of email is now junk mail according to a recent BCS article.

Not only are spam volumes increasing, but junk messages are proving harder to filter. Some spam buries its message in images to prevent filtering on content. To reduce the number of these in your inbox, quarantine messages with headers containing “Content-Type: multipart/related” but check your quarantine folder regularly for false positives.

Others send spam for you to a third party and forge the sender’s address so that it appears to have come from you. This technique is known as backscatter. If you keep receiving messages with the header “Undelivered Mail return to sender” about emails you never sent then you may be the victim of this technique. Quaranting messages containing “Action: failed”, “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” and/or with the subject containing “Undeliverable” will help reduce the volume of these although again this risks filtering off genuine messages alerting you to a failed delivery.

I’ve just started testing greylisting on my email. Email from unknown senders is temporarily bounced back: legitimate mail clients will try again later; spammers either will not try again or hopefully will have been added to a blacklist by the time they do so. Known senders are added to a whitelist and automatically bypass the greylist filter.

Mailsnare offer server-side greylisting. However, I have been disappointed with their service levels recently and am not sure how strongly I would recommend them.

I’ve noticed a plague of “Undelivered Mail return to sender” messages recently in my inbox - all of them spam. Friends with their own domain names have reported the same.

Clearly conventional spam filters are working too well and the vermin who make a living out of unsolicited junk mail are changing their tactics.

Now instead of spamming the victim direct, they forge the headers of their messages so that it appears to come from the person they wish to spam, send it to a non-existent account elsewhere and let the second account bounce it back to their real target.

This level of indirection helps it get through the victim’s spam filters.

If you have received email pitches about dubious stocks that are “about to take off” from this domain please rest assured that they do not originate with me.

Edit: For advice on tackling this problem, please read the following post on using greylisting.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology figured they could learn more from neuron clumps that acted more like real brains, so they’ve developed “neurally controlled animats” — a few thousand rat neurons grown atop a grid of electrodes and connected to a robot body or computer-simulated virtual environment.

It’s Alive (ish) | Wired

A fascinating - but frustratingly brief - look at a something that blurs the boundary between animate life and machines. I, for one, welcome our animat overlords.