Month: May 2006

Most of the time, the half terabyte or so of drives hanging off my Power Mac are solidly reliable. Every so often something slightly screwy will force me to quit lots of applications, unplug the chain, power it down, then reverse the process – but by and large it all ‘just works.’

This afternoon, then, I became rather concerned when ‘Media 0’ failed to mount. On closer inspection, it failed to spin up, instead making a rather alarming clicking noise. I flipped the case open, noting with resignation that the contents – an 80Gb IBM Deskstar – were dated ‘November 2002.’ In the world of hard drives, that’s quite old. Nothing looked amiss, however, so I sealed it all back up again and tried bunging in the power cable once more. Nothing.

So I bashed it. Hard.

Result: the satisfying sound of a hard drive spinning up and calibrating the heads, followed by a cheery orange/yellow icon appearing on the Power Mac’s desktop. Disk Utility tells me there’s nothing amiss in the least, and I should stop worrying.

Hmm. I may have to try the same technique on the even older Lacie 60Gb drive that ‘failed’ on me a few weeks back. Could be that it’s just stuck, and a good slap around the chops will force it to pay attention again.

Lest we all get carried away by the appeal of a tapeless workflow, chuck our Z1s in a skip, and run screaming to the nearest Apple Store to buy a MacBook, Final Cut Studio 5.1, and a Panasonic HVX-200… a cautionary tale about how the P2 system may, in fact, be a total disaster zone. Though it does read to me like the author just didn’t prepare properly. Certainly, assuming everything would work with a version of Final Cut that’s older than the recording format was a… curious move.

Tomorrow, my registration for the domain itlikesyou.com expires. The question is: should I renew it?

Ilya was, had I but known, the first blog I ran. It started in 2001, scant months after the then-unknown Boing Boing, and had Alan, Martin, Damien and myself actually bothered posting much it could, perhaps, have been Boing Boing. Maybe we’d have needed whackier names, like ‘Cory’ or ‘Xeni’ or something. And being American might have helped, rather than, you know, in Leeds. The other difference was that, while Boing Boing is primarily about stuff found online, ItLikesYou was always intended to be primarily offline stuff. It wasn’t, but that was the intention.

However, six months in we’d still not got around to doing anything like a site design, and then finally the Geeklog back-end broke in some non-trivial way. By that time Movable Type was out of beta (!), and I’d started blogging personally at quernstone.com.

So while I do sometimes wonder if Ilya could have been a contender, in some warped and twisted parallel world, it’s also blatantly obvious that it was nothing more than ‘yet another dung-heap website that nobody read.’ Still, it’s at least partially preserved for the historians, in the Wayback machine. I’m intrigued that my writing was pithier and, most likely, better there than here.

Anyway, the question remains: should I retain the domain? Will I think of anything else to do with it? Hmm…

Reading back over the last few weeks’ posts here… my, it’s been a weird time. I’m still not quite convinced this blog is ‘interesting’ per se, but maybe I can see why at least a small handful of you bother with these blatherings. By way of thanks for your continued patronage, here’s a delightful picture I’ve just taken of some charming broad beans I bought this afternoon. Enjoy.

What? You expected it to get less weird?

Unsurprisingly, people can be rather gung-ho about intellectual property and licensing, until it comes to discussing contracts. At which point they usually get terribly worried, and demand everything they think they can get away with. Which in some cases is fair enough – companies in particular have an obligation to their shareholders to avoid being goofy if they can, and accidentally letting competitors use stuff that you could have owned usually counts as ‘goofy.’

But there’s another way of looking at it all, particularly when the product of the project is less tangible than hard cash: that one should assess the IP requirements and objectives of the project. Then, rather than issuing the usual contractual boilerplate, one can write a contract that best meets those goals.

In TV I most often encountered IP absurdities thus:

1. We’re discussing whether to use an idea we’ve seen in a book or on a website in a show. Somebody senior (usually the Executive Producer) asserts that ‘there’s no copyright on ideas’ and that we really shouldn’t worry. Indeed, it is the execution of the idea that’s copyrighted, not the idea itself. But then:
2. Subsequently, said idea appears in another TV show or in a book or on a website. At which point somebody senior (usually said Executive Producer) froths at the mouth about how we should nail them for copying our stuff.

Most recently, I copped some flack because one of the series I made last year, Scrap It!, uses several item ideas from How2 and particularly from The Big Bang. None are direct copies, but it’s certainly recycling, and somebody involved in my earlier shows clearly didn’t like me… er… plagiarising myself. Well, tough. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. Cheerfully.

And right now, my concern for ‘appropriate’ (rather than ‘blanket’) rights is causing problems with another contract. But you see… I’ve already written hundreds of experiments for TV shows, often more than once, and I have to be careful not to look at my own scripts while I’m doing so to avoid infringing copyright from earlier versions of the same experiment. If I’m going to rewrite it all again for a website, I really really want to do it a bit more cleverly this time around. So I don’t have to do it yet again.

Is that so wrong?

I’ve been in London for a couple of days moving stuff on with SciCast – which really is the project title, in that we’ve bought the domain names and everything. It’s been knackering, productive, interesting. A meeting with the website technical partners at the ETB was extremely positive: while part of me would prefer to lash the site together myself in Movable Type, the sane part of me is utterly delighted that somebody else – ie. somebody who actually knows what they’re doing – is going to build it for me. And, crucially, support it.

Best of all, the ETB seem happy to work on a fairly ad-hoc basis. That is, to lash something together and then iterate as appropriate, and as necessity, experience, and time permit. So we spent the rest of the day at NESTA drafting wire-frame mockups of the site, and arguing over functionality. So the first lash-together should reflect our ‘best guess,’ and we can also make considered judgments about which bits are crucial, which ‘would be nice,’ and which are just clutter.

One interesting aspect of the project is that I’m going to rediscover some of the things about TV that I like, but have come to overlook. For example, in TV there’s no real distinction between ‘creatives’ and ‘project managers.’ This often causes utter mayhem, nightmarish schedules, appalling decision-making processes, and a complete lack of budgetary prudence.

But when it works it’s glorious, because there’s nobody in the way. On some of my projects it’s been common practice for the accountant to sit with the production department, which the business types tend to hate. They’re worried the accountant might ‘go native,’ and cede oversight to the producer (who should, of course, never be trusted). But with the right people it works beautifully, in that the accountant can see what’s going on and start shuffling money around before you’ve even made the decision that yes, you really really really want that piece of set, and it’s worth the sacrifice to repaint it blue.

There’s also a prevailing attitude of ‘I don’t care if you can do this, I need to know if you’re going to do it by Friday. Otherwise this discussion is a waste of time.’ Mostly this is plain rude – but again, when it works it’s a gloriously productive approach. Likewise the ‘throw it at the wall and see if it sticks’ technique – lash something together as quickly as possible, bat it around, see if you like the way it’s going. If you do, spend the time you have left making it good. If you don’t, bin it and try something else.

Luckily, Katie (who’s the NESTA end of SciCast) is extremely amenable to just making things happen. She used to be a stand-up and impro comedian, which might have something to do with it, but her approach is mildly unexpected at NESTA. You see, they’re in the business of supporting creativity, but as I’m slowly learning that’s not the same as being a creative environment. Indeed, we slightly freaked people out by being wildly productive, and I was somewhat baffled that we couldn’t do that in an open office.

Television production offices tend to be cluttered, messy, dreadfully-designed, even a bit smelly. They’re usually full of expansive discussions and not very many people having them. I was once on the phone, talking to a contributor, watching a fist-fight at the far end of the office. This is normal, it’s inspiring – it’s part of the fast-turnaround, creative world of TV. NESTA is… an office. With people writing considered reports and filing things. Being enthusiastic and expressive in such a space is distracting, so we ended up sitting in the foyer.

And yes, as the day finished we had an unresolved and fairly fundamental creative disagreement. About the front page of the site, no less. I’m so proud of us.

Theoretically, I’m rewriting last year’s Christmas Lectures today… in practice I’m trying to clear some of the blog posts that have backed up in NetNewsWire. So, in no particular order:

• WorldMapper. This is genius, fascinating, and from Sheffield: an altogether too-rare combination, Medlo excepted.
• Cars – second trailer. So… best guess, folks: is this where Pixar jumps the shark, or will Lasseter manage to pull a charmingly folksy tale out of the bag that has ‘over-familiar cliché and environmentally unsound’ stamped on it?
• Aventis prize for science books winner. This is where I was on Monday night. Er… no, not winning. Good bash, and the children’s books are particularly good: Royal Society’s pages (thanks to a corporate merger and name change, the main Prize site is… er… offline. Oops). It’s True! Squids Suck rocks.
• Lee Siegel rants about Malcolm Gladwell at the New Republic Online. I read Blink while I was traveling to and from India, pretty much hated it, and scrawled a bit of a diatribe in a notebook that I haven’t yet had chance to post here. My criticisms are different to Siegel’s, but I’m still relieved that I’m not going to be the only nay-sayer.

Before anyone picks holes in the previous post – we had huge (huge, I tell you) arguments about what colour the Sun is. Lots of really very very senior astronomers were arguing that it’s ‘obviously’ yellow, which made it rather hard for the likes of me to pursue a line of inquiry centred on the ‘but… it has to be white, by definition’ angle. Black-body radiation curves were calculated, with precise RGB mixing via colour-calibrated monitors. Counter-arguments were raised involving infinite fields of non-specular waveband-agnostic reflector – ie. ‘snow’…

There may even have been punches thrown.

Matt Webb is an interesting chap. Which is to be expected from the author of the charmingly bonkers Mind Hacks. Reading his rambling slides about sci-fi he likes (well worth a look – early on there’s a slide about the aviary at London Zoo, which should probably clue you in that this isn’t a cyberpunk-or-nothing SF talk), I find he did this several years ago. I genuinely can’t believe I’ve not seen it. It’s a script that generates an RSS feed for you, which lets you know when your personal light cone has passed stars within 50 light-years. Hence, My own personal universe is about two months away from Iota Persei.

Back when I first worked at the Royal Institution, one of the things I built for Malcolm Longair‘s Christmas Lectures was a scale model of the 50 nearest stars. They hung from gossamer-fine fishing line in a 3x3x3 metre cube, filling the space in front of the demonstration bench. When I’d finished measuring and cutting and tying and painting, we let the frame hang while we walked around. A visiting astronomer, passing through to wish Longair the best of luck, stuck his nose in the hallowed theatre, saw the model, and became instantly enraptured. He wove his way through the dangling mess, testing his knowledge trying to guess what each star was.

In the centre, an unassuming little yellow-painted polystyrene ball. Home.

Would you, dear reader, kindly do me a favour? Pull up a new browser window, type ‘quernstone’ in the address bar, and hit return. Then leave a comment here to tell me what happens.

For me, in Safari, on both my Macs, I reach this page. Which seems reasonable – browsers usually guess a ‘.com’ ending if none is specified, so here seems like as good a place to end up as any.

Internet Explorer on my Windows XP box, to be different, has a bit of a ponder before returning an MSN search page for ‘quernstone.’ Which is fair enough, I suppose.

Firefox, however, does something altogether weird. Typing ‘quernstone’ sends one to… quernstoneknits.co.uk, a knitwear company on Orkney. Hnnnngh? Firefox does this on both Windows and Mac OS X, for me, using the current release versions.

Can anyone verify this? Better, can anyone explain?