Reflections and Reconsiderations

On my first ever Lufthansa flight, I figured I would write my typical Christmas post, reflecting on the past year and the achievements that have been made by us. Now that i think about it, 2012 has been an eventful year! Unfortunately, I do not really have any one topic to ramble on about, but anyway, it has also been an Intriguing few weeks for me. I have progressed well in my various projects, namely, BaloonSat, where we are due to send a radiation monitoring experiment into the atmosphere; my IP ArdPi buggy (more on that later) and my various controlled assessments and courseworks that I am required to do. However, perhaps most interestingly, I have now become a standing candidate for the Richmond borough for the UK Youth Parliament.

It's quite a funny story actually. The leaflet advertising it came to my tutor group and I took one, figuring that it might be a fun thing to do. Once the first meeting came around and went, I became apprehensive of my willpower to carry this through, due to the work it requires and my own personal workload, especially with A levels coming up over the next two years. Another person from my school decided to drop out that evening for precisely those reasons. I, on the other hand, decided to hedge my bets and hold out making a decision until the next meeting.

So, this Saturday I went to the second meeting, full of apprehension, hoping to make my decision following it. We discussed many things, including how to put together an effective manifesto, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself! I met many new and interesting people of about my age from demographics I had never had the pleasure of interacting with, often with different, yet valid, opinions, for which they were willing to argue with a passion. We discussed and debated many local and national issues, such as transport, energy and the recent education reforms. I even encountered people from a rival school just down the road from us, and despite the many stereotypes my school made of them, we greatly enjoyed ourselves. I managed to greatly embarrass myself, as I always do, by saying that she looked similar to "Sue" from the American TV show, "The Middle". Luckily, she still spoke to me afterwards...! (She kinda did though, just better looking and without the braces!)

Hence, I have decided to continue with the process, and as such I ask you, as I am currently compiling my manifesto, to bring to my attention any issues, both on a local and national level, that you would like me to take a look at and consider putting into my manifesto. It is, after all, you that will be voting! I shall keep you all updated as the process goes on, but for now, the mock GCSE exams are looming, and so, revision is in order [Oh dammit, the Geography! All that Geography!]. 

In terms of the bigger picture, it is a daunting task to concisely and interestingly list all the big events that have occurred this year. I mean, there are highs: the (unconfirmed) discovery of the Higgs Boson, Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the upper-atmosphere and of course the London Olympics, as well as the lows: the death of Neil Armstrong and the recent Newtown, Connecticut shooting, for which I send my genuine thoughts and condolences. Yep, 2012 was an eventful year indeed, and I think that no one does it better justice than Google and their annual Zeitgeist video.

So for now, I wish you all a happy and healthy holiday season, and if I do not get back to you by then and we are all still alive (get the 2012 apocalypse reference?), a happy new year!

Until then, good luck with whatever endeavours you may be undertaking!

Things.

This is an edited version of an article I have written for the Year 11 magazine, ICON, at my school.

If you ever find yourself lost in the far dark corner of my school’s science block, one might stumble across the ‘Control Lab’, where you faintly remember the horrors of your Year 9 System and Control lessons, writing long, mundane and senseless code. A common sight in the control lab is that of panicked Year 11’s, scrambling to complete various aspects of their controlled assessment; the head of department and his highly sarcastic nature, bellowing at incompetent students (including myself); and those bored of everything else, browsing sites like Reddit or 9Gag, going there to escape the wrath of the IT department head in the Computer Gallery; however, occasionally, one can catch a glimpse of someone unsuspecting planning and building a weird and wonderful gadget or gizmo.

This sighting can usually be caught on a Tuesday lunch, where those who make these things gather together in a slightly chaotic manner in a school society called RoboSoc. Returning to the point of this article and its cryptic title, the point of this society, is all about building cool things. One group is building a quadracopter (those 4-propellored helicopters), another, a remote weather station, and myself, an internet-controlled rover; but beneath all of this, there is something much more profound going on, unrelated to technology, and it is causing a revolution of sorts. I just plan to use technology to convey my message, as it is probably the subject I am the most interested in (as shown by my Preview booklet) and contains possibly the easiest way to explain my argument.

Two Months. Damn!

Nope, I am not dead (yet anyway...)! It's approaching almost two whole months since my last post, and I apologise for that. There has been a lot happening in my life recently, some of which I shall go through here, as well as some of the other, more tech-related things, but nothing about the iPad mini or the likes: I trust you have already been bombarded with enough of that from tech blogs or even standard news sites (which, in my opinion, don't do the whole story justice, but anyway...). Let us begin.

Following my wishing of good luck in my last post, we hit the ground running at the start of term! Firstly, the pace of the lessons increased dramatically as we are approaching GCSEs, especially Geography, where my teacher bombarded us with not-so-subtle hints about where we stood in relation to the rest of the year and how it was not good enough in order to achieve that A* at GCSE. He was right, as our end of year exam results were less than adequate (excluding mine, of course!), so now we are all under pressure to preform better. That was one of the more mundane stories.

I volunteered to design and operate the lighting for a small school play called, The Long, The Short and The Tall. I had no idea how to design lighting, so I was running around like a madman taking to the director and the technician for the show, discussing various ideas. Tech rehearsal went smoothly and so did dress, and on that note, opening night came around.

In the audience, I could see several English teachers, of course, as well as my sister, self proclaimed not-nice-person technology teacher and my slightly intimidating chemistry teacher, all of which were sitting within my line of view and had noticed me on the lighting desk. The Chemistry teacher was right next to me, and he told me, in what I interpreted, incorrectly perhaps, to be a good-humored joke, "Don't screw up". Famous last words.

It all went smoothly, up to a point.

The actors were in the middle of a little dance thing. I was hovering over the "go" button, waiting for my cue a few lines later.

Click. BAM! Blackout.

A Semi-Coherent Ramble About Not Very Important Things

It has been a nice few weeks since I posted my last post, involving sun, sea and time for me to remind myself about the impending year of school. This coming year, however, will be more busy than others, not only containing my GCSE exams, but also the many ventures I plan to undertake, some of which I will detail in this post.

To be clear, this post has no real meaning. My notes on posts to write have become meagre and I am having a hard time finding inspiration for a topic sitting in a cramped Ryanair seat.

Yes, Ryanair. I know. I'm so sorry. (post on that later...)

I could write about the recent obliteration of Samsung in the Apple Vs. Samsung trial, the recent book from 37Signals I got through in less than 2 days, or some abstract thoughts about the definition of the verb "To Share" in the new digitally social world. I could, in fact, be bothered to finish the "Hacking the Lego NXT" series, but as I have said, sun, sea and procrastination took over there.

As this post has no aim, as such, I am going to spew a whole bunch of words on the page and see what comes out. Alicia Cuddeford is known for doing this on her blog, and it seems an effective method of writing a half-coherent post which proves to be highly amusing to the reader. I, unfortunately, do not have the gift of the gab, so my attempt at this might fall flat on its face, but screw it.

Hacking the Lego NXT - Part 3

After my slight diversion post of The Old, the New, the Data and a wonderful two weeks with my grandparents, I figured I should update you on my progress with my NXT venture, but before I begin, I would like to point towards a site called MarkPond, a bookmarking service that Alex Forey, a fellow pupil, created within two weeks and hosts the whole thing on two Raspberry Pis. To be honest, I have had one much longer than him, but I was too lazy to do anything with it as of yet. If you have any ideas, please let me know!

Ultrasonic Sensor

The ultrasonic rangefinder

This was an interesting sensor to crack! From my experience working with ultrasonic range finders, I assumed that, as with the SRF05, one sends a pulse to one pin and then waits for the return pulse from another pin, with the delay between telling you how far away the object is. That was until I had a look at the LegoHardware Development Kit, detailing an I2C protocol for the sensor. I had heard of I2C before and knew that it was one of the standard ways one would chain multiple devices on two lines, the clock and data, SCL and SDA respectively.

Because I had no idea how to work with, or indeed wire up, I2C connections, I read up on the I2C protocol, and learned that one had to use pull-up resistors on the SCL and SDA lines. I also looked at the documentation Arduino had on it and found that Arduino's come with SCL and SDA lines, not requiring a digital or analog output, and a really handy library with which to communicate to devices on the lines. There was no need to learn about changing the clock speed or stuff like that.

The Old, the New and the Data

Facebook connections around the globe

I have not ended the Hacking the NXT Series yet, I just thought I would take a break for a second!

Sitting in the tube on the way back from the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, where I did the light design and operation for a show my school put on there, Standing in the Light (more on that in a possible separate post), I was pondering over the idea of data.

Now, you might think that only a nerd would ponder something like that. I mean, data is kind of boring, right? Well, it depends on what you thought what I meant with data. Allow me to elaborate. If you were thinking about an Excel spreadsheet with numbers representing some businesses numbers, yes, that is boring, but if you were thinking of it on the larger scale of things, it becomes much, much more interesting.

Think about it. Have you uploaded a video to YouTube, posted a picture to Facebook or Tweeted a thought? You have created and moved data. Simple. One may also argue that every physical object, be it micro or macro, has data: it's position is 3 dimensional space as we observe it (unless it’s a quantum particle...), its age (time is actually another dimension), mass, weight, dimensions, interactions, temperature, density and anything else you can think of. So, in that sense, data is everywhere. 

The thought then came to me, having recently discussed the astounding YouTube statistic with a few friends, that 72 hour of video is uploaded every minute. This site puts it all in perspective. I then thought of my uncle’s really old Sony Vaio computer, with a 33MB hard drive with less than 50MB RAM. For those without basic hardware knowledge, that's like the Wright Brothers plane compared to a Boeing 737-800. 

Ok, that might be exaggerating a bit, but you get the picture. How a computer with those specs could run a decent operating system astounded me. After all, I am used to a 500GB (that's 512,000MB) solid state drive with 8GB RAM and a 2.23GHz i5 Intel processor. What caused this massive jump? Well, our computers got better. That's it. We figured out how to pack more bits and transistors into the same space, but thats processing power. What still interested me was why we needed larger capacity hard drives and solid state drives. It is at this point where I came up with (although I am not too sure if somebody else has already done so) the term "Data Inflation".

Hacking the Lego NXT - Part 2

This is the second part of a series of posts detailing my adventurous venture into the world of hardware hacking/tweaking, whatever you call it. Part 1 has a full introduction.

The Touch Sensor

The touch sensor

So, following my half-successful attempt at getting the stepper motors to work, I decided to focus on something simpler: the touch sensor. At first I thought that this sensor would be a complex series of variable resistors, giving an analog output in terms of how much pressure was being exerted or how far the pin had been pushed in, so I decided against plugging in stuff and seeing what came out for fear of ruining the component.

The teacher who set me this task of tweaking the sensors told me briefly, that the NXT platform was open source and that the schematics could be found online. Having remembered this useful fact, I scoured the Lego Mindstoms NXT website to find these. Buried deep within the “advanced users” section, I found the Hardware Development Kit, along with a whole bunch of other useful stuff, like the Bluetooth API and software development kits, both of which I would have absolutely no idea what to do with!

Looking through the schematics of the complex processor and other sensors, I felt that the touch sensor could not get any better! Then, after opening the schematics file for the touch sensor, I was greeted with this friendly image, lost in the white of the A3-sized document:

The Lego touch sensor schematic

Hacking the Lego NXT - Part 1

Before we start with this slightly tangential series of posts, let me give a word of advice to those who saw the word “hacking” in the title and immediately thought, “HE IS GOING TO HACK INTO SECRET FILES!”. Firstly, any democracy should not have secret files, but that’s for another post, and secondly, “hacking” is what I define as a skillset: the ability to alter the main function of something, be it hardware or software, to suit what you want to do with it. Henry Dyer (@Direthoughts) did a nice piece of hacking, for example, on those Apple Store iPads. It has been the media convincing people that hacking is bad, when in fact, only a small proportion hack with malicious intent. Taking open-source code and altering it is software hacking; building a buggy out of sheet aluminium and plastic is a form of hardware hacking, and what I am going to describe here is a mere alternate manifestation of that.

I am usually not a very adventurous person: I liked my electronic products simple and stupid, never opening them up to reveal the wonders inside. That was until I changed schools, where I was introduced into an environment of tweaking with things and where I encountered a whole new range of people. I urged myself to get involved, and having screwed up my first year by accidentally doing the exact opposite, sought to catch-up in my next year, the one I just finished. Just adding, I believe I have accomplished that!

My altered RJ12 socket

Aside from that, I also set myself the task of clearing out the dusty abyss beneath my bed, having accumulated 4 years worth of junk down there. I found a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit, the robotics kit Lego introduced a few years ago. It was, unfortunately, missing some main pieces, including the processing unit. A new kit cost £200 and the processor itself £99, so there was no way I was going to be able to use that thing again! I still had one out of the three stepper motors and a few sensors. With no clue what to do with these, I offered them to my technology teacher, who kindly denied, as he had no use for them, but recommended I try and hack them for use with an Arduino or PICAXE as a summer project. Maybe then the school could use them.

BYOD and Home IT

Hello there. It's a wonderful summers day at 30,000 feet and I, as stated by many friends, am now obliged to write an airplane post. Although I might be expected to write this by this stage, I assure you, I am still doing this on a solely voluntary basis, plus, I have nothing better to do! For those of you who were bored out of your minds with the previous series of posts, I apologise, but I felt that it might help the next years doing the competition on their torturous journey, and it was nice to reflect on a year gone by, but this post, I have decided, will not have been thought through very well beforehand and will adopt a very decentralised structure.

I shall be talking about BYOD, “bring your own device”, is the "phenomenon", as many IT departments like to call it, where the users of the network (at school/work/etc.) bring in their own devices from home and use them for work. In addition, I shall also be discussing my experiences with being the IT admin at home, and the annoyances that come with it. I plan to link them in some way I have not thought of yet: maybe a stroke of genius will occur or this whole post could fall flat on its face, that's the fun!

I would like to say that my school has an effective BYOD policy in place, and to be honest, I will. I am lucky enough to go to a school that allows the use of personal devices within school hours and even lessons, if the teacher allows it. I am able to, if I wanted, take notes on my iPad and later upload them to my Mac all within the lesson. It's great! Of course, no one abuses that policy to play games in the lesson, well, not me anyway: maybe the "lower third of the year"*. My sister, on the other hand, goes to a school with a, what I perceive to be, a militant ban on these devices, even during break. Both have their benefits and shortcomings.

A Challenge, a Concorde and a Mystical Magnetic Field - Part 4

That's me on the right with a terrible hairstyle.

It has been a while since the last post, and let me tell you, it has been an eventful while, not least the fact that I had my exams during that period, for which I started revising far too late, but enough with the formalities and lets conclude the epic tale of the Toyota Technology Challenge.

So, after our 8 hour “make it work” session, as described in part 3, we were on the way once again the next morning in our supervising teacher’s cramped mini-cooper to Derbyshire; a 2 hour drive from London. The systems engineer, the chief designer and myself, the team manager, were apprehensive of our chances, but at the same time, thinking through the various situations that could occur at the nationals.

On the way, we stopped at a service station, where my teacher and I devoured a hamburger, to the disgust of my team. Just thought I should include that for some reason.

We arrived and set up shop. Looking around, every other team there seemed to have prepared themselves very well! They had key chains, posters, display boards and even branded gifts for the other teams. Our table had our buggy, a sheet of plastic, repair kits, soldering irons and at least 3 laptops. We dubbed it the engineer’s table, but when I noticed a judge looking at the tables and making thorough notes, I quickly became nervous.

A Challenge, a Concorde and a Mystical Magnetic Field - Part 3

As I said in my previous post of this series, we had miraculously made it through to the National Finals, despite our car being made out of an unsustainable material and not even navigating the course properly at the Regionals! We were truly surprised at the result, but still aware of the challenges that faced us.

On the ride back to the school inside my teacher’s cramped black Mini Cooper, we discussed various things that we would have to do within the 27 days before the Nationals: we would have to rewrite our presentation according to the judges advice, rebuild the entire buggy out of a more sustainable material and design an entirely new algorithm to even stand a chance of winning the Nationals. We were representing the South East of England, and we wanted to at least achieve a respectable ranking!

Following a day of chit-chat, discussing the various things that had to be done, we consulted a few technology teachers as to what material would be best to use and could be assembled into a buggy quickly enough. All signs were pointing towards aluminium, being an infinitely recyclable material, but I was sceptical about the timescale it would take to build this, especially considering that it took us two and a half weeks to assemble a laser-cut case. The aluminium would need to be drilled, cut and sanded to precise specifications and then assembled with nuts and bolts.

A challenge, a Concorde and a Mystical Magnetic Field - Part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote a post chronicling the journey to the regional finals of the Toyota Technology Challenge (TTC). Following a relatively simple German internal exam and a slightly controversial post for Collatyral Damage over the course of this past week, I am now able to continue my telling of this perilous journey through the TTC.

If I am totally honest, the journey was indeed perilous, as I shall explain shortly.

So, we had a functioning buggy and a fairly decent algorithm ready to go. We thought we stood a fairly good chance at winning the regional finals on the Monday following the Friday after school testing session I mentioned earlier. We enjoyed a fairly relaxed weekend and on Monday, gathered all our stuff, including some potent superglue, a tool kit, a wire spool, two laptops, two types of tape, a spare microcontroller and everything else we thought we would need if the worse came to worse.

At 10:35am we were off on the way to the Duxford Imperial War Museum, squashed within my teacher’s Mini Cooper on a (perilous) 2 hour drive out of London. See the peril in that?

Anyway, we arrived and clambered out of the compact car, in uniform and the rest, marching into the museum with our modest red project tray, greeted by the museum manager and a representative from Toyota. We were shown our respective table, underneath the wing of the BA Concord, and instructed to set up. Perplexed by this instruction, we observed other teams walking in with an arsenal of posters, demonstration vehicles and pin-up boards, and asked ourselves whether we should have done the same. After some discussion, we concluded that I was a much better idea to get the buggy working first than waste time on articles the judges did not even look at.

A Challenge, a Concorde and a Mystical Magnetic Field - Part 1

How do these three seemingly unrelated items morph together to form a coherent story, I ask you? It seems almost impossible to think that some sort of challenge or competition can be related to a Concorde or to a mystical magnetic field, am I correct? Well, I ask you to continue reading to find out the tale of the links between these on a project that has been on-going since January and has taken up most of my life.

Ok, maybe it’s not that dramatic, but the essence of it is true. As mentioned in my last post, I had entered a competition called the Toyota Technology Challenge, in which my small team of three had to plan, prototype and manufacture a buggy capable of navigating an obstacle course, while maintaining a high level of efficiency and environmentally friendliness.

There we have it. A challenge. For an inexperienced bunch like us, it was an interesting proposition and one we gladly took up without second thought. The first out of many hurdles arrived as such: The challenge website initially suggested that teams start in early September researching and developing ideas. Then, over the following months, assemble a buggy, document everything in a coherent piece of paperwork and submit it to see if you gained a place in the regional finals. The deadline for this is the end of February. The fun part came when the organising teacher only told us about the challenge and the deadline mid-January. We in effect had six weeks to research, build, test and document the entire process within a 20,000 word, 30-page document.

Education and the Examination Swindle - Part 3

Editors note: Alicia Cuddeford is the author of 'Hello the Internet!' at http://ohlookaliciasblog.wordpress.com/. I am glad to have her here to provide a bit of diversity to the arguments, laid out in my recent posts on Education, parts 1 and 2.

Hello fellow CompBlog readers! I was recently asked by Nicolas to write a guest post for his wonderful site, an offer which I could not refuse. It would be nice to write for people other than friends who have taken pity on me for attempting to become a successful blogger. This is also a brilliant forum for writing something worthwhile and showing it to a different audience.

For those unaware of how I write, my blogging style is basically “Think of a subject and then tap hands on keyboard making words that sort of associate with the topic and end up with an incredibly strange piece of text”. However, I have structured and planned this blog, so hopefully it will be coherent.

I think that’s all you need to know — on with the task in hand.

I would like to consider myself a teenager, and like most teenagers, I am in full time education, and probably will be until I leave university at the age of 21.

And like most teenagers, I’m not a fan of our education system. I think it has failed certain groups and individuals.

With permission, I am taking the example of somebody of I know. He just about scraped through his GCSEs, achieving Cs (and the occasional A, to his credit). His expected grades were As/A*s, but his work ethic was non-existent — so what did the teachers do? Well, he was capable of getting a C without doing any revision or extra work, so they left him to his own devices. I would guess that this is because when you go to any secondary school, they show their GCSE results as “87% of our pupils achieved A*-C grade in more than five subjects," for example. Schools (generally — in my experience) don’t care as long as you “pass” — achieve a C, so they can climb higher in the league table of A*-C grades and give the impression of a good reputation.

Path Finding

If any of you follow the tech industry, as I have repeatedly suggested you do, you will have picked up on the Path fiasco. Just a bit of contextual information here: Path is an iOS (iPhone, iPod, etc.) app that is based on a social experience, like Instagram and the basics of Twitter combined. I have no idea why this app is so popular, but it seems to be so largely in the US amongst the tech pundits I read. Anyway, through a small mistake, it turned out that accidentally Path uploaded the entirety of the user's address book info to their servers. A few hours later, they responded by issuing an apology and a confirmation that the data has been wiped off their servers.

I commend the Path team for their quick and responsive action (unlike Sony at the downfall of the PSN), but aside from that, this story revealed gaping holes mobile platforms' protocol, just like the location data fiasco early last year, where Apple and others were highly criticised for storing an unencrypted file containing location data from the past 6 months. In this case, we are seeing that multiple apps are uploading entire address books to their servers without explicit user permission, like Twitter uploading and storing that data on their servers for 18 months, contrary to what happens currently with location data, where the mobile OS (be it iOS, Windows Phone or Android) will request permission on behalf of the app to use your location.

This is being dubbed "Address book-gate"

Apple has recently issued a statement to AllThingsD detailing their plans to implement a dialog box to appear when an app wants to use address book data, like now with location.

This is good. We are seeing an effort by these companies to protect our data. I actually prefer Google's approach with Android: they basically ask you if an app can use all your data (being more specific of course)! Google's method here is making the user in charge of his/her data, making us the creators and curators, and not just mass creators, churning out vast amounts of extremely valuable data (well, to advertising agencies anyway).

It is here where I would like to show you a video of Steve Jobs talking on Privacy.

 

"I believe People are smart."

And the Fun Continues...

It has been a while, but the amusing comedy show that I like to call patent disputes has finally decided to grace our newsfeeds once more. Guess who is involved in this episode?

Motorola and Apple of course.

What has been unveiling in Germany over the past few weeks had been nothing short of astounding. Oh, wait, sorry. I meant the complete opposite. It's the same boring spiel we have seen time and time and time and time again.

Motorola sued Apple. That is the gist of it, but they are disputing over a patent that is intrinsic to the standard operation of all 3G enabled phones and devices. It's an industry standard patent, even proclaimed as such by Motorola themselves, meaning that companies have to licence it with Motorola giving them fair terms.

What's happening now is that Apple do not believe Motorola are offering them fair terms, as they most likely differ from what Motorola offer other competitors, so Apple removed the iPhone 3Gs, 4 and the iPad 3G models.

Seems ok so far, right? Well, yeh, if you are arguing that the current patent system works.

What we are seeing here is an exemplar case of the patent dispute system gone horribly wrong. After Motorola and Apple sort out this little tantrum, Motorola gets an insignificantly small amount of money from Apple and Apple continues selling their stuff; however, who is affected most in the short and long term by this? The consumer.

In Germany, because Morotola and Apple cannot agree over a simple little thing, German potential buyers are unable to purchase what they want. For Apple, this makes little difference as they are swimming in pools of platinum coins, but its the consumer who has to wait for no reason other than a little tantrum. There is also the case of Apple's push email service being stopped by these patent disputes.

Even though these are minor inconveniences, they do not bode well to an emerging tech industry, where legitimate startups are placed in the firing line of these big tech conglomerates, with no resources at hand to defend themselves with. Do we really want to forge such an image of a vibrant and revolutionary industry?

All these disputes just eat away resources, and for what? So that Motorola can get an extra 0.1p on every 10th iPhone sold, or so that Apple can squash the most popular mobile platform that they claim stole their "look and feel"? How does one even patent a "look and feel"?

Instead of investing these futile paroxysms, why not invest in building the next great thing, you know, the thing that will cause a seismic shift in computing? Alternatively, we could all just beat each other up about nothing that important just as a matter of principal. 


Get over it! No matter how much you try, things will never be the same again, apart from in an alternate universe [cue @TheAftermatter].

A Game and Reality

This is an old { < }CompBlog post


The head of (the teaching of) ICT gave a very good talk a few days ago. It had no real direction to it, nor a real meaning [well, thats what I think], but what I believe he was doing was educating the ignorant about the extraordinary rate of change in the world: how “the powerful are powerless, and the powerless, powerful”. Just a bunch of various examples spliced together to create a beautifully succinct presentation with many interesting facts and images, capturing the attention of at least half the year which, for our standards, is pretty darn good! I will not go into all the details now; just touch upon one.

Then he showed us an image. This image was depicting a war scene, with bullets and explosions and soldiers and turrets and the like, but there was one fact of this image that struck me. This image looked like a beautifully renditioned game screenshot. I do not know why, but everything about that image just looked computer generated! The way in which the explosions were rendered, the people presented and the guns facing, the whole thing looked surreal and fake. But when he told us that it was actually a real image, taken by a real person in a real war zone, it took me by shock.

Yes, it was terrible that people have to deal with and live in such unimaginable circumstances and I do not wish to comment on or discredit their efforts at all, but simply make a tangental observation not related to this topic.

The fact that the whole year associated the picture with a rendered video game rather than reality was surprising to me. Many have proposed and debated the fact that “computer games are becoming more and more like reality"; however,  I believe the question we should be asking ourselves is much, much different and, when answered, will have an irreversible impact on the global community. “When does reality become more like a game?”.

And with that, I leave you.

The Greatest Challenge Yet

After a moderately long pause from blogging, I am happy to report that I am sitting on a Boeing 737-800 on the way to Vienna, therefore, this can only mean one thing, and one thing only: a beloved airplane post! This time, however, I shall not be looking my lazy, grotesque self, as there is a moderately good looking girl sitting across the isle from me who I might talk to if I can musk up the courage to, but then again, it does indeed look impressive when you are writing a short essay on an iPad, although it may also look like I am a complete twat. Anyway, we shall see...

Moving on to the ambiguous title, as one always does. This post does indeed look like it has some deep meaning, and maybe some English teacher will deduce from writing style, similes, metaphors and tone that there is indeed one; however, I can inform you that there is no intended deep philosophical meaning, only a slightly mundane and irrelevant message, or so my mum would say!

At my school, we are lucky to have many high-profile speakers, like Gordon Ramsey or the chief environmental editor of the Guardian (notice the nice example of a contrast, English teachers!). Many of these speakers, apart from Gordon Ramsey, talk about something relating to their subject and then progress onto telling us how this, that and the other will be the greatest challenge to our generation. I believe the challenge count stands at about 10 now: world poverty, an economic crisis, water shortage, social unrest, the potential threat of war, energy shortage, global pollution, severe weather, the destruction of humanity and another damn Gordon Ramsey reality cooking show. Problem, no?

The Privatisation of Education

What has hit me recently following the recent Apple announcement was the fact that everyone (well, almost) is proclaiming that the new iBooks textbook program will revolutionise education, considering the price of college textbooks to be around $200, and once establishments work a way around the $500 price tag of the iPad.

I can now say that it almost defiantly will, but there is a catch, a subtle, but one that no one has yet considered.

If the state system is not careful, education will become privatised. Who wants a nation-wide education system at the whims of a massive conglomerate or organisation? Should every student receive an iPad, Apple would control the distribution and presentation models without any input or limitations by the government.

Now, one might say this is a good idea. A lacking state education system being helped by Apple must be a good thing. It’s not though! While this program might increase test scores and class intake, Apple could easily mess everything up. Then what do you do? By new physical copies without your notes and spend multiple hundreds of dollars/pounds doing so? Well, you will have no other option, and in all likelihood, the same iPad version will not exsist physically, as the iBooks author EULA states that you may not sell your book for money outside iBooks.

So you are completely screwed, in the worse case scenario!

The relevant governmental authorities should have made an integrated system of their own that they could manage across the school districts. They missed their oportunity with physical textbooks, now already privatised, and they have just missed this opportunity.

I have no doubt that the iBooks program will be a success, being an Apple user myself, but how far are we willing to let a cooperation take complete control?

Update: I know that there were plenty of spelling mistakes initially! Hopefully they are all corrected. Just to add, this piece was written in a frenzy, should one wish to call it so, and is not my best work!

A Merge, a Focus and a Conundrum

It has been a while since I have made a blog-update, but today I have some very exciting news to announce. Well, maybe not so exciting to you, but it is to me!

A few readers may know that I am running a recently set up blog on Tumblr called The{<}CompBlog (TheMiniCompBlog), where I post my mini-rants that are too big for Twitter. I have noticed during the 2 week operating span, the readers were coming from 2 completely different groups. I wanted to unify the reading experience, so, as a result, I am going to merge that blog with the regular TheCompBlog. Expect 2 new old posts from the {<} blog to be on here soon and expect more shorter articles more regularly.

Next on the agenda, is focus. What I have realised is that every successful tech blogger has some sort of topic he or she focuses on. MG Siegler from TechCrunch focuses on Apple, for instance. I feel that focusing on a company is too narrow minded and not a wide enough topic, so I am going to focus my blog posts on future and emerging technologies, which will allow me to retain the rant-style post while being of a slightly more uniform topic.

Don't worry! Not every post will focus on this! I still have a few radical views I want to complain about!

Finally, the conundrum. Most of my techie friends at school will know what I am talking about, and if you are not someone who is interested in blogging methods, I suggest you save some time by not reading this part.

I am facing a mental war between Tumblr and Wordpress, the 2 candidates for my blog. I am still not quite sure what my blog is about or what it stands for, making the decision a whole lot harder. Tumblr offers a wide variety of posting options, from a picture to a quote, while encouraging activity. Wordpress, however, is open source (so less likely to be bought) and is used by professionals everywhere as a data-management system for their sites.

The fight rages on with WordPress leading on the score chart. (yes, I have weird metaphors) But Tumblr is still standing with its multi-content posting. Who will take home TheCompBlog?

[Cue onslaught of block capital tweets from @direthoughts and @alex_forey…]

On The Air - Part 2

I ended the last post on a convenient cliff-hanger, right before the excitement of the Northumberland Folk show began. Nice touch, no?

So, the call came, “Transition and play ringding in 3, 2, 1, PLAY!”, and something went wrong, every single damn time (I exaggerate)! Once the ringding was done playing, the second call came, “Transition to blue microphone in 3, 2, 1) and the fun began.

At this time post-cake, the sugar was just setting in, so things went according to my well arranged (as always) plan, but after a few short minutes, small, little details started deviating, gradually leading to someone, usually me, saying something stupid that would throw the whole plot off course in a desperate attempt to steer the show back to the main story line. Examples include times when one character asked the character I was playing, “What are you doing here?” and I answered, “I don’t know”. Those three words changed the plot entirely to involving a bar, three new characters, the death of one older character and the inclusion of a clinic scene. Yes, I know, we are amazing. On the often occurring occasion, whenever one of my two colleagues wanted to spice up the story or were just plain bored, they would shout down the microphone, “Ooo, look! Another unknown character!” and throw the microphone across the room in the hope that someone would continue the story. This practice lead to several new characters; too many for three people to voice. As a result, we called in backup: an extra man. Unfortunately, this lead to even more petty arguments and even more complicated story lines. It ended up being the case that the loyal butler was some kind of thief or alcoholic, and the village idiot was some sort of intelligence agent, or something along the lines of that; I forget.

On The Air - Part 1

Two weeks late, I wish all of my readers a happy new year! At this stage, most bloggers will be stating what they want to see, do, experience, write or some other mostly irrelevant thing that no one really wants to read, but if you must know, I think this is the year information becomes standardized and universal APIs developed that allow inter-web/app communication, but that is for another time and post. There are very good reasons why I have not blogged lately, mainly due to slightly unsuspecting things, like my running around like a headless chicken all weekend trying to find volunteering work for my Duke of Edinburgh award, or sorting out my printed circuit board design for a school project that turned out to have a fundamental problem from the start, or just sorting out preparations for the smooth transition to Wordpress, which will happen once I manage to secure the £30 per year hosting cost [that is a larger problem than you might think!].

For now, however, lets move on to the bulk of todays post: the days when I was on the air. Now, this may seem a bit ambiguous to you; what the hell am I on about? Was I on TV? Radio? A big-name live podcast? To all those, I say no. I did something much more exciting than that, arguably.

What? Name one thing that can be more exciting than being on live TV, as I am sure many of you are thinking. To be honest, very few things are, but what I learned from my “on the air” experience is far more important to me than what live TV taught me (or could have taught me, If you want to be pedantic about it!).