Category Archives: communication

internet, outer space, open source and the new open space

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I Read an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, a personal hero of mine, in The Guardian last night.

A fascinating story of how he wants technology to help people, but not in that overbearing, paternalistic sense but in a more fraternal, assistive way. Having done some very interesting things, like spending $20 million on a trip into space, he also started the company that oversees the Ubuntu project, Ubuntu, meaning, “I am what I am because of who we all are”. Ubuntu is about computing for people, about an environment not directed at the technically experienced but for people who want to get things done on their not so expensive anymore bits of plastic and silicon. This, to me. is usability and user-centred design in action.

Ubuntu is a very popular, respected (among the geekorati) operating system that is open-source and free. Basically this means anyone can come along and modify the code used to create it, unlike Microsoft and Apple, who lock the source code away. (To be fair, the essence, the kernel, to use the proper term, of the Apple operating system, OSX, is DarwinBSD, an open source flavour of UNIX.) I see open source as part of the next wave of personal computing, open, free and distributed, that sees the entire business model of software and digital activity in general, change dramatically. Gone will be the Microsoft model, thankfully, which is already suffering from it’s own market ignorance and inability to see where the rest of the world is going. MS is big, but they won’t be for much longer when I can get everything I need from an office application online and for free from one of a dozen diferent service providors, like Google, and others. OpenOffice Org is working on a mac port of OpenOffice (does what MS Office does but for free!) after being available for Windows and Linux users for years. Even Adobe is offering a simple version of photoshop online, for free, with 2GB storage and some very nifty graphics tools. I still haven’t figured out their business model, but I’m not quibbling when it is so easy to use, unlike almost anything I have seen MS provide.

The thing that really got me from the inteview with mark Shuttleworth was the concurrence of his expression and my realisation, just a few days earlier, that we do so much of our stuff online. I am now in a situation where the majority of my computing is in www, there is so little I do that is not at the very least, networked! I now spend a great deal of my computing time in the open space of social networking, online applications, web-based tools like the one I’m writing in now, and being entertained by streamed music to match my current moods, like with LastFM. This is in part seriously scary, but also amazing liberating, as long as I have a network connection! Why the internet is not supplied as easily as a telephone line I do not understand but surely that can’t be too far away? This is an exciting time both for computing AND the internet, when the two converge in ways that we could not foresee a decade ago.

BTW: did you see how I tied my title through the article? How open can you get! ;-)

get me outta here!

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I just booked a romantic holiday for two, on a remote island in Fiji, where there’s no electricity, the food is local and the beach is all ours, literally.  There is only one Bura (we call ‘em huts round here!) and one dining space and  the nearest village is a hike around the island. The sunsets will be for us alone, and the stars will be our evening light.

Before you can say “where do you plug your laptop in?” I just realised that without the internet, my laptop is pretty useless to me. I use the computer to be connected to the world and the other people in it. I barely do anything that isn’t online anymore….. So a resort that doesn’t even have a telephone, never mind the internet is some how even more secluded than the concept of being on the other side of the world where there aren’t even roads.

And no, I’m not telling you where it is just yet, as we want to keep it to ourselves for just a bit longer.

But the webby thing about it was that we found it by watching an online video on a travel site on a completely random search, and discovered something we couldn’t have from one of the usual text-based searches. We found it wilfing!

C’mon sweetheart we’re goin’ skinny dippin’!

…bliss…

Visionary A C Clarke passes into the void

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I am of the age where the Apollo project, and humanity’s expedition to the moon, holds a great and lasting fascination that has not diminished and forms a strong basis for my core being. My view of technology, humanity, the planet and the universe are all strongly influenced by those live TV transmissions in 1969, in the hushed and darkened classroom of my youth. I still read much of what the few remaining astronauts of the Apollo missions have to say of their experiences and it has affected their view of humanity and themselves deeply.

There are many men like me; interested in science at that exploratory boyish age in the 60′s, where fascination became reality and we watched enthralled as men walked on the moon. Everyone was talking about what was out there, in space, and what a quantum leap it was for humanity to walk on another heavenly body.

The previous year, 1968 saw the release of a film which changed our view of the universe, technology and humanity in a massive way as well. I’m speaking of 2001:A Space Odyssey, Directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by both Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke. Long before CGI in films, and in an genre which had wilder and cheaper sets and bug-eyed aliens wrestling with heroes to dramatic music, 2001 showed me what space could really be.

Clarke defined a great deal of what the world is today. From describing what was required from satellites in order to be used for modern and earth-spanning telecommunications to being prescient in what he would be seeing in his lifetime and in our hands (the internet, mobile phones, high-speed data, nuclear-powered spacecraft, PDAs, ubiquitous computing, video-conferencing) at a time when William Shatner was the “real” spaceman and aliens were shorthand for communists.

Clarke wrote some amazing books, visually stunning and incredibly descriptive and above all written within the bounds of known scientific precepts. If he had the temerity to imagine into the future or onto other planets, he at least based it on known facts and provable suppositions. He rarely made something up that did not feel completely real and intelligent and made all of it utterly compelling.

In his 90th birthday recollections Clarke says some compelling and prescient things, about technology and its’ responsibility to improve not exploit the planet, but my favourite is his sign-off, in which he humbly quotes Kipling:

“If I have given you delight with all that I have done, let me lie quiet in that night which shall be yours anon. And for the little, little span the dead are borne in mind, seek not to question other than the books I leave behind.”

Thank you, Arthur; I have been delighted.