Pete Hindle

Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.

Category: Technology

January 27, 2010

Nuclear Weapons

There’s no need for Trident, the UK’s nuclear weapon delivery system. It’s an expensive waste of time – but not because of the idiotic stupidity of mass destruction.

If North Korea can make nuclear weapons out of sticky-backed plastic, empty washing up bottles, a spare pack of SCUDs, and a giant rabbit, then isn’t it time we started thinking in an efficient manner about our nuclear armament policy? And, as our government is fond of demonstrating, efficiency means paying attention to the bottom line.

Funding for Trident is staggeringly expensive. The figures are available in some forms on the internet – although obviously, not the precise figures owing to national security. Trident also requires a constantly manned submarine presence, being the delivery system for placement of these weapons within effective striking range. So, to recap: that’s one hellishly expensive missile system that requires a hellishly expensive transport system.

It’s also worth noting the size of the UK’s missile system (and it’s requisite submarines). The UK’s submarines are dwarfed by Russian, Chinese and American submarines – we simply don’t have the money or resources to put into building monsters like the Russian Typhoon class, displacing over 10,000 tonnes more than our largest nuclear-capable submarine. I’m not entirely sure what they keep on submarines, but whether it’s petrol, food, or air, I’m pretty sure the Russians have us beat there. Which means they’ll be able to stay under for longer, fire missiles of mass destruction for longer, and win whatever horrific conflagration that these weapon systems are built for.

Speaking of which, the UK’s puny selection of 130 missiles are listed as being a “first strike, counterforce, or second strike weapon”. Please pay attention at this point: if nuclear war does happen, this gives us the opportunity to be the first to kill the entire civilian population of a designated target, or we can do it in revenge for somebody killing ours, or we can do it simultaneously.

Nuclear warfare might not be mentally scarring the kids via shocking documentaries such as Threads, but the reality of the situation hasn’t changed; it’s still going to be a life-taker if put in effect. No government ever uses weapons of mass destruction in a manner that’s lawful; when the a-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese government was already on the verge of surrender. Since then, the only times that this sort of fearsome weapon has been used is most often in one of the less civilised areas of the world, by one of the more insane dictators (such as Saddam Hussein’s use of gas on his own population).

So, it’s worth avoiding if at all possible really. I mean, we can’t trust our governments to use them rationally, we can’t afford to keep the damn things, and we can’t survive if anybody uses them. So we’d be much better off having a distinctly more low-key approach to blowing the shit out of our civilisation. I think we need to follow North Korea’s approach, and build them when we need them.

What I suggest is some sort of home-guard of nuclear power. The minute some nuke-happy nation starts flinging ICBM’s around we’re all doomed anyway, so why not apply the Maker mentality to the end of the world? This isn’t as crazy as it sounds, but it’s still pretty crazy.

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January 23, 2010

Briefly, Links (23/01/10)

Genevieve Valentine is a writer and essayist, working in the SF area. She also has an obsession with Catherine Cookson TV movies, where high levels of snark are to be found – although this mainly seems to come out on her Livejournal blog.

Zed Shaw is an important man in the Ruby on Rails world, but more interestingly he’s a short-tempered essayist on elements of internet culture who has no truck with shibboleths. His blog might occasionally throw up a few nice pieces, but it’s his essays that are really interesting.

Mark Fisher has been linked to by a few people whom I enjoy reading, and I just finished his book. Thankfully, for a heavyweight leftist political tract, it was really short and kept referencing SF.

The Meat License Proposal by John O’Shea – imagine if you had to take the equivalent of a driving test to eat meat? One of the projects that, when I describe it, always has people volunteering to take a meat license test, where they would learn to kill and prepare their chosen meat.

The AV Festival is back again, with various installations and talks across the North-East. Some things are harder to locate than others on the sprawling website, and some feral trade coffee sounds good, but is this an open workshop or is it something else?

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January 21, 2010

Complimentary Verbage

I set myself a few goals regarding blogging after I got back on my feet. One of those was that I wanted to write more, and to write intelligently about topics that I find interesting, such as the uses of technology and science fiction. So far I’ve almost been keeping to a schedule.

What really slows me down, however, are compliments.

Weirdly, if somebody says that they enjoyed something I wrote, then I get a sort of blockage that takes a few days to pass. Actually it’s not a blockage, but more a written version of diarrhea where I try and use all my fanciest words at once. I have some sort of internal editor that runs along the same aesthetics as Henry Rollins, so the combination of trying to write like a man holding a quill whilst thinking like a DC punk causes me some problems.

I regard fancy words (or ‘long words’, as some people refer to them) to be used as a weapon of last resort OR a shortcut across academic terrain. Seeing as I’m in the process of completing a Masters of Research (now on hiatus for obvious reasons), and with my stated aim of talking about technology and scifi, I figure I’m allowed to use a few of the longer words in my vocabulary.

The trick will be in making it not dull…

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January 16, 2010

Bin Badder

Bin Badder is a Mac-only piece of art software that I wrote for the online magazine Unlikely 2.0, sometime in the past half-decade. I found it recently when vanity Googling myself, and decided to update the software a little bit and put a copy of it on my site.

(A brief discourse into vanity Googling – I was trying to solve an issue about Google’s cache of this site, which would involve some knowledge of SEO. I think I’ve got it now, so I can stop turning up webpages like this one, which states “People like Pete Hindle are clueless morons of the first degree”, according to Google. Annoyingly, the Sunday Mail can’t get their head around webpage design – it must be, like, 1993 in their office – so you’ll have to dive into the source code for the webpage to see me being humiliated by the middle classes.)

For the original piece, I wrote:

Bin Badder takes the form of one of those annoying you-must-click-through programs, and is a political statement regarding the resurgence of terrorist activities in the west. I make no excuses for using a stupid scripting language for a minority platform – here, the political message directly mirrors the method of distribution. Because such a outré political message is unlikely to be received without knee-jerk response, and only a minority would ever consider the proposed link seriously. Therefore, limiting the choice of viewing to a minority makes little or no difference, as the piece is essentially didactic. And most people respond badly to being didactic-ed upon.

I think the message slightly loses it’s potency this side of the financial meltdown, as we are more concerned with money issues currently than a nebulous “terrorist” organisation whose effectiveness cannot be proved. I don’t doubt that there are terrorists, but I’m pretty much going to cite Bruce Schneier on the social effects of our current security strategy if you wish to start a debate on the subject.

Thanks to Unlikely Stories for hosting the original of the piece, and please take a poke around their site at some of the interesting things they have.

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January 9, 2010

MMX – The Start of the Post-Digital Decade

2010 and after are going to be about post-digital, by which I mean what comes after we’ve finished staring at our screens. We’re going to see an explosion in the amount of physical objects that would have been impossible without using digital process in the workflow, and objects that won’t work without a connection of some kind to the internet.

Spimes and RFID are only part of what I’m talking about here. Short-run publications, bespoke objects, and even distributed craft networks are also part of this new post-digital boom. There are going to be a lot of interesting tools for artists and designers to explore in the next decade, as we move away from computers being the site of the art (on websites) to being tools that enable interesting things to happen.

With this in mind, I’ve got three predicition for what the post-digital will be about:

  1. It’s about fitting the digital into your workflow
  2. It’s not venerating the things that are on our screens
  3. It’s real-world hard work, and engaging with both hands

With this in mind, I looked back at my last decade and I thought about how my use of computers changed over that time. Do you remember using computers in 2000? I had to wrack my brains a bit, but here’s a personal timeline of digital use:

2000 – Started Foundation course. Used Kai’s Power Tools for the first time, made first video, got first real email address (by which I mean not a hotmail account)

2001 – First year of university. My first computer that was mine- a G3 desktop, zipdisks.

2002 - New computer – G4 eMac with OSX! Lots of browsing at uni, then taking software updates home on disks. Became expert on TWAIN, scanning, photoshop, and waiting for photoshop scanning to finish.

2003 – First external hard drive. Also brought Wacom tablet, midi keyboard (both mostly useless). Made videos, learnt non-linear editing software, wrote dissertation, stared out of the window a lot.

2004 - First broadband connection. Brought Max/MSP, downloaded Processing (alpha!), went on PD course. Still confused by all three ‘easy’ languages. Got Gmail account and my first laptop – a G4 powerbook.

2005 – Overused first broadband connection. Made some digital installations, brought Teleo card, got into electronics, nearly blew Teleo card up. Brought first iPod and Arduino.

2006 - Social networking via Flickr. Went on Arduino course in Barcelona with Massimo and David, gave up on Max/MSP and PD as patcher languages suck time, fun, and light from life.

2007 - Joined Twitter and Facebook. Facebook annoying from start. Finally buy proper domain name and start running my own website. Run the Glowbikes project, using SpokePOV’s as part of an art installation.

2008 – Powerbook dies, replaced with MacBook. Attended geek conferences, wrote and taught two courses for wordpress, made serious effort to learn Processing (which is then forgotten) and brought iPhone.

2009 – Discovered international roaming charges. Erk. eBay’d and sold things on Amazon, wrote thematic blog posts, and interviewed serious hacker-types.

2010 - Now.

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December 17, 2009

Some Old Disks

Uncovered during seasonal tidying, a small cache of 3.5 floppies, still sealed with their “license agreement” stickers.

Why do I blog this?

One of these disks has been left, unopened, for thirteen years. The other came in an eight-inch box, decorated with Alber’s trademark screenprints, that I used as decoration. Now, possibly six years after tossing the disk but keeping the box, it’s impossible for me to get the Albers font off the physical media that it came with. These objects have changed from useful, legally guarded tools to technological detritus.

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May 25, 2009

Basic Tech III – Life, NCL.AC.UK and Everything

I realised today that I could have titled this “Life, the University, and Everything”, which would have worked a lot better. Hey ho.

The grandiose title of this piece could be read as a sign that I’m going to write about things other than relevant to the course. In general, I’m going to steer clear of that sort of approach in this piece of text. I am slightly tempted to do a cross-comparative chart of my mental state versus the deadline of this module, but the time for that sort of navel-gazing isn’t now, and this isn’t really the place. So, what to do with such a grandiose title?

I know: we’ll talk about Lev Manovich.

Manovich is famous for putting together two things. First, his book, the Language of New Media, which was an early foray into series notions about the academic reception of New Media artworks. It’s aligning of the concepts behind computing as being analogous to early cinema was a masterstroke of metaphor, allowing humanities departments the world over to finally get their head around the fact that yes, really, we are going to be using these computer things for artistic purposes and we better get used to it.

The other thing that Manovich is famous for is his de/reconstructed film software “Soft Cinema”, which puts into practice the more theoretical notions that he talks about in his book. This work was, in fact, shown in the Baltic at an early stage in it’s gestation, where I walked in and then promptly walked out again (having a very low tolerance for the sort of abstract narrative found in most art films).

But these are not the features of Manovich’s practice that I’m going to discuss here. In his recent work, Manovich has looked at the way that society is pressurising all information onto a digital plane, and concluded that as more raw data is available in this form, it is the practice of data-mining that will become valuable. This is a conclusion actually being reached independently in several different structures at the same time, by researchers working in different fields.

This polyphyletic idea is ideally suited to Manovich’s position as somebody who can talk about the practice of art and computers in a way that those working in other fields can’t. For instance, whilst both Martin Wattenburg and Ben Fry are creating, promoting, and even working as artists in these fields, they still do not have the necessary academic chutzpah to propel the idea under discussion out of the ballpark. They are, essentially, knocking the idea around between a few like-minded friends.

Franco Moretti is not a like-minded friend, nor is he particularly interested in what we would term “New Media” (from what I can make out, which should be regarded as limited). However, what he is interested in, as a leading left-wing literary critic, is a method of understanding texts. And, as Manovich would point out, these texts are merely data awaiting transmutation into a computerised form. Therefore, coming to the point and the birth of yet another instance of our polyphyletic idea, Moretti suggests the use of quantitative data analysis for literature in his book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”.

I find the fact that infovisualization is being suggested as a research tool in the humanities as particularly interesting, and when I attended a recent afterparty for a Newcastle University conference on Crime Fiction I had a chance to quiz those doing stylistic analysis of texts in other fields. It was regarded as impossible that a visual program could be analysed by a computer (not so, either by using jit.cv or by web services such as Mechanical Turk). But I’m not sure that these people were participating in leading edge research, and besides, I was being plied with mohitios at the time.

The final point of this is, however, that there will be an expanding bubble of interest around these themes of data-mining and the humanities, and that Newcastle University already has some projects and researchers that are interested in this field (by which I am not referring to myself, but rather people working within the English department whom I’ve met very briefly). There needs to be a way of gathering the tools, or creating accessible tools for these researchers, and as soon as possible, so that Moretti’s idea of quantitative tools for qualitative purposes can become a reality.

Having said that, I’m now ready to share my own set of quantitative tools. Be aware that this is a rough and ready – but working – version, and merely produces a small line-graph and a text files that counts specific words. In the next section of this (essay? Series of blog posts?) I’ll discuss the road not taken, by which I mean the false starts and horrific crushing disappointments of working in code.

orange_text_test

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May 25, 2009

Old Video, New Post

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2720282&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

I’m putting this up because my mum told me she liked it. Thanks! It’s a video made with the programming language Processing, inspired by the work of Douglas Coupland.

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May 23, 2009

Basic Tech II – The Poptart at the End of the Universe

I’m eating a lot of pop tarts at the minute. So let’s have a quick diversion into the history of pop tarts.

Pop tarts are a form of sugary pastry sold by Kellogg’s. The achieved a small amount of notoriety in the early 1990’s, in the UK at least, for burning the hands of a kid who’d microwaved his. The site of this child, waving his bandaged hands at the camera, was probably a sigte of great pathos for many people. I never saw it. I did, however, hang out a lot in Stevenage, with people who knew the poor pop-tart scarred kid, and therefore pop tarts are forever linked in my mind to people doing unpitying renditions of the words “I didn’t know it was going to be hot” in the most moronic Stevenage accent possible.

According to wikipedia, the US Forces dropped 2.4 million pop-tarts on Afghanistan in 2001. Currently, you can only buy two out of the total of forty-three flavours of pop tarts in the UK, those being Chocolate and Strawberry. There is no information on wikipedia as to what flavours native Afghan’s received in 2001.

My presentation was done with the entire aim of reproducing my thinking structure. I did consider adding a distracting audio element to it as well, in order to allow people to experience the jarring cuts in concentration I seem to suffer, but I thought that it would be taking it a little far, and anyway, I needed to be talking about my program, rather than anything else. Sadly, as noted in part one, I didn’t have a great deal of success to talk about.

In terms of the presentation and it’s marking, I have to feel some regret that I couldn’t have produced a working version of the program at that point. Nor that I could show a clarity of aesthetic; however, I think my aesthetic sympathies during the course of the taught module have run more towards the conceptual idea as represented by text rather than the visual. What use is the visual in the age of repetitive machine-produce images? And how can the aesthetic idea compete against the barrage of the new?

I think that the best of communication in this period is to resort to clear thinking and simple communication. To that end, showing text to others is the clearest way, so that your thought processes can be evaluated in a simple way at the leisure of others. Whilst I have some issues with essays as a form of academic measurement, I do not have a problem with a longer or shorter form of idea and expression; where original thought can be laid out for the use of others.

It is this projects aim of laying out original thought in a special way that I have been aiming for. My lack of ability to achieve that with programming is not the issue for me, except in terms of earning marks (and without those marks I’ll not pass the course, something which does give me ‘the fear’). What I have achieved is an ability to deal with and understand lumps of text that I have generated. You can read the presentation as I planned it in the attached file, and I’ll discuss the knock-on affects of this text assimilation in part three, the grandiose titled “Life, NCL.AC.UK and Everything”.

PDF Download of Presentation:

basic_tech_pres
ADDENDUM: The reason that this article/blogpost talks about poptarts – as I forgot to mention why I spiralled off into such a diversion – is stress. During times of biological and physiological stress our bodies seek out sugary and fatty foods, which are not necessarily the best thing for us to eat at such times. However, having just moved, I treated myself to a packet of Pop Tarts whilst restocking my kitchen, and found myself hooked on their sugar content. In between starting woefully at code that I was growing to loath, I occupied the vacant space in my belly with glucose and inverted syrup, and felt almost like a true hacker (although the last true hacker I met was just coming off a vegetarian rice-only diet, which is far away from the stereotypical programmers food consumption as depicted in media).

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May 22, 2009

Basic Tech I – (The Hitchhikers Guide to Regex)

The current state of my Basic Techniques project is this:

It doesn’t work.

However, this is a defeatist attitude. Not quite as defeatist as I’ve been considering (it doesn’t work, I’m never going to understand regex, and I’m going to stop bothering with programming being the other considered viewpoint).

On the other hand, sometimes the ways that it doesn’t work make no sense to me. For instance, one piece of code I wrote matched the string being read to a specific string, and incremented a counter once using the ‘++’ function. Except that it didn’t, it decided to increment the counter 559 times, and then it decided that all the words I was looking for were all there, 559 times.

Back to the drawing board from that code then. I really thought that loop was going to work as well; it had all the indications of when and where, as it cycled through the newly created string array that contained the compartmentalised (granulised?) longer string.

Then, when that failed I was back at regex. And I now hate regex deeply and purely, for being such a dense science that needs introduction. A big ‘thanks’ to everybody who pointed me at the same damn impenetrable tutorial. I sort of wish I’d chosen to do a project with Arduino controlled rockets instead, because whilst rocket science might have a reputation for being hard it never involves typing a string of impenetrable characters into a search box and hoping against hope that this would be the last leap. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBwWAu2a5U)

Even the more seasoned programmers threw some askance glances at my code when they saw the way that splitTokens() works – ie, you throw all the tokens you want to use to split up the text together in a big line. For me, this was the lump of code ” ,.?!;: “, which I’d inherited from Daniel Shiffman’s example code in “Learning Processing”. This actually made a lot more sense to me than the output of match().

According to it’s documentation, Match() outputs an array if the sequence searched for matches what is in the inputted string. It outputs a an array “if the sequence did match, an array is returned. If there are groups (specified by sets of parentheses) in the regexp, then the contents of each will be returned in the array. Element [0] of a regexp match returns the entire matching string, and the match groups start at element [1] (the first group is [1], the second [2], and so on).”

Okay: first problem. Putting parentheses in doesn’t make it work with multiple choices. I guess we can swap over to matchAll() for that, but without multiple parentheses and therefore multiple choices, what point is the items returned as an array? It could, surely, be a yes/no answer? In fact, it returns an array which flummoxed me for several days as I realised that no matter what I put into the string as input, it always returned the same value. Two.

Searching for the word ‘will’ in the phrase “Inside will a tag, you will find will will content” will only ever return the value of two. Or rather, the value of ‘yes’ transmuted into ‘two’ by way of the length of an array, which is an entirely erroneous way of doing it. Almost as erroneous as the previous way of counting through the text as a string and looking at each individual part and then counting them (again, erroneously – to the tune of 559). Balls.

In my presentation – which I guess I’ll be covering in Basic Tech II (The Poptart at the End of the Universe) – I was told by Atau that I was only a half step away from solving a few of the problems. Maybe. I can see a functioning end to this problem, just not from here. Should I use the match function and the logic structure that I’ve been working on? There’s no guarantee that the logic structure will even work (559!) Five-five-nine! My least best guess is that my Macbook wants to emigrate to the People’s Republic of China and move to computing division 559.

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