iamsteve.in

Category: Me

  • Legal Threat from Martin Keatings

    A few years ago I wrote an article about how the Scottish Independence Party were/are dangerous idiots.

    At the time, the group appeared to clearly be linked to two individuals: Martin Keane and Deane Syme, and this was reflected in the article.

    Today, I received a legal threat over that article from Martin Keane, claiming that he and Deane Syme had nothing to do with what the SIP became, and that I must immediately remove the article or face legal action in the Sheriff Court. Here is the full text of his e-mail:

    Dear Stephen Blythe

    It has been brought to my attention that you have an article on your site at the following address (https://iamsteve.in/tag/martin-keatings/)

    The article itself deals with details of the Scottish Independence Party or SIP. I am writing to inform you that your article is factually incorrect and indeed rises to the level of libel. 

    I will go through each part of the article and specify to you the factual inaccuracies in the hope that you will remove the article immediately. If you do not, then I will be required to take the matter further which may include you being summonsed to appear in the Sheriff Court.

    You open the article “Tonight I became aware of the existence of the so-called ‘Scottish Independence Party’. No, not the Scottish National Party, but the Scottish Independence Party – aka Martin Keatings and Deane Syme.” – Considering the fact that your article was launched on 27/10/2014, this statement, straight off the bat is factually incorrect. Both Dean & I did consider setting up the SIP, however, based on the preponderance of evidence of the current political climate at that time in Scotland & also the fact that I did not have the time to continue forward, Dean and I both decided, 2 weeks prior to that date, that we were in fact not going ahead with it.

    The group on facebook was left open to the public and the existing members of that group, to do with it as they pleased. But Dean & I’s involvement went no further than thinking about it, trying to find out if there would be enough support & indeed then deciding not to go ahead. This all happened within the 2 weeks AFTER the referendum.

    Any posts after that time were down to third parties and not Dean or I. That makes the rest of your article totally false because any post, any statement, any action, any idea thereafter was nothing to do with Dean or I. The real kicker, of course, is that the situation is further confused by the fact a unionist tried to establish a party in the same name later on. You article, factually incorrect and indeed incorrectly naming us resulted in both of us receiving full blown abuse from the Yes community. Something I was unaware of until I got back from visiting my then-fiancee in Moscow.

    Now it seems your factually incorrect article is dragging us into another dispute. This has now reached the point where it needs to stop. I am asking you to kindly remove the article – or, you may if you wish, remove mine and deans name from said article and put a line at the bottom that says. MARTIN KEATINGS AND DEAN SYME ARE IN NO WAY INVOLVED WITH SIP.

    Its a simple case of, we had an idea, it didn’t go anywhere, someone else (the loons) decided to pick it up, you reported on it and linked us to it (which is incorrect) and then that idea didn’t work. Another loon picked it up again and the web community googled and guess what came up.

    Please remove the article, or our names (with an addendum)or i’m going to have no other choice but to make this legal stephen, and to be honest I don’t really want to do that to you bud.

    Martin

    I’m not really sure what this is meant to mean. Martin states that himself and Deane considered setting up a party under this name, created the Facebook page and associated discussions, but then decided not to go ahead with it… which means that referencing them in the article was perfectly legitimate.

    Given that the standard for defamation requires that a statement must be untrue and lower the defamed in the estimation of right thinking members of society, and that saying somebody is a member of a political party when they are not does not qualify, I would suggest that bringing an action for libel would not be the best use of time or effort.

    I have clarified the original article to highlight Martin’s concerns, and that should put an end to the matter.

  • Dry January Ends. Wet February Begins.

    Dry January Ends. Wet February Begins.

    For the past four weeks I’ve been staying off the booze as part of Dry January, and I’m calling it a day tomorrow after 29 days. This isn’t a spur of the moment decision, but what I had planned on doing from the start. Our friends have just had a baby and are moving to France, so we’re heading out to give them a send off. As I mentioned in my previous post, as far as I can remember, the longest I’d gone before this (since I started drinking properly) was 9 days; so definitely a good run.

      
    The experiment has been an interesting one, and I’m glad that I did it. Personally I think it’s always rewarding to push the boundaries of what you come to accept as norms regularly. Below, I’ll explore some of the things I noticed and felt over the past 4 weeks. Obviously not everything will necessarily just be down to not drinking (correlation doesn’t equal correlation after all), but are still worth talking a bit about.

    L1007095

    1. I still love booze.

    This is important to get out of the way early. Staying dry for January has helped me take a step back and think about the relationship we (and I) have with alcohol, but I have definitely not had any sort of revelation that has led me to commit to further sobriety. Without alcohol, life loses a bit of its colour and vibrancy.

    2. Not as hard as I expected.

    Given my love of alcohol, I expected to be constantly ganting for a drink. However, as it turns out, I wasn’t… at least for the bulk of the time. This is probably largely down to the fact that over the past year I’ve consciously dialled down the amount of alcohol I drink ‘casually’ on an everyday basis. In other words, instead of having wine with dinner, or whisky on a regular weekday, I now tend not to drink anything when we’re just kicking about the house. Coupled with the fact that we weren’t travelling away from Glasgow this month, I think that this made the process a lot easier, and it’s reassuring to know that booze isn’t really as big a part of my day-to-day life as it was at one point. 

    That said, there were definitely times where I could have murdered a drink. We had our anniversary in January, and a few other occasions where a celebratory libation was warranted, but I passed. Interestingly enough, it was pretty satisfying – and almost addictive – to have something to hold the line on in that way; a test of willpower. It’s easy to see how some people would actively choose to not drink more regularly.

    3. Caffeine, sleeping habits, and dreaming.

    I used to have lots of trouble with insomnia, and would drink sizable volumes of caffeine to combat the resulting daytime tiredness, but since switching to a more flexible work schedule, this is something that has largely abated. I’ve generally been going to bed earlier, and not drinking any red bull as a result.

    However, all that went out of the window. Not too far into Dry January, I started feeling wide awake later and later like I used to – staying up, and then craving caffeine the next day. In addition, when I did drink coffee or whatever, it affected me way more than it usually would; a couple of times I felt like I was on speed – rattling about. I felt incredibly productive, and started up a whole pile of projects that I had left stagnating for years, like making music under the moniker ‘unexpected bowtie’. I’m curious to see how that motivation and inspiration pans out when I start drinking again. Hopefully it won’t all go out of the window.

    When I did get to sleep, I found myself having some of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. I dismissed this at first, but apparently this is one of the commonly reported side effects of cutting down on alcohol consumption. Pretty strange, though as the days have gone by, I’ve noticed the dreams less and less.

    4. Weight loss and money saving.

    Two of the oft-stated benefits of going dry are losing weight and saving money. It’s true that I felt generally ‘cleaner’ internally, and lost a few inches off of my waist – but I attribute this more to the fact that we’ve been going to the gym three times a week, rather than just not consuming alcohol. Infact, I’ve probably eaten more rubbish this month than usual, as I replaced one vice with another. That ties back into the caffeine actually, with Grace remarking: ‘Those energy drinks are probably worse for you than booze’. I’ve no doubt that you’d lose weight if you cut out alcohol completely and kept your diet the same, but you’d need to do it for a lot longer than 4 weeks.

    Money wise, the claim that you’ll ‘save’ cash is a bit of a dubious one. In reality, you just have more money to spend on other things. I don’t actually think buying alcohol is a ‘waste’, and I’m well aware of the purchasing tradeoff I make when I do, so whilst it was nice to have money to allocate to different things, it’s something I take into account when budgeting anyway, so seems a bit redundant. In all honesty, I probably spent way more money this month than any other month, as I thought: “Oh well, I can afford this because I’m not drinking”, when in reality I hadn’t actually ‘saved’ that much.

    5. Social situations are different.

    Unsurprisingly, the most notable difference was with social situations. At first, it was tough to think of things to do that don’t involve drinking, and also much harder to suggest hanging out without the usual, and universally understood ‘fancy grabbing a drink?’ invitation. It felt like you had to explain to everybody that you weren’t drinking at the outset, which was a bit strange. Generally though, not drinking as part of Dry January made things easier, as people understand the concept without much explanation. I can’t say it would have been quite the same if I’d been doing this off my own back in October, for example.

    In general though, you just feel boring. As Frank Skinner put it recently, people might respond by saying:

    “Hey, at least you can remember what you did last night!”

    “Aye, nothing.”

    Even when you are doing things, it can be tough. It’s no surprise that being around drunk people isn’t great fun if you’re sober, but it’s another thing entirely to actually experience that – particularly if you haven’t in a long time. We don’t have a car anymore, so I literally can’t remember the last time (January aside) where I’ve been completely sober around drunk people. I’ve been with plenty of people who are far more gone to the wind than I am, but I’ve always still been at least a little bit pished.

    Being with people who are properly drinking is a strange, alienating experience. Drinking is so engrained in our culture that you never question it, and it’s easy to forget how bizarre a ritual it actually is. At first it just seems a bit strange how people are fixated on consuming so much liquid whilst you are trying to stomach your second can of ginger beer. After that, even if there are no outwardly obvious physical indicators that someone is pished, they seem to go into a world of their own, a million miles away. The conversations that they are so deeply invested in don’t mean all that much to you when sober, and it’s hard to break in or share their enthusiasm. Drinking and talking til the wee hours with a group of friends always has a warm, fuzzy ambient feeling, and it was a bit of a shock to do the same thing and feel how cold, or… normal the flat felt without alcohol. That might seem obvious, but it was a much more tangible sensation (or lack of) than I had expected without the shared bond created by alcohol.

    At its best, you like seeing people enjoying themselves, even if you do feel a bit left out. At its worst, you end up in circular arguments with people that can’t remember what was said two sentences ago. There is no way to reason with people when they are drunk, and it’s hard not to get impatient when you have explained something multiple times, and then feel like a dickhead as they get angry at you. There’s no way to win, and it’s easy to see how stupid fights can happen when people are drunk.

    In general, social interaction can be exhausting when sober, and people’s sense of time whilst intoxicated is different. When you’re pished you have a single-minded desire to stay up, drink more, and sustain the good feeling that you have. You forget that people around you who are sober don’t have the same super-human drive that you’ve been gifted by the alcohol, and so if they aren’t as chatty or get tired and want to head home – that’s perfectly natural. They simply haven’t got the same amount of energy to engage at the same level socially, because they haven’t taken the same drug that you have.

    If you aren’t going to drink for a longer period than just a month, it’s easy to see how you could build up a resentment towards alcohol, and the people who choose to drink. It seems (from the outside in), like an exclusive, selfish club, where people become pushy and obstinate… and bear in mind that I say this as a big drinker myself.

    If you get annoyed or introverted then it is often remarked that somehow it’s your fault for choosing not to drink. I heard the line ‘You could have drank tonight and you didn’t’ more than once. The suggestion is that sober people are just bitter because they’re not drinking, rather than just being tired and irritated by the illogical behaviour of drunk people. The idea that the only way to not feel like that is to join them is a pretty sad one, and led to some uncomfortable thoughts about why and how we need alcohol to spent quality time together.

    What it comes down to is this: we don’t need booze to spend time with our friends or family, and can have great times when sober… but alcohol is a social lubricant that makes everything flow so much easier between those sharing the experience – particularly in a generally introverted culture like Scotland. The problem comes when there are people in a group that aren’t on the same level.

    Obiter.

    I love booze. It tastes great, makes you feel great, and helps act as a release for the jumble of thoughts and feelings that get stuck in your head with no other outlet. It was interesting to see it from the other side of the looking glass for once. Not drinking whilst others around got pished made me realise just how much of a drug alcohol is, and the inability of those who are drinking to see past their perspective whilst engaged in it. That’s something that we tend to forget given its normalcy.

    Tomorrow I’ll head out at 3pm for a full day of drinking, which is probably a bad idea, but has to be done. I did joke that I’ll need to drink all of the alcohol that I didn’t drink in January in February. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel afterwards (although I already have the hangover fear), and I hope that I can retain some of the sense of perspective that the past 4 weeks has given. I think the first step is to realise and accept that if you’re drinking, you’re fairly likely being a dick, and need to wind your neck in. Whether that’s possible after a bottle of Jack Daniel’s or not, I’m not sure. We’ll see.

    All in all, Dry January was an interesting experiment, but I won’t be rushing back to do it again.

  • Dry January: 10 days in

    This year I’ve decided to do something I’ve never done before, and not drink any alcohol for an entire month.

    The longest I’ve gone (consecutively) before now since hitting the age of legal consent was 9 days. I remember this because it was back when I was trying to figure out why I was in pain all the time, and the doctor said it could be a stomach ulcer, so I cut down drinking, and then out completely… even managing to make it to the Cathouse without touching a drop, eesh. However, there were some couchsurfers staying from Germany, and I caved after 9 days. The Cathouse was also involved.

    4

    Luckily, it wasn’t a stomach ulcer at all, but some sort of allergy to wheat. I had a drink or two to celebrate that news.

    Anyway, as of today, the longest I’ve gone is now ten days. It’s been much easier than it was back then, as I don’t drink in quite such volumes as I did before. We’ve also been travelling to places like the US, Iceland and Belgium the past few months, imbibing in some fine (and not so fine) beers… so I’m actually not craving it as much as I might usually. There was one moment where we made some bastardised version of carbonara with white wine, and when I poured it in I almost grabbed the bottle and downed the entire thing. All of that said, if I was doing this in June it may be a different story.

     

  • Looking back at how to listen: A year of music

    Looking back at how to listen: A year of music

    I’ve been using Last.fm – the tracking service to catalogue the music you listen to – since 2004. Since then, I have ‘scrobbled’ about 1,600 different artists, and just over 43,500 tracks.

    To be honest, I don’t check in on Last.fm very often, preferring to let it just carry on doing its thing in the background – looking in every once in a while to see how things are getting on. I tend to have periods where I don’t listen to a whole lot of music, and there’s some useful information in there to help spot when that’s happening and do something about it. I can always look back and dig out some of the bands I haven’t listened to in ages, and try and rekindle some of the associated excitement again. I’m not a very good passive music listener… preferring to be more involved when I do.

    A couple of months ago I realised that my music habits over the past couple of years have slipped pretty dramatically – going from 5,952 scrobbles in 2013, to 2,671 in 2014, and 2362 in 2015. The figure for this year is slightly higher than it would have been had I not realised and made a conscious effort to listen to more.

    Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 14.28.05

    I think there’s a few reasons for the dip:

    • Moving House – I always preferred listening to music through my amp + speakers combo than whilst wearing headphones. In my previous (shared) flat, the audio setup was used purely for those purposes whilst I was hanging out in my room. Now, it’s used as my main output – connected up to the TV. Because of that, it gets used far less for music, and I listen to a lot less as a result.
    • Travelling – The past couple of years I’ve been travelling a lot. I have too much music to store on my phone, so rely on Spotify – but that tends to rule out listening to things whilst abroad with no data connection. I also don’t generally really like using my phone for music. I also discovered that the in-built music system wasn’t registering all the scrobbles that it should be…
    • Work – Two years ago I went from working in an office where I would listen to music constantly during the day to working from home. Whilst this was great, it meant that I didn’t always need to block out what was going on around me, and ended up listening to music less as a result. In addition, if I needed some background noise, I would tend to opt for the TV.
    • Not being involved – I used to be in a band, write for a music zine, and a whole lot more. I’d naturally come across music I loved and get excited about it. I don’t really do this at all anymore.

    Now that I’ve worked this out, I’m going to actively make an effort to listen to more music. Here’s some of the things that should help make a difference:

    • New bluetooth speaker – I always thought that bluetooth speakers sucked, and generally they do. After trying out a JBL Charge 2 though, and hearing how great the bass response was, I got one. It’s portable, and means that we can listen to music whilst travelling easier – or whilst in different rooms without headphones.
    • New headphones – I got a pair of open backed Beyerdynamic headphones that have ultra soft ear cups on them. Coupled with a cheap FiiO mini amplifier, they sound incredible – and I can wear them for hours at a time. Listening to music on them is a pleasure, and means I find myself doing so far more often whilst working at home; concentrating better as well.
    • Going to the gym – I stopped going to the gym when I moved flat, as there wasn’t a decently priced one nearby. One has opened up across the road, and I’ve started to go pretty frequently. The music they play in there is utter gash, so that means an hour of music 3 or 4 times a week that I wouldn’t have listened to before. I’m using Vox on iOS currently to make sure that it gets scrobbled properly.
    • Finding new music – The times I’ve listened to loads of music in the past has always been when I’ve gotten passionate about it and explored different artists to get excited about. When I can’t think of what to listen to, I tend to not bother. This year I’m going to make more of an effort to explore related songs on Last.FM and become more involved than I have been for a while.

    All the grizzly details of what I’m listening to can be found on my Last.FM profile here.

  • Real Punishments Needed for DMCA Takedown Abuse

    Note: The opinions expressed within are mine, and mine alone – not necessarily endorsed by Automattic or WordPress.com.

    Last week Automattic released an update to our transparency report, detailing the number of takedown and information requests that were received between January and the end of June this year – as well as the number that had been acted upon, or rejected. There has been some good coverage of what’s included in the report by TorrentFreak, ARSTechnica, and TechDirt.

    One area that’s particularly interesting is that relating to the DMCA notification and takedown process, regarding instances of alleged copyright infringement. The full figures are available on the page itself, but here are the highlights:

    WordPress.com Transparency Report

    If you’re like me, it can be difficult to pull out something meaningful from a table of figures, at least at first glance. The important thing to note here is that 43% of the total notices received were rejected – either for being incomplete, or abusive. This figure rises to 67% if you remove sites that were ultimately suspended for a terms of service violation from the ‘Percentage of notices where some or all content was removed’ column.

    Incomplete notices can be anything from the complainant not including a signature; failing to specify the content that they are claiming copyright over; or not including the required statements ‘under penalty of perjury’. Abusive notices include those that target material which is not copyrightable (such as trademarks or allegedly defamatory content); where the complainant misrepresents their copyright; or attempts to prevent fair use of the material – protected by US copyright law.

    Many complainants simply want to get content removed from the web, irrespective of which route they have to take to get it. As a result, a variety of different tactics are deployed, particularly when a third party agent is engaged to carry out the task. For example, the wording of takedown demands may be fudged in order to give them the appearance of a valid DMCA takedown notification, whilst failing to substantively fulfil the statutory requirements. In other cases, claims regarding alleged copyright infringement are mingled together with threats concerning trademark infringement or defamation – obfuscating the invalidity of the DMCA takedown itself in the process. Web Sheriff in particular have been known to adopt this practice, with ‘kitchen sink’ takedown demands listing what seems like every law passed in the last 20 years incase one of them might apply in any given scenario. The Pirate Bay have infamously mocked Web Sheriff in the past for some of their tactics:

    Pirate Bay Web Sheriff Mockery

    It can be a difficult process to manually review and untangle exactly what a complaint relates to, and whether or not it is a valid DMCA takedown. Clarification e-mails often go ignore, something that is particularly true in cases where the notifications are being generated by bots. Replying to point out that a notification is incomplete, or that the material is actually hosted elsewhere in many cases is met by nothing except a deaf ear, and a duplicate takedown demand the following day.

    Whilst the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions are designed to provide protection for third party intermediaries as well as the rights of copyright holders, the phenomenon of automated takedown demands has resulted in a massively lopsided burden on those service providers who take their responsibilities seriously, and do not just acquiesce to every single takedown notification automatically.

    Complainants are able to submit grossly inaccurate DMCA takedowns on a massive scale, routinely through the use of automated systems that indiscriminately target particular keywords across the web – all without any real fear of legal consequence. The sheer volume notices generated means that the vast majority of service providers simply remove content immediately and automatically, without scrutinising them for their formal completeness or legal validity. The few that do choose to go through them manually in order to protect their users (like WordPress.com), end up facing a huge burden.

    Without stronger statutory consequences for those who abuse the DMCA’s notification and takedown system, the battle for freedom of expression online will be increasingly difficult. The majority of service providers will inevitably default to censorship in the first instance, as the number of notifications (and therefore the resources required to push back effectively) increases.

  • SQA Higher Computing Revisited

    SQA Higher Computing Revisited

    School. Apparently the ‘best years of your life’.

    That definitely was not my experience of school, it has to be said.

    One of the big frustrations I remember from my time at Kirkintilloch High was taking Computing – both at the Standard Grade level (third and fourth year, or aged 14-16 roughly), and Higher (aged 16-17).

    Despite it being something that I had a pretty in-depth understanding of, I ultimately only got a B for the Higher exam. What I remember is that the questions were vague, allowing significant room for interpretation; the teachers lacked the knowledge or the common sense to make allowances, and you could be marked down for answers which were correct, but didn’t match up rigidly with what was on the marking scheme.

    The example that sticks in my head was from a prelim exam we sat where the question was ‘Name three pieces of hardware required to watch a multimedia video’. I answered: ‘Processor, Monitor, Graphics card’, which seemed to me like the very basics of what you would need – discounting all the other bits and bobs that make up a functioning computer. Apparently, this was wrong. The correct answer was something akin to: “An input device, processor, video card, or graphics card.’ My teacher informed me that ‘monitor’ was not on the marking scheme, and therefore I lost points as a result. My desperate pleading for an explanation of how anybody could watch a video without a display fell on deaf ears, and the maddening insanity of this has forever stuck in my mind.

    I decided to go back and have a look at some of the questions from around that period, to see what they were like with the benefit of hindsight. This proved to be a bit tougher than I had expected, as past papers from that era aren’t kept online by the SQA. I e-mailed them to request a copy, and received a rather puzzling response:

    SQA Copyright Restrictions

    Well, that’s weird. Surely the SQA own the copyright to their own past papers? I pressed them on this, and got – if anything – an even more puzzling reply:

    SQA Past Papers

    The SQA can’t keep past papers for more than 5 years due to ‘data storage’?! I almost wrote back to offer a donation of a hard drive. Hell, even a 1GB USB pen drive should have been enough to keep them ticking over for a few decades. It possibly goes some way to explaining the nonsensical Computing questions that they used to ask.

    I searched high and low for PDFs from the relevant years, only to turn up a couple of prelim samples from schools that had seemingly uploaded them yonks ago and forgot. Finally, success! I tracked down this bad boy from a seller on Amazon:

    SQA Past Papers 2002-2006

    So let’s have a look shall we? The examples below are taken from a mix of the online PDFs that I found, and the book above.

    Consider the following question, taken from the specimen question paper to be used from ‘2005 onwards’:

    Higher Specimen Paper 2005The purpose of this question is to discuss ‘peripherals’, and the ‘advantages of solid state storage devices’. These are pretty important to understand, though the question here seems a bit bizarre.

    • What are the benefits of using a camera with a ‘flashcard’, compared to what? The question doesn’t give anything to compare flash storage against, so it seems impossible to know what the benefits would be.
    • There isn’t really any other storage option suitable for digital cameras. All of them use flash storage, so to use that device to illustrate the advantages seems weird. You can’t really have an advantage when that’s the only option. Asking: ‘Give two reasons why a flashcard is the most appropriate form of storage for the camera?’ would make far more sense.

    This is backed up by the answers given:

    Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.19.18

    It’s worth noting that these two are the only two listed in the marking scheme. Personally, I think there should be far more. Here’s a couple of suggestions:

    • Flash based storage is much faster to access than other kinds.
    • Flashcards are more robust, and less sensitive to knocks – as required in a portable device.

    Thankfully, things have improved a bit on this front. Here’s the question from the same subject, but in 2014:

    Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.54.49

    Much better!

    Going back to the 2005 specimen paper, here is question b) – along with the answers:

    Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.30.00

    In some respects, the aim of this is pretty good. Students should definitely understand the different types of file formats available for graphics, and their varying purposes. However, the question itself is stupid. It asks what file format would be ‘suitable for this application’ – i.e. for use in a digital camera, and then gives equal marks for explaining the pros and cons of whatever you choose. That means you’d get the same marks for answering GIF as you would JPEG. Completely ridiculous. A GIF would never be an appropriate file format for use in a digital camera, irrespective of the advantages and disadvantages. There’s too much of a disconnect between the question and the learning outcome.

    This would be a more appropriate question:

    ‘Name a ‘standard file format’ used in modern digital cameras, and explain why it is most appropriate (one advantage and one disadvantage)

    It makes clear that there are particular formats that are used, doesn’t award marks for inappropriate answers to real-world examples, and still requires the student to understand and analyse why the format is appropriate over and against others.

    Here’s a similar question from the 2005 exam, with the acceptable answers underneath.

    Screen Shot 2014-11-28 at 18.06.59

    I think disallowing ‘bitmap’ here is pretty unfair given that it’s the name of the file format bmp. If they had asked for the extension of the standard file format, rather than ‘name a standard file format’, then restricting it in this way would make more sense. Boo, hiss.

    Moving on, take a look at this question:

    Higher Specimen Question 2 2005

    I’d tell Helen to throw out her PCWorld Magazine and go buy a Macbook Pro.

    roncomputer

    Okay, I’m kidding, but only half.

    This is the answer given:

    Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.40.25The purpose here is to demonstrate ‘justification of the hardware selected in terms of appropriate characteristics’. Again, an important aim, but with an inappropriate question.

    We’ll ignore the fact that floppy drives at this point were only ever used in PCs for when (inevitably) things went tits up and you had to do something to the BIOS (Apple had gotten rid of them years before this). We’ll also ignore that the question didn’t actually specify what sort of data Helen wants to back up, so it would be impossible to know whether a floppy drive was too small for purpose or not. (Maybe she just wanted to back up a few text files?).

    Even back then, the most appropriate answer would be to use some sort of external USB storage. Helen would have been better off getting the cheaper system out of the two that let her also get an external device. Maybe that’s what’s meant to be covered under the vague description of: ‘Other suitable.’ However, it looks like they don’t really care what answer you give, so long as you pick the one with the DVD-ROM.

    This sums up exactly what was wrong with much of the Computing Higher back then. Even if you gave a perfectly justifiable reason to pick the ‘Lynx 983’ device, you would be marked wrong – completely defeating the aim of the student justifying the hardware selected based. The questions were vague, allowed significant room for interpretation, and no common sense was used in the marking process. On top of that, the teachers often didn’t have the knowledge or leeway to do anything about it anyway.

    One of the saving grace’s of the curriculum is that it included questions relating to ‘Computers and the Law’. Something that everybody should have an understanding of:
    Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 15.14.10

    Higher Paper Question 4 2005Nice.

    Another of the problems with the Computing course was the disparity in difficulty levels of the questions within the space of one paper. On one hand, students are asked to explain what the benefit of using a DVD is over a CD (answer: more space), or to explain why a short domain name is better than a long, complex one… and how the Internet can help small businesses:

    urlhighercomputing

    and just a few pages later they are expected to know wtf ‘backchaining’ and ‘loop constructs’ are, and to be able to express things in pseudocode:

    Pseudo Code Higher Computing

    backwardchaining

    and does anybody really need to know how to work out numbers in binary? I sure am glad I don’t have to do that sort of calculation any longer.

    Higher Computing Binary

    I get the importance of gaining holistic knowledge about computing and the technology industry, but the consistency in the questions was way off. One of the particular frustrations I remember from sitting these exams myself was being treated like an idiot on one hand: “Duhhrr give an example of a URL.” and then being expected to produce fairly beefy examples of scripts out of our heads on paper (that’s right, we ‘coded’ everything in our notebooks, rather than using the computers). It seems like half the course should have been at Standard Grade, rather than Higher level. Although it’s probably best we don’t go back to look at those particular questions, which involved explaining what a mouse and keyboard were used for.

    Back then the Computing curriculum was a joke, doing a disservice both to those who taught it as well as those who sat it. The purpose of the whole thing seemed (and seems) pretty unclear. Whether it was to teach the basics of hardware, prepare future programmers for University, or just give a general overview of Computing it failed on all accounts. I really hope that things have changed since then.

  • Write Stuff Down: A Tale of a Locked Mobile

    Write Stuff Down: A Tale of a Locked Mobile

    Yesterday I flew down to London to sit on a panel titled ‘Digital Dystopias: Civil Liberties In A Digital Age’, as part of the UK Liberty League’s ‘Freedom Forum’ of 2015.

    The journey meant getting up at 5am, though really it was 4am as the result of clocks going forward… and heading back later on that day. I wasn’t able to get decently priced trains for the times that I needed to get there in time. I packed light, and didn’t bother to bring my laptop with me as I usually would for a trip like this.

    Rather ironically, on my way to speak (partially) about the need to be aware where your data is being transferred online, I got an untimely reminder of my own over-reliance on my phone. Having switched it off for the flight, when it came back on I was prompted to type in the full password. This isn’t something I have to do too often, making use of the Touch ID facility, and it turned out I couldn’t remember what exactly it was. I had opted to avoid using the ‘simple’ code, which is really just a numerical pin number, as it was far too easy for people to read over my shoulder, then use it to ‘frape’ me or something equally uncouth. Back when I was in a band we used to punish each other for leaving our phones unlocked by sending multiple text messages containing the phrase ‘wanna see my weasel?’ to random numbers. This is something I wanted to avoid happening again.

    The way things progress when you’ve forgotten your password, or at least, which variation will grant access, is this: You get a few chances, then you get locked out for 1 minute, then 2 minutes, then 6, then 15, then 60… then completely. Ouch.

    This wouldn’t be too big a problem if I didn’t completely rely on the phone for uh, everything. The location of where I was meant to go for the conference? On the phone. The phone numbers of all the people who could help? On the phone. Since I like notebooks, I had luckily copied down some of my notes, as well as printed out my boarding pass – but I could just as easily have left the former in Evernote, and used the Easyjet app for the latter – and almost did.

    I eventually persuaded somebody at an information desk in Victoria Station to Google the conference venue for me, and worked out where to go using the big ol’ printed maps. It didn’t help that the streets were closed off due to some huge stabbing incident the night before, so I had to wander around for a while before I got to the venue. But all was well.

    Letting my wife know that I wasn’t dead was another matter. I couldn’t get in touch with her via any of the apps on my phone – obviously. I wondered about finding a good ol’ fashioned pay-as-you-go web machine (or a computer) to login to Facebook or something and drop her a message. However, that wasn’t the end of the complications. Even if I could find an Internet cafe (seriously, wtf do they call rental computers now?!), I couldn’t actually login to any of my services anyway. My passwords are all 30 odd characters long, randomly generated things that are stored in a secure database that is only available on my laptop or… my phone. Even if I could get into a backup of them somewhere, I would still need to verify my identify using two factor authentication. Also, on my phone.

    In the end, I resorted to a payphone. Trying to locate one was amusing, with the people I asked for help looking at me as if I was mentally deranged, or a drug dealer, or both. To be fair, I’d probably have the same reaction in their position. The payphone was only slightly helpful though, as eh… I don’t know anybody’s numbers. Literally every single number of everybody I could get in touch with was stored in my phone. Mind when you used to remember them off by heart? Well, the only one that my memory would serve up was my gran and granda’s. Luckily, they were able to get a hold of my parents (in Amsterdam) via Skype, who then sent a message to Grace to let her know what had happened, and that I wasn’t lying in an alcoholic coma somewhere.

    I did eventually find a computer in Gatwick airport, for what it’s worth – but it charged 10p for one minute of access to the Internet. I’m not sure exactly who they think will pay for that shit given there’s free WiFi everywhere – and WTFTENPEEPERMINUTE!? This isn’t the 90s when the web was a novelty.

    So I had to suffer the injustice of a whole day with no Internet access, and no way to contact anybody. It was a weird experience, surrounded by thousands of people who were connected up to their eyeballs with a myriad of devices… yet unable to take advantage of any of it, even if I asked.

    I think I’ll write things down more often.

    Oh, as an obiter, I was told that I’d have to wipe my phone completely and restore from backup to get access back. This proved to be tricky as I had just gotten a new laptop, ergo… no backups. I discovered that if you go into Find My Phone online (if you have it enabled via the iCloud), that you can re-trigger the ability to insert your passcode again if you make the phone play a sound. Good to know for the future.

  • DMCA Rejection Retaliation

    Every day WordPress.com receive a sizeable number of DMCA takedown notifications, and every day I personally reject a fair number of them for being incomplete, invalid, or fraudulent.

    Many of those who find their takedown notifications being rejected are displeased with the decision, used to service providers choosing to automatically process them, shifting the burden of proof onto the user, rather than take on the risk of liability for themselves. Unsurprisingly, this displeasure is often most aggressively expressed by dedicated third party agents whose sole business model is based on scouring the web for potentially infringing acts, and who get paid per removal. Some people may say that with a results-driven financial incentive to have material taken offline, that there is more of a chance for the DMCA process to be used inappropriately – but that’s something you’ll need to make your minds up on independently.

    Yesterday a colleague let me know about one such organisation that had evidently found some of their notifications rejected in the past, who had then chosen to take to Twitter to voice their displeasure about me doing my job.

    Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 23.49.14

    The image they linked to was of me, lying on the grass clutching a bottle of Buckfast – the weekend of the Queen’s Jubilee, if memory serves correctly.

    The one they used wasn’t really very good quality though, so here’s a higher resolution one incase they want to try again:

    crail

    I’m not entirely sure what they were trying to achieve to be honest. It’s not as if pictures of me intoxicated are really all that hard to find, after all. My occasional penchant for Buckfast isn’t exactly a secret at Automattic either, given that I did my first annual ‘flash talk’ at the all-company Grand Meetup in Utah on the ol’ tonic wine.

    Somebody (who shall remain nameless) suggested we reply to say:

    Even smashed on Bucky, Clicky Steve knows more about the DMCA than RemoveYourMedia

    Which is so beautiful it almost brought a tear to my eye.

    That wasn’t the only tweet they aimed at me though.

    Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 23.49.26

    It’s pretty bizarre that they would choose to use that case about Napster to illustrate the potential liability for service providers guilty of contributory infringement, since there are far more recent, compelling, and relevant judgements they could have made their point with. Ah well, better luck next time, eh? As far as I’m aware they never actually sued after these bold statements on social media, but maybe they’re still preparing the paper work.

    At the end of the day, whilst this has given me a hearty chuckle before I turn in for the night, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s not only petty, but ridiculously unprofessional. Making ad hominem attacks on employees of a company for rejecting your legal demands is pretty sad. If I was a copyright holder, I wouldn’t be too impressed to find the agency I had employed to protect my intellectual property deploying tactics like this. Then again, it might be a bigger deal if they had more than 1200 followers…

    In the world of the DMCA, there’s only one thing dumber than submitting bogus takedown notifications, and that’s having a tantrum on Twitter when your bogus takedowns are rejected.

  • Productivity Apps: PopClip

    Productivity Apps: PopClip

    If you work online, there a whole load of tasks that can be a pain in the ass to have to do. Even if work itself is great, nobody likes having to do certain things… like copying and pasting different URLs into new browser tabs, or re-formatting garbled text.

    One of the benefits of working at Automattic is being surrounded by friendly, smart geeks who have tried all sorts of different things to get the most out of their computers, and to tailor them to fit how they work. When you hit the sweet spot, your laptop really seems to sing; doing exactly what you want to straight away without having to footer about and get bogged down in the drudgery; it becomes almost like an extension of your fingers or brain. That sort of harmony can be a really great feeling, and let you enjoy working rather than it becoming a chore. I’ve written before about how great Alfred is for this.

    One of the other tools that helps achieve this sort of inter-relationship for me was recommended by my friend and colleague Mark: PopClip for Mac.

    original

    PopClip is a small helper application for Mac and iOS that pops up a control panel when you select text. You can then quickly access a whole variety of different options, from the standard Bold/Italic formatting options, to looking up the text in the dictionary, Google translate, or whatever else you might fancy.

    This is what my PopClip bar looks like:

    Screen Shot 2015-01-26 at 15.33.31

    Usefulness, and Integration with Alfred

    At first, I wasn’t too convinced about this app. It seemed like one of those cool ideas that didn’t really play out properly in execution. The prospect of having the PopClip bar appear whenever I highlighted text seemed like it would become a real pain real quickly, and it did.

    However, there were lots of cool features in there that I was sure would be useful at somepoint. I realised that rather than have the bar pop up every single time text was highlighted, Alfred could be used to control the behaviour through the use of Hotkeys.

    As a result I created an Alfred workflow specifically for this purpose. You can download that here.

    Once installed, you can toggle PopClip ‘On’ or ‘Off’ by using the keyword popclip from the Alfred launch bar. Alternatively, you can leave PopClip off, and trigger its menu when needed by the use of a hotkey – currently set to ⌘ + P. The latter is what I find myself using more often than not.

    As soon as I realised that I could do this, PopClip seemed a lot more powerful than before.

    Features

    There are a whole bunch of things you can use PopClip for, so it’s just a matter of finding what is useful for your own particular workflow.

    Here’s a glimpse at some of the extensions I have installed:

    Screen Shot 2015-01-26 at 15.40.18

    The ones I use the most are:

    Instant Translate

    This is a great extension. Highlight a sentence, call up PopClip and hit Instant Translate to get a translation into the ‘Destination Language’ that you set in the preferences. Saves the time and hassle of going to the Google translate page, instead bringing up the translation in a bubble:

    Screen Shot 2015-01-26 at 15.46.24

    That’s Greek, by the way.

    Download Instant Translate here.

    Google Translate

    Of course, sometimes there’s just too much text to display in one little popup. The Google Translate extension grabs the selected text and passes it through to the full booner.

    Shorten URL (bit.ly)

    Pretty self explanatory. Grabs the selected URL and shortens it using the Bit.ly service. Download it here.

    CopyURLs

    This is one of my favourites. Often I need to deal with long e-mails that have various URLs in them. Going through these, copying and pasting the URLs out separately was always a real fiddly, and boring task. The CopyURLs extension did away with all of that in one quick swoop. Simply highlight any text, invoke the extension, and just the URLs from that text will be copied to the clipboard. Fantastic.

    This beauty was authored by Brett, and is available to download as part of a bundle here. If you just want CopyURLs though, you can grab it here.

    OpenURLs

    Just like CopyURLs, but this time it takes the URLs in the selected text and opens each of them in a new browser tab. Pretty swish. Grab it here.

    Abbreviation Lookup

    Not sure what an abbreviation means? WTF TLDR? Highlight and invoke this extension to get taken straight to the meaning. I ended up writing my own extension for this purpose, as the existing one on the PopClip page wasn’t producting great results. Get it here.

    Send to SimpleNote

    I had been looking about for an extension that integrated with SimpleNote, but couldn’t find any. So, I wrote one. This will grab the select text and send it over to a new note in SimpleNote. Great for capturing quick thoughts you want to come back to later. Download it here.

    Simplenote-demo
    Image owned by Pilot Moon.

    Custom Searches

    Can’t find what you are looking for on the list of 100+ free extensions on the PopClip page? No sweat. You can easily set up your own. There’s a good tutorial here if you want to get down and dirty with AppleScript, but if you’re not ready for that yet, Brett again has created a fantastic wee tool to help you on your way. Simply plug in the site you want to search with the highlighted text, and this will spit out a PopClip ready extension for you to use.

    Personally, I’ve created a whole bunch of quick extensions for things I need to search for at work regularly – like usernames, domain names, and e-mail addresses. Not dis-similar to Alfred’s Custom Searches function, using PopClip in this way makes the process even quicker for particular tasks, saving the need to copy the text, call up Alfred, paste it in then search. Instead, just highlight, call up PopClip, and hit the relevant search button. Easy!

    Summary and Price

    It can be hard at first to get into the habit of using PopClip, but there are real rewards to be reaped once you do. Certain tasks are made so much quicker than they would be otherwise, and it’s just a matter of finding out what will be of most use to you personally.

    PopClip costs $4.99 from the App Store, but also has a free trial available on the Pilot Moon website. For all the hours it’s saved me copying URLs from lawyer’s emails, it’s been well worth it. Give it a bash and see what you think.