Rhian Sheehan is performing "Standing in Silence" again. Go. The last one was quite probably the best musical performance I've ever been to.

I've been feeling for a while the computers, modern spangly computers - miracle of modern technology that they are - are awful. Like, seriously shitty and something we'll be laughing at in twenty years time because even the very very best ones are like a 1970's Lada in terms of their limitations and ridiculous need to be pampered at every turn.

A few things have bought this mind over the last couple of days. One was witnessing a very modern social spectacle: a twentysomething carrying his laptop to a table to have a meeting. He walks along, coffee in one hand and two grand's worth of electronics in the other - being held only by it's corner, a boatload of torque ensuring the machine stays flat with copious concern being applied to ensure neither the delicate screen nor the hinge holding it on receive the slightest jolt during their journey. How did this become OK?

Another was Sir Clive Sinclair - who basically created the entire UK computing industry when he invented hellishly cheap home computers in the 80's - admitting that he doesn't use computers at all.

"Well I find them annoying. I'd much prefer someone would telephone me if they want to communicate. No, it's not sheer laziness – I just don't want to be distracted by the whole process. Nightmare."

And today - yCombinator, while specifically looking for companies producing iPad applications, linked to this blog post:

you can get some ideas by thinking of the marketing cliche where two people are standing around a computer collaborating on something, taking quick notes, working off a recipe, etc. Those images occur in marketing because they are appealing, but they don't occur much in real life because our existing devices and software are awful.

And that is it. Really. When are we going to start designing these things based around people first and not nerds, politics, or the need to use what exists already?

What really amazes me is that we run this industry in the retarded way we do despite the absolutely shocking amounts of progress made every time someone does it well. Like ... caller ID. The phone rings, I look at it, I decide whether or not I'm going to answer. Absolutely 100% pervasive. Or search engines - type in here some of the words you want to see in the document on the screen. A simple concept that, more or less, gave birth to the web as we know it. Or (pushing a point) facebook's identity system - locate individual people across the entire planet based on their names and who you both know.

But now, right now ... look at it. I'm publishing something and it's covered in HTML tags. In 2010. Oh my god, this stuff has miles and miles and miles to go.

Just got this from Amazon:

"This e-mail confirms that your latest billing statement is available on the AWS web site. Your account will be charged the following:

Total: $0.06"

Atomic Droplet's first hosted mix is now live on the production environment. It's still a fair trek over to something that can be left to it's own devices completely without concern but that first end to end test is always a good thing - heaps of risk disappears :)

The Atheist bus campaign, which has raised $20,000 to carry the message "There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." on the sides of buses - as they did in the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, Croatia, Finland, Holland, Italy, America and Australia - will not be able to run their adverts here. NZ Bus said they had "received a number of complaints from the public" and would not be running them.

And who, pray tell, who might be doing the complaining? Is there someone out there seriously in the business of lying to the public?

It appears they have purchased On2, a vendor of video compressors that run outside the patented IP used in h.264. Looking at their stock I think this probably cost them about $120M. What will be interesting to see now is if "do no evil" Google release On2's patents into the wild - this could make for a very interesting IP landscape and some good opportunities for small vendors of video servers. Not that I'm one of them :(

Edit: Props to Chris Double who posted this first ... I got it via planet NZ tech (which is awesome).

Being simultaneously timely and just at the wrong time, arstechnica takes a well written birds-eye view of the cloud infrastructure space. Timely because I've just rolled out a piece of cloud infrastructure code I outsourced to Fruition Technology for "single click" publishing of mixes and the monitoring, billing and management thereof. This being 2010 the storage backend is Amazon S3 and deployment is onto a Linux server running on a VPS. This also being 2010 it's beginning to look in many ways like not the wisest approach - while S3's promise of basically bottomless storage and bandwidth is appealing, albeit actually quite expensive once you do the math, my favourite DNS provider now has not only entered the VPS hosting market but sells un-metered bandwidth to go along with it. $20/month per 256MB/8GB/5MBit slice. Development would have been cheaper, too.

Looking at the "smart" side MediaTemple will now run you a django container for (drumroll please) $20/month - which seems increasingly to be the magic number. This would be more per month than the VPS but Django can be not-entirely-simple to deploy (very much a solved problem at this end, now) and would have saved quite possibly heaps of programmer time.

So, I dunno. It's a complex and evolving market. Performance monitoring shows that slicehost can be lumpy, Amazon just plain bad. No single supplier can tick all the boxes and ... when they do ... I reckon they will win hands down. If I "had my time again" I think I'd be tempted to go for the "maximally hands-off" approach of grid containers and S3 storage purely to get development time down but then my django development arguably started more like two years ago and this stuff was just not around then. What is for certain is that I don't have time to sit around talking about it!

I've had an interesting time with environmental awareness, concern and/or action over the last couple of years. I am, basically, a believer. We do everything a western family realistically can to reduce our footprint - we recycle, use cloth nappies and "green" light bulbs. Over the last few months I've begun wondering exactly how much of our environmental panic is for real. Certainly there are some truly stunning environmental catastrophes taking place round the world right now but there is also some fudging of figures and (knowing the scientific establishment) some somewhat desperate scrabbling for research grants. Hmmm.

So in the middle of this someone takes a hugely fast offshore powerboat and starts shining lasers in the eyes of a ship's crew and throwing stink bombs on the deck. Regardless of your feelings on whaling this is both not-exactly-friendly and in clear violation of international law. Then yesterday there's finally collision between a Japanese whaling vessel, the Shonan Maru, and said offshore powerboat and both sides come out shouting "wahhh wahhh wahhh" as you might expect - the crew of the Ady Gil claiming they were rammed and the Japanese whalers showing video evidence to the contrary.

And it is to the contrary. The video starts with the Ady Gil dead in the water and maybe 20-30 degrees off the starboard bow of the Shonan Maru. As it approaches the Japanese fire water cannons on to the Ady Gil and after a few seconds the crew of the Ady Gil engage their engines and accelerate forward into the path of the ship. Crunch. The still above shows the Ady Gil just before the collision - note the significant wake from both the engines (showing power was applied) and the hull itself (showing the craft was moving at the time). Idiots. The reverse view from MV Bob Barker (standing off at a sensible distance) shows the Shonan Maru not exactly holding a steady course, either but it does show that the Ady Gil covered a good 2-3 boatlengths in just a few seconds - something that the captain of the Shonan Maru would not have been able to avoid under any circumstances.

It pisses me off. There is clearly no need for whaling and it's just another example of mankind doing frankly immense damage to the planet but Sea Shepherd's actions are exactly the kind of pitiful toss the environmental cause does not need to be associated with. Idiots.

Because Steve Ballmer never creates a half-arsed clone, never, Microsoft are supposed to be unveiling a "slate PC", ahhh, tomorrow. Bags I call it "Zune PC".

Wing sails were starting to become news while I was a budding naval architect. Initially they were being used by the crazies doing the "Little America's Cup" in C-class catamarans, the technology was used in the infamous "Cat and Dog" America's cup by Stars and Stripes and by the time I left the field, the speed sailing record was held by a wing sail boat - Yellow Pages Endeavour. They always held a lot of promise, but the main promise was one of almost unending maintenance and vast vast expense, particularly if one were to capsize.

So I was a little surprised to hear that BMW Oracle are now running a wing sail on their 90ft square trimaran. Built by two Kiwis, no less. I mean, gawd, look at that thing - 190ft tall (80% bigger than a 747 wing) and presumably almost entirely carbon fibre. And what an entirely beautiful boat. I so want a go :)

The page you're looking at was served by a tiny 256MB VPS slice (that can obviously grow with the addition of some money) that also performs a number of other tasks some of which are quite important. One of these important tasks is to run a Django download, authentication, billing, licensing, media serving (kinda) and other-important-stuff server whose performance was beginning to bother me. The root of these performance issues appeared to stem from not really having enough Apache processes around and while I might like to use the worker mpm module to get static file performance basically the same as trendy webserver du jour I can't because while Django is threadsafe (and the wsgi gateway positively embraces them) the situation with php5 is cloudy at best and, in fact, Debian enforces a "no multi-threading php" rule by yanking libapache-mod-php5 whenever you try to install apache2-mpm-worker. Bad nerd, no biscuit.

Hence the murky world of fastcgi awaits. Thankfully I found this somewhat tasty how-to for running php5 under fcgi on Debian including suexec'ing the user that the php5 process is run under and with some more-or-less following of the instructions (notably limiting myself to just one php process - it's not like it's actually all that important after all) we now have it whizzing along nicely. In the tradition of all amateur benchmarks I shall declare the resulting application to be "snappy" and get back to the serious business of what I was supposed to be doing.

But in all seriousness, Apache2's worker MPM is a thing of beauty if you can make use of it. And there is absolutely no need for a separate "special" webserver for serving static files - it's all bullshit.

We still have this daft thing with >600cc paying more but we're down to sub-Arab-prince levels once again: $426 instead of $745, up from $252 so still nearly double. 50cc scooters, probably the most environmentally friendly form of transport that doesn't involve some fat bloke shoving his arse against yours, are still getting it in the face with the rate going from $59 to $129. Yeah, more than double.

The >600cc thing is daft. There are, out there, plenty of 650 singles (adventure bikes, generally) generating perhaps 40hp max. There are also loads of 620 v-twins in Ducati Monsters (60hp) and the 650 parallel twin used in the ER-6 and Versys (70hp) will also attract the higher tax rate. In the cheaper bracket you can still get a Yamaha R6 - 120hp odd and a machine designed entirely to go very very fast. So as a way of discriminating it doesn't work very well and is clearly the work of some daft pencil pusher. FWIW I'm 675 and probably about 95hp.

Hate it. But I can live with it. Still won't be voting for National.

The feature set was off the mark but it appears our usability is good - I just got this from the CTO of a web development company:

iShowU is so quick to use that the easiest way to show a client how a new feature works is to send them a screencast of it.

That's kind of mindblowing.

Heh. Awesome.

Unbelievably the government have hired someone publicly against the "anti-smacking" law to conduct a three month review on how the law is working in practice. His conclusion: that the law works fine and that Family First (the leading pro-child-beating group) have been telling porkie pies when they make claims of ordinary parents being turned into criminals...

The claim: A father claimed he shook his rebellious 15-year-old daughter on the shoulder to get her out of bed after she sneaked home at 4am.

The report says: Police responded to a call from a 15-year-old girl that she had been punched at least three times in the face.

Aaaaha.

Google now run a public DNS service. The addresses are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4