The UK’s Digital Economy Bill is designed to give the government the power to control access to the Internet with the aim of protecting the interests of big business.

The music industry is of course very happy with the bill, but a leaked memo showed that they are fully aware that the only way this will get on to the statute books is if it gets rushed through Parliament without proper scrutiny.

As a micro ISVer, I have to think about software piracy, but this bill is fundamentally flawed from the ground up. Please spare 5 minutes to help block it.

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/speakout/extremeinternetl

Andy Brice has had the splendiferous idea of producing a range of t-shirts for programmers.
Not only are they dripping with geeky coolness, the commission is being
split between a couple of worthy causes. So go on, love your geek, and
remember…

Geeks are for life, not just for Christmas.

Image via Wikipedia

As a species, Homo Sapiens have a frighteningly high capacity for obedience. A majority of us, particularly in the West, *need*
to be told what to do. The systems put in place by the ruling classes
stupefy us into instant capitulation in the face of authority.

Our obedience is trumped only by our apathy and indifference to what
our governments do on our behalf. We accept facts, arguments and
decisions all too easily.

The existence of poverty and famine is the great tragedy of our
time. We accept the systems around us because they make us comfortable,
but we give no thought at all to the consequences of our economic
systems on less affluent countries. Why do we give it no thought?
Because we haven’t been told to give it thought. The narrative spewed
forth by what in this country we amusingly refer to as the “free press”
simply excludes it from our consciousness.

If we had anything that pretended to be a free press, our headlines
would look very different. Take one of the biggest crimes of recent
history as an example: The illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its subsequent occupation.

Do you know what the cost of the war has been in Iraq? Well, for the Americans alone, it has currently cost $562,423,230,338. Have you thought about what *could*
have been done with that money had we not mounted an illegal invasion?
No. Because you haven’t been told to think about it. Here’s a few
things, we could have:

- *Completely* eradicated world poverty.
- Provided a home for *every* AIDS orphaned child in Africa.
- Provided primary school education for *every* child on Earth.

So why does poverty exist? Because our beloved guardians wish it.
You have only to look at the figures above to understand this. We value
Iraq’s oil reserves *far* more than the lives of Africans, for example.

“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the
people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything
about it.” – Albert Einstein

As one humble blogger, I ask this: Engage. Find out what your
guardians are doing. Demand answers, explanations, ask awkward
questions. Do you know what your country is doing on the global stage?
Are you sure the mainstream information systems are telling you the
truth? The whole truth? Find out, and at all times remember this: THEY
WORK FOR YOU!

To find out more of what is happening in the world, look to independent media. For example, www.informationclearinghouse.info

Monitor your guardians closely, for example, I use www.theyworkforyou.com

Discover the truth, form your own opinions, start acting like you
are your guardian’s boss. Take back our democracy from the special
interest groups.

End poverty. Please.

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

This last week, we’ve had GMail, Google Apps, Feedburner and Google customer service all overflowing with FAIL.

If you want to be considered a leader, start acting like it. Pick up the bloody ball Google!

Edit: Not that I’m suspicious or anything, but about an hour after I
posted this, this site dropped out of Google’s rankings for about an
hour.

Some of the changes include:

• A host of bug fixes
• Support for Microsoft Enterprise Search Server
• Performance enhancements
• Trimmed memory usage
• Windows XP compatibility
• Fully customisable themes/skins
• Full proxy support
• Clustering improvements
• Thumbnail caching

As ever, feedback is gratefully received.

—–

By the time I had read Patrick’s blog post, they had already
retracted their policy and realised that it was a colossal mistake, and
that hopefully its creator has been fired.

Some things in no particular order:

The Book

Bob Walsh is to blame for making
me want to give up the highly lucrative agile consultant / developer
gig in favour of late nights sweating over a code base, adwords, web
site design, credit card service providers, landing page optimisations
and other things I’d never even given a thought to this time last year.
Thanks Bob.

Reading thing this book lit so many light bulbs in my tiny mind that onlookers suspected I’d been irradiated.

The Technology

Without
a doubt, Windows Presentation Foundation. Although I’ve been using it
since 2006, this year I’ve relearned what GUI means, I’ve been pushing
WPF to its absolute limits, and then some. See Ergo as an example, more eye candy in the new year as my product (Home Document Manager) hits 1.0.

WPF offers some outstanding opportunities for the Micro ISV -
Windows eye candy just got serious, and small players can steal a march
on their less manoeuvrable corporate competition because it’s so easy.

The Politics

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, messers Bush and Brown are
still trying to convince the world that Iran, a nation that hasn’t
invaded another country in living memory, presents a clear and imminent
danger to the peace and stability of the world, pressing ahead with
their attempts to manufacture public consent for yet another illegal
assault on a sovereign state. The mainstream media is, as always,
obediently playing its part.

The Family

Rose arrived in October, making my family feel complete. The late
nights and early mornings she brought with her provide an unexpected
opportunity to work on ‘the project.’

—–

My views on the environment are a little more niche, and I feel quite happy about that. I’m a member of the Optimum Population Trust,
an organisation dedicated to educating the public and their leaders
about the world’s population levels, and more importantly, the
population levels that our planet can sustain.

Now, there are a number of problems with the OPT. They have a message, an important message, so they have a great website and blog, right? Wrong. They have a lame online presence. Their blog
has 3 posts. They haven’t blogged at all for Blog Action Day. It might
be a resource issue, but I think they simply don’t get it.

They can’t rely on convincing politicians and then expecting the
politicians to do the driving. The vast majority of politicians want
one thing above all others, power, they want to be elected. If saying
“the sky is blue” made them unelectable, they wouldn’t say it. They
can’t voice the theories and evidence of the OPT because they are too
“left field”, they would be branded anti-people, and would become
unelectable. They shouldn’t rely on the doctrinal systems to put their
message across either. Pretty much all western mainstream media outlets
follow the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model to the last detail.

The Internet would allow the OPT to sidestep the official channels.
The OPT cannot gain traction until it already has public mind-share.
Get public mind-share first, then the doctrinal systems will take note,
pressuring the politicians to act. It’s sad, but that’s how it works.

After what seems like an age, I have finally got an active Internet
connection at my new house. It did seem to take an frustratingly long
time. I notified my ISP (Zen) on
the 9th of August that I was moving, giving them the details. I moved
on the 15th, but it took until the 31st of August for the connection to
go live.

Now, my fledgling vaporware micro ISV has not got off the ground
yet, so it was inconvenient, but not a show stopper. But what if it
had? How on earth would I manage to continue running an Internet based
company whilst  completely offline?

This is the first time I’ve moved house with ADSL, so I’m curious to
know what your experiences are with moving broadband. Also -  if
you run an Internet based business, what did you do?