Categories
Random observations

Internet or internet?

I’ve always used a capital ‘I’ when writing about “the Internet” – the publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks. This is because I thought it was a proper noun, like “Shanghai”. It’s also useful, perhaps, to distinguish between the Internet and an internet, the latter being any internetworked set of computer networks. But the distinction between these terms can be made by looking at the definite (“the”) or indefinite (“an”) article preceding the word “internet”, so the capitalisation is redundant. Furthermore, there’s only one sky, but we don’t tend to capitalise the ‘s’. So, like many others, I’m making the switch to lowercase. I will use a lowercase ‘i’ whenever I write the word “internet” unless it’s in a title or at the beginning of a sentence. The same goes for “the web” and related terms.

How long until I start using lowercase ‘i’ for the first person singular pronoun like danah boyd (lowercase intended) does?

Categories
Innovation

Privacy in social software

If I was to enter your address and other personal details into an online application like Plaxo (an address book/calendar), and those details were leaked (or sold, for that matter – not that Plaxo would do that), how pissed would you be. Would you forgive me for storing your details in some third party database? If somebody used those leaked details to impersonate you, and they were caught, would I be liable for having entered your details into my online address book in the first place without getting your permission? I wouldn’t think twice about putting someone’s details into an electronic address book that resides on my computer or using an old-fashioned paper-based address book. But an online address book service could potentially store millions of address book entries put there by thousands of users, and it therefore becomes an attractive and worthwhile target for criminals.

Categories
Random observations

Microsoft Surface parody

What’s Microsoft Surface? It’s a big-assed table.

Instead of using one of today’s more popular compact devices to get directions to where you’re going, why not use a device the size of a small car?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Surface is kind of cool. But I liked the parody too.

Categories
Random observations

Our nursery

Well, I think the nursery is finished, at last. Walls, skirtings and cupboard painted, blinds and curtains installed, cot assembled. Now Karen’s just got to do her bit. ;-)

The nursery

Categories
Innovation

RUNES project: Fire in Tunnel scenario

The following video gives a taste of what ubiquitous computing researchers around the world are working towards. This video has particular relevance for the SAFE project, because it deals with an emergency scenario. It’s a professionally made video, and very interesting to watch. One hopes RUNES didn’t blow their whole budget on this! (To be fair, they’ve produced a bunch of code that can be downloaded from their web site.)

Categories
Random observations

This brought tears to my eyes