As if by magic, this article appeared on the BBC site today also decrying the lack of a viable electronic music distribution service.

The Register today reports that the RIAA is about to unleash a salvo of lawsuits against individual file “sharers” in an attempt to curb online swapping of music. While I am a fan of neither the RIAA nor theft of copyright material, I tend to think that they really have missed the point here.
Rather than expending all this effort on cracking down on file sharing over the last few years, I feel very strongly that they should have been working on providing people with a commercially viable alternative to Napster, Gnutella, etc. With a sensible pricing structure (iTunes strikes me as a bit expensive at 99c per track), a commercial online distribution system with a large library would no doubt draw a huge audience.
Digital distribution is the way of the future (or present if you consider how many people are allegedly downloading the latest CDs already) and the quicker the RIAA gets onboard and offers a compelling product, the better.

The BBC today reports an interesting discovery. Apparently the early church may have been given a helping hand by a explosive “act of God” in the 4th century.

I reached a milestone this week – for the first time ever, I had a day when I received over 200 spam messages on my home email accounts (2 of them combined). This translates to around 98% of my email and I would be a lot happier if these messages were never sent. Thankfully, however, it’s not too much of a problem for me now thanks to a rather good anti-spam tool I’ve been using.
I have been running Cloudmark’s SpamNet since early in its beta program and find that it catches around 90% of my junk mail. More importantly, though, I have NEVER seen an email I wanted to receive misclassified as spam (something that I definitely can’t say about the useless filters built into Microsoft Outlook. SpamNet was free until recently but now it’s $1.99 a month but well worth the price as far as I am concerned.
SpamNet is a client-based tool so I still have to download all the crud before it will filter it for me. With broadband, that’s not a problem but I dread the thought of having to move back to dial-up when we move to the DSL-challenged area of south Austin next year

Although we didn’t stay up until midnight yesterday and don wizard outfits to head to the book store, Nikki and I did pick up a copy of the latest Harry Potter book early on Saturday morning (having reserved it a few weeks ago at our local Borders where, allegedly, they had taken 1000 orders). During the long, dark, sleepless times of Cameron’s colic 3 and a half years ago, the first Harry Potter book provided some escape for us. During the 30 scream-free minutes while Cameron nursed late in the evening, we would read aloud from the book.
After the colic ended, we continued the tradition, reading one chapter each evening. As late starters, we got through the first 3 books pretty quickly but had to wait for number 4 (which arrived by special delivery from Amazon on the morning of its publication) and number 5.
Last night saw the start of another 38 nights of Potter. Things look good with dementors appearing in chapter one. More news in a month or so once we are finished…..

Yahoo yesterday reported a story about a Hungarian company’s unsuccessful attempt to register as an X-Prize competitor. Gravity Control Technologies’ plan sounds fascinating but I am wondering how they managed to keep such a fundamentally important breakthrough to themselves? If they intend having a usable vehicle by 2012, one must assume that the underlying technology is pretty well developed by now? I hope I’m wrong but I see a bit of a credibility problem here.

I have huge respect for Burt Rutan. His bid to win the X-Prize which is currently the talk of many newstand mags (Popular Science and Wired both have major articles this month) is just the latest in a long string of truly inspirational aircraft designs. Rutan’s engineering solutions are perfect examples of not being confined by convention – true “thinking out of the box” designs.

Some of the other competitors may have a longer pedigree as far as space launch systems are concerned by my money is on Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites.

Another story involving the Boy Scouts of America’s attitude towards openly gay members appeared in the
Austin American-Statesman this week. As a youngster, I was a member of both the Cubs and Scouts in the UK and, as far as I can remember, there is nothing in the program which relies upon heterosexuality. Come to that, when I started at the age of 6, sexuality was a completely alien concept. Why, all of a sudden, therefore, has it become important?

I would hope that the Boy Scouts of America would expell anyone shown to be a real threat to children, regardless of that person’s sexuality. No doubt they would argue that any homosexual is a moral threat to the boys in the organisation (a view I disagree with) but, assuming this is the case, why am I not reading more stories about adulterers and cheats being expelled?

Aside from general family news, I expect most of anything I post will likely involve one or more of the following topics:

Digital TV systems and regulations (given that I write software for these)

Web site design (given that I do this in my spare time)

Digital rights management (given that there are some really daft ideas going around these days that, unfortunately, may even end up as laws).

Linux (given that I have a new Linux PC and am enjoying learning something brand new even though the problems are very frustrating).

Photography (given that I am an Adobe Photoshop junkie – if only digital had hit the mainstream 3 years earlier, I could have saved $1000s on the darkroom I built into the house!).

UK/US stuff (given that I am a Scot living in Texas).

I’ll try to post something every day. Let’s see how I get on.

My web time is pretty limited these days with 2 small children in the house and a busy day job. From the spare time I do have, take out the time I need to spend updating my “real” clients’ sites (you can find my web portfolio here and there is pretty much no time left to update any of my own sites. Why start a new one, then, you are probably asking?

The advantage of the blog over my other sites is that I can update is really quickly. No need to fire up GoLive, muck with FTP, etc. Hopefully, this will allow me to keep the information fresh (unlike my personal homepage which is probably the most out of date site I am responsible for).

One other plus to me is that it gives me a public platform to vent frustrations, share opinions and solicit feedback (hopefully). For this, though, I need to persuade a few people outside this house to actually read it….