Archive for February, 2006

Podbop

Friday, February 24th, 2006

Podbop is an interesting idea. I guess you could call it a variation on ‘geopodcasting’ — they podcast bands that are playing in your town in the next few months. Unfortunately it’s US-only at the moment. It also relies on bands having MP3s available on their websites. However, I would imagine that is usually the case with with smaller bands. If it’s bigger acts you want to go and see you probably don’t need to hear a podcast to find out what they sound like …

Guantanamo

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

It’s nice to see <a href="http://news.bbc .co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4741780.stm”>Lord Falconer, Lord Goldsmith and Peter Hain condemning the Guantanamo camp. What a shame it’s taken them four years to get round to this! Of course Tony Blair still refuses to openly condemn the U.S. actions here, preferring only to call the camp an ‘anomaly’. Hain claims this is ‘part of a general approach to speak quietly to the Americans and not make big public statements’.

Phil points to a John Simpson piece that claims that only about 5% of the prisoners in Guantanamo were actually captured by the Americans. Simpson doesn’t cite his source other than to say ‘a thorough analysis by an American law professor’, so he won’t be getting a good grade for this essay, but the actual report appears to be here. The policy of internment for terrorists is of doubtful efficacy at the best of times, but when you have little reason to suppose that the majority of the people detained really are terrorists it becomes clearer than ever that this is purely a PR exercise for domestic consumption. The sad thing is that it appears to have worked for Bush.

Bogons

Wednesday, February 15th, 2006

Had my first encounter with Bogons while setting up <a href="http://wordpress .org”>WordPress.

Installing WordPress was fairly easy but I couldn’t work out why the server could only be seen from certain parts of the network. Luckily David managed to put me straight. It turned out that lots of UK ADSL networks were getting blocked by some over-zealous bogon checking on the firewall. Bogons are basically ‘bogus’ network addresses, addresses that are not supposed to be valid. The problem with blocking bogons is that new internet addresses are constantly being allocated, so addresses that are bogus at one point become valid later.