The Googlisation of Surveillance: The UK Communications Data Bill

June 7, 2013

There is a belief that democracies respect the rights of their citizens. Well, they don't. There is a great deal of cant written about that but even the democratic modern state has become so big, so intrusive and utterly overbearing that its cancerous tentacles have insinuated themselves into every orifice of the body politic. No sooner has one threat to personal and internet freedom receded than another springs up like proverbial dragon's teeth. One of Hecate's children of the night has been brewing for a while and is set to make its way onto the statute book here in the UK.

A very tiny GIS

March 5, 2013

quickplot is a fast, interactive 2-D plotter. All it needs to do its job is a text file with x and y points in a list. If those points are longitude and latitude in decimal degrees, quickplot works like a simple GIS program, with some surprising capabilities.

This article explains how I set up quickplot to do species mapping for Australia. For most of my mapping work I use qgis and Google Maps/Earth, but quickplot is handy for quickly making simple maps and zooming in on details. With an executable size of only 453 kb, quickplot is the tiniest and fastest GIS I know.

Save time with AWK print

May 30, 2013

Since discovering AWK last year I've been using it regularly with tables of data. It seems like everything I do with those tables is faster and easier with AWK on the command line than the same jobs would be with spreadsheet software.

Below are a couple of examples that demonstrate the handiness of the print command in AWK. If you've never used AWK before, see the links at the end of the article for a quick introduction to the basics.

MegaGlest: a fantastic, free software strategy 3D game

February 4, 2012

When the Glest team started "Glest" as a college project a few years ago, they probably didn't expect their game to go such a long way. While "Glest" stopped being developed a couple of years ago in 2009, it was forked in two different projects: GAE (Glest Advanced Engine) and MegaGlest (the game I am reviewing in this article). So, how is it? The answer is simple: this game is incredible, polished, enjoyable, addictive, smart, and plain simply fantastic.

Zurmo, the free CRM: Interview with Ray Stoeckicht

February 6, 2013

I had the privilege to interview Ray Stoeckicht, the co-founder of an exciting new free software/open souce company creating Zurmo. Zurmo is a "social CRM": a program aimed at making CRM fun (if you know something about CRM, you will know that the word "fun" never seems to associate with CRM).

The Bizarre Cathedral - 100

October 13, 2011

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Using kdesvn on a multimedia project

March 9, 2013

This has been a very busy year for our "Lunatics" project (a free-film/free-culture animated web series about the first settlers on the Moon). As with many software projects, we keep our assets in a version-control system -- specifically "Subversion". In principle, Subversion does everything we need. The command line interface, however, does not make the right things easy for us (it's far too obsessed with parsing text files, which are incidental to our project, and it balks when given binary data files (which are essential). To keep a handle on the file tree, we need something a little smarter, and I've recently adopted "kdesvn" to do that job. This seems to solve the biggest annoyances.

Great book giveaway from Packt Publishing: GIMP Starter Guide

May 23, 2013

If you want to learn how to use GIMP, this is your chance to win a book that will teach you just that!

Packt made available 5 copies of the great book GIMP Starter Guide by Fazreil Amreen.

In order to win it, all you have to do is write a comment to this article listing all the typos you can find in this article: Ubuntu Touch: the (natural) next step in personal computing?. .