Day: 18 October 2009

The problem of the single story

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Such a great talk from TED about the problems of single stories. How they breed stereotypes and although stereotypes are not always bad, they are usually incomplete. I remember in Freedom writers, a good speech about how the Nazi's started printing cartoons of Jews in newspapers as a way to point out the differences between people. Its the undermining of people in stories which is the thing which holds us back.

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Second-Hand Sex Toy Competition

Sex toy 1 Sex Toy 2

Not the usual thing I have on my blog but I couldn't help but find this one funny and entertaining. Details for the competition is available on from McBirdie's Blog. Here's a bit to tempt you in…

Sure, money’s tight with the never-ending recession–everyone is trying to finally get on board with re-using, recycling, and giving things they own a whole new purpose in life. Why should sex toys be any different? Not only does it mean you’ve managed to find a new use for something, it’s…just darned funny to see a sex toy floating out in the world in a completely innocuous role.

So what we would like to do is see you use your sex toys in a way that amuses, confounds, or just darn tickles us. Whether you find that your vibrator makes for a great milk foamer or a string of anal beads make for a lovely necklace, take a picture and send it in. If you’re feeling especially creative, you can put together a video (no longer than 3 minutes, please–we have no kind of attention span).

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Don’t bring back the Bananas, please

bananas have split

I've been raving about the new kiwis, apples and limes innocent drink/smoothie for sometime. I'm not the biggest fan of Bananas and a smoothie without Bananas was always going to float my boat. Lovely drink and actually pretty good for you. Innocent drinks have been asking for feedback on this edition of there drinks, so I'm giving it two thumbs up. I've also learned if you mix it with a small amount of lime or apple vodka it makes a great little cocktail too. Not too much or it goes a little funky in texture.

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If bbc backstage had run hackday like this…

1st prize at Yahoo Hackday Taiwan?
The video was removed, so I had to replace it with a image from CocaChou

Found via VickyJo – Can you even imagine what would have happened if BBC Backstage ran a hackday/mashed or any kind of event involving poll dancers and strippers? Oh my goodness can you imagine the newspaper headlines, Eric Huggers apologizing to Mark Thompson, Mark Thompson apologizing to the Trust and the public. And of course I'd be fired and seeking employment elsewhere, maybe Yahoo would be the place to go. I know the culture is very different in Taiwan but as a global brand you've got to think about the reaction.

Seems Tuesday 20th October things have blown up. Not only have the videos been removed or made private but also there's a number of twitters talk about it and blog posts including from Cristano Betta and Simon Willison.

Yahoo finally feeling the pressure, tweeted. Hack Girls from Y!'s Taiwan event don't reflect our values. Was inappropriate, we regret offending anyone. We'll ensure won't happen again.

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Adobe FXG, WTF?

Adobe FXG is so wrong in so many ways, its untrue. When Microsoft decided to do there own xml vector format I was shaking my head but now Adobe's also doing the same my head is in my hands.

FXG 1.0 describes an XML-based graphics interchange format for the Flash Platform. FXG contains high-level graphical and text primitives that can be used to create, group, transform and visually modify basic vector and bitmap shapes. The FXG rendering model follows very closely the Flash Player 10 rendering model and exposes all graphics capabilities of the Flash platform as well as offering expandable support to accommodate future capabilities of the Flash Player.

When initial work on an XML-based graphics interchange format began, the natural first thought was to use SVG. However, there are key differences between SVG and Flash Player's graphics capabilities. These include core differences in SVG and Flash's rendering model with regards to filters, transforms and text. Additionally, the interchange format needed to be able to support future Flash Player features, which would not necessarily map to SVG features. As such, the decision was made to go with a new interchange format, FXG, instead of having a non-standard implementation of SVG. FXG does borrow from SVG whenever possible.

Aka, we see the need for a xml vector language but svg is already developed and we can't be bothered to change our flash engine to support it. Instead we want to write a spec around our already written code base and make you all adopt it. Well geez thanks Adobe. I really hope no one uses FXG, hopefully the lesson will get back to Adobe that they can't just stick opensource on a manipulated web standard and expect people to use it unless you make them do it in your own proprietary world (*cough* Actionscript). Thank goodness at least Google is backing open standards like SVG.

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