Rob Bevan

You can hear the shout of outrage from an attendant at Angel station as the young Norwegian casually straps on his skis and begins a terrifying descent of the London tube network's highest escalator with a camera strapped to his head. What London Underground called a "dangerous, stupid and irresponsible" stunt has, predictably, become the latest YouTube sensation, generating 2,000 views every hour yesterday. The skier, a publicity-shy Norwegian in his 20s, whom friends say is called Arild, hurtles down the 90-metre up escalator in north London, skidding safely to a halt at the bottom to the applause of passersby.

To celebrate the success of the PlayTime event and continue Tim Wright’s mission to play golf on the moon (with David Bowie), XPT is offering a iPod Shuffle to the person who comes up with the best photographic simulation of a particular aspect of the the 30-year plan. By concretising events and situations in a series of manipulated images, we are making the whole project more real, more achievable. Simulation=Solution.

A few weeks on, I’m finally getting around to uploading my slides from my PlayTime presentation, Playing with Pictures (it’s a 20MB+ PDF file, exported from Keynote). I was intending to annotate these so that they’d make more sense to someone who weren’t at my session, but I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll do this. This gist of it however was this: Photo manipulation has always had a bit of a bad name, and even today we’re still worried that adding, removing or modifying parts of a photographic image detract from photography’s perceived ability to show us the truth.

Bruce Sterling is doing the rounds in London at the moment: I caught him on Monday at a New Statesman event upstairs at the Grouse and Claret. Bruce gave a highly entertaining ‘cyberpunk exegesis’ of a bewildering array of contemporary issues and ideas: the UK’s surveillance culture, Web 2.0, Climate Change and of course the Internet of Things to name just a few. Good ‘names’ for things seem more important than ever now: Bruce mentioned that Tim O’Reilly – who coined the term Web 2.

Nokia Research recently announced the Apache webserver had been ported to run on S60 phones (see my earlier post). The plan had been to “bring a full-fledged webserver to S60 and to make a webserver running on a mobile phone accessible from the Internet using any web browser”. Now the client binary is available for download and you can sign up for an account on Nokia’s gateway and try this for yourself.

45 Years ago today, on April 12th 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space. On the same day, 25 years ago, John Young and Robert Crippen flew the first Space Shuttle flight to orbit. Today we celebrate!

I was invited today by one of my clients – The Climate Group – to watch Al Gore give his presentation on Climate Change at the bfi London IMAX Cinema. Gore’s presentation is pretty well covered elsewhere, so I’m not even going to try and summarise it here (it was too dark to take notes and besides I’m a lousy note-taker anyway). Suffice to say for someone who has a reputation for being boring, he’s both funny and extremely passionate about our need to find a common moral purpose to deal with this “planetary emergency”.

From del.ico.us/blog: This is a big step for del.icio.us, but one that I hope will make it more useful. Because del.icio.us is all about sharing and we don’t want to discourage that, we will be watching how this feature impacts the community and will also be experimenting a bit with the UI over the next few weeks.

About the only good thing to result from the theft of my bag just before Christmas was replacing my ageing original 1G iPod with a sleek new black 5G video iPod (whoever thought that glossy white ‘iBook’ look was a good idea?). Actually that’s not strictly true: I’ve effectively ‘upgraded’ many of my closest and most familiar possessions at the cost of many hours cancelling credit cards, talking to insurers and replacing missing Christmas gifts.

Like most of the UK’s web development community I was at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps summit a couple of weeks ago. A couple of highlights for me were Tom Coates’ wonderfully lucid and entertaining synthesis of all things Web 2.0 (see also Jeremy Zawodny’s annotations of Tom’s slides) and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails ‘sermon’. Although I’ve been working with Rails intermittently for at least eighteen months I’ve never seen David speak and it had never really occurred to me before just how Scandinavian Rails is: minimal, beautifully designed and good for the soul.

These images from today’s 4x10km Men’s relay. (FilmLoop is a free photo broadcasting (“photocasting”) network that presents pictures in a “Loop” player on your desktop.)