I’ve just returned from the 2004 Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. It’s a huge five day event with camping, markets, arts and crafts, standing in muddy fields, getting rained on and, most importantly, about 12 stages with three days of live music.

The full photo gallery gives the story of how I spent my time. It was a fantastic time, I managed to get over the jet lag and see most of the bands I wanted to see. Highlights included Zero 7, Ocean Colour Scene’s acoustic set and Muse whose dramatic music is perfect for a big festival finale.

But what I really want to talk about here is the politics of Glastonbury. I feel somewhat out of place at the festival. I’m a libertarian, pro-free-market, pro-capitalism, pro-globalisation, pro-Iraq-war type of person, and Glastonbury is ostensibly all socialism, environmentalism, anti-globalisation, anti-war-ism, anti-capitalism and anti-anything-to-do-with-the-West-ism. I’m everything they hate and they’re everything I hate. But I did my best to subvert them with my own propaganda, as the photos here show.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 12:46 AM EDT

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Christopher Hitchens dismantles Michael Moore’s latest film, Farenheit 9/11, over at MSN. Link via Gabriel Syme. I have already made a list of other sites de-bunking Moore.

I’m off to the Glastonbury Festival tomorrow (I’m planning to subvert it by wearing various not-quite-the-Glastonbury-message T-shirts), so I’ll be quiet here for a few days.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 10:02 PM EDT

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See the captures from the video I took.

Having learnt at 11.30pm local time that the first private manned space flight was due to take place in Mojave — 130 miles north of LA — the next day at 6.30am, I quickly packed and set the alarm for 3am. It was a bit mad, especially considering I had a 3.30pm flight from LAX to catch, but these opportunities don’t come along very often.

The drive to Mojave was good. It was very scenic watching the sun come up over the desert, mountains silhouetted against the horizon, and I made good time, taking just two hours and arriving in time to join the long queue waiting to get into the airport. I parked at 6.30 on the dot and luckily didn’t miss anything. The crowd was bigger than I expected, I estimate at least 10,000 people had gathered to watch, lining up along the runway. I stood at the end near the hangar.

There was a PA system on which could be heard explanations of what was going on and interveiws with the people involved, from Scaled Composites, XCOR and even Guiness World Records. Interestingly, many of the interviewees remarked that the hardest thing about the project was not the engineering or the technology, but the FAA regulations. The biggest barrier to a non-government run space mission was government. This didn’t come as much of a surprise to me.

Indeed, what was really special about this event was the private-ness of it. Everything I saw that day was brought about by hard-working entrepeneurs.

The events kicked off with the small propellor chase plane taxiing down the runway, followed shortly by White Knight with Spaceship One attached underneath. The atmosphere was electric, with much cheering and whooping from the crowd. Shortly after the chase plane took off and began circling, possibly to double-check wind conditions or maybe just waiting for the pre-flight checks going on below. Next White Knight took off, followed by another strange looking, Rutan designed chase plane, and began its hour long ascent to the height at which Spaceship One is launched (somewhere around 57,000 feet, if I remember correctly).

During this time we waited under the desert sun, watching the aircraft. After about fifteen minutes another chase plane, a tiny jet, took off. We were informed via the PA that this one would be following when Spaceship One detached, and that since it was a faster plane it could wait longer before taking off. After a while it became hard to see the aircraft, especially when they flew close to the sun. But the crowd helped - there were always people looking and pointing in the right direction and I could see one absurdly large telephoto lens that was constantly trained into the sky, providing a useful cue. When the craft disappeared from view completely, I became concerned that I wouldn’t be able to see the launch, but I needn’t have worried.

The launch took place not far (but high above) the airport. There was a flash and a bright streak across the sky, met with great appreciation from the crowd. It was fantastic to see; up there was 60-year-old test pilot — no, astronaut — Mike Melville, in a tiny craft, flying into space!

Once the rocket burn was over, the craft could not be seen. Everyone waited excitedly trying to spot its approach. I heard some people saying that they had heard a sonic boom, but, much like the earthquake that my colleages in Newport Beach felt earlier in the week, I detected nothing. Then there was a sparkle in the sky, and then all four vehicles could be made out. Spaceship One glided in and touched down. Mike was safely back on the ground.

Now much more nimble (for its lightened load) White Knight did a fly by, turning sharply away from the crowd with an immense roar from its engines. After this I decided I had to head for the exit — I would have loved to have stayed to soak up the atmosphere for longer, but unfortunately there was a plane to catch and I didn’t want to get involved with the thousands of cars all trying to leave at the same time. As I walked back to my car, I turned round just in time to see, but not to photograph, a formation flyby by the remaining aircraft.

It had been a wonderful couple of hours in Mojave, and now I headed across the desert for home.

See Dale Amon’s inside coverage over at Samizdata (in several separate articles, so keep clicking on the next article link). Don’t miss the one about the importance of this event and the one with some clarification of things reported in the media.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News, Travel at 12:06 PM EDT

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CNN are reporting that Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites Spaceship One is due to make its first space flight tomorrow at 6.30am Pacific time. What’s particularly exciting about this is that it’s paid for entirely with private money. This could be the dawn of a new age of private space travel. Let’s hope so — I want to go to the moon before I die!

Dale Amon has been covering Scaled Composites’ progress since day one.

“I think it is time that the commercial guys get aggresssive with space flight, rather than wait for Nasa.” — Burt Rutan.

“It’s quicker than most fighters and a nervous little airplane.” — Test pilot.

Interesting fact: Much of the money has come from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Oh no! Mojave is two and a half hours’ drive from where I am… What are the chances I can get there in time to watch the flight, and then get back for my return flight…?

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 6:29 AM EDT

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Update: I’m slowly adding photos from this trip.

I’m typing this from my hotel room in Newport Beach, California, just outside of Los Angeles. I’ve been here on business since Sunday night. I’ve never visited the West coast of the USA before, so I jumped at the chance of coming.

The first thing that struck me was the view out of the plane window from about half an hour before we landed. After hours of emptiness in the form of Greenland, New Foundland and the Rockies, the urban vastness of LA was staggering. It just goes on and on, in its fractal grid pattern, for mile after mile. You can drive along ten lane freeways for hours and see nothing but city. The grid just stretches away in every direction.

But that’s not to say it’s boring - far from it. I have done very little sightseeing so far, but there are distinct parts of town that have their own character. Newport Beach, where I live and work, is an affluent area with hotels and business parks near where I am, and marinas, beaches, bars and restaurants closer to the sea. Despite being connected physically to LA by concrete sprawl, it is quite separate in character. Rudendo Beach where some of my colleages are staying, is genuinely a part of LA, but from what I’ve seen of it it doesn’t feel like it’s part of a vast city.

I’m enjoying staying in America partly because it’s an escape from the anti-Americanism I’m bombarded with at home. I like that you can drive around in an absurd, gas guzzling truck if you want. That there are a million types of fast food restaurant, and yet more extremely good and extremely affordable (especially when the company is paying) proper restaurants. I like that nobody here complains about these things, and I like the constant daily reminder that Americans are well balanced, well educated, friendly, helpful people - not the fat, ignorant hill-billies many Europeans like to believe they are.

I’ve noticed that the media is much more diverse here than back home. The first radio station I tuned to when driving from the airport had a talk show in which the host described the French as cowardly and the UN as ineffectual. This is just not something people say in public in the UK! Newspapers and news programmes routinely speak of cutting government spending (especially when talking about Reagan, as they do so much lately). When was the last time the BBC called for cutting government spending as something that could ever seriously be considered?

I’m also struck by how street savvy you have to be to live here. Everywhere you turn people are trying to sell you useless products, or rip you off with get rich/healthy quick schemes. I think many brits would not be able to cope, coddled as they are by the nanny state, they would soon be clamouring for protection if they planned on staying longer than a short visit. People here expect solve their own problems, they don’t go running to the government every five minutes. Political talk seems more about economic and foreign policy, and less about what new legislation needs to be brought in.

And America feels more like a foreign country than I expect it to; more foreign than it has any right to feel being an English speaking country. I’ve noticed this on previous trips too. Thousands of everyday things are different in tiny ways - from the design of light switches, fixtures and fittings and toilets, to fire hydrants and road junctions. The same problems are solved in slightly different ways.

All this makes it a challenging, interesting, exciting place to be.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Travel at 6:51 AM EDT

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Unfortunately I am out of the country for two weeks, and since I had very little notice and the inefficient local government requires about a month’s notice before it can arrange anything like proxy or postal voting, I’ll be missing out on my chance to register my distaste for the European project.

The reason you should vote UKIP is simple. The EU is a corrupt bureaucracy that will eventually bring the UK’s economy down to the level of the rest of Europe if left unchecked. It represents yet more centralisation and regulation of our daily lives by ever more distant and unaccountable politicians. Voting UKIP is just a means of protest; I in no way agree with all their policies, especially their immigration policy which I strongly dislike. And UKIP are unlikely to win anything significant. But there is the hope that every UKIP vote will count towards changing the other parties’ stance on Europe - which has to be a good thing.

Too many people I speak to think that the EU has some role in keeping Europe peaceful and in enabling free trade and freedom of movement withing Europe, and therefore must in some way be a good thing. But it’s a combination of the memory of WWII and global communication that makes war in Europe all but impossible, and free trade and migration can equally be achieved via individual treaties between countries; thousands of expense claiming bureaucrats are not necessary for this. If anything, overcentralisation makes war and oppression more likely.

So do me a favour on Thursday - vote UKIP for me because I can’t.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 6:01 AM EDT

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The mainstream news media presents a very pessimistic view of the world. Being an optimist, I’m naturally skeptical of stories about doom and gloom apocalypse scenarios. Such stories are especially irksome when accompanied by calls for someone, usually at my expense, to Do Something About It.

I have just bought a couple of books that I plan to read in due course that for once present evidence that there is cause to be optimistic about the state of the world and where it is going. The first is In Defence of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg.

In chapter one, he explains how capitalism has improved the lives of even the poorest people.

The chorus of the debate on the market economy runs: “The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.” This statement is offered as a dictate of natural law, not as a thesis to be argued. But if we look beyond the catchy slogans and study what what has actually happened in the world, we find this thesis to be a half-truth. […] The poor have not, generally speaking, come to be worse off in recent decades. On the contrary, absolute poverty has diminished, and where it was quantitavely greatest–in Asia–many hundreds of millions of people who barely twenty years ago were struggling to make ends meet have begun to achieve a secure existence and even a modest degree of affluence.

Norberg goes on to give the example of the authors of On Asian Time: India, China, Japan 1966-1999, who on revisiting these places after thirty years discovered that where before they saw “poverty, abject misery and imminent disaster”, on returning they found that, “Mud huts have given way to brick buildings, wired up for electricity and sporting television aerials on their roofs.”

The second book I bought is The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. A former left-wing member of Greenpeace, he set out to study the statistics in order to discover the real state of the world. Using the same official figures used by the WWF, Greenpeace and the Worldwatch Institute, he finds that the air is in the developed world is getting less polluted, world forest cover increased between 1949 and 1994, people in the developing countries starving less, only 0.7 per-cent of species are due to go extinct in the next 50 years, and global warming…

…will not decrease food production, it will probably not increase storminess or the impact or the frequency of hurricanes, it will not increase the impact of malaria or indeed cause more deaths. It is even unlikely that it will cause more flood victims, because a much richer world will protect itself better.

So there you have it: the world is not coming to an end and everyone is getting richer. Don’t worry, be happy!

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 8:15 PM EDT

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I’m experimenting with a new concept in window managers, exemplified by WMI. The idea is that the window manager should manage the windows, not the user. So instead of a mess of overlapping frames that constantly need dragging around and resizing, the screen is divided into a set of non-overlapping frames.

The first program you run fills the whole screen. The next program you run fills the whole screen too, and switching between the two is achieved using a familiar tab representation. But now it is also possible to split the screen horizontally or vertically into frames. Each frame can contain one or more tabbed windows, be resized, and further sub-divided. Each window can be sent to an alternative frame.

The result is a very neat and tidy windowing system, with the added bonus that keyboard shortcuts become practical for moving windows around the screen. Typically I have the main applications such as a web browser and email on the left, and small windows containing shells and editors on the right, as shown in the screen shot.

WMI is still very new, and there are a few glitches, especially with applications that display a lot of dialog boxes. It’s a bit disconcerting when an “OK” box suddenly fills the whole screen, but thankfully it is possible to convert these boxes into traditional floating windows. I’m sure if I rummaged through the documentation I would find a way to make “floating” the default mode for new windows.

In any case, it’s a whole new, refreshing way of working with a PC, and all the more fun for it.

Posted by site admin as Open Source at 7:18 PM EDT

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