I have been putting photos up here for a while now so it might be interesting to someone…

The arrest of Azhar Ahmed raises real concerns about what any of us can say online. It seem that we live in a time when any expression of a view that is different from those in power can lead to your arrest and imprisonment. Our use of language has to be guarded, to avoid raising suspicion.

To circumvent these restrictions I feel it is important to develop new ways of communicating which allow us to express opinions which differ from the authorities, whist appearing to toe the line. How about this:

“!The arrest of Azhar Ahmed was entirely justified and fair.”

The insertion of an exclamation point before a statement is a commonly used convention in programming languages, to negate the statement it precedes. Thus, with this understanding, the comment above can be read to mean:

“The arrest of Azhar Ahmed was NOT entirely justified and fair”.

The advantage of this form of communication is that it allows you to express opinions which differ from those which are found acceptable by the authorities, without actually expressing them at all. It could easily be argued that the “!” was a typographic error, or was intended to be appended to the preceding sentence; thus the true intention of the phrase can only be induced by the context in which it is used. This is a great advantage when one wishes to express a “thought crime”.

For a long time we kept photos of our trails off the internet because we didn’t want too many kids knowing about them, but I think it’s fairly safe to say that everyone who lives within 20 miles and cares, now knows about them; they are tumbled down and gradually washing away. These photos document the trails from their inception, to their pinacle in around 2007-2008. If you are one of the ungrateful kids who currently trashes these jumps, you can take a look at what you are missing, and all the hard work that you have destroyed:

The Molehills 2004 – 20??

I am enjoying my new copy of the land magazine!

With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see how often our fathers were enslaved; to land barons, or kings. The systems on enslavement we see in history are transparent, and looking back, you wonder why the peasants put up with it. Why di they allow themselves to be enslaved?

What is harder to perceive is that the same forces still operate in our society (and in all societies as far as I know). In the west we may consider ourselves to be free – we are free to chose where we live, and what employment we take, for example. However, we are not free to chose whether we participate in this system.

Yes you can chose what house you live in, and whether to rent it or buy it, but you cannot make a housing choice that doesn’t require you to service it with large monthly sums of money, which also enslaves you to a job. Yes, you can chose who you work for, but you cannot chose not to work at all.

The trick of the capitalist system is to remove a figurehead from the position of “master”. None of us are slaves to another person directly, we are slaves to a system. This illusion of freedom keeps those who are enslaved under control much more effectively than a system where the enslaved are aware of their slavery. The illusion of freedom keeps the slaves in subservience.

True freedom is free access to the resources necessary for life: water, food, and shelter; in short access to land. It is with access to these resources and the freedom to use them, that one can provide for the basics of life. If one can provide for these needs, then one is no longer required to work for shelter, or food.

Access to land is kept out of the grasp of ordinary working people for this very reason. In the UK this is what the planning system is designed to do – yes farm land itself is not vastly expensive, but access to this land to provide for the basic needs of life is prohibited – homes are required to be sited on building land for example.

The rights of ordinary people to provide for themselves from the natural resources around them have been taken away, thus enslaving them to a system which is designed to generate more wealth for the wealthy.

None is more enslaved than the slave who believes himself to be free

A roe deer in the woods today. I see these most times I go into the woods next to our house. My mother says she never sees them but I guess she is just too noisy.

Roe deer rut in the summer but the embryo doesn’t implant until around this time of year, to delay the birth until the summer months when food is plentiful.

This is a good time of year to see deer as there isn’t as much cover.

Most major news sources today are reporting the death of Sean Hoare, a man who exposed the illegal means that News International allegedly used to break stories. They all report the police claim that his death is “unexplained but not suspicious”. (e.g. the BBC).

This is scary. The top two people of the Metropolitan police force have just quit over this scandal; how can we believe a word the police say, especially when phrases like this make absolutely no sense.

The timing of Sean Hoare’s death is clearly suspicious – could it have come at a better time for News International? (Well clearly yes, last week would have been preferable, but you know what I mean). How can the police, unable to provide any explanation for the death of a man in his mid 40s in his own home, say that it’s not suspicious?

I have no idea how or why Sean Hoare is dead, but I can safely say that I am definitely suspicious…

When you add an image in your tumblog one of the options to align it is “middle”. Those who know HTML will know that this align attribute has been depreciated, but the “middle” declaration is for centering vertically not horizontally. The user in question wanted just the images, not the text to be centered, and I wanted to try and achieve this without forcing them to edit classes or anything complicated. You might have thought that adding this to the CSS this would do the job:

p img {margin: 0 auto;}

but also no. Images are inline elements so they don’t understand the margin. However this will fix that:

p img {display:block;margin: 0 auto;}

Hope this helps someone!

Today I stumbled across an interesting feature of flash and CSS3 that I thought might be interesting to someone.

If you have ever done much work embedding flash onto a website you will have come across the wmode parameter. If you set wmode=”transparent” then the swf file you include will behave properly and obey your stacking (z-index) commands.

Today I discovered that this parameter also allows you to apply CSS3 border-radius to a container of a flash movie – if your swf takes the same amount of space as its container, then if you apply a border radius to the container if will also crop the swf.

I couldn’t find that documented anywhere, so I hope it helps someone.

Last friday I went to the full frontal javascript conference, which was really good. One of the speakers was Seb Lee Delisle who showed us some nice animation effects with particles using canvas.

This got me thinking – I thought that same thing could be achieved in CSS, without any javascript, so I gave it ago. This was the best I could do:

http://scruffian.com/css3fun/ [will only work on the latest version of Safari on Snow Leopard].

It’s pretty similar – a few differences, but close enough. The nice thing about this is that it doesn’t use any images or javascript – it’s just pure CSS!

It’s quite amazing what you can achieve with CSS, of course at the moment this is only in bleeding edge browsers, but hopefully this stuff will be standardised. I also made a couple of other interesting variations:

bubbles | planets