a lot of stuff and nonsense from eclectech

Someone just posted some spam in the comments of an old post and it was emailed to me.

It reminded me that I had a blog so I popped over to have a look. It is older than I realised.

I will muse, and decide whether to abandon it or try and make use of it again.

I think I will try to keep it going.

Have a shocked and dizzy pom pom while I think about it...

Labels: blether

Oh my, I have somewhat abandoned this poor blog recently. On the plus side, I have been animating. You can see our new piece below, made for the TUC's Rights for Interns campaign.

Labels: flash animation

Have a good one. See you in 2010.

Labels: festive

A new animation. Hooray! This one was started months ago, I just struggled to find time to get it finished with The Techling and work projects taking so much of my time. Fortunately work is finally under control, and with eclectech.co.uk's 9th birthday I had the motivation to get my head down and finish it. It's called Petit Chaton, the song is by The Swings and it was just perfect for animating. Enjoy.

Labels: flash animation, mr and mrs swing, video

Aside from a few lines on twitter, a couple of new silly dogs and some photos I've not been online much recently. Part has been having fun in the sun with Mr Tech and The Techling, the other part has been doing lots of work that will be going online over the next month or so. The first bit has been working on a web site for the new Rubik's puzzle, the Rubik's 360. The best bit? Getting together top audio mangler Doghorse with 3D whizz Chris Ollis/Happy Toast to make this fantastic launch animation; Twisted Thinking (360).



The worse bit? The fact that I'm just as rubbish at the 360 as I am the cube. I'm not the most patient person with puzzles :)

Labels: neat links, video

Hysterical new site online today from Phorm, a corporation behaving like a small child in a playground calling people names. The people they're calling names include the Open Rights Group, Alexander “The Angry Activist” Hanff and, well, have a look yourself here... phoolish anti-anti-Phorm site.

I don't have time to have the full rant I'd like to have here, but how a company that gathered information about individuals' web activity without getting their permission can call those complaining about it 'privacy pirates' is incomprehensible to me.

There was some research done recently* which showed that you could identify a large number of people from their surfing habits and searches; you don't need their IP address or other standard personally identifiable information, you just need to know that the web sites were visited and searches were performed by one individual. Think about what you search for and where you go online... do they give hints about who you are? I'll put my hand up here and say I Google my own name (both real and online pseudonymns) and look for information about local events and shops and a ton of other stuff that could tell you alot about me. Tie that together with a Facebook or similar profile and you're away...

Anyhow, more reasoned pieces will appear elsewhere I'm sure but in the meantime have some related links...

EC starts legal action over Phorm
Home Office 'colluded with Phorm'
Phorm: Does its stroppy campaign site signal the beginning of the end?
Phorm chief labels critics 'serial agitators'
What the Open Rights Group have to say about Phorm.

* reference will follow when I can find the thing, sorry!**

** Found it. De-anonymizing Social Networks. There's a news report about it at the BBC too.

Labels: disgruntled, news links, open rights group

I've been having a delve up at archive.org. I like making odd little loops from film clips (with a few additions of course) and they have a number public domain films to explore. Someone pointed me at Freaks which has been a suitably rich source of interesting moments.

I totally messed up the placement of the eyes in the top piece, but decided I rather liked their ominous floating so I've kept them.

As you can see from the sidebar I've been toying with Twitter recently too. I'm not a reliable blogger. Every now and then I get the urge but I'm fairly busy, will tend to choose pictures over words, and my recent blogging performance has been poor to say the least so... maybe something that only lets you write 140 characters will be better suited. If nothing else it's a way to get something changing here. Anyhow, if you're a twitter type you can follow* me here.

A quick couple of links before I head back to film mangling...
ID cards are here but no-one in the UK can read them. Oh, good grief.
390,000 to access child database . Well, I suppose all their data is already out there after the government lost all the child benefit details, so maybe I'm being alarmist thinking this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Government plans travel database . This Government has got to go. I don't like the alternatives, but really...

* Something rather stalkerish about it really, isn't there? Hmm.

Labels: flash animation, open rights group

A short, snappy, funky, punky animation of festive frustrations.



Hmm, looking back over the last year I'm barely managing one post a month. Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of it all again next year. It's been a year of changes for me, so I'll have to see how it settles.

In the meantime I'll just have to keep battling against the plastic tat.

Labels: flash animation

Happy holidays and all that.

Love e. x

Labels: blether

A little something I made earlier in the year with DogHorse, only just released to go online along with the new Worksmart toolkit.

Labels: flash animation

The Open Rights Group is 3.
This is a good thing.
You can read about what they've been up to here.

UK organisations keep having problems protecting your data.
This is a bad thing*.
You can read about some of them here.

* Yes. Even when it's the BNP. Guilty schadenfreude aside, I can't pick when to apply my principles. If I say it's OK because it's the BNP and I don't like them, I lose the argument when someone who doesn't like me (or what I stand for) does the same. Bah.

Labels: blether, open rights group

It's finished! An animation for a delightful ditty about the database state from Mr Mushroom.

Watch The Database Rag!

Labels: flash animation, NO2ID, open rights group

... featuring Mushroom the Marmot here, but as it's running a little late I thought I'd spend 10 minutes clearing the rest of my bookmarks out. It's a little bit of a "I'm back online" frenzy from my point of view.

First up, I do rather like the atheist adverts being run on London buses, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." A worthy message and a nice change. I also found this photo great. Well, that's not quite right, I can't bear the hatred shown in the demos, but the protest placard is wonderful. Hooray for that.

I've had a big moan in the past about the quality of comments on YouTube. This Firefox plugin was obviously made for me. Fantastic.

This is definitely the best BBC headline in a long time... Military penguin becomes a 'Sir'. Frankly all a bit nuts, but still a great headline. A slightly sadder headline involves my first penguin love. Berke Breathed has said goodbye to Opus. Again. This time for good it seems. It's a bit of an odd one for me. I've not kept up with the recent Opus cartoons, to me he belongs to the eighties when, along with Calvin and Hobbes, he was my cartoon favourite but I've always intended to catch up. There's something sad about knowing he's gone for good. On the plus side Mr Breathed is about to delve further into kids books, and as a new parent this makes me quite happy. I can't express how much I'm looking forward to reading "A wish for wings that work" to the techling this Christmas.

More books... I strongly recommend Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. I've always enjoyed the blog, but I 've just finished the book and it's tops. Well written, entertaining and informative. A great defense against the horror of "well I read in the newspaper that..." He also mentions me. I was quite chuffed about that. Unfortunately it was because that awful poo woman threatened to sue me, but he called me funny too. Rah!

Finally, Scaryduck has rewritten Romeo and Juliet in txt speak.

Jlt: Rmo Rmo WTF art thou Rmo?
Rmo: Here 4 am I art LOL
Jlt: Oh, you is so lush

Read it!

Back tomorrow with Mushroom the musical marmot in action.

Labels: blether, neat links, news links, penguin joy, poo woman

I'm making a new animation about the UK government's frenzy to put every bit of information they can get their hands on in a database before leaving it scattered around the country, so it seems like a good point to clear out my bookmarks on this topic.

First up, can I just point out how irritated I am that just as we put together a spoof site (assuming that a site the government spent 70-odd grand on would be around for a while) the original site gets pulled. Apparently the community has now finished. Pfft!

So, now a few examples of why I don't trust them with my data...

UK gov't loses 4 million citizens' personal info
‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes
Firm 'broke rules' over data loss
Personnel records stolen from MoD
Probe into data left in car park
Malicious gossip could cost you your job
The verdict is out on DNA profiles

However, despite all the data losses and incompetence apparently people 'can't wait for ID cards'*. Yes dear, of course. Let's hope that fingerprints aren't replied on too much, because it looks like Jacqui's are about to become public. Arf!

Finally, US elections and all that. Splendid. Have a dancing Obama to represent my cautious optimism.

* Update: I rather like the Daily Mash's take on this.

Labels: disgruntled, news links, NO2ID, open rights group