“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!” — @pauljchambers

Not only does this prosecution (taken by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), so supposedly ‘in the public interest’) represent a hideous misinterpretation of a joke, but also threatens our right to free speech.

There is no way that this tweet could be taken seriously. The tweet was posted in January, when Robin Hood airport was closed due to snow, and @pauljchambers was due to be flying out on holiday the next week. His tweet was meant in jest – he would have to take serious action if his flight was cancelled. (There’s a bit of a logical fallacy if blowing up an airport is your response to your flight being cancelled…)

The action taken by the CPS is most certainly not in the public interest. The cost to the police and CPS of arresting, gathering evidence and then taking out court proceedings is really not spending that can be justified on someone who made a joke on a micro-blogging service. More importantly the trial sets a precedent that is worrying – both for future possible CPS investigations, and private court cases against individuals who might have tweeted something offensive.

I’m not suggesting that people should tweet rude, potentially offensive or terrorist material as a matter of course, and before hitting ‘Tweet’ or sending a text to the service users should think about the content their sending. Most times I tweet or post to the Internet I go through a small and tortuous debate: What will people think? Will this make people unfollow me? Will new tweeps follow me if they read this? How might this affect my brand image? But there are times when you feel anger, a carelessness or just the need to say something; blogging – be it Twitter or any other social media service – services make the Internet the perfect space for this. Unfortunately hard-core terrorists do put content on the Internet too, and authorities will need to learn to establish between careless comment and serious threats better.

When people do tweet material that offends some, could be interpreted as offensive, or is terrorist or protests against a government or organisation, how do we deal with it? Personally – in my humble opinion – it is a violation of our human rights to be prevented from speaking our minds. People committing terrorist acts, whether it is our human right to carry them out or not, should be arrested and charged. And yes, this tweet constituted a potential terrorist act by our government’s laws. But this certainly was not terrorist in nature, for two reasons: 1) how many people planning to blow up airports post publicly about it? and 2) the context and humorous nature of the tweet make it clear that it was not threatening.

Having heard Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of civil liberties organisation Liberty, speak this week in Reading, it was made very clear to me that we really do need to protect our rights. Yes, people who are clearly terrorists need to be banged up, but when the authorities are banging people up or making their lives really difficult for simply saying things, well, our society is going somewhere wrong.

I think it’s time that we take a stand here; complain to the CPS, join a campaign against the trial, support the appeal for the @TwJokeTrialFund and support the protection of our civil liberties. If we don’t? Well, I don’t want a fine of £1000 and a Criminal Record for a tweet I write, and I’m sure you’d like the freedom to speak your mind – within reason, at least.

Showing the display

1. Connect your MacBook to the external display
2. Plug in your AC charger
3. Wait for the external display to show up.
4. Shut the MacBook lid and wait for it to sleep
5. Trigger the display to show up using your mouse/keyboard.
6. Activate InsomniaX

7. Remove the power cable.

This has the advantage of keeping the screen at full external display resolution and sleeping the MacBook’s screen. If you enable Insomnia from the MacBook whilst it’s open and then close the lid, the resolution won’t adjust to your external display and the screen will stay on inside the closed MacBook. If you do that, you’re going to lose most of the benefit of using an external display and battery life will be decreased by keeping the MacBook’s screen running.

The only downfall is the fact you have to let the MacBook start charging whilst running through this sequence. But, if you get really quick at following the sequence, the only real time spent charging is during the sleep and wake. I’m not a battery geek, but from what I know this won’t affect the battery life. It’s a little like syncing your iPhone – it doesn’t have a detrimental affect on battery life.

The best thing about it was, though, for a new Google feature you didn’t have to be a geek to understand it. (All modesty aside, I consider myself to have joined the elite ranks of the geek.)

Case Study

I had to get two PowerPoints to a colleague after a presentation, but their inbox didn’t want my large attachments and I couldn’t see them understanding a compressed folder. So I uploaded them, without converting them, made them public documents and bit.ly’d the links. The landing page for downloads is beautifully simple, with all of Google’s normal meta data tucked away and a big “Download” button centre stage.

My colleague was so impressed that I got an email back, thanking me for the presentations and explaining “that it actually worked”. Sure, you still have to be a geek to get the upload process right, but finally here’s a Google product (or element of) – other than Search – that mere mortals can use.

The main problem I see with it is the Windows native design. It looks okay-ish in Vista, but then Vista can’t support running a browser and you don’t get to see much of it. For those of us who stuck with XP, Safari 4 looks absolutely hideous. The tabs bar is horrid XP blue (or oliver or silver) and the close buttons are far too big. I don’t know about anybody else, but the reason I swapped to Safari in the first place is because of the Cocoa style interface and a slight passion of mine for hating everything Windows. Safari 4 does continue to use Apple fonts – such as Lucida Grande, but if you’ve already got them installed then you’re going to be welcomed with a Times New Roman interface … nice. A button to turn off the XP sillyness and force the Safari 3 interface would be a very welcome addition.

Even worse is Safari’s copy and paste job on the “Page” and “Settings” menus that have been in Internet Explorer since version 7. I would have been happy with them if I could have dragged them out of the menu bar and back in to the customize menu, but to date you’re forced to live with them. I know why, a user needs their functionality, but when I’ve turned on the traditional menu system (File, Edit…) then I really don’t need the repetition. It’s the same in IE, but I had credited Apple with a bit more intuition than that.

Finally, there’s work needed on the rendering engines. It’s not good when even Apple’s own web site doesn’t function properly. It probably looks lovely on a Mac, but why produce something for Windows if it’s going to be a half-hearted attempt. Safari 4 hasn’t moved on that much since 3 either. Sure, Apple have thrown in all your favorite iTunes functions and upgraded the Web-Kit and JavaScript libraries used but where’s the amazing new Apple features we’ve come to expect. With increased competition from Chrome and Firefox, as well as the launch of Windows 7 (unless that doesn’t work either), Apple had better get their thinking caps on.

Then again, Steve’s back.

Google Wave was (inadvertently) launched at i/o last week by it’s developers, headed up by Lars and Jens Rasmussen. Quite a few people have criticised the product launch as it was pretty unrehearsed and pretty poorly presented. Apple’s presentations are always smooth and clean, which is true. But I think these critics are missing the point. The whole reason behind the presentation was to illustrate the product to developers, and it wasn’t supposed to be the official product launch. I suppose then, the mistake was putting the whole keynote address on the front page of wave.google.com, in similar fashion to a product how-to.

After watching the video I was left thinking it looked pretty cool. The system looks awesome: if you wanted to reply to something I had written here (and this was powered by Blogger, which it isn’t) then you’d highlight the word, click the reply option that appeared by your mouse point and your comment would appear inline. Most impressively this would appear in my Google wave account in realtime: each character appears as it’s typed.

Google Chrome was launched as a “reinvention of the browser” – what browsers would look like if they were invented today. Now they’re moving on to email – and I think Wave is how email would look if it were invented this weekend. But nobody’s abandoning email or throwing in the proverbial IM towel – to have a revolution there has to be an uprising. And without everybody sending Waves how do you use it: can you email from it? How do you contact someone with a Hotmail address? How do you send somebody outside of Google Wave a blip (a blip is “a unit of conversation” – lot’s of blips make a wave)? The answer to these questions is that you can’t. External developers have been tasked with creating API applications to meet these demands: that was the purpose of the i/o presentation. But I don’t want to send my emails through an external developers server. Nor do I want my blog falling in to my email account and my friends leaving random comments on my sites. I have enough qualms about sending data from the iPhone OS which is essentially virus proof – I don’t want to be working with third party applications from my desktop.

Everybody’s been asking when Google will make a desktop word processor (I’m becoming addicted to Google Docs) or an operating system – I think this is there answer: they won’t. Rather than take on Microsoft with a rival OS they’ll make something new, revolutionary and unique – a OS in the browser. Maybe this will be the future, but I can’t see it happening tomorrow.

It might have the odd edit, and because I inherited it I couldn’t tell you where.

You can download the theme here (.zip, 240kb).

I’m willing to respond to any support questions if you leave a comment below, but make sure you read the ReadMe first.

A YouTube video posted in February shows a Spotify app being tested in the Apple iPhone SDK. It was leaked on TechDigest back in February and looks pretty complete, so it’s surprising that it hasn’t made it to the App store yet – if it’s real. A little doubt is thrown up by the Spotify blog: a search on iPhone, Mac and Apple provides no noteworthy results.

With any luck an app will appear shortly. Spotify’s great on the desktop, and would be 100% worth it on iPhone (especially if you could download playlists in between hotspots). An app will have to appear soon any way – developers can now use libspotify to develop on Linux, so Spotify has been formatted for external applications and Spotify say they’ll open up more platforms soon. Even without iPhone support an app could, theoretically, connect to a Linux host that manages the API and sends back a tidied up result … maybe.

How long will we have to wait?