I'm not a tabloid man myself but their front pages usually hit the public sentiment spot on. Today it's very much my sentiment too.

And in other news it emerges that we apparently have 10 planets in our solar system, not nine.

Gosh.

Thank you to our police and intelligence forces. Tonight it seems that all four of last weeks bombers are now in custody. We've watched this unfold like a real life 24 and now it seems that Sir Ian Blair and his men have the bombers who tried to kill us.

Sir Blair appeared exhausted on the news last night and appealed for people to understand just how drained his officers were. All of the metropolitan police have clearly been working tirelessly to save lives and to defend our city. Only yesterday the tube was literally flooded with officers guarding against another Thursday bombing.

Things certainly aren't over but they are a little better and we owe so much to the people who've been protecting us. Thank you all and I hope we get the chance to acknowlege what you've done publicly.

Fred Wilson recently posted a few articles on his blog discussing how user tracking through cookies is not necessarily a bad thing. I agree but I fear that non-technical readers may think that the debate about cookies implies that they are fundamentally an advertising tool.

Cookies are far from that and I would like to take a minute to to explain why they not only your friend but are essential to all the interactive websites you visit.

Mail ordering from a tent

HTTP is what's called a stateless protocol. This means that the server (website) never binds with a web-browser. Getting a page from a web-server is a bit like mail-ordering something - you're never actually in the shop, you just send over a request for a copy of The Half Blood Prince tout de suite. Because you're never in the shop, the shopkeeper doesn't know what you look like and won't recognise you the next time you order something.

Now a bricks-and-mortar shop will obviously be able to recognise any repeat mail-orders by their address. On the web though, your address is constantly changing. Your cyber-address is about as helpful as the physical address of a backpacker - not very. The webserver knows where you are at the instant you call but when you contact it again, it's got no way of recognising you.

Life as an anonymous

When we first login to our online email we take it for granted that we'll still be logged in when we read our next email. Without any fixed address or way of identifying us though, how does Hotmail know that the request for my next email is from me and not Joe Schmoe@hotmail.com wanting to know what juicies my girlfriend has sent me? Hotmail either needs me to login every time I request a new page or it needs a way to identify me as being the feller that logged into my account two minutes ago.

Who wants to login every time they change pages? Not me, so lets look at the second option: how do we identify ourselves to the server? One possible way to solve the problem would be for every computer to have a unique, fixed address. Great, except that www.dodgydealers.com can read your fixed address just as easily as www.hsbc.com and can then wander to www.hsbc.com, use your address to masquerade as you and take allyourlifesavings.cash. Another plan is called for.

I'll be in the beergarden

Think of the humble webserver as a bit like an overworked but jolly pub landlord taking your food order. You go up to the bar, pay for your food and then head out the back to enjoy the sunshine and peacocks. Your food order disappears into the kitchen and when the lasagne has been duly defrosted, microwaved and garnished with iceberg and a radish it's given to a waiter whose job it is to find you.

How does the waiter know that you are in fact the purchaser of said lasagne? He could of course ask - "excuse me, is your name Peter and would you like me to give you lasagne and chips" but it's hardly the have/know/are approach to authentication.

Star of The Saint

The Trout in Oxford has a developed an effective and efficient method which works like a charm no mattter how crowded the pub gets (and it gets very crowded) or how many people are ordering. They use a spoon.

You place an order and you get given a big wooden spoon with your order number on it. You stick it in a bottle on your table and when the waiter comes round, he can read your order bumber and reliably identify you as the legal recipient of one Beef Wellington (no microwaved lasagne here my friends).

The cyber-spoon

The web has a spoon system too except because TCP/IP is not particularly sympathetic to spoon-delivery, websites use little text-files instead.

Like the spoon, these files are given to you by the web-server (landlord) and you store them on your computer (stick them in your bottle). The web-server can write anything it likes into that file and most servers will simply use it to allocate you a unique ID (order number) so they can remember you.

Every time you go to that web-server your computer automatically sends the file with your request (shows it to the waiter). The beauty is that only the server that initially gave it to you can see it. No webserver can see the file that Amazon gives you and Amazon can't see the files that any other webserver gives you. That file is a cookie and she wants you to like her.

Cometh the hour, cometh the little text-file

Far from being harbingers of evil, cookies are in fact a very elegant, anonymous and powerful solution to a very real problem. From a web-server's perspective, your cookies are your identity and your reputation. Without them, you're no more trustworthy or recognisable than the next man.

Without cookies it would be impossible to have persistent logins*. Every refresh of your webmail, your banking, your Amazon purchases or your snaps on Flickr would require you to login again. That's right - every single new page would require your username and password.

Come and meet your new friends

Cookies are fundamental to how the web works and are an essential piece of its architecture. Without them we would be left with higher web-dev costs, and both less secure and lower-quality applications.

Arguing that we should get rid of cookies is about as helpful as arguing that spoons are bad because the Trout knows which bill to add your pudding to. You may well moan that the spoon is merely a conduit to the inescapable and pervasive nature of 21st dessert-marketing. You may do but you won't with me, it's not an argument I find interesting. I am however interested in you knowing that without the spoon, you'd never have had your Beef Wellington.

* I realise that there logins can be achieved using the URL but there are a lot more very real security, architecture and reliablity problems associated with this approach than with cookies.

Dave Winer launched his OPML editor yesterday and I was interested to see the following disclaimer on his download page:

Terms of service. Let's keep it simple. I'm providing this software for your evalution only. Decide if it's useful and if you do (I don't claim it is), you assume all risk, and I assume none, same with the company that's providing the service, Scripting News, Inc. Further, the hosting I provide is also only for your evaluation. I could at any time stop doing it, or my backups could fail. Please keep copies of all the data stored on the server. If you use the service for illegal purposes we will turn off your account as soon as we find out. These terms will be rewritten by a lawyer shortly.

How short and sweet. We all know what we're entering into and we all know the risks. I'll place a sizeable wager that by the times the terms are rewritten, they're incomprehensible.

I can understand why this is - if you've ever written code, you'll know how much it takes to make sure your backside's covered - but nonetheless I can't help but question the logic.

Legal agreements always remind me of the irony of the British driving test. In this country, you are not deemed safe to drive on a motorway until you've completed your test. By the time you've done your test though, you're almost certainly without your trusty driving instructor and are of course, arguably no wiser than the lesson you had right before the test.

When I initiate any legal agreement, I always write a single-sided draft that summarises the essential parts of the deal. This is of course, not legally reliable until it's been re-drafted by a lawyer.

After aforementioned obfuscation, sorry, drafting, it will seldom be less than five times as long and even I find it difficult to pick out the essence of the deal. My father has been in similar situations and found that hundreds of thousands of pounds later and hundreds of pages of contract later, the essence has in fact been left out. I have no idea how much sense it makes to the people I'm dealing with.

All too often, two parties deemed to be legally insecure until a point where neither truly understands what the agreement is. The only thing they both do know is that they're poorer.

I can't help but ponder the age old question: do lawyers exist because people need their skills or do people need their skills simply because they exist? Is law the original protection racket or is it just an unavoidable arms race.

I suspect it's the latter. The question is, how do we disarm?

I spent yesterday at the launch of BBC backstage and it was a thoroughly enjoyable day. I'm always a little nervous before heading to these sort of events, never entirely sure who I'm going to meet and always a little wary that I'm going to end up sat next to one of the Slashdot trolls.

No such misfortune though, in fact quite the reverse. There were some excellent speakers and I was pleasantly surprised with just how many top-folk I met. Ben Metcalfe did an excellent job, gave a great talk and has started something pretty special at the BBC. I was proud to find that Ben Hammersly, author of the latest O'Reilly book on RSS and Atom was actually a Brit and I was lucky enough to get to talk to Jeremy Z. for quite a while on both Friday at the geek dinner and Saturday. Not sure he felt quite as lucky but it was certainly good for me. If you get a chance to meet him make sure you listen - he's a smart feller.

Spent most of the evening chatting and getting drenched by rain with Richard Livsey and Ed Dowding. Good chaps and working on an interesting and very useful project. The three of us ended up hooking up with more of the BBC-folk and hitting a not-very-nearby Nepalese restaurant. It was good and its beer was better still - Kathmandu. If you get the chance, try it. Rather amazingly it actually tastes of Kathmandu and even more amazing is that that turns out to be a good thing.

Sitting at the launch of BBC backstage yesterday my heart went cold as one of the speakers fired up his presentation. As he flicked from his desktop to the slides, all of us saw the front page of the BBC open in his browser and the headline:

"Shot man was not bomber"

What a tragedy.

What a tragedy and one it is all too easy to see from both sides. For Jean Charles de Menezes a group of plainclothed men shouting and brandishing guns would doubtless have been petrifying. Did he not trust that they were police and were the next few seconds a tragedy of errors or did he believe them and simply make a terribly wrong judgement?

From the policeman's perspective, any hesitation may well have resulted in his death and that of many around him. What could he possibly have done or said? "Put the bomb down and walk away from the crowd". This isn't your usual movie.

Friday's script was finalised from the second Jean Charles, a man already under observation, first ran into the entrance of the crowded underground. The question was not whether the police should have taken the action they did but whether they properly informed him that they were in fact police. I suspect that were Friday to be replayed tomorrow it would still have the same or even a more tragic ending.

My heart goes out to both Jean Charles' family and the policeman who shot him.

So it seems that someone has been shot dead this morning on a tube train. I hope he was guilty. In our town's current climate, it's a bad, bad idea for someone of any race to run when confronted by police on the underground. It can only be a worse idea if you're Asian.

There are tough decisions that are going to have to be made in split seconds by many people over the next few weeks. If the police thought there was a real chance that he might detonate something then they absolutely did the right thing. I hope they did think that.

I notice that the press however are making some very dubious split-second decisions. A man was pinned down by armed police outside Whitehall yesterday. Despite broadcasting delayed footage, the TV stations consciously took the decision to show his face.

The police announced early this morning that he'd been released. What happened to him was almost certainly the result of jittery nerves and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such conclusions are too late for the press though as the todays newspapers splashed his face across all most of their front pages with almost little or no attempt to conceal his identity. I hope he's not made to pay for our lust for coverage.

I had no idea but a friend who works in the square mile told me last night that there are about two controlled exposions a day in the tube stations around their office. A call goes round that one is going to go off and her boss closes the blinds. Then they carry on with work.

So I'm not going to publish anything here but the BBC has got it all. Don't seem to be any casualties though which is the main thing.

News just coming out of more 'incidents' at London undergound stations

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4703777.stm

take care everyone and stay away from the underground

It's what we've all been waiting for:

http://www.somethingwrong.co.uk/crazy_frog_baseball/

Now if someone could just figure out a way of charging him £3/week ad infinitum for the privilege of being beaten around the ears I reckon things would be about even ;)

I don't know whether it's growing up, it's the times that I now watch or because the quality has washed away but I almost never find any TV worth watching. There are a few gems, West Wing, Shameless, Nip-Tuck, Desperate Housewives, and Newsnight but in general, TV has become about as interesting as a rainy day at Wimbledon.

Our broadcasting is designed to appeal to as many people as possible. Success is measured by ratings and whilst you can please some of the people some of the time, modern broadcasting shows shows just how painless it is to bore most of the people all of the time. It's somewhat ironic that as commoditised LCD screens bring larger and brighter viewing to our sitting rooms, the Lowest Common Denominator sees to it that as big and crisp as they are, it's seldom worth even switching them on.

The problem is that programming for ratings suffers from only asking half the question. "Would you like to watch another series of Losers Lives / TV's Most Repeated Moments / DIY Drudgery / Holiday Reps (nuff said)?". Sure if my brain is too addled from a days work to make it worth switching the TV off and opening a book I'll sit and watch some tanned teenagers drink their last summers of freedom away in Majorca.

Finish the question though. Ask me how much I want to yet another person who couldn't be bothered to get off their bottom for five years cry as they see their decrepit, Croydon kitchen transformed by some cheeky chappies with matching sweatshirts into yet another five grand assortment of Magnet-mediocrity? Take a guess.

Ask me how much I want to see the West Wing though. Enough to shell out thirty pounds to pre-order the puppy months in advance? You bet. Enough to avoid watching it on TV for fear of getting out of sync - absolutely. 24? Ditto. How much do I want to watch Desperate Housewives? Enough that I'll plan my evenings arrangements to make sure I'm back in time for it (well, to an extent - I'm picky, not a gimp).

For the thousands of channels out there, it is ironic that we live in an age of TV-communism with a few controllers deciding what they think we the unwashed wish to watch. I want capitalism. I want show makers to be rewarded for being brilliant instead of precisely average. I want to know that when the next Aaron Sorkin emerges he knows that if he never gets the success he dreams of, it will have been for lack of quality not mediocrity.

Podcasting and videocasting have allowed content creators to flourish without a mainstream network. Home-brewed shows pull in thousands of listeners without a penny spent on marketing or management. Almost all the pieces are in place for content producers to go direct to their customers.

For quality and variety to really soar though, producers need to be able to go full time on their offerings and that means that they need income. Once this happens we will let small-time screen and film makers go direct and once that happens we will all be richer.

Right now, 1 x passion < 10 x apathy = an acceptable revenue. Let 100 x apathy < 1 x passion = an excellent revenue and let there be something to watch.

Hmm, this is starting to look a bit more like the Google blog than the PeteNixey blog but this is too cute:

http://moon.google.com/

With only very patchy coverage, it's slightly disappointing at first but zoom in all the way to fully appreciate :)

Every weekday I get up at 7:30, program from 8:30 till 7 and hit the
gym or the dancefloor in the evening. I've got a pair of great
housemates who I chat with in the evenings, I've got my family and
I've got some wonderful friends, all of whom I love to talk with.

Professionally though, I'm completely isolated. I'm now in the closing
stages of writing an RSS app which (as my long-suffering friends will
testify) consumes almost my every thought. All day and every day. It's
not easy for me to find people to toss these ideas around with.

Of all the people I know in the UK, only three read RSS feeds on a
regular basis and one of them is now in the Finnish army. I work from
home and work alone. It keeps me lean and definitely keeps me keen but
I can't help yearning for peers to discuss the things I'm doing.

Reading the feeds coming out of Silicon Valley and the other
developer-hubs in the States has been my lifeline. Not only do I get
to keep my ear to the ground but that ground is the same ground the
inventors and the entrepreneurs of these technologies stand upon.

When Apple released iTunes 4.9 I started experimenting with Podcasts.
I hadn't held out high hopes and was doing it more out of a sense of
obligation than intrigue. When I played that first track though, it
was like nothing I was expecting. If feed-reading brings me close,
Podcasting makes me feel like I'm actually there. It is like being at
a university tailored just for me. I can listen to any lecture from
any of the best professors or the banter of the funniest students and
I can play them whenever and wherever I want.

A few years ago there was an advert for butter on TV. The advert
opened with the line, 'Imagine if you'd never seen a snowflake' and
had showed a little boy in Africa as a flake drifted rather
anomolously down in front of him. The closing line was, "Imagine if
you'd never tasted butter". It was a cute advert but as chuffed as I'd
be to find out that marge wasn't the beginning and ending of
bread-spread it definitely wouldn't be on a par with my first white
Christmas.

When I started listening to Dave Winer, to Steve Gilmore and to the Engadget guys it really was like the first time I saw
snow. Text is wonderful but voices communicate a thousand times more.
In a single episode of Morning Coffee Notes my isolation melted and I
started feeling like I was a part of things. No-one else knows I'm a
part and that's just fine, if they had to deal with all their
listeners they'd probably stop Podcasting and then I'd be back to
square one. All that matters is that I do.

Why then was it Adam Curry who moved me? It was because he's the man
behind the Podfinder show which I listened to for the first time last
night. For those of you who don't know, the Podfinder show does
exactly what it says on the tin. It's half an hour of Adam reviewing
and playing clips from a selection of the different podcasts out there
and I love it.

I love the fact that these people are podcasting, I love how
intelligent and interesting the people he reviewed were, I love the
fact that here, finally, was a way for the funny and the smart among
us to be enjoyed by a wider community without having to prostrate
themselves at the feet of the old media oligarchy.

I love the fact that even though I really don't care about what pilots
talk to each other about on long haul flights or what the most
absorbent brand of nappy is, it was still worth Joe Deon and
Gretchen and Paige making those shows and that people who do
care can listen to them. I love the raw humanity of it and most of all
I love being invited to be a part of these peoples lives. Oh and even
though a childhood of country and western water-torture has left me
numbed to the genre, I love Wichita Rutherford - he's
something special.

From programmers to scientists, the retired to first-time mothers,
feeds and Podcasting allow people to find and to experience each
other. We've had great ways to connect for years but you can't connect
if you can't find and you can't experience if someone doesn't want you
to connect.

Blogging and podcasting give us a little way to let people in. They
let people get to know us and as even big companies are finding, the
better people know us, the more empathetic the are to us
and the more people empathise with us, the more they like us. Web 2.0
helps melt away the barriers that we protect ourselves with but which
simultaneously isolate us from those we crave to know.

When things started happening on the 7th everything here ground to a standstill. It was impossible to get news through the main sites as they were totally overloaded and barely worked for the next few days.

Although I'm pretty new to blogging I've been getting almost all of my news through feed demon for the last 4 months and so that was where I first turned to see what was happening when the news started to break.

There was hardly anything in the feeds I read so I thought it would be helpful to start collating the information I could find and publishing it in mine. It's what I hoped that others would start to do and would give me and others a better idea of what was happening to my city.

I don't think that it was a great idea though, in fact I can't help feeling that it was a pretty stupid idea. I get most of my news from bloggers and the people I read spend their time passing on news but that's not what I've ever done and Thursday wasn't the right time to start.

There were a lot of normal and innocent people including, as it turns out, a friend of mine (who survived), whose lives were torn apart on Thursday. When things like that happen we all want to help but there's a fine line between wanting to help and just wanting to be involved.

Everyone watched the amateur pictures of people escaping and hurt just like we watch the professional footage. People speak of this as having been one of the first major catastrophies where blogging provided a significant chunk of the news but for the first time too, another observation emerged. People who had been hurt and caught up in the events spoke of their disgust at emerging into the daylight only to find people videoing them on their phones. It wasn't the press that hurt them it was the public.

We live in an uneasy symbiosis with the press. We want to know their news but we seldom want to be their news. Normally we're protected by our own insignificance and the truth that even if people do want to know things about us, the press are quick but not omnipresent. For some, like Hollywood this is not true and often leads to huge sadness.

As things start to change though, as the barriers to publishing fall and the ease of distribution rises we find that we are the press and that the press is everywhere. Readership groups can be as small as one and we each inherit a volatile significance.

When this happens the old addage of 'we only print what people want to read' ceases to be an acceptable excuse. We have to take some responsibility. Can we do that? I'm confident that we will. We are very competant at regulating our societies and we are very capable of adapting.

There will always be people who abuse but as long as there are adequate repercussions they will remain a minority. There will be things we gain and things we lose but ultimately I'm sure that such a system will achieve a beneficial equilibrium. Sadly though, none of this will stop some of the dumber of us tripping up during the transition.

Man, I hate these things happening. It's when that first call comes through from someone (my Father) asking if you're ok you just feel your heart drop. OMG, what is it I ask? "I just got a call from Catherine (my sister) saying that there have been explosions on trains all across London and on busses too."

We'd all been waiting for this but it doesn't make it any less scary when it happens. The sudden fear as you start to go through all the people you know who are in the city and who might be hurt. I hate it, I hate the fear, I hate the not knowing and I hate the fact that people are almost certainly dead.

The mobile lines are practically unusable, no connections are getting though and I'm switching to Skype and email.

Well I've really nothing more to add than people can see on the main media sources, fortunately nothing here yet but it doesn't make things much more reassuring.

take care everyone