Tech
I'm fascinated by computers and technology; I have been all my life. My mother described me as a push-button fanatic from about as soon as I could walk. With my own micro - an Amstrad - from the age of eight, it was really inevitable that I was the stereotypical computer nerd in high school and went on to read Computer Science at Cambridge.
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Version: 3.12
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My technical interests lie in the field of cryptography and IT security in general. More than anything else, though, I am a fan of proper robust systems - of doing a good job - and am dismayed at the amount of sheer mediocrity in the software world.
Since university, I have been working pretty much non-stop in high tech. Most of this time has been writing software for companies in Cambridge. I was freelance for a couple of years and got to know how to operate a limited company.
It's not all about computers though. I had a broad scientific education, and I continue to take an interest both in science and engineering in our everyday lives, and in nature's own marvels. I have a side interest in audio/visual technology and production and can sometimes be found helping out with events.
Software and the internet
A citizen of the internet since 1994, I'm often crazyscot when I'm online. I wholeheartedly support the free software movement. I have occasionally contributed to various Free projects and my own rag-tag collection of quasi-publishable works are on my workbench.
Ubuntu Linux has made many great strides of progress in presenting an alternative to Windows and making it viable for the mass userbase. It's not (yet?) a perfect solution, but has a lot of potential.
The internet continues to pose a challenge to the traditional practices of the media industry (in all its forms - books, films, music and software). They collectively have a massive vested interest in the status quo, so it's unsurprising that they continue to lobby to protect their existence.
The massively draconian so-called "three strikes" proposals outrage me, not by what they seek to achieve, but from the point of view of protocol and due process: they threaten to cut off the internet connection of the accused without so much as a by-your-leave or scope for appeal.
Frankly, this frightens the pants off me: having a 'net connection has become so tightly integrated into the way of life of many people that the trauma of losing it would be difficult to quantify.
I am sure that there is a solution to the copyright mess waiting to be found; it's just that nobody has found it yet.
Futurology
The progress of human technological achievement has continued to grow and accelerate throughout my life. Where is it all taking us? I'd like to think I have one foot in the future, but in reality there are so many competing ideas that it's hard to tell which will make it bigtime and be the Next Big Thing.
I am a fan of futuristic science fiction works, particularly those which plausibly look to the near future. Charlie Stross's near-future visions are all too believable. Consider that maybe the next or next-but-one generation of mobile phone will be more powerful than today's desktop PCs. Now, we're starting to see so-called "augmented reality" applications emerge on the current round of smartphones; combine that with more computing power and you've got the ability to overlay arbitrary layers of data on top of a high-resolution binocular visual feed, updated in real-time. The feed could come from cameras on your glasses, assisted by tiny gyroscopes for tracking, and be projected onto the lenses - or even beamed directly into your retina.
As computing power develops and research into artificial intelligence progresses, we humans might suddenly find ourselves obsolete. Consider this: human knowledge and endeavour accelerated rapidly throughout the last century or so. Consciousness is an emergent property of what we call life, and we might not know that we've created a sentient entity until we've already done so. At that point, the machines are likely to be able to improve their own intelligence quicker than we can and at a similarly accelerating rate. I can't being to imagine what would happen next. The term coined for this event is the technological singularity, and it's not a million miles away from the back-story to the Terminator films ...