I’ve always been pro-Europe. I like the idea of everyone working together for the common good.

Today, I changed my mind. Why, you ask?

Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because of the EU cookie monster. Today I encountered my first website with an obtrusive cookie warning all over it. The text of the warning reads:

“www.cambridgeshire.nhs.uk has placed cookies on your computer, to help us improve the website and your experience using it. You may delete and block all cookies from this site, but parts of the site may not work. To find out more about the cookies we use and how to delete them, see our Privacy policy”

This is going to be something you see a lot. Pretty much every website on the web uses cookies, and the EU has now mandated that every website that uses them carry a warning. It’s completely fucking redundant and stupid. The thing that amused me slightly was that the warning itself uses cookies to remember when you’ve hidden the warning, so if you’re stupid enough to disable cookies, you’ll keep seeing the cookie warning over and over again. I say it amused me ’slightly’ because the amusement was completely overwhelmed by rage at the stupidity of the whole fuckin’ thing.

I’ve always ignored the reports of the EU unnecessarily regulating things that don’t need regulating (the curvature of a banana for example). I assumed they were just right-wing eurosceptics spouting shit. Turns out they were right, the EU is getting too big for its boots. Maybe it always has been, I’ve just ignored it because I like Europe on ideological grounds.

Europe is collapsing, and I think we should withdraw completely as soon as possible to avoid any more STUPID FUCKING LEGISLATION. I don’t really care about the financial crisis; it doesn’t affect me, but I do care about them insisting on putting stupid pointless warnings all over every single website that I use. That seriously angers me.

Europe has made its bed of shit, let the stupid bastards lie in it.

The EU is legislating on technology it doesn’t understand again. This irritates me.

Browser cookies – weren’t they something people used to get worried about and disable back in the 90s? (then re-enable quickly when they realised nothing works without them).

A cookie is a file, containing some data, which is stored on your computer by the websites you look at. More often than not cookies are used to allow you to login to a website – when you login, you send your username and password to the website and the website sends back a token which gives you access to the site – the authentication token is stored in a cookie, and this cookie is sent to the website every time you request a page, proving that you’re logged in. This is the only sensible way to do authentication on the web.

Cookies can also be used to track people as they browse around your website – this works by storing a unique code in a cookie on the visitor’s computer, then whenever they make a request for a new page on your website, you add an entry to a log on your server showing which pages they visited. Users are not identified by name or address – they are known only by the unique code you assign them, along with their IP address (which gives you some basic information about what part of the world they may be in and who’s their ISP). This kind of tracking is very useful for a website developer like me because it allows you to tell how people flow through your site, where they get stuck, at what point they get bored and go away etc. – it allows me to improve my site by identifying the pages that work well and improve those that work less well. In my opinion this type of tracking is completely harmless and you should just assume that any website that is worth its shit is tracking you in this way. Mine does, via the use of Google Analytics.

There is another way cookies can be used that’s a bit more sinister, and it’s this that the EU are knee-jerking against with their new bullshit law. Lemme explain it:

Typically a cookie can only be set or read from one website – if I set a cookie on my website, and one of my visitors goes to another website, that website can’t see the cookie that my website has set. This means that each site is a silo – I can track where users have been on my site, but I have no idea of what products they bought on eBay before they came to my site. This is the way it should be, and always has been.

However with social networking and the likes of YouTube and Facebook, “embedding” content has become very common and widespread. Common embedded content includes YouTube videos, the Facebook “like” button, the Twitter “follow” button, but also the Google Analytics tracking code that I use on my website, and the Google Adsense code that people insert into their website to make a few pennies selling pay-per-click advertising.

The reason this matters is that when you embed content from a third-party website, you’re allowing that website to place tracking cookies on your visitors’ browsers – the cookies will only be visible to the site that set them. So if I insert a YouTube video on my blog, visitors to my blog will not only receive my tracking cookies, they will also receive any cookies YouTube wish to set – what’s more, these cookies will be completely invisible to me because they were set by YouTube’s domain not mine. However, because that video is embedded in my website, any Javascript code within the YouTube embedded player will also be able to tell what page of my site you are on – in other words by embedding a YouTube video, I’m allowing YouTube to track what visitors do when they’re browsing my website.

Should YouTube be able to track visitors as they browse around the YouTube site? Of course. Should YouTube be able to track visitors as they browse around my site? Definitely not!

If you think about all the websites that have Facebook “like” buttons on them (it’s a lot), and consider that in most cases these allow Facebook to track everything you do whilst you’re on that site – Facebook can basically track everything you do on the internet. Google can too because of Google Analytics and Adsense, which are installed on the vast majority of websites out there. This is obviously a bit of a privacy concern.

In simple terms; this new EU law is designed to stop big companies like Google and Facebook from having too much access to our browsing habits, particularly on sites which don’t even belong to them – this is a very sensible thing to do – but requiring all EU websites to display a cookie policy and thoroughly audit their Cookie usage just to stop the big boys from gathering too much data is like napalming several hectares of forest when all you wanna do is cut down a couple of oversized trees. Grow some balls and buy a chainsaw for fuck’s sake!

Besides, I don’t like being told what I should publish on my own website. Can you imagine if every book had to contain a warning that reading in the dark might cause eye-strain, or that if you turn the pages too quickly you might get a paper cut? What if this applied not just to books, but to every piece of printed paper ever produced? It sounds absurd but that’s basically what the EU are asking people to do with websites – slap-on arbitrary and pointless warnings and opt-out clauses that nobody will ever read or use. It’s a waste of time, money and energy. Forget it. I opt-out of your stupid cookie rules.

This is a technology problem not a legislature one – the problem is that there’s no way to embed code from another website in a restricted way. I would like to be able to embed YouTube or Facebook code, but do it in a way that made it impossible for those sites to track my visitors.

I would suggest that the best way to implement this would be to add a new HTML tag (or an attribute to the <embed> tag) that would allow the tag to behave like a sandboxed iframe with cookies either disabled or restricted to the site where it’s embedded – in other words an embedded YouTube video on my site would only be able to see cookies set by other YouTube videos on my site – it wouldn’t see cookies set on the YouTube homepage, or cookies from YouTube videos embedded in other people’s websites, or any of the cookies I set myself. This would allow us to continue using embedded content without breaking the silos around each website.

Of course the people providing the embedded code snippets might need to be forced to use the new sandboxed tags rather than the older insecure ways, but at least then you’re focusing your legislation at the cause of the problem – the big companies who are embedding their code using a method which allows them to gather data which they really shouldn’t have access to.

Also I think it’s kinda hypocritical that the government(s) should be trying to take away our fundamental internet freedoms and privacies via pieces of legislation like ACTA, PIPA and SOPA, whilst trying to convince us that they’re protecting our privacy with stupid ill-thought-out pieces of legislation like the Cookie Monster. I wish politicians would just go to hell and stop fiddling with the internet, they clearly don’t know what they’re doing.

One effect I use a lot in web development is what I call “FadeOver“. By this, I mean that when you put your mouse over something, it shouldn’t just suddenly change colour – it should fade to a new colour – it just looks cooler. Since I’m now moving to jQuery, I’ve thought it wise to make this effect into a jQuery UI widget and release it as opensource.

Above you can see an example of the widget – the text with the blue flame is done entirely in CSS, no images involved, FadeOver simply fades between stylesheets with different CSS text-shadow values. The buttons below to enable and disable the widget are also FadeOver widgets themselves, although they look exactly like jQuery UI buttons, if you play with them you’ll notice they fade between colours when they change state rather than just flicking between colours instantly. It’s a subtle difference, but touches like this make all the difference in my opinion.

Click here to see more examples or download FadeOver to use it yourself.

I’ve been using the jQuery Javascript library a lot recently, although this website is actually done entirely using jQuery’s biggest competitor; Prototype+Scriptaculous. A few things have convinced me that jQuery is better:mainly jQuery UI (particularly the theming), also the level of abstraction is nice – you’re almost not writing Javascript anymore, you’re writing jQuery – that’s a good thing (Javascript smells bad). jQuery’s documentation is better too, and there seems to be a bigger community surrounding it.

Furthermore, jQuery UI’s widget “factory” makes it very convenient to create standard web controls that can be easily used by anyone.

I therefore thought it would be appropriate if I ported the cool image gallery slider thingie from the gallery part of my website from Scriptaculous into jQuery, and released it as an opensource jQuery UI widget that anyone could use. That is what I’ve done, it’s called MediaSlide, licensed under my 1-clause Javascript BSD license. Visit the MediaSlide project page now for more details (including the code you need to add a MediaSlide to your website), or have a play with the example below to get an idea of what it does:

The widget you see above is a minature version of MediaSlide – it loads the image list directly from my Flickr feed – the images and thumbnails themselves are loaded directly from Flickr too. You can use Flickr feeds to populate MediaSlide with images, or you can use your own XML or JSON feeds. Consult the comprehensive MediaSlide documentation for more information.

It occurred to me that the 2-clause BSD license doesn’t really apply anymore in a web environment where PHP and Javascript are the languages of choice. The two clauses of the license relate to source and binary distributions – this fits well for compiled programs in languages such as C or C++, but it doesn’t make much sense for Javascript libraries.

Instead, I moot a 1-clause BSD license for Javascript libraries – the Javascript BSD license (or 1-clause BSD license). Here’s my suggested template wording:

Project Name - Version 1.0
Copyright (c) - Author Name

Redistribution and use, with or without modification, are permitted
provided that the following condition is met:

 *  Redistributions of this code must retain the above copyright notice,
this condition and the following disclaimer.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED
TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR
CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL,
EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR
PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY
OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING
NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS
SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Everyone’s talking about the riots, condemning the chavs for mindless violence etc.

It seems to me that to dismiss the riots as pure criminality is a bit of a cop-out. The riots are clearly symptomatic of a wider problem with society. Increasing numbers of people are feeling a disconnect between the establishment (the government, companies, shops, whatever) and the people on the street. Peaceful protests have happened regularly in the last few years, and I think the perception of a lot of people is that those protests have been largely ignored and that in some cases the police exercised undue force to control protesters who weren’t really doing very much wrong.

Of course the people who attended the anti-war demo before the Iraq war, and those attending the peaceful “stop the cuts” protests are probably not the same ones who are now terrorising the streets, but the point is the government has created a generalized distrust of the establishment. The police haven’t helped by allowing themselves to be filmed apparently beating innocent protesters during peaceful demonstrations. The kids on the streets now weren’t at those demonstrations, but you can bet their parents and friends probably watched them on the news. What’s happened is that society as a whole has tried to change government peacefully, it failed, and now those with a lower intellect and a penchant for criminal damage and petty theft have taken over. This is what happens when you ignore the people and deal with them using undue force. They will rise up – the police will be outnumbered.

This is why I’m reluctant to support the Met Police – they’ve kinda brought it on themselves, and I kinda do want the government to be made aware that the people are not happy. I wish the moronic thugs would do a better job of voicing the concerns of the populace, and of course I don’t support petty theft and mugging – it’s terrible the destruction that’s being caused, but if someone threw a brick through the window of number 10, I’d probably be cheering them on. Don’t take that to mean I’m on the side of the rioters, I’m not, but I’m sure as hell not on the side of the government or the pigs either.

I’m just on the side of the communities who’ve got together today to start clearing stuff up.

The government bailing out the banks hasn’t gone down well either – it’s seen as the government taking from the poor to give to the rich, and people aren’t happy about it. They’re right not to be.

I’m not blaming it all on the Tories or the Lib Dems either – this is mostly Labour’s fault, the majority of this has built up over Tony’s rein. The Tories have just pushed things over the edge, I think Tony is the one who’s really to blame, for ignoring the people and going to a war nobody wanted.

Here’s some protest songs to accompany the riots:

Here’s a relevant link from the Guardian.

Lisa is now 7 months pregnant with our baby, a little boy. He’s due August 28th and we’re really excited

The scan pictures are below.. in the first scan the sonographer got a bit trigger happy with the photos so we ended up with quite a few more than we’d asked for (for free). In the second scan we only got 3 pictures, but one of them shows his little feet very clearly!

We’ve not decided for definite on a name yet although we have one likely contender – I think we’re going to make the final decision after we actually meet the little guy, who we’ve temporarily nicknamed ‘Pickle’, due to Lisa craving all things pickled in vinegar early in the pregnancy.

pickle scan 2011-02-10 1

pickle scan 2011-02-10 2

pickle scan 2011-02-10 3

pickle scan 2011-02-10 4

pickle scan 2011-02-10 5

pickle scan 2011-02-10 6

pickle scan 2011-02-10 7

pickle scan 2011-02-10 8

pickle scan 2011-02-10 9

pickle scan 2011-04-12 1

pickle scan 2011-04-12 2

pickle scan 2011-04-12 3

3 of my photos are currently on display in the Celebrate Cuckmere exhibition in the Pump Barn at the Seven Sisters country park, Exceat. Check out the website for more details of the exhibition (Lisa and I did it – in fact I credit Lisa with most of the hard work, I just supervised and pointed in the right direction). Scroll down to see my images on the wall.

Lisa and I also helped with the marketing a bit – seems to have gone fairly well, there’s several mentions of it on the BBC website:

Cuckmere Valley future to be decided
Cuckmere exhibition will mark changes to valley
Cuckmere Valley future to be decided at meeting
Cuckmere community calls for restoration of meanders

The exhibition also marks the end of the “Pathfinder project” – the government’s bullshit “public consultation” exercise aimed at deciding the future of the Cuckmere Valley (bit weird to hold this after they’d already announced they were going to withdraw maintenance of the flood defences right?).

Anyway, as far as I can tell the Pathfinder project can be summed up thusly: lots of people care very much and argued a lot about what should be done, everyone got rather stressed and frustrated with each other, and ultimately the conclusion of the project was that there’s a fair amount of support for reconnecting the river flow to the meandering section of the river (which is currently effectively a lake) – however nothing can really be done until there’s been feasibility studies and costings for this, so for now they’re going to basically do sod-all – continue maintaining it as they have been, and then go over the whole thing again in a couple of years once they’ve properly assessed the options I guess.

This is good news, I think – I would generally support the idea of reconnecting the river to its natural path, but only if it can be done without completely destroying the meanders – I reckon if you reconnected the meanders right now, they’d probably just all get washed away – they need re-planting with deep rooted plants or something rather than the thin layer of grass that’s there now..

(this is, assuming government don’t decide to go back on their promise to listen to the conclusions of the Pathfinder project)

Personally, I’m just glad I kept a distance from the whole thing – I’m not hugely interested in the impassioned arguments of locals, and from what people have said to me it sounds like the whole thing ended rather acrimoniously – everyone’s certainly being very careful not to be too controversial in public now.

I would certainly look forward to the day they may finally restore flow to the meandering section of the river – I think that would be an interesting thing to photograph.

Anyway, here’s my photos in the Celebrate Cuckmere exhibit:

(photos coutesy of North Laine).

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by Alessandro Falcone at dBustle mag (an Italian free magazine) asking if he could use one of my photographs of the Full Moon Calling fire party on the beach on the front cover!

Well, here it is; I think it looks rather good:

dBustle magazine cover

dBustle at Hellnation record store

dBustle at Friends Cafe

dBustle at Windsurf Paradise

dBustle at Powder ProShop

dBustle at Roma Rock School

dBustle at SSH Snow Surf House

dBustle at Urbanstar

dBustle at Pifebo Shop

dBustle at PAC Proietti Art Creations

dBustle at The Northern Rome Barbeque - Gone

dBustle at Gone

dBustle at Chakra Cafe

dBustle at Fisheye Skate Shop

dBustle at Untitled Concept Shop

dBustle and Rude MC at Street Maphia

dBustle at The Butcher

dBustle at Kokoro

dBustle at 146 Street

dBustle at GPoint Store

dBustle at Sin Valley

dBustle at Superstylin Shop

dBustle at Paraphernalia

dBustle at King Size

dBustle at Vinyl Refresh