Welcome, to The Perfect Curve.

There are 173 posts in total.

Pierre Boulez RIP

simon gray — 2016-01-06, 13:14:59

Composer Pierre Boulez has sadly died; his daughter Patti is said to be distraught. Inheritance of the royalties for the Planet of the Apes novel series is yet to be decided.

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simon gray — 2016-01-06, 00:28:08

'I've made 10 albums and none of them match up to Never Mind The Bollocks - and I'm an arrogant bastard, seriously'. Class.

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simon gray — 2016-01-05, 09:07:29

It's mildly irritating having to walk all the way round to get on to Selly Oak station platform from the park and ride. Especially as one sees a train pulling in to the station. 

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About The Perfect Curve

simon gray — 2016-01-02, 06:01:28

Barely a month goes by without me seeing somebody get all riled up about the latest change to Facebook's or Twitter's design, functionality, privacy settings, advertising policy, or myriad other reasons for people to get all riled up.

At the same time, we as online communities have willingly given over our digital identities, our online presences, and the online discussion space from systems which were distributed and owned by nobody and everybody to a pair of private corporations, with single points of failure, accountable to nobody - not even in any real sense to their advertisers and investors - and immune to challenge or boycott.

The Perfect Curve is a response to this; it is here as an alternative to those who object to the way other social media and social networking sites operate corporately, and here as a place where people who just want to talk to other people using text and pictures can do so without other bloat getting in the way.

The aspiration for The Perfect Curve is for the code to be Open Sourced, for the site and its operating policies to be owned and governed by the community of users, for infrastructure of the site to be funded in a financially sustainable manner without resorting to external funders who will wrest control from the user community, and ultimately, for the site to work on a distributed database model to create resilience.

Sooner or later, first Twitter and then Facebook will disappear; if you think that's a fanciful notion, think [...]

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In group Perfect Curve help and information

Slow news day

simon gray — 2015-12-31, 21:26:02
It's a sign of how little UK news there is this evening as for most of it all the UK news channels have near exclusively given over their coverage to footage of a hotel which is burning down in Dubai. [...]

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Wuthering Bytes – A Festival of Technology in the heart of the Pennines

simon gray — 2015-09-30, 17:12:37

I went to the Wednesday session of Wuthering Bytes, which was called Tomorrow’s People, exploring the future of public service provision and how councils, SMEs and individuals can work together. It was quite a departure from the usual local government technology events I tend to go to in that the topics were more of parallel relevance to my usual job rather than of direct relevance – but that said it was still of use for me to take back to work tomorrow, especially the talk about Open Source Circular Economy Days. It was also an good reminder to those of us who’ve become accustomed to the unconference / Open Space Technology format of events that it’s not the format of the event which makes it good or bad, it’s the quality people who turn up to speak at it.

I’ve not written a prose account of the day, instead, here are my bullet-point notes from the sessions, which may or may not be relevant to people outside of the context of the event itself:

Kathryn Grace – Digital Occupational Therapist – Digital tools and dementia

  • Dad had a sensor which can send a text to a carer if he’s left the gas on
  • NFC check-in and check-out on mobile phones for carers
  • CareZone iOS app for logging all relevant data for his care and medication; also caring.com

Dan Powers – IOU Theatre – The role of the artist in developing technology

  • ‘As a society we implicitly understand the value of play and the imagination’ – Brian Eno

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In group Public / Third Sector Digital

A musician's work

simon gray — 2015-09-18, 09:04:14
I dislike intensely the term 'back catalogue'; it implies an artist's work is disposable, that only their last release has any value. Imagine if Beethoven symphonies 1-8 were described as his back catalogue. [...]

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Brought to you by simon gray. Also find me on Mastodon

The code behind this site is a bit of an abandoned project; I originally had lofty ambitions of it being the start of a competitor for Twitter and Facebook, allowing other people to also use it turning it into a bit of a social network. Needless to say I got so far with it and thought who did I think I was! Bits of it don't work as well as I'd like it to work - at some point I'm going to return to it and do a complete rebuild according to modern standards.