Chris McCormick

Over the new-year I wrote this little Free Software (LGPL) app for sketching stuff. It's called SketchThing.

With the impending proliferation of tablets and touchscreens my plan is to make a sketching app which runs on all kinds of tablet/touch friendly devices and browsers, online and offline, and will sync your sketches to whatever device you are using, wherever you are using it.

At the moment it's running on those Apple portable devices, since that's what I have access to thanks to my contract work for RjDj, and I'm quite glad that I have found a way to make Free Software which runs on those devices legally through the web app method. I hope to port it to at least Firefox, Android, and Chrome OS as well.

The core library, sketchthing.js, is device agnostic and should run on anything which supports HTML5, such as Firefox and Webkit. What the library does is take an arbitrary HTML element as an input, and then replace it's innerHTML with a canvas of the same size which can be sketched upon.

Have fun.

My new years resolution for next year is to hug more scientists.

This year I hugged three scientists. These are the people dedicating their life's work to the laborious, often boring work of improving the collective knowledge and hence all of our lives by tiny little increments. Hundreds of thousands of them working in parallel make things very slightly better every day. These are people who often have to struggle silently with ethical challenges. They sometimes have to balance greater rights against smaller wrongs. They often have to argue with family and friends. They often have to deal with ideas they know will challenge our culture. Most of all though, they have to dig away daily at the data trying to disprove the hypotheses that they and other scientists came up with. These people are the truest and most unsung heroes of our culture. I can make this statement secure in the knowledge that if you sit down and think about every tiny little way in which scientists, and scientific thinking have improved your life so hugely over that of our hunter gatherer ancestors, you will be overwhelmed with gratitude.

Think flushing toilets, vaccines, medicines, medical techniques against horrible debilitating diseases, checking your email over wifi, drinking coffee, painting your house, watching television, reading a book, driving a car or riding a bike, catching a plane, sitting in a house that doesn't fall down, eating pretty much any modern food, knowing that you are made up of tiny particles and waves which seem to conform to quantum mechanical laws, knowing that you live on a fertile rock floating in space which is part of a larger system which appears to conform to the laws of classical physics, reading different points of view about climate change, looking at dinosaur skeletons at the museum and realising the collosal magnitude and wonder of just existing in this universe.

So here's to you my scientist friends. I am a huge fan of you. Keep up the great work, and thank you so much.

Ever since i read it listed in the copyright notice in the source code of the program Backupninja, I have been thinking over this statement:

"ownership is theft."

Obviously a very marginal viewpoint in this day, the general implication is that by owning something, anything, you are depriving others of that object, land, or resource.

I believe that this will one day reflect the majority viewpoint of the world, and that this will come to pass because of technological progress.

At the moment, much of the world is in the middle of idealogical turbulence over the nature of intellectual property - the ownership of ideas and virtual 'things' like computer programs and audiovisual data. Despite the best efforts of those with a vested interest in a view that is contrary to a reality where you can freely copy and share ideas and virtual goods, the popular consensus seems to be slowly settling on the belief that copying and sharing are not theft.

Pretty soon there is going to be another slow revolution around the idea of property, only next time it's going to concern physical goods, not virtual ones.

The germination of this impending revolution has already begun. A special kind of tinkerer is working away in their room, homebrewing crude rapid prototyping machines. These are machines that can take something virtual, and turn it into something physical. These machines are as rough at making objects as a young Microsoft was at making software, but like operating systems, they will get better and better. Eventually you will be able to print a pretty convincing pair of shoes, or cutlery set, or mp3 player. There are already startups commercialising this technology despite its infancy.

Coming at the same target from an industrial angle is the field of nanotechnology. We've long been promised Von Neumann self assembling machines, but mostly it's only delivered sunblock. And a heap of other great stuff, just not yet tiny robots. But we will have programmable self assembling stuff, and when we do, we won't know how we lived without it.

Anyway, the point is that we will eventually, probably sooner than you imagine, be able to make physical things, widgets, and objects as easily as we make software and digital data now. And we will be much, much better at software by then too.

Not only this, but there will be media surfaces everywhere. Electronic ink, bendable/wearable displays and screens will get cheap to the point that almost everything will be a display and almost everything will be an audio system. When that happens we won't always need to browse or to go into virtual worlds and social networking sites, but the virtual will come out here to meet us in reality, to augment our reality.

Through those processes much of what we think of as virtual will suddenly become very real, and we will exist in a world where just about everything important is copyable, trivially. The only way to truly own something in our old sense of the word will actually come to mean depriving others of a thing.

It's then that it will become obvious that ownership is theft.

Observe the following technological trends:

• Digital photo frames getting larger and cheaper
• Electronic paper (e.g. e-book readers)
• Phones with real operating systems
• Tablets
• WiFi and wireless broadband
• Pico projectors

The internet is leaving the stuffy confines of the PC and coming out to meet us in the real world. Virtual reality is dead, and augmented reality killed it.

Case in point: the small cafe near the office where I worked for RjDj in London didn't have chalk boards. Instead it had three large LCD screens listing its menu and specials.

Pretty soon, a whole lot more surfaces will become little windows into the internet.