About Me

Hi, my name's Lee.
I create websites and other things.
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What's the project spot?

It's a portfolio where I post projects and other stuff that interests me.

Current Projects

Is the UK becoming a bad place for internet startups?

The UK has been making some really bad decisions for encouraging internet entrepreneurship and tech startups to continue considering the UK an ideal place for starting a new internet company.

For those unaware and reading from outside of the UK, a UK judge has ordered British ISPs to block access to, arguably the biggest, BitTorrent search engine, The Pirate Bay. Alone this is a worrying act of censorship over internet content especially when you consider The Pirate Bay is currently (according to Alexa) the 77th most visited website in the world and doesn't even host any pirated content on its servers.

Unfortunately this isn't the only poor decision the UK has made recently. They're also planning to make it effectively illegal for UK webmasters to use analytics and other cookie tracking services that can be used to collect information on their visitors.
http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/UK-Edition-start-here/Richi-s-Rant-Web-Analytics-Illegal-after-26-May-Crazy/ba-p/2892
In my opinion this kind of action displays a clear misunderstanding about the workings of the internet and will do a lot more damage than the problem they're trying to solve. It's evident that many users have a problem with websites tracking their browsing activity but for concerned users this can be quickly fixed by disabling cookies. If you're worried about being being tracked online, you'll be delighted to hear the UK government are also planning to monitor all your personal email, phone and web traffic.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17590363

It doesn't even end there, the UK goverment are considering to block all pornographic websites by default, requiring users contact their ISPs to first opt-in before being allowed to access adult content.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17952975
If these measures are ever put into action the UK would be making one massive step towards the great firewall of China, where the government has the power to dictate what the people can and can't do online. And how exactly are we defining a pornographic site here? Many family friendly websites occasionally have pornographic content, take Tumblr, most users never upload any pornographic content to their Tumblr account, but occasionally users do, so do we block access to the entire website? Do we block access to any website with user added content? What does this type of censorship do to the functionality of the web? Here are some problems a software developer had when living behind the great firewall of china.

Any internet entrepreneurs looking to create a new internet company in the UK should be worried; your website may be under threat of being heavily censored or even blocked completely over the next few years. If you're startup hosts user uploaded content, you could be under threat already, and I'm afraid it could soon get worse.

If you're a UK webmaster leave a comment below, I'm interested to hear you're thoughts.

27th March 2012 at 11:48

Become a pirate, save the world.

I have a proposal for the people (and robots!) of the internets. Stop downloading your music legally. Whenever you find yourself about to buy a song legally from iTunes navigate to The Pirate Bay instead.

You're crazy, why would I want to do that?
Hear me out... I've had enough of the music industry criminalising our kids for simply using their favourite Justin Beiber song as a backing track for a video shot on a school camping trip, which they shared with Gran.

The truth is if we want to criminalise piracy, then we have to be willing to sacrifice our civil liberties and allow what we share and download be watched. If we're against having our private channels of communication watched 24/7, then we might as well legalise piracy because we would have no way to enforce it.

But legalising piracy would put people who work in the music industry out of jobs
I don't think we should be valuing some people's jobs over our civil liberties. There will always be a demand for art and if there's a demand there will always be a way to make money. It might not be as simple as merely creating a piece of art and selling it for a fixed price, but times change and businesses need to adapt with that change to find new ways of making money. Take Spotify, they're doing great and even helping to convert pirates into paying music lovers.

We can't protect every business from change, and we shouldn't, as technology and society evolves so should businesses. This is what happens in others industries, take newspapers, they are being forced by technological changes to have an online presence to ensure their survival in the digital age.

Wouldn't it would stop artists from wanting to create art?
There are plenty of artists that don't make anything from the art they make and they love making it. It's also a myth to believe the reason they're not making money is just because they're not as talented as other artists. The truth is an artists' sells are usually equivalent to how well the record labels sell them.

Services like PledgeMusic allows artists to make money from fans by allowing them to buy things such as hand written letters, phone calls, personal possessions and merch. This is a great way to support the arists you love without having to give a penny to the record labels.

That's all great, but why should I stop buying music legally?
It's simple, if you don't want record labels dictating what you should listen to and who's successful, if you want to support your favourite artists without the record labels taking a cut and if you want freedom to browse the web and share content without having your every click monitored, then we need to show our support to our favourite artists in different way than just buying CDs.

If you really love music support the advancement of the music industry into the 21st century then choose how you use your wallet carefully. Sign up for a service such as Zune Pass, stop downloading songs from iTunes, heck listen to them on YouTube if you have to, believe it or not a lot of money can be made from YouTube.

Regardless of what the entertainment industry says there is plenty of money to be made and a lot to gain from the non-commercial legalisation of piracy.

15th February 2012 at 19:03

Consciousness, coming to a machine near you.

What is consciousness?

It's one of the biggest questions, what is consciousness? And it's a question that is becoming more relevant with increasing computational abilities and promises of ever more 'clever' robots. To help us answer that question a good place to start is by asking some simpler questions. For example, is an earthworm conscious? Even this is hard question to ask but we would probably agree that it doesn't really. Now how about a cat? It's harder to be sure, cats seem to be aware of their surroundings, they get scared and feel pain but they wouldn't recognise themselves if you put them front of a mirror. So we can say they are more conscious than an earthworm but still probably not to the same extent as us. But what makes a cat different to an earth worm or a human? Well it probably something to do with how big the brain is. We know that consciousness at least has something to do with the brain because we know when someone has damaged their brain their consciousness can be effected it a variety of ways, more on this in second!

Consciousness and the brain

So now we know consciousness is linked to the brain we can apply our first set of questions to the brain, how many neurons does it take to be conscious? How about a single neuron? That's simple, no. 10,000? Nope. What about 75,000,000 (about as many as a mouse)? It's harder to say. So is it just the number of neurons and raw brain power that make conscious or it something else?
Imagine we built a robot that had equivalent processing power to the human brain, something that should be easily done by the end of the century, would it have conscious? Well we're not sure but it's unlikely. So it's probably not just raw brain power that makes us conscious, that means it's got to be more to do with how it's wired.
We know we experience conciseness as being aware of what we are sensing. So could it be to do with the areas of the brain that deal with our senses? Studies show that not to be the case. There are phenomenon's such as blindsight in which a patient is unaware of any visual input. The interesting part is just because they are unaware of the visual input doesn't mean they can act on it. Patients with blindsight are able to predict visual stimuli such as the movement of objects with reasonable accuracy.

Is it all an illusion?

So if there isn't a single area of the brain we can connect to consciousness what causes us to be conscious. I hate to disappoint but we just don't know yet and we may never know. There are many different hypothesis, it could be a side-effect from complex processes in our brain or maybe we appear conscious but we're really just victims of cause and effect.
One of the most fascinating things about consciousness is that we don't have any way of telling if anyone else is really conscious. For all we know everyone around us could just be acting unknowingly on inputs they're receiving from their sensory inputs. If we ever did create a conscious robot we would never really know if it was truly conscious or just acting in a way that made it seem conscious. Being able to merely say you're conscious doesn't make it so.
If you're interested in learning more about consciousness I urge to check out the links below and to submit your thoughts on where consciousness comes from to this survey: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-consciousness/

More information on consciousness

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xze89PCLaWMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA53&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

Recent Tutorials

5th March 2012 at 8:00

Node.js for beginners - Callbacks

Node.js for beginners, part 2. We take a look at what callbacks are and what makes them so useful for creating fast stable non-blocking code in Node.js.

12th February 2012 at 12:19

Creating a genetic algorithm for beginners.

An introduction to genetic algorithms (GA) for beginners. Step by step guide of how to create a basic binary GA in Java.