I hate to say it (especially after putting in so much effort), but is the project codenamed Atom/Echo dead? Let’s look carefully:

1. The Echo wiki is largely dead. A quick look at the wiki’s recent changes shows that work has definitely slowed right down.
2. The Name Voting is an absolute mess. All of the originally cleared candidates have been voted out, the best names (Echo/Atom) have been deemed unviable, and the new names are… well, awful. Kitak, Mota, Syntia? Are we naming concept cars?
3. Oh yeah, and the number of votes for each entry are very much single figures, which doesn’t look good for community adoption.
4. The Atom mailiing list has plunged in usage. From around 30 entries a day at it’s peak to, at best, 5. Ouch.
5. The Formerly Echo blog is pretty dead too. Updates are sparse and short.
6. Very little mention of it in the places we used to see it mentioned at least twice a post.

From this, we can say that work has definitely died down. But, that doesn’t quite paint a fair picture. Important avenues are being explored elsewhere.

The AtomAPI is doing particularly well. Amongst others, a PHP implementation of the API is pretty much done, as well as PERL and Java versions. That’s a big step.

It’s tough to say. The forward motion we once saw has hit a wall. Hopefully, the apathy will clear up soon. We’ve all put in too much effort to let it die.

It’s been one of those fun days, but to save much moaning I’ll cut to the point: my mobile phone has died a horrible death and it’ll be a few days before I’ll be able to fix it or replace it. Fun. I know some people who actually know me read this, so consider this the best notice I can give for a few days.

In my infinite wisdom, I made sure not to keep a list of peoples numbers I had stored separate (on paper etc), so chances are I’ve lost 90% of the numbers I had. Joy.

Big news: I finally have a comments system. It should work, but if you spot any errors or get erroneous warnings, please let me know (via email or comment).

Rules? Stay vaguely on topic, no spam, no flaming, be nice to each other etc. The usual sort of thing. Oh yeah, and you take responsibility for anything you say: IP’s are being logged if banning is absolutely necessary, but I doubt it will.

I don’t expect the comments to get very busy, but knock yourself out. It’s something I wouldn’t mind being surprised about.

Given the recent hassle over creative commons licensing, I’ve decided to pull the creative commons license from this site. It’s just to open to abuse, and misinterpretation.

From this day onwards, Solitude no longer uses a creative commons license. However, I can’t revoke the license for previous entries. So, entries between me adding the license and entries prior to today (that does not include earlier entries today) are still under the by attribution, non commercial, share alike license.

When I find a fairer and safer license, I’ll use it.

With enough twists to make anyone doubt every characters motives, Cypher is surprisingly well-written for how subdued it is. It’s the story of Morgan (Jeremy Northam), a man who wants to escape the drudgery of his life by going into espionage. Inevitably, he gets into a lot more than he wanted.

Surprisingly, the film also shows that Lucy Liu, the lead female character, can actually act. Shocking, when put side by side with her work in Charlie’s Angels.

It is not the best film in the world, the twists do start to push it after a while, but it’s certainly a great deal better than some of the garbage that is being showing recently.