Simple

Update and Movements...

2008-02-01T16:34:00.000Z

I'm currently migrating this blog over to Wordpress in order to incorporate it into a personal website set-up. At the moment it has moved over to http://simpleuk.wordpress.com/, but will hopefully make a final move to http://blog.simpleigh.com/. All in good time, of course...

Blook

2007-05-08T18:14:00.001Z

They tell me that the latest phenomenon to hit the internet today is a blook. An online book. Not sure why the word book gains an 'l' - to me that implies that the word "blog" should be an online bog, which can't be true...

Nowadays you can go straight to Lulu and upload your blook. Anyone can download it and you can even charge to make money! Hurrah! All I need now is a book and somebody to buy it.

Perhaps the most exciting feature of Lulu is the option to publish your book. That's right, for real, actual publishing. To me this seems like one of the most useful options. Suppose I've a massive pdf document and I can't be bothered to read it online. If I print it i'll end up with a right mess of pages falling apart. So instead I can upload it and order a printed copy, hardbound if I desire, and the rates aren't insane.

For a while I've had plans to try and compile a modicum of Change Ringing theory into a text. My lack of knowledge implies a selection of contributors may need to be chosen, but it's a relief to realise that the hard job of having the thing printed is actually quite a bit easier than anticipated.

The question now is whether anyone will want to spend £40 on a full-colour 500-page ringing textbook...

Blog Updates

2007-05-04T11:55:00.001Z

The cheeky people at Blogger have been updating their engine, temporarily breaking the beast which is Windows Live Writer. No matter, a quick journey to the writer home page, a seamless install and we're going again.

They do tell me that it's possible to blog from MS Word these days, though I'm quite happy with the writer so haven't really tried it out. I don't like editing anything other than documents with word because I like the "Print View" mode far too much. Messing around with web pages has an unfortunate habit of switching things to other views, which is incredibly annoying when I later come to edit a document.

The updates at Blogger are quite interesting. When developing applications or libraries it's usually reckoned that changing interfaces is a big no-no. You're free to modify the implementation of your system as much as you like, but it must talk to the outside world in the same way. Add new functionality if you must, but most importantly remain backwards compatible!

Blogger hasn't done this - they broke Windows Live Writer, and they also broke their own Word Toolbar, leaving just the simple message:

Note: Development on Blogger for Word has been discontinued, and is no longer available for download. We don't have plans to update it for the new version of Blogger. If you feel strongly about the loss of this feature, though, please let us know via our Feature Suggestions form. The following article applies only if you are still on the old version of Blogger and have previously downloaded Blogger for Word.

They won't have a problem, of course - they're offering a service people want for free. Who cares about the raft of applications which depend on the way it works? Is this just another big company trampling on the little guy(s)?

Of course keeping "the way it works" the same restricts the range of upgrades you can offer to your service. The choice to upgrade is difficult. Is it really necessary? What are the implications? I'm sure the guys at Blogger thought long and hard about this, and no doubt the upgrade will prove useful if I ever figure out what it offers...

Cake

2007-05-04T11:41:00.003Z

I'd just like to point out that Madeira Cake is very high on the list of greatest cakes known to humanity. It manages to be luxuriously moist, proving far better than many inferior sponge cakes which generally prove to be dry and crumbly.

It's not quite up there with Mille-feuille, of course, which combines several of life's finer pleasures - Puff pastry, icing, strawberry jam and cream.

Smelly

2007-03-29T11:46:00.000Z

The Question of the Week on B3ta at the moment is all about personal hygiene. It's full of exciting stories about people who smell really bad.

Unfortunately this seems to have coincided with an eczema flare up, and the great sage that is Wikipedia is advising:

The first and primary recommendation is that people suffering from eczema shouldn't use detergents of any kind unless absolutely necessary. Current medical thought is that people wash too much and that eczema sufferers should use cleansers only when water is not sufficient to remove dirt from skin.

Interestingly this seems to be serving me quite well. Cutting back on soap has spared me from spending the morning itching, a significant problem just a few days ago. The only problem now, though, is personal hygiene.

If you happen to be walking past me any time soon and I offend your nostrils, please tell me.

Linux - Is it the way forward?

2007-03-20T20:35:00.000Z

I've spent most of today compiling packages aiming to produce a bootable version of Linux From Scratch. I've downloaded the source and compile it on the machine to produce a working Linux OS (hopefully).

It's quite exciting, although I'm not sure how much I'm learning just by typing in commands from the book. Two early observations are:

Bash is really cool. For some reason I thought that DOS was quite good, but this takes the biscuit.
Regular expressions really aren't. I've never seen something so confusing. One day, I suppose, I might get my head round the syntax.

Meanwhile I'm still compiling away. Unfortunately, I rather suspect that the experiment will end with nothing more exciting than a blinking cursor. Oh well, it beats doing work.

Student Journalism

2007-02-08T16:06:00.000Z

I enjoy reading student newspapers. Not only is there no real news in Cambridge worth writing about, but most of the writing is hilariously bad and over the top. I've seen plenty of apologies for erroneous and unbalanced reporting - most notably for an entire front-page spread in Varsity more recently. Most of the writing is, quite literally, intellectual masturbation; I am fairly sure there must be a competition to see which "journalist" can use the longest words in their articles.

Yet at the same time as deliberately obfuscating their meaning by hiding behind verbosity (look, I'm doing it too), they completely misjudge their audience. Yes you can use long words, but you've over-simplified most of the issues so much that they don't make sense anymore.

I'm afraid that was a bit of a rant, but here's a kernel of evidence to back it up. We turn to Varsity again, January 26th issue, page 6.

NEWS INVESTIGATION

Binge drinking endemic in student culture

This is written by Rebecca Lester, "Investigations Editor," who frankly doesn't seem to be able to investigate her way out of a paper bag. I hadn't realised Cambridge offered degrees in "stating the bleeding obvious."

Here's the best bit, right there in the first paragraph:

The average Cambridge student consumes 28.4 alcohol units a week, a CUSU/Varsity survey revealed last week. This equates to nine units a night, far exceeding the recommended daily allowance of two units a day for women and four for men.

Now last time I looked, there were seven days in a week. So 28.4 units per week works out at something more like 4.06 units a day. This seems a little closer to their recommended daily allowance. Perhaps everyone's drinking exactly the right amount!

OK, I'm not that naive. But there is certainly something odd going on, their figures don't make sense. Additional statistical gems include:

177 - bottles of vodka drunk by the average student over course of Cambridge career

Hmm, I've probably had 1 or 2, but 177 sounds like complete and utter tripe. I know several people who don't like vodka at all. Does that mean some people are drinking 354 bottles? I suspect that 177 is the number you'd get if you totalled up the average student's drinking and expressed it in "bottles of vodka" units. Although they don't say how big the bottles are so it's quite hard to check.

31% of students have injured themselves while drunk

Now I've certainly injured myself while drunk. I've even come back with the odd cut and graze. I've also injured myself while sober. I suspect 100% of students have done the same. I admit I'm probably nit-picking on this point, but the statistic in itself is meaningless. It'd be far more interesting to know how the rate of injuries varies with sobriety. Perhaps a study for our beer-goggles scientists?

The most amusing thing about this article, however, is it's formulaic nature. There's nothing really very new here. We know that students drink a little more than is healthy. They always have - Byron et al. used to drink themselves silly on wine. I'm really not convinced that this subject is worth a two-page "investigation." It's as if our "investigations editor" sat down for three minutes brainstorming and decided to write about the first thing that came into her head.

The article is ringed by an advertisement for Jesus College's May Ball. Ah, the great Cambridge May Ball, what more blatant excuse for a solid night of drinking? That's what a May Ball is for. Ethical reporting indeed - if they really cared about student drinking they wouldn't advertise balls at all. They could have at least put the advert on another page!

Now admittedly this article is rather out of date. So what's made me write about it now? Well, it's the fact that this week's TCS has done exactly the same thing.

The dominance of alcohol in much social activity is hard to ignore.

Well, quite. But I don't care, probably since I'm drunk at the time.

My Software Needs

2007-02-08T15:19:00.000Z

Now I've finally installed a release copy of an operating system, I have to go through the process of installing applications all over again. Here's a few thoughts on how my software needs have changed.

In the olden days one of the first things on a new computer would have been Winzip. This application allows you to collect and compress files using the popular zip format. I haven't installed Winzip for a while now, though.

The first thing that's changed is that there's no longer nearly as much need to compress data. There's piles of space on my hard drive. If I want to transfer a big file I burn it onto a CD. The internet is now plenty fast enough to transfer most files in an uncompressed form.

Not only that, but nowadays I've no need of specialist software to unzip downloaded files. Windows will do it for me - and has done since Windows XP (I think - it may be earlier). I'm afraid it means I no longer need Winzip.

Compression isn't dead, however. These days I make far more use of free software. This often comes in a compressed format, for example in RAR form or as a Tarball.

Acrobat Reader has stayed - and is even more useful. I now save my own documents in PDF format to transfer them around. Office 2007 lets me save directly into PDF, whereas before I had used a special printer driver.

The Internet has taken a larger part in my life as well. I transfer lots of data around via FTP and other techniques, using FileZilla. I first installed this only a year or so ago, but now find it indispensible. Putty comes in useful as a Telnet client. The more things I register for online, the more passwords I have. PINs lets me keep track of them all.

Perhaps the most obvious change is in the type of software I use. Now vast amounts come free from open-source developers as opposed to faceless corporations. One day I might even find enough time to improve them or make my own.

More tripe in the name of science

2007-02-07T13:30:00.000Z

According to the Beeb:

Scientists believe they have worked out a formula to calculate how "beer goggles" affect a drinker's vision.

The drink-fuelled phenomenon is said to transform supposedly "ugly" people into beauties - until the morning after.

There's even an equation given on the site to calculate your "beer goggles effect."

A formula rating of less than one means no effect. Between one and 50 the person you would normally find unattractive appears less "visually offensive".

Non-appealing people become suddenly attractive between 51 and 100. At more than 100, someone not considered attractive looks like a super model.

Now I think that this sounds like utter tripe. So why on earth are researchers at Manchester University wasting time and energy on this sort of rubbish?

The research was commissioned by eyecare firm Bausch & Lomb PureVision.

Aha, all becomes clear.

Valentine's Day - Paper Rose Links

2007-02-05T12:13:00.000Z

Some links again, I'm afraid.

Instructions to fold the standard sort of paper rose are available here and here. It's fairly pretty and doesn't look impossible to make (admittedly I've not tried it yet due to lack of paper).

Scroll right to the bottom of this page and you'll see that there are several different roses available. Those interested in the Kawasaki Rose can find a modified version with a stem here.

Finally there's a totally different rose at this site.

The downside to being a beta tester...

2007-02-02T11:23:00.000Z

Somewhat infuriatingly my Beta version of MS Office 2007 has died today. It expires on 1st February and refuses to do anything anymore. I'm allowed to look at my documents but not edit them.

Oh well, £100 spent at Amazon then...

Link clear out (79)

2007-01-31T15:39:00.000Z

From Matt Cutts:

John Walker’s Strike Out idea: I usually stop reading a document after the first misspelling.

Read the whole Strike Out article.

Link clear out (78)

2007-01-31T15:37:00.000Z

Here's some posts on NHS Blog Doctor about the decline of the BBC. There's a really good summary here, with some background information here and here.

Windows Vista Released

2007-01-30T12:18:00.000Z

Windows Vista has now been officially released. It's available on Amazon for those who want it. There's been excitement around the launch, with dancers jumping around billboards in the US and other such fun.

To mark this event, PC World have reposted two articles, Windows Vista: 15 Reasons to Switch and Wait! Don't Buy Microsoft Windows Vista. The first article is a bit of a laugh, as the excitable reporter throws together a list of cool things about the newest OS around. The second article is desperate to rain on the parade.

1. Vista Is Incomplete
Microsoft is already planning its first service pack and seeking input from users on what to include. Vista probably won't be truly ready for prime time until that first service pack version, possibly later this year.

The hardware and software companies that make compatible products for Vista aren't all ready for the new OS. Many of those companies are scrambling to complete Vista drivers and updates. Most important, not all video and sound card companies are ready.

The article they link to is one of their own, which starts:

Vista Update Already Set
Even before launch, Microsoft is compiling items for the first service pack.

On the verge of the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft is already accepting orders for features to go in the operating system's first service pack.

Compiling Wish List
Microsoft is taking feedback from testers who are part of its Technology Adoption Program (TAP), which lets certain partners evaluate prerelease software, a Microsoft spokesman in London said on Wednesday. Service packs typically consist of a mix of bug fixes and new features.

Frankly, if Microsoft weren't collecting bugs to put into the next service pack then I'd be cross. Do they honestly think that all the Microsofties have been sat twiddling their thumbs since November 30th, when Vista was released to volume-license customers? Quite clearly they've been working hard to find the bugs which turn up and fix them, which I think is a good thing.

So clearly the article linked isn't particularly persuasive, but the important point is that most casual readers won't click on the link. They'll believe everything in the first article and never follow through. That seems to me to be a touch deceptive.

Admittedly, though, there's always been a school of thought which says that you shouldn't upgrade to a new operating system until the first service pack is out. The logic goes that all of the important bugs will have been ironed out by then and you've got a good chance of getting a working system.

I've gone off this idea, however. The software life-cycle is complicated, and inevitably means that bugs are left behind in release software; it really is impossible to find them all. There comes a point where the process of fixing bugs starts to generate more, and then you end up in a right mess. Microsoft released Vista at an appropriate point when everything was working reasonably well.

Now compare what people are currently likely to be using, Windows XP, with what they are reluctant to upgrade to. People moan that XP isn't secure enough and is susceptible to Viruses. Surely it's better to move to a more secure OS as soon as possible? Vista is not only more secure, but by its very newness won't have been compromised as much as XP.

The second plank of their argument, that hardware drivers aren't ready yet is partially true. Many hardware companies have been lamentably slow in developing drivers. I'm running on Microsoft drivers for my NVidia display card as NVidia haven't deigned to release any yet. But it's all working fine. Many Beta-testers have happily installed the OS. There doesn't seem a vast amount of point waiting.

The second reason not to buy Vista seems to be the cost.

2. Vista Is Expensive
The cheapest way for current Windows XP users to get a legal copy of Vista is to buy the upgrade version of Home Basic, which is $99. But you don't want the cheapest version.

First, the upgrade version will require you to keep your Windows XP CD for years. You do have a Windows XP CD handy, don't you?

Well, Vista is expensive, it's a fair criticism. But to go off on one about not buying an upgrade version because you'll have to keep the old CD is silly. Why criticise Vista specifically for a problem which affects any operating system upgrade?

3. Vista Wants a New PC
To get full value from Vista, you're probably going to want to buy a new, Vista-optimized PC. Many of the benefits of Vista require hardware your current PC doesn't have. ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive, for example, require special hybrid or flash drives. Windows Aero looks awesome, but only if your graphics card supports Pixel Shader 2.0. You can record high-definition cable TV, but only with a tuner card designed to take advantage of that Vista feature. You can enjoy DirectX 10 games, but only with a compatible video card.

To get full value from any computer you'll want the newest hardware. Vista works perfectly happily on lots of old hardware. ReadyBoost works perfectly well with a flash drive. This "special hardware" is, er, a cheap USB pen drive - the sort which companies give out for free at conferences. Hmm, not so special.

You can't record any TV on any computer without a tuner card, that's fairly obvious. And you'll need a newer video card to play the latest games, as any gamer will tell you. So what's the fuss all about?

4. Vista Is Time-Consuming
Installing any new operating system is time-consuming. You have to configure everything, load your data, install your applications, and get your peripherals working. Then, in the case of Vista, you have to figure out where Microsoft buried all the options, menus, and features, and get used to the ubiquitous Search boxes.

Yes, installing a new operating system takes time. Not as much time as you'd think for Vista - I was astounded at how fast the installer ran. Those "ubiquitous Search boxes" have saved me from trawling through the Start menu - I haven't used it for months. If I want to run notepad, I hit the windows key, type "note," and hit enter. Not only that but everything works quicker. Think long-term gains, people!

5. Windows XP Isn't Obsolete

6. Vista May be the Best Reason Yet to Buy a Mac

The first point is true. But give it time. When everyone else is rushing to upgrade you'll have your computer sorted out and running happily.

But it's the last point which reveals this journalists true thoughts. He doesn't like Vista because it's not a Mac! But let's look at Mac OS X:

Mac OS X 10.0 was a radical departure from the previous "classic" Macintosh operating system. Mac OS X was Apple's answer to the long awaited call for a next generation Macintosh operating system. Mac OS X 10.0 introduced a brand new code base, completely separate from Mac OS 9's code base, and all other previous Apple operating systems. Mac OS X introduced a new Darwin Unix-like core, as well as introducing a totally new system of memory management. Mac OS X is widely regarded to be the best operating system Apple has ever produced; however, Mac OS X 10.0 was a rocky start to the Mac OS X line, plagued with missing features and performance issues.

...

The System Requirements for Mac OS X 10.0 were not well received by the Macintosh community, as at the time the amount of RAM standard with Macintosh computers was 64 megabytes of RAM, while the Mac OS X 10.0 requirements called for 128 megabytes of RAM. As well, processor upgrade cards, which were quite popular for obsolete Power Mac G3 computers, were not supported.

...

The heavy criticism of Mac OS X 10.0 ultimately resulted in Apple offering a free upgrade to Mac OS X v10.1 to all Mac OS X 10.0 users.

So there we are. Vista isn't as bad as PC World think, and Apple is just as bad. But then I'd guessed that from the start.

Google Bombing - An End to the Fun?

2007-01-30T11:36:00.000Z

I've discussed Google bombing before here. Apparently, Google have made some algorithm changes to reduce their impact. From their webmaster blog:

We wanted to give a quick update about "Googlebombs." By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs), but if you'd like to get more details about this topic, read on.

So there we are, it's like the end of an era when searching for "weapons of mass destruction" doesn't come up with this page at the top of the search results.

(with thanks to Matt Cutts)

Moore's Law

2007-01-29T14:34:00.000Z

From Wikipedia:

Moore's Law is the empirical observation made in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. It is attributed to Gordon E. Moore (born 1929), a co-founder of Intel.

Intel have just seen a breakthrough in chip design which have ensured this will live on for a few more years. Here's some links:

Copycat Computing

2007-01-29T14:29:00.000Z

As usual I've been accumulating a whole host of links in my feed reader without commenting on them. Here's a few to help clear out the pile.

Robert Scoble points out a post at the top of Techmeme. The post, by Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny calls out Google for copying one of the splash pages on the Yahoo! site. It's quite amusing - look at the post itself to see how similar the pages are.

Google's Matt Cutts answers back, however:

Jeremy points out that Google had an IE7 promo page that looked remarkably similar to a Yahoo! IE7 promo page.

I can only speak for me personally on this. If Jeremy looked into it and says that it wasn’t a template from Microsoft, I believe him. That would mean that the Yahoo! page was used as a template for Google’s IE7 promo page. I can’t say why someone at Google would decide to do that, but to the Yahoo! UI designer whose page was copied: my apologies. In my personal opinion, it sucks when someone else copies a page layout without attribution.

It can take a lot of work to come up with creative HTML. I remember when Google did a bunch of UI research to decide on a distinctive look for AdWords. We decided to go with pastel boxes with a darker border on the right-hand side of the search results. Not too long afterwards, Yahoo! changed their side ads to pastel boxes with a darker border.

Click on the link to see the examples he offers.

It's quite amusing the fuss that's made in the computer industry about copying. Copycat software crops up all over the place as soon as one company has had a good idea. Apple and Microsoft have both spent years copying each other. The Open Source software movement relies on everyone building on each others work. In the same way as academics, you can only stand on the shoulders of giants if you can copy what they've already managed.

Sony fails to appreciate pornography

2007-01-12T15:58:00.000Z

Robert Scoble makes an intriguing point here, linking to this page.

Has Sony gone mad? Prominent adult movie producer Digital Playground says it is forced to use HD DVD instead of Blu-ray, because Sony does not allow XXX-rated movies to be released on Blu-ray.

It does not matter how you stand to porn. It is here and it is a massive business. It is also an industry that is an early adopter for new media technology. VHS might not have won with out the adult film industry adopting it.

Robert further points out the parallels with the VHS vs. Betamax struggle.

When I worked at LZ Premiums in the 1980s, the Beta vs. VHS video tape formats were in full swing. Our store rented video tapes, including a fairly large selection of adult videos. Many many VHS sales were decided on because of the much greater availability of adult entertainment in the VHS format.

Intriguing stuff.

Food

2007-01-05T12:44:00.000Z

Today I'm eating a Sainsbury's Basics range Macaroni Cheese meal cooked in the microwave. It tastes of virtually nothing. Although it was stupidly cheap so I suppose that makes up for it.

Coincidentally I came upon this chap who has spent the month of November living on a food budget of only $30. That's about 50p a day for those of us over here.

My Macaroni Cheese Meal cost 86p, for a small volume of food, which tastes awful. The worst part of it was that I was quite pleased when buying it: "Wow, this'll save some money."

I've restored a little perspective on the situation now, though, and shan't be spending less than £2 on a ready meal ever again...

Gratuitous Wasting of Space

2007-01-05T12:40:00.000Z

...to say

"Merry Christmas"
"Happy New Year"
"You're all muppets, get out of my face"

Sony in trouble again

2006-12-14T21:39:00.000Z

Apparently Sony has been trying their hand at viral marketing, although without a great amount of success...

Some "teenagers" set up this site (not working at the mo) to discuss how all they wanted for Christmas was a PSP. Unfortunately, they all turned out to be corporate whores.

This Youtube video shows some of the key features of the sham, originally exposed in this Something Awful thread.

Mind you, they do say that all publicity is good publicity.

Shoes

2006-12-14T20:08:00.000Z

For some peculiar reason I have become a compulsive shoe shopper, buying two pairs in as many weeks. As someone who is still wearing shoes he wore at school (they're nice and comfy now the leather is soft), this is a significant change. I've even gone so far as to buy a pair of brown shoes. These will match my brown jacket and jeans in order to form some sort of heinous colour-coordinated fashion statement.

Blimey.

Rumours that I shall be dying the hair brown tomorrow are as yet unconfirmed.

Links - Microsoft Powerpoint

2006-12-09T20:20:00.000Z

I've been stockpiling links in Bloglines for a while now, but unfortunately barely have the time to read them, let alone make decent comments. Unfortunately I want them cleaned out, and so over the next few days will do just that. You'll get a link and a brief excerpt - nothing more.

To start, I'd like to introduce this essay by Edward Tufte:

PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports

Nearly all engineering presentations at NASA are made in PowerPoint. Is this a produce endorsement or a big mistake. Does PP's cognitive style effect the quality of engineering analysis? How does PP compare with alternative methods of technical presentation?

I've often been slightly discontented with the use of PowerPoint for presentations. It's often the first clue that your lecture is likely to be boring. Reading from slides is not an acceptable way to convey information to an (hopefully) intelligent audience.

Tufte argues strongly that the bullet-point style of displaying information disrupts coherent thought and logical flow. The lecturers who use PP often ignore the hard boundaries between slides, but I can imagine that this is harder in a business context. Can't explain your point properly? That's OK - just ignore most of the subtleties so it will fit on the slide.

The very interested can buy an essay in book form:

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

The Full Feeds Debate - some evidence?

2006-12-09T19:08:00.000Z

This blogger has spent two years wondering whether to make the move to publishing his articles in full online via. feeds. Instead they published a short summary of each article, requiring people to visit their page to see the whole thing. Here's an exciting graph:

Growth in RSS Subscribers - We added more than a 1000 new subscribers in less than a month - thanks to full feeds.

I think that speaks for itself.

I like full feeds, and have discussed them at length before (unfortunately it was ages ago and I can't be bothered to find the link).

The Full Feeds petition is still going here.

Link of the day

2006-12-07T23:18:00.000Z

Why engineering's the best subject ever.

via. Bill Sticker

Interesting Thoughts - and Dawkins

2006-11-28T23:46:00.000Z

Exciting article here:

RICHARD DAWKINS IS RIGHT. His deicidal bestseller The God Delusion attacks the absurdities and cruelties, the contradictions and superstitions, the rip offs and fantasies of religion across the world and throughout history. I couldn't agree more. It's enough to make you wish Abraham hadn't been in when God called round.

The problem is, like other fundamentalists, Dawkins won't stop talking when he's finished talking sense. Rather than surveying the countless varieties of religion, weighing up their mixed record, and arguing that on balance we'd be better off without it, he is only willing to see the dark side, and writes off the whole thing, dismissing evidence that makes a monochrome worldview uncomfortable.

He sees the moral failures, but not the moral breakthroughs. He lists the atrocities and ignores the triumphs. He cuts through the supposed proofs of God's existence like a particularly moist sponge cake, but shows no conception at all of why people actually believe – other than that they're a bunch of morons who don't know any better.

There's a lot of sense there, but I especially like the line "like other fundamentalists." I still think that atheism is as much a faith-based position as theism. After all, you can't prove that my God doesn't exist. So atheists just have to believe it - they have to have faith. Just like mine.

Panda Porn?

2006-11-23T13:55:00.000Z

A friend once said to me (we may have been drunk at the time), that he didn't think he'd have figured out how to have sex if he hadn't seen it somewhere else first. He didn't elaborate on where this "somewhere else" was, which may have been for the best.

Interestingly, though, it appears that Pandas have much the same problem:

After years of painstaking research, scientists say they have unleashed a baby boom among one of the world’s most beloved but endangered animals, China’s giant panda.
A bit of panda porn has helped too, they say.
“It works,” enthuses Zhang Zhihe, a leading Chinese expert, about showing uninitiated males DVDs of fellow pandas mating.

Reasons to like Windows Vista (58)

2006-11-22T15:37:00.000Z

I'm currently preparing a presentation to discuss progress made so far in my 4th Year Engineering project. The project is to try and build a music transcription system. In essence, you pump a sound file into a computer, turn the handle, and the score comes out the other end. These sorts of systems have many potential uses.

Great jazz (if there is such a thing) often includes lots of improvisation and original work. How is the ordinary man in the street supposed to be able to produce similar sounds without spending years learning the art of improvisation? How much simpler it would be if a recording could be transcribed quickly and easily and the results published for anyone to play?

Sound files are massive, using lots of disk space. It would be far simpler to store a transcribed score of a recording. This could be played back using a digital synthesiser. Inevitably there would be a quality loss, but this could be made up by storing additional data such as vibrato and dynamics.

Finally imagine the potential for searching on the internet. Imagine if you could whistle a melody into a microphone and Google could find a recording of the piece it came from. This will only become possible when it is simple to transcribe recordings.

In order to illustrate this final point I produced the following picture:

The fact remains that Internet Explorer 7 running in Vista looks very, very cool.

Recording Yourself

2006-11-22T15:12:00.000Z

Some time ago on a ringing email list there was a discussion about recordings. People generally found that when they listened to a recording of themselves, it sounded far better than they anticipated. The converse was also true - that when actually ringing people tended to be far more critical of themselves than when listening.

Interestingly I spotted this effect the other day recording some music. For Remembrance Sunday my voluntary before the service (Praeludium in g - Buxtehude) had to be quite tightly controlled timewise in order that I stopped in time for the 2 minutes' silence. I achieved this by recording my voluntary and writing time checkpoints into the score at various bars. I had a giant clock to compare the time with, and hoped that I'd be able to tell whether I was too slow or fast, giving me room to adjust and finish at the right time. Unfortunately this didn't quite work - the brass band refused to shut up and so I started a minute late, and the choir came in a few seconds early.

While listening to the recording I was slightly surprised at how good it sounded. At the first pedal entry in the Fugue I fluffed a little and made a few mistakes. While I was playing this I was really quite cross - what was played bore little resemblance to what was printed on the page and also sounded quite bad. In the recording, however, it wasn't particularly noticeable. It occurred to me that I was far better at recognising mistakes when playing than when listening. Part of this must be the fact that I had the score in front of me and knew when I was making the mistakes!

On Tuesday night I was grateful to be invited to join the Society of Cambridge Youths in a 12-bell practice at Towcester. [This link taken from Michael Wilby's excellent Rings of Twelve website which unfortunately uses frames and makes linking difficult.] I was quite disappointed by my ringing during the practice, making lots of striking errors and managing to go wrong during a simple touch (worrying about the striking you see). A recording of the practice has been made available online (I'll link to this if I get permission) and so I've been listening to this. A quick listening earlier this morning seemed to indicate the same effect - the ringing sounded far better than I remembered it. Without following too carefully it all sounded quite good.

This afternoon I listened again, this time following my bell through. Interestingly I noticed lots more mistakes this time - I was listening far more critically. Having the line in front of me meant that I knew what should be happening. If it didn't happen then it was immediately obvious. In the same way if I listen to the recording of the Buxtehude with the score in front of me then the mistakes leap out again.

I think there's two important factors working together here:

When listening critically it really helps to know exactly what's going on. Without a copy of the score or line in front of you it's harder to pick out mistakes. In music somebody could make a mistake changing one chord in a piece - you might not notice unless you had a copy on paper or in your head already. Listening to ringing it's difficult to listen very carefully to the striking of one particular bell unless you can follow it through the changes.
While performing one tends to listen far more carefully than when listening. There's a lot more concentration goes into a performance.

When I first started to learn the organ my teacher suggested that I should record some of my playing and then listen to it. He said I'd be amazed at how clear some of the mistakes were. Unfortunately I never did, but I'm fairly sure I would have noticed more mistakes. This is the opposite situation to the one I'm in now. I still feel one of my biggest steps forward as a musician was when I started to listen to what I was playing. It sounds like an obvious and simple skill, but it really isn't. This is especially true for the organ - while playing a particularly complicated passage it's difficult to find the brainpower to listen as well! After I started listening to what I was playing I found that I started to notice the mistakes - and began to correct them myself rather than waiting for my teacher to tell me.

I wonder if learner ringers see the same effect. I'm sure that most ringers could pick out which changes in a recording were struck poorly, but then they grab a rope and don't notice when they crunch and clip others. In the same way they must learn to listen to the sound they're making.

Comments always welcome - please add your thoughts.

A little Google Bombing

2006-11-21T13:11:00.000Z

With thanks to this site. martinlutherkingdotorg is a racist site moaning about MLK. Perhaps you'll join me in posting these links to help knock the site off the top of the search engines.

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

Back to the Beeb

2006-11-20T15:45:00.000Z

This article's quite good. It even has some numbers to back up my bland assertions.

What do the terms ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ mean? Well, if you are the BBC, ‘left wing’ is a term used mainly in sport. Insofar as it is used in politics, it is used to describe the mainstream. ‘Right wing’, by contrast, is a term used to describe political fringe groups: racist, violent, and illegal groups.

...

The phrase ‘right wing’ is often accompanied by words such as ‘extremist’ or qualifiers such as ‘far right’. For example, the search ‘far right’ produces 142 pages while ‘far left’ only 54. ‘Right wing’ and ‘extreme’ generates 29 pages while ‘left wing’ and ‘extreme’ just 18. This is because the BBC links the term ‘right wing’ with the BNP and National Front, while the search for ‘left wing’ does not produce any early matches linking to stories about the Socialist Workers’ Party, Revolutionary Communist Party, or even Respect, a party which won a seat at the last general election, and which is dominated by the SWP.

Entering dangerous territory

2006-11-16T16:43:00.000Z

Today's discussion point is rape. I have to be careful here, because one wrong word or bungled phrase could land me in serious trouble with all sorts of angry women. God forbid I should end a sentence with a preposition.

This article from the Beeb got me thinking, or (more specifically) this quote did:

The government said: "Rape is never the victim's fault."

OK. Fair enough. But let's try and remember that shades of grey exist in every scenario. It's very difficult to have a sensible debate about these sorts of issues without women's groups jumping all over. The BBC links to Women Against Rape, who I'm sure are very nice. They do rather dent their credibility in my eyes with their webpage however, which contains such gems as:

One in six women has been raped.

I really can't believe that to be true. Still, I'm male, so what would I know?

I'd like to suggest, just quietly, that sometimes rape may be the victim's fault. Let's go back to the BBC page:

The study - thought to be the first of its size into drug rape - involved the Metropolitan, Greater Manchester, Derbyshire, Northumbria and Lancashire police forces as well as the Walsall area of the West Midlands Police.

The findings also revealed 119 of the 120 alleged victims admitted they had been drinking alcohol and forensic tests discovered evidence of alcohol in 52% of cases.

"In most cases, the alleged victims had consumed alcohol voluntarily and, in some cases, to dangerous levels," an Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) spokesman said.

And Det Ch Supt Dave Gee, co-author of the report, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that 48% of victims said they had taken a combination of recreational drugs and prescribed medication, in addition to alcohol.

When I go out for a night's drinking, I am very much aware that drinking to excess causes all sorts of carnage. I've had my share of drink-related injuries. I've gazed in confusion at peculiar cuts and grazes discovered the next morning. Nowadays I try to make sure that I retain some level of coherence - it's useful for health and sanity. It's quite clear, however, that many people, including women, just don't.

It's not difficult to imagine a group of friends going out for a night out, and consuming enough quantities of enough things that they really don't know what they're doing, what they have done, or what they are about to do. It's not difficult to imagine that some of the male members of the group might take an interest in some of the scantily-clad female members. It's not difficult to imagine that all sorts of things might ensue.

The question is almost one of consent. The woman protests that she said "no." The man protests that she didn't. Neither of them can really remember. One has to remember what has led them to be in that situation. Most blokes would probably suggest that once they were undressed with a girl then she'd pretty much given consent. She's spent the night leading him on while dressed in a revealing top. Most women would probably still like to reserve the final decision for themselves until the final moment.

If this is too late - if the bloke is psychologically fixed onto one course of action - it's hard to imagine he'll be easy to stop. But is this entirely his fault? I'd suggest that it isn't quite as simple as the first quote:

Rape is never the victim's fault.

Maybe legally rape isn't the victim's fault - but often she's got herself in that situation. Perhaps a few less shots of Vodka would have saved all sorts of problems.

In a way, this ties in with my discussion last week of fundamentalism within Christianity. I think women's organisations do themselves more harm than good when they make statements like the one above. There are shades of grey in everything, and black and white statements which refuse to admit compromise undermine everything they stand for.

ID cards

2006-11-10T10:03:00.000Z

A new twist on the matter...

I have an enormous amount of faith in the cackhanded, blundering incompetence of the British state, and in the gormless, pen-chewing, internet-surfing idleness of its employees - some of whom may well be reading this right now when they should be getting on with being shadowy and malevolent; get back to work, if you are. I'm not particularly worried about the 4 million CCTV cameras in Britain either; that's 96 million hours of footage a day to sift through, and I pity rather than fear anyone unlucky enough to be lumbered with the job of watching it.

...

I'm not unduly worried about the inexorable slide of Blair's Britain into a cryptofascist Orwellian surveillance state, if only because that state would have to be administered by British public sector employees, and they'd be playing Solitaire or sending personal emails, waiting for 5 o'clock so they can naff off home.

Thought for the day

2006-11-10T08:45:00.000Z

I've just thought of something, and unfortunately you're all going to have to hear it as well.

The average 17-year-old is actually 17-and-a-half.

There you are, don't say I never give you anything interesting.

Link Hoarding (2)

2006-11-09T16:00:00.000Z

Ed Bott has been discussing the trends on his site for browser usage.

The last time I published these stats was on April 30, 2006. The share of visitors using Firefox or Mozilla has dipped roughly 1% since then, from 35.2% down to 34.18%. It’s still a bit higher than the August 2005 share of 33.2%, however.

Meanwhile, IE’s share crept back up by 1.5%, from almost exactly 60% to 61.47%. Not surprisingly, the percentage of people visiting this site using IE7 has more than doubled, from 6.53% last April to 14.52% today.

Five months ago, I drew this tentative conclusion and made a prediction:

"The easy gains for Firefox are over. I’ll be very surprised if Firefox is able to make any significant gains in share when I look at this snapshot six months from now. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that IE will gain back some ground during that time with the help of IE7."

I jumped the gun by a month, but the prediction appears accurate. And although Firefox 2 looks like a perfectly solid upgrade, it doesn’t offer anything that’s likely to convince IE holdouts to switch now.

Link Hoarding

2006-11-09T15:48:00.000Z

For a while now I've been collecting links on Bloglines which I keep meaning to talk about. Unfortunately they're all out of date now, but you can still hear about them anyway. Here's an exciting one about the world of driving:

(From the Pedant-General about this document)

It is not speed that kills, it is inappropriate speed. Even then, speed is not even a contributory factor in three quarters of fatal accidents.

...

Cameras will do nothing to improve driver behaviour to reduce the massive 64% caused "driver error or reaction".

Cameras will not reduce the 19% of fatal accidents where "Driver distraction" was a contributory factor. Indeed 1% of that is due to "Distraction outside vehicle". Hmmmm.....

Cameras will do nothing to correct driver "behaviour or inexperience" (29%) either.
In short, plastering the entire country in speed cameras will do precisely nothing to prevent 88% of accidents that result in a fatality.

Most of us interested in driving were fairly sure of this anyway; it's nice to have the statistics to back it up.

CICCU on Sex - This should be fun

2006-11-09T15:38:00.000Z

The Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union are an irritating thorn in the side of moderate Christians throughout Cambridge. And I don't think I'm being harsh, either. This week's TCS contains an enormous feature on what CICCU think about sex. Sex outside marriage, contraception, and homosexuality feature strongly. It's a hoot.

Ideally I'd give you a link to the article. TCS, unfortunately, haven't bothered to update their website since February 2005. So instead I'm going to have to type some bits.

So - Sex outside of marriage?

The heart of the issue is what the God who made the universe wants and what his stance is. As Christians we believe that God has spoken to us through the Bible and that in the Bible he has revealed what is best for us. He clearly tells any form of sexual relationship outside heterosexual marriage is wrong. It is not wrong because it breaks a religious rule. Rather, it is wrong because it is rejecting our Creator and saying that we know best. The Bible has a high view of sex but says it is something precious and to be enjoyed within marriage.

Contraception?

The official Roman Catholic view- that using contraception is sinful - is unjustified biblically. Contraception is probably a neutral thing but in so far as it encourages extra-marital sex it is unhelpful. There may be perfectly legitimate reasons why a married couple may want to use contraception although it should also be noted that the Bible often links sex with having children - although not exclusively. It is a question of balance. Other tricky issues arise where the contraception is abortive and is therfore murder.

What about gay marriage?

The Bible teaches that marriage is only between a man and a woman and that marriage is the only context for sexual relationships. For someone of homosexual orientation, total abstinence would therefore be required. Further, the Bible is clear that any form of homosexual relationship is sinful - again because it is saying we know better than our Creator. We shouldn't single out practising homosexual sex as worse than any other sin. The Bible is clear that even lusting after another person is a sexual sin. God dislikes all sin equally because he is perfect. To anyone who says homosexuality is OK nowadays, God retorts in the Bible, "I the Lord do not change," and, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." God's moral standards do not change.

Now, I personally find lots of this rather silly.

The first and most blatant point I would like to take issue with is the simple one-dimensional viewpoint which the CICCU representative seems to have of God. "It is wrong because it is rejecting our Creator and saying that we know best." Everything's very simple, isn't it? Unfortunately this view of God requires a full-frontal lobotomy to take on board. Furthermore, I'm happy to believe God may know best - but I'd like to know how we're going to derive that from the Bible. The Bible in itself is an enormous tome written across a span of centuries by different people for different reasons. Many of the translations available to us have political motivations underlying their every word. I wonder how the Bible can be clear on anything.

The OED gives a definition of concubine:

A woman who cohabits with a man without being his wife; a kept mistress.

The Bible mentions the word concubine 36 times (according to Bible Gateway), admittedly only in the Old Testament. It does seem as if the practice of keeping mistresses was very common among early Hebrews. Not quite "The Bible has a high view of sex but says it is something precious and to be enjoyed within marriage."

They're right about the "high view of sex" part, however. Consider these verses from the Song of Solomon:

16. My lover is mine and I am his;
he browses among the lilies.

17. Until the day breaks
and the shadows flee,
turn, my lover,
and be like a gazelle
or like a young stag
on the rugged hills.

All this seems to stand in contrast to the hard line of our correspondent.

She knows better than the founders of the Catholic Church as well. "The official Roman Catholic view- that using contraception is sinful - is unjustified biblically." Thanks, that's nice to know. My first problem is here again - glib statements convince nobody. Luckily I've not had my lobotomy yet and like to think I am capable of argument and higher thought. I'm not going to stand and take these sort of points without some sort of evidence.

The official Roman Catholic view probably stems from this passage in Genesis 38:

8. Then Judah said to Onan, "Lie with your brother's wife and fulfill your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother." 9. But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he lay with his brother's wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother. 10. What he did was wicked in the LORD's sight; so he put him to death also.

The difficulty comes when we try to decide which meaning is more appropriate. We can view this passage in two contradictory ways:

Onan spilled his seed on the ground and was put to death. This was because he wasted his sperm. Therefore wasting sperm is a sin and contraception is, by extension, wrong.
Onan spilled his seed on the ground and was put to death. This was because he failed to fulfill his duty to his brother's wife and produce offspring for his brother. This was the sin for which he was killed.

Arguments about this passage will rage on. Personally I choose to ignore the issue - there's no point worrying about doing the right thing when I don't know what the right thing is. Unfortunately CICCU have produced their own interpretation and will stuff it down the throat of anyone who'll listen.

My second big point concerns the changeability of God. Admittedly this quote exists in the Bible (Leviticus 20):

13. If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

In fairness, however, this occurs in a long list of things one must and mustn't do. Leviticus 11 has a complicated set of instructions about what sorts of meat are clean - still kept to by Jews eating Kosher food. It's commonly accepted that this part of God's commandments was to do with keeping the populace healthy - don't eat pigs 'cause they're full of disease. If we aren't going to complain about Kosher food anymore then why should we worry about other things in the list. Surely God knows best about what we should eat, and we shouldn't defy Him?

Moving on, we come to the New Testament. The OT tells a story of a wrathful God who weighs in on the side of the Israelites, helping them slay their enemies in horrific ways. Jesus came to change all this. Originally we were sacrificed for our sins. But now God himself takes our sin upon Himself and becomes a sacrifice for us. Yet apparently "God does not change." The Bible is sufficient evidence that God's outlook on and involvement with humanity quite clearly has changed.

Mark 12

28. One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

29. "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31. The second is this: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.'There is no commandment greater than these."

Matthew 7

1. "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

3. "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4. How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5. You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

Whether you think homosexuality is bad or not, you have no right to judge those who practice it. Love your neighbour as yourself - whatever you may think of them. Love appears sadly lacking in the quoted article. Later on it states that people deserve to go to hell for breaking God's commandments. Gee, thanks.

The problems I have with this interview are manifold, but the two main ones are thus:

If you've been asked to give an interview to a Cambridge University student newspaper about your views, as a Christian, about sex, then there's a right way to do it, and a wrong way to do it. Making bland statements without any argument only reveals your lack of thought and understanding. Blind faith convinces nobody; what is faith without understanding? CICCU's mentality denies this, leaving no room for interpretation.
Judging others is wrong. God dislikes sin, but came to earth as man to save us from it. Sin isn't an automatic ticket to hell, although it may be an invitation to be laughed at by some shallow-minded fools.

The sort of mental process required to swallow this swill is unacceptable to anyone at Cambridge - where I like to think we are trained to think critically. This form of evangelism is fundamentally wrong, and does ordinary Christians a fundamental dis-service. Articles like this make me embarassed to profess my faith in case I am associated with those discussed above.

I'll leave you with a quote on a more general form of evangelism from our College Chaplain:

There are CofE Churches I know of that make upfront evangelism their speciality, going overboard with door-knocking, street preaching and the Alpha method, but in doing so have lost all sense of what it means to be Anglican in their spirituality. "Evangelism" in that kind of pushy, recruiting way is really quite out of step with Anglican spirituality. You can have one or the other, but not both. I'm not saying it's wrong to recruit; just that the style of recruiting will affect completely what you are recruiting people to. It's still possible, I think, to have the doors of the Church wide open (metaphorically) without adopting a sales-and-marketing style evangelism.

Democrats take America?

2006-11-09T14:40:00.000Z

Recent news tells us of how the balance of power has shifted in Washington with recent voting. The House of Representatives now has a Democrat majority, and the Senate has swung in their direction too UPDATE: There is now a Democrat majority in the Senate. Donald Rumsfeld has stepped down as Secretary of Defence.

What I found amusing, however, was last night's 10 o'clock news on BBC1. The news team were thrilled.

Unfortunately I can't access the programme online anymore, but some of the quotes I seem to remember:

This is an unpopular president and an unpopular war.

Oh, OK. Perhaps it would help if you had a source for that.

Now there's a new Secretary of Defence, he'll surely accelerate the plans to get the troops out of Iraq.

Will he? Unfortunately this is only a statement of the hopes of the reporter. Almost certainly the new chap will do no such thing. The link above contains the following line from another news source, referring to the intentions of the new majority in the House:

On Iraq, Democrats have said they would begin a phased redeployment of U.S. forces and would require Iraqis to take responsibility for their country. They have also promised to double the size of Special Forces in order to track down and destroy terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda.

So let me get this straight, the Republicans want to stay in Iraq... and so do the Democrats. Hmm, interesting. Rather unfortunately, it's the opposite of what the BBC want.

Stamp Rage

2006-11-08T15:17:00.000Z

Sometimes I think the Royal Mail ought to give up producing any seasonal stamps. They never seem to manage it without getting in trouble.

Stamp rage strikes again

The Royal Mail has a policy of alternating between religious and non-religious designs for its festive stamps. This year is a non-religious year, but that hasn’t stopped the Daily Express screaming that “Christ is dumped from Christmas stamps”, and phoning round the usual suspects for outraged “political correctness gone mad” quotes.

So the pattern we have is: Royal Mail follows traditional policy, Daily Express doesn't realise, Daily Express writes emotive and sensational story. Here's the start of their article:

BUNGLING mail chiefs were yesterday accused of taking the Christ out of Christmas.

And then the end:

The stamp controversy is a result of the Royal Mail’s policy of alternating between religious and non-religious designs each Christmas. A spokesman said yesterday the festive stamp collections had always alternated.

"It is about celebrating all elements of Christmas," he said. "It is something that we have always done. I think people will see this year’s issue of stamps as a first class set of Christmas stamps."

So if they new this, why the enormous headline and angry opening? Personally I think the "journalist" is hoping that nobody will bother to read to the end of the column. And they say the media is impartial?

More on that press conference

2006-11-03T10:55:00.000Z

Unfortunately, being behind on the modern-day business lingo (since when has "teaming" been a word?) I struggled slightly to keep up with the conference. It does seem to me, however, that Microsoft has teamed up with Novell to help with two areas:

virtualisation
interoperability

Both of these issues have been a problem and I think we should welcome any attempt to solve them ... cautiously.

Virtualisation is a process where you run a virtual machine on your computer. This virtual machine behaves like a blank setup and allows you to test other operating systems within it. Interestingly, Microsoft has been keen on this idea for quite a while, now releasing the 2007 Beta of Virtual PC for free, and guaranteeing that their Virtual PC software will remain free for evermore. An example of virtualisation in action - you could run Linux from inside a virtual machine on your Windows PC. This could be used as an XWindows client or SSH terminal to enable you to control another Linux machine.

Interoperability has been a major problem for a long time. Trying to use two different operating systems only works if you use open document formats which can be read easily on both systems. During the press conference, a Novell engineer announced that they would be building translators between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office. I think that this is a good thing.

However it's always worth remembering Microsoft's history - they don't like the Open Source movement. Here's an alternative spin on the situation:

The word on the street is that Novell had some deep patent dirt on Microsoft and went proudly to demand their bounty.

...

So how was it that at the end of the day they ended up affirming software patents (something Microsoft wants and Free software people hate), set a precedent that open source distributors owe Microsoft money, slandered GNU/Linux as derivative and encumbered, and much more?

...

It's a remarkable reversal of opportunity, all the more remarkable that the Novell participants smiled the whole way through what had clearly become a Microsoft event. They went in seeking a huge payout, and emerged with the payout, yes - but also with a commitment to pay it back in royalties on open source software they sell. This is not at all surprising; indeed, I've heard others say this is Microsoft's modus operandi, a ju-jitsu move that takes the weight of an attack and turns it back both on the attacker and the folks around them, usually without them even noticing (at least not to start with). I'd not want to say how closely I've observed it before...

Here's some more links for those interested:

Google News has loads of stuff
Scoble
Gardner - "Microsoft and Novell: Fox marries chicken, both move into henhouse"

Knock me down with a feather...

2006-11-02T21:50:00.000Z

There's rumours on the Internet - and we all know what they mean...

Or do we? Have a look at Novell's share price. Then have a look at some of the links on the right. Especially this one:

Novell Shares Spike 20% As Wall St Journal Reports Microsoft To Start Reselling SUSE LINUX

In a move that caused Red Hat shares to tumble 3.2% and Novell's to surge by 20% in the same period of trading today, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is going to start providing support for SUSE LINUX and that it is working too on Microsoft-Linux interoperability.

The news is due to be broken at a news conference today being given by Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive of Microsoft and Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian.

You can see the conference here. It'll be on at 2:00pm Pacific Time, i.e. 10:00pm here in the UK.

A Debate - Should there be an inquiry into the Iraq War?

2006-11-01T14:23:00.000Z

Here's the start of a BBC article about yesterday's House of Commons debate:

At-a-glance: Iraq inquiry debate

Here are the key points from the House of Commons debate on the call for an inquiry into the Iraq war.

Adam Price
The Plaid Cymru MP opened the debate by saying the Iraq war was a "monumental catastrophe", which was about "the breakdown in our very system of government".

OK that's interesting. So there's going to be an inquiry, then? Reading down the article it certainly seems that way. Watching the 10 O'Clock News, however, we discover that actually there isn't. The MPs voted against one. How they did after the statement above I shall never know. Perhaps there were some other statements which the BBC didn't report.

Reactions in other sections of the liberal press have also been exciting. I bought the Independent this morning.

They were so upset about the results of the debate that they buried the news down at the bottom of the second page, choosing instead to publish what they have published repeatedly ever since the war started - a glorified article full of hyperbole complaining about it.

This reminded me about an entry on Black Triangle from September 4th:

Like the Daily Express, The Independent cannot be considered a newspaper. In fact, today’s Independent cover has even less news on it that the Daily Express, concerning itself with The World’s Greatest Green Inventions, or their glossy poster of birds in the electronic version, and the rest is concerned with the Independent’s raison d’etre: to prove that US and UK policies post-September 11th are wrong.

The examples used in the graphic on the front page are full of non-sequiturs and simplistic cause and effects - which is ironic given one of the charges made against Bush and Blair is that they hold a simplistic Manichaean view of the War on Terror. Nothing prior to 2001 is considered. All outcomes are seen as the result of US and UK policy. A terrorist lets of a suicide bomb outside a Shia temple? That’s Bush’s fault that is.

Read the whole thing. I think it's a real shame that the Independent, once a respected newspaper, is gradually turning into a total shambles written by hacks who spend their entire time pushing political agendas. The only problem now is what to read instead...

Full Feeds Again

2006-10-31T13:39:00.000Z

The Full Feeds Petition seems to have reached stagnation. Please help the cause and go and sign it.

Captcha - the bug is catching

2006-10-31T13:36:00.000Z

Over at Coding Horror, there's a big post up about Captcha effectiveness. I seemed to have developed an interest in these - I've discussed the issue before here and here. A Captcha is a "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart" - one of those little images with mangled letters which you have to enter into a box on a web form.

I don't like them for a variety of reasons, including the following:

They're difficult to use if you're partially sighted. Some Captchas are hard to use if you're fully sighted! They're impossible if you're blind.
They're slightly less secure than you might think - laboratory tests can break lots of the easier ones.
They waste my time.

The World Wide Web Consortium even agrees with me, which makes a change.

The correspondent at Coding Horror doesn't agree with me:

Although there have been a number of CAPTCHA-defeating proof of concepts published, there is no practical evidence that these exploits are actually working in the real world. And if CAPTCHA is so thoroughly defeated, why is it still in use on virtually every major website on the internet? Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, you name it, if the site is even remotely popular, their new account forms are protected by CAPTCHAs.

Interestingly, most of the Captcha-defeating articles and papers that I have read find the Yahoo and Hotmail Captchas fiendishly difficult. I'm happy to admit that the better Captchas will defeat computer attempts at deciphering. My problem mostly comes from the idea that the better Captchas defeat humans as well.

Aside from computer recognition techniques for Captchas, he also points to some alternative ways which have been suggested as ways to defeat the tests (these originally came from the Petmail Documentation).

1. The Turing Farm

Let's say spammers set up a sweatshop to employ people to look at computer screens and answer CAPTCHA challenges. They get to send one message for each challenge passed. Assuming 10 seconds per challenge, and paying roughly $5 per hour, that represents $14 per thousand messages. A typical spam run of 1 million messages per day would cost $14,000 per day and require 116 people working 24/7.

This would break the economic model used by most current spammers. A recent Wired article showed one spammer earning $10 for each successful sale. At that rate, the cost of $14,000 for 1,000,000 spam emails requires a 1 in 1000 success rate just to break even, whereas current spammers are managing a 1 in 100,000 or even 1 in 1,000,000 sucess rate.

Now that's a fair argument. It's well-considered on economic grounds, with some reasonable assumptions and estimates. Let's consider the other option highlighted:

2. The Turing Porn Farm

A recent slashdot article described a trick in which spammers run a porn site that is gated by CAPTCHA challenges, which are actually ripped directly from Yahoo's new account creation page. The humans unwittingly solve the challenge on behalf of the spammers, who can therefore automate a process that was meant to be rate-limited to humans. This attack is simply another way of paying the workers of a Turing Farm. The economics may be infeasible because porn hosting costs money too.

That's not a well-reasoned argument. "The economics may be infeasible because porn hosting costs money too." Quite possibly, but this fact is just as true for real porn. Porn hosting costs money - yet I believe there's quite a lot of porn out there on the Internet. This remains an entirely feasible way to defeat a Captcha.

Early Adoption

2006-10-29T22:27:00.000Z

For some reason, I have become an early adopter. I'm currently using Windows Live Writer to create this post. It's a simple way to write blog entries offline. It downloads your blog templates and current posts and therefore lets you preview exactly how it will look.

All rather clever. It's somewhat surprising, really, that I'm able to do this. Most of my life I've been significantly behind the curve in terms of computer tools. Both software and hardware that I've used have often been a fair few years old.

Everything's easy now, though. I can go off to a website and download all sorts of useful pieces of software to do all sorts of useful things. Often, however, thar be dragons lurking on the Internet.

It's great to be able to download tools which other people have written. The big problem is all about trust.

Would you install some software that you had written? Almost certainly; you know exactly what it does (note I'm assuming that you aren't a virus writer!)

Would you install some software a friend had written - almost certainly. Some software a friend had recommended - probably.

Hmm, it's all getting a bit more tentative now. Would you install a piece of software written by somebody you had never met. You've never even spoken to them - but you found them on the internet. Their website says they wrote this really cool piece of kit which will make your computer 43.62 times faster.

Put that way, downloading things from the Internet seems somewhat foolish. We often gain a little security from our friends - online communities review downloads and can be useful sources of information. It's still possible, however, for a download page to be hacked and the original file replaced with a virus. Basically, it's all about trust.

I struggle slightly to see how the average computer user will cope with all this information. On the one hand, ISPs are promising better protection, Virus Scanner writers are selling their products anywhere they can. On the other hand, there's lots of really useful things available online.

I think it's important to make a dig at Firefox now. After all, I feel the need to cement my Internet Explorer Fanboy status. So here's the problem - you all seem to want me to go out and download all these extension things. You all want average users to do the same. But will you guarantee their safety?

And it ends

2006-10-27T14:55:00.000Z

But in rather a nice way...

You won't believe me, but it's installed already. This post comes from Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista. That's a half-hour install for an entire operating system.

Blimey.

It has begun...

2006-10-27T14:27:00.000Z

For a while now, I've been building a new computer. I put it all together and it seemed to work.

Hurrah!

So then I tried to install an operating system. I reached for something free - Linux. Unfortunately, despite trying installation CDs from 5 different distributions, they all failed.

Hurroo.

Yesterday, however, something exciting and shiny arrived in the post. Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 has arrived. And it works. Well, the installer does at least. At the moment I'm staring at a "percentage complete" indication which is moving very slowly.

Oh well, I might be able to post a more complete review later this weekend. Or maybe on Monday. Who knows if it will ever finish installing?

Going to the Toilet

2006-10-23T23:48:00.000Z

Going to the toilet at a urinal is fraught (sp?) with danger. It's not really permitted to stand next to another man while going; at least one urinal should be left "spare" to provide a safety barrier.

A safety barrier against what now?

I've always conformed to the unwritten rules of urination, even if not entirely sure why. However nowadays there is a new fashion developing which is somewhat confusing. Nowadays, if there is someone using one of the urinals, the next person will often go to one of the toilets, and go there instead, even if they're JUST PISSING. (I've always wanted to write obscenities in capital letters on the internet... and now's my chance.)

Why is it so necessary to avoid going to the toilet near anyone else? Is it latent homophobia, is it some sort of cultural norm which has developed more recently? I can't imagine it being the slightest worry twenty years ago.

It's time for you, the viewer, to decide. Press "A" on your keypads if you believe that....

Back online

2006-10-23T13:25:00.000Z

Well, my Internet access has returned, finally. It's been off for a week or so, and I hadn't bothered to go and fix it. There was always a chance that somebody had taken an exception to my downloading GBs of Linux ISOs and MS Visual Studio Express - and I didn't really want to risk getting shouted at!

But instead it turned out that some peculiar part of DHCP had become broken -and now it's all fine.

Hurrah!

Terrorists in Britain

2006-10-10T08:16:00.000Z

One day, I shall look back and say: "When I was younger, Britain faced constant terrorist attack."

Hang on... isn't that the case now?

When I was younger, Britain faced constant terrorist attack. My home city was bombed, and hundreds of people were killed during the struggle. Only this time, it was the IRA doing the bombing.

Same situation, different people. The interesting thing is that we don't seem able to cope with this new threat. Everyone's running round saying how terrible it is and how we ought to change our foreign policy to stop winding everybody up.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I think that lots of the people complaining seem to be fairly young. They may have grown up with the IRA threats, but didn't fully appreciate them. This whole "state of war" thing is really throwing them. Perhaps it's the case that the ordinary man in the street really couldn't care less about the supposed risk of death in the streets of Britain. Perhaps that's because he's lived through it all before.

Computing

2006-10-09T16:06:00.000Z

I seem to be wasting an inordinate amount of time computing at the moment. I thought buying a new computer would make my life simpler, but unfortunately it hasn't. As usual, I've entered the great operating system game, where you try and make the computer work and it uses every possible tactic to prevent you. For some reason, four separate Linux distributions fail to recognise my CD drive, despite the computer having just booted off it. So I can't make them install.

I've ordered the Windows Vista RC1 DVD, which will hopefully turn up sooner rather than later. If I'm lucky, that might even work...

Swindon (again)

2006-10-07T19:36:00.000Z

Well, we scored the Swindon. It was OK in the end, although lacking the musical excitement of Bristol. Unfortunately the bells were hard work and my hands hurt.

Oh well.

Sign the Full Feeds petition

2006-10-03T10:28:00.000Z

http://www.fullfeeds.com/

Thinking

2006-10-02T22:57:00.000Z

Part of blogging, I find, is that often one plans enormous posts, full of exciting viewpoints and arguments, but these never get written. How is it that I can so perfectly plan what should be said, but when I sit down at the computer then nothing comes out?

Often I think that the main problem is the latency. Even in our connected world, it can take me several hours to get to a computer. That great thought will be forgotten.

Perhaps the greatest thoughts of the millennium are out there waiting to be written down? Perhaps that's a reflection on the transient nature of our existence. Whatever I may do, say, or think, unless I get any of it published then it's unlikely to outlive me. Maybe I will end up studying for a PhD (or similar), maybe I spend my life in research and publish hundreds of papers. Even then, all that will be published is my work. None of my private thoughts, none of the intrigues and observations produced in response to humanity will live beyond me.

Blimey, I feel almost sober now.

Online ordering

2006-09-27T23:02:00.000Z

Why do so many online ordering firms require landline phone numbers? In the modern age many people rely more on mobile phones. My mobile phone will get through to me at any time of day, and often night as well. A business landline might reach me 9:00-5:00, a home one at other times (except I don't have one, so never).

As a student, I don't have a landline phone. This prevents me from using several online shops. Why is it really so necessary?

My credit cards are registered to my home address. Today I ordered a new motherboard online, and was asked to provide not only a landline number for delivery, but a landline number for the billing address. I put "Ex Directory" in the box. I wonder if they'll honour the order.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

2006-09-26T16:13:00.000Z

The Guardian, (and now most of the internet) have been complaining:

Air traffic controllers monitoring a British Airways jumbo jet were stunned at the pilot's decision to try to "get as far as we can" after an engine caught fire on takeoff, a transcript of discussions between the plane and the control tower revealed.
The controllers in Los Angeles expected the four-engine Boeing 747 to turn around but, after taking advice from BA's operations base, the pilot carried on towards London. He told air traffic control: "We just decided we want to set off on our flight-plan route and get as far as we can."

Crikey, that seems frightening. Why would they do that. Luckily the Guardian has the answer too:

By pressing ahead with the flight, the aircraft avoided a £100,000 bill for delay compensation, though there is no suggestion that this is why this flight went ahead.

Ah, that's it. Bloody corporations at it again, risking lives to make money. Or perhaps not. The pilot's decision seems utterly ridiculous, but let's think about it a little more:

If the plane crashes, then the pilot dies. I don't think he wants to die. I'm guessing he probably thought that carrying on was safe.

Believe it or not, a 747 has absolutely no trouble flying on 3 engines. Taking off might take longer, but crusing along is fine. It's even (just about) possible to fly on 2 engines.

Planes these days come with fire extinguishing devices in the engines. I'm guessing that the fire was almost certainly completely extinguished, and the engine status checked, before the pilot decided to press on.

Most large jets have far lower permitted landing weights than permitted take-off weights. It's OK to take off with a heavy plane - you just turn up the power. Landing is harder. The simple fact is that the undercarriage of a 747 will not take the stress of landing with a full passenger complement, and FULL FUEL LOAD.

In order to land and return to LAX, the pilot would have to get rid of the excess weight (fuel). This means either dumping it all into the air, or doing laps around Los Angeles for several hours. Why spend hours flying in the same place when you might as well make some progress?

The way to London from LA involves flying a long way over America and Nova Scotia before hopping over the Atlantic. There are several large airports en route which could be used in the event of an emergency. What's more, it'd be a lot easier to get an emergency landing slot at a smaller airport.

If the plane got to the coast without trouble, it'd almost certainly manage the Atlantic as well. If not, then they could have landed in Iceland.

The reason for landing at Manchester was almost certainly due to the plane running into its fuel reserves, which is naughty. There's no suggestion that the landing was an emergency landing with the plane running on vapour.

Admittedly some of these points depend on things running smoothly, but it's clear that the pilot's decision wasn't at all foolhardy, and made a lot of sense. Flying on wasn't appreciably more dangerous than flying circles in the air, whereas landing immediately would have crashed the plane (as the undercarriage collapsed). That full fuel load would have burned nicely.

A little knowledge makes people think that they have the right to write articles and posts all round the internet criticising the actions of a professional pilot, but sometimes they don't have all the info to hand.

For those who use contact lenses

2006-09-23T17:08:00.000Z

You my be interested to know that this:

was sold containing fungus. I'm not quite sure why you all see the need to use these things.

Recipes

2006-09-23T07:42:00.000Z

OK, here's how to make the greatest cheese and ham toasted sandwich known to man.

Start by gently toasting two slices of bread in the toaster. These need to be just slightly browned.

Add a mound of grated cheese to each slice, and place under the grill. Make sure to spread the cheese right to the edges.

When the cheese is browned, add a slice of thin ham to each piece.

Wait until the ham is just beginning to curl up, and put the entire sandwich together.

Marvellous.

The ramblings of a tired mind

2006-09-23T07:38:00.000Z

It occurred to me that the strains of the average US voice sound very similar to a mewing cat.

Cats make noise when they need something. What do Americans need? It can't be food, they're all obese.

Perhaps it's a cry for attention?

Blimey, maybe I should start writing for the Independent tomorrow.

Violence in Society

2006-09-22T12:08:00.000Z

I enjoy films. I quite like ones which other people would hate. I really enjoyed "Sin City." Some people would say it was sickening, wrong, violent, barbaric, or any of a whole host of appropiate adjectives.

I might say it was escapism or fantasy. I wonder if there's any significance that these are nouns.

I wonder if my enjoyment of violence on screen is a release from an inner primeval need to witness violence and suffering.

Read that again.

One of the most violent characters in Sin City is described thus:

Most people think Marv is crazy. He just had the rotten luck of being born in the wrong century. He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an axe into somebody's face. Or in a Roman arena taking a sword to other Gladiators like him.

What do we do with people who need violence? One could quite happily argue that everybody needs violence. "Fight Club" works with this premise. So did World War II. Otherwise normal people found they had no trouble killing - killing as many as they could as fast as possible.

Perhaps modern thuggery and hooliganism are a simple expression of a repressed male need.

Me, I'll just carry on watching films.

The World Today

2006-09-22T11:55:00.000Z

YouGov peace and conflict survey

As part of our efforts to raise awareness about the UN International Day of Peace (21 September), International Alert commissioned a YouGov survey to discover the British public's knowledge and awareness of peace and conflict today. The survey was conducted in August 2006 and the results were grim: nearly three-quarters of respondants felt the world is more violent today than 50 years ago and that it will remain that way—or get worse—in the next 50 years.

But the reality is that the number of violent conflicts has declined by more than 40% since 1992 and is at the lowest it has been since WWII, with the deadliest conflicts (those with 1000 or more battle deaths) dropping by 80% in the past 15 years. The current pessimism demonstrates how important it is for Alert and others to offer our ideas on how peace is possibly achieved.

And there's more...

The world: just how dangerous is it?

So, it's not just the Daily Mail that believes we are all doomed. According to a new survey almost three-quarters of Britons think the world is a more dangerous, war-like place than it was 50 years ago, writes Peter Walker.

Conducted to mark the UN Peace Day today, the poll found 74% of the public believes the globe is more violent now than it was in 1956 while 63% think the situation will get worse in the next 50 years. So far, so gloomy. But are they right? Well, not really.

...

The average number of battle-deaths per conflict per year - a measure of the deadliness of warfare - has plummeted from 38,000 in 1950 to just 600 in 2002.

This is rather interesting. It's also rather strong evidence in favour of what most of us have known for ages - the world really wasn't a better place a century ago, and most of the general public need to return their rose-tinted spectacles to be cleaned.

I wonder why there is such a discrepancy about these things. Crime figures fall - and yet people refuse to acknowledge this. "My sister's friend's boyfriend's cat was attacked by three youths the other day, so there must be more violence."

An inability to impartially judge between past and present states of the world is nothing new. But what causes it?

I think a large factor must be the raised expectations people have. Years ago a street urchin would be content - how can anybody judge their position in life when they know no better. Nowadays everyone believes that they can be anything. If they want to be a brain surgeon, then that's fine. The hospital will be happy to take you. Qualifications? A handwriting certificate at age 8 and a 10m swimming badge? Fine! Welcome aboard!

Perhaps not. But there's a grain of truth in absurdity. Years ago crime was something which people expected. Now we all believe that we ought to be free from crime. It's no longer a random act - a piece of bad luck. Now it's the government's fault, and the police's fault. But certainly not the victim's fault, even if the car was stolen from the roadside with the keys in and the engine running.

But what still gets me is that anyone could look back into history, into the bloodshed and carnage, at genocides committed in the name of colonialisation, at murders committed for political gain, and still say that any war perpetrated by a western state today is violent.

Swindon

2006-09-22T10:25:00.000Z

Here's a thought for the day - Swindon Surprise Maximus is rubbish. Almost as bad as the place.
For a picture, click here (scroll down and click the "go" button). The Cambridge overwork messes up the coursing order above the treble, and the underwork doesn't do much. The only music off the front is the odd random 90ET.

Oh well, only one peal due of it - wonder if I can manage the rest of my life without meeting it again?

It's been a while...

2006-09-15T20:40:00.000Z

I've been on holiday. It was great. We stayed in a cottage in the middle of angulsea. I thihought it was really fun. And the log fire was tremenddous.

Holidays appeal to my inner child somehow. Although the log fire was rather good fun. Except when it stubbornly refused to catch fire. Every time my father sees a fire he starts off, "you know, there's something deep about watching a fire, something primeval, somehow." The conversation ebbs and flows for a few seconds before we all realise that we've discussed the issue before. Every bonfire night.

Still, it's the familiarity which makes family holidays so enjoyable.

I'm hoping to actually post something over the next few weeks. Maybe even once a day. Although it may have to wait until after the weekend, as I'm horrendously booked up, starting with a 5:58 train tomorrow morning. Oh well.

Israeli War Criminals

2006-08-30T17:28:00.000Z

This is ridiculous.

Read the whole thing.

In the media there have been many reports of an Israeli attack on a pair of Lebanese ambulances. The above article very successfully debunks the whole thing.

Could it be that the entire incident is a fabrication? All signs point to "Yes." If so, the implications are enormous, both for the outcome of the war and for the credibility of the media. Most analysts agree that Israel was pressured into a ceasefire due to international outcry over how it was conducting the battle. The media informed the public that Israel was intentionally targeting civilians; the public insisted that their governments demand that Israel stand down; international pressure was applied, and Israel caved in. And of all the incidents decried in the media -- taking out infrastructure, destroying Hezbollah-associated buildings that had not been fully evacuated, and so on -- only the ambulance incident could be held up as having no possible military purpose; all the other attacks were pointed out by Israel as being intended to degrade Hezbollah's ability to fight. Aside from a handful of stray missiles and accidents or misunderstandings for which Israel apologized, only this incident was "proof" that Israel was purposely aiming at noncombatants. So reports that an Israeli missile attack destroyed two ambulances played a role in shaping global opinion, which led to a ceasefire leaving Hezbollah intact.

An answer

2006-08-30T16:44:00.000Z

I once said to a friend that I thought Sony was on the way out. When he challenged this statement, I found myself lacking any real arguments, just waving my hands and talking about Microsoft and Nintendo and some other random factors.

Luckily, there is this thing called the internet, and I no longer have to find my own arguments any more, because somebody else will do it for me.

Wired: Can the PS3 Save Sony?

Update: This page saying how the shortage of Blue LEDs is likely to seriously impact Sony's ability to ship Blu-Ray technology. (With thanks to Scoble).

Bush is not a chimp

2006-08-30T16:03:00.000Z

Here's a controversial thought for a sunny afternoon.

George Bush is not a chimp. Not an idiot. Not an imbecile. But rather a reasonably intelligent, quite well-educated chap.

So let's start from the beginning:

President Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Midland and Houston, Texas. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University in 1968, and then served as an F-102 fighter pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. President Bush received a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 1975.

OK, I'm happy to admit that perhaps his own biography might want to put a positive spin on things. But still, he has:

An American high school education
A degree from Yale
A diploma from Harvard

I can already hear the keyboards of you all clamouring that Yale and Harvard are rubbish institutions and that anyone can get in and that his Dad bribed them all. To which I say: "get a grip." Even if these factors are true, there is no chance that this man is as stupid as our newspapers make out.

Since his education, George has reached the dizzying heights of the US presidency.

Yes, OK, he has lots of financial support and assistance. But still, are you all really suggesting that somebody of below-average IQ could reach the top job in the entire United States of America?

Here in the UK, we've heard many comments known as "Bushisms," remarks supposed to have been uttered by George Bush during public speeches. These include such great lines as:

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."
"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country."

But luckily, this Snopes article reveals the truth:

All but one of the 2004 crop of groaners supposedly uttered by President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry are statements either made by former Vice-President Dan Quayle or ones which have for years been attributed to him.

And the one remaining?

Only a lone entry in the 2004 Bush and Kerry lists was anything other than a Dan Quayle utterance or a Quayleism: "The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." Though it is not a word-for-word match, it is close enough to a statement made by President George W. Bush in 2000 to be recognizable: "More and more of our imports come from overseas." (Although not all imports necessarily come from "overseas," when President Bush made this statement he was specifically referring to foreign oil imports, even though the two largest foreign suppliers of oil to the U.S. are the fellow North American countries of Canada and Mexico.)

For a long time we've heard and read a constant torrent of abuse in the British media directed towards the US Premier. Perhaps some of it isn't true. Just a thought.

The greatest recording in the world

2006-07-19T16:50:00.000Z

Here at the Consumerist is a great post.

It's a recording of a guy's attempts to cancel his AOL account. Listen to the whole thing, it's great. One of the best moments is when the AOL call centre operator asks to speak to the caller's father, despite the account and credit card being in his name.

Wikipedia

2006-07-17T22:40:00.000Z

It's nice to know that even Wikipedia suffers from argument. Perhaps a year down the line we'll remember the overriding feature of the web 2.0 world was the tendency for flame wars and arguments. Read all about it here.

The right sort of attitude

2006-07-12T15:38:00.000Z

David Aaronovitch, writing in the Times, makes some good points about the Afghan war.

As I read Christina Lamb’s extraordinary account in The Sunday Times of being ambushed in Helmand my thought was not “too much”, but “not enough”. More helicopters, if they’re needed. More of everything, if that’s required. We should be doing it for Nooria, the 12-year-old girl interviewed by Newsweek in February. A dozen or so gunmen had entered her school, beaten the watchman and then burnt the place down. Then the written threats started.

So classes took place under the trees in the courtyard and other schools lent some of their own books. Nooria, whose ambition is to teach, told the magazine’s reporter that she wasn’t afraid of being beaten or mutilated. “I want to keep studying,” she said.

Links of the week

2006-07-12T15:23:00.000Z

1. Lesbian, a distribution of GNU/Linux
2. Heatseek, a browser designed for looking at porn.

Mind you, the internet is for porn.

Lenna

2006-06-28T17:04:00.000Z

Recently I did a project on Image Compression. One of our test images was a picture of a woman's head. This picture.

We joked a little that this must be a particularly male subject to study, since it'd be hard to justify using a picture of a woman if there were lots of female students around (bloody feminists). But the truth runs deeper than that.

This page gives more of the story.

From the comp.compression FAQ, we can find that "Lenna" or "Lena" is a digitized Playboy centerfold, from November 1972.

In the Playboy and Wired News, we know that in the early Seventies Lenna's Playboy centerfold was scanned in by an unknown researcher at the University of Southern California to use as a test image for digital image compression research. Since that time, images of the Playmate have been used as the industry standard for testing ways in which pictures can be manipulated and transmitted electronically. Over the past 25 years, no image has been more important in the history of imaging and electronic communications, and today the mysterious Lenna is considered the First Lady of the Internet.

Important stuff. But such a shame that the image is cropped. Not any more (NSFW link).

Blimey, me distributing pornography. Who'd have thunk it?

A brave new world?

2006-06-28T16:21:00.000Z

I've been reading some fiction books for a change. It's quite exciting. I read the following tomes:

1984 - George Orwell (full text online)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

I was struck by the different techniques used to control the population in each book, and, in particular, the different attitudes of each author towards sexual pleasure. 1984 describes the classic totalitarian state, with people not even able to think freely in the language spoken ("newspeak"). Sexual thoughts are the only ones which can't be controlled by the Party, so it suppresses them as much as possible. Young girls are encouraged to join the "Junior Anti-Sex League" and sex is used only as means of procreation.

The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

In contrast, Brave New World doesn't use sex for procreation at all. Control of the population is done in two ways: breeding, and pleasure. Children are created in bottles and are bred to fit their role in life. Street sweepers are bred to be stupid. They will never be frustrated with the monotony of their task. Meanwhile everyone is encouraged to take as much pleasure as possible from life. The population are drugged with "Soma," described as similar to alcohol but without the hangover. They are also encouraged to shag like rabbits. "Everybody belongs to everybody else" is a mantra endorsing free sex. Many of the population are born sterile, others are trained to use contraception from their early "erotic play" in infancy.

Both techniques remove the tensions caused by sex. One suppresses the instinct entirely, whereas the other satisfies it completely.

Both books also speak of the problems which ensue as a result of oversupply. As production becomes more mechanised, more goods are produced than can be reasonably consumed by the populace. Orwell solves this problem by fighting a war. An eternal war. War uses resources up quickly. Huxley takes a different approach, describing how his people are trained to consume resources as fast as possible. Their ball games take place using complicated machinery which has to be manufactured.

It's interesting that both authors tackle these two issues, perhaps more interesting even than the different ways in which the problems are solved. It will be interesting to see how the future pans out with regard to the dual crises of humanity: sex and steel.

Firefox (again)

2006-06-28T16:08:00.000Z

I've not updated properly for a while, but this kicked me into action.

It references a post by Asa Dotzler with the exciting title "microsoft security manager calls users stupid."

A couple of months ago, Mike Danseglio, the Program Manager for the Security Solutions group at Microsoft blamed users for the Windows security nightmare, saying "there really is no patch for human stupidity."

Nice one, Mike.

Actually, Mike, there really is no patch for that kind of blame shifting. We make software and it's our job to make it work. Designing and building software is an extremely complex process but it is not magic and it is not only possible to make it safe, it's a requirement.

Of course, if we actually bother to read the original quote...

Danseglio said the success of social engineering attacks is a sign that the weakest link in malware defense is "human stupidity."

"Social engineering is a very, very effective technique. We have statistics that show significant infection rates for the social engineering malware. Phishing is a major problem because there really is no patch for human stupidity," he said.

So what our Microsoft security expert is actually saying is that whatever software you build to protect users, they'll still be vulnerable to attacks which tempt them into doing something silly. One of the best examples of this was the "I love you" bug of a few years ago, which tempted thousands of single office workers into downloading a dangerous attachment. Why did they download the attachment? Because they thought it was a love letter.

And when our Microsoft security expert points out that users need to be smarter in order not to be infected, he gets laughed at by Mr. Firefox. Not argued with, not listened to, but instead his comments are taken out of context in order to make him look stupid.

The Mozilla corporation will never have my support while it continues to act like a 14 year old teenager browsing the internet from his mother's basement. Get some bloody professionalism.

The Office Ribbon

2006-06-20T14:11:00.000Z

The new MS Office Ribbon is reviewed here, one of the best descriptions I've seen.

Did Internet Explorer cause Web 2.0?

2006-06-09T15:53:00.000Z

Here's an interesting theory.

Although opinions vary on the reliability of browser market share figures, a quick scan through all the data reveals one interesting commonality across all the data sources: IE6 market share peaked at around 95 percent sometime in mid-2004. If 95% of the world is browsing with IE 6, pursuing browser independence is a waste of time. If you don't have to worry about browser independence, you are suddenly free to exploit advanced browser techniques like XMLHttpRequest.
The super-saturation and monoculture of IE6 from 2002 to 2004 created an incredibly rich, vibrant development platform where developers were free to push the capabilities of the browser to its limits. Without worrying about backward compatibility. Without writing thousands of if..else statements to accommodate a half-dozen alternative browsers.

Nature Opens Peer-Review

2006-06-08T03:26:00.000Z

Peer-review is the process by which scientific papers get to be published. The papers are first reviewed by a group of "peers." There's usually three of them, and they'll be experts in the relevant field. Thus the nonsense is weeded out, and only papers deemed worthy enough will be published.

Nature, however, have got bored with this scheme.

We will also offer to post the submitted manuscript onto an open website. Anyone can then respond to it by posting online comments, provided they are willing to sign them. Once Nature's editors have received all the comments from their solicited confidential reviewers, the open website will cease to take comments, and all the opinions will be considered by the editors as well as the authors.

This is, quite probably, a good idea, opening the scientific process slightly and allowing more democracy. But somehow, I just can't stop worrying.

Just how many Daily Mail journalists are going to sign up to this scheme so they can view the latest health scare-stories before anyone else? Even if those scare-stories cannot be verified by anyone else, and don't even get published in the journal.

(With thanks to The Scientific Activist)

Quick Quiz

2006-06-07T23:50:00.000Z

Who said this:

Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Who could it be? Perhaps some <texas>left-wing lily-livered liberal douche scum</texas> who doesn't believe in this country?

No, you're all wrong. It was Hermann Goering. But it rings true even today.

Windows better than Linux?

2006-06-07T16:53:00.000Z

This article seems to think so.

Standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.

And there's the rub. Open-source software suffers greatly from it's lack of decent documentation. It isn't simple to use, either.

Many Linux users (and Firefox users) believe that they are superior to Windows (and IE) users in every way. They're cleverer, faster, quicker. Technical support staff are famously impatient when dealing with ordinary users.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say this: Computers are not obvious or intuitive.

I first started programming at the age of 10 or so in BASIC using a Commodore Amiga 500. Eventually I moved onto the IBM PC, into Assembler, into C++ and the rest is history. To me, computers are generally fairly simple. I can usually guess what to do, even with unfamiliar software.

If you haven't been using computers since age 10, but only since you started your new job a month ago, then this isn't the case.

Whereas Windows and Mac OS are designed to be user-friendly, GNU and Linux aren't. They're designed to be functional. And that's what's holding back their chance at real popularity.

Web Applications - The Update Curve

2006-06-07T16:49:00.000Z

When you buy software off the shelf, you'll use it for a number of years, and then decide that it's too old. It'll get creaky and slow, and the formats it uses will become obselete. It won't be supported on newer computers, and newer versions will become available.

Eventually you'll upgrade.

The great thing is that you do it all at once, at your convenience. You get confused for a week as your favourite features move somewhere else, but you get used to it.

Web applications are updated when the engineers decide it's appropriate. OK, you don't have to pay for the latest version, but what happens when a critical feature gets moved when you are racing towards a deadline. You've got 3 hours to finish a large project, and suddenly you can't find the "Bold" button. (I'm exaggerating slightly). I don't think this is a good thing.

Google Spreadsheet

2006-06-07T16:39:00.000Z

This is my limited memory of the post which Blogger lost.

Google have just launched an online spreadsheet application, Google Spreadsheets. It's all over the Blogosphere, so I thought I'd add my two penn'orth of limited viewpoints.

My first problem with the application is right there in the middle: Formulas. Is that a word? Formulae, please.

I also have another problem with this idea, of streaming applications off the web.

The Free Software Foundation was founded on the principal of software freedom. "Open-source" is a derivative of this freedom. Basically, the principal is that you can download the source code of any application, and edit it to suit your needs. You don't like the way your word processor does tabs? Reprogram it, and publish your work so that other people can use your modification.

Most current desktop software, such as the MS Office suite is not free. Open-source software is spreading, however, with products such as GNU/Linux gaining ground. One day, perhaps, all software will be free.

Online software is not free. It can never be free, as its source code never leaves the server. The server handles your requests, and gives you an output. Nobody can reprogram it. I see all the progress in software freedom being dashed to shreds by the one company which might have helped push it - Google.

Do no evil? If only.

Journalism

2006-05-29T14:35:00.000Z

Dr. Crippen makes a really good point in this post. Unfortunately, it occurs half way down the page, so I reproduce it here:

The journalists have just discovered (see the BBC report here) that no one knows the optimum treatment for patients with early prostate cancer. Doctors have been saying this for years but have been ignored by the journalists who have campaigned to increase the demand for routine PSA screening. Trouble with journalists is that once they discover something they did not previously know, they assume that no one else knew either. Now they will be telling us we do too much screening.

I love that line near the end, so I'm going to print it again, bigger:
Trouble with journalists is that once they discover something they did not previously know, they assume that no one else knew either.

And now I turn to Sunday's edition of the Observer:

Down on the bottom, there is a mathematical formula in the headline, heralding a great new way to predict football results. The formula itself is that for the Poisson distribution. I first learnt about this in my A level maths course at school, but I think that it might be even older than that. In fact, it was originally published in 1838. Hmm. Not as new as we'd first thought.

The journalists, of course, are totally correct. Given an average number of goals in a match, the Poisson can be used to provide probability estimates for the scores. None of this, however, is particularly novel. The article moves on to mention the "advanced techniques" now used to predict goal scoring. The Poisson distribution isn't mentioned. Of course, that could be because actually the Poisson distribution isn't particularly suitable. After all, goals can't even be assumed to be independent events. And the value of lambda (the average number of goals) has to be tailored to the individual match.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Web Sue.0

2006-05-27T14:00:00.000Z

Point 1: The term "Web 2.0" was originally coined by O'Reilly - the computing book people - in this article. Since then, they've tried to obtain a "service mark" (trademark) on the term.

Point 2: The term "Web 2.0" is used throughout the web. In this sense, it is clear that O'Reilly cannot pretend to exercise "ownership" over the term, in the same way that "Hoover" and "Linoleum" are valueless trademarks. (Although my father still calls it a "vacuum cleaner").

Point 3: CMP Media Ltd., on behalf on O'Reilly, have sent a cease-and-desist notice to a not-for-profit company, IT@Cork, who are organising a half-day Web 2.0 Conference. Apparently O'Reilly have decided to pull the plug on the Web 2.0 term; they own it and the rest of us can go to hell.

This post contains a good summary of the events.

Result: The whole blogosphere has erupted. There's tales of people cancelling contracts with O'Reilly and binning their books. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, much of the anger is for one reason. Web 2.0 is all about collaboration and community building. O'Reilly have just spat on that ideal.

I know I said I'd stop posting about the BBC

2006-05-27T13:08:00.000Z

... but I think that this is interesting.

Biased BBC are making a big fuss over this article in the Times.

THE BBC has persuaded the creator of the 1970s television series M*A*S*H to turn his fire on the Bush Administration.

President Hillary Clinton is in the White House, and George Bush is on trial for crimes against the American people in Abrogate, a one-off radio comedy written by Larry Gelbart. Radio 4 is rushing the "merciless" satire to air in tomorrow night’s Friday Play slot. Radio Times acclaimed the play, saying that "every line is a barbed swipe, a dazzling barb that hits home".

...

Abrogate is set during an imaginary congressional hearing which is “sifting through the debris of the post-Bush regime to discover what, if anything, went right”.

Originally, I think I agreed entirely with their summary, that "persuading the creator of M*A*S*H to turn his fire on the Bush administration" isn't entirely impartial. But, in the interests of "balance", I'm happy to entertain some alternative viewpoints. The take-home messages are:

- Firstly, this play appears to be a satire. Satire is inevitably going to criticise somebody. Perhaps we should just shut up and let them get on with it.

- The BBC's definition of "satire," however, seems to be "criticism of George Bush." Now, I know that the Bush administration gives a well-polished impression of ineptitude, but one could easily argue that they must be doing something right - after all, they got voted in again. It'd be nice to see a satire of liberals, or of the Democratic party's bungling, or of Michael Moore's production crew. When pigs fly. Original programming is obviously no longer important.

- The line "Hillary Clinton is in the White House" is rather amusing. I recall a time a few years ago when the BBC news was constantly speculating that she might make it to the Oval Office. American opinion now seems to indicate that this is unlikely, but the BBC still entertain this fantasy.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course. I'd be perfectly happy to listen to a well-written, witty satire that made me laugh, no matter who it was pointed at. But there's some indications that it might not be:

- Satires of George Bush are never funny. The chimp jokes only last so long, and his trademark garbled speeches soon run out of steam. The gag-writers soon run out of material.

- If it were a well-written, witty satire, then one imagines that the Radio Times reviewers might have noticed, and said so.

- "Every line is a barbed swipe, a dazzling barb that hits home" is what they did say. As the B-BBC commentator pointed out: "With a write-up as jut-jawed as that we can safely assume that it was awful and the Radio Times knew it was awful."

But now, of course, it's Saturday. I even went to the BBC website to see if I could listen to the programme itself. But they wanted me to download RealPlayer. So I had to make do with this review:

I listened to the first 20 minutes. It was a total rant, totally unfunny.

Worst Tech Products

2006-05-27T00:59:00.000Z

Thanks to PCWorld.com, the 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. AOL at the top, no surprises there. Interestingly, RealPlayer came second worst. I still wonder why the BBC insist on using RealPlayer for their online streaming service. Is it because they want us to break our computers?

Comment Spam

2006-05-18T14:36:00.000Z

Today I've had to turn on comment moderation. I didn't want to, as I think it kills the conversation (not that there is much).

But unfortunately, some f*cking spamming halfwitted tw*t has added 250 comments advertising his stupid product, which are going to take me about a week to remove.

The worst part of it is, that he's only had to sit and wait for about 2 seconds while his script executed, whereas now I'm going to waste a metric assload of time.

B*stards.

Exams

2006-05-15T22:20:00.000Z

I finished my exams on Saturday. That's right, with a paper at 9:00 on a weekend. Following my Sunday afternoon off, I've been launched straight into project work, having spent nine hours in the department today.

Somehow I thought that finishing exams would be quite nice, and that I'd be able to relax. Not so, it would appear. Still, at least the work is somewhat more interesting than the dull routine of lectures which I'm used to.

50 Feeds

2006-05-15T22:19:00.000Z

Some inane chatter to celebrate my return...

I just noticed today that I'm currently reading 50 different blog feeds. In fairness, I must confess that one of these is a test for my new CUGCR website, but I still think I'm doing quite well.

RSS Subscriptions

2006-05-04T11:55:00.000Z

Down at the bottom of the sidebar I've added a whole heap of buttons to let you subscribe. If you're an existing user of Yahoo! or Gmail then it's a doddle. Even if you aren't click one of the buttons, and it'll show you the feed experience you could be having.

Blimey, I sound like an advert writer. All I need to do now is write something worth subscribing to.

Yahoo in trouble

2006-05-03T17:42:00.000Z

Apparently, Yahoo! have been getting themselves into all sorts of shady dealings with spyware vendors. And now they're being sued, by the chap who wrote the post behind the first link.

Firefox fanboys again

2006-04-27T22:21:00.000Z

Now I'll admit I haven't always given Firefox a good press. But sometimes I think they don't set themselves up in the nicest way. The religious fervour of Firefox fans goes to the levels of extremism. Yes, maybe you like it. But it's a web browser. Get a life.

I had mixed feelings, therefore, reading this post by Ed Bott.

Gee, guess who reserved the following domains:

ie7.com

getie7.com

Hint: It wasn’t Microsoft.

I think one of the comments put it best: (UPDATE: I've now added the comment which went before that as it then makes sense.)

Fanboyism at it’s [sic] finest. It will be fun to see Microsoft’s legal hounds jump on this and sue them into oblivion.
...
The best part about this is that if Microsoft was to do this then they would be ripped a new one by the community. Is it me or does the underdog always end up being just as bad as the supposed Golith they are out to slay?

I suppose Microsoft haven't exactly been shining examples of good behaviour in the browser wars, but it still annoys me somehow. Maybe I've become an IE-fanboy.

The power of RSS

2006-04-27T22:16:00.000Z

Somebody today said to me in the pub that he didn't believe that I read every blog in my sidebar. So I thought I ought to show how it's done. Here is a screenshot of Bloglines which I use to subscribe to RSS feeds:

In the left-hand pane is a list of every blog I read, sorted into folders by category. In the right-hand pane is the current entry I'm looking at, which happens to be this one at hack a day.

So that's how. Dead easy, really.

Has the independent gone barmy

2006-04-27T14:13:00.000Z

This post at Harry's Place discusses a feature in the independent giving credence to the old conspiracy theory that "The Jews control the world." The theory itself, of course, is self-evidently nonsense (if it were true, the Palestinians would have been nuked long ago).

What is disappointing for me is that the Independent has fallen so far. The cover image they printed was this:

Which comes disappointingly close to this:

Internet Explorer 7.0

2006-04-26T19:40:00.000Z

I've finally installed it.

It's shiny.

I like.

I lost the links toolbar for a while, but I've found it now. Perhaps the most exciting thing was that it told me my security settings weren't tight enough, but rather than just leave it there, it told me which specific setting was wrong (I was permitting unsigned ActiveX downloads) and recommended what to change it to. All in a totally intuitive way.

By default, the menu bar is turned off, so it'll take me a while to find my way around, but that's great - the lack of clutter is amazing.

I'll tell more in a few weeks.

Recognising mistakes

2006-04-26T18:40:00.000Z

A while ago, I said (while discussing browser extensions for Internet Explorer):

There's extensive information about how to go about coding these yourself. The only thing that's missing seems to be a real drive to produce these things. The only ones I've seen have tended to be produced by big companies, e.g. MSN, Google, Yahoo and eBay have all produced downloadable toolbars. If only Microsoft had put effort into encouraging the creation of new extensions. But it's against their mindset - I think extensions will always be a predominantly open source thing. That's where people are positively encouraged to add code to the browser.

But it turns out I was wrong. There's loads of extensions for IE7, and it hasn't even been released yet.

Those who can, do...

2006-04-26T11:15:00.000Z

... those who can't, teach.

I was thinking about this today while watching a BSM driving instructor trying to park. Suffice it to say, it wasn't impressive. Why do people allow themselves to be taught by monkeys?

100th Post

2006-04-26T11:13:00.000Z

In a sense I feel that this ought to be somehow exciting, and that I should have something really important to say.

Unfortunately, I don't, so I'll just link to videos of people putting CDs in a microwave.

George Orwell's book...

2006-04-15T11:31:00.000Z

...Animal Farm was once banned in the US, according to this list. How ironic that a veiled satire of Stalinism was banned due to Communist overtones.

It's also worth reading the original preface, which was cut from many versions of the book. It's often quoted by those discussing freedom of the press. The discussion of institutional pro-Stalinist bias throughout the media is particularly interesting.

Is Linux as good as I think it is?

2006-04-14T17:40:00.000Z

Now don't get me wrong, I'm a committed Windows user. I like the way I can mess with it and almost think I know what I'm doing. But this site has got me confused. It seems official enough. It's a US site from the .gov.uk domain. It's got a sensible logo. But it says this:

This bulletin provides a year-end summary of software vulnerabilities that were identified between January 2005 and December 2005. The information is presented only as a index with links to the US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin the information was published in. There were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities.

[emphasis added]

So that count gives more vulnerabilities in Unix than Windows? How can that be right?

Maybe some fanboys will come along and tell me where I'm going wrong.

Firefox isn't as good as you think it is

2006-04-14T17:17:00.000Z

This webpage is a rather exciting read.

We have all seen these banners before or heard people say "Firefox is Faster, Firefox has Lower Requirements, Firefox is Secure, Firefox defends me from all Spyware, etc." How misleading is it? Read on.

There's some great stuff in here, and it's all well thought-out, well reasoned, and extensively backed up with other sources. I've drawn out some of these.

This page discusses a study of browser speeds, under Linux, Mac and Windows. There's good evidence that Opera is in fact by far the fastest browser, and also that Internet Explorer outperforms Firefox in nearly all categories.

I've heard some complaints about Firefox using excessive amounts of memory when running. This blog post from the Mozilla team gives some more details.

What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.

To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.

Does anybody else remember the old joke about fixing bugs? If you get stuck, just label the current bug as a "feature" and move on. Personally I'd rather not use up piles of system memory just in case I press the back button ten times. Especially since I very rarely do that anyway.

The page smashes the myth about Internet Explorer not supporting extensions with this page from the Microsoft Developer Network.

Browser extensions, introduced in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, allow developers to add functionality to the browser and enhance the user interface.

There's extensive information about how to go about coding these yourself. The only thing that's missing seems to be a real drive to produce these things. The only ones I've seen have tended to be produced by big companies, e.g. MSN, Google, Yahoo and eBay have all produced downloadable toolbars. If only Microsoft had put effort into encouraging the creation of new extensions. But it's against their mindset - I think extensions will always be a predominantly open source thing. That's where people are positively encouraged to add code to the browser.

Interestingly the page features the following paragraph at the bottom:

Firefox Fanboys are so scared people may actually read this page and make up their own minds that they have gone to great lengths to censor any discussion of this page. Anywhere this page appears they desperately try to have the information removed. So far they have been successful in getting this page banned from www.Digg.com. Anyone even posting a link to www.FirefoxMyths.com will have it removed, their account deleted and their IP address blocked. Now why would Digg do this, unless the administration were trying to promote their own agenda. Which apparently includes censoring any perceived negative criticism of the Firefox web browser. When this site was initially submitted on Digg it made the front page in under two hours and was buried to oblivion by the Fanboys in half that time. This censorship of freedom of speech is supposedly what Digg is against, yet this clearly proves otherwise. You have to ask yourself what are they so afraid of? Obviously people reading the factual information presented on this page, instead of the misinformation fed to them by the Fanboy community. It really is that simple.

Perhaps we've al been carried along by the excitement brought by Firefox. Myself? I'm off to install Internet Explorer 7.

Open-source

2006-04-13T18:38:00.000Z

The Euston Manifesto throws in a paragraph about Open-Source Software.

As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders.

I agree with this, especially with the complaints about intellectual property laws which inspire Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems. But I still remain to be convinced that open-source is a good way to design large systems. Large systems require careful management, and I'm yet to be convinced that that's always achievable in the open-source environment.

I look forward to people's attempts to convince me.

Hopefully I'll be able to discuss the manifesto more thoroughly when I've had time to digest it. The main problem with it is how to actually go about accompishing the aims.