Blogs on Andrew Ferrier

Hugo Blog Revival

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 16:57:49 +0000

I’ve recently relaunched this website, and this blog more generally. I’ve taken the opportunity to clean up a lot of things, including switching the primary generation of the static content to Hugo from Jekyll. The primary advantage of Hugo is speed; the site now generates a lot faster. However, it’s also a bit more featureful and cleaner. It’s inbuilt templating allowed me to stop using the somewhat dated and awkward m4. I’ve also taken the opportunity to clean up my URLs, and improve the visuals of the site. So far, I’m pretty happy with it!

Quickly Cleaning Up Docker Images from the Command Line

Tue, 01 May 2018 19:14:19 +0100

One of the things I find quite annoying is cleaning up Docker images on a development machine, such as my laptop. Over time, they tend to accumulate as you experiment with things, clogging up your machine. It’s really handy to have a quick and easy way to get rid of them. As I typically work from the command line, I wanted a way to do it there, and so I created a shell alias that does it in combination with fzf.

Switching between 'Soft' and 'Hard' wrapping in vim

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 19:58:21 +0000

One of the things I sometimes find quite frustrating about vim is that the standard textwidth and wrap options imply assumptions about whether a text-style file (.txt, .md, READMEs, etc.) have “hard” carriage returns (where paragraphs are wrapped with actual carriage returns) or “soft” (where paragraphs are wrapped dynamically by the editor). When you create your own files, you’ll probably have your own preference for which of these you do, but when you are working with files that come from others, it’s very useful to have the ability to quickly switch between them.

FZF and zsh plugin released

Thu, 05 May 2016 22:01:20 +0200

If you’re anything like me, you like fzf, you like zsh, and you oh-my-zsh’s z plugin.

However, although the z plugin does a great job of allowing you to switch between frequently-used directories just by typing z *somedirectorysubstring*, it doesn’t really easily allow you to browse those directories, with partial-string search.

I’ve written a zsh plugin which brings together the z plugin and fzf to allow you to easily browse recently used directories at any point on the command line. It’s hosted on GitHub - find out more there.

Working around Docker's COPY command copying as root using GNU M4

Fri, 18 Sep 2015 16:30:31 +0100

I’ve been working with Docker a lot recently, and have been switching to non-root users within the Dockerfile using the USER instruction (not for security reasons, but in order to test software not as root). As a result, I’ve been suffering a little from this issue - essentially, files copied into a Docker image using ADD or COPY are copied with the owner as root, irrespective of the ownership outside the Docker image. According to this comment, this behaviour in Dockerfiles won’t change, at least in the near future.

Getting the Logitech Presenter R800 Working with QuickTime Player on the Mac

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 12:24:47 +0100

Based on my previous post about getting my Logitech R800 presenting tool working with Keynote using Karabiner, I’ve now spent some time extending my private.xml to add support for QuickTime Player also. It now supports (inside QuickTime Player):

Left: Rewind the video at various speeds.
Right: Fast-forward the video at various speeds.
“Start presentation”: Go into fullscreen.
“Blank presentation”: Pause/play presentation.

This is very useful when giving a “live” demo from a QuickTime video, as you can pause/play/rewind etc. all from the presenter tool.

How I Used Basic Debian Packaging with Git

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 16:15:31 +0100

I was recently looking for a way to support building a basic Debian package for email2pdf - a fairly simple Python program I maintain. In particular, I wanted to:

Keep the Debian build process simple - its packaging has always been a bit of a mystery to me.
Ensure that the git revision was in some way reflected in the Debian version number in a mostly monotonic way, which solely the git revision would not, since it’s merely a SHA1 hash.

Blog Refresh

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 20:23:00 +0100

Recently I relaunched this blog on andrewferrier.com. This was for several reasons:

I wanted to get away from Wordpress. I’d been beholden to it as a tool for a little too long, and it’s become somewhat heavyweight, and was also exposing andrewferrier.com to a lot of spam. By removing a database backend and the ability to add comments, this should go.
I wanted to give a refreshed look and feel. I’ve redesigned everything from scratch using Bootstrap. The look and feel is still a work in progress, but I now get the chance to play with everything from scratch rather than worry about Wordpress themes.

email2pdf - "Automatic" Conversion of Emails to PDFs

Sun, 28 Sep 2014 14:33:34 +0000

Like many folks, I am increasingly trying to go paperless, and am basing this strategy around the PDF format. I already have some good workflows set up with my network scanner to scan documents to PDF, which get automatically transferred to the desktop of my Mac for myself to file using rsync.

However, I also get a lot of emails which I’d like to capture in PDF format. Currently, for each one, I have to go into my email program, and ‘print them out’ using a PDF printer. It’s not too difficult, but it can still be a hassle when there are several to process.

Getting Logitech Presenter R800 Working with Keynote on Mac

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 09:51:38 +0000

Recently I attempted to get my Logitech Presenter R800 working with Keynote on my Mac. I swiftly discovered that although it works with PowerPoint for Mac out-of-the-box, in Keynote the ‘start/stop presentation’ and ‘blank presentation screen’ keys didn’t work.

After a bit of investigation, I found the solution, which was to use KeyRemap4MacBook. The presenter tool behaves like a USB keyboard, and uses for blank screen, and F5 for show/hide presentation. I installed KeyRemap4MacBook, and installed a private.xml based on the one on this page for a slightly different presentation tool. I’ve uploaded the one I used to github. Tip: Don’t forget to read the KeyRemap4MacBook manual. You need to explicitly reload the private.xml once it’s in place (you’ll also need to rename it to that name when you download from github), as well as tick the ‘R800 for Keynote’ checkbox on the Change Key tab in the KeyRemap4MacBook settings.

Fixing initrd to Regain Ubuntu Encrypted Root Prompt on Boot

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:02:20 +0000

Recently, I upgraded my Ubuntu 12.04 server, which uses an encrypted root directory (with LVM and LUKS). Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the upgrade broke the boot process - next time I booted, it hung for 5 seconds, then timed out and dropped to a BusyBox prompt. I quickly found a workaround which allowed me to manually intervene and continue the boot each time:

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda5 root
exit

Of course, however, I didn’t want to intervene on every boot, especially since this is normally a headless server. To fix it longterm, I eventually found this link, which hinted at the problem. Essentially, I had to locate the mapper name for the partition containing my LVM physical volume which contained the boot logical volume. I found this in /etc/crypttab, and in my case it was flash_crypt:

Correcting iPhone photo filenames

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 20:54:15 +0000

Sometimes, when uploading photos from my iPhone’s camera roll (for example, when using Dropbox), the photo filename format ends up looking like this:

Photo 16-03-2012 21 21 10.jpg

This isn’t very nice. Much better to have something in ISO-8601 format, which sorts nicely in file listings, and so on. So I wrote a quick bash script to search for all the files in the current directory (and subdirectories), and rename them to this style:

Compiling FlightGear 2.4.0 for Ubuntu Linux 10.04 (Lucid)

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:30:02 +0000

Update 2011-08-26: If you are using Ubuntu 11.04 or later, it looks like this is now packaged as a .deb by PlayDeb. This post may still be of interest to those using earlier versions of Ubuntu.

I recently had cause to install FlightGear 2.4.0 on Ubuntu 10.04. It’s not packaged in the form of a deb yet, so I’ve documented the commands I used. No guarantees this’ll work for you, as I haven’t tested them rigorously; and I’m assuming some Linux and command-line knowledge.

CyanogenMod on HTC Desire on Orange UK

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 09:57:10 +0000

I installed CyanogenMod on my HTC Desire about a week ago in an attempt to get rid of some of the crapware that Orange UK are notorious for installing, and get a snappier, cleaner phone. I won’t repeat the excellent CyanogenMod install instructions, which you can find here. However, here are some points that might help you if you’re doing something similar:

The OS (Android) firmware and the radio firmware are two separate things. The phone was at the latest Orange-approved firmware level before the upgrade (Android 2.2, which comes with the radio at version 5.10.05.30). I had read elsewhere that Orange network-lock the phone and that this sometimes causes problems when installing CyanogenMod; so I deliberately removed the SIM card during the upgrade process as suggested. Whether this circumvented the problem or whether it simply wasn’t an issue I can’t say, but certainly I haven’t seen any network-lock problems. I didn’t upgrade the radio at all, as this seemed risky; I simply left it at the 5.10 level and skipped over that section in the install instructions.

Windows 7 64-bit on VMWare on Ubuntu Hangs on Boot-up

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 12:26:15 +0000

I recently tried to install Windows 7 64-bit on VMWare Workstation 7.1.3 on top of Ubuntu 10.04 as a host. I found that it behaved quite unreliably once the VMWare tools were installed into the guest OS - in particular, it regularly hung on boot-up. However, once I saw this error message, which clued me into the problem:

![]({{ site.blog_root }}/images/Selection_001_vmware.png)

I discovered that the solution was to disable 3D graphics acceleration - in the VM’s settings, untick Display / Accelerate 3D Graphics. The VM now works smoothly.

How to Travel

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:45:45 +0000

After three years of travel as a consultant to many cities across 14 countries, and many other personal trips and holidays, it seemed to be about time to write down what I’ve learnt about travel – both for work and pleasure. These tips are the guidelines I lay out for myself – which I don’t always follow – and they might not work for you. But I’ve found they’ve helped get more out of the places I visit, and I come back feeling like I’ve seen something of the world.

Orange/T-Mobile Roaming

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:24:59 +0000

I recently started using Orange’s new roaming service that allows you to roam on T-Mobile’s network, in the same way as you might roam around networks when you are abroad. So far experiences are very positive. The phone remains on Orange most of the time, which is fortunate as 3G/HSxPA signals are only available via the Orange network. However, when a signal isn’t available, it seems to roam fairly quickly and efficiently onto T-Mobile’s network. The phone sees this as a roam: the same “R” symbol appears on my Desire’s screen. Charges are allegedly exactly the same as via Orange, so in theory it shouldn’t cost anything extra (although I’ve yet to see a bill since I’ve had it turned on).

The Song of Lunch

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 21:03:15 +0000

Just watched The Song of Lunch on BBC iPlayer. Catch it before it disappears. An excellent little mini-film, starring the classic and highly-talented Alan Rickman and the beautiful Emma Thompson, it is based on a poem by Christopher Reid. It’s almost entirely sensuous: based around the sights, the sounds, and the baser senses of revisiting a former lover. I really enjoyed it, and it didn’t bore me for any of its 45 short minutes. I related to many of Alan Rickman’s observations about the little nuances of visiting a restaurant, being a very frequent visitor myself, from the silly ritual of wine to the waiter-watching. A few laugh-out-loud moments in the script combine with the many emotional twangs it evokes to make for a powerful drama.

Turning off Resume from Hibernation in Ubuntu 10.04

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 14:02:41 +0000

I use dm-crypt on all my machines now, including laptops, to provide full-disk encryption. I also use it to encrypt swap partitions with a randomly-generated key. All of these are features that Ubuntu 10.04 provides out-of-the-box, at least when you use the alternate CD to install.

I also recently installed µswsusp on one of my laptops, a userspace hibernation facility. I didn’t really connect the dots until one day I left the laptop running, coming back to find it hibernated. When I tried to resume, the boot process hung as the kernel complained it couldn’t resume the image. After a facepalm moment (of course this wouldn’t work - the encryption key isn’t constant across boots - you have to use a constant key if you want to get hibernation working), I eventually figured out how to book the machine: use the noresume parameter when booting the kernel.

Huawei K4505 with Ubuntu 10.04

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:55:48 +0000

I just acquired a new Vodafone Mobile Broadband modem to replace an aging ExpressCard version I had that wasn’t working too well. It came in the form of a Vodafone-branded Huawei K4505 USB stick. It didn’t work completely out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 10.04, at first appearing unrecognisable. After some hunting, I discovered that these sticks initially present themselves as USB Mass Storage to allow you to install the Windows drivers. You have to give a few magic incantations on Linux to make them switch into modem mode:

HTC Desire - Bad Points

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:26:10 +0000

Recently I acquired an HTC Desire, when seems to be the de-facto Android phone of the moment__. Generally, I love this phone - I wrote part of this blog post on it, and the quality of the hardware is frankly astonishing. Irritatingly, one can’t help but feel a little smug comparing it to the iPhone. However, I don’t want to become yet another mindless gushing fan. So instead of raving about it, I thought I’d provide some provide some constructive criticism on the aspects of the phone I don’t like so much:

Turning off Sametime Pop-ups

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:18:28 +0000

I use Lotus Sametime a lot at work, but it has an irritating feature that by default brings all conversations to the front whenever something new is added to them. Nevertheless, this can be turned off. You just need to know how to navigate the labyrinthine preferences menu:

![]({{ site.blog_root }}/images/Selection_001.png)

This screenshot is from Sametime 8.5.1 on Linux, but other platforms are probably similar.

Disabling Synaptics Touchpad with Ubuntu 10.04

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:22:23 +0000

I recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my Thinkpad T61 and set about disabling the touchpad, which I always find irritating. There seemed to be lots of guides to this, including this one, but none of them seemed to work for me. Eventually I figured some fairly simple steps which did work:

Install two packages if they aren’t already installed (gpointing-device-settings is the more modern version of gsynaptics and will uninstall it if it’s installed):

Kick-Ass

Fri, 14 May 2010 04:44:17 +0000

I haven’t written a film review in some time, but having just come back from seeing Kick-Ass, with it still fresh in my mind, here goes…

Kick-Ass is definitely a comic book movie. It’s been portrayed in some circles as the anti-comic book movie, and that’s certainly the impression I had going in: the first ten minutes or so leave you in no doubt that the protagonist isn’t a professional, well, hero. But at the end - without spoiling it - you’re left in no doubt that it is a comic book and not reality. As evidence, the characterisation (for example, of Kick-Ass’s girlfriend, Katie) is pretty shallow. The violence is graphic and for me a little unpleasant at times (I can’t stand watching any kind of torture, and the whooping of the idiotic frat boys at the back of the cinema made it more unpleasant). Nevertheless, the film is definitely amusing - and I didn’t find the overtones of violence or language coming from Hit-Girl as unsettling as many have (if you don’t know, she’s 11, says “cunt” once and “fuck” plenty of times, and kills many people in a variety of gruesome ways).

Logitech Presenter R800 with USB HID in Windows XP SP3

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:55:21 +0000

I recently acquired a Logitech Presenter R800. It’s a beautiful device - not particularly cheap, but very slick and easy-to-use. Unfortunately, Windows XP (Service Pack 3) on my system refused to recognise it - the device was listed as USB Receiver in Windows Device Manager, but Windows kept claiming it couldn’t find the driver. It is presented to the system as a standard USB HID device, so there is no Logitech-specific driver: it uses the standard Windows HID Driver. It worked perfectly out of the box on Ubuntu 9.10.

Highrise Backup

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:40:22 +0000

I no longer use Highrise, but when I did, I used this Python script to back up my contacts. Hope it’s helpful to someone.

Updated 2009-12-14: Added license

#!/usr/bin/python
#
# Copyright (c) 2009, Andrew Ferrier All rights reserved.
#
# Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
# modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
#
# * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
# this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
#
# * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
# this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
# and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
#
# * The name of Andrew Ferrier may not be used to endorse or promote products
# derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
#
# THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS"
# AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
# IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
# ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE
# LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR
# CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF
# SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
# INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
# CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE)
# ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE
# POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

import httplib2
import getopt
import sys

try:
    opts, args = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], "a:d:", ["user-auth-token=", "domain="])
except getopt.GetoptError, err:
    print str(err)
    sys.exit(2)
userauthtoken = None
domain = None
for o, a in opts:
    if o in ("-a", "--user-auth-token"):
        userauthtoken = a
    elif o in ("-d", "--domain"):
        domain = a
    else:
        assert False, "unhandled option"

if userauthtoken == None or domain == None:
    print "You must specify both the user-auth-token and the domain"
    sys.exit(2)

url = "http://" + domain + ".highrisehq.com/people.xml"

http = httplib2.Http()

http.add_credentials(userauthtoken, "x")

offset = 0
content = ""

while True:
    response, newContent = http.request(url + "?n=" + str(offset))

    if response.status != 200:
        sys.exit(response.status)

    numContacts = newContent.count("")
    offset += numContacts
    content += newContent

    if numContacts < 500:
        break

print content

Winchester Waitrose

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:41:08 +0000

Just come back from the new Winchester Waitrose. Upsides are:

Large; decent selection of food.
Looks like usual upscale Waitrose food quality.
Pleasant, well-turned out, professional staff (Sainsbury’s Winchester, I’m looking at you here).
Clean and well-presented store (once again, a glance in Sainsbury’s direction).

Downsides:

It’s too far out of town. OK, it probably isn’t if you have a car, I admit. I’m in the minority by avoiding one for cost reasons (which might cause one to question why I choose to shop at Waitrose, so it probably works for most of their customers). But, for me, it is a trek. I’ll probably be trying out Waitrose Deliver to see if that might help.

veryPC AT20

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:02:22 +0000

I recently bought a veryPC AT20 as a more powerful replacement for an aging Debian-hacked NSLU2 that I had serving up files, doing backups, and other such tasks. I thought I’d do a quick review in case it’s of value to anyone considering a machine from veryPC (at the time of writing, it seems to be no longer for sale, although the veryPC AT10 looks similar).

I particularly wanted something more meaty than my NSLU2 so I could do full-disk encryption, fully-encrypted offsite backups, so it seemed ideal. The variation I ordered has:

Dialling Problems with Vodafone 3G on Windows

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:14:57 +0000

As I’ve written about before, I use a combination of Vodafone 3G and the AT&T Network Client on Windows to access my corporate VPN. Recently, I’ve been seeing this error a lot when ‘dialling’ the 3G network (I connect it via the Windows dialler, rather than the Vodafone client):

![]({{ site.blog_root }}/images/error1.png)

This morning, I figured out what it was that was causing the problem. AT&T was open when I was dialling, and had the modem selected in the ‘Cellular’ tab (which I don’t normally use):

Vodafone 3G - Position Your Card Right!

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:55:55 +0000

I’ve written before about how poor the Vodafone 3G Mobile Connect client is, and the alternative in Windows. However, it’s also worth mentioning that the card itself is far from perfect. It is very sensitive to the position of the SIM Card - having it off by even a few millimetres can mean it doesn’t connect, and it’s not always obvious what is wrong. The crucial thing is to have it poking out of the top, but only by half a millimetre or so. Don’t push it in all the way! This photo shows what it should look like:

Frost / Slumdog / Nixon

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:18:41 +0000

Been to see two films in almost as few days recently. Slumdog Millionaire was entertaining; perhaps not the classic it could have been - I think it lacked a little clarity in storytelling - but still great. Frost/Nixon was more compelling, certainly for me: I was not expecting Frank Langella’s performance as Nixon to be as good as it was - in the end, it perhaps beat Anthony Hopkins’s classic performance from Nixon. Watch out for Oliver Platt’s wonderful performance-within-a-performance imitation of Nixon.

Avoid Vodafone Mobile Connect client in Windows

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:32:20 +0000

If you’re anything like me, you _hate _the Vodafone Mobile Connect client - it’s buggy, unstable, and requires frequent reboots/restarts/taking-the-card-out-and-putting-it-back-in-again to make it work. What I only discovered today - although I should have known from ancient dial-up modem connections years ago - was that you can just use the regular ‘Network Connections’ facility of Windows. Just locate the ‘Vodafone Mobile Connect’ entry, right-click and select ‘Connect’ (I think this will only appear once you’ve installed the Vodafone software):

Using AT&T Network Client VPN with Ubuntu 64bit

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:34:44 +0000

(This post is probably of most interest to my IBM colleagues - however, since the AT&T Network Client is also available for other organisations, I’ve posted this here in case it’s of use to other folks.)

I recently installed Ubuntu 64bit (amd64) on my Lenovo Thinkpad T61. Unfortunately, the Network Client is not available in a 32bit edition. So I had to perform a few tweaks to get it to work. Here’s the steps I took:

Twitter

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:00:15 +0000

After yet another grumble at jt, I’ve finally broken and will give Twitter a try (my ID is andrewferrier). I’m still struggling to see where the benefit will come from, but he made the valid point that I can’t say for sure ’til I try it - so I’ve given in and will give it a go. To be fair, I’ve come across two bits of useful info. already, so early signs are promising.

Standing up to Injustice

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:20:31 +0000

Early this year I wrote about how the French were standing up to anti-smoking legislation. The Dutch are now doing the same. I wish the British didn’t roll over so easily.

Forcing pub owners (or anyone else) to enforce your preferences is wrong and a thoroughly illiberal idea. It makes the world more homogenous and less interesting. Don’t stand for it.

Blood, Sex and Coffee

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 13:47:59 +0000

I don’t normally do plugs on here, but my good friend Ella has just recently completed her first novel: Blood, Sex and Coffee. It’s a mammoth achievement, weighing in at a good 700 pages, and is a campy vampire novel bringing in more themes than you’d think could be fit in such as a size - although is fundamentally a huge tract of story crossing space and time. I haven’t yet had a chance to read it - and I’m not normally a big fiction reader - but I have a 12 hour flight to Cape Town at the weekend, so maybe be burning through some of it then. I hope to post a review sometime soon.

Connecting Google Reader and podget

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:08:09 +0000

For some time, I’ve had a Perl script that runs regularly, backing up my Google Reader subscriptions using the standard OPML format:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Usage:
#  backup-google-reader-opml file-to-write-to.opml google.user.name@domain google-password

use strict;
use warnings;

use WWW::Mechanize;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();

$mech->get("http://reader.google.com")
    or die "Cannot reach Google Reader Homepage";

$mech->submit_form(
    form_number => 1,
    fields =>
    {
        Email => $ARGV[1],
        Passwd => $ARGV[2]
    }
)
    or die "Cannot submit form";

$mech->get("http://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export");
$mech->save_content($ARGV[0]);

However, I recently wrote another script (this time Python) that then takes this OPML, parses out all the URLs that are tagged with ‘podcast’, and outputs a serverlist file for podget (an automated console-based podcast downloader). This enables me to subscribe to a podcast in Google Reader, and have the podcast automatically added to the download list. The script looks like this:

Fixing up TripIt and Dopplr Integration

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:05:47 +0000

I’ve had my TripIt Personal Calendar Feed specified as an iCal feed into Dopplr for some time, to keep the two in sync by adding every trip in TripIt into Dopplr automatically (I’d give up on Dopplr entirely, as it seems a bit overdesigned and buggy - but it is a bit shinier than TripIt and produces nicer stats, so I’m hanging on to using it against my better judgement). But unfortunately the folks at TripIt broke this integration recently by adding exact geographic locations to the feed. This caused Dopplr to be over-zealous and make the destinations too specific (regions of Madrid and Paris, for example - rather than the whole city).

Burn After Reading

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:01:51 +0000

Went to see Burn After Reading with plv last night. It’s a bit of a slow starter, but when it gets going, there are some real solid comedic moments. It’s not laugh-a-minute, and is a little disjointed, but it’s sure entertaining as the plot gets more and more mashed up, and could almost be classed as a farce if it were a little clearer. Indeed, as the CIA boss says at one point:

Threadless's Customer Service

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:00:41 +0000

Ordered a t-shirt from Threadless.
It never turned up.
They offered to refund me in full, no complaints needed.
They also gave me a $5 voucher for future orders, bringing the whole deal even further into the red for them.

This is pretty excellent customer service. I struggle to see this happening in the UK.

NBA @ O2

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:56:36 +0000

I went to the see the NBA game at the O2 Arena on Sunday evening on a last minute whim - Chris had a ticket spare.

The game was certainly entertaining (everything the Telegraph says about attention deficit disorder is true), even though I know little about basketball. It gave me a chance to try out my (new to me) telephoto lens. I was a little disappointed with the results once I pulled them off the camera - I had trouble sucking in enough light whilst getting stable shots - but I still ended up with one or two reasonable ones, although mostly not of the game itself.

Reinstalling The Thinkpad

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:02:45 +0000

My work Thinkpad (a T61) was becoming a little crufty, so I decided to reinstall it from scratch. Here are a few lessons I learnt along the way:

Making a hot copy of your entire drive onto a USB hard disk with VMWare Converter beforehand is a great idea. This basically means you have your entire previous installation still bootable, so you can rescue any data or settings you forgot about, after you’ve done the reformat and reinstall. VMWare Converter is free.

Daily Show Back

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:52:10 +0000

Super. After the mean folks at Comedy Central stopped allowing streaming of The Daily Show outside the US, it’s now available again, courtesy of Channel 4 Catch Up.

If you’ve never watched it, it’s definitely worth a peek. Jon Stewart is pretty funny, and although it has an obvious leftist bias, it has an even greater bias for ridiculing deserving politicans. Kinda the American Have I Got News For You, without the panel-game element.

Icesave

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:50:04 +0000

I was just about to diversify my savings into a newly-opened Icesave ISA this evening. Boy, am I glad it took me a while to get round to it.

Now to try and ~~guess~~ analyse the best place for my money.

Byron

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:17:37 +0000

Decent Hamburger restaurant in Kensington. Well worth a try. Another similar option is Tootsie’s, nearby.

Did you mean 'to type correctly'?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:56:19 +0000

I suddenly realised that I expect Amazon (and indeed many other websites) to correct my misspellings in the same way as Google:

Did you mean: lost in translation ?

But it doesn’t.

They should fix this.

Geconomics

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:41:15 +0000

The son of one of the world’s most influential and talented economists is obviously a total geek. How wonderful.

Oh, and get this blog comment and response.

Update 16:58: Then, of course, you read this.

Why don’t economists get any respect?

TripIt is ... er ... Really Good

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 07:13:29 +0000

I grumbled to the nice folks at TripIt because I wasn’t eligible for their referral competition, so they sent me a T-shirt instead. So I think it’s only fair that I put in a good word for them:

Try it. If you travel a lot it’s invaluable.
It’s free.
It’s better than Dopplr.
Er… that’s it.

BAA Break-up

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:34:33 +0000

I’m kinda undecided on the BAA break-up. The FT thinks it should definitely go ahead. But as a fairly strict libertarian, and therefore keen on economic freedom, I’ve always had a problem with monopoly break-up except in the most extreme of cases (and I’m not sure this qualifies).

Nevertheless, as my job now takes me onto an aeroplane more than I before, I’m curious and so I read the summary from the Competition Commission’s provisional report. I’m not sure I’m any the wiser, but there were some interesting facts and statistics embedded within:

Not-so-Jubbly Line

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:53:42 +0000

I’m beginning to enjoy transport in London almost as much as Richard. Got to Waterloo this morning to find that once again, the Jubilee line entrance was closed - this happened last Monday too. Not being a fan of taking replacement buses and braving the crowds with two large bags half-way across London, I copped out and got a taxi.

But what’s going on here? And why are TfL incapable of communicating with me when it does?

Fullscreen Video Flicker on T61 Thinkpad

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 10:27:26 +0000

Until recently, I was having problems with fullscreen video in Windows on my new T61 Thinkpad, which uses an NVidia Quadro NVS 140M display adapter. Video would regularly flicker when fullscreen was enabled in a variety of players, including Windows Media Player and various embedded Flash players, and had to be taken out of fullscreen and put back - sometimes as many as 10 times - before the image was stable.

New Delicious - For Mobile Once Again

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:03:50 +0000

Used to be, I employed a cunning trick I found on the web to create a quick ’n’ dirty homepage for my browser on my mobile - all the delicious bookmarks I’d tagged with mtag.

Then delicious went and released a new version and this trick broke.

After a bit of fiddling, I’ve found a reasonable alternative. feed.informer will take any RSS feed and turn it into fairly plain HTML. So take your RSS feed, which might look something like this:

Energy Efficient Lightbulbs

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:36:53 +0000

Anyone want any free energy efficient lightbulbs? I keep getting spammed with them by British Gas, Southern Electric, et. al., in a desperate attempt to prove their green credentials. Of course, it doesn’t work - I already have all I need and they are now piling up in the cupboard (here’s a hint: maybe that ain’t so green).

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch.

24h Doughnuts

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:15:14 +0000

I generally consider myself to be a pretty liberal guy (in the old-fashioned sense). However, 24-hour doughnuts are testing my patience. Lots of London Tesco Express stores now seem to stock delicious Krispy Kremes, and to compound the evil, they do it at all times of day and night, just outside the hotels I tend to stay in. I think they are following me.

They should clearly be banned.

Black & Blue

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:15:11 +0000

Being as I travel so much these days, I tend to eat out far more often than is good for me (quite literally). London, where I’m currently holed up for a few months, is generally an excellent location for a good selection of good places to eat, although it’s still challenging to find a good (and quick) meal every night. However, my hotel for this week and last (the above average Hilton Kensington) doesn’t exactly seem to be replete with places to dine.

WALL-E

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:07:22 +0000

Pixar have done it again. WALL-E is their best film since Monsters Inc. The industrial cityscapes are amazing. The rendering detail is stunning. The story is robust, and the emotion deep.

The pre-film trailer for Madagascar 2 looked amateurish in comparison.

WALL-E is a wonderous film. See it.

Dopplr Half-Inches from TripIt

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:22:52 +0000

Fascinating. The sexy-but-basic Dopplr has obviously decided to take a wander into less-sexy-but-more-capable TripIt’s territory and start doing parsing of forwarded confirmation emails from airlines, etc. It will be interesting to see how well they execute on it (I haven’t had an excuse to use the feature yet). I’ve been a fairly avid user of TripIt and so far have been a bit disappointed by Dopplr’s lack of functionality and innovation beyond its core idea. But should Dopplr truly become a tool for organising itineraries, it’ll be interesting to see which wins out. Dopplr’s certainly ahead on the publicity front.

Dubai Trials

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:40:04 +0000

Interesting to see that Dubai are trialling their new T3 in much the same way as Heathrow did with T5. I’ll be curious to see if they get the same result. Somehow, I doubt it.

Biagio

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:59:33 +0000

Excellent little Italian place I found near Embankment and the Strand.

Plus, why is the price of hotel wifi in inverse proportion to its quality? Discuss. The Marriott I stayed in last week had unusable wifi (although the hotel was otherwise pretty good), whereas the Park Plaza this week (a.k.a cheap Radisson) has excellent free wifi (for IBMers). It’s got to be a strong factor for business travellers, yet most hotels clearly treat it as an afterthought.

Firefox 3 RC1

Sat, 31 May 2008 07:57:48 +0000

Normally I don’t touch pre-release software these days (apart from the IBM software I work with, of course). But I just downloaded and installed Firefox 3 RC1. And boy, Mozilla weren’t kidding - it’s noticeably faster and snappier than Firefox 2. Very impressive. For someone like me who spends a lot of time in a browser, this is just great.

Smoking at Cannes

Thu, 22 May 2008 17:26:29 +0000

Why don’t we see this kind of defiance of illiberal legislation more often? It’s something the French do well. In a time when vices are being outlawed left, right, and centre, I’d like to see a bit more bolshyness from the British public.

LAX...

Sun, 11 May 2008 01:06:46 +0000

… is as dismal as promised. JFK has definitely become my preferred transit airport (although O’Hare still has that delicious buttercrust pizza unavailable elsewhere in the world). The AA terminal here is pretty small (I think because there’s another terminal for its poor sibling, American Eagle), and since I’m stuck here for 4 hours, I’ve bought Admirals’ Club access.

McCarran

Sat, 10 May 2008 20:31:32 +0000

I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Las Vegas airport after attending an IBM internal conference for a week. Las Vegas is indeed as tacky as expected, and wouldn’t be first on my list of places to visit on holiday, although I’m thinking about making it part of my ‘road trip’ when I eventually get round to planning it (the short version is SF to Vegas across Death Valley, the long version is the length of Route 66 - I expect the result will be a mixture). The conference was useful, and I got to meet some folk I’d previously only interacted with online, such as the prolific blogger Dan Zrobok. The airport is also surprisingly pleasant, with fast and friendly check-in (surprising for American), short security queues, and free wi-fi (hence this post). Now all I have to do is endure the 10-hour flight (with a full plane) from LA to London. Yuck.

Gel 2008 and NYC

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:06:01 +0000

I returned from New York City at the weekend after having spent a week there, partly on holiday and partly attending Gel 2008. Highlights of Gel for me were:

Attending the Sphereplay workshop - I learnt a new physical skill in about 3 hours, a concept quite novel for me! I will definitely be ordering a sphere (it’s **not **a ball, it’s **not **a ball) to keep this skill going.
The presentations by Clay Shirky and Garrett Oliver.

Tesco Are Clever Again

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:16:09 +0000

I got a new Clubcard from Tesco again today. On the back of the key fob version is a phone number and and an ID number. If your cards get lost, the finder is exhorted to call the number to arrange for your keys to be returned. Who knows if it would work, but it’s an potential extra benefit for little cost to me - since I’d put the key fob tag on anyway. Ingenious.

On the way to NYC

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:36:58 +0000

It’s a lot of palaver to travel these days - I started my journey to NYC yesterday, and as I write, I’ve still only reached the American lounge at T3 in Heathrow (although to be fair that’s mostly down to a combination of me being cheap - no chauffered transfer on my own money - and wanting to maximise my time today in the city). Still, in about 10 hours, I’ll be in Manhattan, and I can’t wait - my first trip abroad this year without work to do (unless you count Gel, which I don’t).

2 in 2

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:19:58 +0000

Two good restaurants in as many days. Raunheim is yielding some worthy secrets. Restaurant Donna Maria is definitely worth a visit; a decent Italian in an area full of questionable ones.

Corner Steakhouse

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:47:02 +0000

With all the travelling I’m doing in my new role, I’m actually having more meals in restaurants than not. This isn’t as exciting as it sounds; particularly here in Germany, where even the smartest-looking Italian restaurants (which seem to be the largest ethnic food group aside from German restaurants themselves) serve up cheap, uninspired food.

So I was delighted today to find the nice (and not so cheap) Corner Steakhouse - not on the corner, but in the middle of Raunheim. Excellent steak, ironically cooked by yours truly on the hot lava stone they gave me. I’m ashamed to say it’s the first time I’ve tried that exact style of food, but it won’t be the last.

Gel 2008

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:18:30 +0000

Really, really, looking forward to Gel 2008 in a couple of weeks. One of my Thursday ‘activities’ is an authentic foods tour, taking in my favourite food store in the whole world, then an evening party at Google NYC.

Speakers the next day include Clay Shirky and Marissa Mayer.

Plus I get to spend the preceding week hanging out in NYC for the first time in yonks - staying on Times Square for free.

Adam Smith in the 21st Century

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:17:59 +0000

A post on the Economist’s Free Exchange blog - about Adam Smith’s house in Edinburgh going on sale - reminded me of a childhood fantasy, and caused me to think how it could be brought up to date.

Adam Smith (and many other free-marketers since) have had a lot to say about the ingenuity of the human spirit and the market’s ability to do a better job of enriching humans than central planning. Nevertheless, I sometimes still wonder about the extent to which new ideas are sometimes missed, even in strong market arenas, because existing ones are taken for granted.

On a More Positive Note... Travel Tip #1

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:49:26 +0000

Always add a note to your hotel reservation requesting a high floor if possible. Some hotel chains will let you do this on your frequent traveller profile, for others you may have to request each time. It’s worth it, for two reasons:

You typically get a better view and a quieter room.
You sometimes get upgraded to a better class of room, without having to explicitly ask for it - they are often high up.

Argh

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:09:22 +0000

Today:

Got an SMS this afternoon saying flight to Terminal 5 had been cancelled. A request to call BA at my own expense.
Rapid call to BA asking for a rebooking on an earlier Malév flight to Gatwick, followed by a semi-run to the hotel.
Panic rush to airport; in the end, got there too early!
Checked in; panic over for the moment.

I’ll have ‘fun’ when I get back checking whether I can claim compensation - I think I can. Normally I like flying with BA, but this will make me think twice in future. I’ll certainly be avoiding T5 for a while, if at all possible.

LaTeX Tips

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:50:09 +0000

A general grab-bag of tips for using LaTeX, from the days when I still used it a lot:

To add nice headers and footers to each page use the fancyhdr package.
Use glosstex for most acronym and glossary needs.
Use the hyphenat package if you need monospace text (such as that set by the \texttt command) to wrap correctly, with hyphenation marks.
The varioref package provides easy-to-use cross referencing with automatic phrases such as ‘on the following page…’ etc.

Buda 5

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:27:07 +0000

Should be an interesting travel week coming up - I am going to Budapest on Tuesday. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been so far east in Europe before. Then on Friday I fly back into Terminal 5, the day after it opens. I wonder how smoothly it will be operating?

Council Tax

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:11:36 +0000

Good to see Hampshire County Council are spending my taxes wisely. In the propaganda brochure accompanying their latest letter demanding 800 pounds for rubbish collection and clogged roads, I find this item:

These pages have been checked for clarity by Plain Language Commission [sic].

Sometimes I’m ashamed to live in a socialist country.

Fraport Badness

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:06:51 +0000

Normally I find Germany to live up to its reputation for competence and organisation. Today’s trip through the bureaucracy of Frankfurt airport, however, has been marred by duplicate security checks, far too many passport and boarding pass checks, annoying queues, and unclear instructions at the gate - and I haven’t even got on the plane yet! I’m not impressed.

Perhaps Frankfurt is suffering from the Heathrow disease of being just too big for its boots.

Picasa and RAW Bug

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:48:37 +0000

Note to self and others: never use Picasa to download photos direct from the camera when using RAW+JPEG. It has a nasty habit of downloading the JPEGs, then deleting the RAWs. Ouch. Always use a card reader on the Compact Flash card instead.

Getting Dopplr and Tripit to Play Together

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:28:44 +0000

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been using Dopplr and TripIt a lot recently as I’ve been travelling more. Although TripIt is far more featureful, I know more people on Dopplr and so keeping it up-to-date is useful as it increases the chance of serendipitous coincidences. They are competitors, but I like them both.

So far it’s been a pain to enter information into Dopplr manually, but they announced today that it can now watch iCal calendars and create trips accordingly. I’ve added my iCal feed from TripIt and it seems to work well so far. They are minor niggles. For example, it gets confused if you have multiple destinations in your trip as TripIt doesn’t really allow for this concept. Also, not all trips involve advance booking, so I don’t bother adding them to TripIt - they’ll need to be entered into Dopplr manually. Nevertheless, it should cut down on the amount of data entry.

Focus on Imaging and the 400D

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:57:50 +0000

I went to the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC at the weekend. The show itself was a little disappointing, obviously oriented more around trade sales than the end-consumer, and was marred a little by poor organisation from the NEC resulting in large queues, a car-park merry-go-round, and so on. But nevertheless, there were some interesting stalls - Canon and Nikon having the largest and most impressive, with some substantial Canon L-series lenses on display.

Excellent Service from TripIt

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:01:21 +0000

As I’ve starting travelling a lot recently, I’ve been making reasonably heavy use of both Dopplr and the less well-known TripIt. The idea behind Dopplr is simple: tell it which cities you’re travelling to and it will share that information with your other Dopplr contacts, notifying you when you’re in the same place. You can also syndicate your travel plans - I have mine published on Facebook and available as a feed via Google Calendar.

Juno

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:13:33 +0000

Sonic Youth sucks, they're just noise — Juno

Juno is the kind of movie that reminds you why being alive (oh yeah, and watching films) is a good thing. From the Sunny D-guzzling opening to the bittersweet ending, it definitely delivers the laughs as the reviews promised. They’ve pinched a few of the cast from Arrested Development, a quality American sit-com, and it shows in the delivery. Ellen Page is also strong in the title role as Juno herself. None of the cast speak like real human beings, but that doesn’t seem to matter too much - as long as you’re at or around the level of political correctness of Jeremy Clarkson, you’ll love it.

RIAS Home Insurance Need Some Data Washing

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:16:06 +0000

Hmm. Got this letter through the door the other day:

Dear Ms Ferrier [sic], **Born before 1958! Your age could save you money on your home insurance.** Let's face it, you are bombarded with messages promising you cheaper insurance... [etc. etc.]

Quite entertaining that they managed to get both my sex and my age (quite significantly) wrong. I don’t think they’ll be getting my business.

Observations on a Journey

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 18:05:00 +0000

I stayed in London last night, so decided to try something a little different and fly out of London City rather than Heathrow for my upcoming journey to Madrid. I think I’ve decided that this was a mistake. I was staying at R’s in Hammersmith, and the journey to City is much longer than it was in my head. In retrospect, Heathrow would have been much simpler; just a quick trip down the Piccadilly line. The DLR (something Richard has written about before) didn’t help. Only a few years after opening a potentially useful extension to London City, they are already deciding to play the UK rail game and shut it at the weekends for engineering work; a bus was needed. Pathetic.

Ratatouille

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:18:58 +0000

With Ratatouille, Brad Bird and Pixar have finally transcended animation. Bird recently said that they wanted animation to be seen as an art form rather than a genre, and one can see why.

Ratatouille has a subtle plot, well-designed characters, humour, tears, and much of the other excellent content one has come to expect from Pixar. At times it drags a little, but in showing how animation can serve to tell a story (rather than simply entertain), as well as any live-action film, they deserve total credit.

Toronto Trip

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:18:20 +0000

I’m in Toronto this week, working with some of my colleagues from the Toronto development lab.

Some observations on the trip so far:

If travelling via the US, JFK is preferable as an interchange to O’Hare - the terminal is modern and pleasant, and changing is easier. But:
Go direct to Canada if you can - you cut down on immigration paperwork.
My car (a Pontiac G6) is pretty cool, and like all North American cars I’ve driven, very usable and drivable. Driving here in Canada doesn’t seem to be much different from the US.

Win a Happiness Workshop

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:47:19 +0000

I met Alexander Kjerulf, the self-titled Chief Happiness Officer (possibly one of the most cheerful and effusive people you’d ever meet) at euroGel 2006, where he was running a workshop. Now he’s coming to the UK to work with HP, providing consultancy on happiness in the workplace. There’s a competition running to win free consultancy for companies of 100 employees or less. If you work somewhere of that size, and you think your workplace could do with a few smiles, I’d strongly suggest taking a look at his blog entry on the subject. He’s a great chap and you’d potentially be getting some great consultancy for free.

More Flexible Firefly Smart Playlists with Perl, sqlite3 and m3u

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 15:30:35 +0000

I use Firefly (previously called mt-daapd) as a media server for my Roku Soundbridge. It has a feature called ‘Smart Playlists’ that dynamically create playlists based on certain criteria, but they aren’t that powerful - they don’t support sorting or other more advanced query features.

Fortunately, underlying Firefly is a sqlite database, which can be queried using standard SQL syntax. This enables a technique of creating static playlists that are automatically re-generated periodically instead.

Online Address Frustration

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:05:45 +0000

I’m surprised at the poor state of online contact management, given how mature the online e-mail market is. I’ve just spent a frustrating and mostly wasted morning with Plaxo, trying to see if it could fulfil my relatively simple needs (online contact management, syncing with something desktop-based, ideally Thunderbird, and syncing with my mobile phone as a nice to have). After struggling with the over-engineered Plaxo interface, a wobbly Thunderbird sync extension that loses critical bits of data, and a de-duper that misses obvious duplicates, I gave up. The latter service requires signing up to a free trial, which I’ve now cancelled.

The Rescuers

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 13:20:38 +0000

The Rescuers is perfect for Christmas - it’s a lovely family movie without the irritating Christmas tat. From its basic yet beautiful introduction with static paintings. through the robust characterisation, rough animation and moving song, it’s a classic from start to finish, especially compared to some of the more recent Disney fare. It’s well plotted, with no parts that drag or bore. The voice talent, particularly Oscar-winning Geraldine Page as Madame Medusa is hilarious and well-timed. The well-named Evinrude (a real brand of motorboat engine) is very funny. It has the typical Disney blend of humour, drama, and sentiment that makes them such a good watch. Walt Disney would be proud.

Subscribers on Google Reader

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 13:12:35 +0000

Tip for anyone who blogs and uses Google Reader: the new ‘Discover’ feature of Google Reader enables you to see how many people are subscribed to your blog. Select ‘Browse’ and search for your blog using keywords. When you’ve found it, it’ll show how many subscribers there are. Take the number with a pinch of salt: it is, of course, only one of many blog readers, albeit a popular one.

Les Livres

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:07:01 +0000

Every time I get sad about the illiberal attitudes of the public sector in the UK, at least I can reassure myself that I don’t live in France.

One-Time Pad Irritation

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 11:57:11 +0000

NatWest have recently introduced a one-time pad device on their on-line banking system, which I’ve just got my hands on. As someone who travels a lot, it’s going to be an inconvenience to carry around, so I phoned up NatWest to see if I could have it disabled. The chap I spoke to implied it was being introduced by all UK banks in one form or another and wasn’t going to be optional. Does anyone know if this is true? I wonder if they have really thought through the implications for their customers. Online banking is often of the most use when you are away from home, and carrying a physical device seems like a very stone-age method of providing security. Why can’t I choose not to have it?

Why is it hard to... (part #734)

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:07:50 +0000

… find good food in Madrid? I’m obviously doing something wrong.

I’ve been in Madrid for just over a week now. My first mistake was to assume that restaurants would be open when I wanted them. Unfortunately, it appears that the local convention dictates that you don’t eat till about 9pm, so most don’t even open till 8.30pm. It took me a few days to give in and toe the line. The places I was forced into when I ignored this convention were not pretty (a cheap and nasty buffet being one of them). Although I’m now resigned to it, the habit of eating so late really disrupts my sleep (please, no comments about siestas. It’s close to freezing here some nights, and most people work 8am-6pm - with lunch at 3pm).

Sunday

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 13:16:01 +0000

Amazon have obviously got just as sick of Royal Mail as I have. They now seem to be using the Home Delivery Network instead for large parcels. I’ve just had some network kit delivered - on a Sunday! What’s even more impressive, I picked the cheapest delivery option available. There’s also online tracking available.

Roll on postal competition.

Lake District '07

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 21:37:49 +0000

Well, it took me a while, so both of my travelling companions already got their photos up. But I finally got round to posting up a few select snaps from our Lake District trip a month or so back. As I expected, most of my interesting shots were of the tragically recursive variety: photographs of photographers.

Getting WPA Working with a Thinkpad T42 and Knoppix 5.1.1

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 08:52:20 +0000

Thinkpad problems mean that I’m currently borrowing a T42 from work. It took me a while to get WPA working with Knoppix 5.1.1. Here are the magic incantations required:

wpa_passphrase YOURSSID YourWPAPassPhrase > /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
wpa_supplicant -ieth1 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf &
ifup eth1
pump -i eth1

Replace eth1 in the list above with whatever network interface name Knoppix has assigned to your wireless card (reading through the output of dmesg should help you with this). Don’t forget to double-check that your router has the MAC address of the card (use ifconfig to find this) if you’re using MAC address filtering.

Zürich

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 13:01:17 +0000

I’m home for the weekend after spending last week with an IBM customer in Zürich - I return on Monday. It’s my first time to the city, and my impressions are certainly mixed. Swiss efficiency is present throughout (with the exception of the so-far variable Swiss airline), with trains exhibiting to-the-second precision and an airport devoid of queues (Heathrow, you have a lot to learn). But my supposed 4-star hotel is a little lacklustre, and the city itself rather concreted and dull. Nevertheless, I had the best falafels I’ve ever eaten the other night, and next weekend I stay in Zürich, so maybe I’ll find something to change my opinion.

Use a Thinkpad Instead of a Hammer

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:26:40 +0000

David Hill wrote recently on a Lenovo Blog about the design qualities that make Thinkpads great. Whilst some of these are shared by other laptop manufacturers, I have to say I largely agree - even if mine is supplied ‘free’ for use on company business. After dropping it again the other day (yes, I’m clumsy, sorry boss), it took a huge chunk out of my wooden floor. But after the battery had been popped back in, it spun back up and back to life. Truly amazing.

R.I.P. Colin McRae

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:01:45 +0000

R.I.P. Colin McRae.

Spam Comments

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:29:59 +0000

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments on my blog recently, which even Akismet isn’t catching.

So I was amused to get this comment today:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site....

I think you can see where it’s going. One can’t help but feel that just maybe he knows a lot of spammers and knows I get a lot of spammy comments because he is a [fill in the obvious blank]. How frustrating.

How to Spell

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:19:04 +0000

I’ve been interested in languages for a few years (despite only being able to speak one with any fluency) and consider myself a bit of an amateur linguist. It’s long been a standing question as to how to determine ‘correct’ English. Linguists divide grammar into two competing factions: descriptive (30% people speak like this, 70% people speak like that) and prescriptive (thou shalt speak in this way, as others have since time immemorial). It’s not hard to see that this concept could be - and probably has been - extended to spelling.

Flickr Disrupts the Rich?

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 14:59:19 +0000

I’ve been interested in photography since I was small, progressing through a simple fixed-focal-length compact camera to a basic 35mm SLR, playing with many cameras, including SLRs and compacts, and now back just to a digital compact camera I quite like. I’ve found digital sufficiently liberating that it has re-invigorated my interest in photography: primarily because it makes everything easier and cheaper. (Maybe one day I’ll invest in a 35mm digital SLR but I still want something smaller). Even my new phone has a camera that’s worth a second look.

Gallery to Flickr

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:10:41 +0000

Just spent a little while consolidating all my photos: moving the remainder from my Gallery installation on andrewferrier.com to their new and preferred home on Flickr. My Flickr account is now vastly more populated with photos (and more variable in quality). This script basically did all the work. It doesn’t support nested albums, so I had to move all sub-albums to the top level, as well as removing the few ‘symlinks’ I had on photos (later versions of Gallery support this). But apart from that, it was plain (if a little slow) sailing. A recommended approach.

Bit Literacy

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:33:04 +0000

Just finished reading Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy. Mark is a chap of many interests and the creative driver behind the excellent (and varied) euroGel conference I attended in Copenhagen last year.

The premise for the book is that the computer-using public are getting swamped by e-mails, web content, blogs, photos, files, and so on - something that most folk would probably agree with. Mark ranges over all of these topics, and gives recommendations for how to handle each. Some of the material borrows from elsewhere - for example, the chapter on email appears to be heavily influenced by David Allen’s now-infamous Getting Things Done method - but this is no bad thing: it’s obvious that Mark is trying to bring together a style guide for the technical world. The Elements of Style is mentioned at least once as a model from the world of the written word. Most of his recommendations are straightforward and backed up with a solid amount of reasoning.

Rome - Tick!

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:28:13 +0000

Got back from Rome - I had a great time with Laura, Minder, and Nick. Some photos and some impressions:

Don’t go there if you don’t like Italian food. Do if you do, it’s delicious.
Don’t go there if you like breakfast. Do if you don’t mind a half-arsed croissant.
Don’t go there if you like modern architecture. Do if you like crumbly stuff a few thousand years old.
Don’t go there if you like your shops to be open and accessible (grumble, continental Europe, grumble). Do if you don’t care.

Oslo Today

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:22:09 +0000

Some photos from Oslo today. I’m not sure what is about this city, but I’m really not gelling with it. Apart from the ludicrous expense attached to everything, it seems to lack much definition, centre, or character. The food, often a highlight of travel for me, is sorely lacking (with the exception of the bread - dark and flavourful). Having seen some of the Norwegian countryside whilst staying in Drammen this week, I suspect I’d much prefer rural Norway to the city. Maybe another time.

Norway Over - Almost

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 14:27:10 +0000

So we’ve just finished our last day with the customer here in Norway, and presented on the work we’ve been doing for them. All in all, it’s been a pretty enjoyable (if stressful) week, and I’m looking forward to doing more direct customer work in the near future.

Due to a mix-up with dates, my flight doesn’t leave until Saturday evening, so I’ve got Friday and Saturday in Oslo to find out a bit more about the city, have a good time and take some pictures. I’ve just checked into the third hotel so far this week, so time to relax for a bit before heading out to find food!

Open Dopplr

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 09:38:16 +0000

I wrote the other week about Dopplr and am finding it quite cool (despite some competition for attention from Facebook, Plazes, and others). They’re now allowing unlimited invites, so if you know me and would like one, let me know.

On the Way to Oslo

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 21:37:49 +0000

Sometimes travel produces the strangest combinations of experience. I was upgraded to Club Europe by BA on my flight to Oslo (probably something to do with the AA Gold Card that I was mysteriously sent after returning from San Jose earlier in the year). So as I write this inflight, I’ve just finished an impressively delicious chicken curry, polished off a bottle of red wine (no, not THAT size), and a decent bit of Stilton (which, I might add, goes particularly well with left-over curry sauce - yes, really). I’m listening to Kellie Pickler on my phone-cum-MP3-player with an operating system that barely manages to go a day without rebooting (but it’s OK, I’m gonna upgrade to an E61 soon, which Dave assures me is the bee’s knees). Kellie Pickler, incidentally, is pretty much the equivalent of Gareth Gates - as an American Idol almost-made-it - but the novelty of country music means that the unadventurous style is lost on me, and it evokes pleasant feelings of my trip to California anyway (yes, even California has country music).

Starbucks in Winchester

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 12:19:15 +0000

It appears that Starbucks is finally coming to Winchester. No doubt many will lament over this further Americanisation and homogenisation of our high street, but I’m kinda curious.

For a long time, Winchester’s most obvious and best option for coffee (in my humble opinion) has been the equally sterile and characterless Caffè Nero chain. There are a few other chains and independents around, but they’re all weaker for one reason or another (low ceilings, no air-conditioning, dirty tables, etc.). Starbucks will become its most obvious competitor, located only a few doors down, and will hopefully shake things up. It’s interesting how Caffè Nero’s dominant position has allowed it to get away with some things - the lines are always far too long, and the staff slow and inefficient. I see this as a practical example to observe how change in markets works, that wouldn’t be possible in a larger city with less incumbency and more turnover of residents. It’s going to be curious to see what happens, and I’ll be one of the first in Starbucks’ door.

The Myths of Innovation

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 08:58:58 +0000

I’ve just finished reading Scott Berkun’s new book The Myths of Innovation. Like his previous effort, The Art of Project Management, its main redeeming feature is its no-bullshit tone. Reading The Art of Project Management, it was easy to see the influence of Berkun’s experience working on Internet Explorer at Microsoft, but it nevertheless stretched into topics other than mere software or technology, giving a less dry alternative to traditional project management textbooks. The Myths of Innovation is similar, and Berkun’s objective seems to be to cut through the Harvard-inspired hype and discuss some of the untruths around innovation - my favourite subjects include ‘The best ideas win’ and ‘Your boss knows more about innovation than you’. He never denies innovation - indeed, he is clearly a major student of it. But if, like me, you’re tired of hearing innovation as a buzzword and want a book you can nod your head to and say ‘couldn’t agree more’, this is probably the one.

Little Miss Sunshine

Tue, 29 May 2007 13:20:33 +0000

Little Miss Sunshine is a film well-described by its title. Its playful and Amelie-esque opening accurately reflects the film to come: well-structured, and full of crazy characters. Steve Carell (The Office - US), in particular, plays a difficult role, that of a depressed man who learns to enjoy life. The stand-out acting, however, has to be from Abigail Breslin, who plays Olive, the little girl around whom the film is centred. It has always seemed unfair to me that child actors automatically get a lower billing, and this is a good example of that disparity. It is amazing to think that someone so young could get such a strong grip on acting.

From Palm, to Google Calendar

Thu, 10 May 2007 18:58:04 +0000

As part of my cunning plan to move my data online, I decided to move away from using my Palm for managing my diary - and towards Google Calendar instead. I’ve already stopped using the Palm to-do list; all I really need to do now is find a decent online addressbook; Plaxo being one possibility that Chris suggested.

It took me a while to figure out how to get my data out of the Palm. Palm don’t provide a decent export to anything other than Palm formats for the datebook, so a third-party exporter was called for. The web is seemingly full of dodgy Windows shareware to do the job, but jpilot (which I already, but rarely, use on my Linux machine) turned up trumps. It exports directly to the modern iCalendar standard, fully supported by Google Calendar. Hurrah! Since this solution doesn’t seem to be well-documented, I thought I’d write it down.

The Departed

Sun, 06 May 2007 22:05:57 +0000

'I don't want to be a product of my environment - I want my environment to be a product of me' - Frank Costello.

This noble sentiment from the mouth of a gangster - reminiscent of Milton Friedman’s reproof of JFK’s famous speech - kicks off The Departed.

Acting in it are a ‘who’s who’ of junior and senior male American film stars, including Leonardio DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Jack Nicholson, and Martin Sheen. Sure, the first two look a bit alike (yes, they do!), but once you’ve overcome that, it’s pretty easy to follow. And boy, are they all good.

Dopplr

Fri, 04 May 2007 13:49:54 +0000

It appears that all the cool kids are using Dopplr to run into each other more often. I’m kinda curious to know whether it’ll work (I ran some numbers on this a few years ago with some colleagues and we concluded it wouldn’t). So I’ve signed up. I’ve one beta invite left, so if you’d like it, let me know.

Blogging ROI

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 15:46:05 +0000

Of recent months, the frequency of posts on this blog has declined from a peak of about two a day to once every few weeks. This is primarily because I’ve realised that such a high posting frequency isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t giving me the ROI I’d hoped for. Combined with some personal projects I’ve been working on in the past week or two, I simply don’t have the time to write all the articles I want to. I hope my writing is still interesting to my friends, family, and strangers - but it has become, and probably will remain, more sporadic than it once was. This blog isn’t going anywhere, and I’ll continue to post - it might just not be as often as it used to be. I hope you continue to enjoy it.

ORD

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 18:12:45 +0000

OK, so leaving some time between connecting flights is sensible. But six hours is just silly. Silly, silly, silly. Nevertheless, I’ve bought lounge entry here at O’Hare, so am relaxing and enjoying what AA have to offer (even though they have the cheek to contract out wireless access to T-Mobile, who charge another ten bucks). Hopefully I won’t feel too knackered by the time I land at Heathrow tomorrow morning.

On the plus side, I didn’t get any argument this morning over the two huge, heavy bags I checked in. Why don’t more hotels have weighing machines, huh?

Hampshire Craigslist

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:28:12 +0000

I don’t know exactly how recent it is, but Craigslist now has a Hampshire section. I’ve found the Bay Area incarnation to be fantastic whilst I’ve been out here in California, and I’m glad that their brand of free listings has finally reached the area where I live. The word needs spreading, so pass it on!

Observations on Automatic Gearboxes

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:13:27 +0000

Well, I’m now staying down near San Jose again. I’ve rented a car again (this time out of my own pocket) and despite going for the cheapest option, Hertz have given me a Mazda (prounced in American English with a long a, according to the TV) with a semi-automatic option on the shifter (I think technically it’s actually Tiptronic, which is subtly different).

The first car - a Toyota which I gave back a week ago - had just standard automatic transmission, and was straightforward once I got the hang of it (never having driven an automatic before). This car is easy too, despite the even sloppier handling. The semi-automatic option is interesting though. I’ve tried flipping it across from ‘Drive’ (handle the gears for me please) to ‘Manual’ (pull stick toward you to change up, and push stick away from you to change down). And it sure does work. It’s even clever enough not to let you do stupid stuff (like downshifting when that would blow the engine, or upshifting when that would stall the car).

Black Snake Moan

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:01:27 +0000

Black Snake Moan is rich, thick, and satisfying, like a good film should be.

Samuel L. Jackson plays a strong role as the Good Samaritan with an unusual method. Christina Ricci is unashamedly raunchy as the object of his ‘caring’ (which makes for slightly uncomfortable watching when you remember her first major role in The Addams Family aged eleven). Surprisingly, even Justin Timberlake does a passable job as the third wheel in the film.

School of Rock

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 04:55:54 +0000

School of Rock is fun, fun, fun. Jack Black, annoying in so many roles, was born to play this never-quite-made-it rock-obsessed loafer who forms a rock band with some school kids. Joan Cusack, whilst not remotely believeable as an actual high-school principal, provides some fun scenes and a sexy will-they, won’t-they aside for Black’s character throughout the film. The kids, clearly crucial to the success of the film, are well-cast and act with skill and talent.

San Francisco - High Up

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:39:58 +0000

I feel a bit like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, but without the good looks, the riches or the sexy female companion. I’m now enclosed in a room on the top (26th) floor of the Holiday Inn on Van Ness Ave., and it’s much nicer than the motel I stayed in last night. The only problem is the altitude; as Gere said ‘[I stay here because] … it’s the best’. I asked for a high room too because of the view - it is fabulous (see this photo). Like his character, though, I’m scared of heights. What a combination.

San Francisco

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 05:16:56 +0000

So the Redbook residency is over, and after a little dance around the Bay Area this morning involving Best Western, Hertz, and BART, I’ve rid myself of my car (minimum hassle, especially considering I dented the bumper), and am sitting in a shabby motel a few blocks off the dodgier end of Market Street in San Francisco. I’m none too impressed - despite the seemingly ubiquitous free wireless - simply because the area doesn’t feel that great. To that end, I’ve booked myself in a (seemingly much nicer, but also more expensive) Holiday Inn from tomorrow. Another hard lesson in ‘you get what you pay for’.

My First Earthquake...

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:28:46 +0000

… was a little less thrilling than I’d hoped. I felt a ripple pass across the room very rapidly, accompanied by a low rumbling sound and a few creaks. You couldn’t mistake it for anything else, but it was very undramatic. Nothing stopped working, nothing fell down. Not quite the next big one.

Update 2007-03-01 21:51 PST: It appears I was nowhere near the epicentre. The San Francisco Chronicle has covered the quake, which was centered around the city of Lafayette (for which the Wikipedia entry is already updated - astonishing). The USGS also has some technical data on their website. It’s impressive that I could feel it almost 30 miles away across the bay in Mountain View.

Almost 4 Weeks

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:42:47 +0000

Things are still ticking along nicely here in San Jose. Am currently trying to plan what to do in my last week here, which will be a holiday. Probably some time in San Francisco, possibly some time in Vegas (flying there, I’ve given up on the idea of driving through Death Valley without a companion), then back to San Jose for a few days before flying home.

On a mostly unrelated note, went to a cinema the other day which was obviously using digital projectors for the adverts. This is the first time I’ve seen them used in a cinema, and they are without doubt the way forward - no flickers and no crackles. Of course, cinemas still suffer from the sticky-popcorn-noisy-teenager syndrome, but that’s a different problem.

3 Weeks

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 03:33:32 +0000

Well, I’ve been in the Bay Area for nearly 3 weeks, with another 2 still to go on my Redbook project and then 1 week of vacation (which I’m now regretting not making longer - too late - my plane tickets are non-refundable). The Redbook is thoroughly enjoyable and there are some talented and interesting people on the team which makes for a worthwhile experience.

The apartment here is beginning to feel a bit like home - I even found myself referring to it as ‘home’ this afternoon. It’s interesting how easy it is to uproot and move your life elsewhere for a while (keeping data on the network has a surprising amount to do with this). I’d quite happily live in this area permanently. The standard of living is without question higher than in the UK (despite the typically variable US food), and the only thing that’d hold me back would be missing my friends and family in the UK, which I would find hard. I’d also miss the opportunity to go to London so often, which I love too (San Francisco is the closest equivalent here).

Napa

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 02:36:36 +0000

Went for a trip up to Napa today (through downtown SF, across the Golden Gate, around to Napa via Sausalito, then back down the eastern side of the bay via Oakland). It was a beautifully sunny day, so I took plenty of photos with the new Sony. Sunny weather always makes photography easy, even for amateurs like me, but I have to say I’m quite pleased with the results. You can see the latest photos in my Flickr photostream.

Photography Problem Solved - For Now

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 04:34:10 +0000

I am now the proud owner of a Sony Cybershot DSCW-55, which I’ll use for the remainder of my trip around the Bay Area to take some photos, after my Canon Powershot failed. I got it from Best Buy for the bargain price of $240 including a 1GB memory card. Not bad for a 7.1MP camera, especially given that current exchange rates almost halve that price when converting to pounds.

Advantages:

Easy-to-use Sony design - the build quality seems pretty good too. Normally I avoid Sony in the same way I avoid Apple - I just don’t understand the fuss (sorry Apple fans). This time, the bargain price swayed it for me.

E18

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 03:04:18 +0000

It appears that my problems with my Powershot may not be the result of mishandling after all; I’m a victim of the dreaded E18 error. This appears to be a design flaw in Canon compact cameras that they refuse to acknowledge the existence of (the fact that there’s an extensive Wikipedia page for the problem says it all). Numerous solutions have been suggested; I’ve tried taking the camera apart a little to clean out around the lens but got nervous and screwed it back together again. My last attempt will be to buy some compressed air in a can and try that. By the sounds of things, if Canon try to charge for repairs, I may just have to pay up. But this, combined with the fact that it appears they won’t honour their warranties worldwide (which means I cannot really buy a 400D here) means that my opinion of Canon has plummeted from their previous record with me.

R.I.P. Katy

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:42:34 +0000

Katy, our family’s cat, died of cancer today. I wish I had been able to be at home. She wasn’t the brightest cat ever, and she was very nervous, but she sure was beautiful and I’ll miss her a lot. Good-bye, Katy.

Canon Can't

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 18:14:42 +0000

Following up from yesterday’s sad tale, Canon US have told me by email that if I buy a 400D from Amazon here, I’d need to return it to the US for warranty service, via a US address. This makes me considerably more nervous about purchasing a camera here.

Unsurprisingly, Canon’s UK website provides much worse service - I can’t even find an email address to check with them whether they’d fix a camera under a US warranty. I still find it amazing that companies think it’s reasonable to leave their customers without an email address to contact. I’ll probably call them on Monday to confirm, but I’m not happy with this level of pre-sales support. I’ll be taking a look at Nikon.

I Hate Being Clumsy

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 01:28:36 +0000

OK, so I’m an idiot. I broke my camera (again). And I can’t (practically) get it repaired before I get back to the UK. Somehow, breaking valuable stuff seems to be happening a lot recently. Is it possible to train oneself to be less careless? Or is it just an unchangeable characteristic? I’m not in a good mood, anyway.

Fortunately, my trip out today wasn’t really that photogenic in practice - there’s been a lot of rain here recently, and even though I drove 140 miles today (all the way up the East side of The Bay to Oakland, across the Bay Bridge, and through San Francisco), it was pretty misty and wet, and I wouldn’t have got any good pictures anyway (although I got a good view of downtown, with the Transamerica Pyramid and many of the other landmarks I remember from my last trip).

Observations on the Trip so Far

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:08:15 +0000

Observations on Chicago: Cold, cold, cold. It was -19 degrees centigrade yesterday evening. Fortunately the only time I had to step ‘outside’ was on the jetway. Today, the police are recommending that people in the area don’t leave their houses. It’s nice and sunny in California.

Observations on Hertz #1 Club Gold: So cool. Just turn up (2 hours late but it didn’t seem to matter), get in the car, show your license, and drive off. This is the way things should be.

Broken Blogging

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 17:51:50 +0000

I’m heading off to San José this weekend to take part in an IBM Redbook Residency. I’ve never contributed to a Redbook before, and by all accounts it’s an intense experience. I’m hoping to take some time out to see the Bay Area, but I probably won’t be writing here very frequently - I’ll be using this mainly to chronicle tales of the California sunshine. I hope to get back to writing for real when I return in mid-March.

Phwoar, Get a Load of those Sales Figures!

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:05:40 +0000

The political arguments around government and business are well understood. At one extreme are people who despise profit-making businesses, considering them a necessary evil at best, and who’d prefer to see governments take more action to protect their and society’s interests. At the other are those who’d prefer to see governments scaled down significantly and businesses given more freedom.

People with my political opinions often make arguments for the latter based on either practical or moral arguments. Richard and I had a online discussion about this recently. But maybe there’s another, more silly, question that’s missing: which is sexier: business or government? A quick look at the primary US government portal compared to Wal-Mart’s homepage leaves me in no doubt who hired the better web designer, at any rate (and Wal-Mart is hardly an example of glamour). Which corporate body makes you want to interact with them? Anybody who’s spent any time at a UK local council, with their cuppa-and-rich-tea-biscuit image, will know what I mean (that’s an example of non-sexiness, if it’s not clear: not that I have anything against rich tea).

Milton Friedman Day

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 08:30:14 +0000

Today is Milton Friedman day. Friedman is a personal hero of mine, an economist who worked hard to publicise the concepts of freedom and liberty, and who sadly passed away last November. His clarity and forthrightness in explaining his beliefs to the layman won him praise, and deservedly so:

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

Milton’s son David is also an economist, and continues to promote his ideas on this blog. The Economist has also drawn up an interesting selection of quotes discussing Friedman.

Drop Your Laptop or: How to Live a Happy and Fulfilling Life by Keeping Your Data on the Network

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:09:12 +0000

I managed to drop my IBM-owned Thinkpad fairly violently last weekend and the hard disk crashed. Thinkpads are worth the money, folks, they really are the most reliable laptops going (honest - IBM has sold the brand to Lenovo now, anyway). Unfortunately even it couldn’t withstand my abuse.

I’m currently in the process of getting it fixed, but it was impressive how little disruption it has so far caused. I was both concerned and embarrassed when it first happened: partly because I really need a laptop to take away with me to San José, and partly because, well, it’s embarrassing to break other people’s stuff (even if that person is a virtual entity employing a few hundred thousand people).

Wagamama Authorisation

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 21:27:47 +0000

Two recent visits to Wagamama (outstanding noodle bars - give them a try if you haven’t already) have uncovered a strange habit: when asking for the bill, it’s brought immediately to your table, with a slip asking for the tip and a signature. Once this is filled in, your credit card is taken away briefly - presumably to be swiped. But no further signature is required, and even more surprisingly no PIN number is requested. That’s the end of the transaction.

Team America: World Police

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:56:45 +0000

**Lisa**: Promise me you'll never die. ** Gary**: You know I can't promise that. ** Lisa**: If you did that, I would make love to you right now. ** Gary**: I promise I'll never die!

Team America is just wicked fun. Sure, it’s political, and that appeals. The satire is well aimed, and the targets well-deserving. But like Parker and Stone’s previous film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, it also works well as a film in its own right. The South Park film performed a strong parody of a Disney movie, with the music being the standout attribute that made it work. Team America serves as a parody of an action film, with exactly the same strength. Fourth wall-breaking satire such as the song Montage only add to the fun.

Boringstoke?

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 18:37:56 +0000

After annoying myself by breaking my Thinkpad yesterday evening, and finding myself with nothing to do today, I decided to take a random break to Basingstoke and try to make a photographic record of this strange town. The results aren’t exactly astonishing photographically, but I have tried to capture some of the divided character of the place.

I grew up in Farnborough, so I’ve been familiar with the area for quite some time, and when I was younger, we used to jokingly refer to it as ‘Boringstoke’. But Basingstoke is a city of strange contrasts, unlike many others I can think of. The main thing that strikes you as you walk through parts of the city centre is 60s concrete architecture (a much maligned style in my opinion; Ernő Goldfinger showed how to do it right). However, Basingstoke has pretty parts that remind one of cathedral towns such as Winchester, Guildford, or Salisbury. It also has some gleaming, shiny parts (the Barclays building) and some unforgivingly ugly office blocks (such as Alencon House, previously occupied by IBM). It has some hilly streets that in places seemed to uncannily resemble Kendal; and a spotless shopping centre selling upper-middle-class goods and services.

Cancelled LOVEFiLM

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 13:20:03 +0000

I’ve written many times before about the poor quality customer service I’ve received from LOVEFiLM, the UK’s largest DVD rental service, and those posts have solicited a lot of complaints from other people too. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and cancelled my account: a combination of frustration with poor delivery times, them never sending me the titles high on my list, and that they won’t allow me to freely suspend my account for a reasonable amount of time. It’s sad, as they used to provide excellent customer service when I first used them a few years ago (when they were small), but acquisitions and growth seem to have made them fat and lazy, and they no longer treat customers with respect - written examples are all over their website, including the veiled threats of continued charges in the cancellation process itself.

The Godfather

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 15:03:50 +0000

Normally I write some rough notes about a film as I’m watching it in order to help me write these reviews afterward. The Godfather had me hooked, and I almost forgot.

The Godfather is a film I’ve been planning to watch for a long time, but have put off (as I wrote in my review for Scarface, I don’t particularly care for gangster films - nevertheless, I’m trying to watch some of the classics). The Godfather is not a film to be enjoyed, but it is a film to see nevertheless. The performances of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino are extremely strong, and it’s hard to imagine that the studio disapproved of the participation of both these actors. Fundamentally, the Godfather is about family ties and trust (or lack of it) rather than dominance and winning, and this - in my crude analysis - is how it differs from a film like Scarface.

Subscribe to Comments Disabled

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:42:21 +0000

I recently installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin on this blog. However, it seems to have attracted far too much spam. I’ve therefore disabled it again until a version is developed that’s a bit more hardy against spammers. You can always subscribe to an RSS feed for the comments on any post (as you can with any Wordpress-powered blog) by appending /feed to the permalink URL for that post.

The Acid Test

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:01:25 +0000

Fun chemistry fact of the day: Acidity regulators regulate pH in general, not just acidity. Hence (presumably) why this smoothie bottle contains Citric Acid as an acidity regulator (my first thought was: shouldn’t it be an alkali?).

This is when I wish I’d done Chemistry A-Level rather than Further Maths.

Open Mapping Becomes Viable?

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:49:35 +0000

A long discussion with plv the other day about open source and what it really meant got me thinking about that model when applied to other domains, such as mapping.

Google have clearly made a success of Google Maps (I’ve discussed Google Maps before as compared to Multimap - not entirely favourably - but whatever I think, the market loves the former). Plenty of competitors have also sprung up, notably from Microsoft. Incidentally, Flash Earth brings together all of these services into one ultra-slick interface; although I’d still love to see them available on Jeff Han’s touch screen (iPhone, eat your heart out - your interface is nothing on this).

Crash

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 21:36:12 +0000

(This review is about the 2004 film directed by Paul Haggis; not the controversial 1996 David Cronenberg film of the same name).

I’ve never been more in two minds about a film than with Crash.

Crash is primarily about racial tension amongst a variety of characters who pop up all over LA. As I began watching, I was getting ready to lay into it for its rather childish and simplistic treatment of these racial divisions. At times, I found it almost insulting to the intelligence. The strongest characters were the cookie-cutter car thieves, who at first seemed to be placed there for some sick comic relief - not an encouraging sign. The film ran through the usual murmurings about stereotypes and making assumptions based on them (some wrong, some right). Roger Ebert thinks this it does well because it shows victimizers being victimized. I respectfully disagree - I think that’s somewhat of a cliché and that it would be more accurate and honest to keep it simple. Scott Foundas describes this position eloquently.

Blog Moved

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 14:35:31 +0000

This blog has now moved to my new domain andrewferrier.com. You shouldn’t notice any change if you are using a web browser or a well-designed feedreader to read it, as all parts of the old blog (including permalinks, RSS feed, etc.) should permanently redirect to the new one. You might just want to check that your RSS reader is pointing to the new blog though, or alter your browser bookmarks. The redirection will disappear in a few months. I’d appreciate it if you can let me know if you see any problems with the new blog.

Does the Web Decrease Attention Span?

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:03:53 +0000

I’ve recently taken to reading a lot more on-line - particularly as services such as del.icio.us have helped me to find high-quality content and more high-quality blogs come on the scene. This, of course, is the long tail of written content. One of the things I’ve noticed, though, is that as I read more and different things, I get more impatient with long articles. I hardly read non-fiction books any more, and fiction books almost never (preferring film).

The Time is Ripe for Innovation in Lenses

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:23:40 +0000

It’s plain that the camera industry has seen a significant degree of disruption in the last 5-10 years, almost all of it driven by digital cameras. On the back of this, we’ve seen a huge explosion in pictures on the web (most obviously on sites like Flickr), as well as other interesting changes (such as print-it-yourself kiosks in photo shops and chemists). Amateur photography seems to be going through a resurgence - I have started taking a lot more photographs, as have many of my friends and colleagues. Whether that resurgence will be permanent is unknown, but of course the increase in the convenience of cameras (no more waiting for development, easy digitisation) is not temporary.

Climate Change, Free Trade, and Money

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:05:06 +0000

TEDTalks has hit a home-run again (seriously, I can’t recommend this series of videos highly enough - whatever you think about whatever else I’ve written here, you’ll find something you like). Bjorn Lomborg, who’s not a stranger to controversy, explains in this 2005 TED presentation why climate change, relative to the world’s other great problems (e.g. disease, sanitation), isn’t an efficient problem to solve. This is a finding of the Copenhagen Consensus, who expended no small amount of effort on the exercise. He makes very clear what the ranking means - not that it isn’t desirable to ‘solve’ climate change (it is) but simply that it’s inefficient - there’s more bang for the buck in ‘solving’ free trade or controlling HIV/AIDS than in solving climate change.

Rational Dating?

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:48:12 +0000

Economists approach things in weird ways. I’ve noticed several posts on the more popular economic blogs recently discussing marriage, relationships, and sex: Are Husbands Really Like Potatoes? being a good example, as well as a discussion of polygamy. Tyler Cowen has even briefly looked at how nudity affects human behaviour (arguably not directly related to relationships, but it’s a fun read anyway).

Given that I like the economic way of thinking (given my limited training), I thought I’d take a look at dating, something close to my heart as a bachelor. This arguably makes me so far unqualified to discuss the subject - but I’ll give it a go anyway.

Winchester Letting Company

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:05:18 +0000

I’m not sure what the blogosphere-approved name for it is, but I had my first truly negative comment on this blog the other day. I’m not quite sure why the author chose to leave it, but he’s right in a roundabout way: I do like holding the market to account, like any amateur economist.

To that end, here’s a positive story: if you’re looking for a letting agent in or around the Winchester area, I can’t recommend the Winchester Letting Company highly enough. They’ve been superb from day one: helpful and friendly. The two problems I’ve had so far with my flat have been resolved in less than 12 hours, including when my boiler broke this morning and they resolved it before lunchtime. They charge no ongoing fees, and are generally all-round helpful folks. If you’re looking to rent somewhere round here, give them a try.

Reward Cards - Still Rewarding?

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:33:40 +0000

Faffing with the contents of my wallet today in the supermarket, I began wondering about reward cards - are they still worth the plastic they’re printed on? They’ve been around in the UK for over a decade, and two major supermarkets - Tesco and Sainsbury’s - still use them. I have one of each. However, I sometimes wonder why I don’t throw them away - cash rewards of approximately 1% (presumably all that the supermarkets can afford) hardly seem worth the bother of carrying them.

Is There a Long Tail of Supply?

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:12:11 +0000

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, although now passé for the trendiest MBAs, still seems to be kicking around as a buzzphrase. The canonical example is Amazon - they have a vast range of books available because the cost of maintaining a huge catalogue is low (many books are listed but aren’t in stock; other books are in stock at a third party supplier so Amazon effectively outsource the storage; an online database can be essentially unlimited in size at minimal cost).

Civilised Airports Put Stuff After Security Control

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 22:06:05 +0000

I travelled just enough last year (although mostly not on business) to start analysing air travel, as some of my colleagues have done for a while.

And so I’m afraid this post is another whinge about airports. Why o why do they ever put interesting stuff (i.e., shops) before security control? OK, sure, some relatives come to see people off, so a coffee shop or two might not go amiss in larger terminals. But apart from that, why bother? Doesn’t every rational person proceed through security control as soon as they’ve checked in - and don’t they check in as soon as they’ve entered the airport?

Virtual Conferences and Video Content

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 16:31:36 +0000

This year has clearly been the year of YouTube, Google Video and other pretenders to the throne. And as I’ve discussed before, I think Flash-based video is really cool.

However, not everything it’s used for involves cats falling off trees as per You’ve Been Framed, or actors fooling people. One of the best uses has been the huge amount of compelling video that’s been released free from conferences this year. I’ve absorbed tens of hours of it this year, on subjects as diverse as life coaching from legend Tony Robbins (Alexander Kjerulf has been to one of his seminars, and I want to go too), the marketing of spaghetti sauce, and curing aging. ‘Catch-all’ conferences such as Gel, TED, and LIFT have all got in on the act. This, of course, is an alternative to physically travelling, and will surely produce more super-star conferences that attract bigger names, bigger audiences, and grow in stature.

Down with Love

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 09:01:44 +0000

Down with Love is the kind of film I would normally pass by without hesitation based on the promo poster. I only fell into it by accident, on late-night TV. I think I need to learn from this experience: it’s excellent.

Down with Love is everything the Austin Powers series would be if it wasn’t so silly. Set in 60s Manhattan, Down with Love is the story of a feminist author who is seduced by a playboy who turns out not to be the guy who she… well, I won’t spoil the plot. Suffice to say it isn’t the main reason for watching. Down with Love manages to be camp throughout, without once breaking down into nonsense. Performances from Ewan McGregor, Renée Zellweger, and David Hyde Pierce are all hilarious, and the ending of the film, whilst a little contrived, lampoons its own plot beautifully. Superb sets, costumes, and everything else required to re-create a 60s that never existed round it off.

Blogging @ Christmas

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 21:21:51 +0000

I’ve been away for the past few days, so haven’t had a chance to write recently. Normal service will be resumed soon. In the meantime, happy Christmas!

Customer Service Update - LOVEFiLM and PlusNet

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 17:47:35 +0000

I’ve written several times before about LOVEFiLM and their deteriorating customer service. They’ve just got worse - sometime during or after the merger with Screenselect, it seems that they sneaked in a change - you can now only ‘go on holiday’ (pause the service) for a maximum of 4 weeks a year, and only 2 weeks at a time (with a holiday size measured in units of 1 week). No doubt this is within the T&Cs;, but this clearly isn’t going to suit lots of people (myself included), and is just another ill-considered attempt to shave costs (maintaining your account details is essentially zero cost). The only thing that’s keeping me clinging on to LOVEFiLM is their range (the delivery times aren’t getting any better), so I suspect I’ll be ditching them soon. Unless of course they feel like improving? Guys? Hello?

Interview with Alexander Kjerulf, Chief Happiness Officer

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 13:11:01 +0000

Since meeting Alexander Kjerulf at euroGel 2006 last year, I’ve been following his work as the self-appointed Chief Happiness Officer with interest. He’s just released his first book, Happy Hour is 9 to 5. Alex is also one of the most energetic and inspiring people I’ve met. He’s kindly consented to be the first interviewee on this blog. I hope you enjoy it.

AF: What first interested you about happiness at work? Were you unhappy at your workplace?

Midnight Cowboy

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 23:08:19 +0000

Midnight Cowboy is a hard film to call. It’s a slice of film history, with some well-known visuals, well-known music, and well-known scenes:

"Hey! I'm walkin' here! I'm walkin' here!" - Ratso

But it’s a confusing film, with plenty of montages, flashbacks, fantasy scenes, and a drug-induced party. I wasn’t expecting any of that, and it doesn’t exactly help carry the plot (that which there is) forward. The sex scenes, despite being notorious (Midnight Cowboy was the only X-rated film to ever win an Oscar - it’s since been downgraded to R-rated) are tame by modern standards: although there’s a strong theme of ambiguous sexuality running throughout the film, with Joe Buck (Jon Voight) - the cowboy of the title - being pretty indiscriminate about who he sleeps with, even in his role as a hustler.

Source Code Crazy

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:38:33 +0000

I’ve thought for a while that build, source-code management, and bug tracking software (which I’m collectively calling meta-software) could, and should, be so much simpler. I’ve written previously about my contention that bugs and features are the same thing, but the problem is wider. Software has a tendency to acquire features over time, and software that’s used to make other software is no exception. Here are some assorted thoughts about how to improve the situation:

No Love for LOVEFiLM

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 21:11:44 +0000

I’ve written before about my mixed relationship with LOVEFiLM. It’s now becoming obvious that, as I suspected might happen, the turnaround time for sending out DVDs is worsening again - my last five or so have all taken several days longer than they should have, and the delays are getting longer each time. I’m far from the only ex-Screenselect customer to see this. If this continues, I’ll be cancelling my account. Please, LOVEFiLM, get it sorted.

Scarface

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 19:26:59 +0000

I’m not a big fan of gangster films, so I’m only prepared to watch the very best. Most such films are violent and gruesome, which turns me off (particularly the latter), and Scarface is no exception. However, it’s surprisingly moralistic. As Tony Montana (Al Pacino, of course) says…

I never fucked anybody over in my life that didn't have it coming to 'em. You got that? All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don't break 'em for no one.

… and he’s right: at least by his terms. Scarface is also an interesting study of the drugs industry. Of course, it’s hard to know how accurate it is (I suspect real drug dealing is much more mundane than the glamorous life here), but nevertheless, there was more than one scene that reminded me of the interesting study of drug dealing in Freakonomics, with the price of risk being openly discussed.

Free Banking Update

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 17:08:06 +0000

After writing a few months ago about how bank customers were reneging on the contracts they signed and suing their banks for ‘illegal’ bank charges, it appears that free banking is indeed in danger, with HSBC introducing a monthly fee. I’m glad to see that they won’t be charging them to those account holders with balances greater than £1,500 (read: those who rarely encounter fees anyway), but it’ll still be interesting to see how this shakes up the market. To me, this is a clear example of an unintended consequence of government regulation, in an area that would be better off left alone.

Steve Forbes @ London Junto @ Lansdowne Club @ Mayfair

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:36:52 +0000

Richard and I went to see Steve Forbes (of Forbes magazine fame) speaking last night at an event organised by The London Junto (a libertarianish organisation). The topic was flat taxes, and Forbes made a compelling argument for one - albeit probably preaching to the converted. Forbes has to be one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever seen speak - he dealt with economics, business, and geopolitical questions with equal capability, forthrightness, and clarity. He’s a former Republican presidential candidate, and it’s obvious from his winning politician’s smile. The Lansdowne Club is a traditional old-boys London Club (you can tell this partly because they pointedly use the word criterion on their website), and it made a suitable venue, although it didn’t exactly appeal to my taste. All in all, a worthy experiment.

Exim: Remove 'if error_message...' From Your .forward

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 10:48:32 +0000

For users of Exim only:

It’s normally recommended to include the line if error_message then finish endif in your .forward filter file, to make sure error messages don’t cause recursive problems in your mail system. I have found that this doesn’t work in practice if you normally receive a lot of spam, because spammers are increasingly using your email address to spam other people. This causes bounces back to you, which bypass your spam filter because of that line (at least in my setup, using sa-exim). Removing that line greatly reduced the amount of spam reaching my inbox.

Map Fight!

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 16:18:46 +0000

I wrote recently about my indecision surrounding the domain of information design; should detail or simplicity win out? (as always, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle - but hey, that’s boring). Google Maps and Multimap provide an interesting example of what I’m talking about.

Google’s maps are simple; straightforward; and link together yellow pages data with mapping data - together with some cool APIs that enable rip-offs (an ancient term for a mashup). However, they also strip out contextual data that any professional navigator would consider important - landmarks, land type, buildings, etc. It seems apparent that Google are trying to hit a particular market - those who find conventional maps too confusing. And to be fair, they’re doing pretty well - empirical data suggests lots of folks use them. Their reasonably robust mobile maps are also quite handy.

Assault on Precinct 13

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 20:10:07 +0000

Assault on Precinct 13 is a low-budget action film from horror director John Carpenter. The premise of the film is very simple: a gang takes revenge for a recent bust by assaulting a police station staffed by a skeleton crew (plus a few hangers-on). Initially it appears we aren’t supposed to sympathise with the police, as they’re shown as brutish and unsympathetic, but a shocking scene a third of the way through the film turns this on its head and suddenly we empathise with the plight of those who then become beseiged and the ’tight corners’ nature of the film shines through.

Transport is Good

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 14:40:41 +0000

It seems to be a commonly held contemporary belief that transport and travel are a guilty pleasure at best, and reprehensible at worst, mainly due to the unpleasant environmental side-effects, and should be minimised. Environmentalists have already invented carbon offsetting to assuage collective and individual guilt about the trendy problem of carbon emissions (Tim Harford has explained why this makes no sense; and I think it’s nothing short of miraculous how carbon offsetting services can put a price on emissions so easily).

Ink Sticker

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:11:23 +0000

Some of the marketing efforts I’m most impressed by are the little, obvious things. I recently ordered some replacement ink cartridges from The Ink Factory (excellent service, by the way - next day delivery and cheap prices, as well as good quality non-OEM cartridges). I’ve ordered from them twice now - this time round I had to dig out their name from my email archives - searching Google for printer ink uk brings up a lot of sites. They’ve now sent me some tiny stickers, with their website and phone number printed on them, one of which has now gone on the inside of my printer hood. Next time, I won’t have to do that hunt. So obvious, so simple, so clever.

Easy Rider

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:47:43 +0000

Easy Rider is cool: and as it’s from the decade that invented cool, the 60s, it’s everything you expect - messy, drug-riddled, hairy and hippy. There’s no slickness or shine here: just folks kicking back.

Easy Rider presents the world as suits it best: there’s no suburban American, just little towns and vast expanses of beautiful and wild desert. The visuals are perfectly offset by classic American music - country and rock ’n’ roll - and even the editor seems to be high at times, with wild cuts and babbled scenes.

Information Design

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 17:10:48 +0000

I’m undecided on information design. For a long time, I’ve been a big fan of Edward Tufte: his wordy-but-worthy book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is a classic of non-fiction (“Best 100 books of the 20th century.” - Amazon), and is self-exemplifying to a fault: the typography is beautiful, the illustrations rich and detailed. It’s also a classic treatise on how to visually abuse statistics. His other publications, whilst they cover some of the same topics, aren’t quite so easy to follow, although the short essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint is worth a read if you’re a Powerpoint hater like me (also see Peter Norvig’s Gettysburg Address in Powerpoint).

Chest Pain

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 16:47:27 +0000

Passing along Chelsea Embankment yesterday, I noticed that the British Heart Foundation is running a series of adverts designed to encourage people with chest pain to call 999. Sounds eminently sensible as a first step. However, Robert Fischell, presenting at TED 2005, stated that 75% of patients arriving at Emergency Rooms (Casualty in Brit-speak) with chest pain aren’t suffering from a heart attack: and thus aren’t taken very seriously - i.e., they are triaged below other patients (Fischell was presenting on an early warning device that provides more certain diagnoses). The BHF says on their website: ‘If you think you are having a heart attack, dial 999 immediately’. But almost no-one will know whether they are having a heart attack: they will merely feel the symptom of a possible one. Obviously trying to educate people in health matters is important. But isn’t it only sensible that we be given a bit of statistical context? I’d like to see the BHF be a little more responsible and a little less alarmist. I want to be able to weigh up my health risks sensibly to make good life-style choices: this kind of education doesn’t help.

Sexual Synchronicity Economics

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 10:30:10 +0000

I’ve written about synchronicity vs. asynchronicity before, but I wanted to revisit the subject because it seems to be so key to modern services; as more and more communication mechanisms evolve out of available technology and entrepreneurs’ imagination, understanding customer’s usage patterns will be important when developing businesses around them. An excellent article by Gregor Hohpe, Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit (included in Joel Spolsky’s Best Software Writing Vol. 1), is an examination of why understanding computer science concepts such as 2PC (and, I would argue, synchronicity) is important when engaging in business process engineering. There’s a large overlap between business and software engineering here, and this is why IBM sells products like WebSphere Process Server together with business consultants to help customers implement them. There are a number of other essays in Spolsky’s excellent book which also discuss related subjects.

Splogged

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 17:18:11 +0000

I’ve noticed that my blog’s been splogged - unsurprisingly, using one of my film reviews that contains some ‘adult’ words (see here for the NSFW copycat). Does this mean I’ve made the blogging bigtime? I’m still only at Technorati rank 147,804 - although (in a not-at-all-sore-loser fashion) I feel the same about Technorati as Richard does about Sun - what exactly is the point?

Spiegel vs. BBC

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 16:49:56 +0000

Fascinating. This 2-day old article regarding a German plane bomb plot made the front page of the Der Spiegel website, but never came anywhere near the front page of the BBC one (this eventually made an appearance, hidden away). Perhaps British folks are expected not to care about German travellers? Maybe alleged terrorist threats are now that commonplace? Or is the BBC just not quite as capable as it many believe it to be? Our ’trusted’ news source slips past day by day without asking the most basic of questions in most situations (mostly, ‘show me the evidence’). It’s immoral that I would face a £1000 fine for having a box of electronics and refusing to pay for this (I don’t own a TV).

IBM Second Life Summit

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 15:59:42 +0000

I went to a summit on Second Life and virtual worlds in Hursley today, hosted by Kevin Aires, Jack Mason, and Roo Reynolds - it’s becoming obvious that there’s a big buzz about Second Life both inside and outside IBM - a primary bit of evidence being IBM’s recent announcement of a $10m investment in virtual worlds such as Second Life. For obvious reasons, I can’t relate everything that was discussed. However, the discussion did get me thinking about Second Life in a slightly different way from before: as a basis for social networking applications, rather than as a basis for any application: an example of the former being The Greater IBM Connection, an IBM alumni community. In this respect, it seems to be more analogous to, say, LinkedIn, than another application platform (Windows, the web, etc.). This scope seems realistic - as I’ve stated before, meetings and conferences seem to be the best application of Second Life that’s been demonstrated so far. The consumer impact of Second Life is still TBD.

WHSmith are Boring

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 17:08:20 +0000

A sign in the Winchester branch states that WHSmith have joined the list of retailers who have stopped accepting cheques - Shell made headlines when they announced they were to do the same back in September last year. Apparently WHSmith are concerned about fraud, and this news story implies that it’s only an experiment, but it wouldn’t surprise me if part of the decision is also related to the cost of processing and handling, and that this will become permanent - after all, it’s rare that you see a cheque being used in a shop now, and with good reason - they are tedious, awkward, and slow to process.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:07:21 +0000

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a murder mystery. It’s sexy, witty, and fast-paced. Lead actors Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer (the latter as the superbly sarcastic Gay Perry), are a fabulous duo and perfectly cast. Michelle Monaghan adds a saucy touch. The plot is intricate and has more twists than a pretzel, just like any decent murder mystery. It has car chases and guns. Downey Jr. breaks the fourth wall all over the shop - and the icing on the cake is his aside about the poor ending to the last LoTR.

RIP, Milton Friedman

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 23:13:52 +0000

A truly great man. The world is poorer (in every sense) with his passing. Russ Roberts was fortunate enough to interview him only a few months ago - his brilliance shone through even at the age of 94. From another interview in 2004:

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.

Update: The New York Times has a detailed story and biography.

Pleasantville

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:11:33 +0000

'What's sex?' - Betty

Pleasantville is a favourite film of mine. Powerful on many levels, it manages to captivate the attention as well as entertain and give pause for thought.

The premise is simple; David (Tobey Maguire) is given a remote control that allows him to enter the TV set and the programme of Pleasantville with his sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon). This mysterious start to the film is a well-trod one (Gremlins and Back to the Future being well-known previous examples), but it works without too much tedium. The world of Pleasantville that they enter is a black and white sitcom set in the 50s with bland, inoffensive content. David loves this programme, but, egged on by his sister’s behaviour in having sex with one of the town’s other teenagers (in a place where holding hands is risqué), he soon begins to encourage the townspeople to rebel and investigate their adventurous side. Apparently too much sex means poor quality basketball the next morning, but as each townsperson’s innocence is challenged, the town begins to turn from black and white to colour, piece by piece, in a most beautiful manner, as they realise their greater potential.

Digital Sound Innovation

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 19:03:13 +0000

When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time tinkering with digital sound: mostly MOD files, on the venerable FastTracker. The highlight was remixing a track by Jim Young - I’ve unfortunately lost my version, but here’s the original (any competent media player, such as XMMS or Winamp, should still be able to play MOD files with the right plugin). I used the sound of my CD drive opening as an ‘instrument’ (slowed down many times), and felt very silly when I came to listen it to some years later. Only later did I realise that the professionals do exactly the same thing; Gary Rydstrom, one of Hollywood’s leading sound designers, describes how he used exactly the same kind of found art - bottles, floors, etc. - to design sounds for Monsters Inc. on the DVD extras for same. Nevertheless, my efforts were still pushing unlistenable.

Illiberal Hampshire Police

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:51:11 +0000

Firstly we learn that owning knives in Hampshire is wrong. Or maybe it isn’t; but the police only seem interested in gathering them anyway. Then we discover that the police are targeting signs that others find offensive. I’m not convinced this is a good use of my tax money.

But accordingly, I would like to politely request that Hampshire Police remove the following signs across the county, which I find offensive:

‘Please wash before exiting rest room’ (the facilities in my office)

Religiously Economical or Economically Religious?

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:38:47 +0000

As I’ve mentioned before, I regularly listen to the Econtalk series of podcasts; along with TEDTalks, they are one of the highlights of my [vod,pod]cast week.

An Econtalk podcast on the subject of religion a few weeks ago was the first I haven’t fully enjoyed. Larry Iannacone, the guest that week, outlined a theory he has spent many years developing: the amount of religious participation in a market (e.g. a country) is correlated with the amount of religious freedom permitted. He alleged that the USA was a good example - somewhere that had constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom, and subsequently widespread religious belief. This argument has intuitive power (when people are more free to do stuff their own way, they are more likely to take part in it), and seems empirically justified too (I didn’t spend long on the ARDA website he linked to, which contains more statistics on this than one can shake a stick at).

Is Second Life Able to Cross the Chasm?

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 22:11:36 +0000

Second Life is an idea I want to like. It’s not a game, and it’s not just for playing around either (despite the slightly frivolous avatars and other trivialities imported from actual games). Some of my colleagues from IBM in various R&D; labs around the world - such as the Emerging Technologies Lab here in Hursley - have been doing an admirable job of promoting Second Life as a genuine business tool (articles on Slashdot, the BBC), and I think it’s great that IBM is looking at using something so bright and fresh.

On Demand, in the Air

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 14:58:35 +0000

A recent BBC In Business episode discussed the recent innovations in the on-demand air-taxi market. One of the startups hoping to make a name for themselves in this market are DayJet, who are in the process of launching a service which allows for buying seats on charter aircraft from and to airports you nominate. The logistics are solved in real-time by an automated system, and the wider the time window you allow for your journey (which permits drop off/pick-up of other passengers), the cheaper the ticket. DayJet are hoping to offer prices not far off the cost of a standard economy/coach ticket on scheduled flights. They are also planning to use extremely cheap (only $1.5 million) jet aircraft produced by Eclipse. I think all of this combines to produce what seems to be a pretty novel service, although to be fair they aren’t the only ones exploring this market.

Spam and OCR

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:12:59 +0000

It’s strange how the same techniques can be used to attack both sides of a problem. For some time now, some of the more sophisticated web spammers have been using OCR techniques to circumvent CAPTCHAs on websites in order to hijack free email accounts, submit comment spam on blogs, and similar forms of mischievousness.

As the more capable e-mail spammers seem to be figuring out that anti-spam technologies are getting pretty good at filtering out the crap they send, normally using rule-based detection, Bayesian learning, or a combination of the two, a lot of spam now being sent out is image-based - and anti-spammers are now using OCR to fight back against this new tide.

Common Myths about Common Myths

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 11:35:07 +0000

A quick Google search for “common myths about” turns up ~315,000 hits. Apparently, there are a lot of myths about:

Sex
Atheists
Copyright
Science
Gifted Students
The Apple Mac
Web Design
Earthquakes
West Nile Virus

The last one is the most surprising. I’m not even sure what the West Nile Virus is. Perhaps that’s why there are myths about it. But at least as regards the other subjects, it seems to be a slight cheat, and writing cliché, to ‘correct’ a set of myths without demonstrating that they exist. For example, here are some alleged myths concerning the subjects above:

S.W.A.T.

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 22:02:26 +0000

Ladies and Gentlemen, you may turn off your brains now.

How to develop the plot of a brainless Hollywood action flick, in 11 easy steps:

Demonstrate SWAT’s awesome prowess but arrogant fallibility with an opening scene that introduces handsome lead Colin Farrell.
Develop some guilt and other emotion to be easily overcome later in the film, via a few heart-to-heart chats between colleagues. Demote Farrell for his cockiness in the first scene, but consign his colleague to the police bin of history.

Lightbulb Conundrum - Drinks, Anyone?

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 10:18:57 +0000

A pint is yours if you can solve this conundrum for me (a theoretical explanation you can convince me of will do; I have a practical workaround).

A few weeks ago I replaced some of the bulbs in my house with energy-saving ones. However, the ceiling light in my hall behaves in a very odd manner. Occasionally, after I switch it off at the wall, it flickers on very briefly (for about 1/10 second) about once every minute - even though the power is (allegedly) off. The flicker is fairly dim, so I only notice it at night. If I take the bulb out of the socket, the flicker stops. If I put it back, it starts again. This behaviour happily continues for hours - to the extent that I remove the bulb when it happens because it’s too distracting when trying to sleep.

Milwaukee, Minnesota

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 19:43:52 +0000

Milwaukee, Minnesota is an engaging story about Albert, a mentally retarded ice fisher in Milwaukee (which keen observers of American geography will note is actually in Wisconsin). It starts out gently, but quickly turns into a mystery, with various parties vying for Albert’s attention and the money left after his over-protective mother died.

Albert is played by Troy Garity, who at times looks uncannily like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Good supporting performances come from Randy Quaid and others, who do a good job of conveying complex sub-plots and old grievances without saying a word.

Liquid Relaxation

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 18:59:08 +0000

For anyone who hasn’t heard, there are new EU-wide regulations on hand baggage - which have the effect of slightly relaxing the rules that were in place at UK airports (although there are still plenty of awkward gotchas). The implication of this, of course, is that either the original terrorist threat has subsided (although it would be nice for the security ‘services’ to explain why), or that they panicked and couldn’t handle the situation they suddenly found themselves in. Either way, I suspect the next knee-jerk reaction isn’t far off. In the meantime, maybe this will reduce the number of annoyed executives having to check in an overnight bag.

The History Boys

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 22:10:42 +0000

The History Boys is a little different from some of the other ‘up-North-lads-do-good pictures of recent years (Full Monty, Billy Elliott). Firstly, it is a bit intelligent (although it’s probably a bit unfair to expect the Full Monty to be intelligent, superb though it is, and there’s still a lot of English-lit. and philosophical self-indulgence in The History Boys). It’s a strong character-focused film, and masterfully acted by a surprisingly large set of prominent performers (who aren’t really as young as they look), as well as being hilarious to boot - to the extent that the more serious scenes sometimes dull the film’s impact.

Fight, Fight, Fight!

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 11:51:56 +0000

Richard posted a link to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’s multi-guess Economic Literacy Test. Most of it was fairly easy if you know the standard economic textbook viewpoint on capitalism (which allows for a few market failures but is mostly fairly single-minded about the market’s ability to be efficient).

Unlike Richard, though, I only managed 11/13 on the first pass. So in true bad loser style, it’s time to defend myself. I got the right answer second time round on both questions I failed on, and I was dithering over two possible answers on both. One mistake was because of the ambiguous use of the phrase ‘public interest’ in the question (they actually meant: make goods and services people want, I thought of cuddly things like clouds and cars that don’t pollute). The other was to do with high inflation and the money supply - mah, I’ve never understood macroeconomics properly anyway. Plus it was the 12th question and I was getting slapdash…

Two Google Ideas

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:07:30 +0000

Google have created a powerful brand based on creating simplicity from complexity (what all good IT is about). Their tools aren’t perfect, but they’ve made life easier for billions, and so I think they still deserve some free feedback from time-to-time. So, a few thoughts:

Mr. Google, please develop a podcast search engine. So much interesting content is now being released as podcasts (quick plug for my favourite: EconTalk), that it would be useful to be able to search them. All you have to do is invent a speech-to-text interpreter that actually works reliably. Simple. [Note: as I sometimes do, I wrote this post in advance of it being published. I’ve since discovered that such a tool already exists. However, I thought I’d leave the original prose here: Google, if you get one out soon, you could still corner the market]

It's a Web 2.0 Jungle Out There

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:02:53 +0000

I’ve upgraded my interweb connection to Web 2.0 in the last few months. Although no-one can really point to what Web 2.0 is (even though there’s a validator for it), many people feel that they know it when they see it. I now defend the term against cynics because I think it’s genuinely useful. To me, it’s a combination of little things: blogging and feedreading, a good quality web browser, in-place dynamic web sites (mostly driven by AJAX), to name but a few. For a technically minded person, I’m atypically late adopting, and so I’ve only recently happened on two powerful aspects of Web 2.0:

SOA Tips 'n' Tricks Blog Launched

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:57:33 +0000

Chris Tomkins and I both work on the WebSphere ESB team, and have been blogging about it and related IBM SOA products for some months. We’ve now decided to join forces and launch a new blog called SOA Tips ’n’ Tricks. This will contain technical tips on ESB and other products as well as wider issues - we don’t know exactly how it will evolve so please feel free to leave us some feedback on the things you read - what you like, and what you don’t. I plan to discontinue writing about ESB or SOA specifically here on my personal blog, although I’ll continue to discuss wider IBM issues.

Rated X

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 10:53:33 +0000

Rated X is a film about the (ahem) adult film industry, so sensitive eyes might want to stop reading this review now. It stacks up well against other films of the genre, such as Boogie Nights (although it’s not as funny), and The People vs. Larry Flynt (although it’s not as political). The film tells a frequently unfulfilled dream: two brothers (well played by real-life brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen) want to make porn that isn’t just cheap and tacky, but tells a story.

Signs of Strife in LOVEFiLM Land

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:27:44 +0000

My recent posting regarding the Screenselect/LOVEFiLM merger elicited a lot of (mostly unfavourable) comments from strangers regarding LOVEFiLM’s poor service. So far I hadn’t seen any of that, but their website has just refused to downgrade my package (i.e allow me to reduce my spend with them). I’ve sent an email, but as others have pointed out, they have pre-prepared excuses ready about the high volumes of email they are getting (hint: this isn’t OK, LOVEFiLM, you should have expected it). We’ll see how fast this problem gets sorted: is this the start of a slippery slope which ends in me cancelling my account? Time will tell.

Broken Flowers

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:15:25 +0000

What Jack Nicholson’s As Good as It Gets is to Bill Murray’s Lost in Translation, Nicholson’s About Schmidt is to Murray’s Broken Flowers. The actors in question are both senior Hollywood players, distinguished and experienced. Both the former films, despite their differences in setting, are existential and witty. Both the latter are existential yet tedious. I had the same feeling watching Broken Flowers as I did watching About Schmidt - boredom. Although only 105 minutes long, it feels like an age, and most scenes simply drift along without holding the interest. It’s not a slow burner - the fire never gets lit. Broken Flowers was acclaimed at Cannes and I simply don’t know why. There’s little else to say - but I certainly wouldn’t recommend this as one of Murray’s best.

Maybe I'm Shallow

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:22:52 +0000

On a trip to London the other week, I was wearing a nice pinstripe suit. With my neatly ironed shirt, conservative tie, and smart cufflinks, I thought I looked very presentable. But as I’ve already admitted, I also bought some pomegranate juice. What was I thinking? Sure, it was OK, but what a yuppie.

So here’s a question: does how you’re dressed and what you’re doing affect what you buy? Do you feel compelled to buy more expensive stuff because you look like you should be able to afford it? Do you allow yourself to buy budget baked beans when you’re sloping down to the shops in a scruffy t-shirt on Sunday morning? Or are you unaffected by such self-imposed peer pressure?

Meta-Blog

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:54:47 +0000

As this blog reaches another milestone (this is the 200th post), I get the feeling I’ve written far more than I set out to. So I thought I’d round up some statistics:

200 posts - approximately 1.6/day since 25th June.
246 comments - approximately 1.96/day, and an average of 1.23/article.
2,958 spam comments caught by Akismet - approximately 167/week - although this is nowhere near my personal email, which hovers more around the frightening figure of** 4,000/week** - I love SpamAssassin.

TV Programmes at the Extremes

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:02:15 +0000

There seem to be only two types of fiction-based TV programme:

The episode starts, everything changes, then everything ends exactly the same way it started. This is typified by comedies, such as The Simpsons, which often have crazy storylines that seem irretrievable, but end up where they began. In fact, more than one episode of The Simpsons has parodied this technique.
The episode starts, everything changes, then everything ends up differently at the end. This is typified by soaps such as Eastenders.

Innovating for the Impossible

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 20:38:00 +0000

Here’s a fun thought experiment: imagine what innovations would be necessary, feasible, or useful if the fundamental biological or physical restrictions of our world were different: not generally, but in a specific area.

For example, let’s say that the hair on our heads grew not at the rate it does now - approximately 0.5mm/day - but at 1m/day. It seems clear that hairdressers, as least as they are currently organised, wouldn’t be able to keep up. Either we’d need hairdressers to be everywhere and very efficient, or, more likely, we’d need some form of automated haircutting machine - perhaps with one installed in every bathroom. Brides-to-be would struggle to look just-so at the right moment, so there’d need to be an emergency hairdresser on standby.

Free Hour

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 10:19:23 +0000

Once a year (today is the day) I wake up and realise I’ve been given a free hour. Does anyone else savour that moment?

(Of course, once a year, I lose an hour - but I prefer not to talk about that…)

Diabetes

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 13:04:21 +0000

Maybe it’s just me, but diabetes seems to be a hot issue recently. In my ignorance, I didn’t realise it was so widespread and so important. A recent podcast on the IT Conversations site with Larry Ellingson (former chair of the American Diabetes Association) discussed the disease in detail, and there was a single fact mentioned that took me by surprise: 300 million in the world (4%) have diabetes. However, the prevalence of diabetes in the Western world is considerably greater, primarily because of poor diet and exercise, which exacerbates Type II diabetes. (Type I: not enough insulin produced by the body, Type II: insulin that’s produced is resisted by the pancreas). In the US, 95% of people with diabetes are overweight. If you don’t know someone with diabetes, you are probably in the minority.

In a Modern-Day World Controlled by International Mass Media, One Brave Blogger Unleashes a Terrible Secret...

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:33:56 +0000

Does it ever seem like every single Hollywood movie trailer uses the same voiceover? Well, it pretty much does. Don LaFontaine is probably the guy you’re thinking of: he’s only got a few major competitors, and you’d recognise each of them too. They all got together in a limo one day (video here). So, any suggestions for what to do about this obvious oligopoly? Let’s hope the FTC get straight on it, anyway.

The Sales Ain't Heavy; That's My Chevy

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:26:10 +0000

For those who don’t keep up with such things, the American car industry is in big trouble. Detroit’s sales have been declining for some time, hurt by high costs, and Japan is stepping in to take their place. Some Americans, of course, will only buy American, but many seem to be taking the more pragmatic approach. High gas prices and a preference for marketing big cars and vans among America’s car markers haven’t helped.

Chevy seems to be upping the ante with a controversial new advert for their Silverado truck - with an admittedly catchy tune (video; I’m not sure what Stephen Colbert has to do with it). A recent Slate podcast deconstructs this in detail; suffice to say that images of Katrina and Vietnam are hardly likely to avoid heated discussion. A slightly blunt and clumsy parody is already doing the rounds.

Wedding Crashers

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:16:21 +0000

5 / 10.
Medium.
OKish.
Reasonable.
Not too bad; not too good.

All of these phrases describe Wedding Crashers.

One of the more infamous moments from Top Gear has Jeremy Clarkson drumming his fingers on the top of a (notoriously bland) Vectra for an entire minute, unable to think of anything to say. This film elicits the same lack of reaction from me. As I watch films these days I tend to take notes so I can write up reviews afterward. With this incoherent set of scenes I struggled to think of much to write.

Marketing Beat Me Black and Green

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 08:10:23 +0000

Marketing doesn’t have to be subtle. I was recently sent a DVD from Lovefilm that contained a small complimentary bar of Green & Black’s chocolate (5p at cost price?). Being the greedy man I am, I knew this bar wouldn’t be enough once I’d started it, but even the thought of eating it got me salivating. Cursing the marketers involved for being so cunning, I immediately hastened to Sainsbury’s to stock up (in my defence, I bought some other stuff too).

Woolwich from Winchester

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:09:42 +0000

Just before a trip to London a few days ago, I inserted my Woolwich card in an ATM near Winchester Station. I hit the ‘balance on screen’ button, and saw ‘your card issuer has declined your request’. A bit mysterious. I don’t normally keep much money in that account, but obviously I still wanted to make sure that someone wasn’t in the process of stealing it. So I phoned up the ’lost and stolen’ line on the back of the card and explained the problem. I was told that, because I wasn’t an Openplan account holder (whatever that is), it wasn’t possible to do any telephone banking past 5.30pm. Although my security details could be verified, I was told that no further information could be given. The card could be cancelled, and a new one sent out, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle for the risk attached to such a small sum of money.

New Coffee; Old Beans?

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:39:31 +0000

We’ve recently got some new break-out rooms at Hursley, which contain some very comfy sofas; I must go in there more often. I tried the new coffee machines therein too - they were more disappointing. I’ll stick with my no-way-to-obtain-good-coffee-at-my-workplace theory. Back to plan A.

Zopa Away!

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 09:43:31 +0000

I’ve just signed up for an account with Zopa, a UK-based peer-to-peer money lending market (for a similar US-based site, see Prosper). It’s going to be a few weeks before I can seed my Zopa account with some capital to lend, but the concept looks absolutely fascinating (as well as potentially lucrative), and I can’t wait to see how well it turns out. It looks like it has the potential to cause some disruption to a part of the financial market in the same way as Paypal did, and I hope it does well. Given the recent news of Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his novel microcredit form of lending, let’s hope that innovation in finance continues, and governments don’t choose to regulate it further.

Ideas Are Assets

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 12:55:27 +0000

IBM loves patents. We’ve held the record for thirteen years for the most U.S. patents granted each year. IBM’s margin over the competition is also good (2941 in 2005, compared to 1828 for our nearest competitor, Canon). IBMers are actively encouraged to develop patents (which is probably why we do so well in the patent charts), and IBM is a large company with a lot of resources and a disproportionately large R&D; spend - perhaps no-one should be too surprised.

Proactive Customer Service

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 23:31:23 +0000

Well, it looks like writing about customer service can have an effect. About two months back I wrote about how 82ASK had disappointed me - they found my prose, replied, and made it all OK. Now, another recent posting about the LOVEFiLM/Screenselect merger has elicited a comment from the LOVEFiLM team. They haven’t entirely addressed my concerns, but their proactive approach is encouraging, and might tip the balance in favour of hanging on, if and when problems do occur.

Barbarous Dentistry

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 11:17:14 +0000

Getting your hair cut is normally dead time, unless you find the conversation particularly stimulating. So as I was having mine trimmed this morning, I got to wondering:

Why going to the barber’s is like going to the dentist

You have to sit very still or bad things happen. This is tricky and you tend to squirm. From time to time they re-orient your head.
They have a special chair that goes up and down.

How to Have a Disappointing Late-Night Journey Home, Part 5

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 17:43:18 +0000

Get on a train at Waterloo bound for Winchester. Discover that there is a bus ‘service’ from Basingstoke to Winchester, due to mid-week engineering work, despite having checked online and the timetable asserting no such thing. After a brief chat with them, discover that the three pretty ladies sitting opposite you are actually travelling to somewhere this train doesn’t go, them having been misinformed by someone from SWT - they will leave the train in short order. Realise that all the podcasts you have on your phone are dry and boring, and the Pomegranate juice you’ve bought from M&S; tastes weird. When you get off the bus in Winchester, walk home through the pouring rain in a nice suit, with no umbrella. Curse a deep and hidden puddle that creeps up on your shiny shoes.

Grave of the Fireflies

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:14:26 +0000

Folks, this is the power of well-constructed fiction. Grave of the Fireflies is an astonishingly powerful animated film about a Japanese brother and sister orphaned during a firebombing in WWII. It’s a film to move you to tears, and feel that frustratingly ironic anger at evil folks who drop bombs on innocents. The characters are so well focused they just draw you into the story, and I found it easy to ride the emotional rollercoaster the entire way. The younger sister (Setsuko) is perfectly honed to behave the way a young child might in such upsetting circumstances, and the older brother (Seita) makes promises he cannot keep, and suffers accordingly.

Welcome

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:44:05 +0000

I didn’t realise this was going to happen, but after my recent posting about the virtues of corporate blogging, ibm.com has gone all-out and has posted a directory of IBMers who are blogging externally on the front page, so it’s entirely possible you’ve arrived from there - in which case, welcome!

I work on one of the test teams for WebSphere ESB, and we’re currently working hard on the recently announced 6.0.2 version, so I haven’t been posting quite as much on work topics recently as I normally aim to do. But if you’d like to take a look at my past postings on SOA and ESB or WebSphere, or indeed anything else on my blog, please do, and please feel to leave a comment, ask a question, or get in touch.

Caffeine Free at Work

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:21:03 +0000

As Adrian did recently, I’ve gone completely caffeine free at work, and have been so for about a month (except on the odd occasion that I’ve forgotten and lapsed). The only things I’ll allow myself are herbal tea, normally camomile, or from time-to-time a green one. I did this primarily for health reasons - I am finding that my ability to concentrate is much better now, as well as suffering from fewer headaches and other unpleasant side-effects. However, I was spurred on by the poor quality of tea and coffee provided by Ritazza here at work - this is something I’ve realised ever since I’ve began to make tea and coffee properly at home. I’ve also found that I’ve been drinking less tea and coffee at home since cutting off caffeine at work - I seem to find it less appealing. The whole exercise also saves me a penny or two as well.

Silly Word of the Day #94

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 08:48:31 +0000

Marchitecture. I shamelessly stole this from a presentation I attended the other day (names withheld to protect the innocent). If it resonates with you, it probably doesn’t need explaining, but marchitecture is IT architecture that is used for marketing reasons rather than technical ones. Sometimes the marchitecture looks the same as the ‘real’ architecture, sometimes not. Wikipedia’s definition seems a bit narrow (I’m not sure what electronic architecture is anyway), but hey. No original research seems to one of the more widely violated Wikipedian principles.

Second Life - Second Look

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:42:29 +0000

James has just given me a brief tour of Second Life. Once again I had problems - cracking graphics and a crashing client - but I was a bit more impressed than last time - having a guide to show me the good stuff and get the hang of the controls helped. I also met one or two of the other IBMers using Second Life. It’s clear that there’s still a lot more to explore. I’ve decided that I should attend one of the virtual IBM events - this seems to be one of the best uses of Second Life I’ve heard of so far.

My Architect

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:30:41 +0000

Perhaps it’s because I rent DVDs online, but I often seem to watch films with similar themes close together in time (Christiane F and Trainspotting, for example). I’ve just watched My Architect for the second time; and spent the entire film realising that it’s everything Tarnation could have been. Nathaniel Kahn goes looking for the spirit of his architect father, Louis Kahn, by travelling the world and finding the buildings (and people) that he touched. This film has real poignancy and warmth. Louis was a quality-over-quantity artist, and it’s apparent in all the architecture here, beautifully photographed.

Flaky Trackback / Pingbacks on Wordpress 2.0.x

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:39:18 +0000

It seems that pingbacks and trackbacks (which are pingbacks’ more awkward, older cousin) are a bit flaky on Wordpress 2.0.x (for more information on how both are supposed to work, see this excellent tutorial). I’ve long suspected that’s the case, because blog entries I’ve linked to haven’t had pingbacks appear, and it seems I’m not the only one with such problems. However, I’ve tested pingbacks with this blog in both directions against TestTrack, which enables you to test ping- and trackbacks, and it does seem to work. TestTrack is running an 2.1 alpha level of Wordpress, so let’s hope that sorts out the bugs when it arrives.

Speakers from a Van

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 09:04:29 +0000

When I was at Imperial not so many years ago, there was a story in Felix, the college newspaper, about local ruffians selling knocked-off speakers from the backs of white vans in the South Ken area. At the time, students were advised not to approach them and to inform the police. I thought not much more of it, apart from it being a slightly bizarre way of fencing.

However, I recently read a story in Seth Godin’s book, All Marketers are Liars, which cast a new light on this. Apparently, something similar was happening in 80s Harvard: entrepreneurs would buy last year’s model of speaker (hence cheaply) and sell them to local students from the back of a van. Because the students assumed they were stolen, they could rationalise why they were cheap. The entrepreneurs made a tidy profit.

Corporate Identity, Alignment, and Blogging

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 08:35:13 +0000

I find it entertaining when people state ‘Walmart wants…’, ‘Ford thinks…’, or ‘BT needs…’. It’s quite painfully obvious that corporations don’t have feelings or thoughts. What is true is that people within them do. I’ve thought for some time that one of greatest contributors to a corporation’s success is when the thoughts of its people are aligned. Unaligned thoughts are unlikely to be useful. Aligned thoughts can happen by accident (less likely) or because of good quality leadership (more likely), but in either case it’s important to recognise that they are still individual thoughts.

Char

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 17:07:28 +0000

For those who live in or visit the area, you might be interested in a funky little tea shop that’s just opened in Winchester called Char. I was introduced to this tea shop by plv, who’s also written about it. The shop is run by a very nice gentleman who seems to know far more about tea than is good for one person. The prices aren’t cheap (let’s be blunt, they are expensive), but you could spend all day smelling the samples and deciding. I can recommend the Jasmine White Needle.

Pulp Fiction

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 10:14:31 +0000

What to say about Pulp Fiction that hasn’t been said before? Here’s what it gets right:

Non-chronological editing: Blocks of story slapped together to make sense rather than mark time. A novel-ish concept when it first was released, and still fairly novel today.
A perfect name: It really is pulp fiction: lurid and action-packed. The burger Jules eats at one point is pure Americana. The comically poor rear projection used as Butch is escaping in the taxi is another joke about the cheap nature of the story.

Second Life - First Look

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:12:58 +0000

I’ve finally given in and taken my first tentative steps into Second Life (it’s legit once it has an Economist article; or something…). My first impressions are so-so; it’s obvious that there’s a lot to explore and do that I’ve only just scratched the surface of (see Andy Piper’s blog for a lot more posts on Second Life; including how IBM are getting involved). But the system obviously needs some work - the client crashed twice within the space of two hours, once bringing down Windows. The movement is pretty jerky, despite turning the detail down to minimum, and the graphics flickery, almost unusably so. I’ve already been forced to upgrade the client once (~25MB download). It’s possible my T43 just isn’t up to the job (dodgy graphics drivers?), but I don’t have anything more powerful or different to try it on.

Feedreader

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 09:36:24 +0000

I’d been struggling for a while to find a decent RSS reader for Windows. However, I’ve now been using Feedreader for a few weeks, and am very happy with it. It fully supports nested folders/categories, which is nigh-on essential if you’re regularly monitoring as many feeds as I am (>100). You can effectively aggregate several feeds together by viewing them at the folder level. Feeds can be viewed using the text contained within the feed itself, or you can easily open the original blog entry inline. The OPML import/export support seems robust, and fully supports the nested folders. Feedreader will also discover feeds in a relatively intelligent way if you feed it a blog URL, as well as supporting searching across all cached blog entries.

Tarnation

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 18:35:06 +0000

Tarnation has been very well recieved. It hurts me to say so, as it’s obviously such a personal film, but I’m going to go out on a limb - it doesn’t work for me. I’m sure the premise is good; Jonathan Caouette created a documentary about his life and that of his mother (both of them suffer from mental problems), and employed some slightly abstract editing techniques and only semi-structured narration. The film was initially produced for $218 on a Mac, which is impressive, and doesn’t really show. But although it has occasional scenes of emotional power, some parts of the presentation are self-indulgent (lengthy scenes that don’t convey much in the way of documentation), in a way that turned me off the participants (and thus, the filmmaker). I do worry that maybe I didn’t get it, but I still ultimately came away unfulfilled by this film.

OpenSSH Niggle #329

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 09:22:16 +0000

It appears that in some fairly recent version of OpenSSH, the support for the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 file was removed (along with the known_hosts2 file). It had apparently been deprecated in preference to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file a while ago. This caused me some grief when my ISP silently upgraded OpenSSH recently and my automatic backup scripts (which rely on key authentication) stopped working. Renaming the file fixed the problem.

I've Got Nothing to Hide

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 15:13:56 +0000

A little practical experiment:

I was listening to a podcast by Bruce Schneier the other day on the topic of privacy. I found his speaking to be a little less powerful than his blog. However, although I didn’t always agree with his proposed economic or legal solutions to problems, primarily because we have a differing political perspective, he is good at explaining security principles and how they apply to real life.

If you’re like me, when discussing privacy with people, you sometimes get frustrated by people who use the mantra ‘What are you scared of? I have nothing to hide.’, or some variation. I find this a hard argument to win. Bruce gave a simple reply which I’m betting is 90% effective.

WebSphere ESB 6.0.2 Announced

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:18:17 +0000

As Adrian has pointed out, WebSphere ESB 6.0.2 has just been announced. This will be available around the end of the year (together with corresponding new versions of WebSphere Process Server and Websphere Integration Developer). There are a whole host of new features which increase ESB’s capability, as well as other improvements. See Adrian’s post for more information.

What is WebSphere MQ link?

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:42:09 +0000

WebSphere MQ link allows you to connect WebSphere Application Server (or any WAS-based product, such as WebSphere ESB) to a WebSphere MQ server. From the perspective of MQ, WAS/ESB’s messaging engine appears to be just another MQ server (and, accordingly, you connect them together with sender & receiver channels). From the perspective of WAS/ESB, MQ appears to be a foreign bus. Thus, ‘foreign destinations’ (WAS/ESB) and ‘remote queues’ (MQ) can be used as appropriate to exchange messages across the link. Both point-to-point and pub/sub style messaging can be used, and the MQ link maps corresponding message features as closely as possible.

GoogleTube?

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 07:07:41 +0000

Google’s deal to buy YouTube confuses me for two reasons:

$1.65 billion is an awful lot of money. Is YouTube really worth that much to Google, even to take a competitor out?
Google Video and YouTube seem pretty similar in look & feel, featureset, etc. So why is Google deciding to keep it as a separate brand? Perhaps they are planning to discontinue Google Video by merging it into YouTube. Keeping them apart would certainly seem like a waste of resources.

Imperial MEng Presentations

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:32:42 +0000

IBM Hursley invited three final-year MEng students from Imperial College to give us presentations on their individual MEng projects today (mine, from several years ago, can be found here). They were:

Marc Hull, who talked about his project on Balancing simplicity and efficiency in web applications. Marc’s work focused on improving the development of stateful web applications, and in particular on object-relational mapping in Java, in an attempt to allow more straightforward persistence of objects to databases. This has always seemed to me to be an area lacking in usability and ease (see J2EE for plenty of examples), so anything that moves us closer is welcome.

Future of the Mainframe

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 08:18:32 +0000

Many folks have written the mainframe off for years. And it certainly seems true that it isn’t as compelling as it once was with respect to performance or capability; it’s complex and most people don’t understand it, despite the potential TCO advantages. But I attended an introductory course on z/OS (IBM’s ‘standard’ mainframe OS) some months ago, and it’s striking how much the mainframe still has to offer that other platforms don’t, particularly with respect to the *ilities that Richard was writing about recently - mostly due to the superior architecture and hardware. Of course mainframes can be arcane, and in some cases actually backward, but it seems like plenty of people aren’t willing to give up on them just yet. However, it’s a known problem that those with expertise in mainframes are leaving the workforce. So it’s refreshing to see that IBM is committing to simplifying the platform. This is going to be a challenge - changing the platform whilst keeping its reputation for stability is going to be hard - but it’s necessary for IBM to keep the platform alive, and necessary for the mission-critical systems that our customers run that still rely on this knowledge. So I look forward to seeing how it changes over the coming years.

Screenselect Merges with LOVEFiLM

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 08:26:57 +0000

Screenselect, the DVD rental service I was using, has finally merged completely with LOVEFiLM, under the latter brand. I was very happy with Screenselect, so it will be interesting to see if this changes anything, for better or for worse. I was using LOVEFiLM up to about a year ago. I left because they used throttling, but denied it when asked and blamed delays on the Royal Mail instead. I hope I don’t begin to experience this again, because I’m going to struggle to find another rental service with such a wide range of film I tend to like (including the more ‘arty’ stuff). Time will tell.

Sign of the Killer

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 18:48:02 +0000

This film makes no sense.

Toto, I've Got a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 14:23:49 +0000

Nope, not The Wizard of Oz. One of the characters in The Cat Returns is a crow named Toto, but he helps out Haru (not Dorothy) when she is kidnapped to the Cat Kingdom (rather than, er, Oz). Yep, this is a kid’s film. It’s entertaining and well-executed, as one would expect from another film from the Studio Ghibli production team, and light-hearted too, but there’s nothing deep, nothing glittering, and nothing rich like one might get from a Hayao Miyazaki film (such as Howl’s Moving Castle, which I wrote about the other day). A good film, but not one with a soul.

Howl's Moving Castle

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 20:40:42 +0000

To see animation at its very peak, you need to see Japanese anime. Howl’s Moving Castle is another excellent slice of this from director Hayao Miyazaki.

Miyazaki’s film is superbly executed in almost every way. The animation is mouth-wateringly rich and silky, supplemented by camera moves made possible in the age of CGI. It’s clear that he is using this technology to not only match what’s possible in live action, but move beyond it. The art is typically Japanese - beautiful and detailed. The moving castle itself seems to be a bewildering mix of 2D and 3D - an almost living object on screen. It has to be seen to be believed - and some scenes have elements of almost photographic realism. The sound, including the foley, is competent and matches the visuals well.

Why Developed Countries are Heading for Increasing Inequality and Centrists Might Not be as Balanced as They Think

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 09:25:21 +0000

From time to time I listen to RadioEconomics. It’s not quite as interesting to me as EconTalk, partly because it doesn’t have the same focus on liberty, but an interesting discussion the other day with Dr. Diane Coyle from Manchester University brought me to two conclusions:

Developed countries will suffer from increasing inequality if the current trend of outsourcing increases. Creative ‘knowledge’ work is becoming the province of a large proportion of the population in places such as the US and the UK. However, there are still fundamental limitations on transport and technology that mean that labour-intensive jobs, from train driving to fruit stacking in Tesco, aren’t going away any time soon. A gap in the middle will begin to form, where the medium-skill jobs once were, that are now being increasingly fulfilled by folks in India and other places. This is probably inevitable. Maybe this seems like an obvious point to some people, but I think it is crucially important to keep this in mind to evaluate the promises of those who would like to be in the position to form public policy (in short, election candidates). Whether income inequality is a problem is a question for another time.

The Consequences of Travel Delay

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 10:17:09 +0000

A train I was on from Winchester to London yesterday was delayed because of faulty doors on another train. In fact, at one point, we actually managed to go backwards for a few miles to get to usable track. Despite sitting stationary for 15 minutes whilst the signalmen dithered and ending up almost half an hour late, South West Trains didn’t mention provide any reparations for passengers on the train. By contrast, my experiments in travelling by coach recently (primarily on National Express) have been very promising; they are cheaper than the train and surprisingly reliable for road-based transport. I shall consider them more seriously in the future as an alternative to the train (I don’t normally drive).

IBM Bloggers

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 08:56:07 +0000

I am now on the official list of IBM external bloggers. You can find plenty of my colleagues there also, blogging on a variety of IBM-related and other topics.

Semasiology Change - the Word 'Expert'

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 15:18:13 +0000

(Using big words gives me a cheap thrill).

Has anyone else noticed that the word ’expert’ is changing its meaning, becoming more generous? It seems like the bar for becoming an ’expert’ is lower than it once was (good examples can be found on the 6 o’clock news). Of course it’s hard to measure this other than empirically, but it’s fun to play the mental exercise - are you an expert in anything? I’m going to assert arbitrarily that unless you know more about a subject than 95% of the people who are in some way experienced in the field in question (by the most narrow definition feasible), then you’re not an expert. I think this approximates to the definition of ’expert’ most people used to have, but not any more (I’d postulate the figure is now drifting in the 60% region). My strict definition of ’expert’ means I’m not one in economics, film, libertarianism, SOA, or a variety of other fields I’m interested in. I don’t find this depressing, though - I think it just makes the word more useful. A vague definition is the enemy of precise language (something Strunk and White advocated). Unfortunately, most dictionaries are vague on expert, only hinting towards a ‘high degree of skill’. This is why I felt it might be better to put numbers on it (even if the domain can still be vague).

Perl Getting the Job Done

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:23:40 +0000

Sometimes I think we in the IT industry forget that the point of computing is to make the lives of human beings easier; to do things for us and automate our work; not to introduce extra tasks (this premise is the thrust of IBM’s Autonomic campaign). I was reminded of this the other day when I was writing a set of Perl scripts to download podcasts for me by tidying up the output of goldenpod. I wrote these in Perl because, despite its arcane syntax, it is fabulous for the kind of ‘glue’ job I was doing: taking the output of another program, modifying it, doing some tidy-up on my filesystem, etc. This is primarily because of the rich set of modules available, which in my experience dwarfs any other language. It took an hour or two to write, but now that I’m done, it’s rock-solid stable and does its work silently without my intervention, saving me time in the long run.

WebSphere ESB Fixpack 3 Released

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 14:21:03 +0000

If you’re using WebSphere ESB, Fixpack 3 for version 6.0.1 has just been released, which fixes a variety of problems. You can find out more here.

Let's be Generous to SOA

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:39:25 +0000

One of the troubles of working in the IT industry is that no-one ever agrees on what the next big thing means. This is partly because software terms tend to run out from between your fingers when you try to grab them, just like soft putty - want to try defining ‘blogging’? One example I’m thinking about a lot at the moment is SOA (Service-oriented architecture). The problem isn’t just that people don’t know what SOA means, but that there isn’t a single definition - every software vendor has a subtly different message.

Ray

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:27:56 +0000

Ray is a biopic-by-the-numbers. Depicting the life of Ray Charles, Jamie Foxx does a competent job of portraying someone blind (it’s of course hard to tell how close he is to Charles). The film lurches from one scene to the next, and portrays Charles as a fun-loving but flawed man (cynics might point out that this is what most biographical films of entertainers do). There’s nothing that particularly stands out, but no part of the film that’s truly awful either. Worth watching if you’re interested in Ray Charles’s life, but otherwise nothing special.

Leadership for the Future - Bill Clinton

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 12:21:20 +0000

Last Tuesday, I attended Bill Clinton’s ‘Leadership for the Future’ seminar at the Royal Albert Hall. Although I don’t necessarily agree with his politics (he obviously sits somewhere around the centre-left and I’m some undecided variety of libertarian), I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see a former world leader speaking. The tickets (£60 - £300) weren’t cheap for the hour and a half’s presentation, and the occupancy of the hall seemed to suffer accordingly, but it was worth it. The Royal Albert Hall, which glittered more than I remembered it from my graduation, was a suitably impressive but slightly gaudy venue.

Starbucks Success

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:15:43 +0000

Starbucks didn’t exactly get where they were by accident. I recently saw this sign in a branch on Gloucester Road (it says ‘Coffee Grounds for Your Garden’). Starbucks are giving away some of their waste coffee grounds for free. The cost of packaging is probably almost equal to the cost of disposal saved, plus it benefits their green credentials. It’s also another good reason to go to Starbucks rather than another coffee shop down the road.

Connected Again

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 13:44:41 +0000

It appears PlusNet have finally resolved the issues with my broadband; although they never really explained what it was, apparently ‘BT corrected a fault on the network’. I was without for about two weeks: given how bad they were at sorting it out, I’ll be sending them a letter requesting compensation. We’ll see how well that’s received.

Paucity of Posts

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:10:36 +0000

Apologies for the shortage of posts recently; it’s been a very busy week - I should be back to normal posting behaviour by the weekend.

Canon Beat PlusNet

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:56:49 +0000

Just so it doesn’t seem like I’m always grumbling about poor customer service, I’d like to point out that Canon have recently been very good. I got some dirt into my S80 digital camera when in Edinburgh about a month ago. I sent it back to Canon’s UK repair centre, half-expecting an argument about mistreatment. They cleaned it, readjusted some things, and sent it back to me, good as new. It took a month, which was a little longer than I’d hoped for, but they didn’t charge either, which I was expecting.

Presumed Innocent

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 10:13:55 +0000

Presumed Innocent is definitely imperfect. The premise is good; the American-legal-system-based-thriller has been done before several times, and well: A Few Good Men, The Pelican Brief. But Presumed Innocent is great in concept, poor in execution. Harrison Ford is miscast as the star, a lawyer with a silly haircut and a silly name (Rusty Sabich). The film relies heavily on flashbacks, but they don’t fit well, and the whole plot is poorly managed and as ill-fitting as Rusty’s suit. Surprisingly leaden acting and a clumsy script don’t help much either. This film is in that rare category - one that has potential, but would benefit from a remake.

Don't Use PlusNet

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 17:46:10 +0000

I’m still having problems with my PlusNet broadband. Not only are they not interested in talking to me (phone line queues over an hour, website queries often take days), but when they do, we go round in circles discussing basic settings on my router rather than addressing the problem (my protestations that I haven’t changed a sausage are seemingly ignored). So please, if you’re looking for an ADSL provider, and value customer service, don’t go with PlusNet.

Irrational Rationalisation and Marketing

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 14:04:43 +0000

I’ve just finished reading Seth Godin’s book All Marketers Are Liars (yes, I know I was reading something different a few days ago; I’ve got a short attention span). His book taught me a lot about marketing and convinced me it doesn’t have to be fake and cynical. But perhaps the most important personal lesson I’ve taken away is to understand worldviews better. One of Seth’s basic principles is that each person has a set of worldviews: marketing that doesn’t match them is rationalised away in our brains, even when that’s illogical. This has been demonstrated by psychologists many times, but irrational rationalisation (pun aware) makes people uncomfortable, so we don’t talk about it much. This is one of things that makes marketing to people hard: framing the message in terms of their worldview. I think this is just as important to understand in personal relationships (persuading) as it is in selling products (marketing). In fact, it seems that Godin would assert that the former is marketing too.

Naqoyqatsi

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:39:16 +0000

Naqoyqatsi is a second-rate final film in the trilogy that also includes Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. I think Godfrey Reggio thought he was branching out into something new here by using digitally manipulated archive material and CGI, but actually the film comes across as tired and pedestrian. Five minutes of it might be tolerable in the Tate Gallery out of curiousity at the ‘pretty patterns’, but it’s nothing compared to the ground-breaking Koyaanisqatsi or its first sequel. I turned it off before the end out of boredom.

IBM, Software, and SOA

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 09:51:50 +0000

Business Week recently pointed out, in an article linked from Sandy Carter’s SOA blog, that IBM now makes more profit from software than services, which had been our mainstay for a number of years now. I’m not 100% clear on the details (it’s not often I get to look at the big book o’ accounts), but it’s good to know that we in IBM Software Group are doing good for the company’s bottom line.

Bill Clinton Leads the Royal Albert Hall

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:16:24 +0000

I’ve just booked my ticket for Bill Clinton’s leadership seminar next Tuesday. Although my politics don’t align that well with his, I’ve nevertheless long thought he’s an intelligent man, and look forward to hearing what he has to say. David Millward from the Telegraph has also written about this.

Media Consumption Control

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:23:21 +0000

Media, and methods for consuming them, could be divided into three categories, according to the degree that they allow control over the rate of flow of information into your brain:

Allow No Control

Theatre
Cinema
Live Radio
Live TV

Allow Some Control (Pauseable, Restartable)

Watching a film at home (VHS, DVD)
Podcast
Radio over Internet
TV over Internet

Allow Flexible Control

Reading - books, the web, etc.

The list is hardly comprehensive, I’ve just listed some of those with which I’m more familiar. There is of course some wiggle room. For example, some DVD players allow films to be slowed down/speeded up, although dramatically changing the speed ruins the experience. Also, of course, you can record TV programmes for later viewing.

Christiane F

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 19:13:20 +0000

Another day, another film about heroin. But Christiane F is no Trainspotting. This film is the true story of Christiane, a 14-year girl in Berlin in the mid-70s, who turns to prostitution to fund her growing ‘H’ habit. Gritty and dirty, the film portrays 70s Berlin as one might expect - as an environment drenched with drugs and dotted with VW Beetles. The blunt effects and the realism of the cinematography support the story well. David Bowie provides an excellent soundtrack for the movie, including a German-language version of Heroes.

Friedman and Roads

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 12:14:51 +0000

I’m currently podcast-less, due to the continued incompetence of PlusNet, and so am reading Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (at Richard’s suggestion). So far it’s an excellent book, and everything I expected.

It’s interesting how the power of the market might surprise even Friedman himself, however - given that the book was originally written in 1962. On page 30 Friedman discusses the use of tolls on roads, and how they are ineffective in the general case, because of the high costs of administering them on most roads. This is an example of a ’neighborhood effect’, one of only two types of market failure he identifies. From this, the implication is that a petrol tax is an effective solution.

euroGel 2007 Discount

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:30:21 +0000

After euroGel 2006, which was truly a ‘good’ experience for me, Mark Hurst has announced that euroGel is coming back to Copenhagen in 2007. I’ve just booked my ticket, and as a previous attendee, I’ve got a 20% discount, so the price was only USD $480. I’m allowed to share this discount (which is only valid until this Friday, 22nd September) with friends and colleagues, so if you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send you the link. You can sign up at the regular price here.

Trainspotting

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 02:06:58 +0000

Trainspotting is from the oh-so-cool Pulp Fiction mold, the late-90s cult film that’s too popular to be a cult. I think this turned me off it first time round, and so I avoided it. But having seen it now, it does have some appeal, despite the largely unpleasant storyline and one genuinely shocking scene. The film walks a tightrope between promoting heroin use as acceptable (although never normal, never glamorous), and showing the downside. But it does have the guts to point out that heroin feels great - 1000 times better than an orgasm can’t be that bad, right? The consensual, liberal attitude of the film has appeal.

DVDs Have Replaced VHS - but why?

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:23:59 +0000

I think it’s safe to say that DVD is now the distribution medium of choice for films (and TV programmes, etc.), rather than VHS. Most high street shops, whether selling or renting, stock DVDs in greater quantities than VHS, and some don’t stock VHS at all. This is also true of most online retailers.

But is anyone else surprised at how quickly this change has occurred? Technically speaking, DVDs aren’t that compelling. Sure, they have some advantages: the quality is better, they last longer, they are random-access. But are they that much better? Is the change entirely demand-side driven? Or are there good reasons for distributors to encourage the switch to DVD?

Alien Quadrilogy - 4 x 5

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 11:57:25 +0000

Alien: Nerve-racking, small, polished, gory, and a classic.

Aliens: Exciting, large, loud, glossy, and militaristic.

Alien 3: Awkward, bizarre, surprising, religious, and closeted.

Alien: Resurrection: Laughable, patchy, graphical, vague, and French.

The Outside World is Broken

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:59:44 +0000

My ADSL at home is currently broken. Unfortunately I’m with PlusNet, who don’t seem to care too much about their customers: I have had to run the gauntlet of poorly thought-out automated phone systems, long waits to speak to a human being, and support websites that don’t cut to the chase.

It’s an interesting illustration of how much I’ve come to rely on this communication mechanism, however. I’ve already had several instances over the past few days where I’ve tried to use my network connection on instinct - for example, looking up train times last night - before remembering it’s not there. I’m really not sure how healthy this is. Of course, a fast, always-on network connection is useful. But perhaps I shouldn’t rely on its presence as much as I do. What are your experiences of this? Do you feel uncomfortable when part of your connection to the modern world is broken?

Gaddafi: A Living Myth

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:32:58 +0000

I went to see Gaddafi last night. Sadly, it was a bit of a disappointment. Poor production values certainly conspired against it: sloppy stagecraft, unadventurous lighting and props, and sound quality that one wouldn’t expect from a theatre like the ENO. It appears it’s their first foray into something so modern and experimental, and it shows. Flaky choreography and a cluttered stage layout didn’t help either.

But the greater problems were in the recreation of the al-Gaddafi story. The script was badly developed, jumping around and never really deciding who Gaddafi was or what the story was about. The historical context was never clear, despite obvious attempts to convey it - apart from when it involved the west, when reliance on pre-recorded TV footage seemed to be the only way the director could sell his message. Apart from some vague sense that I probably wouldn’t like him, I learnt little about Gaddafi or Libya that I didn’t already know (and I’m hardly an expert). Some self-conscious statements about an actor playing Gaddafi, breaking the fourth wall, were arrogant and out-of-place.

Concert Audio and Alison Young

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 11:29:34 +0000

I’ve long thought (I’m aware this will make me sound like a young fogey) that most concerts are way too loud. This is why I tend to avoid them - I’ve seen both the rock music of the Foo Fighters and the delicacy and dynamic range of Sigur Rós spoilt on stage. The only times I tend to attend gigs are when the venue is small and the artist is unknown to me (which helps built the sense of atmosphere and overcome the poorer sound quality). There’s a long discussion on Edward Tufte’s website about the technical aspects of this over-amplification issue.

IBM and Open-source

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 07:35:54 +0000

One of the things I’ve felt IBM’s been strong at in recent years is the way we embrace open-source as a development model, and as a model for providing software to our customers. Eclipse, which has a lot of support from IBM, is a well-known example, but there are plenty of others. I honestly believe that the provision of open-source software gives us a competitive edge over IT organisations of comparable size. Sure, we don’t do it for all our products, but for toolchains like Eclipse it has delivered real benefits - the number of plugins developed for it is testament to that.

Cheeky Sainsbury's

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 09:39:44 +0000

I’ve written before about how useless the downtown Sainsbury’s in Winchester is. I’ve noticed, however, they have recently put up a cunning sign, which, paraphrased, reads:

‘We are currently experiencing a shortage of organic milk. [And indeed they were, the shelf was empty]. However, Sainsbury’s XYZ milk is available, and 5p from each pint goes to farmers to help them convert over to organic production.’

Sainsbury’s, here’s a hint: I’m not interested in voluntarily subsidising farmers’ investment in their own production and helping you and them to solve logistical and production problems. Yes, I’m happy to buy organic milk at a price premium, and, yes, I’m aware that most of the difference goes to Sainsbury’s, not the farmers. But asking me to voluntarily pay extra to you and the farmers for no tangible benefit is taking things a bit too far - I’m going to fall on the tight-fisted side of your price targeting.

Reuse and SOA

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 16:35:12 +0000

Joe McKendrick discusses SOA and reuse in a recent blog entry, essentially drawing on some comments from David Chappell that reuse didn’t do as well as predicted in the era of object-orientation, and that SOA isn’t faring well in this department either. Dave Linthicum, in his latest podcast, also discusses this topic.

I’m not sure I can comment that widely on the state of current SOA projects, and I would agree that SOA may suffer from similar management problems to that of object-orientation: if developers of SOA systems aren’t rewarded for saving time with a reuse strategy, they won’t be enthused to do so. This is an important part of any software project, and encouraging reuse is a best practice that shouldn’t be restricted to object-orientation or SOA.

Google Test Automation Conference

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 18:04:41 +0000

I spent last Thursday and Friday in London at the Google offices in Victoria for the first Google Test Automation Conference. The presentation topics ranged widely, considering the relatively narrow scope of the conference, but most were well developed and interesting, even if some retrod familiar topics. Some of the highlights included:

Steve Loughran and Julio Guijarro, HP Labs. This presentation was about Smartfrog, a system deployment framework, which Steve and Julio were working on as part of a strategy for system testing. They demonstrated several examples of how the system might work in practice. Smartfrog looks pretty flexible, and I plan to spend some time looking into it. Frameworks for deployment have an inherent problem in catering to the wide variety of platforms, configuration mechanisms, deployment combinations and so on that are necessary in practice. Anything that gets closer to this is therefore welcome. Smartfrog also has the interesting property that the XHTML it produces as output is sufficiently well-formed that, although it has an embedded CSS stylesheet for presentation in a web browser, it can also be parsed as XML data without much effort, and thus act as a machine-readable data source as well. This might seem obvious to some folks, and I’m willing to bet it’s not the first time it’s been done, but it seemed novel to me.

82ASK Get it Very Right

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:01:47 +0000

I’m very impressed. A few days ago I wrote about how 82ASK had screwed up the answer to a question. This evening, totally unprompted, I get an email:

‘I have been passed details of your unsatisfactory response from 82ASK…’

‘We have given you two free credits in the hope that you will continue to use the 82ASK service, and to apologise again for your unsatisfactory response.’

‘It appears in this instance our usually reliable sources have let us down, and we will endeavour to find a better source for questions of this nature in the future.’

Copenhagen vs. London

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:17:39 +0000

_Why Copenhagen Is a Bit Like London _

English is spoken fluently.
It has its own wacky money.
Lots of public infrastructure is just a little bit more run-down than you’d like.
Nothing is particularly efficient.
It has a mix of modernity and cuteness in its architecure.
It is tolerant and multi-cultural.

Why Copenhagen Isn’t That Much Like London

It’s much smaller.
Food is nicer but more expensive.
Very few things, beyond tourist material, are written in English.

The Kaospilots

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 07:24:00 +0000

Henrique’s recent comment reminded me of another interesting bunch of people I met at euroGel 2006: the incoming class of the Kaospilots, ‘The most unusual school in the world’. They sound like an indie band, but Kaospilots is actually a private university, teaching business and related creative subjects. They are partly self-funding, and the concept seems novel - all teachers are external consultants. The most striking thing I found in the students I met was their drive - it’s obviously not a university course you drift onto. I think this university model is worth keeping an eye on.

SOA for Dummies

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 10:31:31 +0000

I’ve just received my IBM special edition of Service Oriented Architecture for Dummies. It’s shorter than the regular book, but is free - so you can use this link and order one yourself. It only covers the basics of SOA, and doesn’t dive into depth on ESBs, SCA, or any particular product, but despite being so general, it’s nevertheless worth a read if you’re looking for a good introduction to what SOA is all about.

82ASK Get it Wrong

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 07:33:59 +0000

I’ve had superb experiences with 82ASK up till now. It’s a very simple but useful service; text any question to 82ASK (82275) and they send you the answer back for a pound (or don’t charge if they can’t answer). I’ve found it’s very useful when out and about and you’re trying to answer a travel or shopping query.

After flying back to Heathrow Terminal 4 the other day, I need to get to the Central Bus Station, which is right next to Terminals 1, 2, and 3. On the way out I’d caught the free Heathrow Express to T4, but I thought it went in a loop round Heathrow, like the tube, so wasn’t suitable for the return hop. I wanted to get to the bus station quickly to see if I could catch an earlier bus home. So I sent this to 82ASK as I was getting off the plane:

Syriana

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 18:18:00 +0000

Syriana is a tight but complex thriller that deals with issues of politics, oil, and terrorism. Recent happenings with Hezbollah and Iran give it extra poignance. It would certainly benefit from repeat watchings, and I wouldn’t claim to be able to explain it all. The relevancy or accuracy of the film it is probably almost impossible to know.

It’s certainly an adult American thriller, and Stephen Gaghan, the writer and director, is obviously familiar with American political nature and is not constrained by his national culture. Even the fake British news presentation at one point is not from the usual Hollywood ’tea and the queen’ mold, and only allows one minor slip-up through: the use of the phrase ‘one-hundred-sixty’ rather than ‘one hundred and sixty’. There is a lot of subtitled foreign language content (such as substantial amounts of Arabic spoken by George Clooney), which is also rare in American film (another good example being The Last Samurai). Let’s hope this consciousness of the world from American filmmakers grows.

euroGel 2006 Conference

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 14:08:48 +0000

I’ve just come back from the Good Experience Live (euroGel) conference in Copenhagen (more on the city and Denmark in a later post). It was a superb and surprisingly moving experience, and as a conference that I paid for myself, I would say it was worth every penny for personal development reasons alone. I would recommend it to anyone with a wide range of interests.

The theme of the conference is hard to pin down; it is defined as ‘good experience in all its forms’. I’m still struggling to ‘get it’, but it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t. In practice, this seems to mean a variety of speakers from across the arts and technology, some of them specialising in user experience or customer experience, coming together to share their stories.

Will Media Shops Ever Disappear?

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 09:24:30 +0000

Why do high-street media shops (Videos, DVDs, CDs, Books) still exist? These items were amongst the first to be available for online ordering on the internet, with Amazon and others offering them from around 1995. Yet HMV, Waterstones, and so on don’t show any outward signs of disappearing, or even reducing prices significantly, apart from the hit they allege that virtual media (i.e. MP3 downloading, legal or illegal) is having on their business.

Farmers' Markets Will Be Commodities Soon?

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 09:18:13 +0000

To some people, Farmers’ markets, such as those that visit Winchester on a monthly basis, are an interesting part of a day out. Browsing round provides the opportunity to buy bread, cheese, beer, jams, and other such produce that’s no doubt better than most of what the local supermarkets stock. Many people get stuck on particular brands (read: particular stalls), because they prefer them, and go back again and again to the same place.

Beverly Hills Cop

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:23:21 +0000

Let’s be clear: long before Chris Rock came onto the Hollywood scene, Eddie Murphy was there in his place. This film is classic Murphy, with his wise-cracking, fast-talking, slightly camp personality in full flow.

The plot isn’t much to speak of, but the comic characterisation is well-done, if a little clichéd - the bumbling duo of Taggart (John Ashton) and Rosewood (the strangely-named Judge Reinhold) are straight out of the book of cop stereotypes. The film is well-directed and edited - some of Martin Brest’s opening scenes, showing a-day-in-the-life of poor America, could belong to a film much more serious than this.

The Future of Programming

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:20:36 +0000

Marc Andreessen discussed the history of programming in a recent podcast, noting the shift from machine-targeted languages to human-targeted languages. Although he seems to think that the change was fairly sudden (for him, it was started with Java in 1995), and he spends a surprising amount of time discussing PHP, which seems to be his favourite example of an easy-to-use language, his general point is still well founded.

It’s certainly interesting to see how languages like C and C++ are fading, their place being taken by Java. This is simply due to economic incentives: why spend expensive programmer time solving problems than can be solved by a cheap machine? Java is in danger of becoming overly feature-laden, but it still has a single important strength over its predecessors - simple dynamic memory management - no more explicit object creation/destruction. This does for memory what filesystems have done for disk. It’s hard to see just how much this has done for development speed and robustness until you compare it to what went before. PHP, Python, and so on, have the potential to do more, particularly for the new breed of web-based applications.

Travel Pain

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 08:58:04 +0000

Quiet zones on trains:
- Only make sense if the train company itself makes minimal noise. Waffling away on the PA, as on the Heathrow Express this morning, does not a quiet journey make.
- Allow talking, and modern mobile phone microphones are sophisticated enough to pick up normal voice volume audibly, so why are mobiles not permitted? Shouting into the phone is a different matter. Having said that, landline phones normally feed back a small amount of your voice into the loudspeaker to encourage you to be quieter - why don’t mobiles do the same? Perhaps an audio engineer could explain.

End of Free Banking?

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 11:00:25 +0000

It appears that there are increasing numbers of customers revolting against bank charges which they deem as ‘unfair’. It appears that the law states that these charges are indeed illegal, because they cover more than just the costs the banks incur. In other words, banks are not allowed to make a profit on these charges. This is awkward because it artifically distorts the marketplace. It would be useful for banks to put in place high charges to discourage customers from using unauthorised overdrafts, keeping too small a balance for regular transactions, etc. There are already regulations in place ensuring that charges have to be clearly laid out in account terms and conditions, so this isn’t ‘unfair’.

Fix for Popularity Contest Page Views on Wordpress >2.0.0

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 09:15:14 +0000

I installed the popularity contest plugin some time ago to count the popularity of posts on this blog. Unfortunately, up till now it hadn’t been counting page views, which significantly skewed the statistics. I recently discovered, however, that there was a bug in the WP-ShortStat plugin which caused it not to register hits (due to a regression in Wordpress). I applied a similar fix to popularity-contest.php version 1.1 and it now works. It looks like a different fix has already been applied to the version in Trac to fix the problem.

Amadeus

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 08:15:10 +0000

Amadeus, which could have been more lengthily titled ‘The Rise and Fall of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’, is an outstanding film from the Academy Awards’ back-catalogue. Winners of eight Oscars, it deserved them all, despite its many historical inaccuracies and liberties. An extremely watchable film, it never drags despite its length, and each scene tells.

Amadeus is a film of contrasts. It depicts Mozart as a fun-loving wally, reminiscent of Yahoo Serious in Young Einstein (or at least his hair). His music, always sublime, provides the soundtrack to the film and makes clear the disparity between it and his outward personality (at least here). It’s possible the film libels Mozart with this playful presentation, but if it does, it does it in a charming way. The distinction is reinforced by the assertions of Salieri, the narrator, that Mozart was a vulgar man, but his music was not. The narration is sometimes presented with visuals, and intercuts with the visuals of Mozart’s life. Richard Frank is superb as the priest of few words: the confessional foil for Salieri’s tales of immorality and blasphemy: his head is often in his hands, unbelieving.

10 Web Services Issues

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 17:22:53 +0000

Andre Tost has written a short, but very helpful, article that clarifies a few of the more confusing issues surrounding Web Services. None of the concepts are particularly new, but Andre provides a good summary of some potential pitfalls. It’s well worth reading if you’re interested in SOA or ESBs in general, as well as Web Services specifically.

As an aside, I found this article as part of the WebSphere ESB support RSS feed. For those that aren’t aware, there are support RSS feeds for several IBM software products, which provide new information on documentation, fixes, and other issues. Find the product you’re interested in on IBM’s website, and click on the ‘Support’ link. Then look for the orange RSS logo for the feed.

The Fugitive

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:02:38 +0000

The Fugitive is a good action-mystery, based on the original TV series. Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones both put in solid performances, and Jeroen Krabbé is subtle as the slimy Charles Nichols. The plot is careful, without too much flabbiness. It perhaps lacks the shine of a classic, but it’s definitely very watchable.

Armageddon

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 12:58:23 +0000

Armageddon is:

Laughably inaccurate.
Poorly acted by almost everyone. Given the number of high-quality stars (for better examples, see Death Becomes Her - Bruce Willis, Changing Lanes - Ben Affleck, The Man Who Wasn’t There - Billy Bob Thornton, Ghost World - Steve Buscemi), such a low standard is impressive.
So gung-ho you can barely watch at times.

Armageddon has:

A ridiculous plot. Deep-core drillers are hired by NASA to land on an asteroid in space shuttles and blow it up with a nuclear warhead?

South West Trains Strikes

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 08:00:54 +0000

It looks like ASLEF are going ahead with three days of strike action on South West Trains’ services. I went to their website to look for an mention of it but could find none. The same was true of the RMT, who are also taking part. Meanwhile, South West Trains have put up notices in stations indicating that ASLEF has announced these strikes because SWT managers drove trains to alleviate recent strike action. As SWT put this, ‘we think this is good customer service’. Well, quite. I would support any measures by SWT to reduce union membership amongst their employees if this is what results.

No ESB

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:28:47 +0000

Apologies for the lack of posts recently on WebSphere ESB. I’m currently out of the office and out of ‘work’ mode, so I’m not writing many posts on that topic. I’ll be getting back to it in a week or two, though, so please stay tuned. Incidentally, if you’re not already aware, you can subscribe to RSS feeds for just a specific topic on this blog, such as SOA & ESB (feed here) - in fact, you can do this with any WordPress Blog. Just go to the category archive (select from the list on the right-hand side), then append ‘/feed’ to the URL.

Security Ignorance and Fraud

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 09:16:59 +0000

Richard has been talking about security scams over at Gendal World. There certainly seems to be a lot of empirical evidence that security principles aren’t well understood by the general public.

For example: My credit card expired recently. On receiving the new one, I forgot to sign it, and put it in my wallet with the back blank (yeah, I know). I’ve since been able to use it twice unsigned:

At a pub, I paid for ~£10 worth of drinks. They didn’t use chip-and-pin, so I was asked to sign. When the barman noticed I was missing a signature, he pointed out that I really should sign it, but ’this time’ he’d take other ID. I showed him my photo driving licence (with a signature), and there were no further questions. I was sufficently fazed that I forgot to sign it again, and:

Catering for the Last-Minute Customer

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:36:41 +0000

Imagine the scenario:

You live in Winchester and don’t drive.
You’ve gone out for the night.
You’re catching an early flight from Southampton airport the next morning.
Because you’re a bit slow, it doesn’t occur to you that trains don’t go to the airport early enough, until:
You return home at 1am that morning from the pub to check the timetable.
You realise they start at least an hour too late.
You panic.

Retro-Google

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 07:17:48 +0000

Purely by accident, I discovered this little bug on Google: go to google.com/wibble (or any other invalid URL). The 404 page that appears has an ancient logo. Judging from Google’s logo history, it’s pre-1999.

Is this really a mistake, or is it a feature? I can’t believe I’m the first to notice this. It’s cute, anyway…

Persuasive Words

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 13:55:45 +0000

Economists often use words differently from other folk. Words such as ‘profit’, ‘wealth’, ‘rent’ and ‘cost’ all have subtle, but important, differences from the way many of the general public use them. Such words can easily get tied to particular value judgements or politics - for example, the word ‘profit’ conjures up images of fat cats and greedy people in the minds of many. In the minds of economists, profit is almost always a good thing - partly because they don’t tie the word just to money.

Word of the Day #983

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 11:21:57 +0000

Kleptocracy - where government steals from the public purse.

I came across this term the other day in a podcast from Econtalk in which Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discussed his most recent book, The Logic of Political Survival - a cynical look at how and why governments stay in power. It’s well worth a listen.

Risk Assessment Affects Air Prices?

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:37:48 +0000

Richard and James have been having a little chat about the openness of information in markets and how this affects prices. This caused me to wonder about the recent alleged terrorist threat in the UK, and how this would affect plane ticket prices. The commonly accepted wisdom seems to be that there was a terrorist threat, that a certain amount of it still persists, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The current restrictions on carrying liquids on planes are also a serious inconvienience for people who do a significant amount of air travel.

5/100

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 11:11:35 +0000

As this is my 100th posting to this blog, I’ve decided to do a run-down of the five most popular postings so far:

These rankings are provided by the Wordpress Popularity Contest plugin, which calculates them based on a weighted average of views, comments, etc. It’s almost endlessly tweakable - I’m trying to resist the temptation to fiddle. I don’t think the above numbers are particularly accurate right now, so they’re just a bit of fun, but hopefully the statistics will settle as the new plugin starts to record information.

What is Business Logic?

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:53:47 +0000

In the world of business-oriented software, we use the phrase ‘business logic’ a lot. In my particular area (WebSphere integration products), a typical pattern is to delegate ’technical logic’ to mediation flows in WebSphere ESB, and to put ‘business logic’ in process flows in WebSphere Process Server. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s what many people encourage, as it seems to neatly match what the software can provide.

But what do we mean by the phrase ‘business logic’? Ultimately both business logic and technical logic come down to the same thing; instructions executed by the machine. I can implement both in mediation flows, Java, Perl, assembler, or shell scripts. So why the distinction? It really depends on one’s perception.

The Sixth Sense

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 13:32:29 +0000

The Sixth Sense is a reasonable thriller with a good twist at the end (I genuinely didn’t know what it was; and I won’t spoil it for anyone else who doesn’t). Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis are both excellent, and the supporting cast competent. Osment in particular stands out - he has done well in other films such as A.I., and is one of the most competent child actors of the modern generation. The film drifts rather to start with, and by the time it gets going the end of the film is approaching. But apart from this mismatch of pace, this is an interesting film from M. Night Shyamalan, one of the most successful Indian film directors to break into Hollywood. Willis again proves that he isn’t just an action hero (see Death Becomes Her and Color of Night for other examples).

Why Trade is Beneficial - The Ebay Way

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 10:28:12 +0000

Ebay can provide a very good illustration of why trade is good for everyone.

Let’s say I have a Coldplay t-shirt that I was given as a present, have worn once or twice, but am ashamed of and want to get rid of. As such, it isn’t worth much to me - if forced to assign a value, I might say £1. I’ve just been given a phone, though, an older model, and want a spare charger for it.

Blog Commenting is Weak

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 16:59:55 +0000

Am I missing something, or is blog commenting still immature? I read about 80 blogs currently, and do it mostly through an RSS reader (Thunderbird), as it’s the only way to keep up with that volume. It’s straightforward to keep up with the posts themselves - they appear in a separate list for each blog, typically sorted by time posted (at least that’s the way Thunderbird presents them).

Commenting, on the other hand, is a different matter. On my own blog it’s not too bad: if someone posts a comment about one of my posts, or in reply to comments I’ve made, I get notified by email, because I’m the owner of the blog, and Wordpress (which seems pretty close to the state-of-the-art in blogging software) sends an email to tell me that’s happened. Even on my own blog, though, there is no notion of hierarchy to comments: they just appear in a stream (in other words, there is no notion of ‘replying’ stored with a comment). This can make pulling out longer threads of conversation tricky.

Perversion for Profit

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 14:58:43 +0000

Perversion for Profit is a 1965 anti-porn documentary film. Very little footage is shown apart from the presenter in the studio: George Putnam. His didactic pronouncements, tone of voice, and Brylcreemed presentation would seem hilarious to many today, and this manner is constantly (and justifiably) parodied on TV - The Simpsons perhaps being a good example. Most of the facts Putnam presents are statements of opinion - connected without demonstrating correlation, much less causation. He doesn’t discuss the morality of censorship at all. It’s well worth seeing, though, as an example of propaganda - although less subtle than, say, Triumph of the Will, it’s still crisp, clean filmmaking.

Tesco Show What Innovation Is

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 09:45:23 +0000

A small example of innovation in the supermarket industry. I know that I should eat a variety of nutrients from fruit and veg, but it’s hard to find the time to study foodstuffs in detail. Tesco provide a rough-and-ready guideline on the shelf - at little expense to them, and some benefit to me. I hadn’t come across this before. It sounds like a generalisation that’ll have plenty of exceptions, but is still accurate enough to be useful.

Powaqqatsi

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 07:07:08 +0000

Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation is the sequel to the film Koyaansiqatsi: Life out of balance. Both films share a common style: most shots are of slow-motion or time-lapse (speeded up) photography. Although both are technically documentaries, the only narrator is a Philip Glass soundtrack. In both cases, this means the message is up for debate. The primary difference between the two is the setting: whereas Koyaansiqatsi is set primarily in the developed world, Powaqqatsi takes its themes mostly from developing countries.

Happy Birthday PC - But What About Network Computing?

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 07:01:23 +0000

It’s the 25th birthday of the PC (Personal Computer) today. It was announced on the 12th August 1981 (when I was one), and its impact since is well-understood (Wikipedia has more detail on its history). As a recent Economist article makes clear, it was an unusual product for IBM, and defined part of the company’s image for a long time (the PC business is now owned by Lenovo).

The death of the PC, often seen as the thickest of thick clients, has been predicted before on several occasions. One of the more prominent was by Sun and others in the late 80s and early 90s, when they claimed that Networking computing (based on thin clients and powerful servers) was going to make the PC redundant. They were perhaps ahead of their time, probably because the network just wasn’t up to the job yet, but there’s a possibility that they may yet be right.

7 Java Irritants

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 10:31:09 +0000

Java is a pretty robust language for the objectives it seems to set itself - being a clean and easy-to-learn object-oriented language - although the slippery slope towards featuritis is very apparent in 5.0. The automatic garbage collection, in particular, is a godsend for someone migrating from C++.

But there are still plenty of little niggles that could be rectified:

Make the structure of the program dependent on indentation, like Python, and get rid of the curly braces everywhere. It makes sense.

Menus Again: ProBlogger Compares Them to Blogging

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:01:58 +0000

In an attempt to lighten my mood from writing grumbles about big government and security, I notice that Darren Rowse at ProBlogger mentions that his local cafe has recently reinvigorated their menu, and seems to be finding more success as a result (he then creates a rather tenuous link to re-invigorating a blog by a similar method). Another vague data point for my menu study? Sadly, he doesn’t say exactly what they did to the menu to achieve this. Incidentally, ProBlogger is a meta-blog: blogging about blogging, particularly how to make money out of it professionally.

Virgin Rail Accepting Air Tickets

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:51:21 +0000

Whatever it’s possible to say about Virgin Trains’ unreliability and high prices, they have shown a lot of ingenuity today:

‘Virgin West Coast has said it will accept London to Manchester air tickets on its trains.’

Of course it is good of Virgin to do this - PR moves don’t have to be cynical. It’s also a clever attempt to persuade people that the train makes sense, though - especially for London to Manchester, where the benefit of flying has always been marginal anyway. As airline travel becomes even more awkward (even when today’s restrictions are relaxed - let’s hope they are soon), the train will become increasingly attractive. It’s a shame, because air travel could be so much friendlier if it were calibrated for a reasonable level of risk rather than zero tolerance. But that doesn’t seem realistic in the foreseeable future.

UK Air Travel Recreates 1984

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 09:16:38 +0000

The irony is that I was discussing Shaving and Carry-on not that long ago - it turned out then that I was being over-cautious - but it now seems I was being naïve. It turns out that the UK government thinks that we should be forbidden from carrying pretty much anything on planes because of a ‘critical’ threat (Bruce Schneier has written about the stupidity of these threat levels before). All I can say is, don’t believe everything you are told. When we can hold the government accountable because they actually give us some concrete information, that might change things, but I don’t think we should expect that any time soon. This is why I’m a libertarian.

METRO-polis

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:21:35 +0000

As I wrote previously, I went to see the world premiere of METRO-polis in Leicester Square recently. Dave has now posted METRO-polis on Google Video. You can see his film from last year, Undo, as well (which is even better, in my humble opinion).

Can I have my fiver now, Dave? :)

Do as I say, not as I do

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 11:40:44 +0000

Apparently Bono wants the rest of us to fund his Make Poverty History campaign, but not himself. There’s no reason why he should pay for this, but perhaps it’s time for him to drop the lecturing and recognise that enforced charity isn’t that liberal.

I shall continue to wear my t-shirt with pride.

(Custom Mediations) ^ 2

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 10:21:45 +0000

To recap, WebSphere ESB provides a bunch of re-usable mediations out of the box that you can use in your mediation flows to alter message content (XSLT mediation), filter on it (Message Filter mediation), and so on. However, it also provides the facility to create your own mediations, called ‘custom’ mediations, in mediation flows. Typically, you’d use these when the provided mediations can’t do something you want to do. They are SCA components implemented by a Java class, so appear in the assembly diagram for a mediation module (where you’ll see that the mediation flow component references them), but they also appear in the mediation flow itself as a mediation. They provide an execute method, which has a DataObject as a parameter (message coming in) and return a DataObject (message going out). This is where your logic goes. Normally you don’t need to worry too much about all of this, as WebSphere Integration Developer makes it easy to create a custom mediation in your flow like any other mediation, and creates a Java skeleton for you - all you have to do is define the method. You can’t specify any of your own parameters on a custom mediation, so typically you’d use these where you are doing something specific that you’re unlikely to re-use. Nigel Daniels has written an excellent article on how to implement custom mediations.

Full Deregulation in the UK Telecoms Market

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 16:46:07 +0000

From an Ofcom letter I just received with my phone bill:

‘…on 1st August 2006, Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, ended the formal controls on the cost of phone line rentals and calls from BT. This will leave all phone companies, including BT, free to set their own retail prices for consumers.’

Hoorah! It’s taken a long time, but it’s good to see Ofcom finally taking this important step towards maturity in the UK telecoms market. Less government interference in such a crucial technological industry can only be a good thing. Whether they will take the next logical step and dismantle the now redundant tax-funded part of their organisation remains to be seen.

Menus and Food Quality - In Practice

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 20:20:07 +0000

More worrying menu indicators, this time based on an actual Chinese takeaway menu that arrived through my door:

A massive 222 items in total.
Numbers next to the items.
‘Orders over £12 - Free Curry Samosa’. Hmm, how Chinese. In fact, there is an entire Curry section, including a Chips option.
The menu has plenty of ‘Improved recipe!’ and ‘New!’. Does this come from the McDonald’s school of menu design?

But it would be unfair to mock this menu without trying it. So I have just finished eating Fried Duck with Ginger and Spring Onion (#69), and Egg Fried Rice (#143). And the verdict: 7/10. OK, but not superb - the rice was a bit dry, and the sauce a bit greasy. They also inadvertently added on one more indicator during the ordering process: I was told it would take an unnervingly precise 12 minutes before it was ready.

The New York Times and Graphical Maturity

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 15:05:45 +0000

In Edward Tufte’s dry-sounding but classic book on data presentation, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (which is actually very readable), he draws up a table of the ‘Graphical Sophistication’ of 15 international news publications (see page 83). Der Spiegel and The Economist do well, as do two Japanese papers, Asahi and Akahata. The New York Times comes about half-way down the list. I was reminded of this earlier when I saw this graphic in the NYT, which accompanies a story on the decline of marriage amongst middle-aged men. Although even I could spot some lessons from Tufte’s book which could improve it, it’s heartening to see that grown-up statistics and presentation are nevertheless alive. One of Tufte’s core rules is to ‘Maximize the data-ink ratio, within reason’. This graphic is a good example.

Loadsa Money

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 13:31:24 +0000

Imagine an auction with these rules:

There are 20 people in a room, who can’t communicate.
They are bidding on £10 provided by the auctioneer.
They each have to put a sealed bid in.
Each one has to pay the amount they bid to the auctioneer whether they win or not.
The winner gets the £10.

The real puzzle is, what’s your strategy as a bidder? And just to complicate things, consider this: bidding £11 may not be a dumb thing to do. It turns out that the auctioneer often makes a lot of money first time round.

Kung Fu Hustle

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 21:48:16 +0000

Kung Fu Hustle is a 30s Gangster Comic Book Kung-Fu Chinese Western for the CGI generation. Wild Wild West meets Sin City meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This film draws on so many styles and genres that Stephen Chow (writer/director) must have been reading too much of The Big Book of Movie History; it’s set somewhere that just shouldn’t exist. There’s a rip-off of The Shining at one point that doesn’t work at all.

Nevertheless, it is a lot of good silly fun - although, considering this, it is strikingly violent. Once you get past the fact that it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, the plot is simple to follow, there are some funny bits, and some good shots and set pieces with silly sound effects, including Matrix moves #49, #21, and #8. An enjoyable film, but not a classic.

Controversial Linguistics Concept of the Week #222

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 11:15:03 +0000

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis basically states that there is a relationship between the language that a person uses and the way they think about the world. Although it’s controversial, many linguists believe there is at least some truth in it: as Wikipedia says, ‘The opposite extreme—that language does not influence thought at all—is also widely considered to be false’. The theory has implications, such as that the value of improving one’s vocabulary or learning another language are even greater than they would be otherwise.

A Waffle of Bloggers

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 10:41:53 +0000

Hannah Parker has posted a picture of us (the IBM Hursley bloggers) down the pub. That’s yours truly looking stupid in the huge Aussie hat.

(note: Hannah’s blog is accessible only from inside the IBM network, but the picture is on Flickr)

Rushmore

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 08:15:27 +0000

Max Fischer is a precocious boy at Rushmore school, more adult than some of his teachers (Brian Cox has a small part as the headmaster, and is superb as always). He gets into a spat with Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a local businessman who takes an interest in the school, and who steals his intended girlfriend, Miss Cross, a junior school teacher.

This film is weird, sure. Max Fischer is a chamelonic character and is totally unpredictable. Also, Max isn’t the only adult in a child’s body: his protegee, Dirk Calloway, appears to be even further beyond his years. Like Wes Anderson’s later film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (in which Bill Murray also stars), there was an undercurrent of a joke I just didn’t get. But unlike that film, this film was funny. Not laugh-out-loud, sure. But I got to the end feeling pleased I’d watched it. The choppiness of the plot doesn’t seem to matter anymore by then, and the knots on the love stories are nicely tied. For a film like this, that’s all one can ask for.

Weird Economics Concept of the Week #421

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 18:28:01 +0000

Giffen Good. A Giffen good is a good whereby an increased price means increased demand. Cheap essential foods are sometimes asserted to be Giffen goods, as if the price increases, people can afford less of the pricier foods, and must eat more cheap staples. See this Wikipedia article for more information, as well as the related concept of a Veblen Good. Giffen goods are controversial, and some economists don’t believe they exist.

IBM acquires Webify

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 15:02:48 +0000

IBM has just announced that it has acquired Webify, a provider of ‘Service-oriented Business Applications’, which are SOA assets designed specifically for certain markets, such as insurance and healthcare. It will become part of the IBM WebSphere organisation. It remains to be seen exactly how Webify’s products will integrate into the IBM product line, but they sound like they will be a useful addition to IBM’s SOA vision, and I look forward to working with our new colleagues from Webify.

Inflated Job Titles Considered Dangerous

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:30:50 +0000

Lengthy and vacuous job titles are increasingly common in many organisations. It’s not uncommon to see ‘User experience practice leader’, ‘Technical data specialist’, ‘Revenue protection officer’, ‘PBT supplier’, ‘Guide planner’, ‘Authorising supplier manager’, or ‘Integrating management expert’. They probably make sense to people in that organisation, but to everyone else they seem like goobledygook.

(Note: I made most of those up - only one of those titles is real - guess which? However, they all use widespread vocabulary, so hopefully they seem familiar.)

Straight 8 and 'Metro-polis'

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 12:14:33 +0000

I went to the Straight 8 film showings at the Vue in Leicester Square with Lizzie last night. We saw the film that Dave, Felicity, and Twm had put together - ‘Metro-polis’ - as well as plenty of others. For those that aren’t familiar with it, Straight 8 is a film competition based around shooting onto a reel of 8mm film about 3 minutes in length. The entrants are not allowed to develop the film, so no editing is possible.

Clothing Didn't Always Have Content

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:35:00 +0000

It seems that sometimes gradual changes can have a huge sociological impact. T-shirts have been around for some time now; they started becoming popular during WWI. As time and technology have progressed, t-shirts have become cheaper than the equivalent shirts. It’s now possible to buy t-shirts from a vast array of suppliers with logos, pictures, sayings, and other types of content (to borrow a Web word) pre-printed on them. Moreover, it’s become simple to order t-shirts with your own content printed on them for a reasonable price.

Web Services & JMS - No Problem

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 08:50:08 +0000

This month’s BCS ‘iT NOW’ magazine contains a short anonymous article entitled The problem with SOAs. It does a reasonable job of explaining what an SOA is at a high level, but I thought it might be worthwhile briefly discussing it in the context of WebSphere ESB. As with many discussions of SOA, the majority of the article is spent discussing Web Services as the invocation mechanism for SOAs. At the end it mentions JMS as a possible alternative invocation method, but says ‘implementation may be problematic’ (although doesn’t really explain why).

Removing the Orange Homescreen on the Nokia 6630 and Others

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 08:09:45 +0000

It appears that Orange, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they were better than Nokia at creating a usable phone, and are in the habit of replacing the standby (home) screen on their some of their smartphones with a custom Orange one. It’s actually pretty awful, as it’s unreadable, doesn’t always update correctly, and doesn’t show some useful information such as the current profile. Orange were too arrogant to admit this at first, although in their defence it looks like there will be a way to disable it on future models. I have a Nokia 6630 and this has annoyed me for some time - I also have a suspicion it has contributed to many of the crashes I seem to encounter with the phone. Fortunately someone has written a small application called HSKiller to kill this homescreen and bring back the default (the page is in French - the download link is right at the top). It has a few minor niggles, but seems to be working relatively well so far for me.

My Kingdom for a Wallet

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:52:48 +0000

Why oh why can’t someone make a wallet that:

Can hold at least ten plastic cards, some cash, and some receipts so they are easily accessible?
Isn’t so huge that it looks like I’m carrying a copy of War and Peace in my pocket?
Looks fairly smart, preferably made from leather, but not like I just bought it from Armani or some other o-so-faishonable label?
Lasts more than 2 weeks?
And most importantly, has a zip all the way round so your stuff doesn’t fall out?

ESB Negates the Decline of J2EE?

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 16:23:52 +0000

Cote’ posted an article recently discussing the possible death of J2EE (Andy Piper, another blogger from here in Hursley, has noticed this too). It’s pretty hard to assess the likelihood of that happening, and I’m not sure I’m in a position to comment. However, it’s probably truthful to say that J2EE is a complex platform to get to grips with. In a sense, J2EE, although a standard and a platform, has always really been Java plus some other stuff (EJBs, Web Services, Servlets, JDBC, JMS, etc.) rather than a single entity. This means you really need to be able to claim an understanding of all of these to fully ‘get’ J2EE.

How Do You Know When Documents are Ready?

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:02:06 +0000

So let’s imagine you’ve sent a document out to a bunch of people for their review and comments, and you’re currently going through the process of updating it with their corrections, clarification requests, and so on. How do you know when the document’s done? Well, how long is a piece of string?

I’d propose the following rule of thumb:

Take the number of valid review comments you receive from a particular person, and call that a. Take the number of times you recieve comments that require you to point someone at a part of the document they’ve missed (let’s assume it is well organised), and call that _b. _ Divide a by b - this is the review quotient.

The Breakfast Club

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 20:10:07 +0000

The Breakfast Club is an easy-to-watch movie about five teenagers in detention. It’s definitely a teen flick, and most of the more serious friendship-building scenes are clearly aimed squarely at this age bracket. Having said that, the (partly) slapstick comedy appealed to me, although I think it’s probably necessary to be in a mood for something a bit silly.

The only poorly drawn character in this film is Mr. Vernon, the school principal, who reacts inconsistently and is hard to follow. The students all fit into clear stereotypes at the start, but unsurprisingly move out of these molds as the film progresses. I was expecting good things of Emilio Estevez, and indeed he delivered, but Judd Nelson provides a standout performance as probably the hardest character to play: the rebel, who, despite some softening, stays a rebel to the end.

What is WebSphere Integration Developer?

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 16:41:04 +0000

WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) is IBM’s development tool for constructing SCA modules that can be deployed to WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Process Server. It is built on top of Rational Application Developer (RAD), which is in turn Eclipse-based, so it inherits a lot of functionality, including support for Java, J2EE, UML, etc. However, it also provides the ability to develop:

ESB SCA-based mediation modules, which can contain ESB mediation flows (and Java components).

Mediation the Third

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 14:58:07 +0000

After my previous post about mediation in ESB, I should add that there is a third way to modify messages on the bus, that doesn’t go by the name of ‘mediation’: using a JAX-RPC handler. It’s only suitable for SOAP messages (which can be transported over HTTP or JMS), but is otherwise most similar to Platform Messaging mediations. The primary advantage of JAX-RPC handlers is that they are conformant to a JSR specification, but they aren’t able to do a number of things that mediations can, such as modify the target of a SOAP request.

Correction: SCA Default Binding

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:37:36 +0000

In a previous post describing SCA in WebSphere ESB / Process Server, I wrote that SCA modules have to be running in the same address space. I’d like to correct this: the restriction actually imposed on these bindings is that they need to be between SCA modules running in the same WebSphere cell (see this post for more information on cells, nodes, and servers). This is because the SCA resources that are automatically created when an SCA module is deployed are cell-scoped. Different types of SCA resources are created depending on whether asynchronous or synchronous behaviour is required, which is normally decided automatically, but in both cases the scope is the same. For more information, see this Developerworks article.

Software Change Management Should Change

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 07:31:50 +0000

Almost all software, whether it be public domain, open-source, or commercial, is not just released once. Typically it goes through many versions, changing (and hopefully improving) each time, sometimes adding features, sometimes removing bugs or problems, sometimes introducing new ones. This change is normally managed (at least for larger software systems) using two or three elements:

Version control systems (also called source control or library systems). These are typically used to keep track of different versions of source-code, enabling previous versions to be retrieved, different parts of the software to be merged together, and so on. CVS is a well-known open source example.

Royal Mail Track & Trace is Pointless

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 18:34:21 +0000

I sent a parcel to Sweden on Friday - some binoculars I’d sold on Ebay. Because I sent them International Signed For, I got a tracking number to use on royalmail.com. Entering this number on Friday resulted in a message saying that the parcel hadn’t yet been entered into the system, and to wait to the next day. Fair enough - this isn’t exactly Fedex or UPS, and I posted them at a rural post office in Hursley.

Greasy Spoon #124

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 10:22:05 +0000

If you’re in the Fulham area and fancy a good breakfast, you could do a lot worse than the Fulham Cafe on Fulham Road. Full English Breakfast including coffee for about 5 pounds. Can’t say fairer than that in London.

(head out of Fulham Broadway station, turn right onto Fulham Road, and it’s on the left-hand-side of the road after two corners and about 300m).

Disclaimer: I have no connection with this cafe apart from being a client.

Sideways

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 18:32:47 +0000

This film is about: fine wine, weddings, car crashes, relationships, broken noses, sex, and road trips. It’s an entertaining watch, and an emotional one. You can despise both the main characters and also admire them. Paul Giamatti in particular is good as the neurotic one of the pair.

Sideways is definite entertainment, and the two hours don’t lag. But, ultimately, there’s nothing very demanding for the viewer in it, so it’s probably a once-only deal.

eXistenZ

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 19:07:58 +0000

eXistenZ is David Cronenberg’s The Matrix. But the layers of reality and existential indirection are far more complex and interesting than with The Matrix (although both films are of high quality and have plenty to hold the interest). With eXistenZ, we quickly get into this ’now, is this the real world?’ questions, and keeping track is half the fun. The twists and turns of the plot are pacy and well-thought out. Reality layers are built on computer games, and there are many entertaining in-jokes: anyone who has played simple role-playing games such as one of the Monkey Island series will quickly recognise the style of interaction with the games characters, and it must of been great fun for the actors to play with this.

Barcelona Photos

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 11:40:55 +0000

As promised, my photos from Barcelona, including the Sagrada Família and Park Güell.

Liberty Heights

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 10:37:27 +0000

To sum this film up in one sentence: sex, business, love, and racial segregation in 50s Baltimore. The problem is, I’ve pretty much just covered it all. Sure, there some are charming scenes, but fundamentally this film doesn’t cover topics that haven’t been covered better elsewhere, doesn’t include anything spectacular, and although it holds the interest for a while, is ultimately unfulfilling. A worthy effort, but not a classic.

The Economics of Menu Choice and Food Quality

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 07:31:14 +0000

Let’s say you’re setting up a restaurant. How large should the menu be to encourage potential clientele to believe in your food?

Put another way: is there any correlation (real or perceived) between the size of a restaurant menu (measured in number of dishes) and the quality of the food that restaurant sells? For some time I was under the impression that there was an inverse relationship: for the best food, avoid those with large menus. This was based on the premise of combining: the kitchen can cheaply combine a number of pre-prepared meal components (meat, sauce, vegetables, carbohydrate) at the last minute to give the potential for a large number of dishes: but the components are not made freshly: and so the quality suffers.

Is Text Messaging Synchronous?

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 20:16:16 +0000

Working with WebSphere ESB recently has got me thinking about synchronous and asynchronous communication mechanisms. I began to wonder about a mechanism that’s more familiar to most people - text messaging - and how it plays a dual role in usage. Let’s recap first on two other communication mechanisms that more obviously fit into one category or the other (perhaps ironically, a modern mobile phone can do all of these, including text messaging):

Temporary Speed Limits - Why?

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 16:23:18 +0000

I don’t own a car, and so don’t drive often. This means I usually avoid the passionate debates about speed limits, speed cameras, etc. But I think I’ve come up with a speed limit question that’s less contentious (famous last words). I almost missed a plane the other day when the coach I was on to the airport was held up in a traffic jam on the M25. What made it more frustrating, though, was the temporary speed limit signs (the ones that light up with a speed above the motorway). Either:

Mayor of Sunset Strip

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:13:35 +0000

This film is about the life of Rodney Bingenheimer. Bingenheimer is the Californian John Peel: not quite so famous, perhaps, at least outside the US, but the film is jam packed with footage that proves his celebrity-worthiness. In fact, it’s clear that celebrity is much more important to him than it was for Peel (which is not to say that music isn’t, because he obviously loves that too).

He is also, however, incredibly gentle and shy - he seems to typically avoid lengthy eye contact. The film makes clear that in many ways, he’s the music equivalent of Andy Warhol. He even looks like him. It’s hard to understand how Bingenheimer survives in the cut-throat world of Hollywood and American entertainment. Perhaps just through being so innocent - there are many poignant scenes in this documentary that underline this characteristic.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 19:38:31 +0000

Fabulous drama from an all-star cast. This is the kind of film in which it’s hard to find imperfect acting, and David Mamet’s script makes it even harder. No character is quite as simple as he at first appears, and they’re all fascinating. The film just draws you in, despite the simplicity of the setting (it’s easy to see that it came from the stage). The ending is untidy, but appropriate, and anyway, this film isn’t just about the plot: it’s also about the character and machinations of salesmen and their morally blurred world. Al Pacino’s character is so transparent that you’d swear you’d never fall for his patter: but you know you would (he’s so funny when playing this kind of character; for another example, see The Devil’s Advocate).

How to Handle Mediation

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:19:47 +0000

WebSphere ESB includes two distinct technologies, both of which use the name ‘mediation’:

WebSphere Platform Messaging mediations, introduced in WebSphere Application Server V6.0 (and thus included in WebSphere ESB and Process Server).
Mediation flows, the primary facility introduced by WebSphere ESB V6.0.1 itself.

Let’s come straight out and say it: yes, this can be a little confusing, given that these two technologies go by similar names. Nevertheless, although both of them can both be used to alter messages on the Platform Messaging bus, they work in quite different ways.

Usability When You Least Expect It

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 08:55:20 +0000

After getting to Barcelona airport yesterday, I looked in despair at the long lines for the Iberia economy check-in. I thought I’d give the quick check-in machines a go, but I wasn’t seriously expecting them to work. I’d booked both flights for my roundtrip between LHR and BCN with BA but the return hop was operated by Iberia; the BA quick check-in at Heathrow had worked, but hey, this is a different airline, right? They’re not going to have my credit card details or anything, are they? The machine, though, seemed to accept the record locator (booking reference) as an alternative. Maybe this was a faint hope - though I’d had experiences with the BA website being incapable of viewing my reservations with AA, and vice-versa, so I wasn’t confident. But it all just worked - the boarding card was printed, and I was congratulating myself again for my foresight in only packing carry-on.

Sagrada Família

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 08:30:35 +0000

So whilst in Barcelona, we did manage to go inside the Sagrada Família in the end (after taking a look from the outside).

It’s an even more amazing building inside than out. I felt like I’d stepped into the main engine room of a gas turbine on Mars (think Total Recall). It’s hard to believe that Gaudí was allowed to build something like this (do they have planning permission in Spain?), but thank goodness he was - and to be fair, his work is all over Barcelona, so presumably they must have liked it. It’s a shame to my mind that it’s a Christian building, as it could easily have been something else, unlike most churches, but clearly religion was the main driving force behind Gaudi’s work.

Shaving and Carry-on

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 23:41:15 +0000

Just back from Barcelona. I plan to write in greater detail on my trip when I have the chance, but a quick question to the guys out there: how do you shave when on a short trip, given that you can’t take razors onboard planes these days? (I have the same opinion about this as Bruce Schneier does about mobiles in Mumbai). Increasingly I’m trying to manage with carry-on luggage only these days, and I managed it for Barcelona. But after three days, I do look a touch unkempt.

Barcelona x 2

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 13:03:41 +0000

I´m in Barcelona currently, visiting some friends. I had some free time this morning so decided to spend it rambling around downtown. I think I covered the two canonical tourist attractions in Barcelona:

Las Ramblas - this was a bit of a letdown. It´s obviously a great place to come if you´re after buying a chicken for a pet or some tourist tat, but apart from that the street´s full of tourists looking at not much. Seems to be very much Barcelona´s Oxford Street. Having said that, there is a superb food market to one side - beautifully presented, with the an astonishing amount of colour and liveliness. It felt like a London East-End food market transported to an impossibly posh Indian city centre. That made the ramble a little more worthwhile.

Léon

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 23:19:14 +0000

- ‘L__é__on, what exactly do you do for a living?’ - ‘Cleaner’ - ‘You mean you’re a hit man?’ _- ‘Yeah’ _

Léon is an astonishingly original film. Natalie Portman plays Mathilda, a girl of twelve who befriends a milk-drinking hit-man after he rescues her from thugs who are murdering her family. She asks him to teach her the ways of his chosen career to enable her to exact revenge. And, incredibly, he does.

Office Politics is Worth Understanding

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:59:41 +0000

Scott Berkun’s excellent book, The Art of Project Management, contains a chapter on ‘Power and politics’. In it, he describes a realisation he had - from thinking that politics was something practised by selfish and evil people, to thinking that it was a useful skill to develop - something everyone does, for better or worse.

His prose convinced me, and I am encouraging myself not to put things I don’t like down to ‘politics’ but instead to try and understand them at a deeper level. I think there is a great temptation to put problems and shortcomings down to politics, without realising that it’s part of the way human beings interact and not something that’s disposable, however ’nice’ everyone is. Ignoring it is intellectual laziness. I think the reason I found it hard to face up to this truth before was that I thought I didn’t understand politics, but Scott makes it easy - with descriptions of different types of power, where it comes from, and how to influence those who have it. Practicing politics is still hard, but it’s worth trying to improve one’s skill.

Irony of the Day #972

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:36:51 +0000

You frequently see fire doors illegally propped open outside buildings across the UK. But to see this at a fire station, as I did today at Winchester? Now that’s irony.

WebSphere ESB Topologies (Part 1)

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 15:25:10 +0000

WebSphere Application Server (WAS) has a variety of ways of defining servers, and their relationships to each other. These are often called WAS topologies. Let’s revisit some of the WAS topology concepts from a WebSphere ESB perspective (although many things you may know or learn about WAS topologies probably apply equally to WebSphere ESB, and vice-versa, because ESB is built on top of WAS).

There is a hierarchy of objects in an ESB topology:

What Clients Do I Get with WebSphere ESB?

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 12:09:18 +0000

So it’s Christmas morning, and you’ve unwrapped the shiny paper, and you see that Santa has left you a copy of WebSphere ESB 6.0.1. You’re keen to get going on developing your first SOA solution, but you’re a little bemused by the ‘Message Service Clients’ inside the jiffy bag, on CD2. Well, here’s what they are:

IBM Message Service Client for C/C++ (aka C/C++ XMS) - this is available for Windows and Linux.

What is WebSphere?

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:30:48 +0000

I still meet a lot of people who are confused by the term ‘WebSphere’. Let’s clarify, as it has two oft-used meanings. The first, which IBM encourages, refers to the WebSphere brand of software. This comprises many products (probably over 100 once all variations are taken into account), most of which are somehow related to middleware or integration. Included in this brand is the product WebSphere Application Server (WAS), upon which several of the other products are based. The second meaning of the word is as a synonym for WAS, and is popularly used outside IBM (and sometimes inside, when IBMers are feeling lazy). If someone asks ‘do you know WebSphere?’, they are almost certainly using the word to refer to WAS specifically.

OpenOBEX and Nokia 6630 (progress)

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 20:59:22 +0000

After getting a 1GB MMCmini card for my new Nokia 6630, I decided to have another go at getting OpenOBEX working with it. After applying a patch from the forums, I’ve now got ObexFS working over USB; I can mount the phone’s filesystem locally. The only problem seems to be that I can’t create directories, which makes syncing MP3s cumbersome. Argh! I’ve signed up for the mailing list so hopefully will get some help there.

Why Local Papers are Normally Useless

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:16:29 +0000

There was a front-page story in my local paper the other day - NewsEXTRA, the freebie cousin of the Hampshire Chronicle - about a knife amnesty. Apparently Hampshire police have been running one and are clapping themselves on the back because they’ve recieved so many (3000 in Hampshire, almost 100 in Winchester).

There are two problems with this:

The police are sending an inconsistent moral and practical message. Is owning knives wrong? One can assume it must be - after all, people have been handing in ‘peeling knives’ - and otherwise, the police would reject those, right? But in which case, er, how am I supposed to peel my carrots? Oh, maybe knives over a certain size are wrong? So are museums supposed to turn in their collection? The police should get their principles straight before they try to make people feel bad for owning knives per se. Disclaimer: I only own kitchen knives.

What is an ESB?

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 18:12:05 +0000

I recently had a comment attached to one of my posts regarding ESB suggesting that it needed to be translated into English - so that’s what I’m going to attempt to do here. An ESB is a fairly new and complex concept, and the definition is far from fixed, so don’t be surprised if you see some disagreement. As with many things, though, it’s also a generalisation and aggregation of some other concepts that already exist, so be aware of that too.

The Rescuers Down Under

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 23:16:51 +0000

I just watched this film for about the 5th time (although the first time in many years). It’s the 1990 sequel to the original 1977 classic film The Rescuers. The animation, story, and general quality of the film are quite stunning: it’s little-known, but is comparable to The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and other more prominent Disney animated movies. About the only thing that spoils it are the occasionally dodgy voice talents, in particular some of the Aussie accents. It’s a shame they didn’t do what Finding Nemo did 13 years later and bring in native speakers for all the local characters.

WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere ESB

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 09:16:32 +0000

People are sometimes confused about the differences between WebSphere ESB (built on top of WebSphere Application Server, and using the inbuilt WebSphere Platform Messaging JMS provider) and WebSphere Message Broker (which uses WebSphere MQ as a messaging engine). IBM sometimes describes the latter as ‘Advanced ESB’, but Message Broker is not a superset of the functionality in ESB. There is a good FAQ on the IBM website which clears up some of the confusion.

In general, Message Broker is designed for working primarily with WebSphere MQ, as well as having a larger set of nodes (or mediation primitives, in WebSphere ESB-speak). WebSphere ESB has a richer set of functionality with respect to SOAP and Web Services (Message Broker treats SOAP as plain XML). ESB is also built on SCA, which allows it work more easily with products such as WebSphere Process Server.

Five Easy Pieces

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 21:58:41 +0000

I’m 50:50 about this film, really. I wanted to like it. It does contain plenty of classic Americana, some nice shots, and some very competent acting from Nicholson and others. The central scene of the film, where Nicholson is trying to order in a diner, is also him at his sarcastic best: work we’ve also seen in later films like As Good As It Gets.

But fundamentally, the film is actually quite boring. The premise has potential: concert pianist turned oil rigger returns to his roots. But the execution is so dry, so tedious, that it really just didn’t hold my interest. The film ends without any conclusion, and is ultimately unsatisfying.

What's in a name? (or: Who exactly are we selling to?)

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 15:25:23 +0000

There’s a tradition in the technology industry of a ‘user’. This, apparently, is the poor sod who’s going to ultimately use whatever you’re creating (software, steering wheels, microwaves, and so on). We’re not sure exactly who he is, but he must exist, right? Many of the more theoretical parts of software engineering use this term, for example: user-centered design, user interfaces, user error (a most horrifically arrogant expression), etc.

As a work for a commercial company, I resolved to give up using this word a few years ago, and call these entities ‘customers’ instead. I figured this would encourage me to be more customer-centric (duh). I’ve been relatively successful at giving up my addiction to ‘user’, and use of ‘customer’ reminds me that a feature / bug / product that isn’t important to one of our customers, although it might be important to a ‘user’, isn’t important to me either. After all, we’re here to make money, right?

Would you like some process with that project, sir?

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 13:11:55 +0000

I work in software development, where process is a hotly-debated topic (some think there should be little, some a lot, some think it should be of this type, some of that). Some people can’t even spot a process when it’s staring them in the face, and, to be fair, the definition of processes is not exactly cast in stone.

Scott Berkun understands processes well. He makes an accurate analogy between a good process and the white lines separating lanes on a highway: they restrict the (intended) movement of vehicles, but help everyone to travel faster and more safely. They don’t intrude, they help. Perhaps a slightly more tenuous extension of this analogy to bad processes would be where the lines are constantly shifting about or the lane schemes being re-arranged, in an attempt to improve matters, but actually confusing everyone and slowing them down.

Near-human Tasks

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 13:05:18 +0000

This morning I was writing a test plan document. It contained lots of technical nitty-gritty and detail, but a lot of it was the same stuff repeated over and over again. It was very tedious to write (and hence undoubtedly error-prone), but necessary. I kept thinking how useful it would be if I could automate the process. I knew it was just a little too complex, and contained a few too many exceptions, though, that writing a program to do it would be more trouble than it would be worth.

Toilet Indicator Usability

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 22:13:39 +0000

As an experiment in being a cheapskate (I normally spend too much), I travelled on a Megabus from Winchester to London at the weekend. To pass the time, I attempted to assess the usability of the light situated outside the toilet (I’d left all my good CDs at home). My train of thought was as follows:

After seeing the light turn on when someone went inside, I assumed I was correct in my initial guess - it was to indicate it was occupied. So far, so good - although things would have been less certain if you hadn’t been sitting next to it and seen it do this before. However, the light stayed on for 3 minutes after someone left the toilet. After seeing this consistently happen twice, I figured it must be going through some cleaning cycle - thus the light really meant ‘do not enter’ rather than ‘occupied’. I was just congratulating myself on figuring out this rather straightforward pattern when a further complication arose - as we approached London, and the roads got bumpier (or so I theorized), the light seemed to switch on and off fairly randomly, and this time I just couldn’t correlate it with anything meaningful. Perhaps just a faulty connection in a switch somewhere, but it made me question my previous two conclusions to the extent that as I got off the bus, I realized that I hadn’t really learnt anything at all. Perhaps the light had nothing to do with the toilet, apart from being located nearby.

Economic Specialisation and Air-Con

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 11:29:46 +0000

It’s interesting, working in a modern knowledge economy (I’m not yet sure whether I like that term), how much happens behind the scenes that you’re not aware of. This is the wonder of economic specialisation and trade.

I was reminded of this today on a small level, because one of the buildings here at Hursley has broken air-con (the south of England is currently experiencing a mini-heatwave and I think it’s just become too much for our system). I thought of the time I toured the tunnels and back-rooms of our office buildings here, and became aware of all that happened - the huge heaters and air-con units, the electricity and water supply, and all the things we take for granted. The engineer showing us round (who was a contractor) was clearly a specialist in all of this, and took great pride in his domain. I knew next to nothing about what he was showing us, and became aware how dependent we were on him and his colleagues.

Dog Days (Hundstage)

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 20:48:54 +0000

Corriere della Sera said of Dog Days:

‘Those who have seen this film will never forget it, whether they loved it or hated it’

Well, I certainly didn’t like it, but I also think it is ultimately forgettable. The various stories within the film (whose only common thread is that they happen during a heatwave in Vienna) are vague, directionless, and mostly uninteresting. The characters are tedious. The hitch-hiker who seems to be suffering from some form of autism is by far the most interesting character, but even her scenes become repetitive after not too long.

Color of Night

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:22:37 +0000

Color of Night is an odd film. It starts off as a dreadful drama. The plot, though quirky, is jumpy and inconsistent - although not challenging. Bruce Willis plays his typical smartass role, totally unsuited to the psychiatrist he is supposed to be. He seems out of place in this movie. We know he can manage atypical roles (Death Becomes Her) but he doesn’t manage them here. Scott Bakula plays another psychologist, a friend of Willis - he portrays a relatively believeable character but gets killed off too quickly. The cop assigned to investigate is an even more camp version of Luis Guzmán. His sympathy for Willis is ridicously non-existent. The therapy group that Willis adopts when Bakula dies is full of parodies of nutcases, not nutcases themselves.

Snakes on a Plane

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:05:59 +0000

This film is either going to be amazing (I’m currently guessing Mulholland Drive meets Airplane meets Gremlins) or truly awful. Why haven’t I heard of it before?

Asynchronicity and Synchronicity in ESBs

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:14:23 +0000

Advantages of using synchronous behaviour in an ESB (such as SOAP over HTTP):

You want your clients to be simple to write - with asynchronous behaviour, when a reply comes back to a client, it needs to know how to correlate that with the request it sent out (this is one reason JMS has the concept of message and correlation IDs). This probably requires it to keep some state hanging around. This isn’t necessary with synchronous behaviour, as the client thread blocks waiting for the reply.

Dull Presentations and Organizational Change

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 15:52:04 +0000

Edward Tufte’s excellent essay ‘The Cognitive Value of Powerpoint’ contains an excerpt from Lou Gerstner’s autobiography, an anecdote from when he first joined IBM in the 1990s, when the typical method of making presentations was to use PowerPoint (or similar software of the period), often producing results with a low signal/noise ratio. Lou was less familiar with this, and after enduring a short part of a presentation from one of his senior executives using this method, Lou asked him if we could ‘just talk about your business’. This was famous within and without IBM at the time. Nevertheless, it seems to have been rapidly forgotten. IBM presentations still often have a low signal/noise ratio, with slide ‘decks’ used as a general method of information exchange (sent round in emails, used as substitutes for essays and documents). Tufte explains in detail why this isn’t an optimum method of communication.

5-minute SOA / SCA in WebSphere ESB

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 12:53:10 +0000

SOA (Services-Oriented Architecture) is a very general idea; the notion of defining business and computing logic as interconnecting services, typically in a distributed computing environment, where some services depend on (call upon) others. SCA (Service Component Architecture) defines some terminology and standards for this, using the concept of SCA modules - you can think of each module as being a black-box service. SCA modules can import services from other SCA modules (which have corresponding exports, defining the services they provide). They can also expose (export), and call upon (import) services via other protocols.

The Morality of Updating One's Blog After-the-Fact

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 09:33:50 +0000

These are the principles I’m currently trying to follow:

Treat writing a blog like any other peice of published writing: spend some time on it, re-read it, correct it, don’t publish it till you think you’re done. Use the draft feature of your blog software if you need to.
If you spot a spelling error or any other minor non-semantic blemish in a posting, it’s OK to correct that at any time.

Silly Thought Game of the Day #459

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:55:47 +0000

If you could be any two nationalities, which would you be? (i.e., your mother is one, and your father is the other). The only rule is that you cannot be, or have any relation to, either of them in real life. My current favourite is German-Chinese. Russian-Egyptian has also been suggested to me as an unusual combination.

Streaming Audio/Video Slow-down Performance Improvement

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 21:03:36 +0000

Audio and video players such as RealPlayer use read-ahead buffering on the client when streaming across networks to accommodate for temporary slow-downs or delays in network traffic. Most of them also use a form of pre-buffering, in which a certain amount of data is read before playback starts (or when the buffer runs out). Some - such as RealPlayer - will also dynamically alter the bitrate being requested, if network performance drops for a period of time. This noticeably affects the quality of the audio/video.

How to Approach Overcoming Procrastination

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:36:04 +0000

I am a bit weak when it comes to putting off tasks. If I don’t feel like doing something right now, I will often find a way to delay it. As such, one of my current self-improvement tasks is to work at overcoming my problems with procrastination (I considered not writing this blog entry for at least 3 minutes, after it popped into my head, until I considered how ironic it would be not to write it). I am having a healthy amount of success so far.

Do our American Colleagues have a Greater Passion for Work?

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:53:57 +0000

I was listening to an IBM internal Podcast this morning, produced by some of my American colleagues. It was introduced with fanfare and a lot of casual banter. There was a lot of excitement and phrases such as ’let’s kick butt’. It got me to thinking - do our American friends have a greater passion for their work? Not just a more lively personality - they actually care more about their work and want to make cool stuff happen? As a rule, I hate generalisations. But it seems this might be true.

Cashback

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 22:16:24 +0000

Just watched a short film called Cashback - about in a guy working in Sainsbury’s on the night shift, who narrates us through his life there. His sleepy, semi-dream-like state is both monotonous and joyful at the same time. The film is a piece of two halves - the first a series of surreal and humourous situations backed with some great comedic acting, ending with a crescendo of flamenco music in the background. The second half is slow, sexy, and beautiful, as the hero opines on the beauty of women. The film is superbly crafted and well scripted, although it’s amazing that Sainsbury’s (presumably) co-operated with the making of the film. It has been nominated for an Oscar.

Google News Source Diversity

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 17:51:14 +0000

Google News is a fascinating tool. After hearing on a BBC Podcast about the FBI arresting seven people for an alleged terrorist plot against the Sears Tower, I was curious (I visited it with Lizzie only a year back). Google News makes it easy to track down different versions of the same story. It’s striking the tone adopted by different news sources:

Chicago Sun-Times - Terror plot foiled.
Independent, UK - Plot ’not all that it seems'.

'Chunky Egg Mayonnaise'

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 11:31:12 +0000

Is is just me, or is this the most revolting sandwich title ever? Compass should be ashamed of themselves.

Confidentiality and Organization Size

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 11:13:21 +0000

Presumably it must be logical that the more people know a secret, the less likely it will stay a secret (in the general case). Some organizations have only one level of secrecy (i.e. confidential). This is used for everything from secrets that 3 people should know, to secrets that 30,000 people should know. In the latter case, the secret is highly likely to stray outside the group.

Wouldn’t it make sense to indicate these differently? Increasingly the bureaucracy attached to such things isn’t a good thing to be doing, but surely we should also admit to ourselves that there is a practical difference between the two - perhaps to the extent of keeping fewer things secret?

'New' Best Practice for SOA/ESB?

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 10:16:53 +0000

Simply stated:

Use WebSphere Process Server as much as possible, and WebSphere ESB as little as possible.

Process Server provides a layer to implement a business process - this is (or should be, or could be) ‘interesting’ to a business. ESB simply provides the glue to tie things together - auditing, converting one interface to another, etc. So don’t fall into the trap of faking Process Server functionality in ESB, when Process Server provides it all already.

Traffic Bunching

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 07:09:29 +0000

Whilst trying to cross the road in Hursley this morning, I was struck by how the cars arrived in a long bunch that prevented me from crossing. Someone pointed out that in this case it was probably caused by the traffic light at the end of the village. This got me to thinking: is it important to have cars bunched? If they had been evenly distributed along the road, is it possible that they would be just close enough never to give me a gap large enough to cross? However, it also seems obvious that too much bunching would cause further jams at intersections where bunches came together. Is there an optimum bunching level for any given section of road, and if you plotted it against the width/intended capacity of the road, is there a correlation?

Die Hard is a Serious Action Film

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 21:57:52 +0000

If you’ve never had a chance to listen to the director’s commentary for Die Hard, I can wholeheartedly recommend getting hold of a copy - John McTiernan’s comments are fascinating, and complement the talented acting of both Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman. It rapidly becomes obvious that McTiernan takes action film very seriously, as an artistic genre - not something to turn a fast buck. This is clearly one of the reasons why Die Hard is such a polished film and is a canonical example of the action film genre.

Brokeback Mountain 2

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 20:49:53 +0000

OK, so I admit, I want to see this film made too.

Triumph of the Will

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 19:52:19 +0000

I’ve just watched Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. I wasn’t as moved as I expected to be; perhaps precisely because the film shows only ‘positive’ messages, which I’m not greatly influenced by because of the benefit of hindsight. All the negative connotations of Hitler, WWII, and the Holocaust are absent. In fact, after some time, the film becomes rather repetitive and I skipped several sections. Nevertheless, Hitler’s closing speech to the Party Congress at the end of the film is well worth watching, as a striking example of just how good oratory can get (ironic from a man that’s so hard to admire in most other respects). It is well worth reading Our Masters’ Voices for some academic study of Hitler and other great orators.

euroGel 2006

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 17:56:00 +0000

I am very much looking forward to attending the euroGel 2006 conference; I’ve just been updating my entry in the attendees list. I’m still not 100% sure what it’s about, but it sure looks like fun and I know I’m going to enjoy it! (they describe it as: ‘a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms – in business, art, society, technology, and life’)

Please look after your skin

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 16:54:43 +0000

After cycling round part of the Isle of Wight with Rachel last weekend, and foolishly using little-to-no sun cream, I ended up looking like a lobster in places. Accordingly, I went and refreshed my stock of years-old sun cream this week. However, even though I get a bit pompous about this issue, I didn’t realise just quite how acute the dangers were. Did you know that over a million cases of skin cancer occur every year in the US? In a country with 300 million people, that’s a pretty high hit rate. This article in the New York Times has more information.

Do you know how much money you've got?

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 15:53:51 +0000

One of the things I like to do is keep track of my own personal finances. Knowing how much money you have at any one time, what your debts are (in my case, credit card balances), what your outgoings are, etc., has several advantages:

You can foresee and more easily overcome cash-flow problems, enabling you to avoid those ‘a bit short this month’ problems.
You can spot unwelcome trends in your spending patterns, and plan better for the future.

Nokia 6630 / Podcasts / Linux

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 15:01:40 +0000

I’ve just spent a frustrating few hours trying to get my new Nokia 6630 to talk to my Linux PC properly, and have given up after OpenOBEX kept segfaulting. I did manage to get the USB connection between the two working, but this seems to do little without the OBEX support.

On the upside, I did get GoldenPod up-and-running so that podcasts will be automatically downloaded for me. This should make it easier to copy them across to my mobile when I have the opportunity. I shall buy a larger MMC card for the mobile if I find I use this often; 64MB almost certainly won’t be enough.

Make Bono History

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 11:49:43 +0000

I got a Make Bono History t-shirt about a week ago, and wore it for the first time ‘in anger’ on Saturday. I think it possibly bothered a few people. I think the manufacturer’s original thought was that it was a comment on U2’s music. For myself, it’s not (their music is a little bland but perfectly harmless): it’s a comment on the Make Poverty History campaign and its self-righteous attitude. Debt relief irritates me and is unfair on the lending nations. More free trade would of course be good, but the ‘Trade Justice’ (‘fair trade’?) advocated here is another form of protectionism, just tilted the opposite way. This is immoral and is unhealthy for building up long-term free trade. Freely giving aid (i.e. charity) is fine, but only if it comes from individuals: forcing it out of people through taxation is immoral too. This campaign only continues left-wing economic attitudes and patronises the poor.

Mankiw's 10 Principles

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 10:29:42 +0000

I came across a short article the other day - Mankiw’s 10 Principles of Economics. A good 2-minute introduction to Economics, and possibly also a good clarity regenerator for those whose brains become clogged and confused like myself. I’m not sure how much point 7 aligns with my current libertarian politics - perhaps the point he makes is true, yet morally irrelevant? Still, worth a look.

Integrating blog with new-destiny

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 10:19:47 +0000

I managed to partly integrate my new blog with new-destiny, by following this guide here. The themes aren’t quite right yet, and I haven’t got the footer working, but it’s a start.

Wordpress is Pretty Hot

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 09:43:28 +0000

So this is my first blog post. I’ve been meaning to set up a blog for some weeks now, but I’ve only just got round to it. It was far easier than I thought it would be; installing Wordpress was a doddle. It seems to have all the functionality I wanted, and I’ve even got backups working already.

I was inspired to set up the blog partly as a self-development tool, and partly for self-promotion. Steve Pavlina also has some words to say on this; I think his notion of ‘journaling’ is slightly more private, but it sounded similar to what I’m going to attempt to achieve here.