Cowards complain as Ramsay kills turkey

I'll admit to a degree of bias on this report from BBC News as I'm a vegetarian. However it seems quite clear to me that people who complain about seeing where their food comes from are just being cowards. If you don't like the fact that cute little animals get killed for your pleasure, then don't eat them. I would go so far as to say that you should be prepared to kill them yourself, or you shouldn't be eating them. Why should someone else be expected to do your dirty work?

This is the argument at the heart of my vegetarianism - I'm not particularly sensitive about cute little animals, although I think that mistreating any living thing is probably bad for the people who do it, as well as the victims. I don't have a religious objection as I don't have a religion. It just seems counter to my conscience to ask others to do things that I am not comfortable doing. Just don't ask where that conscience comes from - I have no idea.

Merry Hell

A BBC News Magazine article entitled Merry Hell talks about the effect evil minority pressure groups, such as the one that caused so much trouble over 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' earlier this year, can have on retailers. Sainsburys and Woolworths have pulled the DVD of the show from their shelves following complaints. It suggests that bloggers and other rational people are capable of writing more complaints than a bunch of nutters. Sounds like a plan...
I was thinking of boycotting them until I realised that it would leave me without a source of food. The supermarkets have pretty much done for the independent retailers around here. I'm boycotting ASDA because of Wal-Mart's atrocious human rights record, both with their direct employees and those of their suppliers, Tescos because I just don't think it is healthy for one company to be so dominant and Waitrose don't have a store that I can get to without burning unacceptable quantities of fossil fuels. So if I refused to shop at Sainsburys I'd get hungry. If only Ocado would improve their site design so that it didn't take longer to place an order than it does to drive round to Sainsburys and just buy the stuff.

Ends and means

Condi Rice's statement today sounded awfully close to a claim that the end justifies the means. US foreign policy has always seemed to have an element of 'might is right' about it, but as soon as you start to suggest that anything is permissible if it prevents terrorism, it seems to me that you have adopted the terrorists logic. And if you have adopted their logic, their morality goes along with it. Once you have thus surrendered the moral high ground, you will be locked into an escalating cycle of violence which no-one can win. Someone in the US State Department needs to start reading the history books and thinking with their brain, assuming they can find one.

Palm TX: First Impressions

This is my 5th Palm device since 1997. I've had a 512k Pilot Personal, a 4M Palm IIIx, a 16M Clié T625c and then a 64M Tungsten T3. The T3 I won in a competition (thanks Proporta!) but all the others I paid approximately £200 for, so I guess that is what I consider to be an acceptable price for a PDA. With all of the others this meant that I had to wait for the price to drop, but the TX started at this price. As recorded at Palm 24/7 (scroll down to the 'Palm Europe Trade-in Offer' article) I traded my Pilot Personal in so I got a very good price, but the Dixons airport stores are selling the TX for £195 and it is readily available online for around £210. Such is progress in electronics - I'm glad I don't have to try to make a living off hardware.
Right, on to those impressions...

• The screen is really nice, bright and clear.


• Graffiti 2 still sucks (or blows goats, depending on your idiom preferences) but recognition seems better than the T3


• I've seen all the posts from people moaning about the lack of a cradle.I have a drawer full of cradles that I have never used so I am very happy to have a cable in the box.


• Wi-Fi - just brilliant. Easy to configure, performance is fine, just works.


• MP3 player - pTunes is fine, no frills but perfectly functional.The TX appears as a mobile device in WMP 10 so getting music on and off the card is really easy. I've only got a 256Mb card but now I've confirmed that the TX can do the business as an MP3 player I'll be ordering something bigger!


• Compatibility seems ok. Just one of my favourite programs fails to work - the freeware currency converter 'Currency' causes a soft reset every time I try to run it.


• Outlook synchronisation didn't work. I got a load of OLERR: errors and the Calendar synch failed. This happened with my T3 too, and after trying the various things in Palm's knowledgebase I took their suggestion and gave my money to Chapura for PocketMirror. This is actually a pretty major flaw, and I think it is pathetic that Palm's suggestion when their software doesn't work is to buy someone else's - just fix it for Gods sake! I do have six years worth of data in my Calendar and if I cleaned it up the problem might go away, but PocketMirror and the Intellisync software that came with my T625C work fine on exactly the same Outlook data so it clearly isn't impossible to make it work if you know what you are doing.

Despite the Outlook hassles, overall I think I'd have to say that I'm pretty impressed with the TX. Of course I'm lucky that I'm not bothered by the T3 features that didn't make it to the TX. I never used the voice recorder, I just can't get agitated about the lack of an LED and I can live without a vibrating alarm. Others may feel differently, but for me the lack of a slider, Wi-Fi, longer battery life, non-volatile RAM and better screen are more than adequate compensation.
The final paragraph was going to read "This review written entirely on the palm using Graffiti 2 and posted using u*blog". Unfortunately, u*blog worked fine until I pressed the 'post' button, at which point it soft reset the TX. It doesn't have an export function, so the portion of the review that survived the crash (about 60% of it) had to be copied bit by bit (to keep under the clipboard limit) into Memos. Any suggestions for a Palm blogging tool that works on a TX?

fundaMentalists

Talking about possible future problems like climate change, loss of biological diversity and disease, Royal Society president Lord May says in a speech today

"Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason. The Enlightenment's core values, which lie at the heart of the Royal Society - free, open, unpredjudiced, uninhibited questioning and enquiry; individual liberty; separation of church and state - are under serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East."

Amen to that, brother. (via the Register)

Another step towards Big Brother

Another excellent article at the Register. Technology is obviously going to make all sorts of things possible, but just because something can be done does not necessarily mean that it should be done. Dealing with untaxed and more seriously uninsured cars is obviously a good thing - uninsured drivers cause a lot of grief every year. But as we all know

Power corrupts - absolute power is kind of neat

or something like that. Technology or even legislation introduced for honourable reasons (look, I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here, OK?) can later be used in less benign ways. It is really difficult to know where the line should be drawn but if we don't draw it somewhere, pretty soon we may have no say in the matter at all. At the very least there should be an open and informed debate about the price we are prepared to pay for security and law enforcement, and I don't see that debate happening at the moment.

Software companies are stupid

Mike Magee at the Inquirer has been chatting to some hardware guys - serious hardware guys, the one who design and make chips. He says that they are muttering that all the software indstry has done with the power that the chip manufacturers have given them is use it to allow them to make stupid software. I think they've got a point, but I'm not sure that the software companies are the villains here.
I'll use storage for the following argument, since it is easy to compare like with like - it is a lot harder for processors, although similar logic applies. I am old enough to remember when 2GB of storage took up the space of a large wardrobe and cost £100,000. I just checked and today 2GB of storage can be had for £0.61 as part of a 200GB disk, and if you put it in your wardrobe you'd probably lose it. At the time, as a programmer, I was paid about £8000 a year. On that basis, it was worth spending quite a lot of my time making my software as smart as possible if that saved hardware spend. 2GB of storage=12 man years of effort. I reckon an equivalent junior programmer today gets about £25,000 p.a. which makes 2GB of storage worth approximately 3 man minutes of effort. This fundamentally changes the economics of software development and means that the advances in hardware are just used in an attempt to do the same stuff more cheaply, rather than to innovate and really take advantage of what is possible.
To go back to a familiar theme for this blog, we once again see how a focus on price alone has negative consequences for the society and individuals alike. Just imagine what we could have achieved if we had decided to explore the possibilities of the computing power we now have - HAL 9000 could have been a reality in 2001. On second thoughts, perhaps that wouldn't have been such a great idea.

Why does Hersheys smell like vomit?

No pretence at social or political significance today. Just a deep philosophical question - why does Hersheys chocolate smell like regurgitated lunch?
I presume that it is possible to buy decent chocolate in the USA, but the stuff we seem to hear about over here is Hersheys. People visiting from America bring Hersheys stuff as gifts for our children. And it smells like vomit, especially Hersheys Kisses. Looking at the ingredients, I can't see that it actually contains any sick, they must just process the cocoa in a special way to achieve the effect.
It's kind of embarrassing that many people probably think that Cadburys Dairy Milk is the pinnacle of British chocolate making, but at least it doesn't smell of sick.

PR firm demonstrates extreme stupidity

Someone trying to promote an amusingly named web design firm called WebXperts posted the surprise news this week that Google returned Dubya's biography when asked to search for 'failure'. They said

This search result dilemma was discovered by WebXperts Design, Incorporated, an Atlanta web development and consulting company. The programmers discovered the anomaly on October 19th, 2005 and reported it to local news agencies.

Given that the BBC reported this back in 2003, this only seems to demonstrate that WebXperts wouldn't know the web from a hole in the ground. In case you too managed to miss this news Wikipedia has a good explanation of what it is all about.

Here comes 1984

I know I keep going on about this, but it is really important. Just go and read Martin Brampton's article, and remember what Benjamin Franklin said: "Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security". Don't let these illiberal enthusiasts for a totalitarian state sneak this stuff in under the guise of protecting you from terrorism. You won't be protected, and one day you will wake up and realise what you have lost - and there will be no way back but to fight for it. Then you'll be the terrorist...

Software developers 'abandoned' by management

I think I'm getting kind of obsessional about poor quality and the choices our society is making. This article at vnunet is yet another example of how the current obsession with low price as the only differentiator in fact leads to lower quality of life and higher real costs for most of us. I don't think, in 20 years in the industry, that I've ever worked in a software development organisation where management saw quality as an important aspect of their job. Price, and schedule were the main drivers. Quality was 'what can we get away with?'. I don't blame the managers - the reality is that no-one is demanding quality as their priority measure, so in our market economy we get what the market demands which is 'faster, cheaper'. But as the old saying goes: "you can have it good, cheap, or fast - pick any two". As a developer it is depressing to be constantly pressured to release code that you aren't happy with - and as a customer, it's pretty depressing to pay for buggy software. But that seems to be the choice we have made as a society.

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

Sony is just so wrong here. Performing criminal acts against ones customers is not generally thought of as being a winning commercial strategy. The record lables must hold the moral high ground if they want to survive, and this kind of idiocy is so counterproductive. Great work by Mark to unearth the skulduggery.

Morgan Spurlock strikes again

If you are in the UK, and you have cable or satellite (not sure if it's on Freeview) you should watch Morgan Spurlock's new show on More4. The first episode showed Morgan and his girlfriend trying to live on the minimum wage in Ohio for 30 days. Showing how the richest country in the world subsidises the lifestyles of the better off by exploiting the poor and vulnerable without even the protection of a basic welfare state, it is another sobering look at the other side of the American Dream. Now we know how they can afford that $419bn defence budget (are my prejudices showing?). It is Morgan's job to give it some shock value, but the consensus seems to be that his view is not inaccurate.

Seasonal Warning

Christmas is approaching inexorably, so I'd just like to remind you that anything that is marketed as an Ideal Gift is likely to be anything but. It is almost certainly not a useful item, but something created specifically to be given away, and to make sure that the process is as painless as possible it will be something that no-one would ever want to keep for themselves. When I rule the world, anyone found giving an 'Ideal Gift' will have their entrails extracted by eagles before being dipped in a salt bath. So just say no - you know it makes sense. If you can't think of anything to give someone, try Good Gifts, Great Gifts or Oxfam Unwrapped. Actually, these are great alternatives to any presents, not just Ideal Gifts. Few of us in the developed world actually need a present this Christmas, so why not spend your money on someone who does?

Devil's Advocate: Why poor customer service is all too common

Martin Brampton's column on Silicon.com raises a number of issues, but his basic thesis, that poor customer service is caused by an almost total disconnect between the people to whom you complain and the people who actually do the stuff you complain about, seems sound.
On a related subject, under the title "Airline cost-cutting gone mad" Stephen McDowell of Interactive Investor asks how much cheaper airlines can get now that they are asking the passengers to clean the planes before they disembark.
Neither Brampton nor McDowell ask why this situation has arisen. It's my belief that it is the result of the constant drive towards lower price as almost the only market differentiator. Coupled with the general dumbing down in society which has resulted in fewer people being able to discriminate between articles or services of varying qualities, it has led to a situation where 'just good enough' is all that is available. I also think that there has been confusion between the pursuit of high quality and elitism, and once again the casualty has been quality.

Re-building

Re-building 
Way back at the end of June, I broke my collarbone during the Mountain Mayhem 2005 24-hour mountain bike race. The medical advice at the time was to leave it alone and it would heal of its own accord. I was somewhat sceptical about this, as the two ends of the bone were severely displaced and nowhere near each other, so I didn't really see how they would re-connect. Anyway, they didn't, so last week I had an operation to have a bone graft and a plate put in to hold the bone together, the results of which you can see above. I hope it works because I've spent the whole summer unable to ride my bicycle, unicycle or motorcycle and it is starting to depress me.

National Insecurity Cards

This is quite an old article on AlterNet from my favourite security consultant, Bruce Schneier. In it he argues very persuasively that ID cards make us less rather than more secure. At the core of his argument is the principle that security measures should be evaluated not based on how they work, but on how they fail. Well worth a read, if you value your safety and liberty.

BusinessWeek Best of the Web

A useful list of sites (via Jack Schofield at the Guardian)

LJK Setright

LJK Setright was the most original contributor to motoring journalism over the past 40 years. In Car magazine through its heyday in the '70s I used to turn to his column first. I would always learn something, and I would always enjoy the read, even if I didn't always agree with his position on, say, environmentalism. Highly individual, and a private person to the end, I think it is unlikely that we will see anyone write like he did again. He leaves a treasure trove of books to remember him by - a little searching at Amazon will prove very rewarding. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he had directed his intellect towards some of the issues we find in software development.

Moral Hazard?

In the New Yorker article, "THE MORAL-HAZARD MYTH - The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.", Malcolm Gladwell sheds some light on how The USA manages to be the wealthiest country in the world and yet allow a huge proportion of its population to live with third world standards of healthcare. I found it shocking reading, and a grim warning to us in the UK of what we have to lose. The article doesn't address the financial aspects of the issue, but it seems likely that the cost incurred by society due to the endemic ill health and suffering would outweigh the saving in taxes.

Talk Like A Pirate Day - September 19

Just a reminder - next Monday is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Possibly even more pointless than trying to get 2000 petes in one place, Talk Like a Pirate Day is in its eleventh year, but it didn't become an international event until Dave Barry gave it wider publicity in 2002. The site has plenty of help and advice if you are a beginner at talking like a pirate, and less desirably but inevitably there are now some merchandising opportunities as well.

An unnecessary gathering of people called Peter!

The current record for the largest number of people of the same name gathered together is held by the Mohammeds from Dubai. As a Pete myself, I wholeheartedly support Pete's attempt to bring the record back to Britain. If you are a Pete, register and make plans to be there next year for the largest gathering of Petes in history.

Survival of the fittest?

More from the BBC on whether Katrina will shock America into rejecting the Social Darwinism that has been so influential in shaping its policies for over a hundred years. As the article states, the Americans are basically a kindly people so I find it hard to believe that they can turn their backs once again, yet I fear that they are too well practised at seeing only what they want to see, and hearing only what they want to hear. I hope to be proven wrong, as the passing of peak oil will make the world an increasingly uncomfortable place, and we will all need to learn to be more interdependent and less independent.

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

Have you been touched? Read Bobby Henderson's Open Letter to the Kansas School Board and be saved! Since I discovered this my life has been turned around and I feel like there is a reason for living again.

24FightingChickens

I was disappointed when Rob Redmond took his wonderful Karate site, 24 Fighting Chickens, offline last year. Rob had been very active online, and had annoyed a lot of people by applying logic and common sense to the learning of Karate. I found nearly all of his writing to be very enlightening, and I was quite happy to agree to disagree with the (very) few bits that I either didn't get or actually thought were wrong. The site is now back on line, although most of the original content is absent. He's now running it as a Karate blog, although he has switched off the ability to comment. Still worth a read.

The Dark Side

America is the world's richest country, but that wealth is very unevenly distributed. When Katrina struck, the glossy veneer was stripped off, and the rest of the world could see the reality behind the glitz. It wasn't pretty. America sustains much of its wealth on the backs of illegal immigrants or poor blacks who live and work in third world poverty. These were the people who suffered in New Orleans, who will suffer for years to come. The state won't look after them once the eyes of the world turn away again. This lack of compassion, this exploitation, is justified by the American Dream in which everyone has the potential to rise up from poverty and become a millionaire. Yet social mobility in the USA is very low, because this underclass has little education and hence little opportunity. With my liberal European outlook I would find it hard to live in America, knowing what underpinned my prosperity.

But just when I was feeling all smug in my comfortable anti-Americanism, I found that the UK keeps the US company at the bottom of the social mobility scale. My experience suggests that our divide is less racial and more class based, but I don't suppose that that is any comfort to those who suffer from it.

The Ex-Blogging Officer

Well, while I was away, Chris Locke seems to have got himself separated from his gig as CBO for Highbeam Research. I thought he was doing a pretty good job, and I don't know the circumstances of their parting, but Chris has been asking for donations to pay the rent. He's kind of like the Stonehenge of the internet, so he should be worth preserving. Please give generously.

He's still working on a new book, and there's a blog site for that too. Even stranger than usual, I have to admit I find this one quite heavy going, and I don't really have the time to try and get it all straight in my head. YMMV, and it is at least worth having a look.

It's been so long...

Can't believe it has been so long since my last post. Well, summer's nearly gone so I guess I'd better get writing again.

Your fingerprints are everywhere

"How Much do you trust your government?" is the question asked by Scott Granneman at Security Focus. He goes on to reflect on the way the US government has eroded liberties in the name of security. This prompted me to Google for "Star Wars This is how liberty dies" as I had a hunch that it would lead me to a few people who would draw parallels between Chancellor Palpatine and George Bush. I was not disappointed. Many people have noticed that the creation and hyping of threats to justify the restriction of liberty and the concentration of power in the state is happening in our world just as it happened (or not) long long ago in a galaxy far far away. Scott concludes his piece with a call to action, and he's right. Democracies like ours aren't lost, they are given away, and if we refuse to give it away the forces of the dark side will have to look out there. As citizens (or subjects if you are in the UK) we have a duty to be informed and to resist this gradual theft of our liberty.

The tyranny of choice

In the early stages of the recent campaign, one of the things that the parties tried to outdo each other in promising was choice. Choice of school for the kids and choice of hospital for the sick. Who said we want a choice? Who is going to pick the 'worst' service? We just want the nearest service to our home to be good enough that we don't have to worry about it. Anything else simply creates a market in which the rich win out at the expense of the poor. As an example, consider schools. In my town, there is a school that is considered 'better' than the others. The difference in price between an equivalent house in the catchment area for the 'good' school and one in the catchment areas for the other schools is pretty much the same as the cost of a private secondary education. I don't think this is a coincidence, it is just the market working.

I've never been so insulted in my life

Well, actually I have, but let's not discuss that now. What I'm talking about is the Conservative party's belief that they can get my vote by appealing to my xenophobia and greed. I'm not xenophobic, and I'm not greedy in the sense that the Tories seem to think I am. As I write this, the first results in the UK General Election are being announced and it seems that the Tories have done rather better than the polls had indicated they would. I hope that this does not indicate that my fellow citizens are impressed by Michael Howard's cynical attempt to encourage racism and the pusuit of personal gain. There aren't that many Daily Mail readers, are there?

Who should you vote for?

Following a link I found in a post on uk.rec.cycling I took the test at Whoshouldyouvotefor.com, and my results are shown below. I think I misunderstood one of the questions - when they asked "Which result do you actually expect to get?", I thought they meant "who will win the election?", when what they thought they were asking was "For whom do you think you ought to vote?". Re-reading the questionnaire, I think it is they who were not clear rather than me who is dumb, but then I would say that wouldn't I? According to Google, the original post has provoked 75 replies so far. I can't help feeling that whoever you vote for, the government still gets in. Still, you've got to hope, haven't you?
Apologies for the formatting, the site provided some HTML to copy, but it was unreadable on my black background and I didn't have time to do anything more sophisticated than wrapping it in a DIV with a light background colour.

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Labour

Your actual outcome:

Labour -20
Conservative -12
	Liberal Democrat 32
	UK Independence Party 10
	Green 23

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

If you are wavering, you can take the test yourself at Who Should You Vote For

Election Time

As Sting, the great philosopher said:

You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me

Head of NHS IT acknowledges severe shortages of skilled staff

Computer Weekly announces the not particularly surprising news that attempting to resource a multi-billion IT programme when the industry has lost tens of thousands of people through redundancy tends to lead to a shortage of skills. Good news for those of us who are left as it will push salaries up. We are seeing contractor rates rising quite rapidly, and some of the not particularly inspiring candidates I interview are asking for silly money.

Soon it will be spring... 

Computers no advantage for education

As reported in the Grauniad, recently published research seems to show that computers are a hindrance to education, rather than the unmitigated benefit that many have claimed. I'm pretty good with computers, and I've tried really hard to get my children to learn to do something useful with them, albeit without a lot of success. As far as I can tell, the schools make very little effort to teach useful computer skills (I'll admit my eldest is only 13, so perhaps they will get around to it later), and no attempt to even explain the basics of how a computer or its software work. There appears to be a belief that just by having computers around, children will learn by some weird cyber-osmosis process. This research seems to kill off that belief, so perhaps now we can start asking some searching questions about how to get some value for the huge sums of money spent on computers in education.
Edit:Having just listened to a government minister saying that if we wanted to raise the quality of school meals the money would have to come from elsewhere in the education budget, I think it is pretty clear what should be done. Stop spending billions on shiny computers, and increase the 37p spent on ingredients for a school meal to some more sensible figure. Better diets have actually been shown to improve learning, as well as health, and would represent a much better educational investment.

Blogging doesn't make you a better person

The fundamental flaw.

Video games cause violence? I don't think so

Nor does Charles Cooper, who in an article for CNET News asks "If video games kill, what about the Bible?". The so called religious right, who one could easily argue are neither, tend to lead the outcry against violent video games, but their own book contains quite enough violence. Even worse, it suggests that violence is OK if it is what God wants. Since there is absolutely no objective measure of God's desires, this pretty much gives them carte blanche to commit any violent atrocities they fancy. History clearly shows that they have taken full advantage of the opportunity.

Food-related karma improvement activites

Two things you can do to increase the sum total of human happiness: Firstly, please visit http://www.thehungersite.com and click on the button. While you are there, think about supporting the advertisers, since that is what pays for the food. Once you've thought about it, give the money to charity directly, it's much more efficient.
Secondly, if you live in England, sign the petition at http://www.feedmebetter.com. Feedmebetter is a campaign to improve the quality of school meals in the UK - if you've seen Jamie Oliver's School Dinners TV programme you'll know what it is all about. For various low political reasons, we've been feeding our children on some pretty unpleasant stuff (Scrotum burgers, in Jamie's words), and it is time to do something about it.
Your karma will thank you for it.

Be careful out there

There's some pretty reasonable advice at eWeek in Ten Not-So-Simple Rules for Using the Internet. I am increasingly concerned that the bad guys are winning and that the obvious potential for good that the internet has is being nullified by their activities. I've seen several wikis and even blogs where editing has been turned off because of abusive, obscene or spamming posts. I've seen blog comments being abused to manipulate search engine results. I've had to clean up PCs for several less IT-savvy victims when the burden of malware became so great that the PC barely functioned. The very openness and accessibility that makes the web so great is also its Achilles Heel, and as is usually the case the power of a bad guy to negatively affect others is greater than the inverse case.

Education - saying the unsayable

Prince Charles got hammered when he suggested that our education systems were not delivering for the children or for society. In Peter Cochrane's Uncommon Sense: Can education be saved? on silicon.com a prominent futurologist makes a similar point. I'll restrict my comment on the issue to the observation that in my current attempts to recruit high tech workers, less than 25% of the CVs I see are from British nationals.

Strange...

How weird is that? Blogger's spellchecker doesn't recognise 'Blog'.

Keep Him In Your Heart

Nearly a week snce my last post. It isn't that I don't have anything to say, just not much time to say it. When Warren Zevon was told that he only had three months left to say his piece, his reaction was to book a studio and start recording his 14th album. VH1, the music channel, recorded the process for their (Inside)Out series and later released it on DVD. I saw the show when it was on TV before Christmas, but I only just got around to watching the DVD. I'd forgotten what a tearjerker (Inside) Out: Warren Zevon (Amazon UK list this as Warren Zevon - Keep Me In Your Heart, but they are wrong) was. It is quite casually shot, with excerpts from a wide range of Warren's music, and chronicles his dying and the making of The Wind". It is well worth seeing, even if you are in the majority and you've either never heard of Warren at all, or you've only ever heard 'Werewolves of London'. The DVD has a number of extras, as is the fashion, and some of them are worth a listen. I particularly like the footage of Bruce Springsteen recording his stuff for 'Disorder in the House'.
Stop Press: Jordan Zevon, Warren's son, has just released some footage not used in the film of Warren with Hunter S. Thompson. Read about it on the Warren Zevon Bulletin Board.

History Lessons

On the Developer Central Blog, Mike Gunderson asks "Where the heck is our institutional memory?", questioning why the software development business finds it so difficult to learn the lessons of history. As philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I've spent a large part of my working life trying to get these lessons accepted and institutionalised within the working practices of my employers. Sometimes I'm successful, but then I get assigned to a long project out of the office (or even go off and work for someone else for a while), and when I come back things have reverted. It really seems as if these are lessons that companies simply don't want to learn, and without someone constantly agitating and evangelising they gradually fade away. Why is this? I really don't know, when study after study shows that the end result can be lower costs, higher quality and a happier and more productivity workforce. Perhaps it is just that most of the best practices require management to take a slightly longer term view, and this is something that corporate culture does not encourage. Perhaps it is because it requires management to think of people as human beings, rather than resources, which is counter to the "management by Excel" methodology now employed by most large enterprises. Whatever the reason, as the body of evidence continues to build, it should become easier to persuade people to take notice. I'll cling to that hope, anyway, despite Aldous Huxley's opinion "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach"

Investment advice - avoid America

Financial Decline and fall of the American Empire is an incredible (as in 'I found it hard to believe what I was reading') analysis of present day America. The author's conclusion is that America's decadence makes it a very risky place to invest. This plays to my prejudices, so I'm tempted to agree, but I am amazed to see an opinion like this on an investment site. I'm glad to see that for the moment at least the freedom of the press still exists in the UK.

Restrict freedom to preserve liberty

Restrict freedom to preserve liberty is an well argued piece at The Register about the current UK government's illiberal instincts, about which I have written before. From the Magna Carta onwards, people have fought for the right not to be arbitrarily detained, tortured or executed by an executive. To suggest that we should give up this right because the current incumbents claim to be nice people who would only detain bad people is just barking.

Making a point about privacy

Worth $30million and under 'regional arrest'. This article "Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy" is about John Gilmore's attempt to get the US government to come clean about the encroachment on civil liberty that is happening in the name of security in the post 9/11 world. As Bruce Schneier points out, many of the things we are asked to do in the name of 'security' often do nothing to make us more secure, yet do much to compromise our freedoms. I'm impressed by what Gilmore is doing - if he needed it I'd probably even send him money.

Public service announcement

Firefox 1.0.1 has just been released. There are a bunch of security fixes in there, so it would probably be a good idea to install it and maintain your smug position as 'safer than an IE user'. The page describing the security updates has not yet been updated but they should get around to it in the next day or so. Firefox - YKIMS.

More subversion

In Growth of Human Factors in Application Development, Alastair Coburn says:

"Projects succeed because people break out of the prescribed process to make sure the system delivers, or because the process is deliberately vague, allowing people to do whatever is necessary. The best modern processes are of the latter form. This is

(P1) Trust in people to do what is necessary."

I have always instinctively believed that organisations that attempted to use process as a compensation for a lack of ability were unlikely to succeed - software development cannot be reduced to a 'paint by numbers' exercise. I had not realised that so many others shared this belief.

Breaking the Rules

There's a book out, called "Contagious Success" , and as part of the marketing for the book (and her company's consultancy services) the author Susan Lucia Annunzio was a guest blogger on Fast Company Now. The point she chose to emphasise in this post is that the leaders of high performance teams have to break the rules of their organisation to allow their teams to succeed. The interesting thing for me is the way this reinforces the Dilbertian view of the world, where you naturally assume that your employer is part of the problem. Is this inevitable? Is it not possible to build an organisation that actually works? Or is it true that the only way to quality is subversion?

..and now, a message from our sponsor...

If you are into neoprene related water sports, you will be familiar with the problem of wetsuits that ming. Use Mingaway and your problems will be over. A natural product, it de-mings your rubber leisurewear in minutes.

Giving and taking offence

There's been a media row in the UK over the last week about some insults the London mayor, Ken Livingston, aimed at a journalist. Various people have chimed in saying that Ken should apologise, but now Tory MP Boris Johnson has weighed in with the opposite view. As Boris has pointed out, nothing Ken said was anti-semitic, it was just rude and offensive. And since it was meant to be rude and offensive, and Ken feels that he had reason to behave in this way, he really doesn't want to apologise and I can't see why he should. So called 'political correctness' has us thinking twice before we say anything, but it is worth remembering that being rude is a perfectly natural thing to do - it is part of the way we communicate, and sometimes we need to let the other person know that we are really pissed off. Those who would sanitise our language to the point that rudeness becomes impossible are mealy-mouthed weasels and they should sod off, right now.

Lessons on how to fight terror

I came across this article, written only a couple of days after September 11th 2001, while following a chain of links from the Register. I was struck by how prescient it was, and sadly by how many of lessons listed here that the Americans (and British to some extent) have ignored and must learn again. As the article points out, the British have spent more time fighting terrorists than just about anybody else. You could speculate why that was, and what the two current greatest victims of terrorist tactics, the US and Israel, have in common with the Britain that aroused such hatred. The question you have to ask is not 'how can we stop the terrorists', but 'what is it we are doing that makes these people feel that they would rather die than share this world with us?'. Only when you understand that can you start to stop the killing.

Case Study: A Billion Dollar Boondoggle

If there weren't enough warnings for the proponents of ID cards close to home, perhaps they should look at this Expert Project Management - Case Study: A Billion Dollar Boondoggle
The article discusses the fiasco of the Canadian gun registration scheme. The paragraph that particularly caught my eye is this one:

Aside from monumental fiscal waste, this is ultra-bad law. "It's designed to operate on the law-abiding, without touching the outlaw. People who register their firearms rarely use them for crimes, and people who use their firearms for crimes rarely register them. The law's net effect is to diminish public safety rather than enhance it, first because it consumes financial resources and manpower that could be more usefully employed in other areas of law enforcement, and second because it reduces people's own ability to fight crime."

Very similar arguments could be applied to ID cards. In fact, if ID cards are accepted, they will become a powerful weapon for the criminal, as he will be able to 'prove' his lawful status by presenting his card (forged, stolen, or illicitly acquired) and thus lull the suspicions of his victims.

Another blog victim - or is there more to it?

Mark Jen lasted 11 days at Google before he was sacked, probably for reasons related to his blog. Mark puts his side of the story in ninetyninezeros: the official story, straight from the source , although it is a bit light on detail.
The comments are interesting - a sort of 'all human life is here' experience. There are the 'hello mother!' types, who just want to get their name in lights, the people trying to hijack an event to generate publicity for whatever they are selling, conspiracy theorists, reactionary 'serves you right' posters and plenty more.
For my part, it has always seemed a bit daft to clearly identify ones employer and then bitch about them without a fairly thick cloak of anonymity. My economic well-being depends on my employer's success, and doing stuff designed to undermine that would be, well, just stupid. If there is stuff you don't like, do your best to make the changes from the inside. If you really don't like it, then leave. Or perhaps I've missed something?

The Cuddly Menace

This is absolutely what the internet is for. Forget all this blogging, e-commerce, education and stuff, this kind of thing is all the justification I need.

Fixing stuff

I've been working in IT for the last 20 years and to my contemporaries and I it sometimes seems that problem solving skills are not what they were. I've been wondering why this might be, when it is alleged that modern educational methods emphasise teaching children to reason and think, rather than learn by rote. I got a clue when I was helping my son set up the Scalextric , and as usual the track didn't quite make a good electrical contact, and the cars were full of fluff so they didn't run so well. I remember being really interested in how things worked, and my friends and I would disassemble all sorts of things, Scalextric cars included, in the search for knowledge. Some of them we even managed to re-assemble, occasionally so that they worked. Most of the technology we used was relatively simple and understandable - lift the lid on a 60's car and you'd see things that a village blacksmith could fix. An SU carburettor was basic, an Amal even more so, ignition systems were mechanical and very easy to comprehend. Even looking at a radio, you could imagine the electrons flowing from anode to cathode. There were also plenty of books that described these technological wonders and their workings. I think that this was useful in shaping our world view and teaching basic problem solving and diagnostic skills. Our mental abilities were further honed by having to cope with imperial measures and pre-decimal currency, without the benefit of electronic calculators!
Today, the technology we use is vastly superior, but more importantly, far less transparent. As Arthur C. Clarke said, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', and my suggestion is that to the vast majority of people the things they use every day might as well be magic. This gives rise to a new irrationalism which hinders rather than encourages the development of engineering skills. Despite the huge increase in the number of people going on to higher education, the number studying mathematics and physical sciences is actually declining. Those of us who must work in fields that require these skills find ourselves increasingly isolated. Perhaps it is a race to perfect Artificial Intelligence before the skills we need to do it die out.

So much to choose from today

But it has to be this :BBC NEWS | UK | Terror plan may spark fresh outcry

I listened to Charles Clark on the BBC today, trying to justify why we had to give up civil rights to save our society from these shadowy people who want to destroy it. I'm sorry, but it really doesn't work like that. You can't give up a fundamental principle and pretend that no damage has been done. Principles are like that, they are either wholly intact, or completely broken. Governments that say 'trust us, we won't misuse this power' must be treated with the deepest suspicion. Ironically, I think the Tories understand this, but Labour clearly doesn't (I suppose Stalin claimed to be a socialist too). It reminds me of this possibly apocryphal story, which I always thought was attributable to Winston Churchill, but which a quick Google reveals an equal number of people think was by George Bernard Shaw, with a minority claiming Mark Twain as the source. Anyway:

Mark Twain/Winston Churchill/George Bernard Shaw is at a party, mingling with the upper crust, and he's talking to an obviously rich matron who is busy lamenting the death of morality. Shaw/Churchill/Mr. Twain interrupts her to ask, "My dear madam, your complaints are well-grounded, but I wonder if you would sleep with me for one million dollars?" The woman replied, a bit flustered, "For one million dollars Well, who wouldn't?" "Unfortunately," Churchill/Mr. Twain/Shaw continued, "I don't have one million dollars. Will you sleep with me for twenty?" The woman became offended and said indignantly, "Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!" To which Churchill/Shaw/Mr. Twain replied, "We've already established that; now we're just haggling over the price."

The point being, regardless of attribution, that principles are absolute, and once given up, they are gone.

Do they want my business?

Last night, I tried to buy a digital camera over the net. I buy thousands of pounds worth of stuff online every year, but I'd never used this particular company before. The price was OK, and they had the camera in stock, allegedly. I was a bit put off when the checkout process kept adding extras to the bill without asking (a loyalty card for £14?!!) but I removed them and completed the checkout. All seemed well, until I checked my mail this morning and found the following:

Dear Mr X

In our bid to reduce fraud on the internet, we have issued new measures of security.
To proceed with your order we will need some extra details from you.

If you are opting for delivery to the same address as your invoice address, please send us something that has your name and address on it from the following :

• A copy of your driving licence, OR
• A copy of your social security card, OR
• A copy of your bank statement, OR
• A copy of your council tax bill, OR
• A copy of a recent utility bill.

If you are opting for delivery to a work address, please send us :

• A copy of your passport, driving licence or recent utility bill, AND
• Company letterhead or business card, with switchboard number that we can call to verify that you work there.

If you are opting for delivery to a private address that differs to your billing address, please send us:

• A copy of your passport, driving license or recent utility bill, AND
• A copy of a driving licence, recent utility bill, or something else that has the name and address of the person who will accept delivery.

This can be sent to us either by fax on 00 33 1 nnnn nnnn, or by replying to this email with either jpeg, pdf or gif attachments.
We do not accept mobile phone bills or online statements. If you have not already done so, please provide us a daytime landline contact number.
We are sorry about the inconvenience this may cause you. These measures are intended for our customer's protection, due to the large amount of credit card fraud on the internet, and to allow us to quickly reimburse anyone who has been a victim of a fraudulent transaction.


Since I don't own a scanner, fax machine or photocopier, this was going to be inconvenient to say the least. I was also uncomfortable about the security implications of sending all this stuff to some firm I'd never done business with before. That fax number was also an international call (I'm in the UK, that's a French number). So, I emailed them back and told them to cancel the order, I'll go somewhere else that doesn't give me so much hassle. I can't believe that they'll stay in business if they go on behaving like this.

Why is Software Development Difficult?

Bloody good question. For those of you with an interest in software and who live in the antipodes, this might be worth attending. For the rest of us, just read the session description.

When inspiration fails, wibble

In my CD autochanger today, making the M40 bearable:

Who Killed The Zutons, The Zutons
Vertigo, Groove Armada
My Aim Is True, Elvis Costello
Into the Great Wide Open, Tom Petty
Well Kept Secret, John Martyn
Use Your Illusion Vol. 2, Guns'n'Roses

More than usually eclectic, though I say so myself. The Zutons are the only new band in there. Slightly reminiscent of Talking Heads, which can't be a bad thing. I was introduced to Groove Armada by a friend, I'd never have considered picking it up if he hadn't suggested it, but I'm glad I did. Elvis' debut album was an incredible piece of work, still sounds fresh all these years later. Killishandra calls Tom Petty 'jangly American rubbish', but whatever I think of their president I am rather partial to a number of their musicians. John Martyn, almost as grumpy as Van Morrison, almost as good a songwriter. Guns'n'Roses, possibly the ultimate hard rock band - they had the look, the attitude, the substance abuse and that sound. They really understood what it was all about. Not their best album by a long way, but still worth a listen.

More on US hypocrisy

So, this country that is so God-fearing that it re-elected an idiot simply because he was against gay marriage spends three times more on porn than it does on its other passion, baseball. Actually, I think this points to the reason that they are so successful - the ability to hold two completely contradictory positions simultaneously is incredibly useful. It enables you not to worry about whether what you are doing is right or not, and just lets you get on with it. From this simple beginning comes world domination.
Perhaps I should start to refer to Bush as the Red Queen...
'Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one CAN'T believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."'- Lewis Carrol

Jonathan Meades

As I was reading Rageboy's latest missive (subscribe, why don't you?) when it struck me that when he is in his more rational moods, his writing reminded me of someone. So I googled for Jonathan Meades and came up with this.
Then flicking through the paper this morning, I discovered that Mr Meades was on television tonight, with another of his discourses on architecture. It was his first architecture series, Secret Architecture, that first introduced me to his rather eclectic style. Mr Meades is a little smaller than he was then, but the programmes are none the less interesting. Both visually and aurally poetic, with wide-ranging comments on social history, art, politics and of course the architecture. He wanders around his subjects, dressed in a dark suit and Ray-Bans, delivering his theses with style and a few well aimed swipes at politicians and religion. I particularly liked his description of the C of E as 'The First Church of the Obese Adulterer, currently trading as the Anglican Church'. There are two more in the series, don't miss them.

Bendy buses - why?

What exactly is the advantage of a bendy bus over a double decker? As an engineering solution the double decker looks better - smaller footprint, simpler mechanism and so on - so why has it been abandoned in favour of the elongated single deck bus? Just curious, that's all.

Human Rights, Hypocrisy and the USA

"Human Rights Watch says the US can no longer claim to defend human rights abroad if it practises abuses itself.", reports the BBC.
The hypocrisy inherent in the US position has been obvious for some while now. Since they became the only superpower, able to do exactly as they pleased, the Americans have become increasingly careless about how they use that power. After all, what censure do they have to worry about? Still, it is comforting to think that God will get them on the Day of Judgement - shame I won't be there to see the look on their faces as he condemns them to the fires of hell. Bwahahahaha

Rageboy's back!

Thought it was worth recording that Rageboy is back, with his customary well read and erudite but scarily unstable postings, both on Entropy Gradient Reversal and ChiefBloggingOfficer. I've read and enjoyed his stuff for about 5 years since the launch of the Cluetrain Manifesto back in 1999. I just can't figure out how he reads so much. Anyway, it is good to hear from you again Chris, and thanks for all the entertainment so far.

Freeedom of Speech

The recent row caused by Waterstones sacking of one of their employees for comments made on his blog is interesting for many reasons.
Firstly, the damage done to Waterstones reputation by the sacking massively outweighs any possible effects of the original blog. Not so much shooting themselves in the foot, more like deliberately stamping on an anti-tank mine.
Secondly, the implication that corporations now feel that they have the right to control what we say, even outside the workplace, and discipline us if they don't like it. That this should come from a bookseller, for whom freedom of speech is a pre-requisite for their business, is ironic. There have been several similar cases recently, some of which may have been justifiable in that the intent behind the blog was clearly to inflict damage on the employer (and if you are in a place where you want to inflict damage on your employer, what the hell are you doing still working for them?), and the worry is that this right will get enshrined in law.
Waterstones used to represent a refreshingly un-corporate approach to business. Now, after several ownership changes, it appears that the cold dead hand of corporate idiocy is firmly on the tiller. It must be time for a new competitor to take their customers away, the way Tim Waterstone originally took the market from WH Smith. I certainly won't buy another book from them.

R.I.P. Fabrizio Meoni

Very sad. The Dakar is an awesome event, and an incredible test of endurance, skill and bravery. Meoni was one of the best but even he wasn't invincible.
My heartfelt sympathy goes to his family.