Don't go quietly

In 1988 the following text was published in full page advertisements in the quality papers:

We have had less freedom than we believed. That which we have enjoyed has been too dependent on the benevolence of our rulers. Our freedoms have remained their possession, rationed out to us as subjects rather than being our own inalienable possession as citizens. To make real the freedoms we once took for granted means for the first time to take them for ourselves.

The time has come to demand political, civil and human rights in the United Kingdom. We call, therefore, for a new constitutional settlement which will:-

• Enshrine, by means of a Bill of Rights, such civil liberties as the right to peaceful assembly, to freedom of association, to freedom from discrimination, to freedom from detention without trial, to trial by jury, to privacy and to freedom of expression.
  Subject Executive powers and prerogatives, by whomsoever exercised, to the rule of law.


• Establish freedom of information and open government.


• Create a fair electoral system of proportional representation.


• Reform the Upper House to establish a democratic, non-hereditary Second Chamber.


• Place the Executive under the power of a democratically renewed Parliament and all agencies of the state under the rule of law.


• Ensure the independence of a reformed judiciary.
  Provide legal remedies for all abuses of power by the state and by officials of central and local government.


• Guarantee an equitable distribution of power between the nations of the United Kingdom and between local, regional and central government.


• Draw up a written constitution anchored in the ideal of universal citizenship, that incorporates these reforms.

The inscription of laws does not guarantee their realisation. Only people themselves can ensure freedom, democracy and equality before the law. Nonetheless, such ends are far better demanded, and more effectively obtained and guarded, once they belong to everyone by inalienable right.Add your name to ours. sign the charter now!

That was Charter 88; signatories were led by Lord Scarman and many other high profile figures from the law, civil service, politics, media and business. How much progress have we made in nearly 20 years? You can still follow that link and add your name, and you can still apply pressure for our democracy to be made as good as we like to think it is.

Please send money now

For years, I have deliberately avoided skiing, as the last thing I need is another expensive hobby, especially one that also demands large chunks of my annual leave. Then, last autumn, my wife suggested that we share a chalet with some friends. We quickly realised that we'd left booking a bit late but eventually, having got nowhere with internet searches and so-called specialist ski agents, our local travel agency found us a place in Les Deux Alpes for the February half-term week. The most expensive week in the calendar :-(

So that I wouldn't look a complete muppet when I got there, I booked a 'Learn to Ski in a Day' session at the Snowdome in Tamworth. That was well worth the money, and the instructor was excellent. More than can be said for me. My excuse is that my unicyclist insticts are just all wrong for skiing.

Once in Les Deux Alpes, for the first couple of days, I was just crap. I heard what the instructors said, but I just could not make it happen. I lay in bed at the end of day 2 thinking that I had just wasted thousands of pounds (family of 5 in peak week) - I was really quite fed up. By day three, I was just getting the ocasional feeling that I'd got it right and I was feeling better about it. On day 4 I forgot my lift pass and had to miss the lesson, so I got to spend the morning just practising the things that I felt I needed to. That really helped, and by day 6 I'd got it and was hooked. Now my problem is how to find the money to do it at least once every year.

Never apologise never explain

Right

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.