The Wrong Side of 50

Moving Web Sites Forward

2012-02-04T16:46:00.000Z

An article from Google today says that 60% of the web is now in Unicode. Interesting. It made me wonder what encoding I was using on the three small web sites I maintain. Turned out to be ISO-8859-1.

Can't have that: I do this sort of thing for a living, and this makes my edge feel decidedly less than 'cutting'. I resolve to move straightaway to UTF-8 encoding, and move onto HTML5 while I'm about it.

Well, what an improvement! This is what the top of one of my HTML files looked like before:


   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
   <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
   <body>
      <meta content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type"/>

and this is what it looks like now:


   <!DOCTYPE html>
   <html lang="en-GB">
   <body>
      <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">

I'd never liked the header stuff before, as it was verbose, repetitive, and error-prone. I'd never even bothered to learn its rules, and would just cut and paste an existing file when I needed to start a new web page. HTML5 throws all that dross away, and leaves little more than the absolutely bare minimum to get the job done.

That was basically all it took, apart from my £ signs, which were now showing up as solid black diamonds; they simply had to be changed to "£".

So, make that 60.000001% of the web.

Another Useless Message from Microsoft

2012-01-28T16:06:00.002Z

This is what just came up when I tried to run a .mov file using Microsoft's Movie Maker:

"Sorry, Movie Maker can't start."

Why not? Your software must know. Some test was done by Movie Maker and the wrong answer came up, so it bottled out and put this stupid message up instead of telling me what's wrong.

Clicking on the first link took me to a web page that wasn't really very useful. However, it was a beacon of illumination compared to the second link, which took me here:

I gave up and installed QuickTime.

Back in the nineties (before Steve Jobs's return), Scott Adams wrote that Microsoft had turned Apple into Microsoft's R&D division. I sometimes wonder if nowadays Microsoft hasn't morphed into Apple's Marketing division.

Spotify for Android exited after logging In

2012-01-11T12:57:00.000Z

Although I installed Spotify for Android shortly after I bought my Nexus S, I rarely used it; when I have time to listen to something I tend to choose podcasts or audio books. So I couldn't say for sure when the Spotify app stopped working.

The symptoms were that I would start up the app, log in, and a few seconds later it would just quit. No explanation. If I started the app up offline (i.e., no wi-fi or 3G network available), there was no problem, other than not having any music to play. Then as soon as I went online, the Spotify app would crash.

I couldn't find anything about on it on the web, apart from one person who'd 'fixed' it by deleting all their playlists. He suggested it might be due to an awkward character in a song title. This fitted in with my experience, in that the program seemed to crash while synchronising data. Unlike him though, I wasn't prepared to chuck out all my carefully assembled playlists.

But it kept bugging me, and the more I thought about it, the less plausible this seemed. If it was really down to having foreign characters in a title, surely thousands of people would have been hit with this, and Spotify would have quickly fixed it? So maybe it was something else in my playlists. Looking at them on my PC, I noticed that several tracks had a sort of lock icon next to them. In each case the track could no longer be found via a general search, though an alternative version of the track could. I'm guessing that the original track is no longer available, but Spotify is substituting the replacement. So I went through and manually replaced all those tracks. Alas, it had no effect on the Spotify app.

All was not lost: while getting rid of the lock icons, I'd noticed a few 'musical note' icons. These indicate tracks which are local to your device. Could the Spotify app be falling over trying to synchronise music that was on my PC's hard drive? I took all the local music out of my playlists, and my Starred items, and a couple that were in my waiting to play list. And finally my Spotify app managed to start up properly.

So that's the trick: don't have any local files anywhere in your lists. I can log in just fine now. In fact, it's even better than that: I've just noticed I can't seem to log out.

Supplemental: My Android app is bombing out again, and there are no longer any local files in my playlist. So I'm back to square one, or maybe square two, as at least I've established that the problem's something to do with the playlists. I am not giving up on this though: watch this space.

Skipping through YouTube

2012-01-08T12:25:00.002Z

Just read this at LifeHacker, and was completely astonished that something so useful isn't better known. (The original story seems to be here.)

It turns out that you can automatically jump forwards and backwards in a YouTube video by pressing the number keys, 1 to 9. It only works when the video is paused or just about to start, not when it's playing. Pressing 4, say, will take you to the 40% mark in the video. And it's really quick.

On my PC it only works for the normal number keys, not the ones on the numeric keypad. However, in verifying that just now, I've also noticed that you can also use the arrow keys and Home/End to navigate through a video.

Now if there was only a shortcut to Pause a video.

Port Forwarding

2012-01-07T15:28:00.000Z

My son asked me to explain port forwarding to him last night: he's trying to set up a Minecraft server on his laptop so that his friends can play on it, but he needed to give them his IP address, and this keeps changing.

As I struggled to explain, I realised that I didn't fully understand port forwarding myself. I could see exactly what his problem was, but even though I've been using the internet for 16 years, it had never occurred to me to really wonder how external computers can communicate with a computer that's inside a local network.

We've cracked the port forwarding problem now, after he found out how to do it on YouTube, and then talked me through configuring our router to forward requests to port 25565 to his server. It turns out that I did know what was going on after all: I'd just never got all the pieces properly together in my head before. Going through this exercise forced me to.

My son is still only eleven, and already I'm having to up my game to keep up with him.

One thing I don't understand: how did our router have an up to date list of possible games built into it? Is this coming from our ISP? Nearly all the games are ones we've never used, so it's unlikely it found out from our own computers.

Upgrading a Nexus S to Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

2012-01-07T15:13:00.001Z

There's been major excitement (albeit very localised excitement) in this house following the news that Nexus S phones would be automatically upgraded to Android 4. However, as the days turned into weeks I began to wonder if I should ignore my phone provider and do the install myself.

I almost went ahead with it over the Xmas holiday, but news reports about Google suspending the process because of unspecified problems made me back off. Yesterday I cracked.

The process was very simple, and took less then ten minutes. I followed these instructions here. There were no incidents, although I would advise you to read all the instructions before setting out. (I have nobody to blame that I didn't read the words "when you see the warning triangle" before I actually saw the warning triangle.)

What's Android 4 like? Well, the Look & Feel of the UI has improved, and it looks like I no longer need a couple of apps because Android now does the job for me. The default Camera app is much better, and there are several other enhancements. Nothing earth-shattering, but perhaps I haven't yet found all the changes. (I only a couple of hours ago found that I can dismiss individual notifications by swiping over them from right to left.)

Now for the downside: I have encountered three problems since I upgraded.

Most worryingly, last night for the first time ever the screen stopped responding to touch. I tried to power it off, but of course couldn't confirm the action. Then, when I pressed the power button to turn off the display, it was still faintly visible. After a few cycles the phone started responding again, so I quickly powered it off fully before it changed its mind. It hasn't done it again since I switched it back on.

Secondly, I've had notifications that Google+ has stopped. Google+ seems to be built-in, because you can't uninstall it. I disabled it instead, in case it's behind the first problem.

Finally, I've twice been told today that my phone provider is unavailable. To be fair this does happen, but not often, so I mention it here for the sake of completeness.

All in all, I do like the new look, but it may take a few days before my confidence in the phone's reliability is fully restored.

A Pniower Map

2012-01-02T14:12:00.000Z

This map hung on my mother's wall for as long as I can remember. It was drawn by her father, the landscape architect Georg Pniower, and I always assumed it was a map of gardens he'd designed, as indicated by the 'P' shaped spade handles.

Looking at it again yesterday I noticed for the first time that the writing on the left is in verse. Now I wonder if it was some sort of puzzle ('for 1939'). My German isn't good enough for me to be able to transcribe the writing accurately without considerable effort, and even then I've noticed that Google Translate can be very poor when given poetry to work on. I'm posting it here in the hope that someone can one day shed light on it.

In 1939 my grandfather was no longer officially designing parks and gardens, the Nazi regime having long since decided that his Jewish ancestry made him unsuitable for this role. After the war though he became a Professor of Horticulture at Berlin University.

My Neanderthal Past

2011-12-31T12:48:00.000Z

Interesting news from 23andMe, the organisation that sequences your DNA and reports on your genetic health risks. As a side benefit they can find out information about your ancestors, and this time they've really surpassed themselves. It turns out that 2.9% of my DNA is Neanderthal, a species that Homo Sapiens parted company with tens of thousands of years ago. Seems that some of my ancestors kept in touch though.

That was all a long time ago, so I'm happy to put aside the shame and let bygones be bygones. In any case, the average value for 23andMe customers is 2.5%, and Homo Neanderthalensis are no longer believed to have been the slow-witted brutes we once thought. In related news, I do not appear to have any Native American ancestors, and they reckon I'm ten times more likely to have ancestors from Ireland and Poland than from Britain.

Even though I've got a reasonable understanding of how scientists come by this information, I'm still staggered that it's possible at all. The lives of people who've been dead for hundreds of years are now being illuminated again. As their descendants discover their common ancestors, we can deduce where and when these people might have lived, even how many children they might have had. And this science is still in its infancy.

Why is it so hard to buy extra RAM?

2011-11-18T20:22:00.001Z

As I mentioned in a recent post, I managed to buy a PC with only half the RAM I'd intended, following some carelessness by PC World and a lack of checking by myself. I decided to buy the missing 2GB of memory using the £80 refund PC World gave me.

First, I opened up my PC to look at the memory slots. There were two, one of them empty. I carefully took out the RAM board to look for a product code or something that would let me order a new one. As has happened every time I've tried this in the past, all I could find were several very long numbers, which might mean something to the manufacturer, but certainly don't mean anything to me. I carefully made a note of what the RAM looked like, put it back in, and booted up my PC. (With a quick check in case it now thought it had 0GB.)

Why the manufacturers make it so hard to order more of their product is beyond me. Maybe not enough PC owners get round to installing extra RAM, or maybe they are actually providing all the information I need, but I'm just too ignorant to work out what they're telling me.

Whatever.

Onto Lenovo's web site; surely they would be able to tell me what RAM to order. No, they mentioned the H420, but I couldn't find a spec for it. A colleague mentioned Crucial, who list loads of PCs and the memory they need. They had several Lenovos, but not mine. That's what comes of buying a new model, I guess. Then I read about a free program you could download that tells you all the intimate details of your machine. I won't give you its name, because their web site managed to trick me into downloading and installing a completely different program, which also changed my default search engine in all three browsers I've got installed, as well as insinuating itself via unwanted toolbars and start up settings. It goes by the name of iLivid, and I've been seeing tempting download ads for it all over the place recently. That might just be ad servers spotting I've got a cookie from it though. uLivid would be a better name for it. I thought I'd managed to get rid of it last week, but I found today that it had got back into IE9. The icing on the cake was that the program I was looking for claimed it was getting incorrect values from Lenovo, and couldn't really be sure what RAM I needed. I uninstalled that too.

While reading up furiously about the different types of RAM available (including the bizarre discovery that 10600 and 10700 mean the same thing, because it's actually 10666 but vendors round it up or down in case the '666' puts people off), I came across a company called Orca based in Surrey. They also had a memory checker facility, which couldn't tell me about my model (although I see it now can), but which did offer me the chance to e-mail for help. I told them my model number and hoped for the best.

It was a Saturday, so I was more than a little surprised to get a reply at 16.45 telling me exactly what I needed to know, and even pointing me into their on-line catalogue where I could order the new RAM. It turned up earlier this week, and is now sitting comfortably inside its slot, working just fine.

Now that's service!

And just for the record, the Lenovo H420 takes 240-Pin DDR3 DIMM PC3-10600 (1333MHz).

Yes at the Apollo

2011-11-18T16:13:00.001Z

Down to Hammersmith Apollo last night to see Yes in concert. The last time I saw them it was on their 90125 tour, so quite a while ago now. Three of the band must be in their sixties, and their lead singer has been replaced by a more youthful version, but the magic was definitely still there.

Going to see a band that came to fame in the early 1970's is an odd experience: the fans are largely the same people who went to their concerts forty years ago. I'm in my fifties, but I was far from the oldest there. And what a white, aging, middle-class audience we made. As I was in Circle, row S, for the first time ever I decided to take my long distance glasses with me. I needed them too.

The Apollo is enormous, but Yes seemed to have sold it out. There was an empty seat in front of me (and I would like to thank whatever virus or mechanical defect made that possible), but otherwise the place looked chock full. I hadn't been there since a Hawkwind concert in the mid-eighties, when it still the Hammersmith Odeon, though I've seen it on telly since, of course.

The music was excellent, with the performances seeming to get better and better as the show progressed. A third to a half of it was off their latest album, 'Fly from Here'. I'm a dedicated Yes fan, but even I have to admit that much of their studio output over the last 25 years or so has been very disappointing. 'Fly from Here' is a real gem though, and all the better for being so unexpected.

When I first got to know Yes, in 1976, I started to hunt down their albums in record shops. I had no idea what they'd produced, and for a couple of years I could still come across albums I hadn't heard of. Nowadays when I discover a group or artist I like, I google them and immediately learn their entire discography. Chances are they're on Spotify, so I can straight away start listening to them too.

It is so easy to consume music now, but some part of the thrill of discovery is gone forever.

We welcome our 4000th visitor

2011-11-13T18:00:00.001Z

Sometime today this blog clocked up its 4000th page view. (Not that I've been checking every day for the last week.) Given that I started The Wrong Side of 50 in June 2009, I'm obviously not setting the internet on fire yet, and over a third of my hits came from the death threat story. Still, I feel I can give myself a gentle pat on the back for sticking at it this long.

And thanks also to everyone who's visited here. From the page stats Google gives me, a lot of you are just trying to find technical fixes, but that's okay, as one of my main reasons for starting this blog was to post knowledge I wished I could find somewhere else.

Speaking of the stats, can anyone explain what happened on October 28? The day before I got 6 visits, the day after a more typical 2. But on the 28th itself there were suddenly 104 visits. And Russia shows up as the most popular source of visitors. (I have a picture of some poor Russian Nexus S owner trying to connect their phone to Windows XP, returning over and over again to my site, trying to make sense of my notes.)

I've averaged a post every couple of weeks, though I have been a bit better in the last couple of months. I shall try to keep up the pace, or even increase it, and maybe I can get to 8000 visits before I hit my 55th birthday.

A Farewell to Windows XP

2011-11-10T18:31:00.000Z

After nearly a decade of using Windows XP, I've finally moved to a more up to date operating system. I am now the proudish owner of a Lenovo H420 running Windows 7 Home.

The excitement of a new computer is always soon tempered by the realisation of how many programs need installing on it, as well as the long slog of getting all your settings correct, and the other long slog of rooting out all the unwanted rubbish that the manufacturer thought you might like. I bought it on a Saturday, but wasn't happy with it until Sunday the following week. (Not that I spent eight solid days on it, mind.)

Mostly it went very smoothly. In the case of Google Chrome, it was almost effortless: as soon as I enabled Chrome Sync, it transferred all my previous settings, and even installed my chosen set of plug-ins. Python was a less happy experience, when I discovered that the last of my essential libraries wasn't available in 64 bit form, and so had to uninstall all the others and start again with the 32 bit versions. I had similar incompatibilities with 64 bit Eclipse and Java. That, though, wasn't my fault, as the Java download page doesn't offer you a choice, and merrily installs the 32 bit version.

By last Sunday most of my treasured functionality was available again; I just had to add a folder to my $PATH variable. I brought up the System section in the control panel, and got two shocks. Incredibly, the editor for environment variables is still the cramped, rubbishy little box it was in the nineties:

How hard would it be to give us a proper dialog for entering these values? Instead you have to type in a list of semicolon-separated folder names, nearly all of which start with 'C:\Program Files' so you quickly get lost if you try scrolling through it. Unbelievable. Contrast that with the improvements made to the 'Extract All' option for zip files: Windows XP brings up a three pane wizard, while Windows 7 sensibly combines these three into a single screen. I cannot believe nobody at Microsoft finds this editor annoying. Maybe it's legacy code that Steve Ballmer wrote, and everyone's too scared to change it.

That was my first shock. The other came when I happened to glance at the installed memory figure. 2.00GB? The PC I ordered had 4GB. And what's this? A Celeron processor, where I thought I had bought an i3 core. Yes, I had managed to come away from PC World with the wrong computer. I'd reserved a £350 Lenovo H420 on their web site, then gone to collect it. They'd given me the £270 version instead. The receipt was okay though!

The details were there to see on the box, but I'd been too busy opening it. And the Intel Inside sticker on the front of the PC did say 'Celeron'. But I put 'desktop' PCs on the floor, so the sticker ended up conveniently situated at carpet level.

PC World offered to wipe the PC I had and give me the correct model. However, as they'd proved incapable of getting the correct box out of their back room I decided against handing over a computer full of my personal details in the hope that they might remember to clean the disc before they sold it on. Also, after all the work I'd put in getting the PC up and running, I was in no mood to go back to square one. In the end I settled for a refund of the difference in price. The main reason for buying the computer in the first place was to get some more speed, and this machine seems fast enough.

Here's some advice for PC World at Clifton Moor, York: when someone comes to pick up reserved goods, wipe the goods through your barcode scanner, not the reservation paperwork. As to Lenovo, given that a naming system that brings forth such memorable gems as 'H420' allows for 26000 possibilities, maybe you could try not giving two different computers the same model number. As for me, I've learned the importance of reading the label before opening the box.

How to Stop AutoHotkey from sticking the Shift Key

2011-11-03T12:51:00.000Z

AutoHotkey is an excellent little program I've mentioned before that lets you define keyboard shortcuts and automatic corrections to your typing. I set it up so that typing Ctrl + Shift + F12 would insert the current date as a text string. Then, when I open my day book (formerly a Word document, now in the Google cloud), I can quickly insert the heading for today. That worked fine. Then I decided to improve it, so that it would start by moving to the end of the document, and also add a newline at the end. Now, not so good. Sure, it moved to the end, and it inserted the correct text. However, afterwards my PC acted as thought the control and shift keys were being held stuck down.

I could clear the problem by actually pressing the keys myself, but this was hardly an elegant solution. After a bit of research I believe that this is an AutoHotkey bug. I present this workaround:


SendMode Input

; - Insert Date Time stamp
+^$F12::
   KeyWait, Shift
   KeyWait, Ctrl
   FormatTime, xx,, dddd d MMMM yyyy
   Send ^{End}%xx%{Enter}
Return

That fixed it for me. Now I just need it to put the date into bold italic.

Getting Comfortable with Eclipse

2011-10-24T19:23:00.000+01:00

I started using Eclipse recently. I'd tried and given up twice before, because the learning curve is quite steep and my heart wasn't really in it. This time I persevered, and now definitely see its advantages.

I'm been a Visual Studio user for over a decade, and most of my problems with Eclipse were to do with the dissimilarities between the two. It was quite tempting to change all the key settings to make Eclipse look like Visual Studio, but decided to forbear and take the hit of learning a new set of commands. With a bit of searching around under Windows > Preferences > General > Keys I managed to find equivalents for most of the functionality I was used to in VS2010. One command escaped me though: typing Ctrl + C to copy the current line onto the clipboard. There is no native Eclipse equivalent for this; the best you can do is move to the start of the line, highlight the line, then copy. However, someone else had also found this a problem, but unlike me, they came up with a solution.

You need to visit this page and follow the instructions. (On Windows, the 'dropins' folder is in the 'eclipse' folder; presumably something similar for Mac and Linux.) Restart Eclipse and Ctrl + C will work as it used to.

My thanks to the author of this drop-in. I have to point out that, for my setup at least, it's not working for HTML and CSS files. Python and JavaScript are perfect though.

Listening at the Double

2011-10-23T14:57:00.000+01:00

The excellent Lifehacker sent me to the somewhat bizarre Buddha Machine Wall. This web site lets you blend short loops of "Buddhist temple music" together, making an ambient soundscape to cut out surrounding distractions. Although you'd think it would get repetitive and annoying, I've managed to play it for hours: it does shut out the surroundings, and in addition I don't even notice it after a few minutes. This is a lot better than my usual technique of listening to music, which does affect my concentration (though not as much as some of the noise going on in my office).

However, it does feel like a waste. When I listen to Spotify, getting to know new albums, I feel as if I'm doing something productive. Ironic, as all I'm doing is consuming, but there you are. Just listening to a wall of sound doesn't cut it.

It would have once, but I think my problem now is a continual feeling that I'm not processing information as fast as I should.

To help with this, I've started listening to podcasts and audio books at higher speeds. Both BeyondPod, my podcast app, and Audible both let you play at a variety of faster (or lower) speeds. I tend to stick between 1.25 and 1.5 times normal speed. Any faster than that and it's too easy to lose the thread. It doesn't work for music, unsurprisingly, and it's not very good for comedy,where timing is all important, but otherwise it works really well. Now the challenge is to train myself up to be able to listen at x2.

How We Know that Precognition Doesn't Exist

2011-10-23T13:35:00.001+01:00

Although in my youth I was quite sympathetic towards the possibility of ESP, the continued lack of consistent evidence turned me away from it. That, plus the realisation that, if phenomena such as telepathy were possible, they would confer a huge survival advantage on any creature possessing, so natural selection would ensure that they were as widespread as, say, the sense of smell.

In the case of precognition, the ability to see the future, there is an even better argument against its existence. Many countries around the world hold lotteries, in which the participants have to guess which numbers are going to turn up in a draw. If precognition was a real power, even one that was only held by a small percentage of humanity, and then not even very reliably, still the effect would be visible in lottery results.

The lottery organisations would be the first to notice that more people were winning than chance would allow. Rollovers would be almost unheard of, and jackpots would routinely be shared between many winners. In the UK, guessing just three numbers out of six gets you a £10 prize.Even someone whose precognitive powers were only right half the time should be able to scoop up prizes week after week.

None of this happens. Unless it goes hand in hand with a profound aversion to gambling, I think it's reasonable to conclude that precognition does not exist.

Sometimes You Already Know the Answer

2011-10-21T18:45:00.000+01:00

Funny how I sometimes manage to install really useful stuff on my PC and then forget all about it.

Months ago I downloaded Dropbox onto my PCs at home and work, and on my Nexus S. I got them going, but couldn't think of anything much I needed to transfer or share just then, and time did the rest. Dropbox became just an icon on my desktop.

A few months ago I was reflecting on how annoying it was that I had to remember to take my portable disc drive home every Friday so that I could run SuperMemo at home over the weekend. A penny faintly dropped in the background: what if I put the SuperMemo files into Dropbox? Then I wouldn't need the portable drive at all. Five minutes later I was set up; the hardest bit was remembering the Dropbox password.

Another example. I have AutoHotkey running on my PC. A really useful program, though a complete b*gg*r to configure, thanks to its highly cryptic scripting language. I used it to set up keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, Explorer, et al. so that, for instance, typing Ctrl + Alt + F in Explorer will convert it to Folders view. It can also correct typing errors on the fly (in any program), which is useful if you make consistent mistakes. For instance, I very often type my first name as 'CHarles'. AutoHotkey corrects that. (In fact it did it just now; I had to edit the 'h' manually.) I was very enthusiastic about AutoHotkey for a few weeks, but once I'd put in all the obvious shortcuts, it went out of my mind.

Last month it stopped working, after I'd rearranged some folders. (I noticed when I signed an e-mail wrongly.) Easy enough to get it going again, but having been drawn to my attention again, I thought of some more useful shortcuts I could add to it. So now, instead of entering my full e-mail address, I can just type 'c@' and AutoHotkey fills in the rest (as indeed it just did). Other user names I frequently use are also now shortcutted, and when I'm writing JavaScript programs, I can type 'jq' instead of 'jQuery', which saves more time than you might think.

I did these new shortcuts at work, then realised it would be nice to have them at home as well. If only there was some way of sharing the two AutoHotKey config files. Oh, wait...

50% Increase in My foursquare Friends

2011-10-20T19:01:00.000+01:00

Okay, so there are now three of them.

I have a fairly tentative approach to social applications. I'm not on Facebook, and my Twitter account remains untweeted. But I thought I'd give foursquare a go, and I've been on it for a few weeks now, dutifully checking in whenever I remember, so that my two friends (who incidentally live miles from York) will know where I am (usually a long way away). Not very useful yet, though I can see how it could be if I could just reach that critical mass of friends. It's not helped that so few of my non-virtual friends have smartphones.

However, the price of smartphones will continue to drop, and in no great time they will presumably be the norm. Meanwhile I look forward to the time when I can't count all my foursquare friends on the fingers of one hand. Maybe when that happens foursquare will give me a badge?

Do it Yourself Internet Radio

2011-10-19T18:25:00.001+01:00

I rarely listen to the radio unless I'm in the car, or cooking. In the kitchen we have a DAB radio, which I usually tune to Jazz FM or, on the suspiciously large number of times when Jazz FM isn't actually playing jazz, Planet Rock. A few days ago I happened to notice that the DAB radio had a USB port on the side. I still don't know why it needs this, but it got me thinking again about getting an Internet radio. Trouble is, they start at around the £100 mark, which seems a bit steep, particularly as, a recent All About Android podcast informed me, I could listen to internet radio for free on my mobile phone with the TuneIn Radio app.

A lightbulb came on inside my head (and not one of the longlife ones, which take a few minutes to warm up) What if I plugged my mobile's earphone socket into something with a speaker? I'd have my own internet radio.

(Or I could listen to my mobile through earphones. However, for some reason listening to music in a world of my own without disturbing anyone else is deemed more anti-social than playing it out loud for everyone to hear.)

My first attempt was the Sound Traveller universal USB speaker. Not very expensive, but unfortunately not very loud either, and the sound was a bit tinny. I had much more success with E-volve MP3 Vibe-Dock Home portable speaker system. This runs off the mains, and has an excellent sound for £25. It has a USB outlet, so it can charge my phone up even as the phone streams music at it. I've tried this once, and the speaker system started to give off a faint smell of overheating electronics, so I'll probably use that feature sparingly. Bizarrely, the system also has an earphone socket, though why I should ever need that I can't begin to imagine.

So now I can listen to radio stations from around the world in the kitchen, and the question comes down to choosing which station to listen to. Or whether to listen at all. I have Spotify on my mobile, which lets me listen to millions of songs. I could build the playlist of my choice and listen to that instead. (Or not, because it seems that the Spotify app now bombs out a few seconds after logging in. Tried reinstalling it, but no luck. Haven't used it for months, so no idea when this behaviour started, and may have to wait until it just as mysteriously stops. Anyway, I reckon my argument still stands.)

Radio listening has the advantage of serendipity, plus I always find that music I know sounds much better when someone else chooses to play it. However, the amount of access we now have to music creates a new variation of the old question, "What do you give to someone who has everything?"

What a Difference a Gym Makes

2011-10-13T19:09:00.000+01:00

I got into gyms comparatively late in life, in my mid-forties. At school gym was about the last place I wanted to find myself. No, on second thoughts it was totally the last place I wanted to find myself. I said goodbye to PE at age 18 and never regretted it. Then I read Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman. 'Forever' sounded a bit optimistic, but I was enthused enough to alter my lifestyle in several ways, including putting a bit more exercise into it. I joined the gym near my place of work.

Last month my employer moved location, and the formerly local gym is now remote. Swallowing my tears as I discovered its mandatory three month cancellation period (bast**ds!), I said goodbye and joined the gym nearest our new site.

It's smaller, and several pieces of equipment I'd grown used to are no longer available, and there's a wall with a notice telling me not to use it as a support "for my own safety" (and to prevent me dislodging any more of its loose plaster), but I can ignore all that. Even the fact that they have communal showers (shades of school again).

No, what's bugging me is the average age of my fellow gymnasts (is that the right word?). At the last one, many of the clients were well into their retirement. I could comfortingly reflect on how I was still the Right Side of 60. In the new place I seem to be one of the oldest people there. It's early days, and maybe I'm just having a wrong first impression, but it seems that, rather than being surrounded by people trying to get fit, I now find myself among the already perfectly fit, annoyingly attempting to get even fitter.

The Dell Laxative Utility

2011-09-22T18:37:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago I was moving my Dell PC around, which involved unplugging all the cables from the back. When I'd finished, everything worked except the Forward and Back buttons on my Dell mouse. That was a nuisance because I use them instinctively to navigate my way through Google Chrome. I checked in the Device Manager, and the mouse was showing up as a vanilla device. Attempts to fix the problem in the Control Panel were ineffective. Unplugging and replugging the mouse failed to bring up any 'New Hardware Found' dialog that might have let me attack the problem.

So I let it rest.

Until today, when I decided enough was enough. It occurred to me that Dell might have the solution. When the PC was brand new there were several Dell applications lying around, which I quickly bundled off the desktop and forgot about. Maybe one of them could help. What was this I found? The 'Driver Reset Tool'. That could be just what I was looking for. I launched it.

There was a pause, and then a small dialog popped up telling me that my ethernet port was disabled. It offered me three choices: Yes, No, Cancel. Well, I had indeed disabled the port when I went wireless, so I clicked Yes. Another pause, another dialog: Nokia phone disabled. I clicked Yes again. Again the pause, then a dialog that just said, "EN?" (I should add that the last two dialogs had also started with "EN". I presume it meant 'ENglish'.) There was only a Yes button this time, so I dismissed the dialog. A final pause, and then the PC shut itself down.

Years of working with computers has left me with a certain amount of intuition about what's going to happen next. I was not feeling good about this.

The shutdown finished, and the reboot started. It got as far as 'Press F2 for Setup and F12 for System Menu'. I did, repeatedly. Could I possibly have reset the drivers so much that the keyboard wasn't working? No, surely we hadn't got that far yet. In any case, that wouldn't stop the auto-boot from finishing. I decided to power it off, count to ten, and try again: same result.

At this point I had to answer a sudden call of nature.

When I got back the reboot was under way. Much slower than normal, but everything eventually came back, and here I am typing it all up. The only thing I've had to fix so far is the annoying 'network unplugged' icon which had reappeared in the system tray.

Chastened by my near death experience, I decided to ask Google if anyone else had had this problem. Hysterical laughter: it seems it's a recent bug in Google Chrome. Sure enough, the mouse is working perfectly well in Internet Explorer.

I guess there's a lesson here, but I'm still too close to appreciate it.

Cheating in Audio

2011-09-18T17:05:00.000+01:00

I started listening to audiobooks a couple of years ago, through the admirable Audible company. I mostly listen to the books while cycling home, which makes it difficult to skip back a few seconds when my concentration slips and I miss a bit. I soon realised that this mode of reading is more suitable for fiction than non-fiction. The mind-blowing 'Decoding Reality' really deserves a re-listen in less distracting circumstances, while '50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know' I gave up around number 15, after a near miss turning onto Haxby Road while using rather less of my brain than I really ought to have.

For stories though, it's ideal, and I'm using it to catch up on authors I might otherwise never have found the time for, or getting through the complete works of Stieg Larsson (sadly only three).

I had one worry though: is listening to a novel rather than reading it cheating?

Recently I was sat down with a real book, 'Use of Weapons' by Iain M. Banks. It's one of his Culture novels (masterpieces of SF, if you've never tried them), and I stopped to count the ones I'd already read. I knew there were three, and that one of them was an audiobook. The interesting thing was that I couldn't remember which of the three was the one I'd listened to. As far as my memory was concerned, I had the internal 'soundtracks' of three novels, and I couldn't tell the difference in quality between the one I'd heard through my earphones and the ones I'd made up myself as I read the written words.

So as far as I'm concerned, the answer is 'No: audiobooks are not cheating'. At least, it isn't for me. The end result in my memory seems to be exactly the same, except that I can now combine some of the more tedious parts of my life with probably my favourite hobby.

4' 33"

2011-09-08T12:56:00.000+01:00

Listened to John Cage's famous piece, 4' 33", today on Spotify.

When I first heard about this piece, I thought it had a certain mathematical interest, for if you think of compositions as being ordered sets of notes, then this would be an empty set. The visual equivalent might be a TV program that showed a blank screen for its whole duration. That was when I assumed that 4' 33" would be four minutes 33 seconds of total silence. Far from it.

In fact, the subtlety of 4' 33" is that it has to be performed by a real life performer. Frank Zappa once covered it, for instance. Thus if you listen carefully, you can hear the creaks of the performer's chair, and maybe the odd clearing of the performer's throat. Presumably on live recordings there is audience noise to add to the interest.

I said I listened to it, but actually I gave up at 0' 28", faced with the prospect of wasting another 4' 05" of my life. I've just seen the piece referred to as 4' 33" - 3 parts: 30" / 2' 23" / 1' 40", so perhaps I should have soldiered on into part 2. However, I think I got the rough gist.

E F Schumacher's book "A Guide for the Perplexed" introduced me to the idea of "adequatio", meaning that sometimes you're simply not adequate to the task of appreciating something. It's a good concept to take to heart, and I can think of many examples of art that I initially couldn't see the point of, but now really enjoy; Jazz and Opera spring to mind. They didn't change: instead I became adequate to the job of listening to them.

In the case of 4' 33" though, I'm not sure if I will ever find myself adequate. Like the artists who works consist of piles of rubbish or unmade beds, I kind of feel that the only talent Cage needed to produce 4' 33" was the ability to keep a straight face.

Oddly, Spotify claimed the running time was 4' 39".

Getting a Nexus S to connect to a PC running Windows XP

2011-07-28T19:21:00.000+01:00

In an effort to prevent anyone else going through the misery and frustration I've just experienced, I will now document the steps I had to go through to get my Nexus S to talk to my PC.

Obviously I'm not talking about seeing the phone's file system as an external drive; I mean having the phone show up in the Device Manager so that you can try your hand at developing on it. Sparing you all the false starts and dead ends that I went through, and assuming you've already installed the Android SDK and have a USB cable that fits into the phone, proceed as follows:

Start up the Android SDK Manager.
See if 'Google USB Driver Package' is listed under Installed Packages.
If it isn't, it should be under Available Packages. Select it and click the Install Selected button
Enable debugging on the phone in Settings/Applications/Development.
Disconnect the phone's USB cable, then reconnect it.
The PC should report having found a new device, and bring up a wizard to ask you whether you want to install a driver. Cancel out of this wizard.
Go into Device Manager (right click My Computer and select Manage), and find the phone under 'Unknown devices'. Right click on it and select Properties/Details. Note the two four-digit numbers after VID_ and PID_.
Open the file C:\Program Files\Android\android-sdk\extras\google\usb_driver\android_winusb.inf for editing.
Add in an entry for the Nexus S, using the VID and PID revealed from the device manager. It should look like this:

    ; Google Nexus S
    %SingleAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_XXXX&PID_YYYY
    %CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_XXXX&PID_YYYY&MI_01

The values of XXXX and YYYY you should have noted down above in step 7.

Now use the Device Manager to Update Driver for the phone, telling the wizard to search in the C:\Program Files\Android\android-sdk\extras\google\usb_driver folder.

In the Device Manager, the Nexus S should now move from 'Unknown devices' to 'Android Phone'.

Of course, for you any one of these steps might go wrong. However, even then I hope this blogpost might give you the clues you need to get to your goal.

A Sign of the Times

2011-06-18T19:43:00.000+01:00

No posts for weeks, and then three come along! This one's been on my mind for a while though.

We moved our wireless router recently. No longer sat on my desk, it's now attached to the wall at the bottom of the stairs. I'm moving room soon, which was the principle reason for moving it, but in any case it was becoming inconvenient to keep it there. Without noticing it happen, we now have no less than nine devices that connect to the internet by wi-fi: three computers, two mobile phones, two game consoles, a TV and even a printer.

When the router first arrived in our house, the Wi-Fi was almost an optional extra. The main PC plugged straight into it, and only my wife's laptop needed wireless. Slowly the creep began, driven more by manufacturers pushing wireless into their devices than by us seeking it out. Every time we upgrade a machine now, it seems that it comes with internet access.

All this is probably just the beginning, if the Internet of Things is to be believed. For now I'm just amused that our household routine has acquired a slight alteration after all these years: the last thing to do before bedtime is no longer checking the front door, it's making sure the router's turned off.

Searching by Image

2011-06-18T19:28:00.001+01:00

Google Images now lets you search by image instead of keywords. You can give it an image and it returns images that look similar, at least to its algorithms. I immediately put it to the test by giving it my mugshot from Stack Overflow. Hmm. Mostly women, with a few babies thrown in. It seems to be having more luck noticing that I'm wearing a black shirt than that I'm male.

Maybe it's because the photo I gave it has the top of my head cropped off? I try the mugshot from this blog. This time it successfully finds web articles containing that same photo, and also comes up with a few faces that do look vaguely like me. Not sure what Angelina Jolie's doing in there though.

Okay, clearly these are early days for this technology, but I applaud what they're trying to do. I look forward to the day when it's so reliable that it can spot family resemblances. That would make a useful complement to the Relative Finder in 23andMe. Another search engine I would like to see is one that let's you hum a few notes of a song and then tells you what it is. Targeted ads could include places to buy the song, or Singing Lessons if it thinks you're off tune.

Jazz FM Reaches Yorkshire

2011-06-18T18:57:00.000+01:00

Spinning the stations dial on our DAB radio last night, I was delighted to find, lurking among the pop channels and the dubious attractions of the numerous Christian stations (who listens to all these?), a newcomer to the Yorkshire area: Jazz FM. Seems they went national in March, but this was the first I've heard of it.

I bought the radio back in early 2008 in order to listen to "theJazz", which dutifully went t*tsup a couple of months later. Since then I've mostly listened to Planet Rock, where music from my youth is played by DJs even older than me. And though I really enjoy Rock, I honestly wouldn't miss Heavy Metal, so Jazz FM will make a nice alternative refuge for me when I'm not in the mood for pounding, endless guitar solos.

It may also save me a bit of money, as I'd been wondering for a while if I could justify buying an Internet Radio in order to get access to Jazz again. The main thing that had held me back was not the price, but the enormous choice I would have been presented with. A simple decision like Planet Rock or Jazz FM I can cope with, but when the choice is pretty well every radio station on the planet, my listening pleasure might be ruined by the continual worry that there was something better on the next channel.

Speeding up Firefox and Firebug

2011-05-07T15:33:00.000+01:00

Last Thursday Firefox stopped working for me. Not on the web, but in a web-based user interface that I help to develop as part of my job. Every time I tried to login, the program would hang.

At first I assumed it was my fault, but by a process of slow elimination I tracked the problem down to the Firebug add-in. This is Firefox's debugger, and pretty well indispensable, so I had to get it working again. I won't bore readers any more with descriptions of all the dead ends I went down, but here for posterity is the fix.

I had to create a new Firefox profile (by default you have called 'default'). From the command line, type:

firefox -profilemanager

This brings up a simple dialog that lets you create a new profile. Of course, Firefox now looks like you've just installed it for the first time, so you have to restore any settings you want, and reinstall your add-ins. However, it fixed my problem, and Firefox/Firebug now appear blisteringly fast (I believe the program had been silting up for quite a while). It also got rid of the many incomprehensible warning messages that Firebug had been sticking into the console log since I upgraded to Firefox 4.

On Watching 2001: A Space Odyssey Again

2011-04-30T19:05:00.000+01:00

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on DVD last night. The disc was in one of those 3 for £20 deals a few years ago, but I'd never got round to playing it as I'd seen it several times before. Which begs the question of why I bought it, but it was reduced, so it seemed like I was saving money. Anyway, it was quite a few years since I'd last seen the film, so I put it on.

2001 is now ten years in the past, but when it was made it was thirty-three years in the future. Humanity was due to land on the moon the following year, and the film's writers, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, saw no reason why we wouldn't continue pushing on into space. So as far as the space technology goes, the film could easily be retitled 2101: A Space Odyssey, as the space station and spaceships in the film are decades ahead of anything we've got in 2011. They also had Artificial General Intelligence in the form of the HAL9000 series computer. This had a supposedly fault-free record, but went on to murder four people (the QA department having rather dropped the ball there, I feel). AGI is still far off in the real world, though some experts think it will come in the first half of this century.

Other aspects of the futuristic technology in the film have lost their power to surprise. The videophone call from the space station, for instance. Granted, they seemed to have more bandwidth than I've seen Skype use, but in principle we could do that now. And the computer controls were very little advanced from what was around in 1968 when the film was made: lots of flashing lights and large, square illuminated buttons. Not a touch screen in sight.

All that apart, the film still conveyed that sense of wonder that blew my mind when I first saw it age 12. And the beauty, grace and remoteness of space, that was still there too.

My Genes and Me

2011-04-24T20:03:00.001+01:00

A few weeks ago Matt Ridley, the Rational (but possibly a bit over-) Optimist, wrote a blog entry condemning moves in the US to block people getting their genomes decoded. Apparently doctors over there feel that this should only be possible by going through them. There are actually strong arguments for this, as the field of Personal Genomics is still very immature, we don't understand a lot of what our DNA can tell us, and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, particularly when placed in the hands of the health-conscious types who would go to the bother of having their genome sequenced. Nevertheless, I agreed with the thrust of his argument that it's our DNA, and we should be allowed to get it sequenced if we want to.

He was going to make a stand by getting his own DNA sequence through an American company called 23andMe, a name I've bumped into on several occasions in the last few months, in podcasts, blogs and articles. I had understood that the cost was still in the tens of thousands but, intrigued, I made my own way over to the site. Turns out that for just $199 + $60 postage I could get my genome sequenced. I couldn't resist, and ordered the testing kit. (And now I see they've reduced it to $99. Oh well, that's actually to my long term benefit, if it encourages more people to get it done.)

It arrived almost immediately, and I dutifully filled up a test tube with spit, put it into the courier pouch and sent it back. "Six to eight weeks", they said, but it was nearer three. I got the e-mail telling me the results were ready, and nervously logged into their website.

I should add at this point that they don't really sequence the whole 3 billion base pairs of your DNA: just stretches where there is useful knowledge to be gained. And even in these areas they're not looking at all possible deviations, just what are called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), where a single base is altered. Despite this they have dozens of comparisons they can make, all rated according to the confidence you can have in the research behind them.

I looked at the Health Results first. These could have contained seriously bad news, but in fact there are only three conditions for which I have a substantially increased risk (other than ones where the base risk is really low to start with), and for all three there's nothing much you can do to avoid them that I wasn't already doing. The worst offender was prostrate cancer, for which a diet rich in tomatoes may be effective. Or may not. Either way, my food is going to look considerably redder from now on. I will also make sure that the doctor doesn't skip the prostrate check again when I have my annual health check up. (It may not be much fun for them, but then it's no picnic for me either.) On the plus side, they think I have a significantly reduced chance of developing Alzheimer's, which could be very useful if the retirement age keeps going up.

In the section about heritable conditions, it seems I am not a carrier for anything they can test. Good news for my son. In the section about traits they successfully managed to give me only a typical chance of having the two that I know for certain I do have. They said the same about the one medical condition I have, which does make me wonder a bit about how accurate the diagnoses are. However, part of the payment is a $5 a month subscription, so I can keep up to date with new medical advances.

Finally, I went to what turned out to be the most interesting section of all: my ancestry. They anonymously match you up with any close relatives who've also been tested, and you can make contact with any that want to be contacted. The nearest they found for me are (probable) fourth cousins, which means we share a common great-great-great-grandparent. That's quite a way back; however, as more and more people join 23andMe (no doubt tempted by the new low price), the chances of bumping into a closer relative increase accordingly.

Even more fascinating was the tracking of my paternal and maternal lines. On my father's side I seem to be descended from someone in Britain, Ireland or the Basque country. Sounds plausible enough. However, on my mother's side I can trace my line to a group made up principally of Ashkenazi Jews, Kurds and Druze. For geographical reasons I am inclined to rule out the Kurds and the Druze, so that means I am probably, and I have to admit unexpectedly, partly Jewish.

Strictly speaking, what it really means is that my mitochondria are Jewish, as they're what carry the DNA that is passed down from mother to daughter, and the mother to daughter line is only one of thousands of possible ways you can follow your family tree backwards, so the total Jewish part of my DNA might be very small. However, I find myself considerably amused by this: I was adopted as a baby, and because my birth mother was a Catholic I was entrusted to a (nominally) Catholic family. My adopted mother had converted to Catholicism when she married my father, but had been brought up a Lutheran. Her father though was partly Jewish. So all things come around.

Next time, remember the shift key

2011-04-16T19:51:00.000+01:00

Just bought an internet-enabled TV. We had to also buy a £75 (!!) wi-fi dongle to connect it to our router, and it didn't work. Very annoying, as a laptop, my smartphone, and a Nintendo 3DS had all connected effortlessly in recent weeks. The error report from the TV was quite basic: 'Failed'. It did at least confirm that it could see the dongle, and our router, but no indication of why it couldn't connect.

I went on to the web and googled "Sony Bravia wireless connection problem". Loads of people in the same boat, but no solutions, other than a couple of people for whom it had just started working eventually. One guy wanted me to go into my router and start setting DNS settings. I think not.

After half an hour of trying to set the TV's IP address manually, changing the wi-fi channel, and moving the router into the living room, I gave up for the night.

Today my 11 year old son has a go. He converts the letters in our SSID to uppercase, and suddenly the TV is on the net. I am more than a little bit miffed, and not because I've been outsmarted by someone four decades younger than me (I've grown used to that). Those letters in the SSID are hex digits, so it shouldn't matter if they're uppercase, lowercase or in bold italics. And if it does make a difference, why did the TV let us enter in lowercase in the first place? Am I missing something?

Anyway, that's behind us now. Tonight we will spend the evening watching YouTube videos from the comfort of our living room. Truly this is the Golden Age for nerds.

BT decides it's not so good to talk after all

2011-03-20T20:22:00.000Z

One of my other hats is Secretary to an Out of School Club. To save funds we decided to get rid of our BT land line and just use a cheap mobile phone on Pay as You Go. Our manager rang BT up to cancel our line, failed, and asked me if I'd have a go. "No problem", I confidently, and wrongly, answered.

First I rang the 0800 number on our bill. The automated answer system didn't have cancellations among its numerous options, so I aimed for the nearest one (getting new facilities on your line), and got straight through to an operator. He was not happy to speak to me about cancelling. We don't handle that here; you need to ring 0800 800 871. I did, and a polite voice thanked me for ringing BT but informed me that the number was no longer in use. I should ring 0800 800 152 instead.

Apart from the annoyance of being given a wrong number by someone whose job is to help BT customers (even outgoing ones?), would it have killed BT to automatically redirect me? I mean, they should have access to this advanced technology, what with them being a phone company.

By now realising why I had ended up with this job, I rang the new number. I had to negotiate with a voice recognition program, but we established that I wanted to cancel my line and I was put into a queue. Turned out they were 'exceptionally busy', but if I held on long enough, hell would eventually freeze over and someone would talk to me. I gave up after ten minutes.

The next day I tried again, this time having taken the precaution of emptying my bladder first in anticipation of a long wait. I was not to be disappointed. Twenty minutes this time, before the phone against my ear got so hot I gave up from the sheer discomfort. I really find it hard to imagine that there were so many people queuing that long in front of me; nobody at the other end sounded much more likely. I decided to ring again, but this time to request changing my direct debit details (from having one to not having one). The cursed automated system got the better of me: it wanted me to key in the new direct debit amount without reference to a human operator.

Back to the original sales number: two rings and I was through to a human being. Without giving him time to start his spiel, I told him my story of woe and begged for assistance. Now for the happy ending: although BT as a company seems to have little respect for its customers, its staff are made of better stuff. In a few minutes the cancellation was in progress, and I even had a ten digit reference number to take home.

Of course, it could all still go pair-shaped, sending me back to square one, and the overall experience has left a bad taste in my mouth. BT don't provide an address you can write to, their web site doesn't mention cancellations, and the phone number they provide for this doesn't seem to be staffed. You could almost imagine ...

Biggles Flies Again

2011-02-27T15:31:00.000Z

My son has just started reading a Biggles book. I used to collect the works of Capt W E Johns when I was roughly his age, but 'Biggles Defies the Swastika' is one of the few of those books that I can even vaguely remember. Biggles is in Norway in 1940 planning what aid Britain could provide in the event of a German invasion, when the Germans actually do invade, and he has to get out of the country posing as a Norwegian nazi. Quite how he hid his clipped British accent I forget.

I was surprised to see that the book was published in 1941, when it would have been extremely topical. In fact, given the lead times for publication, I wonder if Johns's narrative was as overtaken by events as was his hero. I would have read it nearer to 1970, when WW2 already seemed like distant history to me. And yet it was in fact no further in the past than the Falklands War is to me now, an event I can still remember in some detail. On the other hand, to my son the invasion of Norway is as far away as the Boer War was to me as a child.

His previous book was a Star Wars novel. Here we have a shared outlook, although he will never know the sense of wonder audiences experienced in 1977 when we first saw an SF film with decent special effects (pace 2001).

Stumbling Across My Mother

2011-02-27T11:49:00.000Z

Last year I uploaded two photos of my maternal grandfather to this blog. I did it because, although he was slightly famous in his field, Google Image Search can't find a single photo of him.

It took a few weeks, but Google did eventually index the photos--but only for a few days. Since then a search for 'Georg Pniower' will bring up numerous images, including just about every other image on this blog of mine, including screen shots, but not those. I really have no idea of what algorithm Google uses that could exclude photos labelled 'Georg Pniower', while including one of me on the grounds that it lives in the same blog as a post mentioning Pniower.

I tried the search again last week. Still no photos of my grandfather, but imagine my surprise to see my mother, Renate, staring out at me, aged 12: a photo I'd never seen before.

Georg Pniower was half-Jewish, and when the Nazis came to power he and his family came under increasing threat of persecution. For safety he sent his daughter to a boarding school in Surrey set up for the children of refugees from Nazism. Stoatley Rough was a name I remember my mother mentioning often, though I don't think she ever visited it again, even though we only lived in Kent. Someone has created a web site about the school, with photos of the pupils, and so Google have included it in the results for 'Georg Pniower'.

Despite my grandfather's efforts to protect my mother, war broke out during the summer holidays in 1939 when she was back in Germany. Pniower thought twice about bringing her home, but the British Foreign Office reassured him that it would be safe. As we saw in Libya this week, competence is still something the FO aims for.

08080 600832

2011-02-26T17:13:00.001Z

This number has been ringing my mobile phone all week: twice a day sometimes. Twice I picked up the call, but both times I just heard office noises for a few seconds before being cut off. A Google search reveals fellow sufferers enjoying a similar experience, with a few getting to speak to a tele-salesperson.

Presumably whoever's responsible is auto-dialling several numbers at once so that they always have someone to speak to on the other end. However, when you're dialling mobile phones (or even a lot of non-mobiles), the recipient phone displays the incoming call's number. As it happens, I've added the number to my contacts under the name 'Spam' and I now refuse the calls. However, if I was prepared to answer the phone again and again until I finally spoke to a human being, I would by then be so hacked off by their cavalier approach that their chance of selling me anything would be zero.

And yet they keep doing this, so it must produce a return. I can only assume that there are people who will always answer the phone, no matter how obvious it should be that it's a waste of time. And maybe these are the same people who don't instinctively type the number into a search engine to see what comes up. Also this week, I got forwarded a hoax virus warning e-mail. The friend who forwarded it to me (and also to all the rest of their friends and acquaintances) suggested it might be a fake, but 'better safe than sorry'. It would have taken them ten seconds in Google to find out that it was a hoax dating back at least two years. Instead they propagated it to dozens more people, who all now have my e-mail address in their mail clients, as the BCC facility is also grossly under-utilised.

My son starts at secondary school in September, and I was pleased to note that the ICT course starts by teaching the children how to be safe on the internet. I sincerely hope that this includes a few common sense practices that will make the job of hoaxers and spammers a whole lot harder.

A Farewell to Thunderbird

2011-02-06T19:43:00.000Z

I have finally taken the plunge and abandoned using Thunderbird as my mail client. Running four different e-mail accounts, Thunderbird made it easy to download all my mail to one place, as well as allowing me to easily move messages between accounts, while the Lightning add-in did a fair job of handling my calendar. Unfortunately, Thunderbird had taken to hanging for several seconds at a time while I was typing, and this seemed to be becoming more frequent. Also, synchronising the calendar with my mobile was far from satisfactory.

When I recently changed my mobile for an Android model, the fact that three of my accounts were on GMail made it suddenly much more sensible to go straight to mail.google.com to see my messages, rather than downloading them to my PC's hard drive via Thunderbird. The only drawback was GMail's limited ability to create folders to put old messages in. Then a colleague explained how there was a Labs feature to allow child folders, and suddenly my last objection vanished.

(Incidentally, the feature is called 'Nested Labels'. Why is this still experimental? It's virtually a 'Make Program Usable' option, and it's standard in any mail client I've ever used.)

The fourth e-mail account is the one I have with my ISP. Nobody knows the e-mail address except them, which means all I get is the monthly 'your bill is ready' message, and the odd bit of marketing. I'll still use Thunderbird to check on those occasionally. The most recent mail from them was to tell me that they liked me so much as a customer that they'd spontaneously upped my download speed to between 8 and 24 Mbits. I checked straight away: still 6 to 7. But it's nice they're thinking of me.

Have you seen my hair?

2011-01-08T16:06:00.000Z

Exciting news from the BBC. Apparently scientists have found the cause of male pattern baldness: instead of being bald, I just have invisible hair.

I guess this is Life's way of laughing at middle-aged men. As we get older we risk our hair going invisible. Similarly, I've noticed that hours of working out at the gym have resulted in me developing invisible muscles. And as my three endowment policies finally come to maturity after 25 years, I can look forward to enjoying invisible payouts.

Actually, that last part's not strictly accurate. For 'invisible', just substitute 'nowhere near what those w*nkers at Abbey National suggested to me back in 1987.'

Mobile Phone in non-Event mini-Crisis

2010-10-31T15:44:00.000Z

A frantic Google search last night failed to shed any light on what happened to my mobile phone last night, so I'm posting this blog for anyone else who suffers the same thing.

It began with my mobile chirping at me with an unfamiliar sound; not a call or an event or a text. I pressed it to light up the face and got a brief glimpse of a message telling me that F-Secure was active. Then the phone switched off and wouldn't come back on.

Disaster. Had the phone security program decided that the phone had been stolen and so locked it down?

The phone had spent all day connected to my PC, so it should have had a full battery. However, on the off chance I disconnected, then reconnected it. The battery charging indicator came on, though nothing else was happening. After a few minutes I tried to power the phone on, and it came back to life.

I don't know how or why the micro-USB connection decided to blow instead of suck, but that's what must have happened. The battery got empty, the phone tried to warn me, and the message about F-Secure might have been related or just a complete coincidence.

One last thing worth remembering: even with the phone in this state, I could still access the memory card via the PC.

A New Way to Recycle CDs

2010-10-30T17:24:00.000+01:00

Back in the '90s I used to subscribe to a magazine called Classic CD. Every month it would come through my letterbox full of reviews of the latest classical CDs, until one month it vanished forever. I used to scour through those reviews, at first buying a couple of discs a month, then three or four, and finally, with the ease provided by the internet and Amazon, up to half a dozen a time. (This is one reason why I consider paying £10 a month for a Napster or Spotify 'all you can eat' subscription to be blisteringly good value.)

Anyway, accompanying the magazine there was a CD sampling the best albums of the month. Or maybe even two on good months--ah, the anticipation. Over the time of my subscription I accumulated dozens of these discs. The magazines I threw out years ago (recycled, of course), but the CDs were harder to let go. They still worked, and I could play them like any other compendium disc (albeit one where many of the tracks just faded away mid-piece). I rarely did, and the discs inevitably ended up languishing at the back of a drawer.

Fast forward to a fortnight ago. A 2 disc set of the ballet 'Undine' had stuck in my head since I heard it sampled in Classic CD back last century, but I'd never got around to buying it. The music seemed a bit too alien to my taste at the time, and it was priced at around £30. I'd tried looking for it in Napster when I was with them, and Spotify when I moved to that service. Now on the off chance I check again, and it's there.

Brilliant! I've saved thirty big ones. With interest over thirteen years, that's ...

To my surprise I have no difficulty with the music at all now. Indeed, it sounds completely different to my memory of it. This happened before with 'Boston', which I'd heard at a friend's house, and bought several months later only to find it a totally different experience. I didn't like it, and gave up on it on the third playing. Now that turned out to be because the cassette had been wrongly printed: it was in fact 'Abraxas' by Santana, which I only discovered when I purchased the real thing and noticed its stunning similarity to Boston. It must say something significant, but possibly uncomplimentary, about me that I only liked Abraxas when the music matched the album cover. I don't want to consider what exactly it says, so I'll put it down to cognitive dissonance.

Back to Undine. Could it be that it sounded so different to my recollection because the sampler had played me the wrong track? I dug out the CD from the back of the drawer, ripped it onto my hard drive, and played it alongside the Spotify version. No, it was the same piece; my tastes must just have widened over the years.

And now to the original point of this blog entry. If one album I once thought about purchasing is now available for download, why not others? Maybe lots of others. All those albums I toyed with buying but didn't because everyone has to draw a line somewhere between collecting and compulsive behaviour.

So the sampler CDs will get one more outing, a celebration of the effort that those Classic CD reviewers put in every month, for 130 issues.

When The Obvious is Just Not Obvious Enough

2010-10-22T14:12:00.000+01:00

Thank you, Orange, thank you so very much.

Just for the record, the missing line of code your programmers are after is:

phoneNumber.replace(' ', '');

Tales Of The Dying Earth

2010-10-16T19:32:00.000+01:00

While researching my last post (i.e. searching in Amazon) I came across a remarkable offer: Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth for just £6.49.

It's made up of all four Dying Earth books: The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga, Rhialto the Marvellous, and of course The Dying Earth itself. These were such enjoyable stories. I think they embody Jack Vance's particular writing style more than anything else he wrote. And all that for £6.49.

Also for sale is Songs of the Dying Earth, a collection of tribute stories written by other authors. Projects like this are hard to pull off successfully. The authors run the risk of either missing the essential charm of the original, or looking like a weak pastiche.

Michael Shea wrote a sequel to The Eyes of the Overworld called A Quest for Simbilis, which was well written but fell into the first trap. I can remember nothing at all about it now other than my disappointment. But a few years after that I read his Nifft the Lean, which still sticks in my mind more than two decades later.

I notice there is a sequel to Nifft the Lean. Also, that Songs of the Dying Earth is available for the Kindle.

I suddenly get an overwhelming urge to go back to my backlog of books.

Reading in the Age of Plenty

2010-10-16T19:01:00.000+01:00

I have always been a book reader. As a child, and all the way up to my university graduation, I would read pretty well every book that came into my possession. My income was barely sufficient to feed my need for books.

But then I moved into the world of work and salaries, and found I could just buy a book if I felt like it. A single foray into a bookshop might see me coming out with half a dozen new books to read, and the list of unread books started to lengthen.

I still have nearly all of them, piled up in bookcases around the house. For most of them I can even remember where I acquired them. Running the book stall at jumble sales for many years didn't help, as there would usually be some books remaining at the end that I felt inclined to provide a home for.

About the middle of last year I resolved that all new books I bought would go onto a pile in my bedroom, to remind me how much money I was wasting on books that never got read. When one pile had become three piles I decided to pretty well stop buying books until I'd caught up. Somewhat to my surprise this has mostly worked, and the piles are going down. Only Amazon is the loser.

Only now they've brought out a Kindle at a price I'd consider paying (£109). That, plus my natural nerd tendency to want nerd toys, makes me suspect I will soon own one of these devices. But what of my resolution about buying new books? Should I first purchase the eBook versions of the ones on my piles? No. Fortunately I'm too tight for that.

Ah, but I did say I wouldn't 'buy' any new books. Turns out that there are eBooks you don't have to pay for: The Amazon Kindle Store lets you choose from thousands of the most popular classics, all available for free.

Garhh! Are these people mad? The classics! These are books I've spent nearly my whole life thinking I really ought to get round to reading someday before I die. In under an hour I could download more classics than I could read in what's left of my lifetime for no more cost than a few pence on my electricity bill. I'd have to either renounce any pretensions to culture, or admit that the battle to finish reading all my books was finally and definitely lost.

My sole consolation is that e-books do not make a very tall pile.

Defending my Mobile

2010-10-16T18:14:00.000+01:00

I've just installed an app on my Nokia smartphone called Anti-theft for Mobile, partly because I've been thinking for a while that I should have some way of protecting my phone in the event of me losing it, but mainly because I found out that it's free from the Nokia OVI store.

Now, if I find I've lost my phone, I can send it a text message to lock it, locate it, or even wipe it clean. Of course, by definition I won't have a mobile phone with me when I realise this, but eventually I'll be able to get my hands on one and send the necessary message.

Two thoughts now occur to me. To begin with, unless I lose my phone in the next few days, I will almost certainly not be able to remember what it is I'm supposed to send to lock the missing mobile. Normally I would make a note of this in my smartphone, but clearly that's not going to cut it in this situation. Secondly, I can't be sure that the program will work unless I test it. However, there are three possible outcomes to this experiment: it might work flawlessly, it might not work at all, or it might lock the phone but not let me unlock it.

As this app must have been downloaded many, many times by now, you'd think I should be reasonably confident that it will work properly. And yet...there are so many times when software has decided to fail on me in ways that (according to Google) nobody else in the world has ever experienced.

My two year contract expires soon and I'll be getting a new phone. Very tempting to think that that would be the ideal time to risk bricking my Nokia.

Amazon Now Pricing Toys by Weight

2010-09-11T15:07:00.000+01:00

Can anyone explain why Amazon think I'd like to know how much games cost by unit of weight?

Georg Pniower

2010-08-30T17:06:00.001+01:00

This is just a thought that crossed my mind while I was writing my last post. My mother's father was Georg Bela Pniower, the landscape architect. If anyone's out there doing research on his life, I have some items in my loft that might be of interest to you. Please feel free to contact me.

Here are a couple of photos of him, newly scanned into the digital world. As he died in 1960 and I found these in my family connection, I am assuming that either the copyright has expired or I've inherited it.

The portrait is undated, but the other is dated 24th May 1957. Pniower is third from the left.

The End of Genealogy

2010-08-30T17:00:00.000+01:00

I was talking to friends yesterday about their research into their family trees. I don't do this myself, but it seems to me that this must be the Golden Age for amateur genealogists, with so much data available online nowadays, and more going that way all the time. The days of wandering around graveyards, combing through parish records, and scanning microfiched birth certificates will one day be over, when all conceivably available data is somewhere on the web, indexed and accessible.

And sometime after that, genealogy will be effectively over.

For once someone has accurately mapped their ancestors, there is no real work left for their children to do, except add on the latest generation. Even if someone coming new to genealogy knows that their parents never did any research, it is quite likely that one of their cousins did. Go back just three generations and you've already got eight direct ancestors. If just one of their other descendants has already done the leg work, all you need to do is link up with them. And with web sites like Genes Reunited, that's becoming increasingly easy.

If I ever decide to research my own family tree, it will be out of curiosity, not a wish to acquire a new hobby. If I can quickly link up with some distant relative's existing work, I'm pretty sure that's just what I'll do.

The principal reason I haven't ever had attempted to trace my own ancestors is down to me being adopted. Which tree should I trace? I've always been clear in my mind that my real parents were the people who brought me up and nurtured me to adulthood, not the couple whose unprotected fling resulted in my conception. And my real grandparents were the people I remember from my childhood. But go any further back and issues get muddied in my mind. If I ever wonder about who my predecessors were in, say, the sixteenth century, it's biological ancestors I think about.

Once again, modern technology is stepping in. Companies providing personal genetic testing like 23andMe can offer you the option of being put in touch with close genetic relatives who've also been tested. Just as in genealogy, family trees are going to be constructed, then linked together.

Not all linked together though. Genealogical records usually only go back a handful of centuries, and even royalty can't trace back much more than a thousand years. That's hardly anything when measured against the age of the human race. This will mean that, when we get to the point where everyone can access their tree (their paper, rather than genetic, tree) as far back as is possible, the population will be naturally partitioned into groups sharing a common ancestor. A common, known ancestor, that is.

Genetic testing will achieve a similar effect. DNA tests though, will go back much further than genealogical records. Logically any two human beings share a closest common ancestor, and our DNA should be able to make a good estimate of just how far back that person lived.

I wonder how human interaction will change when all this comes to fruition. In the last decade you've been able to google a new acquaintance. The day may be coming soon when you'll also be able to quickly find out how much DNA you've got in common.

Local Man Makes Small News

2010-08-28T17:47:00.000+01:00

The story about my threatened assassination continued to spread slowly for most of last week. I even made it all the way to page 36 of The Press, York's local newspaper. In it I am described as a 'software expert'. Not accurate, but I'm prepared to let it pass. The photo of me isn't bad either, by my standards. Normally I'm very far from photogenic, with most shots showing me apparently either scowling, or grinning inanely, or at worst, scowling inanely. Believe it or not, in this one I was aiming for a sardonic smile.

And so we draw a curtain over this story, and my blog's brief burst of fame comes to an end.

My 15 Minutes of Fame

2010-08-24T18:45:00.000+01:00

After posting my blog about the assassination scam, it occurred to me that some people might not take receiving a death threat so well. Believing that the best way to combat scams is to publicise them as widely as possible, I forwarded the offending mail to The Register. They thought it worthy of an article, and kindly linked back to my original post.

Since then I have heard nothing more from Gladlord Mohammed or his Yemeni hit squad, but according to Google Analytics, traffic to this blog has leapt by over 7000%. Amazing what you can do from a very, very small base. Their report also shows three visits from Yemen. (I would like to assure any Yemeni readers that I never for a moment believed that the scamster was really from Yemen.)

It was also interesting watching how the story spread across the web. At the start of the day a Google search for "Gladlord Mohammed" came up with just two hits: my blog and a site for people who like to wind up scamsters. Then the Reg article showed up. After that several other news sites took up the story, mostly crediting The Register, though not all.

This humble blog will probably never be so popular again. When I started it last year, little did I think that it would be a death threat that attracted any serious readership. At least it wasn't an obituary notice.

Irony on the M62

2010-08-22T19:15:00.000+01:00

I just had to take a photo of this doughnut display I saw in a service station on the M62 east of Manchester:

The doughnuts suggest you buy a dozen to share with a friend. "Clear!"

Somebody wants me dead!

2010-08-22T18:46:00.000+01:00

There is disturbing news in my e-mails when I get back after a week away in North Wales. Apparently someone has hired a hitman to have me whacked. The contract is for $200,000, which is quite a large sum for a next-to-nobody like me. I am almost tempted myself.

Fortunately my potential killer has alerted me, and is prepared to strike a deal. For a mere $50,000 he will not only not kill me, but will also tell me the identity of my enemy, as well as hand over a tape that will let me have him (or is it 'her'?) convicted. Sounds like a bargain. Alas, I recently gave my last $50,000 to a Nigerian gentleman who was having difficulty getting money out of his native country.

"You have no need of knowing who i am", he writes. However, he goes on to sign the message 'Gladlord Mohammed'. Hmm, possibly an alias?

"i have followed you closely for one week and three days now". If true, he will have recently enjoyed several of North Wales's top tourist attractions. I hope he enjoyed Caernarfon Castle, and had better luck at finding a restaurant in Bangor than we did.

"Do not contact the police or FBI ..." The FBI? I begin to suspect he's got the wrong man. "... or try to send a copy of this to them, because if you do i will know." Oh, really? Nice to know at least one person is following this blog.

I click the Gmail 'Report Spam' button and consign the message to digital oblivion.

Seriously, is this a new departure for the scammers? Every previous scam mail I've received has relied on me being a greedy, gullible moron. This is the first one I've ever had that has tried to scare me into handing over my life savings.

Idle Time at Camberley Station

2010-08-10T22:17:00.000+01:00

The first anniversary of my blog has come and gone, unnoticed by everyone probably, certainly by me. I am inspired to break my two month postings drought by my experiences at Camberley station last week.

Two adults and a child need to buy day tickets to London, returning at any time. There are three humans selling tickets to a slowly moving queue of travellers, and six automated ticket machines. Some of the machines will even accept cash. The machines are largely unused, so I try one of them out.

Picking the destination is very easy, but then I get stuck. How to select for more than one person? Did I miss that step already (given that I'm only on step 2)? And how to tell the vending machine that we don't want to have to worry about off peak restrictions?

At this point a station employee comes up to help. Rather than staffing one of the several empty ticket counters, her job is to loiter around the machines, helping the confused. When I tell her our needs, she advises us to get our tickets from one of her human colleagues instead as our best option is a group ticket.

I know absolutely nothing about the story of those ticket machines and the engineers who developed them, but I can guess at it. The conflicting requirements, an ever changing list of pricing options, group discounts, London Underground inclusive deals, finally leading to a system that baffles first time and occasional users, becomes more out of date with every marketing initiative, and (cruel irony) needs a human attendant to help customers make sense of it.

In the Style of Charles Bukowski

2010-06-02T19:38:00.000+01:00

There is a polyp in my gall bladder.

The NHS found it while I was having an ultrasound scan at our local hospital in 2008. However, the operator wasn't allowed to tell me the results there and then. Instead they were posted to my GP, which meant another appointment. I didn't even know what the gall bladder was except that it sounded mediaeval, like my humours were out of balance, or something. But with the web at my disposal I quickly boned up on the subject, and learned that theses polyps were quite common, and are usually left alone unless they grow to more then 10mm across, after which they could turn nasty.

My GP told me it was 4cm across. Almost at once I was sure I could feel it in there, growing. I even got an occasional twinge from it. The doctor and I both managed to act unconcerned, and it was decided I would go back for a second scan a few weeks later to have it measured again. If it was growing, I was in trouble. If it wasn't, maybe it was just a gallstone. These aren't fun normally, but it would definitely have got a laugh out of me.

The polyp was measured the second time at 4mm.

"4mm!" I exclaimed, "but my GP was told it was 4cm."

"Yes, it says 4cm on the card, but it's actually 4mm."

I was so relieved I even forgot to inquire about which idiot had written down a simple measurement incorrectly, multiplying my polyp's size at a stroke by a factor of 1000.

Nothing has been done about my polyp since, and I have never again felt it twinge. (Later I found that the area the twinge was coming from isn't even where the gall bladder lives.)

The reason I'm writing about this is that I'd completely forgotten about it until a few days ago. Which is strange, seeing as I how for a few weeks I seriously thought I might have a tumour.

I was reading The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski when I suddenly remembered the polyp.

if I was
him
I would have written
all this in
short staccato verses
and
started each paragraph
in lower case

but
would that make it
poetry?

Anyway, it makes me wonder, if I could forget something as significant (as I thought then) as that polyp, what other incidents might have slipped out of my memory.

Some people have started recording their whole lives electronically. That would solve the problem of forgetting, only to replace it with the problem of finding time to play your life back again and again to keep it fresh in your memory. Sadly, a lot of it wasn't too interesting the first time through.

Ergonomic Experiences

2010-05-30T11:54:00.000+01:00

Following on from my last post, on the subject of recommendations, I can heartily recommend that Evoluent mouse. I developed tennis elbow last year (and not from playing tennis), which has largely disappeared since I moved to using an ergonomic mouse. Ironically, the tennis elbow was probably triggered by me moving from a vanilla flat keyboard to a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic keyboard. Decades of habitual arm positioning were abruptly overturned when I started typing more naturally, and my muscles resisted. Ironically I made the decision to change keyboard when I noticed my wrists were starting to ache a lot.

It's a good keyboard though, and I've bought one for work and one for home use. There was another downside, or maybe it's an upside. Because the keyboard splits the keys into two groups, I had my nose rubbed in just how bad my two fingered typing technique was, so after thirty-five years of keyboard use I've finally had to teach myself touch-typing.

AI - Still Some Way to Go

2010-05-30T11:36:00.001+01:00

A year or so ago I wanted to know the mass of the planet Jupiter (never mind why: it's a geek thing), so of course I typed "mass of Jupiter" into Google. Up came a list of hits, with Wikipedia as expected at the top. But above all of that was a single result from Google Calculator:

mass of Jupiter = 1.8987 × 1027 kilograms

It was like the Internet had just spoken to me, and I started to take seriously the suggestions from people like Kevin Kelley that our technology could be developing into an artificial intelligence.

So it was refreshing this week when I was browsing through my Amazon recommendations to find the Evoluent left-handed mouse, suggested to me on the grounds that I'd already bought the right-handed version. And even though it's annoying, I'm a little bit reassured when my Windows XP computer at work (though oddly not my home PC, which is also running XP Pro) spots on start up that my external hard drive is missing and so reports that my total disc capacity has decreased, only to next time warn me that it's just gone back up again.

Comings and Goings in Programming Languages

2010-05-16T16:50:00.000+01:00

Last week I wrote my first GOTO statement in around fifteen years. Strictly speaking it was a JavaScript 'continue' statement, but I specified a label after it to let me jump out of a nested loop, so in my mind it's a GOTO.

At University I was taught that GOTOs and labels were a bad thing because they encouraged spaghetti code. That was ironic, as they also taught me BASIC and Fortran IV, which completely depend on those very same bad things. However, looking at some of the code I used to write back then, I saw their point. Later, when I was writing assembly code for a living, and half your program seemed to be jump statements of one form or another, I really had my nose rubbed in how difficult this style of programming could be.

So for many years now I've tried to steer clear of anything that looked like a GOTO or a label. The nearest I got was in a C program when I mistyped 'default' as 'defualt' and the stupid compiler thought I was creating a label in the middle of a switch statement. (Boy, was that bug hard to spot.)

Going back to my 'continue', I have enough years behind me now to appreciate that jumping out of two loops is no worse than jumping out of one via a 'break', especially as the target label was just a few lines above. But in trying to remember all the arguments against jumps and labels, I suddenly remembered a former colleague saying about a computer language that it was the only one he'd ever met that had the equivalent of a COMEFROM statement.

Sadly, I cannot remember what that language was. A search on the web though found a language that actually does have a COMEFROM statement, namely Intercal. There was also a page explaining how one would work in Fortran. This is all quite amusing, but it's odd how much more difficult the idea of coming from is then going to, even though they're logically equivalent.

For another humorous but fairly unusable computer language, I would recommend Shakespeare, the language that lets your program read like a Tudor play. With true style, that implements a GOTO like this:

Hamlet:
   Let us proceed to scene III.

Social Networking and Me

2010-05-16T16:10:00.000+01:00

Just been listening to last week's This Week in Google podcast, much of which centred on the recent concerns about Facebook privacy, as well as Facebook's apparent attempts to own the web. My own experience with Facebook used to be limited to a brief flirtation with it a couple of years ago. I gave up after a couple of weeks: I found I had little interest in giving the world a blow by blow account of my life, and I resented the wash of messages being a Facebook member generated, many from people I didn't even know. The final straw was a suggestion from a woman I'd never heard of that I should give her a slap. So I cancelled my account, or at least I think I did; it wasn't very straightforward.

Twitter and I have a similar relationship. As someone who's supposed to be tech-savvy, I felt I ought to open a Twitter account, but I quickly got fed up with having to repeatedly check for new messages (when I tried feeding them into Goggle Reader, I got someone else's messages instead--something to do with Google Reader not being set up to do logins). I do not share my user name, and have never tweeted. Despite this, I do get followers, though not for very long. None of them are names I recognise, and they all seem to be following hundreds of others without anyone reciprocating.

As someone who doesn't care to share the minutiae of his life with the world, the privacy issues of Facebook and others are less of a worry for me than the time it would take keeping up with all the messages they generate. I already have difficulty getting through all the blogs and podcasts I follow, as well as the music I want to listen to and the books I want to read, not to mention having a bit of a life away from the keyboard. Earphones and mobile devices have helped a lot: I've just finished listening to 'The Age of Innocence' (a novel I would probably never have got around to reading) on an Audible book, all done while cycling to and from work, or pounding the streets delivering election leaflets last month (much good that did). Even with their help though, there's still more content I want to consume than I can fit in to a day.

Despite me not being interested in Facebook and Twitter, in the last few weeks it's started to seem that I can't go anywhere on the web without being asked if I want to tweet about it or share it with Facebook. It feels like there's another layer being built over the web, one made up of the shared recommendations on social networking sites like Facebook, and maybe the time will come when newcomers to the web can be persuaded by the likes of Facebook to only access web pages via their site, in the same way that AOL and CompuServe tried with their home page portals.

Even Spotify, my beloved music streaming service, now invites me to share all my listening experiences. As if there might be someone out there who wants to know, in real time, which piece of music I've just listened to. Actually, I think I will start doing that, purely in the interest of research. I'll find out how long my few Twitter followers can stay interested in a stream of tweets directing them to pieces of music they've likely never heard of.

Or maybe I'll get some recommendations back.

A Tangled Web

2010-05-08T16:05:00.000+01:00

We were looking for the power adaptor for my son's mobile phone today. After searching all the obvious places, I reluctantly opened the drawer where anything remotely cable-like gets put to rest once we don't need it. It was a real mess.

This wasn't surprising: it usually is. But this time I decided to sort it all out, and chuck away anything that clearly would never get used again. It took nearly ten minutes to completely untangle the mass of wires, leads, and power cables. How does this happen? Logically, every time I add something to the drawer, it must end up sitting on top of everything else. So how do the leads tie themselves into knots? A mystery that may never be answered.

Anyway, now everything is separated, cables are folded and secured, and I'm deciding what to throw. My AKG wireless headphones, for a start. Plug the base station into my hi-fi, and I could enjoy listening to my CDs anywhere in the house or garden, with just the occasional crackle or hiss. And yet now superseded by so, so many different technologies. Trying hard not to remember how much they set me back 15 years ago. Still, I haven't used them for nearly a decade, and never will again, so out they go.

And why do I have four different sets of earphones squirrelled away (on top of the two sets I actually use)? Well, answered that: two leak sound, one sounds awful, and the fourth only works in one ear. Goodbye to the last two of those.

This illustrates another problem: my reluctance to get rid of something if it could conceivably be used again, even though it almost certainly never will.

One item is almost certainly an old fax cable from my last PC. I no longer fax, and my new PC doesn't have a modem anyway. Still, you never know. It can go back with all the USB and network cables that are so neatly wrapped, they clearly have never even been used at all.

And when did I ever need a cable with stereo connections at one end, and a microUSB connection at the other? I can only think it used to belong to the USB radio receiver I once owned. This would generate gigabyte-sized .wav files if I even tried to record a half hour radio show, and then became completely irrelevant once internet streaming radio caught on. The receiver's long gone, but the cable remains. Well, you never know.

There's our old battery recharger. Why did we buy another one to replace it? I can't remember, and I haven't got the time or inclination to experiment with it, so that one survives another day.

Finally, the sorting is over, the drawer is as tidy as I could wish for, and I'm left with a single power adaptor. Not, unfortunately, the one for my lad's mobile phone.

"Check Printer Cartridge"

2010-04-11T16:01:00.000+01:00

I occasionally have a dream in which I suddenly remember some task I'm supposed to do, along with the realisation that I'd completely forgotten about it for a very long time. Usually it's revision for an exam I actually took 30 years or more ago. Shortly after my son was born, I dreamed I'd forgotten to feed him for nearly a month, and couldn't even recall where I'd left him. In a similar vein, I realised today that it's been nearly two months since I added to this blog.

In the search for inspiration, I need look no further than my HP PSC 1510 'all-in-one' colour printer, sat not 50cm away from this keyboard, which has smugly informed me that it needs some more colour ink. I'm just guessing at the smugness, of course, but it seems a reasonable guess, considering its behaviour since I installed a set of W H Smith own brand ink cartridges, faced with the high cost of the HP versions. Right from the start the printer kicked up a stink. It detected the alien inserts immediately, refused to even guess how much ink they still contained, and insisted from thence forward on printing a test page every time I switched it on.

I'm just speculating, but my guess is that they thought that this would make me think twice about buying non-HP cartridges the next time I ran out of ink (an event that was only hastened by all those unnecessary test pages that it produced). Well, that worked. Their victory is tempered though by my new found determination that my next printer won't be from Hewlett Packard.

And so now it's out of ink, and Amazon are quoting around £25 for a replacement set of cartridges. Plus, the printer's paper feed has always been temperamental, to the extent that it's only accepted a sheet at a time for the last several months. Plus, when I recently went to HP's web site and downloaded the latest driver for the 1510, the installer reported that, "A newer version of this software is already installed on your HP All-in-One series computer." (How'd that happen?) Plus, I can get a completely new printer for £70 or so.

Much as it pains me to replace a piece of kit that is mostly still working, the bizarre economics of printers means that I can actually do it for less than three times the cost of its consumables. If I pick the next printer looking at the cost of its inks rather than of the printer itself, it can even make economic sense to.

But now I come to the 'devil you know' situation. There are so many choices available--which to pick? And as Michael McIntyre pointed out, in this age of web reviews, no matter what you're thinking of buying, you can always find a bad review for it somewhere. So for now the printer will still sit on my desk, unable to print, while I weigh up the pros and cons of replacing its cartridges or relegating it to the loft, where it can sit next to a motley collection of other old printers and monitors that still work, but will almost certainly never do so again.

Irony and Retirement

2010-02-13T12:49:00.000Z

Receiving mailings from finance companies these days could be quite painful if I didn't have a robust sense of humour. Just yesterday I got an update on an endowment policy, with the now familiar warning of a 'high risk of under-performing'. Yes, indeed. If it manages to grow by 4% per year it will end up worth less than two thirds of what I was told it would make when I signed up for it in 1986. Twenty-five years seemed a long way off back then; now it's next April, and my investment needs to grow by over 50% to hit its target. Or I need to snuff it before then.

Today I got an update on a pension scheme from a company I left in 1989. It informs me as to the size of my pension pot, notes that once again I haven't added anything to it in the last 12 months, and cheerfully tells me that when I retire I can expect an income from it of a staggering £1200 a year. Just to add insult to injury, that income will be taxable.

However, that's not the funny part. That goes to the three identical enclosures:

It's these little touches that really show how much you care.

Another Fine Ale

2010-02-13T11:32:00.001Z

Working my way through the Brakspear Classic English Ale collection I received in my stocking for Xmas, I get to Brakspear's Triple Ale. This is a truly lovely beer, that flows down your throat without a hint of its 7.2% alcohol content. At least, at the time.

Their web site observes that, "this is a beer that will go on to develop further complexity as it matures in its bottle". Alas, that's a development I'm unlikely to ever experience. Fortunately the branch of Threshers in Haxby currently stocks Triple Ale, so I can continue to taste it in its less mature, though still delicious, state.

It's been a good week for beer, following the news that "moderate beer consumption may help fight osteoporosis". Excellent! The word 'moderate' tempers my joy a bit, but in the end that's such a subjective word.

Years ago we were told that every time you drank alcohol you suffered a small but irreversible loss of brain cells. That's now been shown to be untrue. All we need now is the discovery that alcohol consumption aids liver function, and the rehabilitation will be complete.

That's probably pushing it a bit far, but I suppose we might yet hear that beer helps to fight hepatitis, say, and so could be regarded as a net positive for your liver.

Truly, we live in the Golden Age of scientific discovery.

Are Amazon scrumping apples?

2010-02-05T12:18:00.000Z

Just now I wanted to go to Apple's home page, but I mistyped and asked to go to www.appple.com instead. Imagine my surprise when I was whisked straight to Amazon.com and presented with the results of a search for 'apples'. This surely can't be accidental. Also, surely Apple must have heard about it by now. Maybe they figure they're more likely to get a sale through Amazon than through their own web site. Based on a highly representative sample of one product, Amazon are definitely the cheaper option.

There's a 'http://www.apppple.com/' as well, which doesn't feature Apple products, and is harder to imagine anyone mistyping, though what the name stands for is beyond me.

Upwardly Mobile

2010-01-28T21:18:00.000Z

So I finally cracked yesterday and signed up for a Premium Spotify account. I'd got to the point where I'm not sure I could have listened to one more of those banal mobile phone adverts, or 'Roberta from Spotify' announcing yet again the same new service she was telling me about last year, without having to numb the horror by repeatedly hitting my head into my monitor.

It was a very painless procedure to convert from Free to Premium (apart from the £10 a month bill, but that's no more than a CD a month, and I'm listening to several new albums a week), and now I can enjoy ad-free music, and also an ad-free user interface. Oddly, for the first few hours I actually found myself missing the interruptions. That passed.

I still have my Napster subscription, as there are a number of albums that they have and Spotify still doesn't, but the gap is closing. Spotify is a far faster service, while napster.exe is a horribly slow program to start up, and one which often decides to hog the CPU and hard drive for long stretches, presumably re-indexing my music files. Okay, I have over 23000, but it's not as if they move around or anything.

It would be nice if Spotify could detect music on the hard drive, just as it would be nice if it would order all an artist's albums by title, rather than in a long list showing all their tracks, including whole compilation albums even though they only have a single song by the artist you're after. That may well change one day, when they get round to improving the UI. According to the plugs that I now no longer get, Spotify seem to be putting all their technical efforts into their mobile phone offerings. Which, now I think about it, I can access using my Premium account status.

Off to spotify.com...

Stunning Presumption from Nokia

2010-01-05T15:30:00.000Z

I've just noticed that my PC now thinks that .jar files are 'Nokia Application Installer Files'. And to think, all I had to do was load their mobile phone synchronisation program. Thanks, Nokia. Another classic example of Software Manufacturer arrogance.

I should be used to this by now. Every browser I've ever set to be the system default has always immediately celebrated by claiming ownership of the .htm and .html file suffixes.

Speeding up my PC--the cheap way

2010-01-03T17:32:00.000Z

Personal computers, in my experience, tend to silt up and slow down. My Dell at home was little more than a year old and already noticeably slower than when I first booted it up. Of course, I look at what's running in the background from time to time, and remove anything that looks suspect or unnecessary (such as the Adobe and QuickTime quick start tasks), but it never seems to have much effect.

I'm toying with the idea of buying a solid state hard drive, of which I've heard many good things. Trouble at the moment is that they're still so pricey that it wouldn't be much more expensive to just buy a faster PC.

Last month I lost it during a particularly slow session, and decided to take drastic measures. I would often hear the hard drive working, even though Process Explorer (this is a brilliant program, that replaces Task Manager with something really informative--highly recommended) showed no significant CPU activity, and I decided to remove stuff I'd installed that might be responsible. First to go was 'Everything', a nifty program that indexes the files on your hard drive. It's really quick at finding files, but I hadn't made much use if it, so I ran the uninstall program. "Uninstall Everything?" came up the prompt. With clammy palms I clicked on Okay. That didn't seem to do much, so I moved on to Google Desktop.

Google Desktop is another program that indexes the hard drive, as well as your e-mails and any web sites you've visited. It too is really fast, and, on the occasions I've needed to find a lost e-mail, has proved invaluable. However, I was desperate, so out it went. From now on I shall rely on the fact that all my e-mails come in via a Google Mail account. I'll search through them there instead of on my Dell.

And amazingly, that seemed to do the trick. My PC is once again a fast machine, and the hard drive doesn't (often) sound busy when nothing's supposed to be happening. Is this a known drawback with Google Desktop, or just a side effect of my PC configuration? All I know is that I feel like I've saved two or three hundred pounds.

Still, those SSDs do look tempting.

Nostalgia comes in Box Sets

2010-01-02T16:19:00.000Z

Xmas brought two new DVD box sets into our home, both TV series from my childhood, namely Wacky Races and Top Cat. I got to see them when they were orinally aired in the UK in the sixties, and the contrast when viewing them again for the first time in decades was rather surprising. Top Cat is still charming and funny; Wacky Races, on the other hand, after getting to know the line-up of competitors, is largely a one joke show, with the same plot rehashed in every episode. Dastardly and Muttly establish a commanding lead, which they then throw away in trying to set up a completely unnecessary trap for the other competitors, which naturally backfires, leaving them to come in last. Again.

I never noticed this as a child, but my nine year old son, who has been happily watching Top Cat episodes with me for the last week (not continuously, mind), summed up his opinion of Wacky Races five minutes into the first episode: 'This isn't funny'. No, it wasn't. But then, he's grown up watching The Simpsons and Futurama, which I realise sort of raises the bar a bit.

Another interesting observation was how up to date the plots of Top Cat still are, despite being nearly half a century old. Except for Officer Dibble having to keep in touch with his station via a police phone mounted on a telegraph pole (why not in a large blue box?), the only real clues to it being set fifty years ago are the clothing fashions and the car styles.

I probably watched every episode the first time round, maybe more than once, but I could only remember vague details of one show. Watching them again, my recall doesn't get any better, though occasional scenes and gags do ring bells. I did remember not being quite able to make out some of the lyrics in the opening credits. "Close friends get to call him TC, providing it's wikitity...". Never been too confident about that last word. Now, using the awesome power of the Internet (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A249842), I am finally able to decode it as "with dignity". No wonder I could never make it out, as it's a really crap lyric. At this point I remember that there is a word for misheard lyrics, but I can't remember what it is. Back to that awesome power--it's 'Mondegreen'.

And one last piece of Top Cat trivia. In the UK the series aired on the BBC, who have a policy on not running commercials. Back in 1961 the policy was so strict that the existence of a brand of cat food called Top Cat was sufficient to make the BBC rename the show to Boss Cat. They even trimmed out the first part of the closing credits to remove the Top Cat billboard. For full effect they should have gone through each episode dubbing over every 'Top Cat' and 'TC' (preferably in a clipped British accent) , but that was presumably thought to be over the top (or maybe just too expensive). Anyway, as a consequence British kids were left puzzling over the following exchange at the start of every episode.

Continuity Announcer: "And now, Boss Cat."
Opening Credits: "Top Cat! The most effectual Top Cat! ..."

Troubles in PC Printer Land

2009-12-30T20:19:00.000Z

As someone who counts himself as reasonably computer literate, and one who spends much of his life sat in front of a screen trying to bend computers to his will (with mixed success), I am constantly staggered by how difficult even fairly straightforward problems on a home computer can be to sort out. Always the same thought occurs: if it's this hard for me, what must it be like for the layperson?

A couple of days ago I experienced a perfect example of just how far personal computers still have to go. A relative of mine has a laptop, and was trying to print off a PDF file. "It just comes out blank," she said. That rang a bell, so I started the machine up, reasonably confident of a quick fix.

On opening the file, Adobe Reader 8 informed me that it had an 8.1 update ready. Why not? Who knows, it might even fix the problem. While it got to work on that, I noticed that Windows wanted to do an update too. Odd that, because the machine was configured to install Windows updates automatically. (Yes, I know the downsides of that, but I still think it's the best option for users who don't really understand what updates even mean.) Hmm... Windows Vista SP2! I could see why it hadn't just ploughed ahead without permission, but I also noticed that the updater didn't think it worth mentioning that it was now going to take the next half hour to download everything, install it, shut down and restart. I left it running in the background.

It soon became obvious that the Adobe updater was in trouble (unless it really did need ten minutes to delete temporary files), so I cancelled. With a bit of luck the update would have completed anyway. No. In fact, now we no longer had Adobe Reader at all. So, off to Google to find out how to download it from Adobe. Now this is interesting: there's a version 9 available. Why didn't Adobe Reader 8 tell me about that? It downloaded and installed very easily, far faster than the 8.1 update, even before it reached the tidying up stage and jammed.

I say 'easily'. That means ignoring all the shortcuts, quick starts and menu options that Adobe like to pollute your machine with. I can only think of one reason why you might want to start up Adobe Reader, and that's to read a PDF file. The natural way to do that is to just open the PDF. Not so for Adobe: their preferred mode of operation is apparently to launch Reader first, which is why they stick shortcuts to it on the desktop, in the start menu, in the Explorer context menu, and in the Explorer toolbars. For good measure, they also put a quick start program into your startup options so that, on those rare occasions when you need to open up a PDF file, it's slightly faster than it would otherwise have been. On the downside, your PC now takes that little bit longer to start up every single time you switch it on, regardless of whether you plan to look at PDFs at all. I've had enough experience with this arrogance from Adobe to know how to remove it all, but it's still infuriating. Not as infuriating, though, as when you do the next update, and Adobe cheerfully reinstall all the crap again, ignoring the fact that you must surely have deliberately taken it all out, presumably on the assumption that you're too stupid to know what's best for you.

I seem to have drifted a bit from my original topic. If you detect a hint of bitterness here, it's the result of many years' miserable experience of this company's attitude to its users. And don't get me started on their web sites.

So, back to the non-printing PDF. By now I've upgraded Adobe Reader, and rebooted the newly service-packed Vista. Time to open the file again. Sure enough, it won't print--nothing at all comes out. Off to the Control Panel to look at the printer. Here I see that there are several print jobs queued up, dating back six weeks or so. The earliest one is marked as 'Deleting'.

Although I can cancel all the subsequent jobs, the 'Deleting' one stubbornly refuses to go. This is a state I've been in on more than one occasion. What you want is to tell the printer to completely forget about everything it's been told to print, but for some reason it can't. My guess is it needs to confirm with the actual device that all printing has ceased, which should have given me a clue. Instead I decided to delete the printer and reinstall from CD. That didn't take long, and it did clear the print queue, but I couldn't get a test page out. Now it occurs to me that maybe there's a connection problem. And yet, there's the printer cable sticking out of the side of the laptop, and there's the other end going into the printer, which is switched on, with no error lights showing. Try pushing in the connection at the printer: fine. What about the one at the laptop? Well, it's definitely in, but suspiciously loose. Is it really supposed to be able to wobble like that? Come to think about it, since when do USB sockets go into network ports?

Mystery finally solved.

It would have been really nice if the Control Panel hadn't listed the printer as being 'Ready', just as it would have been nice if Adobe Reader had updated correctly, and to the latest version. But I got there in the end. Nevertheless, the printer had been out of action for weeks, and only got fixed because of a relative coming round with enough computer literacy to fix the problem (though, sadly, not enough to fix it quickly). So I'm left wondering how many other home computers around the world have components and programs that have stopped working because of easily solved issues like this.

There will be a day when your computer will sort out stuff like this for you itself, in language that even the layest of lay users can follow, and that's the day when the computer can finally be labelled as 'an appliance'.

Special Friend

2009-12-08T17:28:00.000Z

Starting work on a bottle of real ale a few evenings ago, I was struck by how particularly pleasant it tasted. Not that surprising perhaps, as the label boasted the title,"Young's Special London Ale". Ah, yes. Young's Special, an old friend from many years back. I noticed something else on the label: Alcohol Content 6.4%.

Ohhhkay. That would work out as 3.2 units of alcohol (I know I've had enough to drink when I can no longer calculate alcohol units in my head), or roughly what the Government thinks I should drink no more than per day. Maybe I should leave a bit for tomorrow?

6.4% was rather higher than I remembered. A bit of research (read 'Google') revealed the truth. "Young's Special London Ale", which comes in bottles, isn't the same as "Young's Special", that comes on draught and is only 4.5% alcohol. Not a huge amount of imagination shown there by the Young's beer naming department, and a potential source of catastrophe for bottled beer drinkers like me.

Which brings my memories round to the first time I tried Young's Special. A party in London with a bunch of dental students, thirty years or so ago. A pub beforehand, where a friend introduced me to the brew and I polished off two pints of it. A foolish decision later that evening at the party to move onto cider. And finally, an indeterminate time staring into porcelain wishing my life was over so I could stop being sick for a bit.

Ever since my dramatic discovery that beer and cider don't go well together, I have had very mixed feelings about cider. Yes, I do drink it occasionally, but my heart is never in it. Real ale, on the other hand, has never left me with any sort of lasting aversion. And yet it wasn't just the cider that wasted me that night, so why does my body remember that cider isn't good for it while ignoring the effects of the beer? My tentative theory: cider is usually well stronger than 4.5%, so maybe my body only paid attention to the strongest drink involved.

As corroborative evidence, I would cite the fact that I haven't been able to drink Pernod since my 20th birthday, but I still like orange juice.

Word Puzzles

2009-11-29T16:40:00.002Z

While writing my last post I noticed that the spellchecker didn't recognise the word 'aerogramme', which is fair enough, as the whole point of the post was that aerogrammes are no longer really needed. But just now I was writing a letter in Google Docs, and it put the red, wiggly lines under 'blogging' and 'Google', both words you'd think it might have heard of.

I don't know where Google Docs keeps its dictionary. Maybe it piggybacks on one that's already on my PC, though Blogger, in which I'm writing this and which is also owned by Google, is quite happy with both words. (But not with 'Blogger'! The plot thickens.)

Perhaps this reflects some streak of self-effacement among Google developers. I don't know. I was also intrigued a few years back when I spotted that Microsoft Word didn't recognise the word 'Dilbert', but was quite happy with 'Dogbert'. Presumably someone on the Word team was a member of Dogbert's New Ruling Class, and snuck that one in. Considering that the Excel team once hid a flight simulator in their program, one extra line in a dictionary file wouldn't have been too hard to manage.

And now it's time to check again whether Haxby has had its water supply reconnected, following the 'incident' (as Yorkshire Water usefully describe it on their web site) earlier today. I do miss the 21st century.

Another Superseded Technology

2009-11-29T15:34:00.001Z

Rummaging through our stationery drawer this morning, looking for a suitably sized envelope, it occurred to me that most of the difference between a tidy drawer and what we actually have was the pile of old aerogrammes at the back. Actually two piles, I suppose: the one that I'd bought to our marriage, and the one that Julie had. We've been living together for over 15 years now, but I doubt if we've used a single aerogramme in all that time.

For those of you too young to remember aerogrammes (which seems to include the Blogger spellchecker), they are (were?) very thin pieces of blue letter paper, carefully shaped with gummed edges that allowed the aerogramme to be folded in three to form its own envelope, which would then be posted to exotic destinations around the world. The light weight of the paper, and the prohibition on any enclosures, made them ideal for air mail.

I do have friends in foreign parts, but, apart from the annual Xmas card, anything I send to them goes over the internet nowadays. I don't even know how well an aerogramme would go through a laser printer (okay, I do now: not too badly, except you need a larger top margin).

Most of our aerogrammes are postage prepaid, which will make parting with them a little painful, but the hard truth is that we'll get more utility out of them by freeing up some space in a drawer than by leaving them there untouched for another fifteen years.

Putting them into the recycling bin (where else?), I notice that on one of the packs there's a 50th Anniversary message (1943 - 1993): "50 years ago, when Churchill was Prime Minister, Aerogrammes took off as a vital means of communication." It finishes off with, "Aerogrammes - still the easy way to keep in touch."

How difficult is is to sync a phone and a PC?

2009-11-22T16:02:00.000Z

As I've mentioned before, my mobile is a Nokia N85 smartphone. This is a good device, though I wish I'd known how limiting texting was before I bought something that didn't have either a keyboard or a stylus. Where it falls down is in its communication with my PC. The Nokia software that comes with the phone allows you to synchronise contacts and calendar data with Outlook, Outlook Express, and Lotus Notes. I use Mozilla Thunderbird.

Not to worry. There's a program you can buy called Mobile Master, which lets you synchronise various mobile phones with sundry mail clients. Problem solved.

Well, not quite. Right from the start I've been suffering all sorts of glitches with the data transfer. Some events that recur every fortnight in Thunderbird show up every week on the phone, others shift by a day sometimes, and the 'Other data' field in the Contacts gets strangely mangled when sent back from phone to PC. All that was insignificant compared to the way that the entire calendar got downloaded to the phone twice (most times; tantalisingly, it would work occasionally).

There are fairly frequent updates to Mobile Master, which I would install hopefully, and a few months after I'd bought the phone, suddenly the transfer started to work every time. Events would get sent down just the once, and the other misbehaviour I fixed by deleting the affected items in Thunderbird and recreating them. (No idea why this was necessary, as they were fine when I used to synchronise with an iPaq.)

I stopped updating Mobile Master then. The newer versions were mostly concerned with supporting the latest models of mobile phone. But then, a couple of weeks ago, I took leave of my senses and upgraded to 7.5.5.

It was mostly okay, if you weren't bothered about not having any calendar items on your phone any more.

I raised a bug report, which had as much effect as the one I'd raised about getting stuff sent down twice. As before, I got back an automated reply with the ambiguous message:

We have received the following message and will answer as soon as possible.

Sorry, but we can no longer answer questions whether this or that phone is supported.

Had they written off my query as a question about support for the n85, or was that just a standard line added to every reply? As I've never received a further reply, the question will remain open.

Luckily I still had an earlier version of their installer on my hard drive, so I was able to go back to that. A bit too early, unfortunately, as I'm back to having two copies of the calendar again.

Some time soon we are promised Thunderbird 3.0 will be released. Unlike Thunderbird 2, this will have a calendar system in-built, instead of as one of two possible add-ins. Perhaps it will build up enough market share then to make Nokia think it's worth supporting. (A quick web search suggests that Thunderbird 2 only has 1.12% market share at the moment, so I might be whistling in the dark on this. On the other hand, Lotus Notes only has 1.72%.)

In the meantime, I wait for another update to Mobile Master, and remind myself more often not to bother updating something that already works perfectly well.

Thirty Years of Experience - A Perspective, part 3

2009-11-08T17:15:00.000Z

I think it's time to finish off this set of posts before the title has to change to 'Thirty-One Years of Experience'.

I started off trying to work out how much use thirty years of programming experience was really worth, given that so much of it was in technologies that are no longer extant. I've come, sadly, to the conclusion that much of the first fifteen years or so can be safely skimmed through by anyone reading my CV. In the field of Software, specific knowledge of languages, libraries and operating systems dates all too quickly. If you're not constantly learning new technologies, you can end up fit only for maintaining legacy code.

And yet I still hold that I've gained something from having programmed since 1980 that I wouldn't have now if I'd only started in 2000. Thirty years of debugging have given me an intuition for tracking down bugs, to the extent that sometimes I can't even explain to myself afterwards how I got to the solution. I believe this is because debugging is quite often a logic problem, and practice makes you better at it irrespective of what language or platform you're using.

Over thirty years I've seen trends come and go, supposedly 'killer' languages have their day and then fall away (Ada, you promised so much!). It would be nice to say that my experience lets me spot which upcoming technologies are the ones to follow, and which are going to fail, but that would be untrue. I write as someone who once learned Forth.

In the end, it's not so important how much my experience is worth. The bottom line is that, after nearly three decades in the field, I still feel as I did when I received my first pay packet back in 1980: that it's a nice life when you get paid to do something you'd willingly do for a hobby.

More lessons in XHTML

2009-11-07T19:44:00.001Z

So, following on from my last blog, I've now done the research I mentioned, and found out that the way to deal with ampersands in URLs is to write them as XML entities, i.e. '&', which is slightly embarrassing, as that should have occurred to me given that I've been using XML for nearly a decade.

And the XHTML-approved way of making a hyperlink open a new window is to replace the 'target' attribute with an 'onclick' attribute which calls the relevant JavaScript function to do it.

Something else I've just learned, having just previewed this blog, is that typing '&' out in full is more than a bit dumb, as the browser, of course, renders it as '&'; time for a sneaky trick to fool the browser. One last question: how can a modern browser possibly not know that 'blog' is a proper word?

The Quest for XHTML Perfection

2009-11-07T17:53:00.000Z

This afternoon I remembered the existence of the W3C Markup Validation Service, http://validator.w3.org/, and decided to submit the web sites I maintain. As usual I was appalled by the number of omissions, typing errors, and plain mistakes that your average browser will quite happily work round without telling you. Unterminated paragraph blocks, lists inside blocks, attribute values with a quote at one end but not the other, to name just three blunders which now no longer afflict my HTML.

The ideal is to press the Validate button and get back the message, "This document was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Strict!" Once you've got that, you're allowed to put a W3C badge on the page to tell the world how compliant you are, or at least the 0.1% or less of the world who've ever even heard of the W3C, or XHTML. Rather than confuse the other 99.9% of the world, I have decided not to use this badge. Also, I would then live in fear of inadvertently invalidating the page through some stupid edit, and incurring the wrath of the W3C.

Another reason for not boasting of my pages' compliance is that not all of them are, and there doesn't seem to be much I can do about it. At one of my sites, gratuitous link to encourage Google to notice it, I include a link to a specific page at the UK Charity Commission's web site. Even though I'm quoting their URL exactly, the W3C is flagging up errors in the URL and blaming me. This seems a mite pedantic of them. Am I supposed to tidy up someone else's web site?

The link in question is http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/ShowCharity/RegisterOfCharities/CharityWithoutPartB.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=1119272&SubsidiaryNumber=0, and the presence of the ampersand near the end causes W3C to kick out four errors and three warnings. And now, by putting that link into this blog, I've managed to make this page non-compliant too!

Footnote: thinking about my question above, I wondered if I could tidy up the URL. Turns out I can leave the part from the ampersand onwards! I got lucky there, but I think my point still stands.

Now my only non-compliance is the use of the 'target' attribute in hrefs. Need to do a bit of research about why that's not valid XHTML.

Farewell then, GeoCities

2009-10-31T17:41:00.000Z

So GeoCities is no more.

When I first got access to the web (around 1995), you used to bump into GeoCities sites all over the place. I would look at my web browser (good old Netscape), and wonder what to go looking for. "How about my favourite bands?" And at the other side of the web there was some adolescent setting up their GeoCities web site, wondering what to put onto their home page. "How about a list of my all my CDs? Yes, that will be interesting." In the days before Google and relevant web searches, Lycos or Alta Vista would happily bring up such sites in response to a query for Genesis or Pink Floyd.

Web sites like that are now either long gone, or on page 945 of my Google results and so, effectively, equally non-existent. Lycos is still around (much to my surprise--what market share can they have?), but nowadays puts the Pink Floyd official web site at the top of its search results.

CLCL

2009-09-29T17:10:00.006+01:00

I can't remember where I found out about Nakashima Tomoaki's CLCL, but I do remember that I was sufficiently taken by the idea of a program that remembers a list of everything I copy onto the clipboard, whether it be snippets of text or whole files, that I downloaded and installed it straight away, and I've been using it every day since. A few months later I was able to get it set up to act as a quick launcher too, and I use that every day as well.

Despite being so useful, some of the installation instructions took me a while to work out (which explains the few months gap I just mentioned), so I thought I'd lay out here what I did to get this excellent program working.

First, and unsurprisingly, you need to download it. I got my copy at http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html. Download clcl112_eng.exe (or one of the other language variants, if they're a better match for you than English). While you're there, also download the two tool plug-ins, tool_text and tool_utl, and the three format plug-ins.

Now run clcl112_eng.exe. It's an installer, and by default unpacks into C:\Program Files\CLCL. You should find you've now got four new files: readme.txt, CLCL.exe, CLCLHook.dll, and CLCLSetup.exe.

CLCL.exe is the clipboard program. It needs to be manually launched, so I put a link to it into my Startup folder under the Start menu. If you run it now, you should notice a paperclip icon appearing in the taskbar. This is a shortcut to CLCLSet.exe.

CLCLSet.exe is a bit confusing. If you double click on the file icon in C:\Program Files\CLCL, it will bring up the CLCL Options dialog. However, if you click on it in the taskbar, you get the CLCL viewer instead. Also, if you right click on the paperclip icon, you get a pop-up menu containing the clipboard history, the Options dialog, and the viewer.

There are endless ways of configuring CLCL, so I will only describe what I've done with it. I find this works flawlessly (for me), so hopefully it will for you too.

Setting up the clipboard history

Run CLCLSet.exe to get into the Options dialog.
Choose the Action tab.
Click on Add...
Set 'Action' to 'Menu' and 'Call type' to 'Alt + Alt'.
In the 'Menu' area, click on the line marked '(New content)'. Don't be put off by it being greyed out.
Now click on the 'Content' dropdown, and select 'History(Ascending)'.
Hit OK.

You should now find that pressing ALT twice in quick succession will bring up a menu containing a history of everything you've put onto the clipboard since CLCL started running (and this history is retained from session to session).

Setting up the Quick Launcher

Run CLCLSet.exe to get into the Options dialog.
Choose the Action tab.
Click on Add...
Set 'Action' to 'Menu' and 'Call type' to 'Shift + Shift'.
In the 'Menu' area, click on the line marked '(New content)'. Don't be put off by it being greyed out.
Now click on the 'Content' dropdown, and select 'External Application'.
Fill out 'Title' and 'Path' for an application of your choice; e.g. 'Python 2.5' and 'C:\Python25\python.exe'.
Pick the executable for 'Icon path' too.
Hit OK.

You have now added a quick launch for Python 2.5. Pressing Shift twice in quick succession should bring up a menu containing 'Python 2.5'.

Clicking on '(New content)' also allow you to add several other useful features, such as 'Options', 'Cancel', or sub-menus (via 'Pop-up menu').

The CLCL Viewer

I mentioned the CLCL viewer, that comes up when you left click on the paperclip icon in the task bar. The main use I make of this is to edit the contents of the clipboard.

CLCL Tools

Earlier on I said to download two tool plug-ins, tool_text and tool_utl. The tools inside them let you perform a variety of actions on selected text, such as wrapping in quotes, changing case, etc. I will now explain how to install these tools.

The download will give you two zip files. Unzip these and you should find a DLL in each one. There is also the source code and a text file, but these can be ignored. Move the DLLs to a sensible location, such as under C:\Program Files\CLCL.

Now bring up the CLCL options dialog again. Pick the Tools tab. Click on the Browse button and select one of the DLLs. Then select the first tool in the list that appears. Click OK twice to get back to the main dialog.

Repeat this until you have added all the tools in both DLLs. I'm afraid that I have not found a way to import all the tools in a DLL in one go.

To use these tools, go back to the instructions for setting up a quick launcher. Where it asks you to select 'External Application', select 'Tool' instead. In this way you can add the tools to your menus.

CLCL Formats

As well as the tool plug-ins, there were three format plug-ins. These will extend the range of formats available to CLCL, and to install them you have to perform these steps.

Unzip the downloads. Take the DLL in each one and move it to a suitable folder, such as the same one you put the tool DLLs into.

Bring up the CLCL options dialog. Pick the Format tab and click on the Add button. Now click on the Browse button and select one of the DLLs. This will bring up another dialog containing a list with one item in it. Select that item and then press OK twice to get back to the main dialog.

Finally

I hope these instructions prove useful to someone one day. Looking through the options dialog, I realise that there is plenty of stuff I still don't understand. The Window tab in the options dialog is a complete mystery, for instance. If anyone can illuminate that, or any of the other bits I've left out, please let me know and I'll add them to this guide.

Milestones for Spotify and this Blog

2009-09-09T19:37:00.004+01:00

I've had my first comment, maybe even my first reader, as a result of my last posting on Spotify ads! Seems that if I write about something topical, people might want to read it. Who'd have thought?

I'm please to find out, after a week's holiday, that the anti-cannabis ads seem to have finished (taking the 'pot' out of 'Spotify'?). I wait with baited breath to hear if cannabis use has slumped as a result of the Government's information campaign.

In related news, Spotify is now available on the iPhone and Android mobile phones, though not my Nokia as yet. I tend to listen to podcasts on my N85 (commuting or at the gym), and only use Spotify at work to drown out noisy co-workers and the printer/copier that for some reason is sited near my desk instead of out in the corridor where it belongs. So I'm not inclined to become a premium Spotify subscriber just yet. However, it's good to see Spotify still moving forward. Napster has provided me with a competent service, but it's far from ideal, and I'd happily transfer my allegiance to a better alternative. Maybe when Spotify's catalogue matches Napster's; at the moment there are too many albums I'd lose access to.

Spotify Ads Up the Annoyance Factor

2009-08-21T15:19:00.006+01:00

The Spotify inline adverts hadn't been particularly intrusive until today. Although none of them made me want to purchase their products, they weren't unpleasant to listen to, so I could easily mentally blank them out.

This afternoon I've heard three brand new ones from Her Majesty's Government warning me about the side effects of cannabis (the bad ones, that is). Irritating the first time, I dread to think how I'm going to feel about them if I have to listen to them repeatedly.

The sound effects of a cannabis user repeatedly throwing up are offputting enough, but what really annoys me is wondering exactly what the government thinks they're going to achieve. Most alcohol users very quickly discover that drinking makes you talk too loudly, gives you a hangover, and can lead to serial vomitting, and yet these obvious downsides don't stop many people from over-indulging on the booze. Presumably the learning curve for cannabis is just as rapid. Still, it's nice to see the government supporting the music download business, with taxpayers' money, of course.

In one way this is the sort of ad that Spotify could really do with, as I'm immediately more tempted to upgrade to the premium, ad-free service. On the other hand, they're so annoying, I could just decide to give Spotify a miss for a couple of weeks in the hope the cannabis campaign is over by then.

Thirty Years of Experience - A Perspective, part 2

2009-08-20T16:12:00.009+01:00

Even if the languages I wrote in are dead, the knowledge of how to write good software is timeless.

There are some problems with this, though. Many of the techniques for good coding that I was taught, I no longer agree with. Sometimes I completely disagree with them. At university I was taught that there should be as many lines of comment as there are of code, which led to absurdities like:

C    Increment counter
     I = I + 1

In my code nowadays, comments are the technique of last resort for explaining what's going on. I much prefer to use plentiful, sensibly named functions to express my intent.

Nor do I any longer believe that every function should have only one return statement. Maybe that made sense once, but modern compilers are quite capable of coping with multiple return points. The emphasis on speed of execution and compactness that I learned at University also looks quaint. For most of my work, the most important quality that software can have, after correctness of course, is readability, so that the poor git who has to debug it three months later (quite often me) has a sporting chance of understanding it. Speed and size optimisation almost always reduce comprehensibility.

Another point that occurs to me is that I'd been programming for 16 years before I came upon Object-Oriented Design, and 25 before I had a chance to try Test Driven Development. I don't have any of my code from 16 years ago (what with it being the intellectual property of my former employers and all), but I rather suspect that most of the good practices I was using then haven't proved portable to the current day.

This isn't looking too good for the usefulness of my 30 years of experience. Let's look at my second argument instead.

I have acquired a sense of perspective, useful in a field like software engineering where the landscape changes at exponential rates.

As many others have already noted, IT is a field that undergoes exponential change. Processor speeds, memory size, disc capacity, etc. are all doubling every year or two. We all experience this; however, you have to be a certain age for the full magnitude of what's going on to sink in.

From this side of 50, I have a sense of perspective that younger (more energetic, faster learning, possibly more talented, not that I feel in any way threatened) programmers still lack. A good example of this involves the prefixes we use for size and speed. G for Giga is typical nowadays. When I started my professional career in 1980 though, memory size was typically measured in Kilobytes, and disc space in Megabytes. The HP1000 I worked on in 1980 had just 128K of RAM (and you could only address 32K of that at once). Three or four years later when my department was buying a Comart Communicator, my boss had to weigh up the pros and cons of getting one with a 10 or 20 Megabyte hard drive (in those days referred to as a Winchester drive).

My favourite example: in the mid-eighties Cambridge University was upgrading its mainframe system. I forget what computer exactly they were buying (though I remember it was replacing an IBM 3081), but I listened in stunned silence when a friend told me that it would have 50 Gigabytes of online hard drive. 'Giga' was new then, so I had to take a second to work out that that meant an astounding fifty thousand Megabytes! And that was to service a whole University. I have three times that much space in my Western Digital Passport external hard drive now, and I've nearly filled it up. Also, I've just noticed that, for the price I paid for it less than two years ago, Amazon are now selling the 500Gb version. And there's also a 1 terabyte version! Tera is coming to personal computing. That's a million-fold increase in disc space in a couple of decades. Also, what used to need its own air-conditioned room now fits comfortably in your pocket.

All this is starting to make me sound like some boring old f**t, going on and on about what things were like when he was your age. I will therefore stop now, and try to salvage my argument in part 3.

Thirty Years of Experience - A Perspective, part 1

2009-08-17T16:40:00.015+01:00

Having recently felt the need to update my CV, which now lists nearly thirty years of computing experience, I couldn't help noticing that quite a few of the skills I list are somewhat out of date. Fortran IV, Algol68, DEC VMS--who uses these any more? (More to the point, would I want a job using them anyway?) In fact, for most of my first decade in employment I was working on computers, operating systems, and languages that have all but vanished. Much of my second decade has already gone the same way. (Now that I think about it, most of the companies I've worked for no longer exist either. I'm pretty sure that's not my fault, though there does seems to be a pattern there.) So what use then, is thirty years of experience?

Does our field change so fast that there's a maximum amount of useful experience that you can acquire? After which, your total experience is being rendered redundant at one end as fast as you can add to it at the other?

Not liking the way this argument was going, I came up with two counter-arguments that show why it is still useful to have a many years of experience in computing.

Firstly, even if the languages I wrote in are dead, the knowledge of how to write good software is timeless. I've spent thirty years learning how to program.

Secondly, I have acquired a sense of perspective, useful in a field like software engineering where the landscape changes at exponential rates.

It's been three days since I started writing this entry (work, chores and childcare not being conducive to creativity), so I'll get back to these points in my next blog.

A Napster User's First Thoughts on Spotify

2009-08-15T16:55:00.011+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I read an article at The Register or somewhere about 'Spotify', and how it was going from strength to strength as a music download service, despite offering its basic service for free. Now I've been paying Napster £15 a month for the last few years to download their music, so this piquéd my interest enough to make me decide to give it a go.

I'm a bit cautious about these sites after my bad experience with iTunes. All I wanted to do was look at their catalogue to see if they were worth signing up to. However, to do that you first had to run their PC client. Only when I'd downloaded it, installed it, and started it up did I get told that iTunes wasn't yet available in the UK! (Yes, this was a while ago.) Like they couldn't have told me that to begin with? Spotify, however, is extremely quick to get going. My only complaint is that they ask for your date of birth. Why? A lot of banks and the like also use that particular piece of information for their security checks, so I don't like giving it out for no good reason.

So on to the Spotify experience. Well, the program is very fast, and downloads start almost instantaneously. Both these are unfamiliar experiences to a Napster user: napster.exe is a horribly slow program, that frequently hogs my CPU even when I'm not listening to anything. In terms of music availabity, Napster seems to have many more tracks that Spotify doesn't than the other way round. Why this is baffles me: you'd think that all the music labels that were prepared to let their music be downloaded would sign deals with the same download services. Anyway, the bottom line is that there are enough albums that I'd lose by moving to Spotify to keep me from leaving Napster. For the moment.

On the other hand, Spotify's basic service is, as I've mentioned, free, so there's nothing to stop me from using it as a supplementary service. I say 'free': there are adverts, which initially were about twice an hour, but seem to be picking up in frequency the more I listen. I guess they're aiming to be unobtrusive to start with while they're getting you hooked, before picking up in intensity in the hope of so annoying you that you sign up for the premium service. Apart from that though, the service is generally pleasant.

There are a few annoyances I've encountered.

Spotify can't spot your existing music libraries. Napster, on the other hand, will quite happily integrate your ripped CDs (not surprising, as it uses Windows Media Player under the cover).

The queueing mechanism in Spotify is highly unintuitive. Gary Fleming has provided a very good summary of its vagaries here, but suffice it to say that, if you queue up three albums in quick order, you'll get to listen to the first track of the first album, followed by all of the third album, followed by the second album, followed by the rest of the first. It gets worse: if you search for all the music of a particular artist and then queue up one of their albums, you effectively queue up all their music below that album in the search results as well.

Spotify won't let me play music on my mobile phone; Napster will.

If I close Spotify by clicking on the top right X icon, Spotify disappears, but the music continues to play.

The last one, of course, is a bug, and will disappear in due course. The first one is such a blatant shortcoming I can't believe they haven't fixed it yet. Number 3 is allegedly on the way. The second one is a pain for someone coming from Napster or Windows Media Player, and takes a little while to get used to. The trick is to put the music you want to listen to into a new playlist, and then queue that. After that you can add more music to the playlist, and it gets queued up in the way you'd expect. (You can also drag playlists out of Spotify and into Explorer or onto the desktop, letting you organise them into folders or mail them to other people.)

In summary, Spotify seems highly promising. It's faster than Napster, and, if you listen to your music on more than one machine, it's more convenient than Napster, which stores music tracks on the hard drive (you can just stream them, but that's much slower than Spotify). Spotify is available on MacOS X too, which Napster isn't. If it can just catch up in size with its catalogue and go mobile, I can see myself spending the £10 a month they ask for the ad-free service and kissing Napster goodbye.

Now I can send Texts

2009-07-25T16:40:00.005+01:00

I've already mentioned my Nokia N85, which is quite a powerful machine, but with just a few annoyances that I've yet to sort out. The largest of these was the discovery that it had a problem sending sms text messages: it couldn't.

I found out about this four weeks after purchasing the phone, which gives you some idea of how important texting is in my life. Initial research suggested that this is an uncommon, but not unheard of, problem. Fellow sufferers were to be found on Symbian and Nokia forums. Seemed the only solution was to reformat the phone, and risk the problem reoccurring as I put all the settings back to my preferred values. I decided not to bother.

Then last week I was idly exploring some of the phone's lesser used utilities when I found some settings I'd never noticed before. I toggled one of them that looked a likely candidate and tried to send a text. It worked! To prove I'd found the key setting I went back and toggled to the original setting; however, I could still send texts.

So whether changing this setting is the once and for all way of letting me send texts, or whether the problem had fixed itself, I cannot say. But for posterity, here is what I changed:

Go into the Utilities folder and open the Device Manager. Select Options, then Settings. This should show you the 'Default server profile', which for me was 'Nokia'. I changed this to 'Orange', my network provider. That's all there is to it.

And now for something vaguely useful

2009-07-09T12:29:00.003+01:00

The principal reason I had for starting a blog (apart from having somewhere to sound off) was to be able to give back a little bit of knowledge to this amazing repository that the internet has become. Now comes my first chance.

I switched to using Mozilla Firefox for web-browsing when it first came out, and haven't regretted it. Apart from its own rich set of features, the add-ons you can download give it a real edge over its competitors. Firebug and Hyperwords are both amazing, when you consider how much functionality they give you, for free.

Last week I upgraded to the latest version: Firefox 3.5. Not a great deal to see in terms of extra features, but the start up time was remarkable, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons. It was literally taking several minutes to load. Firefox 3.5 was really slow.

I hoped it might be a glitch, or it might recover by itself. No such luck. So I did the natural thing and asked Google. Bingo!

I started to follow the instructions, but when I went to the Temp folder like they said, there were so many files in there that Explorer just showed the torchlight icon for a couple of minutes, before I gave up. In the end I had to delete the files from the command line. It freed up over 5Gbytes of disc space, and Firefox now loads really quickly again.

I have a suspicion that more than one program is going to be running a bit faster now. The annoying thing is that I've bumped into this sort of issue before, a while back. These Temp folders fill up. It would be nice if the applications that put the files there had the courtesy to get rid of them when they'd finished, but clearly many of them don't. So it's left to the users, and how many of them know to look in their application data folders? I'm one that does, which is why it's annoying.

A Vast Torrent of Wisdom

2009-06-29T13:03:00.003+01:00

Google reckon (in the sense of knowing for sure) that every minute of every day, 270,000 words are written on Blogger. That's a remarkable figure. It would be interesting to find out how much of that gets read every minute-substantially less, I'm sure. This blog can't be helping the averages, for a start.

To get some readers it would help if I told my friends I'd started blogging. However, I'm reluctant to do that until I've got a reasonable body of work here. Readers I don't know would be okay, except that the chance of anyone finding this blog is almost infinitesimal at the moment. It takes a very specific Google search for even me to find it, and that's only when I include my name, at that.

Unvisited blogs like this do have one purpose though: people with nothing useful to say, but a strong urge to say it anyway, now have a good place to vent steam harmlessly, and nobody need ever listen to them. Just like this blog, at the moment.

Nobody Rings

2009-06-22T16:32:00.004+01:00

My first mobile phone was a sort of family heirloom; I inherited it from my mother when she died six years ago. It had a pay as you go account, still with all of the original money credited to it from when she'd bought it. I'm not surprised, as it was an ungainly model, difficult to navigate through. I kept it with me for emergencies, switched off as the battery discharged at a prodigious rate.

A couple of years later I bought a more up to date model from Nokia. Much easier to use, lightweight, and kept its charge. (In fact I've just turned it on successfully after it's spent the last five months in a drawer.) I still kept it switched off though, using it just for emergencies.

You see, I had never felt the need to be constantly connected with the phone network. I get few enough calls on the landline, so what was the point in handing out my mobile number, and incidentally losing my peace and quiet? That feature of today's technology I was quite happy to miss out on.

But last year I realised that the newer 'smartphones' pack a considerable amount of processing power. For many years I've lived out of a PDA (first a Palm m105, then an HP iPaq), and couldn't do without their built-in calendar and address book, not to mention the task list, calculator, music player, etc. One thing about the set up bothered me: when I did have to make a phone call on the mobile, I had to first look up the phone number on my iPaq, then key it into the phone. But if I had a smartphone, the two would be combined, and I could just dial straight away.

And so, even though I barely used my existing mobile, I began to condition myself to realising I 'needed' a smartphone costing £300 or more.

Fortunately, deciding what model to buy was sufficiently confusing to stop me just leaping in and spending my money. It had to be able to play the music I download on my 'Napster to go' subscription (and try getting a definitive list of devices that can do that, even from Napster!). It had to synchronise with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client on my PC (same problem). It took months of umming and ahhing before I finally settled on a Nokia N85. It can play my music, and it does sync with my PC, though not without several annoyances (I shall have words to say about the Mobile Master software in a future blog). It can pick up FM radio, download the web, take photos, play games. And it can make phone calls directly from my address book.

I set about telling all my friends my new mobile number, and waited for the calls to come flooding in. And waited, and waited. Turns out my friends have as much need to ring me as I have to ring them.

There have been moments of excitement. Early on a couple of times at work the mobile went off in my pocket (both times making me start), but it was just Orange trying to sell me extra features. And just last night it rang again, but it was a wrong number. "Is that H?" "No." "Are you sure?" "Quite sure?" "So ... you're not H who lives opposite the shop on whatsit street?" There was a time when a display of stupidity like that would have received some choice remarks about the caller's probable IQ range. Sadly, nowadays he'd be able to get my number from his phone's list of dialled numbers, and then maybe one day find out who I was via a Google search, so I just had to reassure him that, yes, I was quite sure of my own name thank you.

Meanwhile I continue to carry my mobile with me at all times. It's fun being connected.

Birthday Greetings

2009-06-20T14:32:00.007+01:00

Thought I'd post again before I run out of steam. Still no followers, I notice, despite having had this blog up for two whole hours. Maybe a tad over-optimistic there. However, since I set up a Twitter account I've picked up three followers, despite never having yet posted a tweet.

On the day of my 50th birthday I received an e-mail birthday greeting from snopes.com, the Urban Legend site. What does this mean? And how did they get my birthday? Sure, I have visited them, but why did I supply my birth date? Maybe an urban legend in the making...

I also got the usual selection of cards, mostly with a '50' theme. One stood out: a fluffy teddy bear opening a present. Very nice, but about 42 years too late. Perhaps somewhere a small child is receiving a card with the words "You're never too old to be naughty!" on the front.

Going back now ten years, the day after my 40th I got a card signed by all the nurses at the local Health Clinic, asking me to come in for a Well Man Check. I dutifully went along, looking forward to the battery of high tech tests that would assess my life chances. They did a blood pressure test and a questionnaire. Although I wad doing no sports or exercise, the fact that I cycled the two miles to work apparently pushed me well into the safety zone, and I've never heard from them since.

Into the Blogosphere

2009-06-20T12:22:00.002+01:00

It was my fiftieth birthday a few days ago.

Reaching 20 was no big deal. I was still at University, with few things worse than exams to worry about, and the rest of my life ahead of me.

Getting to 30 did cause me some soul-searching; it's harder to still think of yourself as young once you've left your twenties behind. But, I had my health, I was married now, and owned my own house. Life seemed on track, and the future still beckoned.

Arriving at 40 I was surprisingly comfortable about. Different house by then, and different wife, but the imminent prospect of starting a family kept me feeling young inside, so I could cope with having reached 'middle age'.

50, though, is much tougher to laugh off. For a start, if I'm still middle-aged, that means I'll have to make it to 100.

There's more: up to now I've thought of Saga holidays as an activity exclusively for a person's sunset years; now I'm allowed to go on them.

Worst of all, I've been officially reclassified as an ('older citizen'), with my own Assembly, and even my own festival, where presumably I can meet other 'old' people!

Well, stuff all that! I've still got the rest of my life ahead of me (albeit thirty years less of it now), plus most of my health, and I'm not going to start feeling old just because it's expected of me.

Chewing my muesli that morning, I decided it was time to start some new interests. And then, in a flash, I finally thought of a snappy title for this blog I'd been toying with starting. So here I am, taking my tentative first steps as a Blogger. I only hope I'll be able to live up to the high standards that implies.