davblog

A lot of books this month. But you might think that there was a bit of cheating going on.

The Bible: The Biography - Karen Armstrong
This is a book I've wanted to read ever since I saw it published in hardback last year. Actually, it wasn't quite what I expected. I was expecting a lot more about the writing of the bible, but that was all covered in the first couple of chapters. Most of the book was about the history of the interpretation of the bible. It was all very interesting stuff. I recommend it.

The Children of Men - P.D. James
Something else that I had wanted to read for some time. In this case, my interest was piqued by seeing the film adaptation last year. This was one of the best films I saw last year so I really wanted to read the book. This is the first PD James book that I have read and I was very pleasantly surprised. The plot has major differences to the film, but it's a great story and well worth reading. I understand that it's not typical of James's work though so I'm not usre that I'll be rushing to read any more of her books.

Linux Networking Cookbook - Carla Schroder
Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two - William Hagen, Brian Jones
The first little bit of cheating. Neither of these books are really meant to be read from cover to cover, but I skimmed over them both over the course of a few days. Both of them do exactly what it says on the tin and if you're interested in Linux systems administration then you'll find one or both of these books to be useful.

The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing
This is this months book club book. I've read a couple of her books in the past and this has left me wanting to read more. I'll probably start by tracking down a copy of the sequel - Ben in the World.

Lyra's Oxford - Philip Pullman
More cheating here. This book is about twenty pages long. And the pages are tiny. I read it because I'm a big fan of the His Dark Materials books. But this is a pretty pointless extension to that series. I bit of a waste of time to be honest. But not much time.

A Spot of Bother (Mark Haddon)
Like pretty much everyone I know, I read and loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime a couple of years ago. That was always going to be a really difficult book to follow. This isn't in the same league at all. But that's not saying it's a bad book at all. Far from it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone. It's just a shame that its predecessor gives everyone such high expectations which, realistically, were highly unlikely to be met.

Slam - Nick Hornby
A new Nick Hornby book is always a cause for celebration. This is apparently aimed at young adults, but you barely notice that. The protagonist is younger than you'll find in Hornby's others books, but other than that we're on familiar territory amongst the middle class of Islington. There were a couple of chapters that didn't really work for me. I can't go into too much detail without giving spoilers, so I'll just say that Hornby doesn't seem particularly comfortable writing supernatural events.

Update: Removed one book which I realised I'd read in May, not April.

One of the joys of MPs having blogs is that you often get to see what they are really like without their utterances going through the filter of the party spin machine. And it's amazing how often so many of them make complete fools of themselves.

Today's example is Nadine Dorries. Of course as a Tory she's very happy about the results of yesterday's council elections. I can't really blame her for that. But does she channel that happiness into a well-researched and interesting article about why people voted the way they did? Did she write something about how the Tory party can build on this success in order to maximise their chances in the next general election?

I think you can guess the answer to those questions.

No, she wrote some childish nonsense[1] comparing Gordon Brown to Andy Pandy.

Oh dear boys and girls, Gordon's not looking very well today.

Lets put him back in the desk shall we and see if he can face coming out tomorrow.

There's obviously a very good reason why she isn't making large sums of money as a comedy writer.

Voters of Mid Bedfordshire, is this really what you want from your MP? She is making you a laughing stock. Please use your vote more wisely next time.

[1] It's possible that this link might not go to exactly where it needs to. Dorries "blog" (it's not really a blog at all) has a ridiculous URL scheme which means it's impossible to link directly to individual items.

From a geek mailing list where they are currently retreading the endless arguments about why there aren't more women in Open Source.

Now arguably, "chick" is a bit derogatory.

It's not even ironic British understatement - the writer isn't British. But it's a good indication of just how far we still have to go.

For a number of years now we've taken part in a weekly quiz in a local pub. We do pretty well and occasionally win. The chap that runs this quiz runs a number of other quizzes and a few times he's held a Champions' League night where top teams from all of his pubs come together to compete. We do well enough to be invited to these nights.

So we weren't too surprised to be invited to one a couple of months ago. The difference with this one was that it was being filmed by Channel 4. According to  the quizmaster, they had been in touch with him as they wanted to make a documentary about the rise in pub quizzes in London. They had asked him to put on a night that they could film. He got together about thirty of his best teams and Channel 4 added in another couple of teams - one of which was one man one his own.

We turned up and were given a release to sign. My wife pointed out that it was a bit more comprehensive than we had expected. It basically said that we agreed not to tell anyone anything about anything that happened that night. She said something about how she could understand why people like Derren Brown might need a form like that, but that it seemed a bit over the top for a documentary about pub quizzes.

But anyway we signed it and for that reason I'm not going to tell you anything about what the Channel 4 people did that night. I'll just say that it was a standard Champions' League pub quiz and we really didn't do very well.

Our friend the quizmaster got in touch on Friday and said he'd heard that the programme was going to be transmitted this coming Friday (May 2nd). I had a quick look at the Channel 4 listings for that night and couldn't see anything that looked like a documentary about pub quizzes, so I asked if he knew what the title of the programme was.

He replied that it was the new series of Derren Brown's "Trick or Treat".

So I shall be watching on Friday with great excitement.

Update: The Telegraph has an article explaining what is going on.

Updated update: No idea why the Telegraph have taken that story down. They've replaced it with this similar one.

I'm not sure why, but I always come out of the Apple shop on Regents Street feeling slightly disgruntled. It's like I'm visiting some strange planet where I don't understand the customs and I know I'm never really going to fit in.

The staff don't help. I know they're all really helpful, but at the same time they always seem so smug and self-satisfied. Like they think they have the coolest job in London and whilst they're happy to help, they'd really far rather not have to deal with people who aren't cool enough to get jobs working for Apple.

I'm probably projecting some deep-seated insecurities of my own.

I was in the shop yesterday (which is rare) and I even bought something (which is rarer). I picked up the stuff I needed and joined the queue to pay. There were rather a lot of people in the queue so it took a while to get to a till. Actually, now I think of it, I don't remember seeing a till. Maybe Apple customers are too cool to sully themselves with actual money. The chap serving me was very friendly in the slightly disconcerting way that many religious converts are. He pointed out that I didn't need to queue to pay as now all assistants in the store have a portable credit card reader and barcode scanner and any of them could take my payment. Of course, I had to queue up in order to be told this. Having a sign up to explain wouldn't be cool. He also explained that he wouldn't print me a receipt as their system would email it to me. This means that Apple now have my email address (I bet their marketing department loved that idea) and it also means that I need to take the responsibility for printing out yet another climate-destroying piece of paper work. I know it means they're taking their responsibilities to the environment seriously, but somehow it struck a false note with me.

Then he asked if I needed a bag. This is becoming common in London shops. Again it enables the customer to choose how much environmental impact their shopping trip will have. But sometimes you need a bag. And you shouldn't be made to feel guilty for asking for one. I think I took him by surprise by saying "yes please". He obviously looked at the Foyles bag I had rested on the counter. It was already full of things I had bought from Foyles and Forbidden Planet, but I don't think he realised that. I definitely got the impression that he didn't expect Apple customers to be as cavalier towards the environment as I seemed to be. He gave me the bag though.

I'm probably reading far more into this than I should.

Oh, and having got my name (from my email address) he took to calling me 'Dave'. I suppose it shouldn't bother me. We life, after all, in an egalitarian society. But I'm old-fashioned enough to prefer it when shop assistants don't use my first name. It seems a bit disrespectful. Probably just more evidence that I'm not cool enough to be buying Apple kit. This whole entry would probably give a psychologist a field day.

Turns out I bought the wrong thing. I needed a Mini-DVI to VGA adapter. Somehow I picked up a Mini-DVI to DVI adapter instead. So I need print out my receipt and go back this evening to change it.

I'm really not looking forward to it.

I've harped on about this before, but I firmly believe that when you publish a URL on the web then it should be permanent. Of course you might want to change the way that your site is set up at some point in the future, but when you do that you should do everything you can to ensure that visitors using the old URLs are seamlessly redirected to the new URL.

And this is true of any kind of URL. It's not just web pages. The same is true of the URLs of your web feeds. Many people who read your web feeds won't check that they're still reading the correct address. They'll usually just assume that you're still publishing the feed to the same place. Perhaps I'm not typical, but I subscribe to almost 200 feeds in Bloglines. If one of those feeds goes quiet, it could be weeks before I notice the problem and investigate what has happened.

When I was talking about the problems with the new Sun RSS feeds last year, I mentioned in passing that they had lost a lot of subscribers by just moving them to new URLs, but Martin covered it in more detail.

In the last few days, I've seen three instances of the same thing happening. Three places where a web feed just stopped working. Only one of them bothered to tell their users what was going one.

Firstly, I noticed that I was no longer getting updates from my MP's web site. When I investigated further I found that they had redesigned the site and the URL for the feed had changed. Now I don't expect my MP or his staff to understand stuff like this. But I expect they paid a lot of money to the people who redesigned the site. It would have been nice to think they were getting their money's worth.

Secondly, this morning the BBC Doctor Who news site told me that it was moving (again, due to a redesign and change of technology). In this case they told their readers to resubscribe to the new feed, but a simple web redirection could have made it seamless. As a big Doctor Who fan, Martin has also covered this in some detail. I expect the BBC's web department to have the experience to know that this is a really bad way to handle the move.

And finally, this afternoon I noticed that I wasn't getting any news from BoingBoing. I only noticed this because I had submitted a story to them and was looking to see if it had been published. Like the BBC web group, the people behind BoingBoing should really know what they are doing and shouldn't make such basic mistakes.

I think that web feeds are a great tool. They enable me to regularly read far more data from the web than I did before I used them. But it's clear that many web site owners are publishing them because everyone else is doing it and they don't really understand how important they are.

Update: Another one. Today (May 1st) I see that the Telegraph have moved all of their RSS feeds. At least the dropped a message about it into the old feed. But haven't these people heard of URL redirection?

I spend a lot of time here complaining about broken web sites, so it's nice to be able to praise something that worked better than expected. And I'm slightly surprised to be able to report an impressive experience with a UK government web site.

One thing that I found whilst sorting through my study over the the weekend was my driving licence. It's a provisional licence. I've never passed a driving test. I got a provisional licence when I was seventeen and over the next year I took many lessons and failed three tests. Back then (this was the late 70s) provisional licences were only valid for a year so once I gave up learning to drive I let my licence lapse and thought nothing more about it.

But then in 1996 I thought perhaps I would have another go so I applied for another provisional licence. By the time the licence arrived I'd lost any enthusiasm that I had and the new licence was just filed away and forgotten about. One thing had, however, changed in the intervening period. Provisional licences were no longer valid for just one year. This one was valid until (I think) my 70th birthday.

So on Saturday I found this long-forgotten, but still valid licence. The first thing I noticed about it was that it was still registered to my last address (it's been ten years since we moved). The second thing that I noticed was a threat of a £1000 fine for failing to inform them of a change of address. Of course that really means that you'll be fined if you get caught driving with a licence that has an out of date address, so there's not much chance of me ever being fined. But I decided that it was worth getting it updated and put it aside in a small but growing pile of things to be addressed later.

Late on Sunday I was going through that pile and came to the licence. The instructions were to fill in your new address on the back of the licence and to send it back to the DVLA who would then issue a corrected replacement. Before doing that I decided to check if I could do this online.

I found the DVLA web site which quickly lead me to the Driving Licensing Online site where I found the link that I was looking for. As I was going through the process I realised that there might be a problem. My licence was of a pretty ancient vintage and new licences have a photo on them. I could see disaster looming. I was sure that I was going to end up with a form to print off and send in along with a photo. But that's not what happened. What happened was a lot cleverer than that.

The system realised that I was a registered driver (albeit a provisional driver) and that it didn't have a photo of me. It then asked if I had a passport and when I said yes, it offered to use the photo from my passport on my new licence. Not only does this demonstrate a level of technical ability and standardisation that is rarely seen in organisations of this size, but (far more importantly in my opinion) by asking for my permission before doing this, it shows an awareness of privacy issues that is, in my experience, even rarer.

I assume that had I said no, then I would have still ended up with a form to print off and instructions to send it in with a photo. But because I was happy for them to link these two records, I was able to do it all online. And it was free too. I half expected them to try and charge me fifteen of twenty quid.

So I'm now expecting my new driving licence to arrive in the next few days. I don't know whether or not I'll actually use it to start learning to drive again, but it'll be a useful piece of ID to carry around. All in all, I was very happy with the way it all worked out.

I spent a lot of the weekend clearing piles of old crap out of my study. I can't remember the last time I gave it a good clean, but it was nice to be reminded of the colour of the carpet and to be reassured that there is still a wooden desk underneath the layers of paperwork.

One decision that I took was that I was going to throw away all of the old 3.5" disks that I found. It's been years since I used a floppy disk and I can't see me needing them in the foreseeable future. The last time I bought a desktop computer it didn't even come with a floppy disk drive as standard. That was an added extra. I gave it one last workout on Saturday though as I checked about fifty disks to see if they contained anything that I wanted to keep. The only useful thing I found (I say "useful", but that's probably an exaggeration) was a set of eight disks that contained a set of Disney graphics that I must have acquired somehow when I worked for their home video group.

I also found a number of disks that were labelled with various DOS version numbers and a complete set of Visual Basic Professional 4.0 which came on about ten disks. It gave me great pleasure to dispose of those. The only disks that I didn't throw out were a copy of the original version of Doom (I remember three of us at Disney clubbing together to buy that) and the boxed set of The Lost Treasures of Infocom. This was partly just because of nostalgia, but also because in both cases the most important part of the game is a data file and there are interpreters for reading those data files available for many computing platforms. It appeals to me that I just need to hunt down a Z-Machine implementation and I'll be able to play The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy on my Linux system.

I found one other set of software that I haven't yet thrown away. I had largely forgotten about it, but in the second half of the 90s I wasn't as committed to open source software as I now am and I spent quite a lot of money on Microsoft software. I found a big stack of installation CDs for things like Encarta, Cinemania and Money. I remember being very impressed by Encarta and Cinemania when they were released - I spent hours watching tiny jumpy clips from films when I first got hold of Cinemania. Of course the presence of things like Wikipedia and IMDB makes them a bit pointless these days. I have no idea if these 1990s products even run on modern versions of Windows, but I can't help wondering if there's a market in secondhand versions of this software. Let me know if you're interested in hearing more about exactly which products I've got.

Is anyone else getting Google Calendar spam? About half a dozen times in the last month I've got an SMS message telling me that I've received an invitation to an event on my Google Calendar and when I check the calendar it's actually some kind of 419 spam.

I suppose that it was inevitable that the spammers would eventually find this new way of annoying people, but I'm not happy that it's apparently so easy for them. Is this going to go the way of email and blog comments, with people becoming reluctant to accept event invitations from random people? Will you need to join some kind of whitelist before you can invite me to an event. I really hope it doesn't come to that.

I've been just deleting the invitations, but it's times like these that I wish there was some way to transmit a poke in the eye over HTTP. Is there something else that I can be doing? Should I report them to Google in some way? Would that help at all? I assume the invitations are being sent from disposable accounts.

I've only been using Google Calendar for a month or two. It would be a shame to see it become unusable. I'd love to hear any suggestions you have (as, I'm sure, would Google).

Another month, another list of books read. I know how much you all love reading these lists.

number9dream - David Mitchell
I started this at the end of February. And, surprisingly, found it all a bit of a struggle. I say "surprisingly" because I've loved the previous two David Mitchell books that I've read - Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. This (earlier) novel just didn't seem to work as well for me. I didn't find the story engaging and the characters all seemed a bit one-dimensional.

Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion - David J Murphy
Like January's Catalyst, this is a book that I was sent to review by the publishers, so a longer review will appear elsewhere in the next couple of weeks. All I'll say now is that it's a completely pointless book and you would be wasting your time reading it.

Unweaving the Rainbow - Richard Dawkins
It's only in the last three or four years that I've started reading books by Richard Dawkins. I've read the most recent ones and now I'm gradually going back through the older ones. Unweaving the Rainbow addresses the idea that by studying the universe in depth we remove the mystery and wonder. Unsurprisingly, Dawkins thinks this is complete nonsense and in the book he presents a compelling case for the opposite point of view - that an understanding of science increases the feeling of wonder he gets when contemplating the universe. This would be a great introduction to the works of Richard Dawkins as it doesn't concentrate on evolutionary biology the way that some of his other books do.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick
This was this month's book club book. I read a lot of Philip K Dick twenty or thirty years ago, but for some reason I didn't get round to this one. Which is a bit strange given that it's generally considered his masterpiece. Perhaps the "future history" aspect wasn't science fictiony enough for my younger self. Anyway, I'm glad that I've now corrected this omission as this is one of the best books I've read for a long time. It's one of those books that is deceptively easy to read, but which you find yourself thinking about for some time after finishing it. Dick obviously worked out the history of his new future meticulously and I'm pretty sure it's the kind of novel which will be well worth rereading.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale - Iain Banks
I've been a big fan of Iain Banks (not so much Iain M Banks) for many years. But, to be honest, his last few books have been a bit disappointing. Things like Whit, The Business and A Song of Stone seemed a little formulaic to me (even though they were all very different to each other). His last novel, Dead Air, was a lot better and with this novel I think he has returned completely to form. This reads a bit like a cross between The Business and The Crow Road and is exactly the kind of novel that I enjoy reading. If I had to make one criticism, it would be that the ending was a little too neat, but after almost four hundred pages of great writing I can forgive him that.