September 2005 Archives

We'll no doubt here a lot about the Tory flat tax proposals during their conference next week. Here are a few alternative suggestions.

• A Fat Tax Your rate of tax is the percentage that you are over the average weight for your height. I'm still debating whether that should really be both over or under.
• Child Tax Your rate of tax is based on the the number of children that you have. And it increases exponentially. You can probably have the first one for free.
• Stupidity Tax The tax rate is set incredibly high. But there are a large number of well-hidden loopholes which bring it down to a reasonable rate. Only stupid people pay the full rate. The cleverer you are, the more loopholes you find and the cheaper it gets. And you're not allowed to pay accountants to find them for you.

I like the last one best.

Robert saw this poster and uploaded a photo of it to Flickr. It contains an incredible number of grammatical errors.

Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

Also

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

And I especially liked

The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.

From the Times

The reason for this weekend's trip to Brighton was to move my stepdaughter into Sussex University. She loaded up all of her stuff into her boyfriends car on Saturday lunchtime and they drove down together[1]. We followed on the train and by a sheer fluke managed to arrive just as they had finished the unloading. We then stayed a while and helped her do some of the unpacking. I put her computer together - but wasn't able to test it as she didn't have enough power sockets. The information we had recieved in post said that the rooms should have all had network points by the start of this term, but that work hasn't finished so she doesn't currently have an internet connection from her room - which is a bit disappointing.

Later on we had a brief wander around the campus until we found the student union bar and enjoyed some subsidised food and drink. Eventually we wandered off to stay overnight at a friend's house leaving her to enjoy the first night of freshers week.

The next day we met her in the centre of Brighton for lunch. Brighton this weekend was even more surreal than it usually is. Firstly, every where you went there were eighteen year olds byuing household goods that they had forgotten to bring with them (the 99p shop was doing a roaring trade) and secondly the Labour Party were in town for the start of their annual conference - which also meant an increased police presence. It was very strange to turn a corner in the Lanes and walk into two policemen carrying machine guns.

In the middle of the afternoon, she went back to the campus and we wandered off to the pier and, later, home.

In many ways it was a very nostalgic weekend for me. It brought back a lot of memories of the weekend that I moved to London to start my degree. At various points over the weekend I started telling stories of my time living in halls of residence to anyone who would listen. I remembered things that I hadn't thought about for twenty years.

[1] A tip. The capacity of a small Fiat is about the same as the capacity of a room in halls of residence. IF you've got too much stuff to go into the car, then chances are you've got too much stuff to go into your room.

I was in Brighton over the weekend (for reasons I'll write more about later) and whilst I was there I took the opportunity to visit the new Doctor Who exhibition.

It was a bit over-priced for what it was (£6 each!) but it was nice to see a number of the props from the new series. There were also some nice touches, like a button labelled "do not press" in the Dalek section - when you press it the Dalek turns its eye to look at you.

I would have liked to have seen more exhibits about the older shows but the small section they had was well done. Oh, and the merchandise was all massively overpriced. I really want a large inflatable Dalek, but I'm not going to pay £30 for it.

If you're a Doctor Who and you're in Brighton and you don't mind spending £6 on something that you'll walk round in about fifteen minutes then I recommend giving it a look.

Slowly organising all of my old photos on Flickr. I've just created a photo set for a crisps walk we did in November 2002 around the highwalks of the City of London.

Must be time for another crisps walk. I suspect I volunteered to organise one...

Today's Guardian has an interesting account by David Mery of the day he was arrested by the metropolitan police for acting suspiciously on the tube. This took place the day after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell station. Mery has a web page where he is keeping a record of the incident and its aftermath. His flat was raided and some of his possessions were confiscated. Two months on he still hasn't got them all back.

The police decided that wearing a rain jacket, carrying a rucksack with a laptop inside, looking down at the steps while going into a tube station and checking your phone for messages just ticked too many boxes on their checklist and makes you a terrorist suspect. How many other people are not only wrongly detained but wrongly arrested every week in similar circumstances? And how many of them are also computer and telecoms enthusiasts, fitting the police's terrorist profile so well?

Interesting piece by Ian McEwan about what happened when he tried to give away books to strangers in a park near his house.

Every young woman we approached - in central London practically everyone seems young - was eager and grateful to take a book. Some riffled through the pile murmuring, "Read that, read that, read that ..." before making a choice. Others asked for two, or even three.

The guys were a different proposition. They frowned in suspicion, or distaste. When they were assured they would not have to part with their money, they still could not be persuaded. "Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks mate, but no." Only one sensitive male soul was tempted.

So why do men dislike reading? Do they see reading as a challenge to their masculinity or something? Or do they like reading, but are just reluctant to take books from strangers?

Two nicely contrasting stories in today's papers about members of politicians' families.

Firstly, theguardian has used the freedom of information act to get lots of good dirt on how Mark Thatcher abused the fact that his mother was Prime Minister. This is, of course, exactly how the freedom of information act should be used.

And then we take a deep breath and turn to the Daily Mail who are predictably furious that Cherie Blair doesn't much like the Windsors.

One day I'll learn that I should have nothing to do with any version of Windows. It always ends with me swearing at hardware.

As mentioned before, I've got a new Dell PC. Which frees up the old one to go off to university with my stepdaughter. Neither of my PCs have Windows installed, but the new PC came with a Windows XP installation disk[1] so the plan was to install the new version of XP onto my old PC.

Simple? Well, no.

I thought it would be as simple as putting the XP installation CD into the CD drive and rebooting. I thought that the PC would boot from the CD and automatically start the installation. I was wrong.

The PC found the CD and realised that it was bootable. It then tried to boot up. It got as far as saying that it was checking the hardware but then it hung. I tried this a few times. On one occasion I even left it for a few hours to see if it was just running very slowly. But no. It had just hung.

So it seemed that this installation CD didn't like being booted on a PC that didn't already have Windows installed. So I thought that I'd install another, older, version of Windows first and then install XP over that. And what a large number of of Windows installation media I found around the house. I tried Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95. All of them failed to boot from the CD. I was beginning to think that the CD drive was faulty (even though I knew it worked fine under Linux).

And then I found the installation disk for the copy of Windows ME that originally came with that PC. And for some reason, that one worked. About half an hour later I had a copy of Windows ME installed on the the PC. I was tempted to just stop there, but I know that Windows ME is one of the flakiest versions of Windows ever, so I had to proceed to stage two and install XP.

That only took two attempts. The first attempt got to the stage when it was going to start copying files over and then informed me that it couldn't find any of the files it needed to copy. It helpfully suggested that I put the correct installation media into the CD drive. It was, of course, already there. On rebooting, it booted from the CD and went straight into the installation routine. I still don't understand why it didn't do that before.

There was only one surprise left. During the system setup phase, it asked me to give the computer a name. I gave it my stepdaughter's name as that's the name that here previous PC had on our home network. Then when it asked me the names of the people who would use the computer I gave her name again - only to be told that user names could not be 'Guest', 'Admin' or the name of the computer!

But eventually it all worked. Well, I think it worked. It was too late to actually try anything. Now I need to get it on our network so I can connect to the internet and install all the security updates.

And then I can think about what software I need to install. There will be as little Microsoft software as possible on this PC.

[1] Well, it didn't actually come with it. I had to phone them up and ask them to send it. They seemed surprised that anyone would actually want the installation media for the operating system.

I spent the weekend staying with friends in a small Devon village. It's nice to get away from the city every once in a while.

One of the bonuses of the weekend was seeing my first real-life badger. Unfortunately it was dead, having been hit by a car. We did, however, get a good view of the buzzard that was eating it.

It's like some kind of battle of Greek (or is it Roman?) heroes.

David Heinemeier Hansson is less than complimentary about Microsoft's new Javascript framework, Atlas.

Until recently I often used a website called TV Tome. This was the best place to go for information about TV programmes. It contained episode guides, cast lists and various other bits of trivia about all of your favourite programmes. Nice simple interface. A few ads, but nothing too intrusive.

It's not there now tho'. It has reinvented itself as TV.com. I think that all of the content is still there, but I can't be sure because the new site is almost unusable. It's far more graphics intensive than the old site and it makes heavy use of flash and/or Java applets. The site is horribly slow and there is too much going on all over the page.

I know people need to make money from their web sites and I suppose that they are now able to charge advertisers more. But when the needs of the advertisers takes precedence over the needs of the users then a web site is in deep trouble.

Or maybe it was just change for the sake of it. In which case it was pointless.

I hope that someone builds a new, simpler TV site. Or perhaps there's another already out there. Currently I'm still struggling along with TV.com, but I won't be able to take it much longer.

Update: Ok. From the comments I'm getting, I see that the TV IV Wiki is the place to go now.

Either I'm missing the point, or Google's new Blogsearch is missing the functionality that I'd use most - the ability to search for sites that link to a particular blog.

I'm talking about something like Technorati's blog search page or Bloglines' citations service. Without this it really doesn't seem to add much that I can't get from Google's main search page.

I'm getting involved in a debate on the uk-netmarketing email list on the value (or otherwise) of web page popups. Another of the people in the discussion works for Eyeconomy who I've mentioned before.

Like all people I've discussed it with, I hate unrequested popups on web pages. When one appears I close it down immediately without reading it. Proponents of popups point to data proving how much more effective they are than plain banner ads. I say that this just proves that it's impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the average web user :)

So we have a situation where most web surfers still see popups as an unavoidable annoyance on the web. About 90% of surfers still use Internet Explorer and I suspect it's a very small percentage of those who have installed any kind of popup blocker. These are the people who are still providing data which encourages the use of popups.

But there is another (smaller) group of people. These are the people who have installed a decent browser that has a built-in popup blocker. Or have installed popup blocking extensions for their browser. These people know that they don't like popups and have taken the decision to do something about them.

This action annoys the people who use popups. Popup blocking is, they think, attacking their livelihood. Less people are seeing their popups and therefore they are making less money. So they devote time and energy to writing "super-popups" that get past the popup blockers. And in many cases they succeed.

But I think that they are missing a fundamental point. The people with popup blockers installed have, as I said above, taken the conscious decision that they don't want to see popups. Before installing a popup blocker they saw popups as an annoyance. Now, if they see popups they are very likely to get far more pissed off as someone has overidden their choice. These people didn't like popups before (that's why they installed popup blocking software). They were never going to click one the adverts. Why waste time and energy developing these super-popups when they are only going to further annoy people who already disliked popups?

But I don't think that this kind of logic has any chance of working with these marketeers. I think that our only hope is to convince their clients that using super-popups is doing nothing but annoying people. I've now decided that every time I come across site that serves me super-popups through my popup blocker, I'll email the webmaster explaining what has happened and telling them that I won't be using their site again. I'd encourage you to do the same. Maybe if enough of us tell them then the message will start to get through.

(I know I said the last post would be the final one on the new Guardian - it seems I lied, but this is important stuff)

One of the things that provoked the loudest complaints about the Berliner Guardian (maybe I should just start calling it theguardian) was the removal of Doonesbury. There were some angry discussions about this over on the Editors blog (currently 179 comments on that post) and it seems that some of the Guardian staff were surprised by how many people were so strongly attached to a rather parochially American cartoon strip.

But these complaints haven't gone unheeded. A new post on the Editors blog announces that Doonesbury will return to G2 on Monday and that there will be a catch-up omnibus published on Friday.

See, this demonstrates the power of the Guardian's blogs. No other paper in the UK (maybe the world) has such close communication with its readers. Well done to the Guardian for listening to the readers, admitting its error and fixing things so quickly.

Now, I wonder if I can get them to run Opus for those of us who still miss Bloom County.

A couple of final points about the Guardian redesign before I start looking for something different to write about.

Firstly, circulation levels. One of the driving forces behind this redesign is (I assume) the Guardian's falling circulation figures over the last year. I realise that this is purely anecdotal evidence, but over the two days that the new format has been on sale I haven't seen any increase in people reading it on the tube.

And finally, I think that people who are complaining that the web site wasn't redesigned at the same time as the paper are being slightly disingenous. The amount of resource that the Guardian has put into this redesign has obviously been phenomenal. Trying to redesign the web site at the same time would have been madness.

In general, I think that the new format Guardian looks fabulous. It was, by far, the most interesting looking paper in the newsagent's this morning. The few niggles I mention below are only very minor and I fully expect to not be noticing them at all in a month's time.

• I'm not sold on the new masthead. The all lower case typeface makes it more like a style magazine than a serious newspaper.


• Love the new font in most of its different versions. The one version that I'm not sure about is the one used for the initial drop caps. It looks a bit thin and weedy to me.


• The subtle difference between the typesetting for news (justified) and comment (ragged right) is a great idea. Wonder how many people worked it out without themselves (I didn't).


• The use of colour and the reproduction of the photos is really impressive. Printing technology has come a long way since Today - just look at the massive double page photo on pages 20 and 21.


• The paper stock looks better quality than they were using last week - but not as good as they used for the preview edition on Saturday.


• My copy of the main paper had a few badly folded pages and my G2 was mis-cut. The new presses still have a few bugs to iron out.


• No Doonesbury! Oh well. I hope Trudeau has an RSS feed.

But to be honest, I'm not sure about the size. I used to fold the broadsheet in four and carry it under my arm. It now looks ridiculously small if I do that. And if I ony fold it in half it's too big and flappy. I'm sure I'll get used to it tho'.

And it's been really interesting following the new Editors' Blog. It's not often (if, indeed, ever) that you get such a detailed look into the workings of a national newpaper.

And while I'm talking about the new Guardian (face it, that's all I'm going to talk about today) it's worth pointing out that the digital edition is free for the next two weeks (until Sept 26th). This is partly to let people have a closer look at the new format and partly because the move to the Berliner format has obviously introduced a glitch or two.

It's well worth a look.

Obviously I've got my copy of the new Guardian and I'll have more to say about it later on.

But I just wanted to raise a point about the letters page. They've renamed it "Letters and Emails". Now that makes sense on one level as I assume that a large proportion of the letters aren't actually sent through the post any more.

My issue is with the use of the word "emails". Given that "email" is based on the word "mail" then I'd expect it to follow the same rules. And the plural of "mail" is... well it doesn't really have one. It's a weird noun that is only ever used in the singular. "I got a lot of mail yesterday"[1]. "Email" should follow the same usage.

Which of these sounds better?

"How much email do you get in a day?"
"How many emails do you get in a day?"

"I have too much email in my inbox"
"I have too many emails in my inbox"

I feel a letter (or, rather, an email) to the editor coming on.

[1] Ignoring, for a second, the fact that if you were speaking British English you'd actually use "post" instead of "mail".

When did people stop knowing the difference between adverbs and adjectives? It's becoming common to hear people using adjectives instead of adverbs and it really grates.

There's an example on the BBC new site right now. The headline says "Charles urges society to go slow". Isn't it obvious that the last word should be "slowly"?

There's a special report about the new Guardian now available on the GU web site. It includes a PDF version of a preview edition that will apparently be in tomorrow's paper.

I haven't examined it closely yet, but on first glance it looks good. Of course the main change (the size) won't be really apparent until you hold it in your hands.

According to Technorati, this is currently the most authorative blog about the Guardian.

I expect that to change pretty quickly.

Most "celebrities" are obviously too stupid to add anything sensible to discussions on world events. Unfortunately that usually doesn't stop them trying. Here's Celine Dion on the recent looting in New Orleans.

Some of the people who do that they're so poor they've never touched anything in their lives. Let them touch those things for once

She should really have a publicist to filter this stuff for her.

Ooh. New series of Spooks starts next week. There's a two-parter on Monday and Tuesday.

The last series wasn't up to the standard of the first two (losing the three main characters didn't really help) but it's good mindless entertainment. I'll certainly be watching.

Oh and, purely coincidently, today I was given the first two series on DVD for my birthday. I know what I'll be doing over the weekend.

Is there anyone still alive who remembers when Kate Bush last released an album? It seems she'll be releasing a new one later this year.

She makes the Blue Nile look positively industrious.

I hope it's worth the wait.

The Guardian has announced (free registration required) that it will relaunch in its new Berliner format from Monday 12th September.

Recently I've got out of the habit of buying a paper every day, but I've bought one twice in the last week or so and it reminded me how much I enjoy reading the paper on the tube in the morning. I'll certainly be picking up at least the first few copies in new format.

Update: Lloyd is understandably excited by this :)

It's tempting to quote huge swathes of Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne's article from today's Guardian as it does such a great job of debunking the idea that "intelligent design" should be taught in science classes. But I'll resist and just give you a couple of the best paragraphs. Here's one good one

Intelligent design [...] is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?

And here's another

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

Oh look, I can't do it justice by giving you extracts. Just go and read the whole thing yourself.

Oh, and it's good to see the Flying Spaghetti Monster in Pass Notes.