January 2006 Archives

Anyone from Yahoo! reading? I've got a new slogan for you.

Yahoo! - the Swiftest search engine

I just thought of that. I obviously missed my calling. I should have been in marketing.

What do you mean, it's too literary? You just don't read enough!

This years EuroOSCON has been announced. It's on the 18th - 21st September in Brussels. Last year's conference was great, so I hope to be there again.

Oh, and there seems to be another similar conference taking place in the US in July.

It's over six months since I got my iRiver H140 and I'm very happy with it. Unfortunately I can no longer recommend it to new buyers as it's no longer available and I'm told that the replacement model (the H340) isn't as good.

But this afternoon someone mentioned the iAudio X5 to me. It has all of the features that I love in the iRiver (Ogg Vorbis support, FM radio, microphone) and it also plays videos. Oh, and it mentions Linux support in the list of features. And it looks very nice.

And look, you can get them from Amazon.

If I was looking for a portable music player, I'd be taking a much closer look at this one.

Why do so many people buy iPods when there are so many better players out there?

The BBC is reporting new UK government findings about the impact of greenhouse gases. It makes chilling reading:

The report, published by the UK government, says there is only a small chance of greenhouse gas emissions being kept below "dangerous" levels.

It fears the Greenland ice sheet is likely to melt, leading sea levels to rise by seven metres over 1,000 years.

And then there's the Have Your Say that the BBC are running on the subject. This just shows that overwhelming scientific evidence just isn't enough for some people. Here are some choice quotes:

I am looking forward to living in a sea front property. From the report I saw earlier on the BBC news, it looks like I will not have long to wait as I only live 15km north of the City of London.

It is time the "Greens" were identified for what they are, not Pro-Earth, but Anti-Human

I'll be dead before all the so called effects take place, and I have no offspring so it won't affect them either !

I'm suspicious that most of the "Global Warming" advocates are extremist tree-huggers, anti-globalization nuts, and others with lost causes trying to make themseslves relevant.

"Global Warming" is a political agenda propelled by the socialists who lost the free market capitalism vs. Marxism argument.This is the new agenda to attack the terrors of global business thats all.

As long as it means less rain, i don't mind. Solve the problem of the non stop rain and grey skies in the UK and i'm happy. If only we could sail this Island down to the Med!

And my personal favourite:

Until someone explains why polar ice cap melting and rising sea levels is bad i am entirely FOR global warming.

Dan Hill has a brilliant idea - adding a time slider to Google Earth so that you can trace the development of a map through time.

This has to happen. Only possible downside would be the amount of time I'd spend exploring old maps.

Here's a good example of how not to design a user interface.

Yesterday I realised that I needed to pay my tax bill. My accountants had filed the return, it was just up to me to actually stump up the money. The deadlne for payment is January 31st so it was a bit late to send the payment in by post, but I noticed that the payment slip included instructions for making an electronic transfer. It told me the sort code and the account number that I needed and told me which of the numbers on the slip I should use as the payment reference. Armed with this information I opened up the First Direct web site and found the section for making a one-off payment.

There are two routes through this section of the site. If you have all of the details that you need you can enter them directly but there's also another route where First Direct have gathered a number (hundreds, it seems) of common payment details so that you don't need to fill in all the numbers. That sounded like the easiest route, so I went that way. I soon found myself looking at a long list of potential payees. The problem was that their names were a bit cryptic so I wasn't sure which one I needed. There were two that seemed to be for paying personal tax bills which were called "InlandRevCumbSelfAssessment" and "InlandRevShipleySelfAssessment". Now Shipley is a town in Yorkshire and my payslip said that my payment should be sent to Bradford which is also in Yorkshire and "Cumb" is short for Cumbernauld which is in Scotland. So I thought I knew which one to choose but I wasn't 100% sure. And when you're paying taxes, it's best to be 100% sure that you're paying the right people.

I selected the "InlandRevShipleySelfAssessment" in the hope that the next screen would confirm the sort code and account number that were associated with this payee. But in the interest of simplification, those potentially confusing details had been helpfully left off the screen.

At that point I decided that I would be happier taking the alternative route and typing all of the required details myself. So I went back to the first page and started again. This looked better. I was given a screen that asked for all the details that I had. I filled in the details and pressed the "proceed" button. I was asked to check and confirm the details which I did. And then on the next screen it went wrong. I was told that First Direct already had those details in their system and that therefore I had to use that option and couldn't choose to type in the details myself. Of course there wasn't any indication of which of the list of names I should choose or (which would have been better) a link to a page that was pre-filled with those details. No, I just had to go back to my original guessing game. I chose "InlandRevShipleySelfAssessment" and hoped that it was correct.

This morning, whilst running through the process again to ensure that this description was accurate, I discovered that "InlandRevShipleySelfAssessment" has been added to my list of previously used payees. And in the list it includes the sort code and account number. So I can confirm that my tax has been paid to the right place. Which is nice, but it was all a bit of a struggle.

Let's review the problems:

• The list of known payees is badly organised. The symbolicc names that they have been given aren't very clear.
• When a known payee is selected, the next screen should contain the sort code and account number for the payee, so that a user can confirm that the correct selection has been made.
• When a user chooses to enter the details, then why not let them do that? What is the point of saying that you must use the list of known payees for a payee that is on the list.
• If you are going to insist on a user using the list of known payees, then you can at least make their life easier by telling them which of the known payees you are talking about.

I've always been a fan of First Direct. I've been with them ever since they started up and they've rarely done anything that has annoyed me. Even their internet banking service generally seems a lot better than most others I haveused. But in this case it seems that their interface designers were on holiday and this part of the site was designed by someone who had never given any thought to how someone might actually want to use it.

It should be illegal to design web site interfaces if you haven't read Don't Make Me Think (damn, I've just seen there's a second edition out...)

Here's a good example of how not to run a bulk email list.

Some time ago I registered with the Financial Times web site. At that time I must have given them my email address. But I'm certain that I wouldn't have ticked any boxes marked "send me email". I never tick those boxes and I always untick them if the come pre-ticked.

So I was surprised to get email from the FT yesterday. It wasn't even an important email. Just some kind of regular newletter. I'm pretty sure I'd never seen one before. But the FT are a responsible organisation so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I followed the instructions at the bottom of the email explaining how to get off the mailing list. This involved sending an email to the FT.

Then it all started to go wrong.

First I got an email in reply confirming that my request had been received. It said this:

Your request to not receive promotional emails about your subscription has been received and will be processed within the next 10 working days.

Ten working days. Two weeks! It takes them two weeks to remove an email address from a mailing list. That's ridiculous. Anyone would think they didn't have any computers to do the work for them. There is no good reason why a request to be removed from a mailing list shouldn't be honoured immediately. Anyone who tells you otherwise is using software that should have been retired years ago.

And then to add insult to injury I got another copy of the original email a few minutes later.

I'm forced to reach the conclusion that the bulk mailing part of the FT's IT group is run by idiots. Or maybe they outsource it to idiots. The mail comes from interelate.net. I wonder if they are a (rubbish) bulk mail company.

See, this is a good example of what you can do if you're parsing every page you can find on the web. Google has been examining the HTML used in the pages that it trawls and has published its findings. The results are interesting but not altogether surprising. The executive summary seems to be "most people use invalid HTML"..

There's an entertaining piece in today's Guardian about the joys of shopping in places like PC World[1].

There is one vital rule to entering such a store: never, under any circumstances, ask a question. The answer will be 30% repetition, 30% wild conjecture and 40% utter gibberish.

I also like the description of the sales staff:

Roving imbecile staff pick on the weak and ignore everyone else. Salesmen (they're always men, or rather lads) that think "computing" consists solely of downloading ringtones.

The bit about them picking on the weak and ignroing everyone else rings particularly true. I always find it almost impossible to get any attention from the sales staff in PC World. Somehow they seem to sense that I'm going to ask how well this printer works under Linux.

There are, however, a few points that writer misses:

• Most technically literate avoid shopping in PC World whenever possible, prefering to do their own research and then buy (probably cheaper) online. It's only when I need a new piece of hardware right now that I'll even consider PC World.
• No matter how much comapnies like PC World want to believe it, shopping for a PC is not like shopping for a television or a washing machine. Most people need a lot more advice and support when buying a PC. And many of them seem disappointingly likely to accept advice from badly trained sales staff without questioning it.
• Anyone who does actually have the level of knowledge required to give useful advice to PC shoppers almost certainly won't want to work for the kind of salaries that PC World pay their staff. But PC World won't increase their salaries as they need to keep prices as low as possible.

So my advice is to avoid places like PC World. If you want to buy a PC or new PC hardware then find your nearest geek (everyone knows one) and offer them a few pints in return for helping you with your shopping. You'll probably end up with a better quality system for less money. Everyone wins. Well, except PC World.

[1] PC World isn't actually mentioned by name, but it's obvious who the writer is talking about.

Feeling smug about not being American is, of course, practically a national sport her in the UK. And one of the best things to be smug about is ridiculously high percentage of Americans who think that creationism (or "intelligent design") is a reasonable way to explain the creation of the universe. People in the UK have moved far beyond those medieval beliefs - or so we like to think.

But where the US goes, the UK is bound to follow. And the BBC is reporting a survey that MORI have recently undertaken for the BBC's programme Horizon. The results make grim reading.

Over 2000 participants took part in the survey, and were asked what best described their view of the origin and development of life:

• 22% chose creationism
• 17% opted for intelligent design
• 48% selected evolution theory
• and the rest did not know

39% of people believe in creationsism in one of its forms and only 48% of people believe in evolution. Those are very worrying numbers.

And one less reason for feeling smug about not being an American.

Update: Smylers rightfully points out some loose thinking on my part - which actually stmes from some loose questions on MORI's part (or maybe loose reporting of the questions on the BBC's part). The point is that evolution does nothing to explain the origin of life. It only considers the development of life. So if you're asked what best describes your view of the origin and development of life then evolution shouldn't really be considered a possible answer.

Personally I don't think that most people would have considered the question that deeply. And most people see it as a binary choice - evolution or creationism. So I'm still very surprised and worried by the data.

(Non-geeks will probably want to ignore this entry)

If you buy a keyboard these days, chances are that it will have a number of extra keys on it. Ones for opening your email application or your web browser or for controlling the CD player. If you're using Windows then your system probably came pre-configured to use those buttons, but on Linux I've always pretty much assumed that the buttons were useless.

But I was wrong. Yesterday I came across LinEAK (which apparently stands for "Linux support for Easy Access and Internet Keyboards"). This is a daemon that runs on your system watching for keys being pressed. When one of these extra keys is pressed, LinEAK steps in and runs whatever command you have associated with that key.

Of course, LinEAK needs to support your keyboard. It didn't support mine (a Dell SK-8135) but it only took ten minutes to work out what the keycodes were for the extra keys and create a keyboard definition for my keyboard. And then a few minutes later I had useful commands running for all of the buttons. Well, not quite all of them. I need to do a bit more research on controlling Firefox from the command line, so I can set up things like the 'back, 'forward' and 'refresh' buttons.

Oh, and the volume control on my keyboard isn't a button. It's a rotating thing that LinEAK doesn't seem to recognise. More research needed there.

But all in all it was a successful hour's work.

I know that goes without saying, but here's a great example of the madness of the mob.

The British Divers Marine Life Rescue are auctioning the watering can that was used to keep the Thames whale[1] wet on Saturday. Now I don't have a problem with that. All of the money raised will go to the BDMLR and will offset the huge sums of money that they spent on the rescue. That's all fine.

But how much do you think the auction will raise? As I write this entry they have had 120 bids. And the current winning bid is £9,000. Nine. Thousand. Pounds. For a plastic watering can. Ok, it's been on the telly a few times, but what are you going to do with it? Put it on the mantlepiece so people can talk about it? Or are you going to stick in the shed and use it as a watering can?

Here's a link to the auction. I dread to think what it will have reached by now.

[1] And despite what the Sun says, the only place where I've heard the whale called "Wally" is on the front page of the Sun.

Update: Ok. People are taking the piss now. It's currently (Jan 24, 22:30) standing at just over £99,000.

Update: A lot of the larger bids have been withdrawn. It's currently (Jan 26, 13:30) at just over £10,000.

Well, at least, it is according to an article in today's Observer.

One of the new names to watch that they list is Sheila Chandra. I'm not sure I'd describe her as a new name though. I first heard of her in 1982 when she was the lead singer on Monsoon's hit single "Ever So Lonely". A few years later she sang on "Raining" by Ancient Beatbox, which was one of the first Cooking Vinyl records that I heard.

In it's monthly music magazine, the Observer also mentions that a new Beth Orton album is imminent - which has to be a good thing.

Gilbert and George are on top form again. Their new exhibition is called "Sonofagod Pictures: Was Jesus Heterosexual?" and it opens at the White Cube gallery today.

Even before the opening they've managed to grab just the right amount of press coverage by getting rent-a-bigot (and Tory MP) Ann Widdecombe to describe them as "blasphemous in the extreme". The Guardian quotes the artists' response:

Gilbert: Christians are abusive to humans - to women, to queers. They threaten us with hell.
George: That's offensive, not us.

Recently I've been getting more and more annoyed with people who don't know the difference between the "reply" and "reply all" buttons in their email programs. You get an email from a friend that goes to a group of people. Perhaps it's about arranging to meet up for a drink. You hit "reply all" and suggest some potential dates in an email that goes to everyone who recieved the original message. But then someone replies to your message pointing out which of those dates they can't make and they only send it to you because they hit "reply" instead of "reply all". At the same time other people are replying to the original message but only sending their reply to the original sender. The conversation becomes fragmented and no-one has a complete picture of what's going on.

It's much easier to just stay in and watch the television.

Your email program has two ways to reply to a message. Please learn the usefulness of "reply all".

Oh look. Following in the footsteps of the BBC's Beethoven experiment from last year, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation is making nine Mozart symphonies available for free download starting on January 27th.

I got the information from Jon Lund, but here's the original announcement (in Danish).

I've seen quite a few films over the weekend. So let's pretend that you're interested in my opinions of them and give you some reviews.

Batman Begins
I still love buying and reading superhero comics. But it's been some time since I saw a really satisfying film based on a comicbook hero. This wasn't very satisfying at all. I've never really got the hang of all this "Dark Knight" interpretation of Batman. I grew up in the sixties when we all watched Adam West playing Batman and that's always been the real Batman to me.

Having said that, this was obviously much better than the last two Batman films and is on a par with the Tim Burton/Michael Keaton version. I'm wasn't at all convinced by Christian Bale as either Bruce Wayne or Batman. He seemed too young for the role. And when he put on his deep Batman voice I just wanted to laugh.

Sin City
Now if you're going to make a film based on a comic, then this is the way to do it. The stylised direction of this film makes it about as close as you're going to get to just filming Frank Miller's comics - which is, of course, a very good thing. If you haven't seen this (and I suspect that I'm about the only person who hadn't) then rent the DVD and watch it as soon as possible.

Ghost World
Another non-superhero comic adaptation. Not quite as successful as Sin City, but still pretty good. Mind you anything with Steve Buscemi in can't really fail can it (ok, that's your cue to come up with counter-examples).

Sideways
Chosen purely on the basis of a trailer on some other film that made this look interesting. I don't think it completely lived up to expectations, but it was still a pleasant enough way to spend two hours. Some of the set pieces were a bit cliched, but they were handled pretty well and there were enough laughs to keep me amused.

Brokeback Mountain
This is one of those films that you really feel to have to see in order be able to have intelligent conversations with other film fans. It reminded me a lot of Cold Mountain. Very well written. Great direction. Fabulous acting by a great cast. But ultimately, all rather dull. Can't really see the point of making it myself.

Withnail & I
This wasn't part of the plan, but somehow we ended up watching this in the evening. It's still wonderful.

Looking back over the music that I've bought over the last couple of years I see that I've bought a lot of CDs that replace albums that I have already bought once on either vinyl or cassette. I've bought very little new music recently.

This year I want that to change. I want to investigate more new music. And I'm also going to start buying a larger proportion of it as downloads rather than CDs.

My current download site of choice is Karma Download. They do most of what I want, but in some areas their catalogue can be a bit limited (for example, earlier today I was filled with the urge to buy some Lone Justice songs but Karma didn't have any).

I'm a bit out of touch with the download world, so I'm asking for advice. Where are good places to buy music online? Any site I use must have as many as possible of the following features:

• Web site must work in Firefox on Linux
• Downloads must have no DRM. I expect that will mean MP3s. I'd prefer Ogg Vorbis, but you can't have everything
• The catalogue should be extensive and contain both new music and old back catalogue stuff

What sites do you use?

I liked it.

I've just watched the first part of Richard Dawkin's The Root of all Evil? which I videoed earlier in the week. And it was great.

Dawkins is, of course, a well-known atheist. But when given an hour of prime-time television by Channel Four he really didn't pull any punches. He starts by describing the "process of non-thinking called faith" and then for the next hour he was unremittingly caustic about the idea that in the 21st century there are still people who can take religion seriously. He spoke to representatives of the three biggest monotheistic religions and made them all look ridiculous.

One point is made very clear. Religious intolerance is the same the world over. The evangelical christians trying to get the teaching of evolution banned from schools in the US are following exactly the same train of thought as Islamist terrorists. The difference is just one of degree. Relgious faith, in any form, is damaging to society.

One interesting data point. I noticed that the advert breaks were very short. I wonder it advertisers were wary of being associated with such views.

Try and track it down on bittorrent and then watch the second part at 8pm next Monday (16th Jan).

An interesting example of the mob mentality that is becoming more prevalent on certain parts of the internet (and, indeed, in real life).

Yesterday Digg published a story claiming that O'Reilly editor Steve Mallett had "stolen" the Digg's CSS definitions for his own sites. The response from Digg's readership was immediate, nasty and, ultimately, completely wrongheaded.

Steve didn't steal anyone's code. He used an open source project called Pligg to build his sites. Pligg builds on another project called Menéame and it was this project which had used CSS that originated with Digg. A few hardy Digg readers pointed this out, but the vast majority chose to ignore the facts and overnight over three hundred comments were posted to the story - most of them calling for some kind of retribution against Steve.

This morning I see that wiser heads have prevailed. A new story which corrects the facts has been posted and that is now getting a lot of attention. Hopefully Steve's reputation will recover.

But there are two issues raised by this. The first is the number of people who just commented on the story without actually reading any of the other comments and realising the facts (Martin recently pointed out another similar case on his blog). The second issue is a bit more fundamental Of all of the Digg readers who were getting angry over Steve's "theft", I can't help wondering how many of them swap illegal copies of MP3s.

Not passing any judgements here. Just wondering.

One interesting use of Greasemonkey is to improve web sites that you don't like the look of. This is useful feedback to the owners of the sites that are being "improved".

With that in mind, I noticed a couple of Greasemonkey scripts that are for use on Guardian Unlimited.

Guardian Title Goodifier reorders the parts the title on GU pages so that the most useful part (i.e. the headline) comes first.

Guardian Blackener simplifies and darkens the design of GU pages.

Update: Guardian Blackener lasted less than a minute before I uninstalled it. The Title Goodifier is useful tho'.

I've made a start on building a directory of all of the RSS feeds available from UK national newspapers. It's online at dave.org.uk/newsfeeds. If I've missed anything then please let me know.

Also, if anyone can work out why my Javascript filtering code doesn't seem to work on IE, then I'd love to know what's going on.

Update: I've now added links to various OPML files. And (having cleaned it up a bit) I've released the source code.

Update: Blimey. We've been Winered. We are not worthy :)

Looks like The Times have completely reorganised their RSS feeds. The old 'one size fits all' feed is dead and has been replaced by a number of individual feeds (including a some that come from weblogs).

The full list (together with a brief explanation of RSS and all the licence terms) are here

At some point last year I was vaguely thinking about building a directory of UK newspaper RSS feeds. Must give that some more thought.

Update: These new feeds look a bit strange in my Bloglines feeds list. For example, the title of the world news feed is just "World" which rather makes it look more important than it actually is. Titling is important.

Update: They've now fixed the title problems. The title are now all "TimesOnline: <subject>". That's much better.

In the entrance hall to all tube stations you'll find a notice board telling you how each line is currently running. It's worth noting that when the sign says a line has "good service", what they actually mean is that it has "the expected level of service".

It's a subtle, but important, distinction.

Long time readers might remember how I was going to read fifty books in 2005 and review each one as I finished it. I was going pretty well until the middle of March when I got rather ill and lost all interest in reading. After a few weeks I started reading again, but I never got round to reviewing any more books. I almost certainly didn't reach my target of fifty books, but I don't think I was that far off.

This year I'm going to make it easy on myself. I'm going to track the titles of books that I've read. But I'm also going to track films, TV programs and CDs. Currently It'll just be titles. Maybe I'll go back and add more details (like a review) later.

To get me started I've put the list in the top righthand corner of this site's main page. But it's built from an RSS stream so you can get (slightly) more information from here if you're interested.

I'm already looking forward to looking back over the list at the end of the year.

My Amazon wish list took quite a battering (but in a good way) over christmas so I needed to find some new things to put on it. Luckily a shopping trip to buy presents for other people gave me plenty of inspiration.

A new (ish - well I can't remember seeing it before) Books etc shop opposite John Lewis on Oxford St had a larger than usual section of books on London and that contained a number of interesting looking books about the London Underground.

Anyone interested in the tube will already have a copy of Mr. Beck's Underground Map which traces the history of Harry Beck's version of the London Underground map. What I hadn't seen was a sequel to that book called Underground Maps after Beck which brings the history of the map up to date. And there's also No Need to Ask! Early Maps of London's Underground Railways which completes the story by looking at maps before Beck.

Another interesting book was Spread of London's Underground which shows how the tube has expanded (and, sometimes, contracted) over the years. It does this by showing what today's tube map would look like if it only contained the parts of the system which where open at various dates throughout the system's history. Combine that with London's Lost Tube Schemes and London's Disused Underground Stations for a pretty complete understanding of the tube's history.

And looking a bit wider, there's always Metro Maps of the World which contains maps of metro systems from almost two hundred world cities.

Did you know I was also a tube geek?