Does no-one speak English any more?
In Leicester Square station last night I saw a Transport for London poster that proudly declared that the work they are currently doing on the network will lead to "less delays".
Do they mean "less delay"? Or perhaps "fewer delays"?
I wonder how many people approved that copy. And none of them knew the difference between a mass noun and a count noun.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about some problems I was having with Apple software updates that were stopping my MacBook connecting to my wireless network. That problem has just got far worse.
Since having the problems, we've learned to avoid Apple Airport updates. Whenever the software updater tells us that there's an airport update pending we just ignore it. This policy has worked well for over two months.
But on Wednesday there were a new load of updates which managed to break the wireless connectivity even though we ignored the airport update that was included. The symptoms were exactly the same as the two previous times - the computer could connect to our neighbour's wireless network but couldn't even see ours.
So I assumed that the fix would be the same too. And this morning I copied the backed up files into the correct directories and rebooted the system. But the fix didn't work quite as well as it usually does. This time the wireless connectivity icon on the menu bar vanished.
I rebooted again. Because, y'know, well... an extra reboot never hurts :-)
And this time as the computer got about twenty seconds into starting up it displayed a grey box saying something like "you need to restart your computer again". Which I did, only to be greeted with the same message again. I tried another half a dozen times, but nothing changed.
So I'm stuck with Mac that won't start up. And I'm pretty sure that we didn't get the operating system disk with the Mac so I can't really see how I can boot it up in some kind of "rescue mode" in order to fix whatever it is that is broken.
I foresee a trip to the genius bar over the weekend.
Unless any of my Mac-wielding readers can suggest anything that might help.
Update: Paul points out that holding down the shift key whilst rebooting prevents the Mac from loading any kernel extensions. This means I can, at least, boot the Mac and get to work on fixing the mess that the update (with, I admit, some help from me) has made of the machine.
Update: Here's what has worked in the end. I downloaded the OSX 10.4.10 Combo Update to ensure that I had a completely updated system. That got me back to the level where everything worked except the wireless connectivity. Then I had the bright idea of updating the wireless access point's firmwire to the most recent version. That seems to have fixed any incompatibilities between the access point and OSX. And now everything is working fine.
This is the third time I can remember a Prime Minister handing over power to a successor from the same party without a general election. Wilson handed over to Callaghan in 1976 and Thatcher handed over (albeit unwillingly) to Major in 1990.
Every time this happens the same constitutional misunderstandings are heard. People start insisting that the incoming PM has no mandate and demanding a general election as soon as possible.
This pre-supposes that they elected the outgoing PM in some way. Which, of course, they didn't. Here's how it works.
That's all there is to it. You elect your MP. You don't elect the PM. It's up to the queen to decide who she wants as her Prime Minister.
Yes, you can argue that it's a silly system. And, yes, you can argue that it shouldn't work like that. And, yes, certainly many people use their vote not to vote for an MP, but for a particular party or even a particular party system. But that's not how the system works. If you're trying to use the system that way then you're not using your vote in the way it's supposed to be used.
You expect to see that kind of muddled thinking from Have Your Say contributors (who are rarely the clearest-thinking group of people) but it's particularly galling to see people like Boris Johnson perpetuating this misinformation. Of course, Boris knows how the system works. He knows he's talking bollocks. What he says isn't really his opinion, it's just what he is forced into writing by the adversarial nature of our (effectively) two-party political system. But stupid people read his articles (and similar articles by other people who should know better) and believe that he's speaking the truth. And so the misunderstandings are perpetuated.
Gordon Brown may well want to call a general election soon. But that's completely up to him. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is either stupid or deliberately trying to mislead you. Maybe both.
Seems like we're approaching another of those periods when it's fashionable to leave the BBC. This morning my RSS reader brought me "I'm off soon" posts from Tom Loosemore and Alice Taylor.
Oh, and there's me. I'm leaving (again) on Friday. Back in the City from Monday.
It looks like the BBC are ramping up to make an announcement about the iPlayer later today.
I'll link to the press release just as soon as I can find it on their site.
Update: Here it is. Looks like the iPlayer officially launches today.
Update: I can't read properly. It doesn't launch today. It launches in a month's time. On July 27th.
Longtime readers might remember that I have rather strong opinions on the Silver Ring Thing and may be surprised that I haven't commented on the recent news stories about them. I've been following the stories closely, but I've been a bit to busy on other stuff to compose a coherent blog entry on the subject.
But, luckily for me, Unity from The Ministry of Truth has been delving into the story and has published a fascinating piece containing many facts that the mainstream media seem to have ignored - including the fact that Lydia Playfoot (the girl who is protesting her right to wear the ring at school) is the daughter of two of the organisers of the UK branch of SRT. So a cynical person might conclude that this is all a publicity stunt.
It's a great piece of journalism and deserves a wider audience.
Update: Bloody hell. There's more.
There's a new London Weblogger Meetup group that sprang into existence over the weekend. Their first meeting is in Kensington in a couple of weeks.
Only two people have replied so far (and one of those is me) but if it takes off, then I'll certainly go along and have a look.
The entire British honours system is, of course, outdated and ridiculous. However, until the revolution comes it looks like we're stuck with it.
And whilst we're stuck with it, it's good to see it used it to reward people who stand up for democratic principles like free speech. Which is why I'm very happy to see Salman Rushdie given a knighthood.
I am however disappointed (though not at all surprised) to see the reaction from members of the muslim community. They really need to be challenged on this. The Satanic Verses was published twenty years ago. What do they hope to achieve by dragging out these tired old arguments? They are just embarrassing themselves.
Lloyd points out that some of the UK press coverage of this story has been biased in favour of the muslim point of view and that it gives the impression that this knighthood is in some way controversial.
This award isn't controversial in any way. Rushdie is a well-respected author and deserves this recognition. Anyone claiming otherwise has a shaky understanding of reality.
It looks like 7digital have won the race to be the first web site to sell EMI's non-DRM MP3 audio files.
Or, at least, they're the first one I've heard of that claim to work in any browser on any operating system. I shall be testing this theory tonight and, if it works, then I predict a lot of my disposable income heading their way over the next few months.
Update: Well that all seemed to work fine. Currently listening to Orbital Live At Glastonbury 1994-2004. I've also downloaded Icky Thump. All in completely DRM-free MP3.
I'll write more about Hack Day over the next few days. But I should point out that most of yesterday was spent updating the version of Plagger on this web server. This had the unfortunate side-effect of breaking all of the Plagger-run planets on this server. So today was largely spent fixing them again.
Everything should just about be how it was. In fact, in many cases, the newer version seems to be a vast improvement over the older version that I was running previously.
There have, however, been a few small changes in the names of some of the files that are generated. The RSS and Atom feeds have been renamed, as have the OPML files. And each planet also has now has an associated FOAF file.
So here are the new URLs.
If you're using any of those links, then you should probably update them. I'll put some redirections in place tomorrow but, for now, I'm tired and I'm going to bed.
Wow. Pretty weird start to Hack Day.
We were in the West Hall of Alexandra Palace. A talk had just finished and there was lots of general milling about going on. All of a sudden there was an almighty bang followed by some loud crackling. It sounded like it was coming from the roof.
Then there was a whirring sound and about twenty flaps opened in the roof. And letting the rain in. Luckily it was light rain and it soon stopped.
The organisers took the stage to explain what had happened. The building had been struck by lightning. And that had set off some of the fire prevention systems, which is why the ceiling flaps had opened. And the systems had fused so that it seemed to be impossible to close the flaps.
All of which was ok (ish!) but there was another storm approaching and the roof was still open. And then the rain arrived. So everyone buggered off into the next room - one that didn't have gaping holes in the ceiling.
Time passed. Lunch was serve. And at some point in the next couple of hours the ceiling was sealed and the room was dried out.
We're now back in the main room. And the main hacking of the weekend has started. Not sure what I'll be hacking on. I'm now just waiting for the wireless network to come back so I can post this.
Never been in a building when it was struck by lightning before though. It was all very exciting.
The BBC/Yahoo! Hack Day (actually two days) is this weekend. If you're coming then please feel free to link with me on the back network.
Now, here are the most pressing questions that need to be answered. Will there be a television showing Doctor Who on Saturday night? And, if there isn't, will the network cope with dozens of simultaneous impromptu iPlayer demonstrations?
It seems that the new Creation Museum Is even more ridiculous than I expected. Have a look at this set of photos. And read the information signs. And try not to laugh too much.
I was going to write a bit of a rant about the depressingly familiar DRM discussions that have blown up (again!) on the BBC Backstage mailing list over the last couple of days.
But I find that Martin has already done it. So I don't have to. Which is nice.
Our bathroom scales gave up the ghost recently. Well, so would you if you had me standing on you every couple of days for ten years. But replacing them gave us a wonderful opportunity for consumer overkill. Not for us a simple set of mechanical scales. No, we bought the Tanita BC-543 Body Composition Monitor. Because you can never have too much data about how overweight you are.
The Body Composition Monitor isn't actually as complex as you think. You tell it your age, sex and height and it measures your weight and your body fat percentage. I think it measures your body fat by pushing a small electric charge into your heels and measuring your body's resistance. Armed with this data it then gives you a barrage of information about your body and its imperfections.
But I reckon they've missed a couple of tricks.
Firstly, nowhere in the mass of information does it include your BMI. Now I know that BMI isn't a particularly useful measure, but it's certainly popular and they have all the information they need to calculate it.
But it's the second omission that has me thinking. Tanita have a web site where users of their equipment can input data and track their health. But that's all too much like hard work. You need to write down the numbers that you get from the monitor, go to a computer, log into the site and then type in all the numbers. Where's the fun in that? We have computers to do all that drudgery for us.
What they should be doing is putting a wireless networking connection in all their products. Then when the monitor is used, it can use the local wireless network to transmit the data directly to the web site. None of that tedious transcription with its potential for errors (or for cheating). Each time you stand on the scales, your data is instantly available on the web site. It's a lazy person's dream. And let's face it, anyone who is using one of these to monitor their weight is very likely to be a lazy person.
I shouldn't be blogging about this. I should be running off to the patent office. Or, at the very least, writing code.
It's a constant refrain round these parts, I know, but here's another example of a web site that has a couple of nasty errors that could have been avoided with a little thought.
The site in question is Knight Frank the estate agents. I was drawn to their site as they are selling a house on my road. The house is a little bigger than ours and I wanted to know what it was selling for. Yes, I'm using the web to feed my middle-class obsession with house prices.
Anyway, the search functionality on the site was easy enough to use and I quickly found the property that I was looking for. So I clicked the link in the search results to see the details.
That's when I noticed the first problem. When you have a details of objects (in this case houses) on your web site, then it makes a lot of sense to give each object a unique web address so that it's easy for people to pass details of a given object to their friends. As we'll see later, Knight Frank's site does have unique addresses for each property, but they do their best to keep them hidden.
When I was looking at the list of search results, the location bar in my browser said:
http://www.knightfrank.co.uk/flash/search.aspx
And when I clicked through to the property details, it said:
http://www.knightfrank.co.uk/flash/search.aspx
Nothing changed. There was no address that I could have used to pass on to a friend. To my mind, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works.
However, looking at the details of the property, I saw a "send to a friend" link. I realised that if you can send a link to the property to a friend then the email that is sent must contain the unique link that the web site hides from you. I decided to send the details to myself.
And here's the next problem. The "send to a friend" page asks for your email address, your friends email address and a message to include in the email. The web site then sends an email containing the message and the link from you to your friend.
Can you see the problem?
The problem is that this mail claims to come from you. But it doesn't really. It really comes from the Knight Frank web server. A common spam technique is to send mail that doesn't originate from the site that it claims to come from. For this reason, a number of people have implemented a system called SPF. In SPF a domain publishes a list of mail servers that are allowed to send mail for that domain. At the other end of a transaction, when a mail server receives a mail, it can check against these published lists to ensure that the mail comes from a mail server that is allowed to send mail for the domain that it claims to come from. Any mail that doesn't match these requirements can be discarded as spam. I publish a set of SPF records for dave.org.uk and I also check SPF records for any incoming mail and discard any that don't match.
So we have the situation where the Knight Frank site is trying to send mail that claims to come from dave.org.uk, but that server isn't on the list of servers that send genuine dave.org.uk. And that means that my mail to myself is rejected by my incoming mail server as spam. Luckily I got a bounce message that contained the original message so I finally managed to work out what the address of the property details is. If the Knight Frank web site had been honest and sent the mail from itself, then the mail would have got through without any problems.
This system probably works for them currently because SPF isn't really widely implemented. But as spam gets worse then it will become far more common. And less and less Knight Frank web site mail will get through to the intended recipient.
The Knight Frank web site designers probably thought they were being really clever. They probably think that hiding the details of the web site address makes things look simpler. They almost certainly think that people are more likely to read mail that comes from a friend. But I think that in both of these cases they are failing to understand how the internet should work.
If you're interested, the property details are here. It's on sale for £795,000 and over the weekend the "for sale" sign changed to an "under offer" sign.
Yesterday we went to the Dali and Film exhibition that is currently running at the Tate modern.
Alongside many of his paintings they were showing a number of Dali's experiments with film. Most people will know about Dali's work with Buñuel[1] and the dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound but there's plenty of his lesser-known work on show too.
My favourite was Destino, a short film that Dali worked on with Walt Disney in 1946. The film was shelved and was only completed in 2003 using computer animation. It's fabulous - in at least two meanings of the word.
If you have any interest at all in surrealism, film or Dali (and who isn't interested in one of those things?) then you should really go and see this exhibition. You'll love it.
[1] Confession time. I hadn't seen Un Chien Andalou until yesterday.
A week ago I was really rather excited about Fedora 7. I'm less excited now.
There seems to be a problem with the DVD drive in my laptop. Or, at least, an incompatitbility between it and the ISO images of the new version of Fedora. Over the last week, I've burnt several disks to us for the upgrade and none of them have worked. They've booted to the screen that says "press enter to start your installation" but the PC has then frozen and refused to recognise any keypresses. The same disks have worked fine elsewhere. And other disks work fine in this drive. It's just the combination of the two that doesn't work.
So on Friday night, having grown bored of turning CDs into drinks coasters, I tried to do a yum-based upgrade. The idea is pretty simple, you update a couple of packages to tell your system that it's running the new version of the software and then it will automatically upgrade all of the other packages. That was going well until some stupidity on my part meant that I had to reboot the system. And it wouldn't reboot. Because the upgrade was halfway through, the system wouldn't boot at all.
So I was stuck with an unusable PC (well, it would still boot into Windows - but that's pretty much the same as being unusable). At which point I remembered the DVD that came with the latest issue of Linux Format. It had a number of Linux distributions on it.
One quick reboot and a (slightly longer) installation later and my laptop is running the latest version of Ubuntu. I've been meaning to try out Ubuntu for some time but as a long-term Red Hat user I've always found it easier to just stick with what I know. This problem has kicked me into trying something new.
Initial reactions are that I don't like it much. But I'm sure that's just because it's different. I'll stick with it for a few weeks and see if I get used to it. I'm already impressed with the much larger number of Perl modules that are available from the standard repositories.
It feels a lot like being in another country. but one like Australia or the USA where everything is really similar ro what you're used to, but you're constantly coming across things that are subtly different.
It's going to be an interesting few weeks. I'll let you know how it goes.
For the last couple of years I've been using Eric Meyer's S5 for creating and presenting slides. It uses a combination of CSS and Javascript to create nice-looking slides which can be viewed in any decent web browser (see, for example, the slides from last Saturday's Perl Teach-In). As an extra bonus, there is BooK's spod5 framework that turns Perl POD into an S5 presentation. So, all in all, I'm very happy.
But I've just signed up with Slide Share so that I can share the slides from some of my presentations. And Slide Share doesn't support S5 slides. It doesn't even support plain HTML presentations.
So I want a way to convert S5 presentations to PDF files. I'm sure there's a way by chaining together half a dozen or so tools. But before I go off working out how to do it, I wondered if any of my very clever readers had any good ideas.
Tony Blair says he wants more Muslim imams trained in UK universities, to reduce reliance on imams from overseas.
No. It is not the job of the education system to encourage people to believe in fairy stories. The job of the education system should be to educate people (not difficult to work out really - the clue is in the name). And educated people are less likely to believe in fairy stories.
Oh. Also this:
It came as a report said teaching of Islam in English universities was based on "out-of-date and irrelevant issues"
You don't say? Surely teacing any kind of religion is teaching out-of-date and irrelevant issues. By definition.
The new London 2012 Olympics logo looks like a car-crash. Which is, I suppose, somewhat appropriate. I can only assume that this was done deliberately to make the 2012 Olympics a laughing stock.
Hopefully someone from the IOC will see the logo, realise that we're not taking this at all seriously and let some other city host the games instead of London.
Update: The BBC have published some alternative logos that have been sent in by readers. Can I just say that Sean Stayte (logo number 5) is a very naughty man. And that the editor who published that picture is either very naive or else has a keen grasp of internet memes.
Update: The dubious logo has been removed from that page. But the direct link still works.
From a recent BBC Have Your Say (as pointed out by spEak You're bRanes).
don`t blame buisineeses for exploiting the cheap labour if the imigrants can`t be bothered to learn english they have pnly themselves to blame ,in any country if you want to succeed then the first rule is to learn their langusge, every one will exploit weekness weather in work or play ev eryone aim is to win sometimes by any means[happyfrisk], northampton, United Kingdom
So, are we clear now? If you don't bother to learn English then people will exploit you.
Actually, on re-reading it, I'm starting to wonder if it's deliberate.
I'm really surprised that no-one got the first question. Wikipedia had all the information that you needed.
Question 1 (the easy one): What connects Queen's "Sheer Heart Attack", Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy" and Emerson, Lake and Palmers "Brain Salad Surgery"?
Notice that I didn't say that I was talking about songs or albums. In each of these cases there is both a song and an album with the given title. But the song doesn't appear on the album of the same name.
"Sheer Heart Attack" appears on the Queen album News of the World, "Houses of the Holy" appears on the Led Zeppelin album Physical Graffiti, and "Brain Salad Surgery" appears on the ELP album Works Volume 2.
Question 2 (a bit harder): Midge Ure has played in bands whose names begin with every letter of the alphabet from R to V. What were they?
As the two Kevins managed to work out between them, the bands are Rich Kids, Slik, Thin Lizzy, Ultravox and Visage. Thin Lizzy is the one that people rarely get.
This might come as a bit of a surprise to some of you, but I don't think it's necessary to ban religion. Of course I believe that it's all completely pointless and that people who follow religions are completely wasting their time. But wasting your time isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've wasted more than enough time on pointless nonsense in the past.
So, by all means, go on following the religion of your choice. I'd only ask that you do whatever it is that you want to do in private, with a group of consenting adults and never in front of the children. I suppose it's best if you think of religion in the same way as you think of masturbation. Many people do it, it doesn't really do any harm, but you wouldn't want to boast about it in public.
In particular, this is a message for the Balham Community Church. Nothing ruins my Sunday quite as much as coming out of the Balham Sainsbury's only to find that you've set up a PA system and you've got some naff christian rock band who are rabbiting on about how wonderful their invisible friend is.
I know you think you're spreading the "good news". But honestly it just fills me with murderous thoughts.
I've been interviewed by O'Reilly UK for their new blog Scenius.
Apparently, I'm the Techie's Techie. Which is nice.
...that the media was full of articles that started "It Was Twenty Years Ago Today".
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