July 2007 Archives

This is a brief follow-up to my piece from a couple of weeks ago where I jokingly suggested that everyone should move away from Windows to Linux. I found this blog entry where a Windows user has been trying Ubuntu Linux for a couple of weeks.

His findings make interesting reading. He's had a bit of trouble with hardware compatibility but in general he's very happy with how it's all gone.

In the end I've been very impressed with Ubuntu. After two weeks of banging under the hood and using it as often as I can, it has shown itself to be stable, fast and customizable. Hardware support is solid and application support is good. It is a tweakers paradise. I can work at work and and home. If I had to I could use it as my day-to-day system and not have many regrets. I'm still not as comfortable with it as I am in Windows, but I'm getting there. I may not be a convert yet, but I am a fan.

Update: Another article on the same subject. In this case CareGroup CIO John Halamka tried Ubuntu for a month on his laptop. He liked it enough to stay with it after the experiment finished.

"A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008," says Halamka. "I'll continue to watch the marketplace evolve and report on my progress. For now, the only devices I'll be carrying are a Dell D420 with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and a BlackBerry 8707H e-mail device.

My D70 arrived yesterday. What a lovely shiny toy. Seems to play well with all my old lenses too.

Now I just need to work out what all the buttons do before setting off on holiday on Sunday.

Just one thing I want to say about Shambo. Whilst I'm happy for people to believe whatever nonsense they want in the privacy of their own homes (or temples), belief in fairy stories (no matter how firmly held) cannot be allowed to stand in the way of public health considerations.

Ramesh Kallidai, Secretary General of the Hindu Forum of Britain, said he wanted "to check how agricultural law can cater to the needs of sacred animals in Hindu temples in Britain". Well, it can't and it shouldn't. "Sacred animals" do not exist. Calling an animal sacred doesn't alter that animal in any way. The animal and its owners still need to obey the relevant laws. As Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said, it is absolutely unacceptable for people to say their religious rights are supreme.

I hope the protesters are all arrested for attempting to prevent government officials from doing their duty. And I hope the temple at the centre of the row is billed for the extra police resources that were used.

Problem solved. I've bought a second-hand Nikon D70 from Ebay.

Current Mood: Happy (but poorer)

I mentioned yesterday that we're off to New Zealand in ten days time. If anyone's interested, here's the itinerary (all dates in August):

I've tried to list the whole tour on my Dopplr account, but it doesn't recognise some of the places.

I'm prevaricating on buying a digital SLR. I have been for over a year. I'm pretty sure I know what I want, but I've been prevaricating so long that it's now become hard to get hold of.

I'm pretty sure that I want a Nikon D50. I'm tied to Nikon because I have an old F65 (which hasn't been out of the house for years) and I still have some Nikkor AF lenses that I'd like to continue to use.

But the D50 seems to have been discontinued and replaced by the Nikon D40 - which is cheaper than the D50. So why not buy that, you ask. Well, because the D40 has had the on-camera autofocus motor removed, so that my old AF lenses won't autofocus on that body.

I'm looking on Ebay. And it seems that I can a D50 with its standard 18-55mm lense for about £300. That would seem to be the best answer to this problem.

Except.

I'm off to New Zealand in ten days time. That's going to be photogenic, so I definitely want the camera before I get there. But we're stopping in Singapore on the way to New Zealand, so there's a chance that I could pick up something in Sim Lim Square. But will they have a D50? And, if they do, how much will it cost? Can I get one cheaper on Ebay?

Or should I just go straight for a D80?

Top tory pundit Iain Dale was a bit busy on Sunday

I am spending today helping commemorate the tenth anniversary of the end of the Rwandan genocide

Bit of a shame that he's three years too late for the tenth anniversary.

Just remember the quality of his research the next time you read "facts" on his blog.

(Thanks to Tim for pointing it out)

The BBC has a worrying report on levels of literacy in the UK

Bedtime stories are proving a struggle for many parents who are not confident readers, says a survey from adult learning agency Learndirect.

More than 10% of the 1,000 parents asked had struggled to understand some words in the stories they had read to their five to 10-year-old children.

One in ten parents if having trouble reading stories aimed at five to ten-year-olds. Not reading a broadsheet newspaper or government forms (both of which would be worrying but not entirely surprising) but reading children's stories.

The survey comes from Learn Direct who obviously have an agenda here as they sell adult literacy courses. But if you think about the people who you come into contact with in your day to day life then you'll know that they're really aren't exaggerating the problem.

Depressingly they also say

Even more parents - a third - struggled with their children's maths homework.

The last two paragraphs in the BBC report sum up the report's findings and, handily, demonstrate the problem

The report said that five million adults lacked functional literacy and more than 17 million had difficulties with numbers.

More than one in six youngsters left school unable to read, write or add up properly, said the report.

It's not exactly illiterate, but it could have been phrased a lot more elegantly.

The Balham Kitchen and Bar has closed down. It has been sold to Sam Harrison (who owns a place called Sam’s Brasserie & Bar in Chiswick). It will reopen in September under the new name Harrison's.

The BKB won't be missed. I've only been there a couple of times in the four years that it's been open, but that's because every time I've gone the food has been average and the staff have been very unhelpful. Not what you expect from what is probably the most expensive restaurant in Balham.

I've said it before and I'll no doubt say it again, but if you want a top-notch restaurant in Balham then you should really try Lamberts.

We'll be trying Harrison's when it opens though. I'll let you know how it goes.

I monitor an RSS feed of all photos uploaded to Flickr with the tag "balham". Which is how I came across this set of photos of a flash flood in Balham today.

I'm trying to work out how close to my house this was. And vaguely dreading what I'll find when I get home this evening.

Do you remember Prussian Blue? They are a pair of blonde twins, Lynx and Lamb Gaede, who appeared, aged about ten, in a Louis Theroux programme about the US white supremacist movement. They wore t-shirts with a smiley-face Hitler logo and sang sweet songs about how much nicer life would be if it wasn't for all the non-white people who were in the country. It was all pretty disgusting.

Well, last night they were the subject of a new Channel 4 documentary called Nazi Pop Twins. In it, director James Quinn follows the twins (now aged 14) over the course of a year.

And things aren't quite the same as they used to be. It seems that as the twins have got older they have started to think for themselves. They are starting to realise that the ideology that their mother has had them promoting isn't as correct as they have previously been led to believe. And they are starting to kick back against her control of their career.

So, I found this documentary very hopeful. Parents will often try to poison their children's minds with their own beliefs, but it's great when the children kick back against that.

Lynx and Lamb have a difficult few years ahead of them. But I hope that they manage to extricate themselves from from their mothers dangerous influences. And I hope that people outside of the white supremacist movement give them a chance to put their dubious past behind them.

I'm currently reading Rachel's book Out of the Tunnel. You should too. It's really rather good. More details when I've finished it (which won't take long at all - it's a very gripping read).

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was giving Ubuntu a trial on my laptop. That trial is now over and I've gone back to Fedora. And in the process I've upgraded to Fedora 7.

It's not that there's anything wrong with Ubuntu. I want to make that quite clear. I'm sure it would make a great choice for a new Linux user. Or for many old Linux users who fancied a change.

No, my problem with it is simply that it's not Fedora. I've been using Red Hat based Linux distributions for many years. The first version of Red Hat Linux that I used was 4.2 which (I'm surprised to see) was released ten years ago. So I have ten years of experience of using Red Hat Linux and its successor, Fedora. That's a lot of product knowledge. And it would be a shame to see that go to waste.

Oh, of course there are a lot of similarities between Linux distributions. They are, after all, all the same operating system underneath and they all install largely the same set of software. But there are subtle differences between them that can sometimes trip you up. In my case it was the package management system. Red Hat uses packages called RPMs which you manage with a command line program called yum[1]. Ubuntu uses deb packages which you manage using apt. I could probably become proficient in using apt very quickly if I put the effort in. But I'm already proficient in using yum, so I'm not sure if there's any point.

So I'm far happier back on Fedora. And Fedora 7 is a really nice advance on Fedora Core 6. But I believe that Ubuntu is probably just as good a choice for people who aren't as stuck in their habits as I am. Ubuntu is certainly the distribution that is getting most of the publicity these days.

I don't really think there's much to choose between in modern Linux distributions. Just choose one that you like.

But please choose one. Don't stay on Windows. That would be madness.

[1] Yes, there are GUI programs available too, if you're that way inclined.

Martin Belam has some fun with his crystal ball.

Lydia Playfoot, the daughter of the Silver Ring Thing's UK organisers, has lost her case against her school[1] banning her from wearing her silver ring.

The BBC quotes Miss Playfoot as saying that this ruling will

mean that slowly, over time, people such as school governors, employers, political organisations and others will be allowed to stop Christians from publicly expressing and practising their faith

I agree with her completely. Where I suppose we differ is that she thinks she is painting a picture of a nightmare scenario, but I think she's setting a laudable target for society to aim at.

People should, of course, be allowed to belief whatever they like. But they should be strongly discouraged from making fools of themselves by professing a belief in invisible friends in the public arena.

[1] A school where she is no longer even a pupil.

If there's one time in your life when it pays to be very careful about what you're saying, then it's when you're answering questions about crimes that you have been accused of. You know, there's that whole "anything you say will be taken down and can be used in evidence against you" thing going on.

So it's depressing to read what Yasemin Vatansever (one of the girls who has been caught smuggling drugs out of Ghana) has to say for herself. At the end of a barely literate phone conversation, the BBC quotes her as saying:

We don't know nothing about this drugs and stuff.

Which, when you think about it, is about as good a confession as you can hope for.

Nik Silver tells the truth about quick and dirty development. I was particularly interested in a couple of the points he makes:

If you’re my customer and I’m your techie, then there’s a significant and unfortunate thing about quick and dirty that I need to tell you: You get the quick, but I get stuck with the dirty. Or to put it another way: the cost and the benefit are not felt by the same person.

That's not strictly true of course. The customer also bears some of the cost of quick and dirty development. Particularly when the next feature takes twice as long to implement because of the dodgy foundations that it's building on. But it's generally true that the developers bear far more of the brunt than the customer.

Quick lasts only a short time, but dirty lasts forever.

More precisely, the benefit of quick lasts from the time the quick thing is released to the time the “proper” thing would have been released; and the cost of dirty also lasts from the time the quick thing is released, but it goes on until the time the software is rewritten or deleted.

Oh, that's certainly true. There's a particular kind of depression that falls on a development team when they realise that their quick and dirty solution will be the bane of their lives for far longer than it would have taken to do it right in the first place. I've been on teams where the cost of a quick and dirty solution is still being felt years later.

Far better, of course, to be quick and clean. But the difference between clean and dirty is often hard to see at the start of a project. That's where good unit tests and constant refactoring come in.

A heart-warming tale from Ben Goldacre, author of the Guardian's Bad Science column (and also a forthcoming book on the same subject). It seems that his web site had rather outgrown the limits placed on it by his current hosting plan and his hosting providers didn't like that. At one point they pulled the plug on the site completely.

Well, Ben's geek friends rallied around magnificently. Positive Internet have given him a free (and really rather overpowered) dedicated server and a host of other people are working to get the old site moved over as quickly as possible. This task is still going on.

It's great to see the geek community coming together like this. And Ben is planning to repay the favour by using some future columns to promote the open source philosophy.

Looks like everyone wins. Open source gets a wider audience, Ben gets a great new server and Positive Internet get some fantastic publicity.

Nice to start the day on a positive note.

I've just worked out where I am. By which I mean I've just had one of those moments when I join up two previously unrelated parts of my mental map of London.

I'm working in Appold St, which is just to the north of Broadgate. I get here in the morning by taking the tube to Moorgate and walking from there. For the past week, when I've been going out at lunchtime I've been going back south to Broadgate and Liverpool St. Today I decided I'd go the other way - and head north.

Just north of my office, Appold St becomes Curtain Road. And that's when I realised where I was - I'm in Shoreditch. Or Hoxton if you want to be trendy (and play a bit fast and loose with geography).

When I first moved to London, I lived in university halls of residence at the western end of Old St. Here I'm near the eastern end. The whole area was all a bit dodgy in those days (the early 80s). I remember friends of mine who were in bands using cheap nasty rehearsal studios on Gt Eastern St, but all in all it was an area best avoided unless you wanted to visit a pub where ladies danced around whilst taking their clothes off.

I moved away from the area in my second year at university and then didn't have much need to visit it until I started working for a bank in Broadgate about ten years ago. By that time the first web boom was getting underway and the area was becoming known as a popular place for web start-up companies to have their cheap shared offices. This influx of money brought with it lots of bars and restaurants and I remember spending a few evenings in bars with strange names like Cantaloupe. When we started london.pm in 1998 a lot of members were working for the start-ups that congregated in the area so I got quite used to socialising around here.

I suppose the area must have gone out of fashion when the web bubble burst. Or maybe it get going on the money of the bankers who were working just to the south. I don't think I've been in this area for five years or so. But the arrival of Web Bubble 2.0 has meant that a lot of the new start-ups are again heading for this area. My short walk at lunchtime showed me that there are still many of the same bars and restaurants going.

It was an interesting walk. I remembered many of the names of the roads I was walking along, but I never really got the hang of local geography so it was still a bit of an adventure. Still plenty more exploring to do though, so I don't think I'll get bored over the next ffew months.

Anyone else in the area? Fancy meeting for lunch?

I'd never heard of "tombstoning" until yesterday. Apparently it's an "extreme sport" and involves diving off rocks and cliffs into the sea. Sounds bloody stupid to me.

It seems that it's also something of a craze in the town where I grew up.

A middle-aged man drowned and another was seriously injured when they jumped into the sea off a pier in Essex, in a stunt known as "tombstoning".

The two men - both believed to be in their 40s - were found face-down in the sea by lifeboat crews after jumping off a pier at Clacton, Essex, on Saturday.

Man dies after 'tombstoning' jump

Natural selection in action.

Update: More details on the story. It seems that the man who died was a former soldier who had moved to Clacton to escape his drink problem. Not sure that was the brightest of moves. As long as I can remember, there's always been a big drinking culture in Clacton.

From the "stating the bleedin' obvious" department.

Organic fruit and vegetables may be better for you than conventionally grown crops, US research suggests.

I mean, really, how much research did that need?

I've been a bit quiet for the last few days. It's my first week working with a new client and there's a lot to pick up so I haven't really had time for blogging.

I'm sure things will get back to normal before too long. In the meantime, good news about Alan Johnston, innit?