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Greenbelt - animation software, techies and luvies

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Open Source Software, faith, Blogs on August 29, 2008 at 9:57 am

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Well I’m back from http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/ and a fine time I had. although it is an arts festival I’m always interested in the technology. They have a venue called The Tank where some splendid guys set up a load of PC’s as an internet cafe, you can pay to get your phone charged and they run workshops on presentation skills, web site building, pod casting … I didn’t see a blogging workshop this year (as you can tell from my lack of blogging skills!) but I have attended the presentation stuff in the past and this year I made a stop frame animation film with my son. They are usually keen to push OSS but the stop frame stuff was IBM’s I believe. My son uses Monkey Jam at home which seems to do the job!
I have to say that the efficiency with which The Tank runs implies the techies are more organised than the luvies but as I’m keen not to differentiate between “creatives” and “techies” maybe I hadn’t better push that ;-)

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Signs and Wonders

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in In the news, Funny, faith, media, Men and Women on August 20, 2008 at 3:51 pm

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I’m off on yet more holidays - this time to
A Christian arts festival - but there is plenty of IT about. I may even be down for the stop frame animation workshops - I’ll let you know when I get back!
Here’s a thought before I go
The Mail, how distasteful, but I heard about it on R4 so that’s better. Some 65 year olds object to be seen as old and infirm BUT they still want signs up telling drivers to be considerate to them. Some people just want their cake as well as eating it!
Maybe I should object to the “men” symbol, after all it doesn’t look much like me - I’m not black, seldom spread out like that and I don’t have a completely round head. Still it’s better than the “women” symbol - apparently all women wear skirts and only have one leg.
What would a symbol for programmers look like? Well, many of them do have completely round heads…

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How many computers are obsoleted each year?

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Coding, Freecycle on August 18, 2008 at 11:22 am

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I freecycle old computers (making sure they are safe to do so http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/06/20/hard-disk-sanitation-for-recycyling/ ) and I know many others do but the size of the problem of “old” computers is staggering. I came across these figures the other day
Hundreds of millions of PCs are sold to businesses each year … On the other side of the equation, hundreds of millions of PCs are taken out of service every year.…  in the United States alone, as many as 500 million computers became obsolete in 2007, according to the National Recycling Coalition.

500,000,000 obsoleted computers last year in the US alone - that is potentially a lot of land fill.

What can we do about it?
  1. As individuals we can recycle kit.
  2. In our companies we can use what influence we have to make sure kit is recycled.
  3. As IT sales people I guess you can’t just stop selling them! Maybe a recycling program can feature in the service though?
  4. As s/w / infrastructure designers we could aim to keep stuff runable on old kit (it won’t make you popular with your h/w sales team if you have one!). Also, unless you support the latest interfaces it makes your product look old.
  5. Perhaps the hardest option is that at home and in the office we can choose not to keep up with the latest kit. On the bright side that means when you do need to upgrade you can either go for cheap recycled (not creating more waste) or super state of the art  (not needing updating so often).

Hmm, that’ll be recycled at home and state of the art at work please :-)

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Dumbing down A levels?

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in In the news, education, Home, Wikipedia, Google on August 14, 2008 at 5:25 pm

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It’s that time of year when people start muttering about A levels.  Do better results mean cleverer kids or easier exams? I can just about remember my A levels (nearly 30 years ago) and I did a fair amount of looking at the work my daughter had to do for hers so I’m not in a bad place to comment.
As far as I can see the answer is yes and no.  No the questions aren’t any easier but yes the way you can sit them is.
Course work means you don’t have to rely on a good day to produce good work. It also means you can get some sneaky help but most of all it can be re-done. If you hand it in and get a B (or and E or an F) they hand it back and say do it better (with suggestions of how to).
The fact that teachers teach to the exam (in my day teachers occasionally “wasted” time telling you useful stuff that wasn’t on the syllabus) and both teachers an kids put a lot of effort into getting the grades has got to help too.
Plus there is all the help available outside of school. When I couldn’t do my calculus it was wait and see the teacher or walk to the library and see if they had some books. My daughter not only had homework clubs, revision books galore she also had Google and even me (my dad helped me but he hadn’t done A level maths). I have to say of all of those the one that was most help was probably google (most often linking to wikipedia)!
So exams don’t have easier questions and kids aren’t vastly cleverer but they are better informed (and certainly in this family) they work harder so improved results are no great mystery.

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Alcohol ‘irrelevant’ in rape

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in In the news, Men and Women on August 12, 2008 at 8:59 am

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7555000/7555600.stm

We need to ask what is the ethos of the criminal injuries compensation fund. If it is akin to a insurance scheme that pays out to when we have been injured then there is every case for reduced payments to those who have placed themselves at greater risk. I fully agree that to be considered to be “to blame” for being raped (or mugged) is offensive and plain wrong however in terms of compensation some allowance for risks taken may be appropriate. My insurance will not pay out if I leave my car unlocked although the crime is still not justified. In fact I have to pay a higher premium because I am guilty of not owning a garage!

There is also the issue of psychological consequences. Many victims suffer because they no longer feel safe in the situation they were in. If the consequence is the victim no longer leave the house even in daylight this is a more severe situation than if the victim can no longer walk down dark alleys drunk.

These are general points and are not directed to the woman in the case referred to especially as she claims not to have been drinking to excess!

I also have to question the use of sex discrimination law. As this policy applies to all forms of attacks how is sex discrimination used when young men are by far the highest target of violence?

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Please turnaround when possible…

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Funny, Men and Women, Home on August 11, 2008 at 7:28 pm

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I’m back from my hols safe, sound and slightly damp. Considering we normally go to mad places like The Lakes and Wales the English Riviera was disappointingly moist. We have had better weather in the afore mentioned rain traps but never mind we had a good time. Maybe because of the weather we did a lot of travelling about and this was my first holiday with a Sat Nav so I was quite interested in the difference it made. One thing was, I never quite got to grips with the local roads. It could be the location, I remember last year in The Lakes there seemed to be only one road where as  Cornwall seemed to have 100’s - albeit very narrow ones. Maybe the whole county is ready for a one way system. However, I guess I didn’t stare at the map so much and when ever we went somewhere we seemed to take different roads even if we passed through the same places - weird.
The weirdest thing was trying to find the A34 north of St Austell. We were scudding along nicely when the Sat Nav suddenly said - “please turn around where possible” so we did but a few hundred yards down the road with no turn offs it said the same thing. Whoops. It seems we were crossing the road we wanted but on a bridge, there was no slip road and no Sat Nav instructions to leave the road we were on (presumably something like “please jump the fence and drive down the embankment where possible” probably in a Steve McQueen voice).  Rather than spend the whole holiday playing Pong bouncing up and down the road we did resort to the map - tricky as we didn’t know where we were at that point.
What made the frustrating situation worse was the fact that we had switched to the specialist voices. My wife seems to have some antipathy to the Sat Nav which may be some lurking jealousy of me actually following another woman’s advice so we had John Cleese giving directions. We chose John Cleese because in the sample speech just as your thinking “Is this John Cleese or an impersonator?” he says “You’re wondering if this is really me so I brought my mother along. Mother is this really me?” To which suitable Monty Python old hag voice replies. We thought it was funny. What wasn’t funny was “Please turn around where possible. You are facing in the wrong direction, you need to turn your vehicle so it is facing the opposite direction that which it is now facing… “. Not several times in the same piece of road it wasn’t funny.

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Unable to Post for Health and Safety Reasons

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Funny, Blogs, Wireless on July 25, 2008 at 9:18 am

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I won’t be blogging for a week or so as I’m off on my hols. Last year I was told the place I was going had WiFi so I bought a wifi adaptor especially to surf whilst away. However, when I got there they said “We were putting it in but weren’t allowed because of health and safety”.
I recently heard that the first step to wisdom was to stop blaming others and to accept the blame yourself. The second step is to realise no one is to blame. Wise words (except when obviously someone IS to blame) but I can’t remember where I heard them - possibly Kung Fu Panda!
Anyway, my point is that Heath and Safety has taken over from computers as the excuse of choice. Something we love to hate and are powerless against makes the best scapegoat. I guess we should be glad we have them to blame, in less technical times and places it has been the Jews or the Hutus…
Maybe Kung Fu Panda had a point.

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Accomodating Company Travellers

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in the company on July 23, 2008 at 5:11 pm

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There’s been a load of fuss about MP’s expenses and their “second homes”. I don’t really understand this. Bizarrely for a the London Centric media no one seems to be saying what about the MP’s who live here already? Plenty of  people commute from my area - no company would fund moving expenses let alone second home expenses if they offered me a job in Westminster. In fact my lovely company didn’t offer me expenses to travel / move when they closed my local office. It was work from home or fund your own 5 hour commute (or take statutory redundancy).
Anyway, back to MP’s. Because it is potentially a short job (although 5 years is longer than most peoples contracts these days) and because some work is in the constituency and some in London they get funded for a second home. Why not just set up furnished flats which the country owns and lend them out?

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The perfect interface - until you let a user near it!

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Funny, music, Coding on July 21, 2008 at 3:29 pm

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Qu’est-ce que c’est le point? As Georgia Nicolson might say (I haven’t seen the film but the books are excellent.)

I spend a lot of my time designing user interfaces to be as usable, easy on the eye and generally as elegant as possible so I tend to notice other peoples idiocies and (very occasionally) other peoples genius.

The harmonica is an example of both (sort of). To get a major scale from hole 4 it goes:

blow, suck,

blow, suck,

blow, suck,

… suck, blow.

Doh! Let’s just make it complicated shall we? But it is actually a piece of genius. Why everyone thinks they can play the harmonica is because where ever you blow not only is every note in the same scale EVERY 3 adjacent holes form a major triad of that scale (the root chord). Brilliant, every note fits in with the scale and if you (deliberately or accidentally) get more than one hole it harmonizes with itself! How can you go wrong?

Well obviously getting the right notes to any particular tune still requires a bit of skill - the clever thing is the wrong notes still sound OK(ish).

And then it all goes wrong. People are just perverse. The harmonica contains all the notes that you need of the major scale which accounts for most “traditional” western music. The blues scale is different, you need different notes so blues and rock players play “cross harp” - they take a C harmonica, bend a load of the notes (by sucking “wrong”) and play in a G blues scale. Even if you gave them a harmonica with the right notes for the blues scale it wouldn’t work because the bending is what gives that beautiful distorted sound and allows you to play a bit “off key” for bluesy dissonance and tension.

So great design but Qu’est-ce que c’est le point?

NB This all refers to a 10 hole diatonic harmonica - they do make all sorts but this is the common one!

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Who’s been using my credit card?

By Dave F in Reader

Posted in Men and Women, Home, Security, e-commerce, Uncategorized on July 14, 2008 at 9:08 am

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Too much security? I’m always complaining about it - however unless my wife has really spent £160 on XBox games like Metal Gear Solid (or something like that) then I may have to slightly change that to - Too little security, I’ve always said so.

It would be typical if if my wife’s card had been cloned / abused / whatever (what do I mean “if”, do I really think she’s got an Xbox stashed in the wardrobe? All those shoes are just a false lid to her gaming haven?) as she is always shredding innocent details (I keep saying “your name & address is in the phone book”, “yes it’s a receipt that has 4 digits of your card on but no one can use it”) and warning her aged P’s to look after their details. In fact we spent last night shredding years worth of her mum’s financial records. She still leaves a check on the step for the milkman though - name, address, bank details!

Anyway looks like we’ve got to spend hours on the phone getting it sorted :-(

I’ve got to decide what outcome I want here, do I want it to be stolen card details? Hmm, which is going to be cheaper - a ripped off credit card or marriage counselling and gaming addiction counselling?

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