Greenbelt - animation software, techies and luvies
Posted in Open Source Software, faith, Blogs on August 29, 2008 at 9:57 am
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
Posted in In the news, Funny, faith, media, Men and Women on August 20, 2008 at 3:51 pm
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?
Posted in Coding, Freecycle on August 18, 2008 at 11:22 am
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?
- As individuals we can recycle kit.
- In our companies we can use what influence we have to make sure kit is recycled.
- As IT sales people I guess you can’t just stop selling them! Maybe a recycling program can feature in the service though?
- 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.
- 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?
Posted in In the news, education, Home, Wikipedia, Google on August 14, 2008 at 5:25 pm
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
Posted in In the news, Men and Women on August 12, 2008 at 8:59 am
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…
Posted in Funny, Men and Women, Home on August 11, 2008 at 7:28 pm
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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