So, I needed to photocopy multiple copies of a manuscript that included blank pages. The helpful photocopier saw that I was trying to copy blank pages and concluded I obviously didn't really want to do that, so left the blank pages out. Result: pagination all mixed up in the multiple copies.
I had to copy another manuscript. This time I was cleverer. I wrote BLANK in large, friendly letters on the blank page. The copier still couldn't quite believe I wanted to waste valuable time, paper and toner on a page with BLANK scrawled on it and so again left the blanks out.
Please will machines stop trying to be helpful. It really doesn't help.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Friday, May 22, 2009
Friday, November 21, 2008
Buran
Yesterday was the tenth birthday of the International Space Station, measured from the first module being fired up into orbit. Last Saturday (thanks for the up to the minute coverage, Beeb) was the twentieth anniversary of something even more exciting – the one and only flight of Buran, the Soviet Space Shuttle.
Buran was cool and it wasn't just a steal from the US version, unlike the Soviet's version of Concorde; there's only so many shapes something designed to be a space shuttle can be. The Shuttle is a bodge, the rump remnant of a much more ambitious space programme left over from the sixties; Buran did exactly what it was designed to do, and did it well. The Shuttle is inferior technology bolstered up by the politics of the richest nation on Earth; Buran was superior technology let down by a state that couldn't afford it. The Shuttle has to include its own engines to assist in lift-off, and once it ceases its burn those engines are just dead weight until the next time it takes off. Buran left all the taking-off business to its Energia booster, so every ounce and cubic inch on board could be dedicated to being a nifty piece of space kit.
It was also better designed generally. I hadn't realised, until reading the BBC link, that apparently on its test flight it landed within 3 metres of the centre line of the runway, in winds that would have made the Shuttle cancel altogether. And this was under remote control.
Another key difference between the two was that Buran could fly. But it had no engines, I hear you cry! No, but in good Soviet make-and-mend fashion it could. For its test flights, you could strap on some jet engines with some sellotape and string, and it could take off like an aeroplane ...
Basically, the Soviets watched far too much Gerry Anderson.
Of course, this is how a space launch should look.
Buran was cool and it wasn't just a steal from the US version, unlike the Soviet's version of Concorde; there's only so many shapes something designed to be a space shuttle can be. The Shuttle is a bodge, the rump remnant of a much more ambitious space programme left over from the sixties; Buran did exactly what it was designed to do, and did it well. The Shuttle is inferior technology bolstered up by the politics of the richest nation on Earth; Buran was superior technology let down by a state that couldn't afford it. The Shuttle has to include its own engines to assist in lift-off, and once it ceases its burn those engines are just dead weight until the next time it takes off. Buran left all the taking-off business to its Energia booster, so every ounce and cubic inch on board could be dedicated to being a nifty piece of space kit.
It was also better designed generally. I hadn't realised, until reading the BBC link, that apparently on its test flight it landed within 3 metres of the centre line of the runway, in winds that would have made the Shuttle cancel altogether. And this was under remote control.
Another key difference between the two was that Buran could fly. But it had no engines, I hear you cry! No, but in good Soviet make-and-mend fashion it could. For its test flights, you could strap on some jet engines with some sellotape and string, and it could take off like an aeroplane ...
Basically, the Soviets watched far too much Gerry Anderson.
Of course, this is how a space launch should look.
No computers for the kids, though
This 1969 vision of the computer-enabled household is surprisingly close, in some areas. There's still the occasional gem ...
"What the wife selects at her console will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console." (We see husband shaking his head dolefully as he survives the wife's expenditure ...)
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Little Brother
Recently I drove home from Northampton to Abingdon. The most logical course for the final stage of the journey would have been to come down the A34 to the south Abingdon exit, then drive towards the town centre and home. A reasonable variant on this would have been to take the north Abingdon exit off the A34 and come anticlockwise round the ringroad. A most unusual and unpredictable variant – and the one I actually used – was to come off at the north exit, drive clockwise around the ringroad to the town centre, head due north again back towards the north exit and this time come anticlockwise round the other half of the ringroad. Essentially, I did a big sideways figure 8 (or an infinity sign, of course). Why? Well, if you must know I was listening to Pink Floyd’s "The Wall" and I wanted to get to the end. It's designed to be listened to in one piece. I've done similar in the past for the William Tell Overture and other pieces of music.
And, well, why not? I’m a free responsible adult. I can take any route I like.
Now, supposing there was a number plate tracking system in place programmed to detect unusual traffic variations, and alert the cops who would subsequently turn up and ask me to prove I hadn't been doing anything suspicious?
Thoughts brought to mind by reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. A book not without its flaws but still one that everyone should read.
About five minutes into the future, a terrorist atrocity in San Francisco kills thousands and the Department of Homeland Security (henceforth the DHS, always making me think of sofas) swings into action with a programme it has obviously had long prepared, just waiting for the right opportunity. A security clampdown begins on absolutely everyone except the right people, i.e. the terrorists. Caught up in this, purely by dint of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is 17 year old Marcus, a techno-savvy geek without (frankly) many redeeming features. Justifiably angered at the illegal treatment he has received at the DHS's mini-Guantanamo in San Francisco Bay, he decides to fight back.
The point isn't to bring down the government or to encourage terrorism. The point is that the DHS has completely missed the point, mistaking looking busy and ideological enforcement for actual results. There is no evidence that terrorists are even in San Francisco at all after the attack, yet the crackdown continues. Meanwhile, with a bit of technical wizardry that anyone can pick up off the web, a kid without a political thought in his head can pull the wool over the DHS's eyes. How much more likely are the real terrorists to get clean away with it?
The situation is not really a thousand miles from what actually happened after 9/11 and continues to happen today. Posters like this one are serious. (Posters like this one, however, are not - mostly.) Have you tried taking any photographs in public lately?
First, things I didn't like.
Marcus is not a sympathetic character, though others will find him so – even some of my friends. He is a cocky techy geek who is heavily into games. Not my kinda guy. He can be bratty and immature. I assume this is characterisation rather than Doctorow's own personality showing through, as Marcus makes mistakes and gets it wrong. He is in love with his own cleverness and can never see in advance that every victory he scores over the DHS will simply make them up the game a little more, thus cracking down even harder. After all, the DHS is run by humans too and they don't like getting it wrong either. Thankfully, Marcus grows up.
There were times that the great cause Marcus et al were fighting for becomes distinctly cloudy. Sometimes it just seems they want to fight for the right to party and be selfish little brats. If Marcus is immature, the self-important rebellion-for-rebellion's sake yoof movement that grows up around him is downright pathetic. There is a fine line to draw between responsible use of freedom and anarchy just because you can. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, and I really don't care who argues otherwise.
In Denver back in August, I witnessed an exciting confrontation between an American gent who called the Democrats socialists and an American lady who called the Republicans fascists. As the native of a continent with plenty of experience of both, I was thinking "rank amateurs, the lot of them", but Americans get like that when they talk politics (okay, okay, Doctorow is Canadian). Someone in the novel who I’m pretty sure we're meant to take seriously refers to "Gulag America" and that really annoys me. America at its worst under the current administration doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the Gulag. Name calling is just babyish.
"Don’t trust anyone under 25!" becomes a major rallying call. What, and I'm expected to put the major decisions into the hands of children with 24 years or less life experience? Feel free to let the door handle hit you on the way out and leave a nice bruise. For the record, according to Wikipedia Doctorow is 37.
But let's talk about where Little Brother, and Doctorow, and Marcus get it right. The technology – well, I take his word for it on the technology. At least I recognise the words he uses (Xbox, Microsoft, Linux) so I presume it's sound. The minimum lesson to take home from this is that the younger generation will always be ahead of the older in finding new and clever ways to utilise technology. What impresses us is already old hat to the teenagers.
Above all I can't fault the logic of Marcus’s critique of the system. He does the maths for us. Suppose, he says, you have a means of detecting terrorists that is 99% accurate? And you apply this to, say, a city like New York with a population of 20 million, to find a terrorist cell that will have only a handful of members? At 99% accuracy you are still going to accuse 200,000 people wrongly. And the DHS does not have a system anything like 99% accurate. No one does.
Thankfully, what carries the book past posturing and preaching to the converted is that the ending, mostly happy, is brought about by the actions of Marcus but ultimately is attributable to forces he has no control over. The rule of law is brought back to San Francisco's streets but this time it is open, attributable, accountable law by grown-ups (yes, even those over 25) who know what they're doing. And not even Marcus is exempt. As it should be.
I quite enjoy not being blown up by Al Quaeda and I'm very glad there are people out there whose job it is to see that I’m not. I accept that they may from time to time find it convenient to read my email without letting me know, or track my car's movements by CCTV that read my licence plate. Let 'em.
Little Brother says that the old security maxim "those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear" is a lie. Actually, it’s technically true. However, everyone has a lot to fear if all that power, all that surveillance data is put into the hands of morons and empire builders. Ian Huntley and the 21/7 bombers were found out by surveillance and studying old records. I'm not against the concept. But what is needed isn't more surveillance of absolutely everything, it's intelligent surveillance of what we have available.
Here are the basic ground rules for using our astonishing technological abilities to keep ourselves safe and safeguard our liberties. First and foremost, there has to be the simple recognition that dissent and disagreement <> terrorism or treason. Unfortunately, a lot of politicians are unable to make this connection and they're the ones meant to be in charge. In another context, I believe statistics show that teenagers from families which openly discuss sex matters are much more likely to go on to have responsible sex lives. Same thing. Just talking about something should never be a crime and school is where it should start.
Politicians and law enforcement officials must realise that the best way to radicalise people against you is to piss them off. You counter insurgency by winning hearts and minds. There has never been a revolution in a happy country. I'm referring here to the hearts and minds of the people, not the headline writers of the Daily Mail or the US equivalent. They may safely be excluded from any decision making process.
I require anyone with this kind of power over me to know and understand considerably more than I do. If someone can't understand why I would add twenty minutes to my journey just to catch the end of a Pink Floyd album then that person should not be put in charge of surveilling me.
From those to whom much is given, much is expected. The people entrusted with power that could ruin lives must get it absolutely right, or else. One of Marcus's friends is detained for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and kept there simply because it reaches the point where his release would be embarrassing. Now look me in the eye and tell me that isn't the reason a lot of people are still held at Guantanamo. Or, indeed, just cast an eye over reports on the Menezes inquest. The public interest is not the same as saving the blushes of a red-faced politico. If you get it wrong, you are out.
But, they might cry, how can we possibly recruit people into the security services with that hanging over their heads? Well, it's not that different to recruiting people into the armed forces on the understanding that someone might shoot them dead. It happens. Maximise your efforts to make sure that it doesn't happen; but once it has, live with it. They expect us to put up with all kinds of crap for the privilege of not being bombed by terrorists. They might even expect us to lay down our lives ourselves, or at least not raise a fuss if they happen to gun down the wrong person. Expecting them in return to put their career on the line doesn't seem such a hard thing to ask. It's not as if they're left in the library with a revolver and a glass of brandy any more.
I'll close as I started, with a driving-related anecdote. I once gave Cory Doctorow a lift from the centre of Oxford down Botley Road to the train station. En route, a traffic camera snapped me and I got my first ever speeding ticket ...
(For reference, see Farah Mendlesohn’s review.)
And, well, why not? I’m a free responsible adult. I can take any route I like.
Now, supposing there was a number plate tracking system in place programmed to detect unusual traffic variations, and alert the cops who would subsequently turn up and ask me to prove I hadn't been doing anything suspicious?
Thoughts brought to mind by reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. A book not without its flaws but still one that everyone should read.
About five minutes into the future, a terrorist atrocity in San Francisco kills thousands and the Department of Homeland Security (henceforth the DHS, always making me think of sofas) swings into action with a programme it has obviously had long prepared, just waiting for the right opportunity. A security clampdown begins on absolutely everyone except the right people, i.e. the terrorists. Caught up in this, purely by dint of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is 17 year old Marcus, a techno-savvy geek without (frankly) many redeeming features. Justifiably angered at the illegal treatment he has received at the DHS's mini-Guantanamo in San Francisco Bay, he decides to fight back.
The point isn't to bring down the government or to encourage terrorism. The point is that the DHS has completely missed the point, mistaking looking busy and ideological enforcement for actual results. There is no evidence that terrorists are even in San Francisco at all after the attack, yet the crackdown continues. Meanwhile, with a bit of technical wizardry that anyone can pick up off the web, a kid without a political thought in his head can pull the wool over the DHS's eyes. How much more likely are the real terrorists to get clean away with it?
The situation is not really a thousand miles from what actually happened after 9/11 and continues to happen today. Posters like this one are serious. (Posters like this one, however, are not - mostly.) Have you tried taking any photographs in public lately?
First, things I didn't like.
Marcus is not a sympathetic character, though others will find him so – even some of my friends. He is a cocky techy geek who is heavily into games. Not my kinda guy. He can be bratty and immature. I assume this is characterisation rather than Doctorow's own personality showing through, as Marcus makes mistakes and gets it wrong. He is in love with his own cleverness and can never see in advance that every victory he scores over the DHS will simply make them up the game a little more, thus cracking down even harder. After all, the DHS is run by humans too and they don't like getting it wrong either. Thankfully, Marcus grows up.
There were times that the great cause Marcus et al were fighting for becomes distinctly cloudy. Sometimes it just seems they want to fight for the right to party and be selfish little brats. If Marcus is immature, the self-important rebellion-for-rebellion's sake yoof movement that grows up around him is downright pathetic. There is a fine line to draw between responsible use of freedom and anarchy just because you can. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre, and I really don't care who argues otherwise.
In Denver back in August, I witnessed an exciting confrontation between an American gent who called the Democrats socialists and an American lady who called the Republicans fascists. As the native of a continent with plenty of experience of both, I was thinking "rank amateurs, the lot of them", but Americans get like that when they talk politics (okay, okay, Doctorow is Canadian). Someone in the novel who I’m pretty sure we're meant to take seriously refers to "Gulag America" and that really annoys me. America at its worst under the current administration doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the Gulag. Name calling is just babyish.
"Don’t trust anyone under 25!" becomes a major rallying call. What, and I'm expected to put the major decisions into the hands of children with 24 years or less life experience? Feel free to let the door handle hit you on the way out and leave a nice bruise. For the record, according to Wikipedia Doctorow is 37.
But let's talk about where Little Brother, and Doctorow, and Marcus get it right. The technology – well, I take his word for it on the technology. At least I recognise the words he uses (Xbox, Microsoft, Linux) so I presume it's sound. The minimum lesson to take home from this is that the younger generation will always be ahead of the older in finding new and clever ways to utilise technology. What impresses us is already old hat to the teenagers.
Above all I can't fault the logic of Marcus’s critique of the system. He does the maths for us. Suppose, he says, you have a means of detecting terrorists that is 99% accurate? And you apply this to, say, a city like New York with a population of 20 million, to find a terrorist cell that will have only a handful of members? At 99% accuracy you are still going to accuse 200,000 people wrongly. And the DHS does not have a system anything like 99% accurate. No one does.
Thankfully, what carries the book past posturing and preaching to the converted is that the ending, mostly happy, is brought about by the actions of Marcus but ultimately is attributable to forces he has no control over. The rule of law is brought back to San Francisco's streets but this time it is open, attributable, accountable law by grown-ups (yes, even those over 25) who know what they're doing. And not even Marcus is exempt. As it should be.
I quite enjoy not being blown up by Al Quaeda and I'm very glad there are people out there whose job it is to see that I’m not. I accept that they may from time to time find it convenient to read my email without letting me know, or track my car's movements by CCTV that read my licence plate. Let 'em.
Little Brother says that the old security maxim "those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear" is a lie. Actually, it’s technically true. However, everyone has a lot to fear if all that power, all that surveillance data is put into the hands of morons and empire builders. Ian Huntley and the 21/7 bombers were found out by surveillance and studying old records. I'm not against the concept. But what is needed isn't more surveillance of absolutely everything, it's intelligent surveillance of what we have available.
Here are the basic ground rules for using our astonishing technological abilities to keep ourselves safe and safeguard our liberties. First and foremost, there has to be the simple recognition that dissent and disagreement <> terrorism or treason. Unfortunately, a lot of politicians are unable to make this connection and they're the ones meant to be in charge. In another context, I believe statistics show that teenagers from families which openly discuss sex matters are much more likely to go on to have responsible sex lives. Same thing. Just talking about something should never be a crime and school is where it should start.
Politicians and law enforcement officials must realise that the best way to radicalise people against you is to piss them off. You counter insurgency by winning hearts and minds. There has never been a revolution in a happy country. I'm referring here to the hearts and minds of the people, not the headline writers of the Daily Mail or the US equivalent. They may safely be excluded from any decision making process.
I require anyone with this kind of power over me to know and understand considerably more than I do. If someone can't understand why I would add twenty minutes to my journey just to catch the end of a Pink Floyd album then that person should not be put in charge of surveilling me.
From those to whom much is given, much is expected. The people entrusted with power that could ruin lives must get it absolutely right, or else. One of Marcus's friends is detained for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and kept there simply because it reaches the point where his release would be embarrassing. Now look me in the eye and tell me that isn't the reason a lot of people are still held at Guantanamo. Or, indeed, just cast an eye over reports on the Menezes inquest. The public interest is not the same as saving the blushes of a red-faced politico. If you get it wrong, you are out.
But, they might cry, how can we possibly recruit people into the security services with that hanging over their heads? Well, it's not that different to recruiting people into the armed forces on the understanding that someone might shoot them dead. It happens. Maximise your efforts to make sure that it doesn't happen; but once it has, live with it. They expect us to put up with all kinds of crap for the privilege of not being bombed by terrorists. They might even expect us to lay down our lives ourselves, or at least not raise a fuss if they happen to gun down the wrong person. Expecting them in return to put their career on the line doesn't seem such a hard thing to ask. It's not as if they're left in the library with a revolver and a glass of brandy any more.
I'll close as I started, with a driving-related anecdote. I once gave Cory Doctorow a lift from the centre of Oxford down Botley Road to the train station. En route, a traffic camera snapped me and I got my first ever speeding ticket ...
(For reference, see Farah Mendlesohn’s review.)
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Eat your heart out Gerry Anderson
I used to think a gull-wing car door would be the ultimate in cool.
No longer.
No longer.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Friday, November 23, 2007
HMRC: much explained
Everyone has been asking questions about HM Revenue & Customs' entertaining little faux pas, and how it could have happened. Especially as it all seems to be officially dumped on one of the younger members of staff, who are probably a lot more with the technology thang than the Sir Humphreys above them.
There may be a clue in the exchange of emails and correspondence shown here.
The damning evidence is on pages 6 and 7. Hidden among all the censor's black ink, you will notice that someone at HMRC uses Comic Sans MS as their font of choice.
I think we have our culprit, and if we don't, we should.
There may be a clue in the exchange of emails and correspondence shown here.
The damning evidence is on pages 6 and 7. Hidden among all the censor's black ink, you will notice that someone at HMRC uses Comic Sans MS as their font of choice.
I think we have our culprit, and if we don't, we should.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Spot the flaw (there must be one)
In my latest bid to become rich before I'm 30 40 50 ...
The problem: URLs, especially those based on a back-end database, can become long and unwieldy. For instance, http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_w_h_?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ben+jeapes&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go gets you the complete works of me as known to Amazon, including
Online Information 93: 17th International Online Information Meeting Proceedings London 7-9 December 1993 and Online Information Hong Kong: The 2nd Asian Information Meeting, which resolutely refuse to sell out no matter how hard I try.
But it doesn't really trip off the tongue, does it?
The A solution: tinyurl is your friend. You enter a massive, unwieldy URL like the above and get a nice small one to show all your friends, reproduce in publications etc. In this case that would be http://tinyurl.com/296bct.
Some magazines, like Focus, gladly use tinyurl already. Organisations with a more proprietorial attitude still prefer to use their own URLs, because no matter how unwieldy (say) the above URL is, it still points you at the Amazon site. A tinyurl URL could take you anywhere, and you wouldn't know until you got there.
Ben's solution: why can't the two be combined? Why can't there be a package sitting on a web server that encodes the URLs in something short and alphanumeric - just five characters long would give you a range of 60466176 entries, which might not be much by Amazon standards but will do fine for most of us - and puts them after the root URL? Thus in bencode the above could be rendered www.amazon.co.uk/abcde. Companies don't have to use a third party, they control their URLs and the customer goes straight to their web site.
This seems so obvious that I can't believe someone hasn't tried it, and that being so, it seems so useful that the only reason you don't see it everywhere is that it doesn't work. So, what's wrong with it?
The problem: URLs, especially those based on a back-end database, can become long and unwieldy. For instance, http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_w_h_?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ben+jeapes&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go gets you the complete works of me as known to Amazon, including
Online Information 93: 17th International Online Information Meeting Proceedings London 7-9 December 1993 and Online Information Hong Kong: The 2nd Asian Information Meeting, which resolutely refuse to sell out no matter how hard I try.
But it doesn't really trip off the tongue, does it?
Some magazines, like Focus, gladly use tinyurl already. Organisations with a more proprietorial attitude still prefer to use their own URLs, because no matter how unwieldy (say) the above URL is, it still points you at the Amazon site. A tinyurl URL could take you anywhere, and you wouldn't know until you got there.
Ben's solution: why can't the two be combined? Why can't there be a package sitting on a web server that encodes the URLs in something short and alphanumeric - just five characters long would give you a range of 60466176 entries, which might not be much by Amazon standards but will do fine for most of us - and puts them after the root URL? Thus in bencode the above could be rendered www.amazon.co.uk/abcde. Companies don't have to use a third party, they control their URLs and the customer goes straight to their web site.
This seems so obvious that I can't believe someone hasn't tried it, and that being so, it seems so useful that the only reason you don't see it everywhere is that it doesn't work. So, what's wrong with it?
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Always a bigger phish
Who exactly falls for email scams? Obviously someone does. The BBC says that "In 2005 UK losses from phishing scams stood at £23.2m." I'm probably setting myself up for a fall - and if I am, you have my full permission to point and go "ha, ha" when it happens - but I've not yet fallen for a phish and I can't imagine anyone I know doing so either.
My guess is that it's not the reasonably techno-savvy who pay up. It's the grannies out there who have just got their first computer and are justly proud of finally piercing the technology barrier. £23.2m = lots of grannies.
Today eBay and Paypal are the first two big names to sign up to Yahoo's DKIM system, which uses public and private key encryption to weed out the frauds. Now, stop me if I'm missing something, but ... "in order for the technology to work, both the sender and recipient need their mail services to be signed up to DKIM."
The spammers won't be signing up and neither will the grannies. So, really not sure how this solves anything.
My guess is that it's not the reasonably techno-savvy who pay up. It's the grannies out there who have just got their first computer and are justly proud of finally piercing the technology barrier. £23.2m = lots of grannies.
Today eBay and Paypal are the first two big names to sign up to Yahoo's DKIM system, which uses public and private key encryption to weed out the frauds. Now, stop me if I'm missing something, but ... "in order for the technology to work, both the sender and recipient need their mail services to be signed up to DKIM."
The spammers won't be signing up and neither will the grannies. So, really not sure how this solves anything.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
I have discovered time travel
For much of the last few weeks I've been in 1996.
I remember it well, for 'twas thenabouts that I was briefly and accidentally an AOL member. I suspect their CD fell through my letter box and I got carried away.
My chief memories are: it taking forever to download new artwork whenever I logged on; their abortion of a browser that couldn't recognise frames, tables, size tags etc in basic HTML; and their utterly rubbish FTP software that could upload one file at a time. For which, if memory serves, you had to enter, manually, the name of the remote destination file and then the name of the local file you were uploading.
Even by the standards of 1996, it was rubbish.
So I was quite surprised to start playing with our new content management system at work in 2007 and find it strangely reminiscent. It's an open source, browser based thing and professionalism prevents me from naming the company responsible but strewth, how the stupid drongoes look themselves in the mirror is beyond me. In this era of drag'n'drop, point'n'click mass selection and transfer of files I do not expect to have to upload files one at a time. And type in their names manually. I find it absurd that to edit a file I have to right click an option from a menu and then click a button and then click an icon. And if I'm stupid enough to look at another file too, forget it, my changes to the first one are gone. Unless I've clicked publish.
Perhaps most baffling of all is that you get two HTML views. Raw HTML, i.e. what you actually code in, and what can best be described as prettified HTML - it looks like HTML code until it starts formatting itself. Guess which of these two is the most obvious, and which is obscurely hidden behind another icon and drop-down menu.
The techies who designed this have the same attitude to users as I have to fairies. I've heard of them but I've never met one and I don't really believe they exist.
Time taken is the worst thing. Until recently, when I clicked publish, the IE or Firefox logo would start to turn as the browser did its stuff ... and stop. It may start again, it may not. You have no way of knowing. The system appears to have crashed, or, it may just be thinking. This can last (literally) for a couple of minutes. I have gone off to make a cup of tea and come back to find it still thinking about it. It may finally decide to save your work, in which case it suddenly springs back to life, or it may crash for good. Again, you simply cannot tell, without calling up the Task Manager. What you can't do during this time is anything else on the computer - read e-mail, work on a document - because that guarantees it *will* crash. I sent my manager a ranting email in which I generously estimated each document averaged at 30 seconds to save. I had put up c. 300 pages that week (we're doing a big web redesign), so that works out at 2.5 hours during in which I was unable to do anything other than stare at the screen and twiddle my thumbs. That's ignoring all the times the system fell over and I had to start again from scratch. And many files took considerably more than 1 minute.
This has improved slightly since I upgraded to the latest version of Firefox. The improvement is that it no longer hangs about for a couple of minutes before crashing, it simply vanishes from your screen.
There is, I have a found, a way round this. Go to the raw HTML view, and code it manually. Yes, manually. I'm actually quite good at this as before I learnt Dreamweaver two years ago all my HTML coding was done manually. Children, I can remember coding for the company website using nothing more sophisticated than Windows Notepad. My productivity has soared.
1996 is a fun place to be. My first novel's been accepted by a publisher and we're due a general election next year. Be interesting to see how it turns out.
I remember it well, for 'twas thenabouts that I was briefly and accidentally an AOL member. I suspect their CD fell through my letter box and I got carried away.
My chief memories are: it taking forever to download new artwork whenever I logged on; their abortion of a browser that couldn't recognise frames, tables, size tags etc in basic HTML; and their utterly rubbish FTP software that could upload one file at a time. For which, if memory serves, you had to enter, manually, the name of the remote destination file and then the name of the local file you were uploading.
Even by the standards of 1996, it was rubbish.
So I was quite surprised to start playing with our new content management system at work in 2007 and find it strangely reminiscent. It's an open source, browser based thing and professionalism prevents me from naming the company responsible but strewth, how the stupid drongoes look themselves in the mirror is beyond me. In this era of drag'n'drop, point'n'click mass selection and transfer of files I do not expect to have to upload files one at a time. And type in their names manually. I find it absurd that to edit a file I have to right click an option from a menu and then click a button and then click an icon. And if I'm stupid enough to look at another file too, forget it, my changes to the first one are gone. Unless I've clicked publish.
Perhaps most baffling of all is that you get two HTML views. Raw HTML, i.e. what you actually code in, and what can best be described as prettified HTML - it looks like HTML code until it starts formatting itself. Guess which of these two is the most obvious, and which is obscurely hidden behind another icon and drop-down menu.
The techies who designed this have the same attitude to users as I have to fairies. I've heard of them but I've never met one and I don't really believe they exist.
Time taken is the worst thing. Until recently, when I clicked publish, the IE or Firefox logo would start to turn as the browser did its stuff ... and stop. It may start again, it may not. You have no way of knowing. The system appears to have crashed, or, it may just be thinking. This can last (literally) for a couple of minutes. I have gone off to make a cup of tea and come back to find it still thinking about it. It may finally decide to save your work, in which case it suddenly springs back to life, or it may crash for good. Again, you simply cannot tell, without calling up the Task Manager. What you can't do during this time is anything else on the computer - read e-mail, work on a document - because that guarantees it *will* crash. I sent my manager a ranting email in which I generously estimated each document averaged at 30 seconds to save. I had put up c. 300 pages that week (we're doing a big web redesign), so that works out at 2.5 hours during in which I was unable to do anything other than stare at the screen and twiddle my thumbs. That's ignoring all the times the system fell over and I had to start again from scratch. And many files took considerably more than 1 minute.
This has improved slightly since I upgraded to the latest version of Firefox. The improvement is that it no longer hangs about for a couple of minutes before crashing, it simply vanishes from your screen.
There is, I have a found, a way round this. Go to the raw HTML view, and code it manually. Yes, manually. I'm actually quite good at this as before I learnt Dreamweaver two years ago all my HTML coding was done manually. Children, I can remember coding for the company website using nothing more sophisticated than Windows Notepad. My productivity has soared.
1996 is a fun place to be. My first novel's been accepted by a publisher and we're due a general election next year. Be interesting to see how it turns out.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
256k memory lane
A nostalgia-inducing article on the BBC today. Ah, the Amstrad PCW. My friend.
I bought mine with money received for my twenty first birthday. I had already discerned the need for a word processor in my life - easier to write and edit, kinder to my neighbours than the manual typewriter I was then using for writing. Amstrad got their marketing exactly right. Most people probably weren’t going to buy a home computer because they couldn’t think what to do with one – and a computer really was just that, the CPU. Keyboards, monitors and disc drives were optional extras to buy separately. (Mouse? What’s that?) Word processing was the most likely application for home use but word processors at the time tended to be dedicated machines – a computer to all intents and purposes except that they processed words and that was it. A user-friendly word processor on a cheap and cheerful, all-peripherals-bundled computer (including its own one-sheet-at-a-time dot matrix printer) was the perfect solution.
No C: drives, of course. Everything ran off universally incompatible three-inch 180k floppy discs – or 720k if you got the 8512 model or added a high density floppy drive yourself. The word processor, Locoscript, was its own operating system and took up so much space on the boot discs that so you had to switch discs to edit anything if your file was of any decent size. (A fact that you eventually had to work out for yourself.) Alternatively you could load the other operating system, CP/M, and run programs off that. The software came from a different age when everything was about 99% bug free before it left the factory – and people’s expectations were so low that they would forgive the remaining 1% quite happily. (Microsoft have their faults, which you can learn to live with, but the one thing I can’t forgive is the way they have standardised shoddy workmanship to the point where it’s expected and accepted.)
For anything fancy like a spelling checker the world had to wait with bated breath for Locoscript 2. Another problem 2 solved was 1’s habit of scrolling, very slowly, through a document whenever you saved it. Apparently it was to check the formatting. It would head down to the bottom of the file, think about it, then scroll slowly back up again to wherever the cursor was at that point. Fine if you’re just typing a letter; if you’re working on a 5000 word story, not helpful. If you were still working off the Locoscript boot disc, or hadn’t got the hang of working off the memory drive, chances were good it would run out of space and complain at you. I learnt to work in small files – in fact, until very recently I still wrote novels with one chapter per Word file. Old habits die hard.
On the plus side, you weren’t distracted by Minesweeper or Freecell because they didn’t exist ... The nearest games were a whole reboot away and probably written in BASIC so you could customise them to your heart’s content.
At work we often got books sent in on PCW discs which meant I could edit them at home. We had to send them off to a bureau that would put them onto – gasp! – 5.25" floppies (the last generation of floppies that really could flop) for our office PCs. I once got an author’s disc where he had even broken his chapters into different subsections, each one in its own file named by subtopic. So, the contents of his book appeared on screen in alphabetical order. Oh, what fun that was to sort out. One of my first professional paid pieces of writing wasn’t science fiction, it was an essay in one of the PCW consumer magazines on how best to prepare your manuscript for a publisher. I may still have it somewhere.
So the PCW was far from perfect but it introduced a generation to the basic computing habits that we take for granted in any modern software – and indeed hardware. How impressed would you be today if you bought a new PC from Tesco and got blank looks if you asked where the keyboard was? Or had to buy the OS separately? (And I mean had to, Linux geeks, as opposed to optionally buying a better one ...) It changed expectations and set new ones.
My first couple of published stories – and many, many unpublished ones – were written on my old green-screened friend, as were the first few chapters of His Majesty’s Starship. I only really got rid of it and upgraded to a PC to be compatible with work. Windows had just arrived, e-mail and the web were looming on the horizon – the poor old thing would never have coped.
The new PC was a laptop with a 30Mb hard disk. The veritable bee’s knees. Any further advances have been purely cosmetic ...
I bought mine with money received for my twenty first birthday. I had already discerned the need for a word processor in my life - easier to write and edit, kinder to my neighbours than the manual typewriter I was then using for writing. Amstrad got their marketing exactly right. Most people probably weren’t going to buy a home computer because they couldn’t think what to do with one – and a computer really was just that, the CPU. Keyboards, monitors and disc drives were optional extras to buy separately. (Mouse? What’s that?) Word processing was the most likely application for home use but word processors at the time tended to be dedicated machines – a computer to all intents and purposes except that they processed words and that was it. A user-friendly word processor on a cheap and cheerful, all-peripherals-bundled computer (including its own one-sheet-at-a-time dot matrix printer) was the perfect solution.
No C: drives, of course. Everything ran off universally incompatible three-inch 180k floppy discs – or 720k if you got the 8512 model or added a high density floppy drive yourself. The word processor, Locoscript, was its own operating system and took up so much space on the boot discs that so you had to switch discs to edit anything if your file was of any decent size. (A fact that you eventually had to work out for yourself.) Alternatively you could load the other operating system, CP/M, and run programs off that. The software came from a different age when everything was about 99% bug free before it left the factory – and people’s expectations were so low that they would forgive the remaining 1% quite happily. (Microsoft have their faults, which you can learn to live with, but the one thing I can’t forgive is the way they have standardised shoddy workmanship to the point where it’s expected and accepted.)
For anything fancy like a spelling checker the world had to wait with bated breath for Locoscript 2. Another problem 2 solved was 1’s habit of scrolling, very slowly, through a document whenever you saved it. Apparently it was to check the formatting. It would head down to the bottom of the file, think about it, then scroll slowly back up again to wherever the cursor was at that point. Fine if you’re just typing a letter; if you’re working on a 5000 word story, not helpful. If you were still working off the Locoscript boot disc, or hadn’t got the hang of working off the memory drive, chances were good it would run out of space and complain at you. I learnt to work in small files – in fact, until very recently I still wrote novels with one chapter per Word file. Old habits die hard.
On the plus side, you weren’t distracted by Minesweeper or Freecell because they didn’t exist ... The nearest games were a whole reboot away and probably written in BASIC so you could customise them to your heart’s content.
At work we often got books sent in on PCW discs which meant I could edit them at home. We had to send them off to a bureau that would put them onto – gasp! – 5.25" floppies (the last generation of floppies that really could flop) for our office PCs. I once got an author’s disc where he had even broken his chapters into different subsections, each one in its own file named by subtopic. So, the contents of his book appeared on screen in alphabetical order. Oh, what fun that was to sort out. One of my first professional paid pieces of writing wasn’t science fiction, it was an essay in one of the PCW consumer magazines on how best to prepare your manuscript for a publisher. I may still have it somewhere.
So the PCW was far from perfect but it introduced a generation to the basic computing habits that we take for granted in any modern software – and indeed hardware. How impressed would you be today if you bought a new PC from Tesco and got blank looks if you asked where the keyboard was? Or had to buy the OS separately? (And I mean had to, Linux geeks, as opposed to optionally buying a better one ...) It changed expectations and set new ones.
My first couple of published stories – and many, many unpublished ones – were written on my old green-screened friend, as were the first few chapters of His Majesty’s Starship. I only really got rid of it and upgraded to a PC to be compatible with work. Windows had just arrived, e-mail and the web were looming on the horizon – the poor old thing would never have coped.
The new PC was a laptop with a 30Mb hard disk. The veritable bee’s knees. Any further advances have been purely cosmetic ...
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
The links effect
Links have started breeding on my blog.
A couple of days ago I got an nice email from Amazon inviting me to add a bit of HTML to the source code. I read it several times, I even looked at their demo page, and I still couldn't quite understand what it did. So I added it anyway out of curiosity.
Oh right, now I get it. Scroll down and look at the reading or read list at the bottom of the sidebar on the left. None of the links there are my own doing. Amazon cleverly scans my content for phrases it can identify with and makes its own links. Hover the cursor over one of them and a little preview window pops up. Neat. Note that it's not actually rewriting my own code to add these links - a quick check on View Page Source tells me that. Somehow these links are overlaid on top of what I've already written. If you follow through and actually buy the thing, I get a cut of your money. Apparently.
And they change. Yesterday, Vice Versa had a link to the 1988 movie of that title, but today it's gone. Maybe someone bought their last copy. This leads to the second unavoidable observation which is that they use guesswork. Amazon had no way of knowing that I was reading the 1880s original of a pompous father and wayward son accidentally swapping bodies, which is still very funny. Likewise the Good Shepherd link is to the Matt Damon movie of that name, not C.S. Forester's harrowing tale of the Atlantic convoys in WW2. Not seen the movie but I'm prepared to hazard a guess as to which is better.
If the pounds start rolling in, I may keep it; if not I'll drop it. Let's see.
A couple of days ago I got an nice email from Amazon inviting me to add a bit of HTML to the source code. I read it several times, I even looked at their demo page, and I still couldn't quite understand what it did. So I added it anyway out of curiosity.
Oh right, now I get it. Scroll down and look at the reading or read list at the bottom of the sidebar on the left. None of the links there are my own doing. Amazon cleverly scans my content for phrases it can identify with and makes its own links. Hover the cursor over one of them and a little preview window pops up. Neat. Note that it's not actually rewriting my own code to add these links - a quick check on View Page Source tells me that. Somehow these links are overlaid on top of what I've already written. If you follow through and actually buy the thing, I get a cut of your money. Apparently.
And they change. Yesterday, Vice Versa had a link to the 1988 movie of that title, but today it's gone. Maybe someone bought their last copy. This leads to the second unavoidable observation which is that they use guesswork. Amazon had no way of knowing that I was reading the 1880s original of a pompous father and wayward son accidentally swapping bodies, which is still very funny. Likewise the Good Shepherd link is to the Matt Damon movie of that name, not C.S. Forester's harrowing tale of the Atlantic convoys in WW2. Not seen the movie but I'm prepared to hazard a guess as to which is better.
If the pounds start rolling in, I may keep it; if not I'll drop it. Let's see.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Vista, pros and cons
Cons: the release of Vista is expected to put 175 million PCs into landfill sites within the next 18 months.
Pros: it makes things like this possible.
http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/
It's an 18 minute video which you can either stream or download, and it starts getting good after about six minutes. It also features the world's most boring Director of Marketing but try and look past that.
Environment? Who cares.
Pros: it makes things like this possible.
http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/first-look-microsoft-surfacing-computing/
It's an 18 minute video which you can either stream or download, and it starts getting good after about six minutes. It also features the world's most boring Director of Marketing but try and look past that.
Environment? Who cares.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Privacy on parade
Well, the young people of Great Britain in the forms of Simon, David, David, Sarah and Peter have rallied to answer my open question about privacy and what they expect of it. See the comments column of the post in question or, in the case of one of the Davidi, his own blog. The answers are encouraging. Attitudes towards MySpace and Bebo range from “eurgh” to “I have all of them because I have different friends on each”, but either way they are seen as useful tools, not personal infodumps to which it is compulsory to contribute.
A good point from David W: “You know virtually everything about my politics, but then that's the point of the blog, not my life.” (And) “The question that every "lifelogger" needs to ask themselves is: will I look back on this and cringe? If so, either stop now, or refocus your web presence.”
Indeed. Lifelogging isn’t compulsory and you’re as public as you choose to make yourself. If you feel a compulsion to reveal every single detail about yourself then you’re a mug and social Darwinian principles will apply. (Even if that isn’t you, but you have a witty or whacky e-mail or cyberspace persona, now may be a good time to change it. When you’re standing for party leader 30 years from now, once having been called sexlegend@spammail.com may come back to haunt you.)
It’s reassuring to know that the cyberspatial majority isn’t like that real-world (thankfully) minority who insist on regaling you with every incident of their tedious, tedious lives, down to how drunk they were last night and which bird they shagged.
But it begs a question. Even if they’re not prepared to add that information actively to the public datapool, there is an ever-increasing amount of information that can be added passively just by being alive in this modern electronic world. Are the instincts of the present generation sufficiently well tuned to detect abuses of this as a Bad Thing, which is what the post that started this all off was talking about?
Dunno.
Some comments on the use of blogs were also made.
Simon: “I know for sure that I censor my blog, whether consciously or subconsciously. Often I use it a lot like propaganda to paint a picture of me I think people will expect, leaving out certain things and emphasising others.”
David C: “when I do present myself on the net though, I make sure I am real. I believe that honesty is one of the more important qualities of people and of the Christian ideal, so I stick to it.”
Good points, not necessarily contradictory. There is a certain amount of showmanship and it’s not pretence. This blog shines a light on particular areas of my much broader life and I try to make it shine on the nicer bits, or at least move anything unpleasant out of the spotlight before I turn it on. But it’s all genuinely my life, the real me.
And there’s never any harm in being presentable. Note how nice I was to teenagers in the original post. I could have said “right, you pimply hormone factories, it’s time to get off your wii-using web-surfing butts and make yourselves useful for a change,” but that would have been counterproductive. And not all of them have wiis.
Kidding. Love you all.
A good point from David W: “You know virtually everything about my politics, but then that's the point of the blog, not my life.” (And) “The question that every "lifelogger" needs to ask themselves is: will I look back on this and cringe? If so, either stop now, or refocus your web presence.”
Indeed. Lifelogging isn’t compulsory and you’re as public as you choose to make yourself. If you feel a compulsion to reveal every single detail about yourself then you’re a mug and social Darwinian principles will apply. (Even if that isn’t you, but you have a witty or whacky e-mail or cyberspace persona, now may be a good time to change it. When you’re standing for party leader 30 years from now, once having been called sexlegend@spammail.com may come back to haunt you.)
It’s reassuring to know that the cyberspatial majority isn’t like that real-world (thankfully) minority who insist on regaling you with every incident of their tedious, tedious lives, down to how drunk they were last night and which bird they shagged.
But it begs a question. Even if they’re not prepared to add that information actively to the public datapool, there is an ever-increasing amount of information that can be added passively just by being alive in this modern electronic world. Are the instincts of the present generation sufficiently well tuned to detect abuses of this as a Bad Thing, which is what the post that started this all off was talking about?
Dunno.
Some comments on the use of blogs were also made.
Simon: “I know for sure that I censor my blog, whether consciously or subconsciously. Often I use it a lot like propaganda to paint a picture of me I think people will expect, leaving out certain things and emphasising others.”
David C: “when I do present myself on the net though, I make sure I am real. I believe that honesty is one of the more important qualities of people and of the Christian ideal, so I stick to it.”
Good points, not necessarily contradictory. There is a certain amount of showmanship and it’s not pretence. This blog shines a light on particular areas of my much broader life and I try to make it shine on the nicer bits, or at least move anything unpleasant out of the spotlight before I turn it on. But it’s all genuinely my life, the real me.
And there’s never any harm in being presentable. Note how nice I was to teenagers in the original post. I could have said “right, you pimply hormone factories, it’s time to get off your wii-using web-surfing butts and make yourselves useful for a change,” but that would have been counterproductive. And not all of them have wiis.
Kidding. Love you all.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
The future's bright, with the possibility of showers
Calling young people. I need your thoughts.
SF author and one-time roommate (for one memorable week) Charles Stross has published an interesting talk he gave on ‘Shaping the Future’, in which he extrapolates growth in technological ability and changing attitudes towards privacy, and draws some not entirely optimistic conclusions. Not entirely pessimistic either, mind you. A couple of key passages:
I started my personal web site in 1996, on the basis that if I was destined to become a world famous author then I should give the fans something to satisfy their craving for More Ben. Still working on it. I remember hearing one friend describing it to another as: “you can learn everything there is to know about Ben!” And I thought – no, you can learn everything I choose to let you know about Ben. (The second friend remained net-sceptical until, later in the same conversation, he was shown how to track down the website of Barnsley FC, whereupon he converted.)
I certainly put up more information on the site than I might usually divulge at a first face-to-face meeting, but it still didn’t contain anything that wouldn’t soon become apparent in a more than passing acquaintance. Eleven years and a blog later, we’re in the same situation. I may come over all friendly and chatty here in cyberspace, but unless you already know me personally you probably don’t know the names of my wife or stepson. Or my address. Or where the Boy goes to school. Or my bank details. And so on. And you need to know me very well indeed to know details about my extended family – parents, siblings etc.
So, someone might work on the assumption that anything knowable about me is available on the net, but they will be disappointed.
But of course, I am not Young People. I’m almost half my grandmother’s age, which is a scary thought. You Young Things have Bebo and MySpace and apparently you fill it up with all sorts ofcrap stuff that helps you ‘hook up’ (whatever that means).
Believe it or not I have a MySpace profile; I had to sign up to leave a comment on a friend’s blog. The friend in question is one of the least MySpatial people you can think of so I’m not quite sure what he was doing. According to my profile I have one friend. Not the friend whose blog I was looking at. This friend is called Tom. I have no idea who he is; he seems to have been randomly assigned to me by Murdoch’s Minions. His profile includes the helpful note that he may have been there when I signed up and if I want I can get rid of him. Well, I dunno. If I only have one friend then maybe I should hang onto him. My peculiar notion that I’m well able to choose my own friends, thank you, in my own space and time may just be a hallucination.
More Charlie:
This is an optimistic assessment that I make based on the personalities and my estimation of the intelligence of the teenagers I know (friends of the real-life, reach-out-and-touch-them variety). But what do your classmates think? What’s the word on the street in yo’ hip with-it well-happenin’ world?
Go.
SF author and one-time roommate (for one memorable week) Charles Stross has published an interesting talk he gave on ‘Shaping the Future’, in which he extrapolates growth in technological ability and changing attitudes towards privacy, and draws some not entirely optimistic conclusions. Not entirely pessimistic either, mind you. A couple of key passages:
“If it's an offense to pick your nose in public, someone, sooner or later, will write a 'bot to hunt down nose-pickers and refer them to the police. Or people who put the wrong type of rubbish in the recycling bags. Or cross the road without using a pedestrian crossing, when there's no traffic about. If you dig hard enough, everyone is a criminal. In the UK, today, there are only about four million public CCTV surveillance cameras; I'm asking myself, what is life going to be like when there are, say, four hundred million of them? ... [snip] ... One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.”It’s a conclusion that follows logically from his premises. But here’s a key passage from earlier in the talk:
“Our concept of privacy relies on the fact that it's hard to discover information about other people. Today, you've all got private lives that are not open to me. Even those of you with blogs, or even lifelogs. But we're already seeing some interesting tendencies in the area of attitudes to privacy on the internet among young people, under about 25; if they've grown up with the internet they have no expectation of being able to conceal information about themselves. They seem to work on the assumption that anything that is known about them will turn up on the net sooner or later, at which point it is trivially searchable.”Assumption. Right. In any argument, it’s the assumptions that are important.
I started my personal web site in 1996, on the basis that if I was destined to become a world famous author then I should give the fans something to satisfy their craving for More Ben. Still working on it. I remember hearing one friend describing it to another as: “you can learn everything there is to know about Ben!” And I thought – no, you can learn everything I choose to let you know about Ben. (The second friend remained net-sceptical until, later in the same conversation, he was shown how to track down the website of Barnsley FC, whereupon he converted.)
I certainly put up more information on the site than I might usually divulge at a first face-to-face meeting, but it still didn’t contain anything that wouldn’t soon become apparent in a more than passing acquaintance. Eleven years and a blog later, we’re in the same situation. I may come over all friendly and chatty here in cyberspace, but unless you already know me personally you probably don’t know the names of my wife or stepson. Or my address. Or where the Boy goes to school. Or my bank details. And so on. And you need to know me very well indeed to know details about my extended family – parents, siblings etc.
So, someone might work on the assumption that anything knowable about me is available on the net, but they will be disappointed.
But of course, I am not Young People. I’m almost half my grandmother’s age, which is a scary thought. You Young Things have Bebo and MySpace and apparently you fill it up with all sorts of
Believe it or not I have a MySpace profile; I had to sign up to leave a comment on a friend’s blog. The friend in question is one of the least MySpatial people you can think of so I’m not quite sure what he was doing. According to my profile I have one friend. Not the friend whose blog I was looking at. This friend is called Tom. I have no idea who he is; he seems to have been randomly assigned to me by Murdoch’s Minions. His profile includes the helpful note that he may have been there when I signed up and if I want I can get rid of him. Well, I dunno. If I only have one friend then maybe I should hang onto him. My peculiar notion that I’m well able to choose my own friends, thank you, in my own space and time may just be a hallucination.
More Charlie:
“Now, in this age of rapid, transparent information retrieval, what happens if you've got a lifelog, registering your precise GPS coordinates and scanning everything around you? If you're updating your whereabouts via a lightweight protocol like Twitter and keeping in touch with friends and associates via a blog? It'd be nice to tie your lifelog into your blog and the rest of your net presence, for your personal convenience. And at first, it'll just be the kids who do this — kids who've grown up with little expectation of or understanding of privacy. Well, it'll be the kids and the folks on the Sex Offenders Register who're forced to lifelog as part of their probation terms, but that's not our problem. Okay, it'll also be people in businesses with directors who want to exercise total control over what their employees are doing, but they don't have to work there ... yet.”So here’s my question to young people. Do you have these reduced expectations of privacy? Does it even occur to you that you don’t have to put everything about you out on the net, and it’s quite easy not to? ’Cos if we do end up in a future like this, I don't think it will be you lot who put us there. It will be our present generation of technophile, how-can-we-possibly-be-wrong-I-mean-we're-Christian politicians. It will be up to you lot to sort it out.
This is an optimistic assessment that I make based on the personalities and my estimation of the intelligence of the teenagers I know (friends of the real-life, reach-out-and-touch-them variety). But what do your classmates think? What’s the word on the street in yo’ hip with-it well-happenin’ world?
Go.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Unbearably Satisfied Ben (or, take your USB and stick it)
My pride was stung by the last post – it finally struck me as ridiculous that my laptop's USB port has never worked.
It now works. The credit is not all mine.
The laptop is an IBM Thinkpad that I bought in January 1999, with money from His Majesty's Starship which had been published the previous month. It was the only relatively high-end machine I've bought yet and of all my PCs it's lasted the longest. At the time I had never heard of USB so as far as I was concerned the funny little slit in the back was just another hole. Nor did I know anyone with the requisite networking skills to hook it up to its predecessor, a Windows 95 PC bought in – strangely enough – 1995. So, transferring data involved floppies. Lots of floppies. Lots and lots of floppies, back and forth, back and forth ... I had a filesplitter program that broke down files too big for a floppy (i.e. more than 1.44Mb) into smaller chunks that could then be reunited on the other machine, but of course that just increased the floppy load. Frankly it's a wonder anything worked.
The laptop remained my primary computer for two years, but the second of those years was the first year of Big Engine and by 2001 it was obvious I was going to need a bigger machine. This was a desktop running Windows ME (which, as I’ve said before and will say again, is named after a painful debilitating disease for a reason) and I hadn't yet caught up with CD-R. At least at this point I was able to find someone who could network the two to copy data over, but it took several wasted evenings to work out that the laptop's USB wouldn’t work. If memory serves over the gulf of six years, it was configured for games, not communications. Or something. Eventually the two machines were connected by parallel ports and the data transfer could commence, very, very slowly. It took about 48 hours. The floppies would have been quicker.
By the time that machine came to replaced, I had heard of USB flash drives, I even owned one, and transferring the data took a couple of minutes. I shed a small tear.
A passing teenage whizkid took the laptop into custody for a few weeks last summer to see if he could unravel the mystery of its USB. He confessed failure but I've since worked out he was doing himself down. He got things to a stage where the laptop recognises it's had something plugged into it – but of course, an eight year old machine won't have the right drivers to make the whatever work. They need to be tracked down and installed. And he was using my old memory stick, something cheap and grotty bought off eBay that insisted on installing its own little program called i-Run in the tray on the taskbar. i-Run served no useful purpose I could ever see except to require turning off before you disconnected the drive. Oh, and it made the laptop crash. But, with a new stick from a decent manufacturer, that supplies drivers on its website, and no i-Run – ta-dah! I have a laptop with a usefully working USB port. My technological triumphs are few and far between so I feel it's worth shouting about.
Which is fortunate, because otherwise this would be a load of wibble about something quite fundamentally uninteresting.
It now works. The credit is not all mine.
The laptop is an IBM Thinkpad that I bought in January 1999, with money from His Majesty's Starship which had been published the previous month. It was the only relatively high-end machine I've bought yet and of all my PCs it's lasted the longest. At the time I had never heard of USB so as far as I was concerned the funny little slit in the back was just another hole. Nor did I know anyone with the requisite networking skills to hook it up to its predecessor, a Windows 95 PC bought in – strangely enough – 1995. So, transferring data involved floppies. Lots of floppies. Lots and lots of floppies, back and forth, back and forth ... I had a filesplitter program that broke down files too big for a floppy (i.e. more than 1.44Mb) into smaller chunks that could then be reunited on the other machine, but of course that just increased the floppy load. Frankly it's a wonder anything worked.
The laptop remained my primary computer for two years, but the second of those years was the first year of Big Engine and by 2001 it was obvious I was going to need a bigger machine. This was a desktop running Windows ME (which, as I’ve said before and will say again, is named after a painful debilitating disease for a reason) and I hadn't yet caught up with CD-R. At least at this point I was able to find someone who could network the two to copy data over, but it took several wasted evenings to work out that the laptop's USB wouldn’t work. If memory serves over the gulf of six years, it was configured for games, not communications. Or something. Eventually the two machines were connected by parallel ports and the data transfer could commence, very, very slowly. It took about 48 hours. The floppies would have been quicker.
By the time that machine came to replaced, I had heard of USB flash drives, I even owned one, and transferring the data took a couple of minutes. I shed a small tear.
A passing teenage whizkid took the laptop into custody for a few weeks last summer to see if he could unravel the mystery of its USB. He confessed failure but I've since worked out he was doing himself down. He got things to a stage where the laptop recognises it's had something plugged into it – but of course, an eight year old machine won't have the right drivers to make the whatever work. They need to be tracked down and installed. And he was using my old memory stick, something cheap and grotty bought off eBay that insisted on installing its own little program called i-Run in the tray on the taskbar. i-Run served no useful purpose I could ever see except to require turning off before you disconnected the drive. Oh, and it made the laptop crash. But, with a new stick from a decent manufacturer, that supplies drivers on its website, and no i-Run – ta-dah! I have a laptop with a usefully working USB port. My technological triumphs are few and far between so I feel it's worth shouting about.
Which is fortunate, because otherwise this would be a load of wibble about something quite fundamentally uninteresting.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Two conversations across the generational divide
From a few weeks ago:
But for truly advanced tech you can't beat this notice on the door of the canteen.
I actually want to be there at 6.45 to see exactly who beams down, and how it interferes with the hot food.
- Him: have you ever played any RPGs?
- Me: yes, I was in a couple at university.
- Him: oh, I didn't think the computers could do that back then.
- Him: can your laptop take flash drives?
- Me: no, the USB port doesn't work.
- Him: [blank stare] then how do you get data off it?
But for truly advanced tech you can't beat this notice on the door of the canteen.
I actually want to be there at 6.45 to see exactly who beams down, and how it interferes with the hot food.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)