Category Archives: Thoughts on the World

I’m in the process of replacing my laptop, and yet again finding that the alleged miniaturisation and convergence of digital solutions is nothing more than a figment of marketeers’ fevered imaginations. I suppose that after the experience of my last desktop replacement (see here) I should have expected nothing more, but hope springs eternal…

I’ve been very happy with my 15″ Toshiba Satellite Pro, new in early 2009, but recently it’s been showing some signs of reaching the end of its economic life, plus the way I now develop my photographs is very compute-intensive, and a faster device would speed that activity up considerably. I also find that the relatively slow single 2.5″ disk leads to very slow startup times and virtual machine operations, both of which slow down my professional use.

Thus my first decision was that my new device should support an Intel Core-i7 processor and 64-bit Windows, at least 8GB RAM and ideally have solid state disks, at least for the boot drive.

The next driver was forced on me by the vagaries of the market. Prior to 2007, most laptops had a 4:3 (=16:12) aspect ratio, but suddenly the market decided that all laptops should be “widescreen”, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. This was great for viewing movies, but meant that for a given diagonal size the new devices were more than 10% smaller than before. Not much good if you’re working on text documents (usually of vertical orientation), or digital images with <3:2 aspect ratio, which is most of them… That’s one reason why my next laptop went from 12″ to 15″, just to maintain the vertical size of the display.

Now they’ve done it again! Almost all new laptops have a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means a further reduction of about 8% screen height for a given diagonal size. This is a right royal pain in the neck, particularly as it is typically accompanied by an increase in pixel resolution, which combine to make text and icons much smaller, just as I’m getting to that age where my eyes are starting to change, and slightly larger text would work better. There are other disadvantages too: a given laptop model is around 8% longer than it’s predecessor, so it may not even fit in the same bag.

This all appears to be driven by fashion, and targeted solely at those who watch movies on their laptops. The goal appears to be “true HD”, and hang the consequences. After some brainstorming, I can only think of three things short wide screens are good for:

1. Watching films
2. Browsing spreadsheets or other tables with lots of columns
3. Working on photographic panoramas

On the other hand, they are much worse for:

1. Reading and writing documents (most pages are portrait orientation, and the human eye has problems tracking across very long lines of text)
2. Developing – you want to see plenty of lines of code and diagnostics, and most lines of well-written code are quite short
3. Working on any normal image, especially if it’s portrait orientation
4. Working with any application which has multiple top and bottom toolbars, or a Microsoft “ribbon”
5. Everything else…

So where does this put my laptop choice? After rather more agonising than usual, I’ve gone for a desktop, or should that just be “desk”, replacement system , an Alienware M17x. This is very fast, has the usual stunning Alienware looks, and importantly supports dual disks, with a highly-rated quality screen. The screen is just slightly taller than the Toshiba, but the laptop is a full 5cm wider, and over 1kg heavier. It’s a good computer, but portability is definitely down a notch. The thing which makes it feasible, of course, is the iPad, which now fills the role of the portable, meeting-friendly launch to the Alienware cruiser. Admittedly carrying two devices increases the weight of my computer bag, but usually only until I have decanted the laptop into its base location for the day, and maybe it justifies the weight training…

Thus far, I’m impressed with the beast. CPU performance is certainly as expected, and I’m pleasantly surprised by battery life, at almost 5 hours in light usage. This makes up for the fact that the main power supply is about the size of a house brick, and although the laptop will run off a smaller Dell supply, it won’t charge the battery. On the disk side I’ve installed a Seagate Momentus hybrid drive as the secondary data drive, and that seems to be working well, but my first attempt to install the SSD for the boot drive didn’t work, so that’s still pending. What is annoying is that like all my previous laptops, the LCD panel is nowhere near correct colour calibration with the default profile, so I have to sort that out before serious photographic use. Further updates will follow…

To wrap up, here’s the potted history of my laptops since I started buying my own, and why:

• 1999-2001: Compaq Presario with 12″ screen. Worked for VB development and general office use, but slow
• 2001-4: Dell Latitude LS400 with  10″ screen. I got the “light, portable” bug, and this little laptop fitted the bill, even if I did have to haul a separate CD drive and floppy drive around. It was good on the move, but never quick and I worked off an external screen when I could.
• 2004-6: Toshiba Portege M200 with 12″ screen. The first decent convertible tablet, great in meetings (in tablet mode), and decent for development although you had to be patient…
• 2006-9: Toshiba Portege M400: The only time I’ve done a straight upgrade, this was basically the M200 with built in CD and a dual core processor. CPU performance was fine, I/O was very limited. However, the thing which really started to frustrate me was the difficulty of getting accurate colours on the screen.
• 2009-11: Toshiba Satellite Pro A300, 15″ screen. With the change of aspect ratios, I had to go to 15″ to get a screen as “tall” as the 12″ of the Porteges. This workhorse has served very well, it’s fairly light, and only the most extreme image processing or virtual machine work exceeded its abilities.
• 2011-: Alienware M17x. Fast, elegant, and just about preserves the important vertical dimenion of the screen! Also heavy and expensive… The jury’s out.

Has anyone else noticed or suffered from this odd trend?

Helga | "Helga", my Porsche 911, behind a tree

Resolution: 1247 x 1870

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working fairly regularly with a chap called Carl. The other day a group of us were chatting, and got to talking about cars we had owned. Among others, Carl had once owned a very souped-up Ford Escort. To explain how fast it was, he pointed out that he’d once “burned off a Porsche” in it.

My ears pricked up, and I interjected “You know, that once happened to me in my Porsche. I was at a set of traffic lights just outside Croydon, and some imp in a mark I Escort pulled up alongside, turned to me with a very cheeky grin, and then left me standing when the lights went green.”

And Carl said “The Sutton bypass. About 1987. Tobacco brown 911 with no rear wing.”

Yes. We were describing the same event from opposite sides of the dotted White line. It was him!

———————

We all occasionally experience odd coincidences, but this has to be a pretty wild one by any standards. It got me thinking – what are the chances of re-encountering someone from an anonymous past event like this?

I reckon that a significant part of the British population have timelines which will never intersect mine at first or even second hand. However between places I have lived and worked, places with which I have family, friend or work connections, events I attend and routes I travel the number of intersections in a lifetime (counting any individual once) must be quite large. Let’s say it’s 10 million. This includes “knows someone I know” and “in the same place at the same time” as well as more direct interactions.

Now I also reckon that I work with perhaps 20 or 30 people at any one time closely enough to have such a conversation, and that group changes at a rate of perhaps 10 people a year. Others might put the figure higher, but let’s use that for now. Therefore since 1987 maybe 250 people have added to that group.

It’s therefore very easy to come up with a crude estimate of the probability that some individual I crossed in my youth would end up working with me, at about 250 in 10,000,000, or 1 in 40,000. That’s about half the chance of winning £10 with a three number match in the British lottery.

However, that’s just the “latent coincidence probability”. You then have to factor in the chance of actually discovering it.

To come up in conversation at a range of 24 years an event has to be pretty memorable to at least one party, and recognisable to another. Trivial or indistinct events get forgotten. I suspect our traffic lights grand prix was one of many for both Carl and myself in our youth, but it’s memorable as the one in which the ancient Escort beat the (almost equally ancient) Porsche, in a way which left my friend and I in my car laughing rather than anything else. I have forgotten almost all the others, where Helga did what Porsche built her to do, and won.

There’s also an upper limit on memorability. If events are too dramatic or tragic they will also preclude conversation.

Even if you have a history of memorable events, they may just not come up in conversation. Carl and I have worked together for a couple of years, and not discussed old cars before. The topic could easily have come up when I was not in the room, or just not listening, and not been repeated.

These factors are more difficult to quantify, but I reckon there’s probably only a 1 in 100 to 1000 chance of discovering the co-incidence at the 24 year range of my example. So for a single event involving just one other main party we have a net probability of the order of 1 in 10 million that I’ll work with that other party, and then discover it. That’s about the same as winning the UK lottery jackpot!

Three factors make things more likely. Obviously if more than one other person was involved this increases the probability proportionately. There’s also a smaller than 10 million group of people whose paths are likely to cross several times because of location or other factors.

You also have to consider that most people have a pool of such events to draw on. We’re talking about events which would merit a special mention in the pub, a couple of paragraphs in the letter home, maybe a blog rather than just a tweet in today’s parlance. I reckon I accumulate these at the rate of one every few weeks. Therefore since my memory became really active, I have maybe 40×25 such events, a convenient 1000 to draw on.

Thus the probability for a given event is ~ 1 in 10 million, but the probability of any such coincidence drops back to ~ 1 in 10 thousand, and maybe down to 1 in a thousand for events based on a home location, a favourite sport or similar.

Now I reckon I’ve had a couple of such coincidences in my career. There are three possibilities: either my calculations are wrong, I’ve set the bar for what counts too low (increasing the number of potential events), or I’m just very lucky.

What do you think?

I have decided that there are essentially two types of film or play, those which are about whether to get on the train, and those which are about how to get on the train. I don’t really like the former, but I love the latter.

OK, I know that not all films and plays involve trains, but enough do that this is a surprisingly powerful classification system.

A couple of years ago we went to see a performance of Chekov’s Three Sisters. While I may be oversimplifying things slightly, most of the second act is the sisters talking about getting on a train. I forget the details, I think one wants to move away from the family to Moscow. I can’t even remember whether she actually gets on the train or not. Despite the fact that it was a good performance by several famous British actors, many of whose other work I love, I was bored out of my skull. Frances and I were both so affected by this, that we now have an in-joke reaction to any mention of Chekov where one of us immediately says “just get on the —— train”.

But then I realised just how many of our favourite films do involve someone getting on a train. The key difference is that there is never any debate whatsoever about the need to do so. The challenge is how. You may have to drive your Audi off a bridge (Transporter 3), jump from a helicopter (Under Siege 2, Broken Arrow), shoot lots of bad guys first (3.10 to Yuma), jump from a camel (Sahara), talk the bad guys down (Pelham 123), jump from a car (Unstoppable), quietly murder some of the good guys (From Russia with Love), jump from another train (Unstoppable again), hide in a mailbag (Live and Let Die), run several Manhattan blocks (Die Hard with a Vengeance). You get the picture, and I haven’t mentioned Speed, Batman Begins, Goldeneye…

So do you like stories about talking about getting on a train? Or those about doing it?