Sometime around 2007-8, maybe by coincidence just when Bill Gates retired, this all went to hell in a handcart, and since then I’ve been cursing new Microsoft software versions as much as praising them. Each release has brought frustrations, and in many cases they have been sufficiently severe to drive me to adopt a competitor’s product, or at least a third party add-on.

XP SP 2 broke WMA format so it is incompatible with most third party players. My car was new in 2008, but I have to rip CDs using an XP SP1 virtual machine. Vista broke the reliable and flexible ntbackup. It took a bit of effort to get it working again, and it’s still part of my (more complex) backup strategy, but the “heavy lifting” is now done by Acronis rather than Windows.

The disruptive user interface and file format changes of Office 2007 have been widely discussed elsewhere. Suffice to say that I never used Office 2007, and run Office 2010 only with a third party add-on which restores the old menus. The compatibility-breaking changes to follow up flags in Outlook 2010 are extremely annoying, but as yet insufficient to drive me to an alternative product.

The same is not true of the changes to Virtual Machine support in Windows 7. Before that move, I used Mirosoft’s own Virtual PC extensively. However, the loss of compatibility, features and reliability were so severe that I now only use and recommend VMWare WorkStation/Player for this purpose. You can read about my experiences here.

The latest problem, and what has prompted this blog, is the appalling state of Internet Explorer 9. I have been a faithful user of IE since V1, and have lived, fairly happily, with its limitations through to IE8. However, since “upgrading” to IE9 I have become completely disillusioned, because it just isn’t reliable enough. Here are a sample of the things which just don’t work properly:

• Downloading dynamically-generated PDF files, such as bills from BT,
• MasterCard SecureCard authentication. This one’s a real pain if you’re at the end of a long online purchase, and you find your main credit card won’t work,
• The combined address / Google search bar. If I type in a valid www…. address, I expect the browser to at least attempt to use it , not do a search!
• Printing. Some long text pages, especially from typepad blogs, get mashed with the main font/character set replaced by something unreadable,
• Rendering some web sites readably at all. Some of the worst offenders, ironically, are Microsoft’s own “support” forums.

By direct contrast, Google Chrome seems to do a decent job of all the above. I am hereby announcing my intention to make it my primary browser whenever I have a choice.

I’m now really scared about Windows 8, with it’s so far half-hearted changes to the desktop. What will that wreck?

Now in fairness, Microsoft are not the only, or maybe even the worst offenders in this space. For example Bibble/Corel have just pushed through a change to their AfterShot Pro software which no-one wanted and which breaks a plugin I’ve written, and I suspect in that community I have some influence to say “the new version is broken, don’t use it.”

I really don’t understand Microsoft’s behaviour here. Are all these compatibility wrecks conscious decisions? If so, do the conquest sales related to cool new features really outweigh the loss of loyalty from existing users? If not, have they just got lazy and complacent? Who knows?

The idea of making a real historical figure the detective in a historical mystery is not unique (arguably Philip Kerr makes an even better choice with Isaac Newton in Dark Matter) but it is very effective. We know these characters had considerable intellect, the right political connections to advance investigations, and were in interesting places at interesting times.

However unlike Kerr’s Newton, Leoni’s Dante is initially very ill-prepared for his task, and is annoyingly gullible until right at the end of the tale. Given that this is his fourth outing in such a role, you’d think he’d be getting a bit better at it! The novel also struck me as very similar to S J Parris’ tales featuring Giordano Bruno, but with the difference that at least Dante does at least realise the truth for himself, albeit right at the end.

The story is well written, with action which advances very steadily and got me involved quite quickly. There’s a distinctly Italian focus on the political relationships between the players, but Leoni avoids the mistake of creating a cast of thousands, and focuses on a relatively small group of core characters. The very distinctive writing style is usually easy to read – whether this is the author’s skill or the translator’s is not clear, and arguably unimportant. There are occasional wordy patches, especially when trying to describe Dante’s state of mind or his ideas about his poetry, but these give way fairly quickly to the main action.

The book creates a brilliant depiction of mediaeval Rome, complete with crumbling Roman buildings not yet supplemented by Renaissance replacements, complex power politics and downtrodden lower orders of society. However, I did find the repetitive details of the routes around Rome, described without benefit of a map or some sort of overview, a bit hard to follow. Fortunately it’s not critical to do so for the plot. On a lighter note, I now understand the inspiration for Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork…

The fact that this book is fourth in a series doesn’t seem to be a barrier to reading it first, as the small amount of necessary background is simply explained at the right time. However, as noted, you do wonder how much practice Dante needs to get any good at detection.

This book is not a “light”read, but rewards the reader with a rich, captivating tale well worth the effort.

On the upside, however, Morey has done a fine job of creating a compelling and highly amusing story which rips along at a great pace, from the first evil practical joke to the final complicated dénouement. The plot, although relatively simple, winds and unwinds steadily and you won’t want to put the book down once engaged. Although the overall outcome is never really in doubt, there are enough surprises in respect of which characters receive satisfaction, which rehabituation and which a well-deserved sticky end.

The best writing of this style has me laughing out loud, whether in company or not. This didn’t quite achieve those heights, being read with more of a constant wry grin. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read and I’m happy to recommend it, but here’s hoping the author’s next novel will be even better.

The concept is simple: Chad Orzel’s dog, Emmy, may be a typical mutt obsessed with walks, squirrels and discarded food, but she’s also intelligent enough to have a basic grasp of quantum concepts, and a view to how they might be exploited in her favour, for example by passing simultaneously around both sides of a tree to catch a squirrel. Each chapter starts with Chad explaining why “it’s not quite like that”, and going on to explain the real physics to her in some detail. This works well, breaking up some quite complex discussions with amusing dialogue between master and hound, and makes the book eminently readable.

The books scores because it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex areas like decoherence, entanglement and quantum teleportation, supplementing explanations of the basic concepts and “thought experiments” with the details and outcomes of relatively recent experimental verification. Similarly “quantum” is the current buzzword beloved of pseudo-scientific charlatans, and the last chapter is a timely effort to debunk those who abuse it for get-rich-quick schemes and medical quackery.

I also particularly liked the way that the author is not afraid to embrace the concepts of measurement errors and accuracy. These are vital tools to understand how well, or badly, something has been established, and I was very pleased to see such an accessible book using them well.

The explanations themselves are a mixed bunch, some being very complicated and taking me a couple of goes to read and absorb. Given that I probably have rather more background that the target demographic (I do have a good Physics degree, albeit a few years old) this may mean that some readers could struggle with the most complex parts. I suspect a few more diagrams in these areas might have helped. However overall the book succeeds, and will probably prompt keen readers to re-read or seek out secondary explanations where they don’t understand first time.

In the Kindle edition some of the graphics are a page or two adrift of the relevant text, and the footnotes (which often contain important or amusing asides) are presented in a bunch at the end of each chapter, which is not very reader friendly. I suspect the paper version of the book is better in this respect.

This books is well worth reading, and has certainly helped to refresh and update my understanding of a complex field, while giving me a welcome laugh at the dog’s antics. I look forward to reading the relativity volume later this year.

At the core is the old idea that the achievements of the ancient Egyptian 4th Dynasty were created by and for visiting aliens, and that much of Egyptian mythology stems from that encounter. However, unlike the disappointing, distorted and disingenuous pseudo-science of Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock this book just sets out to spin a great yarn, and succeeds admirably.

The author paints on a grand canvas, covering three worlds and five millennia, but keeps the story at a human level, by focusing on a number of well-developed central characters: be they good, evil or simply misguided. While throughout the book historical and current stories proceed in parallel, a believable contextual and technical explanation is developed for their linkage.

The science is clever, focusing mainly on the achievements of one of the races who have developed technology several hundred years beyond ours, but based almost entirely on organic solutions. Interstellar travel is handled realistically, with sub-light journeys based on long periods of hibernation, and the quest to recover a lost faster-than-light solution a key part of the plot. However, at no time does the science dominate or become superfluous to the plot.

I had a few minor niggles: The cover notes don’t do the story justice, and won’t help sales. The character, race and place names are arguably too Americanised and insufficiently “alien”. Also my pre-release copy of the book contained a number of odd spelling errors, which suggested that it had been typed without the benefit of a spell checker. However, these are very minor complaints about a very good book.

I enjoyed this thoroughly, and it’s restored my faith that it is still possible to write new science fiction work which bears inspection against the old masters. Highly recommended.

On the face of it, this is a  classic Pitt story: maritime mysteries, strong male and female characters, the gradual disrobing of byzantine plots, heinous villainy committed mainly by an evil family firm, and the side of right held up by Pitt, his NUMA colleagues, and a handful of other worthies. At the climax Pitt and Giodano ride to the rescue against a heavily armed force of Korean villains, who have just destroyed a SEAL taskforce, transported on a confederate paddle-steamer! The book’s a real page-turner, and you won’t want to put it down.

But maybe the most interesting facet of this book, and why I’ve decided it deserves a review, is as a historical snapshot of the world and America’s assessment of it. Some authors deal with contemporary issues and seem to have a remarkable ability to predict real events. Others, Cussler usually among them, avoid the current in order to avoid becoming “dated”. Unusually in this book he’s tried to paint a picture of the near future, and it’s interesting to see what he got right, and what wrong.

The main villains (who have their offices on the 100th floor of the World Trade Centre – some things no-one could have predicted) are motivated mainly by money. The other evil force is a very cold war Soviet Union leadership, even though the cracks were starting to appear by 1984, and in reality by 1989 it was all over bar the shouting.  Mere “terrorists” are despatched as possible players early on by the rather dismissive statement “[it’s] Too elaborate. This operation took an immense amount of planning and money. The ingenuity is incredible. It goes far beyond the capabilities of any terrorist organisation.”

Remarkably Cussler does predict a middle eastern war triggered by an invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but he has it happening in 1985, by Iran. However as a counterpoint, at one point the idea of American forces ever fighting in Afghanistan is treated as an example of the impossible. How times change.

The book is a revealing period piece, and interesting for the references which have been overtaken by history. Ultimately, however, it’s a good story and deserves to be read in the spirit in which it was written. Do so and you won’t be disappointed.

Like most myths this may have started from an original truth, but is now a lie. I am it’s latest, but I suspect far from only, victim.

Let me explain. For over a year now I have been developing a plugin for the RAW developer Bibble and it’s recent successor, Corel AfterShot. These plugins are developed using c++ and the Nokia QT framework, which theoretically allows the same code and user interface design to compile and run on Windows, Linux and Mac.

As a died in the wool Windows developer, that’s where I started. There’s a QT add-in to Visual Studio, so with a bit of juggling I managed to get one of the examples to load into VS, build, and run using Bibble as the target executable, and I was off. I was on a fairly steep learning curve in respect of the programming model, but I had very few problems compiling and running things.

When it got to the stage that I had something to share with the Bibble community I published the Windows version, and another member of the community kindly cross- compiled for the other platforms. There was another learning curve to make sure my code compiled cleanly on the other platforms, but nothing too drastic. For over a year I sent code updates to Jonathan, and got compiled Linux and Mac libraries back.

Although Jonathan still provides a very helpful service, it became apparent that if I wanted to have full control over the application versions I support, and be able to verify my plugin’s portability, I needed the ability to compile and run each version myself. I wasn’t prepared to buy and carry extra hardware around, but maybe VM technology would work.

I started with Linux. I had a couple of false starts but quickly found a site which has pre-built VMs for most Linux distributions (http://www.trendsigma.net/vmware/), and homed in on Lubuntu – based on Ubuntu but with a quite Windows-like shell. I downloaded and installed AfterShot and QT Creator, loaded up a copy of my code, and clicked “build”. And it worked first time! Getting a completely slick solution took a bit more effort, but it works so well I don’t now even copy the Windows code, I just open the same directory from my Linux VM and run the Linux builds in place.

So far so good. Now for the Mac. What could go wrong?

Apple’s antipathy to virtualisation is well known (see http://www.andrewj.com/blog/2012/mac-osxa-third-class-os/), and strictly speaking you’re not allowed to run OSX on non-Apple hardware. However, I got a legal copy of Snow Leopard, and found advice on the web on how to run up an OSX VM. You have to be patient, especially as it can take a couple of goes to boot the VM cleanly or install software, but generally it works pretty well.

First challenge: installing software. Unlike Windows or Linux, where non-trivial software has to be installed by a program which does useful things like error checking, on the Mac you often just simply drag a package of files to “Applications”. When it works, this is nice and easy. But if it fails, and I’ve now experienced this several times, it does so silently leaving you with a broken installation, which may not be obvious until things don’t work.

Eventually I manage to install Bibble, ASP, QT and, adding 30% to the size of the OS, XCode, the Mac development environment. I open QT Creator, and try to open my project. The first problem is that QT puts platform-specific settings in a small file alongside the main project files, and this has a fixed name, so you can store either the Linux or the Mac settings, but not both. Sigh, and copy the files from Windows to a local directory on the Mac.

After a bit of juggling, I got the plugin to compile. I then had to set up the deployment steps, renaming and copying files. Cue the next annoyance. Deployment configuration requires copying and adjusting complex filenames and paths. On Windows, you right-click any file or folder and there’s an option to copy the path to the clipboard. I was delighted to find that exactly the same trick works on Linux. OSX has no such simple solution. In the end I found a page of instructions on the web, which involved setting up macros as the like, but it wasn’t “easy”.

So I’ve compiled and deployed my plugin. Start AfterShot. Half the plugins and tools are missing, including mine. Re-install AfterShot, reboot the vMac, and now the standard tools are there, but still no sign of my plugin. The files are there, but the log has a very cryptic message about how my plugin “does not contain any recognisable symbols”.

Cue about 5 days of testing, trying different things, emails and posts on the Bibble forums. To cut a long story to a tolerable length…

1. No one seems to know how to compile successfully using QT Creator on the Mac, you have to convert to XCode,
2. XCode can’t cope with spaces in your folder or filenames. Another reason why the code can’t be shared directly with Windows and Linux,
3. When you’ve finished compiling, you have to do an extra step called “fixing the paths”. The QT/XCode combo manages to embed hard-coded pathnames in the executable files, which fail immediately you rename or move it. This doesn’t happen on the other platforms. Fortunately there are scripts available to perform the fix, but it’s certainly not obvious,
4. It’s all very sensitive to precise choices of SDK versions and the like,
5. Plugins for Bibble have to be compiled using a different QT version to those for ASP, and you can’t have more than one version installed on a Mac (ironically this restriction doesn’t apply on Windows or Linux, where there’s no problem just using the latest libraries for both). I had to use the “clone” feature of VMWare to create a “branched” VM with a different installation – on a physical machine I’d be sunk.

That’s not quite the end of it. One of the SDK features I use in AfterShot relies on an asynchronous processing model. On the other platforms and on a physical Mac my code runs fine, but on the “vMac” it returns invalid data. This is clearly a Bibble/Corel problem, but one for which no-one has yet offered an explanation or fix.

Now I accept that some of this may be down to my use of a VM, and some is definitely weaknesses in the Mac versions of the QT and Corel software. But setting those aside, the fact remains that the Linux exercise was genuinely quite easy, the Mac version far from it.

So there are lies, damn’ lies and statements about how “Macs are easy, they just work”. The next person to repeat that lie to me may suffer a painful injury to a soft part of their anatomy…

A sequence of short chapters each explores a topic, usually identifying a stream of words stemming from a common source, whether that be a Greek, Latin or proto-Indo-European root, a language which has been partially adopted into the English tapestry, or a fount of linguistic innovation such as the writings of Milton. In many cases he threads a route through time, geography and lexical space to words which have dramatically different or even opposite meanings to their antecedents.

While each chapter can be read alone, Forsyth cunningly links them together, with each feeding the next, and the last linking back to the first like Ouroboros swallowing its tail.

The writing is always amusing, and occasionally funny enough to stimulate a laugh out loud. Forsyth reserves particular cruelty for poets, and other specialists in the use and abuse of words. My favourite quote: “[we] should devote a chapter to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. So we won’t.” Myles Coverdale, editor of an early English Bible, is characterised by “[he] didn’t let the tiny detail that he knew no Latin, Greek or Hebrew get in his way. This is the kind of can-do attitude that is sadly lacking in modern biblical scholarship.”

This isn’t a learned book, and its structure and style preclude any deep exploration of a particular topic. But it will convey a broad appreciation of the mixing of the rich Jambalaya which is the English language, and will certainly pique your interest at understanding where words come from, as well as their immediate meaning.

I’m a Windows user, spending much of the working week away from home. I get a vast amount of value from virtualisation. It allows me to carry just one PC with multiple “client specific” images, and enables me to keep running legacy software almost indefinitely. My main client uses the same technology to provide legacy support for essential software, which in long-cycle engineering businesses can easily be 20-30 years old, as physical assets in such businesses age many times more slowly than the computing equipment around them.

I also develop plugins for the Bibble RAW processor. The same code should work on Windows, Mac and Linux, but you have to compile and test on each platform to confirm this. I’ve recently added a Linux Virtual Machine to my kit. This was remarkably painless, just a few hours work, and I can now rapidly cross-compile and test my Windows-based developments under Linux. If there’s an issue which means having to support more than one flavour or version of Linux adding it would be trivial.

I just can’t do this for the Mac. I don’t want to buy and carry another laptop (which would be useless for any other purpose), and you can’t get virtualised OSX, either as a VM or as a service, through any legal and “safe” route. The result: as far as I am concerned OSX is a “third-class” OS, almost a “technical ghetto”, and I have to rely on the good offices of other developers to deliver my plugins for it.

People will put up with a lot in the name of love. Maybe Mac users “love” their computers enough to tolerate this behaviour. But looking in from outside I find Apple’s attitude perplexing and very annoying.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

It is perfectly possible to make the iPad play nicely as part of a professional Windows-based environment, but you do have to be prepared to grab the bull by the horns, dump most of the built-in apps (which are almost all pretty useless), and take control of both file management and communications via partner applications on the PC. This article presents some of my hard-won tips and recommendations on how to do this and get productive work out of the iPad’s great hardware.

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?

The first third of the book deals mainly with the evolution and nature of scientific “laws”, and the meaning of reality relative to our various mental models. This is very interesting, but perhaps a little ironic given the authors’ statement on the first page that “philosophy is dead”. What other label should be attributed to this discussion?

The next section explains key aspects of quantum theory, in particular wave/particle duality, probabilistic rather than deterministic behaviour, and the effects of observation on the system. That we can now demonstrate this behaviour for relatively large objects, and affect the observed outcome from behaviour originating some considerable time before the observation, is fascinating.

Since Newton science has developed a series of theories describing the workings of our universe, and has then attempted to combine or extend them to provide an ever more comprehensive description. The next section of the book describes this progression. The descriptions of classical physics, relativity and quantum theory are fine, and don’t suffer too much from relative brevity as the older theories will be broadly familiar to most readers. However the pages on M-theory are really too brief, and don’t adequately explain it. Finishing that section with the fact that M-theory admits 10^500 solutions makes it sound very far from the elegant theories espoused earlier in the book.

The final section of the book attempts to describe and explain some of the most problematical aspects of current cosmology, but in my view doesn’t make a very convincing job of it. Cosmological problems include both the fact that universal expansion is still accelerating, and that our current model requires the young universe to have spontaneously “inflated” from coin-sized to many times galaxy sized in less than a second. Neither of these are well explained by current theories as I understand them, and this book doesn’t bridge the gap. Earlier in the book the authors pooh-pooh theories relying on “then a miracle occurs”, but don’t seem to be proposing something much better.

Instead of proposing a theory which explains the observations, the authors seem to be saying that under M-theory all things are possible, and we choose the set of outcomes which matches our measurements. To my mind this is perilously close to saying “God created the Universe as it is”, even though the authors are at pains to refute precisely that interpretation.

It feels to me that Physics is on a threshold similar to its position in the late 19th Century, where we are creating progressively more arcane versions of existing theories in an attempt to prop them up, but what is really required is fresh new ideas – the 21st Century equivalents of Relativity and Quantum Theory. This book confirms that need, but its suggested resolution does not convince me.

Refreshingly Khoury avoids making his heroes into supermen, but the same is not quite true of his villains, all of whom seem to be well-resourced single-minded psychopaths one step ahead of the good guys. A bit more variety there would also help.

Khoury writes well, much better than Dan Brown or some of his other competitors, and the book never lost my focus or interest. The action is well paced, with occasional explosive sequences of high drama. These feel slightly like the the author has an eye on the future film script, but are plausible and reasonably easy to follow. However as much as the action I enjoyed his observations on the formalisation of Christianity by the Romans under Constantine, and the extension of these ideas into yet more possible roles for the mysterious Knights Templar.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, with a bit more depth than some others of its genre. I just hope that the author now has the courage to develop a bit more subject matter variety for his excellent writing.

I knew before going in that the film portrays espionage without action, an “inaction thriller” if you like. What I didn’t expect was that it also lacks humour, intrigue and to a surprisingly large extent, dialogue. So much time is allocated to the menacing glances and thoughtful fiddling that some sections might as well be silent. It’s as if the screenwriters and director got to points where Le Carre was describing characters’ internal thoughts, and decided that we could just be left to guess them.

What this also means is that the film lacks the complex plot twists which one might expect. If the characters don’t engage in conversation, then there’s little opportunity to dissemble. Problems like a damaged log book are resolved by simply finding the man who was on duty and asking him to recount his memories, not by any complex act of detection. When a key character who is supposedly dead resurfaces later in the film, there’s no explanation of the timeline, or how he has just been allowed to go back to his cover job with no explanation of his absence.

While the film has a stellar cast, most are sadly underused. The senior spies other than Smiley and the mole have maybe a few lines each and almost no interactions between each other – completely wasting the talents of some of our most senior actors.

The film is shot in a dull brown monotone, carefully stripped of any variation in colour, or tone, or subject, with the single exception of scenes at a key office party. The colour scheme goes well with an accurate portrayal of the dullness of ordinary lives in the 1970s. There’s one very good sequence where Benedict Cumberbatch has to exploit the weaknesses of the low tech environment to extract a key piece of evidence, but most of the period detail is treated as simple background rather than context, a crucial difference.

A spy film without explosions or chases is one thing, but when there’s no attempt to substitute intricate detection, verbal jousting or witty banter then it rapidly becomes a very dull thing indeed.

A few weeks ago the excellent Page Eight with Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon showed exactly how this sort of thing should be done. This much vaunted “film of the year” fails badly.

Location:Southern Ln,Stratford-Upon-Avon,United Kingdom

This evening I watched this week’s Horizon, which, by remarkable assonance with my blog, was on the topic of the perception of colour. The programme made it clear that colour perception varies widely and subject to personal and contextual forces. However, given my post this morning, I was most interested in the fact that colour perception is strongly linked to the vocabulary you have to describe colours and their differences. The Namibian tribe who have words to describe slightly different shades of green, but who lump blues and greens together under a single word, can see the former, but not a blue/green variation.

Now I’ve always had a very good physical ability to remember and match or discriminate colours, but when I first met my wife I couldn’t articulate this. To exploit my colour vision in conversations with her (such as answering “do you think this will match X?” ) I learned a more powerful vocabulary, and in turn further developed my colour visualisation skills.

When I took up photography seriously a few years ago I became aware of the colour of light, but again really got on top if it when I learned appropriate vocabulary to describe lighting causes and effects.

So maybe my visualisation skills relate to my ability to describe (even internally) what I see or the resultant image I want. I can do this in colour because I have developed an effective colour vocabulary. I don’t “see” in monochrome because I don’t mentally describe scenes using monochrome terms, unless I’m forced to because it’s all shades of grey, or just a single colour.

The great photographers of the early twentieth century developed the vocabulary I need. Ansel Adams’ Zone System was designed for exactly this purpose, and in his writing, such as Examples he actively describes scenes using the zone terminology. I understand the theoretical concepts, but I haven’t developed the habit of using them as linguistic tools to describe a scene. Clearly I could train myself to do so, but I don’t want to lose my skill with colours as a result. The interesting challenge is whether I can become visually bilingual.

Location:Bookham Rd,,United Kingdom

What would work look like if you only had an iPad as your computing device?

My first reactions focused on whether my iPad could replace my laptop. Then I had a horrible second thought:

“I hope he doesn’t mean taking away my phone!”

I suppose I could go back to carrying a separate phone (or bag of 20p pieces), diary, address book, alarm clock, notepad, dictaphone, GPS, map, camera (well, I do do that, but that’s different), puzzle book, music player…

Yes, the iPad can do all of these, but it’s just too big to carry around all the time. I’m certainly not going to strap it to my arm in the gym, or hold it to my ear in public. So let’s assume I’m allowed to keep my phone, and focus on my first interpretation of the question. Could the iPad replace my laptop? What couldn’t I do without the latter?

First, say goodbye to a lot of content creation. The iPad touch keyboard is just too slow and inaccurate for entering large amounts of text. The ZaggMate keyboard which comes combined with a cover for the iPad screen is great, and at least allows you to navigate and select text accurately, but it suffers from some nasty key bounce and the keys are a bit too small for my fingers. Even ignoring physical text entry problems, you’ve got the challenge that there’s no truly compatible version of MS Office for the iPad, so creating properly compatible structured Office documents is almost impossible.

The problem is even worse in respect of graphical content. Set aside the fact that I do a lot of image processing on my laptop, which requires both substantial horsepower and a proper PC-level operating system. The iPad just doesn’t hack it for fine graphical manipulation. I can reliably drive a PC with a mouse to an accuracy of 1-2 pixels (in 1280 on my laptop, and 1600 on my desktop). The iPad is designed for operation with a 1/2″ paintbrush, and is realistically limited to operations suited to such a tool.

I do a lot of development work, with 2 full scale databases, 2 web servers, various modelling tools, a Java development environment and no fewer than 6 versions of Visual Studio on my laptop, plus a couple of virtualised alternative PC operating systems. That’s not going to work on my iPad! I could cheat and move to “thin client” (Remote Desktop) access to the equivalent running on a server somewhere, but that would function only when I’m connected (I’m often not when I want to do such work), and the navigation and text entry limitations of the iPad would drive me bonkers.

Even for general “office” work the limitations of iOS would rapidly challenge my sanity and productivity. For example, when I’m developing complex documents I do a lot of multi-tasking, working across multiple open documents each of which needs to be in a fixed known state under my control. I also make a lot of use of drag & drop and working with multiple windows visible at once.

The other big problem is iOS’ lack of content management separate from the “apps”. I manage about 200GB of “content” on my laptop: client files, my own documents, photos, technical library, publications etc. This is all synchronized to the big desktop/server at home, but available offline. The thought of all of this being tangled up with individual applications is just horrific.

So no thank you Malachy, the iPad isn’t going to replace the laptop or the phone any time soon. Now if someone can come up with a Windows 7/8 slate with the same performance and capacity as my laptop, and the same battery life as my iPad, and capable of operation with either a finger or a stylus…

That’s quite a big question…   I didn’t have time for a detailed answer, but came up with the following main “turning points”:

• 1996-7: The “ubiquitous web” becomes useful. This was the point at which someone with an average PC and dial-up connection could perform real tasks as well as or better than going to a traditional intermediary, e.g. for booking holidays.
• c2003: Composite applications and services start to become a reality (e.g. Amazon marketplaces). This required a number of technological advances (RSS, web services), but also a shift from human-computer to computer-computer interactions. I was never completely convinced about “web 2.0”, but in hindsight I suppose this was what it meant.
• c2005: The web becomes “the main way of doing things” for things like banking, tax & interactions with the government. Before that date I was often frustrated either by not being able to use the web, or frustrated because of the services’ limitations. Since that sort of date I’ve only had to perform a handful of such transactions by other means, and they’ve usually been a disaster!
• c2009-10: The web starts to deliver on the mobile “information everywhere” vision, as per things like Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead. It’s the confluence of decent large-screen hardware, standards-based services and well-designed apps. Put it another way – this was the point at which the computing in Star Trek, the Next Generation started to look out of date, just as the original series did by 1987.

I’m aware that this is very focused on practical, e-commerce type uses. I’m not personally convinced that social networking represents a watershed in itself, rather than another exploitation dimension, which probably has a very similar set of milestones. The same is probably true of several other content / application areas.

What do you think? Have I nailed it, or have I missed a big one?

A little research later, and it transpires that @DignitasLtd is the Twitter handle of a software consultancy in the West Midlands. I haven’t confirmed it yet, but I suspect it may be someone I work with, or have worked with, at National Grid.

Panic over, but I wonder who else has this problem. Is there an @BadLuckAndTrouble or an @DeathAndDestruction out there?

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I looked at commercial solutions, but they have several drawbacks, including the need to carry at least one more gadget, and some questions about how they would fit with my photographic workflow. Then I realised that I could achieve a similar result using just my new mobile phone and some low-cost software which can integrate neatly with my Bibble-based workflow. Read how my solution works in this article.

Quite often I go to use an app which needs to communicate over the Internet, and it gets “stuck”, clearly trying to communicate but with nothing happening. Depending on the app it may just sit there forever, or the operation may time out with an error. The iPad as a whole is still responsive, I can switch apps and use those which don’t need comms, but at that point all comms from all apps appear to be blocked. The only solution I have found is to switch the iPad off and on again.

This is now sometimes happening several times a day. I thought Apple products were supposed to be so reliable they never needed a reboot? This is worse than a twenty year old Windows PC.

The problem seems to have got worse since I started using Twitter, and installed a couple of apps which wake up periodically to check for new activity. It therefore seems like there may be some common comms routine or resource which is essentially single-threaded and can get into a deadlocked state if there is more than one call on it.

Does anyone else suffer this, or know how to fix it?

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?

This morning’s keynote was excellent, it’s just a shame that I had to leave early to set up for my own talk. It could have been subtitled “why ‘cloud’ means people trying to sell you stuff”, and was the most balanced discussion I have yet heard on cloud computing. The most interesting observation is that individual component reliability is very much subservient to scalability and “elasticity”, which has major implications for more critical applications.

The rest of the day’s presentations were a mixed bunch. Some were too academic, others very light on real content. The one exception was Mike Rosen talking about SOA case studies, which included both real successes and failures, and should be the yardstick for anyone looking to move to SOA.

One thing I have learned from this conference is a (arguably the) real purpose for Twitter. It’s a great way for a group engaged in a joint activity like this to have a shared background conversation. In many ways it’s the electronic reincarnation of the DeMarco/Lister red and green voting card system, but with wider and longer reach. It’s not without problems: it can be a distraction, some users can dominate with high volume, low value tweets and retweets, and Twitter’s search and the available clients (certainly on the iPad) are not optimised for hashtag-based operation. However, these are minor complaints.

The iPad makes a superb conference tool, and I was amazed by the number of them in use, for making notes, reviewing slides, and tweeting. Interestingly I think this trend will drive a move to standardise on PDF-format material: slides published this way worked very well, but some available only in PowerPoint format weren’t viewable.

My congratulations and thanks to the conference chairs and the IRM team for an excellent event. Time to start thinking about a topic for the next one…

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Location:Falcon Rd,Wandsworth,United Kingdom

Take, for example, South West Trains, who run commuter services to the South West of London. There are two main lines out from Waterloo via Guildford and Woking, but also a number of parallel minor lines, like the secondary line to Guildford which runs past my house.

When North Surrey got a foot of snow for the first time in 30 years in February 2009, it was clear that no trains were going to run on any of these lines for a couple of days, but only a relatively short stretch of the lines was blocked. It was still possible, for example, to get from Surbiton (about 10 miles nearer to London than my home) to Waterloo.

I had to attend a course in London, and the roads were becoming passable, so I dug the car out and drove to Surbiton. It rapidly became clear that everyone else had had the same idea. How had SWT reacted? By running the same four commuter services an hour from Surbiton. These were, of course, enormously overcrowded and slow. What about the other trains which would, for example, have usually been running the express services carrying the rest of the traffic? These were nowhere to be seen, presumably sat in a siding near Waterloo. Would it have been beyond the wit of man to press some of these into use as additional shuttle services to carry the excess traffic from those stations which were accessible? Apparently so.

Last night, I got caught again. I got to Waterloo at 10:30 pm to see a blank indicator board. The cause of the trouble was signalling problems in turn due to cable theft at Woking. Now I don’t blame the rail companies for that, and I hope the perpetrators are found, hung, drawn and transported to South Georgia, but I do think the train companies’ response is inadequate.

True to form, they had reverted to “what’s left of plan A”, running a tiny number of overcrowded and delayed services under manual signalling procedures. Now theoretically my line should not have been affected. Not only should I have been able to get home, but my line is perfectly capable of carrying some additional “relief” traffic, as it does when there is planned engineering work on the main lines. (About once a month the 8 commuter services per hour are joined by about 20 express and freight services, and when planned that seems to work fine.) With a bit of ingenuity you could even alert taxi drivers at the intermediate stops to the sudden need for their services, at profitable late night rates.

Is that what happened? I should coco. Instead not even the regular services to my home station appeared to be running. I ended up on one of the overcrowded trains to Surbiton, and finished my day with a £40 cab ride.

Why is this so difficult for the train companies to get right? In both of these cases there was no fundamental problem with the remaining infrastructure or rolling stock. In both cases they even have a model for the alternative schedule. For last night it’s in a file marked “Saturday service with engineering work at Woking”. Staff flexibility might be the problem, but that must be resolvable, maybe via higher overtime rates?

There’s also an architectural lesson here. I design computer systems and networks. My clients run national power networks. In both cases the customers expect those systems and networks to be resilient, and to cope with growing demand without wholesale replacement. It’s not always possible to justify dedicated “DR” capacity, so you have to get inventive with alternative configurations of the capacity you do have, and then run tests and introduce clever asset monitoring and management practices to make sure those configurations can be used safely.

If we can do it, why can’t the transport operators?

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Location:Cobham,United Kingdom

I was umming and aahing about whether to attend yesterday’s seminar sessions, and couldn’t make up my mind which to join. In the end I made up my mind about the morning session while having a cup of coffee on the way, when I recognised one of the speakers, Lawrence Helm, as having given an excellent presentation a couple of years ago on NASA’s knowledge management problems. This time he and his colleague Robert Stauffer were talking about NASA’s adoption of Capability Modelling, and how they have put it to use supporting some very high level decisions about NASA’s future shape.

This was another stimulating session, and really benefitted from the extra space from making it a half-day session. Lawrence and Robert actually ran out of time, which was probably a testament to the depth of the material and the discussions it engendered.

The principle of relating capabilities to strategic objectives was not new to me, although the NASA examples certainly were. What did surprise me was the level of detail required for capability definitions in that environment. For example, the launch capabilities relate specifically to certain target longitudes and temperature ranges, and could not be moved to a location outside those ranges (for example Korou or Baikonur) without re-engineering the rocket platforms.

The afternoon session was also a bit random, as I got confused between Mike Rosen’s half-day seminar and his separate one hour talk for which I had the slides. Not a problem, the half day session on case study methods was very educational. The example, of how Wells Fargo created a federated model to integrate their various systems under a common customer model was interesting, and plays nicely into my EAI talk tomorrow. Like a good sermon, I didn’t learn much new, but I felt thoroughly validated that Wells Fargo did what I would have recommended, and succeeded with it. We had a very robust discussion on the importance of stable service interfaces, so hopefully that will drum up some support for my talk.

You get a very good class of attendee at these sessions. Alec Sharp joined the NASA session, and John Zachman joined the afternoon session, although he didn’t participate much.

Thursday’s highlights have probably been the two keynotes: this morning on how different companies have developed different strategies to come through and out of the recession, and this afternoon on “how to think like a CEO” and get your messages across to senior managers. However, there was also an excellent talk this morning by David Tollow on how EA feeds management and planning of long term outsourcing deals, from the supplier’s viewpoint. Very relevant to many of us in the current day and age.

Just to make things interesting, Sally has asked me to swap slots with someone else tomorrow, so my talk which was carefully trimmed to the constraints of the last slot on Friday will now be at 10 am. This may or may not be a good thing.

Wish me luck!

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Location:Portman Towers,Paddington,United Kingdom

I’ve just uploaded the slides to my website. You can download them here.

Unfortunately, I’ve been put into a real “graveyard slot”, right at the end of business on the Friday afternoon. And I thought Sally, the conference chair, was my friend! If you are attending, I would very much appreciate your support. If not, I’d appreciate your thoughts on this topic, as always.

However, even had she fulfilled her role, I would probably have come away feeling short-changed. Keeley Hawes was “the draw” on the advertising, with her image alone on all the posters, yet her character was on stage for less than ten minutes in over two hours. The lead role was that of Cleo Singer, played competently and enthusiastically by Jessica Raine, who I can only image is very frustrated at her marginalisation by the bigger name.

To emphasise the insult with injury, I didn’t care much for the play anyway. The plot can be summed up simply: “Frustrated dentist has short affair with air-headed assistant. Various other men try it on with her. Eventually the girl sees sense.”. Lots of angst, and I don’t do angst. Worse, the Depression-era New York setting was completely wasted. There were characters making lots of money, and others not making enough to survive, but this was mere background, like the Manhattan street sounds filtering in through the back window of the stark set.

This play was a wasted opportunity, and a poor use of a big name.

The area of concern, an unfortunate one for an action film, was the fight scenes. The camera was right in with the whirring blades, and this led to two problems. The first, which several reviewers have commented upon, was that it became impossible to follow the sequence of events, or the “big picture” view of the battle’s progress. You just couldn’t work out who had done what to whom. A key Roman character is killed in the final battle, yet neither Frances nor myself could work out when, or at whose hands. This stands in contrast to, say, Ridley Scott’s direction in “Gladiator”, when you are never in doubt about what has happened.

The other problem is more personal, and I don’t know how many people it affects. My brain obviously process visual information quite quickly, and at a certain point the world’s most popular optical illusion breaks down. If, say, a sword scythes across a large cinema screen in less than a second, I see it as a series of distinct jumps as my brain discerns the movement between successive frames. While at one level I follow movement, at another I’m distracted by “spotting the jumps”. This only happens in relatively extreme circumstances, with quick movements across large screens, but it’s consistent under those circumstances.

“The Eagle” is not the only film I’ve recently seen which demonstrated these problems. This excessive closeness to the action seems to be a developing trend. directors and cinematographers need to test their work by seeing whether someone sitting towards the front of a large cinema can follow it. If not, a step back might improve things considerably.

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Location:Bookham Rd,,United Kingdom

On Barbados recently, we were trying without much success to find Fisher Ponds Great House, a widely-recommended ex plantation house, now dining experience. This was not well signposted, and although we knew we were probably less than a mile away, we were getting progressively more lost.

Deciding to swallow my male pride, I spotted a police car heading towards us, and flagged it down. My request for directions drew an unusual reply: “sorry sir, I’m looking for that myself”.

Fortunately at this point Tonto rode to the rescue, in the form of a young lad on a bicycle, who when asked did know the way. So I followed the lad, and the cop followed us. At least, he did up to the point where he saw a sign and took the initiative. We followed the youngster, who directed us to the proper gate and earned $2. We were amused to see the policeman waiting at the locked back gate.

So if you want to know the way, don’t ask a p’liceman – find a bright lad on a bike!

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Location:Beachy Head Dr,Bel Air,Barbados

Where it differs from Cussler is that most of the protagonists are troubled, damaged people, and Adams takes pains to explain their state of mind and how they arrived there. This makes a refreshing change from the two dimensional “supermen” heroes too common nowadays, but takes a little getting used to in an otherwise quite lightweight yarn.

The novel also has a very refreshing British feel, with several English characters and background elements. In particular the cultural references, banter and even the swearing are distinctly British rather than American, which makes a welcome change!

I liked the structure in which the stories of the central characters progress in parallel with each getting time in each chapter, at least until their paths converge. Coupled with good but eminently readable writing, well paced, it makes the book a real page-turner. Towards the end I found the book impossible to put down, and – I hope this doesn’t give too much away – I loved the final plot twist and uplifting ending.

This is a great yarn. As long as you can treat it on it’s own merits you’ll have an enjoyable read.

I am short sighted. With an SLR I look through the viewfinder at an image focused at the optical equivalent of about 1m, maybe a bit less with “diopter adjustment” applied, so I can view it fairly easily regardless of whether I need my glasses for the scene or not. With a compact camera I hold it at my natural reading distance of about 40cm (a bit less than 18″), which is both optically comfortable and a good distance at which to hold and operate the camera. The same will be true for those with normal sight.

This is not true for those who are long sighted, which includes a majority of those in middle age or older. These people will be comfortable looking at longer-range subjects without glasses, but will need them for shorter-range subjects.

The SLR, or even an “electronic viewfinder” camera with diopter adjustment, should be fine. As long as the effective optical distance of the focusing screen is 1m or more it should be viewable with glasses off if that’s correct for the target scene, and because it’s viewed inside a dark “tunnel” the effective distance is not an issue.

But a compact camera can be a real challenge. The user has to either hold it inside their comfortable viewing distance, and accept a blurred image and other display data, or hold it so far away that both camera shake and incident light become issues, or try switching between glasses to view the camera and none for the scene itself. None of these is a good option. The result is a camera which is effectively unusable by that person.

I saw this in action myself yesterday. I was sitting in a restaurant with Frances, and she had a good view of a potential photo, but I didn’t. Thinking it would be easiest, I handed her my little Canon Powershot S95. Useless. Eventually I rummaged under the table for the “big lump” (Canon 7D and 15-85 lens, all 1.6kg of it ). No problem.

I do wonder if the move to fewer and fewer small cameras having optical viewfinders is a wise one, or if it will alienate a significant proportion of potential photographers.

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The real meat of the tale, however, is an exploration of how religion interacts with science, politics and society, and how religious extremism of any kind can sponsor the very worst in human hatred and violence, just as much as more moderate spirituality can drive good behaviour. For a change the religious extremists are not Muslims, but American extreme right-wing “Christians”, while the moderates are mainly Navajos, both Christians and those who follow the old ways. I haven’t previously seen this portrayed in the same way in other fiction.

Although the story also features key characters speaking to God, and the creation of a new world religion, as this is a Whyman Ford tale everything is eventually resolved without recourse to the supernatural, with most driven by much more human causes.

The story rips along at a good rate, keeping you engaged right to the last. The hard science background is well presented and credible, as are the personalities and actions of the key players. It’s eminently readable, well up to Preston’s usual standard.

I enjoyed this book, and can recommend both it and the others in the series.

In this story the heretical monk, Giordano Bruno, is back at the French Embassy in Elizabethan London, where he is drawn rapidly into both a catholic conspiracy to invade England, and a related murder mystery when two of the queen’s ladies in waiting meet very sticky ends.

The style is very similar to the first book, with Bruno trying to both uncover the truths about the murders, and navigate complex relationships with the other characters. The tale is again told in the first person, but here it makes a bit more sense as you get to understand Bruno’s concerns, guilt and frustrations, and the motivation for some of his deeds.

I loved the period detail, particularly the descriptions of Elizabethan versions of well-known London locations. In this book Parris also makes much more use of actual events and personalities, such as Francis Walsingham, William Cecil and John Dee. I could almost hear some of the dialogue being spoken by Geoffrey Rush and Richard Attenborough.

The story is a real page-turner with a steady pace which kept my attention right to the end. However, if I have a slight criticism, it’s that some plot twists, such as the murderer’s identity, seemed to be signalled very early, while at other times key actions were taken by characters who had not been introduced.

These are minor failings, and overall this is a very enjoyable romp. I look forwards to Bruno’s next outing.

Update 13th May: the restructuring is complete, and you should see new reviews more fully integrated than previously. The process was non-trivial, and may spawn a blog post at some stage.
Thanks
Andrew

If you’ve seen the film “Young Winston”, based on this book, you will be familiar with some of the events. Other programmes and books have adequately explained his war leadership and his contribution to many serious political issues. However, the films and documentaries I have seen fail to capture the mischievous spirit communicated through this book.

This a fascinating study of a bygone age, when Britain maintained a great empire, when most politicians took the title Lord, and when politics and army officership were sports for those of independent means. Interestingly despite his aristocratic bloodline Churchill’s family was not particularly wealthy and some of the most poignant lessons stem from this.

Sometimes the sentiments in the book appear bloodthirsty or imperialistic, but you have to realise that at least part of the time Churchill is writing satirically, reflecting common values which you suspect he did not always share himself. When he is sincerely expressing his own serious ideals it is usually easy to detect.

These beliefs link both his skilful analysis of historical events, and Churchill’s account of his own development. For example he explains the British government’s failure to be magnanimous after the early victories of the Boer war as the reason that a relatively fast-moving and honourable conflict descended into “shocking evils” on both sides. The same failing is shown as a prime force in the leftward drift of Churchill’s own politics.

Churchill was a great writer, but it’s instructive to learn that his facility with English developed largely because he was judged early on to be too dim to cope with Latin and Greek. The classics loss was our gain, the legacy including both Churchill’s great deeds and great writing.

The last chapter is slightly disappointing, with Churchill’s early parliamentary career an anticlimax, and the story stops rather than ending on a major event. That apart, the pace, interest and humour are consistent throughout.

This book was written in 1930, when Churchill was already 56, but in the “wilderness years” before he regained high office and led Britain through the Second World War. It is interesting to speculate whether the book would have been very different if it were written either much earlier or later.

If you want adventure, read this book. If you want to understand a great man, read this book. If you want to do both and have a good laugh, read this book.

When this book came up on the Amazon Vine review system, I had hopes that it might offer something akin to the Foundation stories, or even Star Trek DS9. Sadly although there might be superficial resemblances to both, this book is just not well enough structured to engage my imagination the way they do.

The background is very Foundation-like: a stagnant galactic empire with rebellion brewing at its edges; human domination (although there are other sentient species); and technology which, faster than light interstellar travel and communications aside, looks remarkably like ours. The ships even “jump” between locations.

The major characters are well drawn, and the core idea, of a mutant seeking revenge on those who created him by illegal scientific experimentation is sound enough (although arguably done better by Mary Shelley in 1815). The problem is that the plot just doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s very difficult to tell who’s on which side, or even the state of play at the book’s end. In some ways it’s not unlike a very complicated “Spanish Prisoner” tale, but it doesn’t work. By halfway through I got very frustrated trying to understand the bigger picture, and I ended up unconvinced the author really has one himself.

One specific problem is that there’s no sense of scale: are the different locations adjacent solar systems, or galactic quadrants? Do the battles take place within the confines of planetary systems, or over a much wider range? It’s impossible to tell.

It doesn’t help that the jacket notes seem to have been written by someone other than the author, who in attempting to address the lack of a big picture introduces ideas not actually expressed in the book. The book could disappoint a reader who expects the story to match them.

I wanted to enjoy this book, but it frustrated me. The author writes the detailed stuff well, but next time needs to make sure his plot takes the reader somewhere.

OK? Now imagine that your brother is one of your country’s top military and political leaders. He’s Hermann Goering, and you are his younger brother Albert.

Thirty Four is the remarkable story of how Albert Goering protected and saved the threatened and dispossessed throughout the duration of the Third Reich. He also led acts of anti-Nazi defiance and even sabotage. His innumerable exploits ranged from moving people round the Skoda empire to places where they would be less vulnerable, through remarkable political interventions such as persuading Goebbels to classify Franz Lehar’s Jewish wife as an “honorary Aryan”, to acts of almost unbelievable audacity like driving a convoy to a concentration camp, demanding that it be filled with “workers” for Skoda, and then freeing those supplied in a nearby forest. What’s even more impressive is that through a combination of the protection afforded by his brother’s name, his own charm and political skill, and Hermann’s occasional protective or helpful interventions, he survived to tell the tale.

I’m always captivated by these “edge” stories from history, of those who didn’t fit the mould, and this is a fascinating, uplifting and inspiring tale. It’s not a hagiography – Albert’s personal weaknesses and his difficult post-war years are fully acknowledged – but throughout there’s a strong sense of his moral compass and his need to do something.

Although almost forgotten by history, Albert Goering needs to be remembered alongside Schindler and Wallenberg, and this book attempts to make that a possibility.

William Hastings Burke has made a decent job of telling the story, although by his own admission it should probably have been researched and told twenty years earlier, when it might have been possible to talk to those who knew Albert Goering themselves, rather than their descendants. The style of the book is deliberately chatty, mixing historical findings, dialogue from interviews and the author’s own wry observations from travelling around Europe with limited support and an even more limited budget.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the book is a bit short (maybe reflecting the difficulty of researching very personal stories at this distance), and it would have been great to include a few photographs of the central characters. However, these are minor niggles.

This is a good read, and very inspiring. Recommended.

Oh well…

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Location:Beachy Head Dr,Bel Air,Barbados

I was visiting my mother last weekend and picked up a science book which I read as a teenager, but which originally belonged to my grandfather. It’s a brilliant discussion of materials science by Sir William Bragg, based on some Royal Institution lectures he did. I was thinking of passing it on to the next generation, but then I read the following sentence:

“The weight of air in the Royal Institution lecture theatre is about 15 cwt; the weight of argon is about 18 lbs”

I realised that this might be a bit of a puzzle for a current youngster, but I was intrigued to find out how far such dreadful ignorance extends. I therefore conducted a moderately scientific test, by asking a group of friends, relatives and colleagues the following: “Who can, without cheating (e.g. Google, scientific calculators etc.), tell me what percentage argon is by weight on this basis?” The victims were all bright boys and girls, but represented a wide spread of ages (19-65) and educational and ethnic backgrounds.

I knew the answer, but I had to think about it.

What surprised me was that I only got one other correct answer. From Ken, who is “about 60”. None of my other respondents had a clue, even those who are slightly older than myself.

So I appear to be pretty much the last of a breed who can work with a system of units based on 12, 14 and 16 as well as 10. Does this bode ill for our mental agility?

If you’re interested in the answer, I’ll post it as a comment, so you can have a go without cheating!

First, some ground rules. I’m very happy to spend money on software which works and provides me with value. I don’t like being at the mercy of a monopoly, and I don’t like being forced to spend money on things which I don’t want.

In the PC world, there’s a very simple model which meets these requirements. It’s called evaluation software. It works for something as cheap and cheerful as a tiny utility, or as complex and costly as Microsoft Office or VMWare. You download the evaluation, which is typically fully functional but time limited, and try it. If it does what you want, you pay for it. If it doesn’t, you delete it. Now there is inevitably a certain amount of “piracy”, as some people try to cheat the registration/payment process, but most people are pretty honest. I certainly always pay for anything I keep using if I can, but for every software item I retain there’s at least one I tried and threw away.

Down at the level of the small apps and plugins we even have the “donation” model. Now I am prepared to admit that the proportion of users who make a voluntary donation if the software will work without it is probably well short of 100%, but that can readily be compensated by the way in which genuine service or ingenuity are rewarded. For example, another Bibble user recently sent me €5 for a plugin which I had modified to meet his requirements. Now that’s not much by the standards of my usual professional fees, but I learned it represented about 2% of his monthly income. As far as I am concerned, that’s a really big “thank you”.

Then we have the Apple App Store model. You have to buy an app based on about 1 page of text, or less, and a maximum of 5 screenshots, which may or may not portray the functionality you’re interested in. There’s no systematic “try before you buy” model – a few applications have a free evaluation version, but these don’t always reliably indicate the functionality or stability of the full version. When you’ve paid, you can try an application. Perhaps 33-50% of the time it works, and you’re happy. The rest of the time, the app doesn’t do what you want, and you’ve effectively wasted your money.

How about a refund, I hear you say? In theory, there is a refund concept in iTunes. In practice, it seems to have about the same status as the Easter Bunny. For a start, you can’t do anything on the web, or from the iPad itself, so if you have a problem when you’re away from your main PC/Mac, tough. Assume you are sitting at your PC, you open iTunes and navigate through the account areas to find the iTunes receipt which includes the problem item, and click “report a problem”. You have to choose the nature of the problem from a drop-down: there isn’t an obvious choice, the best one is something like “the software doesn’t work properly”. You then type in a description of the problem, including something like “I want a refund”, and press the OK button. In response a little message pops up, saying something like (I’m working from memory here) “Apple are not responsible for application functionality. Your message has been filed.” That’s it. No confirmation email. No reference number. No options for further action. So you go back and try and click “report a problem” to try again, but now you can’t, because “you’ve already reported a problem”. So you email the application developers and explain what’s wrong and the fact that they really should have disclosed certain key information in the App Store advert rather than immediately after purchasing the app, and they email you back very politely saying “we’re sorry you don’t like our software. refund requests have to be processed through iTunes”.

I’m not making this up! This is not a broken business process, it’s a process which has been deliberately and systematically ground into tiny pieces under the tracks of a tank driven by the ghosts of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller.

OK so Apple don’t give a stuff about their customers. This is not news. But the model doesn’t work very well for developers either. There’s no way to reward a developer for special effort, e.g. to meet a specialist requirement, although I might often do so through the donation model. There’s also no way to charge for an upgrade, except by creating a separate new application edition, which will have to be purchased at full price, will have its own data set etc.

This is frustrating at many levels. Although most individual apps are inexpensive, evaluating applications to find the best fit to your own requirements can become very expensive. I can afford a few wasted pounds, especially as a business expense, but that’s not true for the man who donated for my plugin from a €240 monthly income. The worst thing is that it seems to be down to laziness or callous disregard on Apple’s part. Surely with the centralist control of iTunes it wouldn’t be difficult to provide full versions which are disabled after a trial period, but for which a license is only an app store click away?

Apple’s tyrannical control makes Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany look like models of libertarian freedom by comparison. This market desperately needs some competition to an abusive monopoly provider.

Location:Hill Drop Ln,,United Kingdom

However, to date I’m extremely frustrated by the quality of the tools available to capitalise on this opportunity. Most are, at best, OK for plain text blog entries, and none really delivers what I have come to expect, based on what’s available free on the PC platform.

My benchmark is Microsoft’s LiveWriter. This “free” software does exactly what I want: it provides a WYSIWYG preview as I write, using the stylesheet of my blog, provides style-based formatting (so I can create lists, headings and emphasise text, but otherwise add an absolute minimum of markup clutter), and provides the ability to manage all the post metadata, including things like hand-written post excerpts. It even has a plug-in architecture against which some kind soul has written a little plugin to manage custom fields, so I can easily add linkage to other articles or images in my photo albums.

Now maybe Microsoft have done their usual trick of hiding a lot of clever code behind a simple facade, but the above features don’t seem to be “rocket science”. There are several shareware packages on the PC (e.g. BlogJet) which have very similar capabilities. I therefore hoped that the iPad could deliver similar capabilities.

Nothing doing. For a start, all the available apps are strictly plain-text only. A couple have the ability to insert some HTML, but you need to know what you’re doing, and you have to visualise the result. If the available tags are not sufficient, then it becomes really painful. Just typing < p > on an iPad takes a grand total of 9, yes 9 keystrokes.

Some apps just don’t appear to work. MacJournal is a case in point: only when you’ve paid for it do you get a “read me” screen listing the limitations, and I couldn’t get it to connect at all. This is where I try to explore the “refund” option in iTunes… Worse, others succeed in corrupting existing entries. The worst offender, to my horror, is WordPress’ own app, which succeeded in filling my nicely formatted text with a load of random markup and line breaks. Deleted.

Beyond that, there are a couple which are trying, but not there yet. The best I have found to date is BlogPress, which seems to be reliable, handles basic metadata OK and at least has the concept of “select text and apply an HTML tag to the selection”. If I can engage the developers to extend this then it may become workable.

I did wonder if I could just post the flat text and then use the web-based editor in WordPress. However while this works fine on the PC, on the iPad the browser doesn’t seem to recognise the editor as a text area, so you can’t select text within in it. Foiled again.

I’ll keep you posted, but don’t be surprised if I can’t do so just from my iPad.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Leatherhead,United Kingdom

However, some of the supporting cast decisions were odd, to say the least. Most strange was the decision that while Victor Frankenstein and his brother William were both white, his father was played by a black actor, George Harris. Now Harris is a fine actor, and I have no problem with him playing a rich, powerful man in the right context – 2010 Britain, for example. But to cast him as Frankenstein senior, a Baron in early 1800s Switzerland, and in a story where one of the key themes is the inability of humans to see past The Creature’s physical difference from themselves to his inner abilities, that’s just plain wrong. It grated with me, and from comments I heard it grated with others too.

If that casting decision was PC tokenism, it was misplaced. If Danny Boyle was deliberately trying to contrast the loathing for the creature with our modern acceptance of people of different appearances, then it backfired. Sometimes the obvious route is the right one.

Maybe things are getting better. We seem to have standardised (for now, until the next bright spark tries to be different) on 5V supplies for most rechargeable hand-held devices, and some (but not all) expect the source to be a standard USB type A socket. This at least reduces the number of independent chargers. That’s the good news. The bad news is the device end. I really don’t get why we can’t standardise on the standard mini B USB port, but the creative types seem to want more variety.

Then there are the devices which take mains input. Set aside the fact that mains outlets come in several varieties, as it’s probably about 100 years too late to do much about that, there’s still the matter of the mains connection into the device (or its power supply). There are at least three standards, and while quite a lot of my kit uses the common “figure of eight” version, sod’s law dictates that my laptop uses the three-pin variant. Oh well…

On a more positive note, thanks to Apple I now have a transformer which is “figure of eight” in and USB out, so that will cover a lot of bases, and I have a pair of mains cables which the appropriate plugs for each region I regularly travel to, so I don’t need to carry adapters.

Despite the fact that my cameras all hail from the same manufacturer, Canon, they each take different batteries and each has a separate charger. The better news is that apparently Canon have declared that their next generation of DSLRs will use only two battery types, but I can’t see how that will help because knowing my luck I’ll still probably end up with a camera from each family.

So what’s the upshot. Here’s what I carry regularly:

• Figure of eight mains cable with appropriate plug
• Laptop power cable with appropriate plug, and laptop power supply
• Mains to USB transformer (clever Apple version, which has a UK plug but also takes a figure of eight cable)
• USB to mini B (doesn’t actually charge anything, but connects disks, cameras etc. to the laptop)
• USB to “slim mini B” (I don’t know what they call this, but it seems to be an emerging standard, as my Zaggmate keyboard, Frances’ phone and her Kindle all use it)
• USB to even slimmer non-standard plug for my phone. Thanks a lot, HTC
• USB to Apple connector for the iPad
• USB to HP iPaq connector, to charge the iPaq. In fact, you can’t buy this lead, but it’s amazing what you can achieve with a load of cannibalised bits and a soldering iron

Yes, I know I should be able to condense my phone and PDA into one device, and I might get one with either a standard USB or Apple connector. See here and here for why I might resist that…

Then for holidays, you add:

• 2x or 3x Canon chargers, depending on what I’m expecting to photograph
• Shaver cable and appropriate mains adapter

Is this getting better?

Oddly, although the wonderful “Waterfall 2006” web site still exists, I couldn’t find DDD on it. So I checked with Google and found a couple of references to non-ironic (as far as I can tell) papers on the subject. Yes, some people seem to think that document-driven development is a good idea! Now I might be prepared to concede this for applications where documents are themselves the key business objects (some legal processes, for example), but as far as I can see this isn’t what those papers were referring to. If that’s the case, they really haven’t understood…

What I did find, however, was a wonderful blog post from a few years ago with the excellent title “Asshole Driven Development”, in which Scott Berkun has collected a wide variety of development and project management anti-patterns. It takes a while to read through all the comments, but doing so is quite rewarding, if mainly as a form of therapy. At least you know you’re not alone.

The list is pretty comprehensive, but despite over 300 contributions, I couldn’t see my own bête noir. A lot of large corporate organisations now seem to follow a governance methodology I term IAKOM (the “It’s A Knock Out Method”), known on the continent as la Methode Jeux Sans Frontieres (MJSF). Those of a certain age will remember a series of hilarious television games in which relatively simple tasks (such as carrying a bucket of water) were rendered impossible by the imposition of progressive handicaps and obstacles (such as carrying the bucket up a greased slope against a rubber bungy while wearing clown shoes and being pelted with wet sponges).

Some IT governance is like that. Just when you think you might have a fair run at doing something, a new governance hurdle or document check is inserted into the process. It wouldn’t be so bad if it all made sense, but sometimes it feels almost capricious. Some organisations are more enlightened than others, but as a general industry trend it’s inescapable.

I don’t know what the answer is. If you do, let me know!

Personally, I’ve never got on reviewing significant text on a PC screen, and tend to work instead on printouts. The iPad has already proven itself an excellent reading tool, so much so that I will now download any lengthy document from my PC at work, and read it on the iPad, rather than just print it out.

Three third party applications make this much easier: DiskAid runs alongside or in place of iTunes to make managing iPad documents from the PC much easier, providing many of the functions missing from the Apple software, like folder views and drag/drop file operations. Full two-way folder-level synchronisation is promised for the next version. It also works well over USB – this, combined with the fact it’s not iTunes, makes it a good bet for corporate environments.

The companion iPad app, FileApp, is the best file management and general-purpose viewer I’ve found. And if you want to annotate a PDF document I can strongly recommend iAnnotate, which produces fully Acrobat-compatible markup, and you can either export the result via DiskAid, or simply email it to yourself.

MS Office documents are a bit more of a challenge. For example, there are many apps which view or edit Word documents. They vary from acceptable to poor. None, as far as I can see, supports embedded files, embedded objects, or style-based formatting. More critically for document reviewing, there’s almost no support for change tracking. Most apps just ignore Word markup. The only current exception is Documents To Go, which at least displays the markup and preserves it in exported documents, but doesn’t allow you to add to it. The work-around is to just type your comments into the main text, email the document to yourself, and use “compare” against the original on the PC, but that’s just plain crude.

Support for other MS Office documents is even more patchy. There are lots of apps which will read an Excel spreadsheet, but most can’t export back to the same format. And there are plenty of PowerPoint viewers, but they all present the slides as a long scrolling document. None of them have the ability to effectively show a presentation full screen on the iPad with a simple “tap to advance” model. Surely I can’t be the only person in the world who recognises the potential power of iPad+PowerPoint for presenting ideas to people in small meetings, so why have all the developers ignored this opportunity?

I await the iPad version of SoftMaker Office with hope, because the SoftMaker guys have successfully delivered full Word compatibility to Pocket PCs for years. It can be done…

The iPad should also be an ideal note-taking device, but several things mitigate against it. Firstly, the applications seem universally crude, with no rich text or outlining support, and limited or no hierarchical arrangement features. Some are quite “flashy”, with good support for doing things like pasting in pictures from the photo album, but what I need is more structured. The standard, of course, is Microsoft OneNote, which has transformed my general note-taking and list management on the PC, but Apple and most developers seem to be studiously it’s example. The one ray of light is MobileNoter, which aims to be a partner application to OneNote. At the moment it’s incomplete – it does quite a good job of synchronising your OneNote notebooks from the PC, and displaying them faithfully, but input is a bit iffy and you can’t create new sections or pages on the iPad. The “quick notes”, which can be freely manipulated, are plain text only. That said, the developers promise that the abilities to take notes in OneNote format and add them into your synchronised notebooks are coming, so maybe this omission will be fixed.

Creating content is generally a bit painful because of the restricted text input model Apple have imposed. For a start, the multi-modal keyboard is very annoying. The main screen just has the basic letters, and you have to switch modes two or three times for anything else. This is OK for bulk text, rubbish for anything with numbers or “special” characters such as the dash or the colon! No wonder the youth of today are losing touch with punctuation…

I do wonder if Apple were influenced by this wonderful video of the “laptop with no keyboard” from the Onion News Network, and didn’t get that it’s meant to be satirical?

If you make a mistake while typing, it’s quite painful to have to roughly point with a finger, then steer the insertion point exactly with the magnifier, then make your corrections. There are no arrow keys to quickly navigate a few letters back, no reversible “undo”. I also find the lack of drag and drop very frustrating.

The predictive text / dynamic spelling is rubbish compared with other platforms, offering only a single option and then usually only when you’ve typed almost the whole word. Worse, if it corrects incorrectly, and you delete the text and type your version again, it just changes it again unless you manually over-ride it. The Microsoft version is much more intelligent, and gives you a “stop changing…” option after the first time.

Some of these restrictions and crudities make no sense at all. Others might make sense on the iPhone, but on a full screen tablet device they are just plain frustrating. But what really bugs me is that the pocket PC, despite originating in an even smaller form factor than the iPhone, gets all this right.

The iPad is a great tool for some purposes, but it’s potential for business use is thwarted by Apple’s inability to recognise good ideas in the non-Mac world, and a young application ecosystem where key capabilities are still developing. Getting business value feels like a bit of a battle, even if it is far and away the best platform for Angry Birds!