What surprised me most about this book was the humour. I expected the familiar story of our greatest leader’s early life, I expected an insightful account of Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I expected a stirring tale of a young man who was a practical adventurer just as much as politician and author. I didn’t expect to laugh out loud regularly for much of the story.
I used to read a lot of what was known as “hard” science fiction, but gave up around the time that Asimov and Heinlein died, as a lot of what was on offer was getting too clever for it’s own good, with science and adventure both taking a back seat.
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.
Imagine you are a wealthy industrialist, but also a humanitarian with a keen sense of justice. Imagine you live in a brutal totalitarian regime which is waging war over half the world and subjecting those under its control to acts or repression and genocide the like of which the world has never seen.
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. Read the full review 
Observations on the iPad’s ability to work as a general entertainment device for the duration of a 9.5 hour flight:
– battery charge (an impressive 35% charge remaining): 10/10
– screen (looked like someone had cooked breakfast on it): 2/10
Oh well…
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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!
I’ve posted previously about the inadequacies of the iOS/iTunes architecture, and in particular the content management nightmare it creates, but I haven’t really reflected on the commercial model of the iTunes / App Store. I’m afraid I can hold back no more.
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
| 0311 7D 4518 | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM | Date: 13-03-2011 10:43 | ISO: 400 | Exp. bias: 2/3 EV | Exp. Time: 1/10s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 29.0mm (~47.0mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM | |
With my half century finally upon me, my wife Frances has excelled herself by commissioning a most wonderful cake, celebrating my photographic passion! This is well up to the standard of “Bear in a Porsche“, from a few years back…
Those of you who have known me for some years will recognise that “Tatty Bear” probably more accurately reflects my shape and condition than my earlier icon, the “Forever Friends Bear”. Ah well, that’s the advancing years for you.
Of course, some of you will also know that it’s a long time since I last shot a roll of film, but somehow I think a row of 1s and 0s around the base of the cake wouldn’t work nearly so well. And I did manage to help expose four sheets of 8×10 on my last visit to Barbados, so I can’t claim to be absolutely 100% digital 🙂
Quick plug: if you need a good cake maker, then the above creation was the work of Jonathan at Simply Cakes in Weybridge. Having now sampled it, I can confirm it tastes just as good as it looks, so I’m happy to recommend him.
| Coral on a shipreck in Carlisle Bay | |
| Camera: Canon PowerShot G10 | Date: 26-04-2009 18:20 | ISO: 100 | Exp. Time: 1/200s | Aperture: 3.2 | Focal Length: 6.1mm (~28.0mm) | |
I’ve just managed to catch up with some of my shots from recent trips to Barbados, and in particular I’ve added some wildlife, sports, entertainment and underwater shots I’m quite pleased with. Have a look and let me know what you think.
In an odd confluence, multiple streams of activity have come together to convince me that current IS thinking may be suffering from a bad dose of “the wrong orientation”. My work on data modelling at National Grid, an excellent course on business process modelling, my frustrations with the iPad software architecture and finally some exposure to Oracle’s latest SOA tools have all convinced me that we need to get back to designing systems with an “object-action orientation”, rather than the regressive move back to the alternative.
The iPad really ought to be the ideal blogging tool: it’s light enough to always have with you, large enough to edit a decent quantity of text on, and potentially always connected, so you can strike while the muse is hot (if that’s not too odd a mixture of metaphors…)
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
I went to see Danny Boyle’s production of Frankenstein at the National Theatre, yesterday. It really is a “must see” event. The staging is superb, the script accurately reflects the eloquence of Mary Shelley’s novel, and Johnny Lee Miller’s performance as The Creature was astounding, portraying a moving evolution from incoherent newborn to the intelligent, articulate but frustrated and vengeful central character of the original story. Unfortunately I can’t comment on Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as he was unwell, but his understudy competently portrayed Frankenstein and the conflicting emotions which drive him.
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.
The trouble with having lots of gadgets is having to also manage and travel with a vast collection of power supplies, cables and chargers to make them work. I know I’m not alone in being annoyed by this – one of the late Douglas Adams’ last pieces of writing was a rant (there’s no better word) at the tech industry he otherwise loved, and how a lack of standards burdened him with an annoying plethora of single-use cables and transformers.
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:
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:
Is this getting better?
List
Abstract
One+Abstract
Email me
Others
Thoughts on the World (Main Feed)
Main feed (direct XML)