Miscellaneous Blog

Some completely stupid drivel from a tiresomely hipper-than-now New Statesman scribbler called Rachel Cooke.

Podcasting is for geeks — created by geeks, listened to by geeks. Think about it. Don’t you ever wonder why you no longer see anyone wearing a Marillion T-shirt? I’d bet good money that the reason for this is that the owners of said T-shirts are all too busy at home, messing around with their podcast software.

Doesn’t she know that Marillion T shirts are for wearing when going to model railway exhibitions?

I find something vaguely fascist about the Bruschetta-eating literati’s hatred of ‘geeks’. They seem to feel threatened by the very existance of people that don’t conform to their narrow definition of ‘cool’. How dare we listen to music which has some depth and complexity rather than the latest three-chord style-over-substance flavour of the month? How dare we read science fiction rather than pretending to like dull novels in which nothing happens but are deeply symbolic of man’s struggle against his socio-polical environment?

The Ministry of Information‘s take on HippyDave’s post on mailing lists vs. web forums.

On the initial topic (e-mail groups vs. online fora), I definitely favour the latter, for one main reason: threads. For me, that’s the ‘killer app’ of fora, with which e-mail lists can’t compete. I drastically prefer to read the topics I choose, rather than an undifferentiated stream of all traffic.

I can see the point on signal-to-noise ratios, but I find that the extra time spent checking and navigating web forums is longer that the time skimming and deleting off-topic postings on most mailing lists. This may be because I’m still on dialup, and I find web forums with all those graphic avatars and other ‘cute’ cruft take forever to load. But few if any web forums have an easy way of telling you which posts you have and haven’t read, or even which threads have new posts.

Most mailing lists support threading if you use a decent mail program (i.e. anything other than Microsoft Outlook, which was intended for corporate email, not Internet discussion groups, and it shows), although that gets weakened by poor thread discipline, mostly from top-posting Outlook users who don’t realise that other mail programs exist.

One of these days someone will come up with a ‘killer app’ that combines the best elements of both. Although I think the usability of web fora would be dramatically improved by the simple addition of RSS feeds which can tell you when there are new posts on a particular subject – I can’t imagine the Blogosphere without RSS.

Today is One Day In History.

‘One Day in History’ is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. We want as many people as possible to record a ‘blog’ diary which will be stored by the British Library as a historical record of our national life.

Write your diary here reflecting on how history itself impacted on your day – whether it just commuting through an historic environment, discussing family history or watching repeats on TV.

Here’s my entry.

Wake up at 07:25

Breakfast: 2 Oatabix spread with margarine, one cup of coffee.

First half of the day was a four-hour train journey from my parents’ home in Slough to my workplace the Alderley Edge in Cheshire. The previous day I’d had a dental appointment with my old dentist in Slough; since I’ve only recently started a new job in the north of England I haven’t found a dentist up here.

Noticed that First Great Western have started painting ex-Thames Trains Turbos in the new First Group livery, dark blue with swirly bits. One passed through Slough while waiting for my own train, and I saw a second at Paddington.

Paddington was thrown into chaos this morning due to a fire in Praed Street. Several streets were sealed off, and most of Paddington’s entrances were closed, as was Paddington underground station. Everyone was being diverted to the bus station through a narrow exit that wasn’t able to cope with anything like that number of people. There were three or four fire engines visible in neighbouring streets, but so sign of the major conflagration that would have required closure of such a large area.

The rest of the journey was uneventful. I managed to catch the 9:46 Virgin Pendolino with about five minutes to spare, which arrived in Crewe on time at 11:30. Train about two-thirds full. The local connecting train to Alderley Edge was also on time (A three coach Northern Rail class 323 for those interested).

Lunch: Baked Potato with beans, bacon and red onion from the sandwich bar round the corner from the office.

Afternoon was spent working on a software change control request, the gory details of which are not appropriate for a blog.

Arrive home to find that the landlord was still away, and therefore hadn’t got my note about the air pockets in the central heating, which means the house is still cold.

Dinner: Chicken Jalfrezi and Pilau Rice, washed down with one bottle of Becks (about one-and-a-half units)

Music on stereo while I’m typing this: Second Life Syndrome by Riverside.

Johann Hari puts the boot in to Jeremy Clarkson. Completely over the top, but no more so than Clarkson himself. (Link from Harry’s Place, who has more to say on the subject)

I have never engaged with Jeremy Clarkson’s arguments in my columns, because he doesn’t have any. I may as well engage with one of the Tweenies. He is merely the court jester for the Petrolhead death-cult, a far-right jokesmith whose erotic obsession with inanimate metal objects may well stem from the fact that – as Piers Morgan alleges in his diaries – he once confessed to being “not physically capable” of sexual intercourse. (Clarkson of course denies this, but with trousers that tight, who would be surprised?). A man whose response to global warming is to deny its existence and brag that he leaves his patio-heater on 24 hours a day “just to wind up Greenpeace” is not a person to argue with; he’s a person to ignore. But as he has learned in the past week, Clarkson’s unserious statements can have very serious consequences.

I have to confess that my first thought when I heard about Richard Hammond’s rocket crash was “Why couldn’t it have been Clarkson?”. Which probably means I’m not a very nice person.

Charlie Stross questions whether the 50000 jobs that Microsoft Vista will allegedly create is actually a good thing.

Of course, the usual analysis of employment trends we get in the press doesn’t usually go as deep as to question the need for jobs (that jobs are virtuous is taken for granted) so it shouldn’t be any surprise that ZDnet’s report that Microsoft Windows Vista could create 50,000 jobs in the EU alone is framed in tones of breathless approval.

Stop and think about it. The PC market is pretty much saturated in the developed world; we are no longer buying our first PC, we’re just upgrading regularly for the faster processor/new features. So what does this really mean?

Microsoft are predicting that this ravenous new operating system will demand the sacrifice of 50,000 extra human lifetimes to keep offices across the EU running. That fifty thousand people are going to be sucked into the thankless task of software support and system administration for no functional gain — not to bring the benefits of computing to new users, this is simply to keep the wheels turning. It’s money for digging holes in a field and then filling them in again: pointless make-work that should be automated out of existence rather than lauded.

The post is a bit of an anti-Microsoft pro-Linux rant, and the comments thread lapses into entirely predictable calls for everyone to join the Church of Scientology, sorry, use Apple Macs. But there’s a good point; are all ‘jobs’ really worth doing? How much human potential is wasted doing what are essentially unnecessary tasks?

I’ve often wondered about the overall efficiency of the IT industry; what proportion of time is actually spent of activities which directly advance the mission of the business? I suspect the figure is alarmingly low even in the best-run organisations; when it gets to the badly-run ones I wonder if it approaches zero. I’m talking about real horror stories such as some of those mentioned in The Daily WTF, or organisations where entire projects are routinely abandoned part-way through, or where backstabbing political types deliberately engineer the failure of projects in order to set up rivals as fall-guys.

Johnathan Pierce wants nominations for the worst film you’ve ever seen.

How do you classify a ‘bad’ film? Some people in the comments thread even nominated Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey“, which seems totally ridiculous to me; perhaps they can’t get their heads round the concept of a cerebral science-fiction film, and think SF is solely for action movies with big explosions.

There are a lot of different criteria for badness. There’s the low-budget Z grade schlock like Manos, Hand of Fate, which I can’t nominate since I haven’t actually seen it. Then there are plenty of the ridiculously pretentious and incomprehensible ‘art’ films that used to be shown late at night on Channel 4.

Then there are the lame sequels and prequels marking the point where some franchises jumped the shark. Think of Star Trek V (the one where Captain Kirk meets God), or the dreadful Phantom Menace.

And what about the ‘entertainingly bad’ category, such as Ed Wood’s classic “Plan 9 From Outer Space“, where the director’s ambition far exceeded either his talent or budget. But “Plan 9″ is so bad it’s good. If you want really bad, try the same director’s “Glen or Glenda“. That’s just plain bad.

My nomination is the 1929 British melodrama “The Flying Scotsman”, which could fall in that category. If the synopsys wasn’t bad enough..

A young fireman on the famous Flying Scotsman locomotive falls in love with a beautiful young woman. What he doesn’t know is that the girl is the daughter of the man he replaced, who was fired for drinking on the job and has vowed to get his revenge on the railway for firing him.

This turkey started out as a silent film, but turns into a talkie half-way through. Because it was originally intended to be silent all the way through, there was no actual script. So the cast just improvised their own dialogue, which is so bad it makes George Lucas look like Shakespeare.

I saw this in the 1970s at a evening of railway-themed films presented by film historian and rail enthusiast John Huntley. To quote Huntley himself, “If he saw this film, the man who invented talkies would go out and shoot himself”.

The star of the film was the locomotive itself, only six years old at the time, making it the equivalent of a film made today set on board a Virgin Voyager.

Mark Rosenfelder questions some examples of Game Theory.

An economist sets up this game: He offers $10 to you and a stranger. The stranger is to propose a division of the money; you can either accept the division (in which case you each get the money according to the other guy’s proposal) or reject it (in which case neither of you get anything).

If the stranger decides to divide it up nine to him, and one to you, what do you do? Think about it for a moment.

You told him to get stuffed? According to game theory you were wrong.

Game theorists say that you should accept any positive offer you receive, even one as low as a dollar, or you will end up with nothing. But most people reject offers of less than three dollars, and some turn down anything less than five dollars.

According to Mark Rosenfelder, you did the right thing.

Read the rest of the article to see why Game Theory, at least for this example, is completely useless as a model for economic interactions in the real world.

Yesterday I attended the second Manchester Blogmeet ably organised by The Manchizzle. We met up in Urbis. Unfortunately the conference centre where we were supposed to be meeting was out of action due to overrunning engineering works, so we ended off reserving a corner of the museum cafe. After a couple of hours we decamped to the the Hare and Hounds pub (despite it’s name, it’s an old-fashioned inner-city pub), where much beer was drunk, and I found out that nobody had heard of Porcupine Tree.

A total of 23 people attended, including Ian of Spinneyhead, Jonathan of crinklybee, Beth of GirlonaTrain, A Free Man In Preston, “Sticker Esquire” of RantSpace, and the one and only Norm, plus a lot more I either can’t remember or didn’t get to speak to.

Next one’s in November. See you there.

On Thursday I attended the first day of the Old Trafford test between England and Pakistan, the first cricket match I’ve been to for something like twenty years. It turned out to be a great day for England and not such a good day for Pakistan, who collapsed to 119 all out in the middle of the first afternoon. Over the next two days England went on to win the game by an innings with two days to spare.

American readers probably find it strange that most individual spectators only attend a single day of a five-day match, and only follow the rest of the game on TV or radio. Only hardcore fans like Norm actually attend all five (or in this case, three) days.

I’m not so sure I agree with on this….

Anyone out there envying me my holiday should understand that, in this heat and humidity, it’s really hard work sitting in the sun all day watching cricket. You have to concentrate on the game while you’re sweltering. Plus: for much of the time there are people around you making what can only be described as an unpleasant racket. So it’s hard, I tell you. Others don’t realize. I arrive home in the evening exhausted.

The only ‘racket’ I remember a was group of kids chanting “Pakistan zindabad!”, and a middle-aged Pakistan supporter telling them to shut up with the words “Every time you lot chant that we lose another wicket!”

I’m going off to Switzerland for a week.

This means that I’ve (temporarily) disabled comments until I get back, since I don’t want to be faced with having to delete a week’s worth of comment spam on my return:(