Off for the weekend
I am going to southern France for the weekend. The plan is to fly into Toulouse tomorrow morning and back out of Toulouse on Sunday evening, and to drive to Millau to look at the now complete viaduct at some point of the weekend. And I might drive around some of the scenic country nearby, eat some food, and generally enjoy myself.
I probably won't spend that long in Toulouse itself. However, I do know that Toulouse is famous for being the source of Toulouse sausages (to which long term readers of this plog know that I am partial) and of many Airbus aircraft (I am less partial to the company, but there is nothing wrong with their engineering). In the true spirit of European backstabbing, there is a second Airbus factory in Hamburg. I don't think I have any urge to visit the Airbus factory (although I did once visit the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, just outside Seattle), however, there might be something to be said for eating some Toulouse sausages while actually in Toulouse. Has anyone a suggestion as to a good place for me to get some particularly fine examples?
Friday, March 04, 2005
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
People continue to follow me to northern Spain.
I have told the story of my trip to Spain last August, and how the fact that there were no discount airlines flying to anywhere along the coast of Spain and Portgual between Bilbao and Faro was a major factor leading in my having to make an absurd overland journey from Porto to Bilbao, but was also a major factor responsible for their being few Anglophone tourists in that part of Europe, even in high summer.
I have also observed that since then Ryanair have announced flights from London to Santander, Santiago de Compostela, and Porto, meaning that the places I visited will be much more accessible this year.
Subsequent to that, I now see that Easyjet have added a flight from London to Oviedo in the Asturias. (This part of Spain has a twin city structure. The cities of Oviedo and Gijon are very close together, with Gijon (where I spent a night) being on the coast and Oviedo being a few kilometres inland. Although they are not contiguous they are close enough together that by many measures they would make up a single agglomeration just the same).
What does this mean? Well, the last gap in my journey has been filled. Whereas last August quite a lot of travel was necessary to get to some of the places I visited, it is now possible to get to pretty much anywhere on the trip inexpensively out of London in a couple of hours.
The mood of these places is going to change. Of course I will be one of the people using these flights, as I enjoyed myself a great deal last year and want to go back to some of those areas. In particular, I want to drive up the Douro valley from Porto to the vineyards where the grapes for port wine are grown, and I want to see more of the estuaries of the Galician coast.
I have told the story of my trip to Spain last August, and how the fact that there were no discount airlines flying to anywhere along the coast of Spain and Portgual between Bilbao and Faro was a major factor leading in my having to make an absurd overland journey from Porto to Bilbao, but was also a major factor responsible for their being few Anglophone tourists in that part of Europe, even in high summer.
I have also observed that since then Ryanair have announced flights from London to Santander, Santiago de Compostela, and Porto, meaning that the places I visited will be much more accessible this year.
Subsequent to that, I now see that Easyjet have added a flight from London to Oviedo in the Asturias. (This part of Spain has a twin city structure. The cities of Oviedo and Gijon are very close together, with Gijon (where I spent a night) being on the coast and Oviedo being a few kilometres inland. Although they are not contiguous they are close enough together that by many measures they would make up a single agglomeration just the same).
What does this mean? Well, the last gap in my journey has been filled. Whereas last August quite a lot of travel was necessary to get to some of the places I visited, it is now possible to get to pretty much anywhere on the trip inexpensively out of London in a couple of hours.
The mood of these places is going to change. Of course I will be one of the people using these flights, as I enjoyed myself a great deal last year and want to go back to some of those areas. In particular, I want to drive up the Douro valley from Porto to the vineyards where the grapes for port wine are grown, and I want to see more of the estuaries of the Galician coast.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
I remember when 16k was a lot of memory
If an old computer is running slowly, the easiest way to do something about it is almost always to install more RAM. New software amd new operating systems use more memory than old ones. If there is not enough RAM, then a lot of the data has to be stored on the hard disk instead of in RAM, data has to be constantly swapped back and forwards, and everything goes slower. (As a bonus, all the hard disk activity means that there is more danger of the disk failing, and if you are using a laptop this all runs down your battery faster). Many a computer has been thrown away as slow and out of date and replaced by a new one when a RAM upgrade would speed it up considerably and make it useable for some time longer. (Non technical people often fail to grasp the distinction between storage and memory, so this point is sometimes difficult to explain).
In any event, Windows XP is known as a bit of a memory hog, and for this reason I won't build a computer with less than 512Mb of RAM, because performance with less than this is generally poor. (XP is not alone on this score - you need 512Mb for decent performance on Mac OS X, too). If someone is buying a computer from an OEM, I strongly recommend either that they buy it with 512Mb or they get me to upgrade the RAM immediately after they buy it. (The second option is usually more cost effective, as OEMs seriously overcharge for memory upgrades). I make it very clear that I think that sticking with 256Mb is asking for trouble. (The situation is even worse if the computer has integrated graphics and the main memory is being used to drive the display as well as run programs, which is often the case on cheap computers).
I have generally argued that 512Mb is enough for good performance, however. If someone who is not financially constrained wants a computer, then 1Gb is worth buying, but to some extent this is insurance against future requirements. When I built myself a new desktop computer a few months back, I put 1Gb in, but to some extent I considered this overkill.
However, recently I found myself doing one of those memory upgrades for a friend with a new laptop. The laptop had come with a woefully inadequate 256Mb and I offered to upgrade it to 512Mb. For this I needed a 256Mb SO-DIMM. As it happened, my own laptop had 512Mb in it, in the form of two 256Mb SODIMMs of the correct type. Rather than buying a 256Mb SO-DIMM, I instead bough a 512Mb SO-DIMM for myself, swapped this with one of the 256Mb SO-DIMMs in my laptop, and then installed that 256Mb SO-DIMM in my friend's computer. This brought the memory in my laptop up to 768Mb.
And what did I find out? I wasn't expecting that much improvement, particularly given that the laptop has separate graphics RAM and main memory is not being shared by the graphics system. But I was badly wrong. As it happened the performance of my machine improved considerably. It is running substantially faster and there is less swapping to disk. I don't know to what extent battery life has improved, but I am sure that it must have. The truth is clearly that more than 512Mb is a good idea even now. I will have to change my recommendations.
But a 768Mb or 1Gb seems like such a gigantic amount of memory. I am not going to claim that 640k should be enough for everyone or anything like that but seriously, what is the computer doing with all that memory?
If an old computer is running slowly, the easiest way to do something about it is almost always to install more RAM. New software amd new operating systems use more memory than old ones. If there is not enough RAM, then a lot of the data has to be stored on the hard disk instead of in RAM, data has to be constantly swapped back and forwards, and everything goes slower. (As a bonus, all the hard disk activity means that there is more danger of the disk failing, and if you are using a laptop this all runs down your battery faster). Many a computer has been thrown away as slow and out of date and replaced by a new one when a RAM upgrade would speed it up considerably and make it useable for some time longer. (Non technical people often fail to grasp the distinction between storage and memory, so this point is sometimes difficult to explain).
In any event, Windows XP is known as a bit of a memory hog, and for this reason I won't build a computer with less than 512Mb of RAM, because performance with less than this is generally poor. (XP is not alone on this score - you need 512Mb for decent performance on Mac OS X, too). If someone is buying a computer from an OEM, I strongly recommend either that they buy it with 512Mb or they get me to upgrade the RAM immediately after they buy it. (The second option is usually more cost effective, as OEMs seriously overcharge for memory upgrades). I make it very clear that I think that sticking with 256Mb is asking for trouble. (The situation is even worse if the computer has integrated graphics and the main memory is being used to drive the display as well as run programs, which is often the case on cheap computers).
I have generally argued that 512Mb is enough for good performance, however. If someone who is not financially constrained wants a computer, then 1Gb is worth buying, but to some extent this is insurance against future requirements. When I built myself a new desktop computer a few months back, I put 1Gb in, but to some extent I considered this overkill.
However, recently I found myself doing one of those memory upgrades for a friend with a new laptop. The laptop had come with a woefully inadequate 256Mb and I offered to upgrade it to 512Mb. For this I needed a 256Mb SO-DIMM. As it happened, my own laptop had 512Mb in it, in the form of two 256Mb SODIMMs of the correct type. Rather than buying a 256Mb SO-DIMM, I instead bough a 512Mb SO-DIMM for myself, swapped this with one of the 256Mb SO-DIMMs in my laptop, and then installed that 256Mb SO-DIMM in my friend's computer. This brought the memory in my laptop up to 768Mb.
And what did I find out? I wasn't expecting that much improvement, particularly given that the laptop has separate graphics RAM and main memory is not being shared by the graphics system. But I was badly wrong. As it happened the performance of my machine improved considerably. It is running substantially faster and there is less swapping to disk. I don't know to what extent battery life has improved, but I am sure that it must have. The truth is clearly that more than 512Mb is a good idea even now. I will have to change my recommendations.
But a 768Mb or 1Gb seems like such a gigantic amount of memory. I am not going to claim that 640k should be enough for everyone or anything like that but seriously, what is the computer doing with all that memory?
Thursday, February 24, 2005
There's a camera everywhere, for good or for ill
A year or so back I read an article in which Digital Camera Shopper decided to compare the various flash memory card formats for durability. I think the attempt was to determine which of the various formats were most robust, but had difficulty differentiating between them, as all cards easily survived being dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy. It was only when the testers started doing things like smashing the memory cards with a sledgehammer and nailing them to a tree that some of the cards stopped working.
This received a certain amount of coverage in the blogosphere at the time, and one blogger (who I thought was Instapundit, but I cannot now find the reference) to observe that it was clear that the only way to destroy memory cards was to drop them into the same fires of Mount Doom in which they were forged.
Sadly, we now have another demonstration of the durability of memory cards. They can apparently survive when the camera (and the people carrying it) are smashed to death by a tsunami. We therefore have a sequence of pictures of the tsunami approaching.
News footage has long been about showing the consequences of distasters rather than the disasters themselves, as generally there haven't been cameras there when the disasters have actually happened. In recent years this has been changing, as so many people are carrying (still and motion) cameras with them to so many places that there now often are photographs of news events actually happening.
And sometimes, like this, this trend takes some strange and possibly disturbing twists.
A year or so back I read an article in which Digital Camera Shopper decided to compare the various flash memory card formats for durability. I think the attempt was to determine which of the various formats were most robust, but had difficulty differentiating between them, as all cards easily survived being dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy. It was only when the testers started doing things like smashing the memory cards with a sledgehammer and nailing them to a tree that some of the cards stopped working.
This received a certain amount of coverage in the blogosphere at the time, and one blogger (who I thought was Instapundit, but I cannot now find the reference) to observe that it was clear that the only way to destroy memory cards was to drop them into the same fires of Mount Doom in which they were forged.
Sadly, we now have another demonstration of the durability of memory cards. They can apparently survive when the camera (and the people carrying it) are smashed to death by a tsunami. We therefore have a sequence of pictures of the tsunami approaching.
News footage has long been about showing the consequences of distasters rather than the disasters themselves, as generally there haven't been cameras there when the disasters have actually happened. In recent years this has been changing, as so many people are carrying (still and motion) cameras with them to so many places that there now often are photographs of news events actually happening.
And sometimes, like this, this trend takes some strange and possibly disturbing twists.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Weekend diversions
A couple of weeks ago, I arranged to meet a friend of mine this last Sunday for a walk in Surrey, in the London green belt near Gatwick airport. We had been talking about doing this for a while, and had made the arrangement at least on the hope that the weather would be getting a little warmer by then.
But as it happened, it didn't. We got off to a good brisk walk from Tattenham Corner and got some exercise and saw some of the country, but by around midday the clouds started closing in a little, and shortly after that it started snowing lightly. We kept walking bravely and boldly through the North Downs, but it became apparent that it was perhaps not the best day for walking.
Eventually we reached Lower Kingswood and found a pub. Here we had beer and roast food. Oddly, as the snow came down the urge to leave the pub became weaker and weaker. We knew we would have to go out into the cold eventually, but with beer and food inside one's hiking skills appear to deteriorate.
And it was true. Walking the considerable distance to Upper Kingswood felt somehow much colder and I felt much stiffer, although the walking conditions were probably no worse and the temperature no colder than in the morning. Eventually we got to the railway station and discovered that the next train was 50 minutes away, so we had to go to another pub. (Shucks).
Such is London in February. That was just the start of an extremely cold snap, and last night a lot of snow fell. Britain is of course woefully unable to cope with anything other than mild weather, so my commute to work this morning was something of an ordeal.
Such is London in February. Or did I say that already?
A couple of weeks ago, I arranged to meet a friend of mine this last Sunday for a walk in Surrey, in the London green belt near Gatwick airport. We had been talking about doing this for a while, and had made the arrangement at least on the hope that the weather would be getting a little warmer by then.
But as it happened, it didn't. We got off to a good brisk walk from Tattenham Corner and got some exercise and saw some of the country, but by around midday the clouds started closing in a little, and shortly after that it started snowing lightly. We kept walking bravely and boldly through the North Downs, but it became apparent that it was perhaps not the best day for walking.
Eventually we reached Lower Kingswood and found a pub. Here we had beer and roast food. Oddly, as the snow came down the urge to leave the pub became weaker and weaker. We knew we would have to go out into the cold eventually, but with beer and food inside one's hiking skills appear to deteriorate.
And it was true. Walking the considerable distance to Upper Kingswood felt somehow much colder and I felt much stiffer, although the walking conditions were probably no worse and the temperature no colder than in the morning. Eventually we got to the railway station and discovered that the next train was 50 minutes away, so we had to go to another pub. (Shucks).
Such is London in February. That was just the start of an extremely cold snap, and last night a lot of snow fell. Britain is of course woefully unable to cope with anything other than mild weather, so my commute to work this morning was something of an ordeal.
Such is London in February. Or did I say that already?
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Natalie Natalie Natalie
It's so declasse to buy a new computer in a shop. If you had bought a Michael Jennings bespoke computer, you would have had none of these problems.
It's so declasse to buy a new computer in a shop. If you had bought a Michael Jennings bespoke computer, you would have had none of these problems.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Broadband dilemmas
About 18 months ago I upgraded from dialup to DSL at home. The principal motivation for doing this was that my landlady was complaining that I was tying up the phone line too much, but I wasn't too hostile to the idea anyway, because dialup had become a chore. At that time, most broadband packages offered in the UK were unlimited 512Mbps, and this normally cost about £30 a month. Some providers had slower services for a bit less, and some had faster services for quite a bit more, but most ISPs were providing pretty similar services at pretty similar prices. I signed up for Richard Branson's virgin.net for £25 a month, partly because it was on the low end of prices offered, but mainly because unlike most other providers they didn't require me to sign a 12 month contract, as I wasn't sure if I was staying in Britain at that point. I have been using Virgin since, and the service has been good from a technical point of view. (I have heard bad things about their support and customer service from other people, but I tend to avoid using support and customer service as much as possible, so I wouldn't know). Upgrading to broadband was one of the best things I have ever done, particularly after I added a wireless router as well, and I am never going to be able to live without it ever again (although I um unlikely to have to)
And my landlady has got a bonus out of this, because she has a wireless card in her computer, and she gets to share my broadband without paying for it. (I built her computer and put the card in it for her, so she is welcome).
However, broadband pricing has come down since then. £25 became not cheap but standard for 512Mbps service, and a few months back Tesco.net undercut the competition by offering 512Mbps unlimited for £20 a month. The Carphone Warehouse has been offering 1Gbps for £25 and 512Mbps for £20, with some fixed line telephone calls included as well. (Given that their plan without any telephone calls is more expensive, I think their plan is that they get customers connected to get their phone service, and the customers then use more calls than those included in the price and At that point, £25 is looking expensive. Over the last few weeks, a number of providers have doubled the speeds for their various plans without increasing the price. This means that AOL is offering 512Mb for £17.99, 1Gbps for £24.99 and 2Gbps for £29.99.
So I think the going rate is about 20 quid for 512k, 25 quid for 1M and 30 quid for 2M. So I am paying too much. When I move (which I am planning on doing shortly) I don't think I shall pay less, but I shall move to an ISP that offers faster speeds for the same or a little more money.
But I do wonder how much I will notice the extra speed. It won't be of the same order as I noticed the jump from dialup to broadband, but how much faster will it be? Will the bottleneck turn out to be the upstream infrastructure. I'm not sure, but I have a certain eagerness to find out.
And these guys seem to be offering 4Mb per second for £30 a month. If I would upgrade to this, my speed would be increasing by a factor of 8, compared to the factor of 9 it increased by when I went to ADSL in the first place. Perhaps I would notice another change of the same order. I must do this.
Update: What a foolish thing it was to praise virgin.net's service from a technical point of view. Their mail server went down almost instantly after I said that, and it has now been down for more than 24 hours.
About 18 months ago I upgraded from dialup to DSL at home. The principal motivation for doing this was that my landlady was complaining that I was tying up the phone line too much, but I wasn't too hostile to the idea anyway, because dialup had become a chore. At that time, most broadband packages offered in the UK were unlimited 512Mbps, and this normally cost about £30 a month. Some providers had slower services for a bit less, and some had faster services for quite a bit more, but most ISPs were providing pretty similar services at pretty similar prices. I signed up for Richard Branson's virgin.net for £25 a month, partly because it was on the low end of prices offered, but mainly because unlike most other providers they didn't require me to sign a 12 month contract, as I wasn't sure if I was staying in Britain at that point. I have been using Virgin since, and the service has been good from a technical point of view. (I have heard bad things about their support and customer service from other people, but I tend to avoid using support and customer service as much as possible, so I wouldn't know). Upgrading to broadband was one of the best things I have ever done, particularly after I added a wireless router as well, and I am never going to be able to live without it ever again (although I um unlikely to have to)
And my landlady has got a bonus out of this, because she has a wireless card in her computer, and she gets to share my broadband without paying for it. (I built her computer and put the card in it for her, so she is welcome).
However, broadband pricing has come down since then. £25 became not cheap but standard for 512Mbps service, and a few months back Tesco.net undercut the competition by offering 512Mbps unlimited for £20 a month. The Carphone Warehouse has been offering 1Gbps for £25 and 512Mbps for £20, with some fixed line telephone calls included as well. (Given that their plan without any telephone calls is more expensive, I think their plan is that they get customers connected to get their phone service, and the customers then use more calls than those included in the price and At that point, £25 is looking expensive. Over the last few weeks, a number of providers have doubled the speeds for their various plans without increasing the price. This means that AOL is offering 512Mb for £17.99, 1Gbps for £24.99 and 2Gbps for £29.99.
So I think the going rate is about 20 quid for 512k, 25 quid for 1M and 30 quid for 2M. So I am paying too much. When I move (which I am planning on doing shortly) I don't think I shall pay less, but I shall move to an ISP that offers faster speeds for the same or a little more money.
But I do wonder how much I will notice the extra speed. It won't be of the same order as I noticed the jump from dialup to broadband, but how much faster will it be? Will the bottleneck turn out to be the upstream infrastructure. I'm not sure, but I have a certain eagerness to find out.
And these guys seem to be offering 4Mb per second for £30 a month. If I would upgrade to this, my speed would be increasing by a factor of 8, compared to the factor of 9 it increased by when I went to ADSL in the first place. Perhaps I would notice another change of the same order. I must do this.
Update: What a foolish thing it was to praise virgin.net's service from a technical point of view. Their mail server went down almost instantly after I said that, and it has now been down for more than 24 hours.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Redirection
I have a piece on buying a new antenna for my mobile phone from a guy in Singapore, and what this says about global e-commerce at the retail level over at Samizdata.
I have a piece on buying a new antenna for my mobile phone from a guy in Singapore, and what this says about global e-commerce at the retail level over at Samizdata.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Everything in "Yes Minister" was true. The French are really like that
I watched the television series "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" when they were first shown on TV in Australia in the 1980s and very early 1990s. These television series travelled exceedingly well, because politics is fundamentally the same everywhere. What I did not realise at the time that I watched the episodes in Australia was that the episodes were often quite topical and were about real events, some that had happened the week that the program first aired in Britain. (I later read an interview with one of the writers in which he stated that he had initially been surprised that the series was so popular throughout the world, because he had considered it to be principally about topical British events)
In any event, there was an episode of "Yes, Prime Minister" about 15 years ago that dealt with the arrangements to do with the opening of the channel tunnel. These presumably were a response to events that had occurred in real life, but I was not in Britain at the time that the things that happened in real life happened, so I know nothing about it. In the television program, we discovered that however antagonistic to one another Sir Humprhey and Prime Minister Hacker usually were, they were capable of uniting against the true enemy - the French. In this episode the French president initially makes some rather uneven demands concerning national issues with respect to the tunnel: for instance that menus on the trains should be only in French, and that the territorial line should be at Dover and not in the middle of the tunnel, and things like that. Eventually the French commit a diplomatic faux pas and an agreement is reached that the territorial line will be in the centre of the channel, the menus will be in both languages etc etc.
And in reality the system functions smoothly. When you are in France announcements are in French followed by English, and when you are in England the announcements are in English followed by French. (They are in Dutch as well on trains to Belgium, but I forget the order).
However, when travelling to Paris a couple of weeks ago I discovered that the French do still appear to be expansionist. When travelling on a channel tunnel train you now go through immigration before getting on the train. Getting on in London there is a French policeman who examines your passport, and in Paris there is a British immigration official who does the same. As I have a non-EU passport, my passport has to be actually stamped as well as examined. And it is interesting to look at the stamps. And what do they say?
Well, the British stamp I received in Paris states that I entered the United Kingdom, and that the location at which I did so was "channel tunnel". The French stamp on the other hand says that I entered France in "Londres". So it seems that France may still be trying to annex London, although Britain doesn't seem terribly concerned about annexing Paris. This is exactly what Sir Humphrey would have predicted.
And what do I think of this? Well, I think I am with Shakespeare.
This star of England: Fortune made his sword;
By which the world's best garden be achieved,
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed.
I watched the television series "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" when they were first shown on TV in Australia in the 1980s and very early 1990s. These television series travelled exceedingly well, because politics is fundamentally the same everywhere. What I did not realise at the time that I watched the episodes in Australia was that the episodes were often quite topical and were about real events, some that had happened the week that the program first aired in Britain. (I later read an interview with one of the writers in which he stated that he had initially been surprised that the series was so popular throughout the world, because he had considered it to be principally about topical British events)
In any event, there was an episode of "Yes, Prime Minister" about 15 years ago that dealt with the arrangements to do with the opening of the channel tunnel. These presumably were a response to events that had occurred in real life, but I was not in Britain at the time that the things that happened in real life happened, so I know nothing about it. In the television program, we discovered that however antagonistic to one another Sir Humprhey and Prime Minister Hacker usually were, they were capable of uniting against the true enemy - the French. In this episode the French president initially makes some rather uneven demands concerning national issues with respect to the tunnel: for instance that menus on the trains should be only in French, and that the territorial line should be at Dover and not in the middle of the tunnel, and things like that. Eventually the French commit a diplomatic faux pas and an agreement is reached that the territorial line will be in the centre of the channel, the menus will be in both languages etc etc.
And in reality the system functions smoothly. When you are in France announcements are in French followed by English, and when you are in England the announcements are in English followed by French. (They are in Dutch as well on trains to Belgium, but I forget the order).
However, when travelling to Paris a couple of weeks ago I discovered that the French do still appear to be expansionist. When travelling on a channel tunnel train you now go through immigration before getting on the train. Getting on in London there is a French policeman who examines your passport, and in Paris there is a British immigration official who does the same. As I have a non-EU passport, my passport has to be actually stamped as well as examined. And it is interesting to look at the stamps. And what do they say?
Well, the British stamp I received in Paris states that I entered the United Kingdom, and that the location at which I did so was "channel tunnel". The French stamp on the other hand says that I entered France in "Londres". So it seems that France may still be trying to annex London, although Britain doesn't seem terribly concerned about annexing Paris. This is exactly what Sir Humphrey would have predicted.
And what do I think of this? Well, I think I am with Shakespeare.
This star of England: Fortune made his sword;
By which the world's best garden be achieved,
And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed.
Monday, February 07, 2005
Movies
I finally caught "The Aviator" over the weekend, and my good friend Jonathan Pearce is right: I really enjoyed it and it is a really good movie. Certainly it is Scorsese's best film since at least "Goodfellas".
I wonder how historically accurate it is. Fairly accurate, I suspect, but I am not sure quite how precise the details are. (The Spruce Goose did fly for longer at the end of the movie than it did in real life. It does boggle the mind that someone built an aircraft that large out of wood. It is still in a hangar in Los Angeles, and I must go and look at it next time I am in that city). The historical stuff about how the airline industry evolved is quite interesting, and fits in with what I know happened later. I know the history from the dawn of the jet age reasonably well, but didn't know much about what happened before that. Pan Am boss Juan Trippe is famous for later essentially making a bet with then Boeing boss Bill Allen on a yearly fishing trip that the two men took. The conversation supposedly went "If you build it, I'll buy it.". "If you buy it, I'll build it." and as a consequence Boeing built the 747 and almost sent both Boeing and Pan Am bankrupt by doing so.
In the movie, Howard Hughes is seen fighting for the airline TWA (which he owned) to be allowed to compete with Pan Am on major international routes, despite the fierce lobbying and dirty tricks of Pan Am and Pan Am boss Juan Trippe to prevent TWA from doing so. In the end he wins the argument, and TWA starts flying to Europe. It is quite refreshing to see a businessman being portrayed positively demanding the right to compete.
In reality, though, after the events of the film Pan Am and TWA were actually granted legal duopolies. Whether these came at the request of foreign airlines, Pan Am, TWA, or who I don't know, but it might be that Howard Hughes was not interested in more general competition, but was quite happy with a protected market as long as he was part of it. And of course in many instances the duopolies are still with us, although neither Pan Am or TWA exists as a company any more. (Pan Am's routes were bought by United and Delta before the company went into liquidation, and TWA's routes were bought by (mostly) American before the rump of the company was ultimately fully acquired by American).
Whatever may be said for Juan Trippe, one thing he had in common with Howard Hughes was that he had an enormous love for aeroplanes. When you see him in the film saying "We will force you to sell your airline and we will paint all those beautiful Connies in blue", you can see the two men understanding just how painful it would be to lose a fleet of aircraft like that. The Constellation (and the later and larger Super-Constellation) is regarded by a lot of people as one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built. Australian airline Qantas has one painted in their 1950s livery that they keep in airworthy condition to fly to air shows and use for other publicity purposes. I have seen it fly once or twice and it is indeed a thing of beauty.
I finally caught "The Aviator" over the weekend, and my good friend Jonathan Pearce is right: I really enjoyed it and it is a really good movie. Certainly it is Scorsese's best film since at least "Goodfellas".
I wonder how historically accurate it is. Fairly accurate, I suspect, but I am not sure quite how precise the details are. (The Spruce Goose did fly for longer at the end of the movie than it did in real life. It does boggle the mind that someone built an aircraft that large out of wood. It is still in a hangar in Los Angeles, and I must go and look at it next time I am in that city). The historical stuff about how the airline industry evolved is quite interesting, and fits in with what I know happened later. I know the history from the dawn of the jet age reasonably well, but didn't know much about what happened before that. Pan Am boss Juan Trippe is famous for later essentially making a bet with then Boeing boss Bill Allen on a yearly fishing trip that the two men took. The conversation supposedly went "If you build it, I'll buy it.". "If you buy it, I'll build it." and as a consequence Boeing built the 747 and almost sent both Boeing and Pan Am bankrupt by doing so.
In the movie, Howard Hughes is seen fighting for the airline TWA (which he owned) to be allowed to compete with Pan Am on major international routes, despite the fierce lobbying and dirty tricks of Pan Am and Pan Am boss Juan Trippe to prevent TWA from doing so. In the end he wins the argument, and TWA starts flying to Europe. It is quite refreshing to see a businessman being portrayed positively demanding the right to compete.
In reality, though, after the events of the film Pan Am and TWA were actually granted legal duopolies. Whether these came at the request of foreign airlines, Pan Am, TWA, or who I don't know, but it might be that Howard Hughes was not interested in more general competition, but was quite happy with a protected market as long as he was part of it. And of course in many instances the duopolies are still with us, although neither Pan Am or TWA exists as a company any more. (Pan Am's routes were bought by United and Delta before the company went into liquidation, and TWA's routes were bought by (mostly) American before the rump of the company was ultimately fully acquired by American).
Whatever may be said for Juan Trippe, one thing he had in common with Howard Hughes was that he had an enormous love for aeroplanes. When you see him in the film saying "We will force you to sell your airline and we will paint all those beautiful Connies in blue", you can see the two men understanding just how painful it would be to lose a fleet of aircraft like that. The Constellation (and the later and larger Super-Constellation) is regarded by a lot of people as one of the most beautiful aircraft ever built. Australian airline Qantas has one painted in their 1950s livery that they keep in airworthy condition to fly to air shows and use for other publicity purposes. I have seen it fly once or twice and it is indeed a thing of beauty.
Friday, February 04, 2005
How to reveal you are an idiot - part one of a series
The other day I was in a computer shop in Tottenham Court Road, and I overheard a customer explaining things about laptop screens to a person who he was shopping with.
"This one has an LCD screen, and this one has a TFT screen. See the difference?"
It is actually true that the terms "TFT" and "LCD" mean different things.
LCD means "Liquid Crystal Display", meaning that the each pixel works by having a voltage applied across a liquid crystal element, the opacity of the element varies in accordance with the voltage, and when a light is shone through it it appears light or dark depending on the voltage. (Colour displays work by having three crystal elements per pixel, each with a different coloured filter - one red, one green, one blue).
TFT means "Thin Film Transistor", meaning that there is a transistor attached to the back of each crystal element, which controls the voltage applied to that element. TFT is synonymous with "active matrix" when applied to LCD displays. TFT screens are sharper than old kinds of passive matrix LCD screen, and as a consequence passive matrix screens are no longer available on laptops.
Now it is also possible for Thin Film Transistors to be used to control other kinds of display besides LCDs. Some people are quite optimistic about a new display technology called Optical Electroluminescence (OEL), and prototype OEL displays generally do have the pixels controlled by Thin Film Transistors.
So, it is therefore technically true that not all LCD displays are TFTs, and also that not all TFTs are LCDs, but for practical purposes the two terms are synonymous, particularly when referring to laptop screens. So the person in the computer shop was doing a fine effort at demonstrating that he did not know anything.
The other day I was in a computer shop in Tottenham Court Road, and I overheard a customer explaining things about laptop screens to a person who he was shopping with.
"This one has an LCD screen, and this one has a TFT screen. See the difference?"
It is actually true that the terms "TFT" and "LCD" mean different things.
LCD means "Liquid Crystal Display", meaning that the each pixel works by having a voltage applied across a liquid crystal element, the opacity of the element varies in accordance with the voltage, and when a light is shone through it it appears light or dark depending on the voltage. (Colour displays work by having three crystal elements per pixel, each with a different coloured filter - one red, one green, one blue).
TFT means "Thin Film Transistor", meaning that there is a transistor attached to the back of each crystal element, which controls the voltage applied to that element. TFT is synonymous with "active matrix" when applied to LCD displays. TFT screens are sharper than old kinds of passive matrix LCD screen, and as a consequence passive matrix screens are no longer available on laptops.
Now it is also possible for Thin Film Transistors to be used to control other kinds of display besides LCDs. Some people are quite optimistic about a new display technology called Optical Electroluminescence (OEL), and prototype OEL displays generally do have the pixels controlled by Thin Film Transistors.
So, it is therefore technically true that not all LCD displays are TFTs, and also that not all TFTs are LCDs, but for practical purposes the two terms are synonymous, particularly when referring to laptop screens. So the person in the computer shop was doing a fine effort at demonstrating that he did not know anything.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Why 5.1 channel audio is good
When I was assembling my present Athlon 64 based PC, I initially couldn't get anything to appear on the screen. The motherboard would boot, the fans would spin, and then nothing would appear on the screen. (In the end, the solution was an extreme case of needing to kick myself for missing something obvious - socket 754 motherboards have a second 4 pin 12V power connector that provides power to the CPU and that needs to be plugged in in addition to the main 20 pin ATX connector, and the socket A motherboards I had previously assembled do not. And I didn't have the 12V connector connected). I am not a gamer, and as a consequence I didn't bother upgrading the graphics card, although most of the rest of the computer was new. As it happened though, bad case design had meant that I had had a little difficulty removing the graphics card from the previous machine, and I had forced it a little more than I would have liked in order to get it out. As a consequence, when the new machine did not work, I assumed that the problem was with the graphics card.
So, eager to get my new computer to start, I purchased a new graphics card. I did something I wouldn't normally do, and bought the card from my local retail park PC World, a branch of the evil Dixons group. (Okay, not actually evil, just clueless and stocked with a far too limited selection of seriously overpriced product. The description of the Vogons from The Hithhikers Guide to the Galaxy as "not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters" comes to mind, actually). I got some kind of 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600 that had been returned by somebody else for about £60 if I recall correctly.
Anyway, as I said, the graphics card turned out to not be the problem. Once I had the machine working on the original graphics card, I took the new card I had bought back to PC World in the condition they had sold it to me. Perfectly reasonably (given there was nothing wrong with the product they had sold me) they were not willing to give me a refund, but they were willing to allow me to exchange it for something else from the store. (So they perhaps weren't evil). However, the issue of the store being overpriced and badly stocked came up, and it took me a while to find anything I wanted. Eventually, I found a set of Creative 5.1 speakers for about the right right amount of money, and I bought them and took them home. Plugging them into the computer, I found two problems. Firstly, the OEM copy of Cyberlink PowerDVD that came with the DVD drive turned out to only support 2 channel audio. In order to listen to my DVDs with full six channel audio, I needed to get some extra audio codecs. (Does Windows XP media center edition come with extra audio codecs built in? Even if it does, it doesn't greatly matter because I have XP Home). Cyberlink had a variety of packages available. The cheapest including Dolby Digital 5.1 cost $20, but I went for the "every codec under the sun" package for $25 (mainly because I wanted to be able to listen to DTS soundtracks on those DVDs that have them). Okay, great.
Still, though, there was one problem. I did not bother buying a separate sound card for the PC, on the (ultimately correct) assumption that the on board 5.1 audio would be fine. The speaker system is connected to the computer via three 1/8th inch two channel audio connectors (mini-headphone jacks, basically) on the back panel. For some inexplicable reason, there are two conventions for the third connector (which handles the centre speaker and the sub-woofer) in such cases. Because the nature of these audio channels and the way they are amplified is so different, you can't simply reverse the speakers, as you could if there was any such confusion for any of the other channels. And the driver that came with the motherboard (and later versions on the VIA website) didn't allow the channels to be reversed in software. So rather than getting the dialogue out of the centre speaker (as is normal with most movies), I got a very garbled version of the dialogue out of the sub-woofer.
However, there was finally a solution. A bit of googling located a different set of drivers for the on-board audio system, which did allow me to properly reverse the audio channels. Finally I could listen to DVD soundtracks the way that god intended.
And what can I say? The audio is just beautiful. I have the full cinema soundtrack in all its surround sound, multichannel and low frequency effects glory to listen to when I am watchind DVDs on my lovely 19 inch Sony DVI display. The difference is noticeable and is immensely better than with lesser sound systems. (Many people use astonishingly crap speakers on their computers - this doesn't matter if you are only using the speakers for dignostic purposes, but if you are going to listen to music or watch movies you need better). I have a set of two channel speakers that are fine for music but not as good for movies, and I probably would have used these for the new computer if it were not for the fact that I had store credit to spent at PC World. While I am not happy that it took me as much effort as it did to get the computer to work, the end consequence was good, as it led me to buy a set of speakers that I would have bought had I known how good it would be to have them.
When I was assembling my present Athlon 64 based PC, I initially couldn't get anything to appear on the screen. The motherboard would boot, the fans would spin, and then nothing would appear on the screen. (In the end, the solution was an extreme case of needing to kick myself for missing something obvious - socket 754 motherboards have a second 4 pin 12V power connector that provides power to the CPU and that needs to be plugged in in addition to the main 20 pin ATX connector, and the socket A motherboards I had previously assembled do not. And I didn't have the 12V connector connected). I am not a gamer, and as a consequence I didn't bother upgrading the graphics card, although most of the rest of the computer was new. As it happened though, bad case design had meant that I had had a little difficulty removing the graphics card from the previous machine, and I had forced it a little more than I would have liked in order to get it out. As a consequence, when the new machine did not work, I assumed that the problem was with the graphics card.
So, eager to get my new computer to start, I purchased a new graphics card. I did something I wouldn't normally do, and bought the card from my local retail park PC World, a branch of the evil Dixons group. (Okay, not actually evil, just clueless and stocked with a far too limited selection of seriously overpriced product. The description of the Vogons from The Hithhikers Guide to the Galaxy as "not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters" comes to mind, actually). I got some kind of 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600 that had been returned by somebody else for about £60 if I recall correctly.
Anyway, as I said, the graphics card turned out to not be the problem. Once I had the machine working on the original graphics card, I took the new card I had bought back to PC World in the condition they had sold it to me. Perfectly reasonably (given there was nothing wrong with the product they had sold me) they were not willing to give me a refund, but they were willing to allow me to exchange it for something else from the store. (So they perhaps weren't evil). However, the issue of the store being overpriced and badly stocked came up, and it took me a while to find anything I wanted. Eventually, I found a set of Creative 5.1 speakers for about the right right amount of money, and I bought them and took them home. Plugging them into the computer, I found two problems. Firstly, the OEM copy of Cyberlink PowerDVD that came with the DVD drive turned out to only support 2 channel audio. In order to listen to my DVDs with full six channel audio, I needed to get some extra audio codecs. (Does Windows XP media center edition come with extra audio codecs built in? Even if it does, it doesn't greatly matter because I have XP Home). Cyberlink had a variety of packages available. The cheapest including Dolby Digital 5.1 cost $20, but I went for the "every codec under the sun" package for $25 (mainly because I wanted to be able to listen to DTS soundtracks on those DVDs that have them). Okay, great.
Still, though, there was one problem. I did not bother buying a separate sound card for the PC, on the (ultimately correct) assumption that the on board 5.1 audio would be fine. The speaker system is connected to the computer via three 1/8th inch two channel audio connectors (mini-headphone jacks, basically) on the back panel. For some inexplicable reason, there are two conventions for the third connector (which handles the centre speaker and the sub-woofer) in such cases. Because the nature of these audio channels and the way they are amplified is so different, you can't simply reverse the speakers, as you could if there was any such confusion for any of the other channels. And the driver that came with the motherboard (and later versions on the VIA website) didn't allow the channels to be reversed in software. So rather than getting the dialogue out of the centre speaker (as is normal with most movies), I got a very garbled version of the dialogue out of the sub-woofer.
However, there was finally a solution. A bit of googling located a different set of drivers for the on-board audio system, which did allow me to properly reverse the audio channels. Finally I could listen to DVD soundtracks the way that god intended.
And what can I say? The audio is just beautiful. I have the full cinema soundtrack in all its surround sound, multichannel and low frequency effects glory to listen to when I am watchind DVDs on my lovely 19 inch Sony DVI display. The difference is noticeable and is immensely better than with lesser sound systems. (Many people use astonishingly crap speakers on their computers - this doesn't matter if you are only using the speakers for dignostic purposes, but if you are going to listen to music or watch movies you need better). I have a set of two channel speakers that are fine for music but not as good for movies, and I probably would have used these for the new computer if it were not for the fact that I had store credit to spent at PC World. While I am not happy that it took me as much effort as it did to get the computer to work, the end consequence was good, as it led me to buy a set of speakers that I would have bought had I known how good it would be to have them.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Oh the Humanity
Something terrible is going on in Australia prior to and on our national day. Sausages are being recalled. How will we the nation cope?
Something terrible is going on in Australia prior to and on our national day. Sausages are being recalled. How will we the nation cope?
Monday, January 24, 2005
The foibles of the modern technological world
When I went from England to France on Saturday morning, the time was adjusted automatically from Greenwich Mean Time to Central European Time. (This was slightly confusing to me, as I was not expecting it. Presumably the GSM mobile phone standard or one of the additions that were made to it later allows the network to send a time signal, and my phone (a quad band GSM/GPRS Motorola v500) supports this feature. Presumably also one of the French networks that I connected to is transmitting such information, so the phone's time was adjusted. (I am permitted to roam to any of the three French networks, and I would have been connected to all three at various times, so it is only necessary for one network to be doing this).
However, when I came back to England, nothing happened. My phone is still set to French time. Presumably my home network - the Orange network in the UK - does not transmit time signal information. Therefore I have to reset the clock manually. It is normal for phones to be allowed to connect to any network when roaming in foreign countries, but only to their home network in their home country. Therefore whereas it is only necessary for one French network to be broadcasting a time signal for my clock to be adjusted when I go there, it is necessary for one specific network (Orange) to be broadcasting a time signal for my phone to be adjusted when I come back.
This is the worst of all possible worlds of course. If you use your mobile phone as a timepiece, you want its behaviour to be predictable. You want to know that either that it will reset itself automatically or it won't. A situation where it will reset itself sometimes but not at other times is not ideal.
And it must be a complete pain in the arse for people who (say) work in cross channel ferries and whose phones are constantly switching from English to French networks and back again.
When I went from England to France on Saturday morning, the time was adjusted automatically from Greenwich Mean Time to Central European Time. (This was slightly confusing to me, as I was not expecting it. Presumably the GSM mobile phone standard or one of the additions that were made to it later allows the network to send a time signal, and my phone (a quad band GSM/GPRS Motorola v500) supports this feature. Presumably also one of the French networks that I connected to is transmitting such information, so the phone's time was adjusted. (I am permitted to roam to any of the three French networks, and I would have been connected to all three at various times, so it is only necessary for one network to be doing this).
However, when I came back to England, nothing happened. My phone is still set to French time. Presumably my home network - the Orange network in the UK - does not transmit time signal information. Therefore I have to reset the clock manually. It is normal for phones to be allowed to connect to any network when roaming in foreign countries, but only to their home network in their home country. Therefore whereas it is only necessary for one French network to be broadcasting a time signal for my clock to be adjusted when I go there, it is necessary for one specific network (Orange) to be broadcasting a time signal for my phone to be adjusted when I come back.
This is the worst of all possible worlds of course. If you use your mobile phone as a timepiece, you want its behaviour to be predictable. You want to know that either that it will reset itself automatically or it won't. A situation where it will reset itself sometimes but not at other times is not ideal.
And it must be a complete pain in the arse for people who (say) work in cross channel ferries and whose phones are constantly switching from English to French networks and back again.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Still in Paris
It is a little after four on Sunday afternoon. I am in a faux-English brew pub near the French national library. The beer is good. The WiFi is free. I could go and explore a little more of the more remote bits of Paris, as I intended to when I arrived, or I could have a couple more pints, continue typing away, and watch Newcastle United play Arsenal on the big screen.
Life is hard.
It is a little after four on Sunday afternoon. I am in a faux-English brew pub near the French national library. The beer is good. The WiFi is free. I could go and explore a little more of the more remote bits of Paris, as I intended to when I arrived, or I could have a couple more pints, continue typing away, and watch Newcastle United play Arsenal on the big screen.
Life is hard.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Observation of the day
My mother's Pecan Pie recipe is a dangerous weapon. I should use it with care.
(Of course, as a cook, I generally take it as a compliment if the dishes from which I served the food are completely empty at the end of the evening).
My mother's Pecan Pie recipe is a dangerous weapon. I should use it with care.
(Of course, as a cook, I generally take it as a compliment if the dishes from which I served the food are completely empty at the end of the evening).
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Low cost airline update
It seems that Ryanair has recently added or is about to add flights not just to Porto from London but also to Santander and Santiago de Compostela. It looks like I visited that north and north western section of Iberia during its last summer of being largely free of Anglophones. (Do I mind this? Not really. I did really like the place, and it is now easy for me to visit bits of it (even for a weekend) without having to make absurd long distance journeys).
It seems that Ryanair has recently added or is about to add flights not just to Porto from London but also to Santander and Santiago de Compostela. It looks like I visited that north and north western section of Iberia during its last summer of being largely free of Anglophones. (Do I mind this? Not really. I did really like the place, and it is now easy for me to visit bits of it (even for a weekend) without having to make absurd long distance journeys).
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Redirection
I have a piece on visiting a strange and wonderful little piece of Japan that exists in north London over at Samizdata.
I have a piece on visiting a strange and wonderful little piece of Japan that exists in north London over at Samizdata.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
I suppose I am not a nerd king god for nothing
For undisclosed reasons I was in a really shocking mood yesterday, and I managed to be rude to a couple of people at work, before going home reasonably early. I had intended to do some blogging for Samizdata - I have a piece on Japanese food and how this relates to the interactions between the cultures of Tokyo and London to write - but somehow couldn't motivate myself to write it. Instead I sat down and repartitioned my hard drive and installed a 64 bit version of Linux on a new partition. (I will install the beta of the 64 bit version of Windows XP on another partition in due course).
Somehow this was very relaxing.
For undisclosed reasons I was in a really shocking mood yesterday, and I managed to be rude to a couple of people at work, before going home reasonably early. I had intended to do some blogging for Samizdata - I have a piece on Japanese food and how this relates to the interactions between the cultures of Tokyo and London to write - but somehow couldn't motivate myself to write it. Instead I sat down and repartitioned my hard drive and installed a 64 bit version of Linux on a new partition. (I will install the beta of the 64 bit version of Windows XP on another partition in due course).
Somehow this was very relaxing.
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