More geographical relocation
I am now at my parents place on the Gold Coast in Queensland, not far from Brisbane. I am going to be here for about a week, which is good because I don't think I can take any more plane trips for a little while.
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Monday, March 21, 2005
If it's Tuesday, it must be Sydney
I am now in an internet cafe in George Street in Sydney. Since I was here last, Australia has changed from being a "Short, Tall, Grande" country in Starbucks terms to being a "Tall, Grande, Venti" country. China and Hong Kong remain "Short, Tall, Grande" countries, however.
While on that, I forgot to redirect this little Samizdata piece on finding nerd heaven. This piece was actually posted over WiFi from a Starbucks in Shenzhen in China. (I was having a Grande triple shot latte at the time. I was fighting jetlag and really needed it).
I am now in an internet cafe in George Street in Sydney. Since I was here last, Australia has changed from being a "Short, Tall, Grande" country in Starbucks terms to being a "Tall, Grande, Venti" country. China and Hong Kong remain "Short, Tall, Grande" countries, however.
While on that, I forgot to redirect this little Samizdata piece on finding nerd heaven. This piece was actually posted over WiFi from a Starbucks in Shenzhen in China. (I was having a Grande triple shot latte at the time. I was fighting jetlag and really needed it).
Saturday, March 19, 2005
We haven't quite figured out the wireless business model.
I am now in an entirely different Starbucks clone in Hollywood Road. (The whole mid-levels / Hollywood Road / SoHo area in Hong Kong really is yuppie expat heaven). This one has free internet terminals for customers. This is a nice touch, and compliments to them. It also has wireless internet access. However, this is for pay wireless internet access. So it seems they will offer me a terminal plus internet access for nothing above the cost of a cup of coffee, but if I provide my own computer the internet access itself will cost money. That's a new one.
And yes, I do actually spend the majority of my time outside coffee shops, even when travelling. Really.
I am now in an entirely different Starbucks clone in Hollywood Road. (The whole mid-levels / Hollywood Road / SoHo area in Hong Kong really is yuppie expat heaven). This one has free internet terminals for customers. This is a nice touch, and compliments to them. It also has wireless internet access. However, this is for pay wireless internet access. So it seems they will offer me a terminal plus internet access for nothing above the cost of a cup of coffee, but if I provide my own computer the internet access itself will cost money. That's a new one.
And yes, I do actually spend the majority of my time outside coffee shops, even when travelling. Really.
I am in Hong Kong.
This is one of my very favourite cities in the world. Specifically, I am using a free hotspot in a Starbucks clone on a ferry pier on Hong Kong island. Today I have been to Cheung Chau island, and I am about to get an escalator to the mid levels. (Someone one expects that sentence to have been written by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World somewhere). More later.
This is one of my very favourite cities in the world. Specifically, I am using a free hotspot in a Starbucks clone on a ferry pier on Hong Kong island. Today I have been to Cheung Chau island, and I am about to get an escalator to the mid levels. (Someone one expects that sentence to have been written by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World somewhere). More later.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
My life is backed up
My Finnish readers will be delighted to hear that I have backed up the contents of my laptop hard drive onto this little box you see presently sitting on top of my desktop PC.
It is a Lacie 160Gb USB 2.0 external hard drive. On the outside it claims to have "Desgign by F.A. Porsche", but it just appears to be a bog standard Maxtor 160Gb 2Mb Cache hard drive in a box, presumably with some fairly simple IDE to USB interface in the box also. I am almost tempted to open it and take a look.
Except if course there are no obvious screws, so I am not sure how to open it. This must be that design by F.A. Porsche.
Maplin Electronics will sell me a box with the interface built into it into which people can install their own bog standard hard drives, but this seemed too much trouble. (Also, I didn't remember that until now).
My Finnish readers will be delighted to hear that I have backed up the contents of my laptop hard drive onto this little box you see presently sitting on top of my desktop PC.
It is a Lacie 160Gb USB 2.0 external hard drive. On the outside it claims to have "Desgign by F.A. Porsche", but it just appears to be a bog standard Maxtor 160Gb 2Mb Cache hard drive in a box, presumably with some fairly simple IDE to USB interface in the box also. I am almost tempted to open it and take a look.
Except if course there are no obvious screws, so I am not sure how to open it. This must be that design by F.A. Porsche.
Maplin Electronics will sell me a box with the interface built into it into which people can install their own bog standard hard drives, but this seemed too much trouble. (Also, I didn't remember that until now).
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
My life is on my non backed up hard drive
Yesterday, I read this interesting piece by Bruce Sterling discussing the fact that he has recently moved from Austin, Texas (where he has lived for many years) to Los Angeles where he is a visiting professor at a design school for a year, and he describes the fact that he no longer needs as many possessions as he once had, because a lot of the important stuff has been digitised.
As a rather itinerant and fairly tech-savvy person myself, I recognise this. My whole life is in my laptop, too. My television has barely been switched on in a year. (Here is a huge way in which younger people are different from older people - they don't watch television). Oddly, though, I haven't given up on television as an art form, but I have modified the way in which I watch it. For series television, I now buy the DVD sets of complete seasons of television series and watch them on my laptop. Television changed as an artform in the 1980s. Prior to that most episodes of most series had stand alone plots, whereas since then there has been much more continuity from episode to episode. (Steven Bocho is usually given a lot of the credit for this, although it may have been an inevitable reaction to the widespread adoption of the VCR). This works okay in the modern age of VCRs, PVRs, repeats and the like, but I think having the whole season on DVD at the same time is actually a better way to watch modern TV series. And the laptop makes it much easier to squeeze into the spare moments of my life. And I have a much greater choice as to what to watch and when.
And for watching sport on television I either go to a pub or I tend to put the game in a window at the top of the screen on my desktop computer, which has a digital TV card in one of its PCI slots. What would be good would be some way of watching lvie sporting events in a window on my laptop screen while I was travelling, but we are not there on that one yet. Some kind of digital TV card for a laptop (problematic with the sort of antenna one needs I think) or high speed streaming service over some sort of wireless internet connection would be useful. I am sure we will see it, but not immediately
But all my music, all my correspondence, things like details of airline bookings and insurance policies, address details of my friends, various pieces of personal writing that are of value to me - they are all on my laptop hard drive. If hard drive failure were to occur, it would cause major problems for me. And hard drives fail far more often than any other computer component, particularly laptop hard drives that get jostled around and suffer more physical shocks than desktop drives.
Which is slightly scary, because it isn't backed up at all. This is bad, but I fear not especially uncommon. Backing up a laptop hard drive is a nuisance. My laptop doesn't have a DVD burner (although my next one undoubtedly will), and CDs and (heaven forbid) floppies aren't really big enough. I could backup over my home network, but this is pretty slow too. I could unplug the laptop hard drive, plug it into my desktop and then copy at IDE connection speeds, but this is too much of a hassle to do regularly. Or I could get a large external USB or Firewire hard drive and backup to that.
Oddly, I also bumped into this article yesterday afternoon. It was a response to the fact that Fujitsu yesterday announced a 120Gb 2.5 inch hard disk for laptops, the largest yet available in that form factor. The argument is a little curious - it first gives one of those "Who on earth is going to have 120Gb of data on a laptop?" and then proceeds more to an argument that having drives that big will encourage people to put too much data on them and cause greater disasters when the hard drives fail, and the lack of easy backup solutions makes having big laptop hard drives bad rather than good. I can't really agree with this - I can think of plenty of cool new audiovisual applications that will work better with 120Gb than 60Gb, and the fact is that a great deal of data in this world isn't backed up, laptop or desktop. The author of the article does suggest an interesting solution though. Installing two hard drives in a laptop with a RAID-1 configuration. (This means having two drives with identical data on them, so that if one drive fails you simply save the data from the other).
I'm not sure that this is terribly practical though, because putting a second hard drive in a laptop would use additional space and would thus make the laptop bigger and would also cause the laptop to use more power, defeating some of the purpose of having a laptop by making it less portable. And there is an easy backup solution for laptops - the abovementioned USB external hard drives and regular backups. The fact is that the only reason most of our laptop hard drives have not been backed up is because we couldn't be bothered. Crippling our machines because our drives haven't been backed up strikes me as silly. The solution is instead to improve the quality of our backups, which can relatively easily be done. (On the other hand Toshiba has recently announced a 1.8 inch 80Gb hard drive and a 60Gb is already shipping, two of which would take up about the same space as one 2.5 inch drive. However, that would give up the improvements that could be gained in terms of size and power consumption by using only one 1.8 inch drive. Some subcompact laptops do use 1.8 inch drives for this reason).
Which leads to the question of what I should do myself. I could buy a USB external drive and backup my laptop hard drive regularly. Or I could move my life - all my archives of e-mail, documents I have written, addresses, important documents and everything else over to the desktop computer, add a second hard drive and RAID-1 to the desktop, and be absolutely secure.
But this is far less convenient than using a laptop for this. And I have to remember to transfer stuff that I develop and put on the laptop over to the desktop.
Sounds like work. But hard drive failure would be a disaster.
Yesterday, I read this interesting piece by Bruce Sterling discussing the fact that he has recently moved from Austin, Texas (where he has lived for many years) to Los Angeles where he is a visiting professor at a design school for a year, and he describes the fact that he no longer needs as many possessions as he once had, because a lot of the important stuff has been digitised.
When I was formerly a Texan author-journalist type rather than a Californian "visionary," I naturally lived like a pack rat. Then I drove my hybrid electric across I-10 to the gloriously unfurnished Pasadena pad over here, and I suddenly realized that I can thrive with something like 8% of my former possessions. Not that I've lost them. Basically – and this is the point for SXSW-I attendees – they've all been digitized. They got eaten by my laptop.
There's an Apple Store a block away, where Mr. Jobs is selling iPods like Amy sells waffle-cones when it hits 105 degrees. So, where're all my records and CDs? They're inside the laptop. DVD player? Laptop. Newspapers? I read Google News in the morning. Where're my magazines? I read Metropolis Online, I write stories for SciFi.com. Where's my TV? I got no TV: Compared to Web surfing on broadband wireless, watching a TV show is like watching ice melt. I tried real hard to sit down and watch a television dramatic episode recently – it felt like watching Vaudeville, with a trained dog act and a guy juggling plates. TV is dying right in front of us. It's become a medium for the brainwashed, the poor, and the semiliterate. Where's my fax machine? Laptop. Mailbox? Laptop. Filing cabinet? Laptop. Working desk? Laptop. Bank? Laptop. Place of business? Laptop. Most people I deal with have no idea I'm here in California. They'd never think to ask me. Why should they? They send e-mail, they get what they want, game over.
My laptop is even a library now; I've taken to reading books as e-text. For instance, a freeware, public domain version of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Silverado Squatters. This is the amusing real-life tale of a sci-fi novelist (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, etc.) marooned in 1880s California. Stevenson shows up in an abandoned California mining camp, where he immediately sees and uses his first telephone. The good folk of Cali, these grizzled miner 49ers, are already hip-deep into high tech telecommunications.
As a rather itinerant and fairly tech-savvy person myself, I recognise this. My whole life is in my laptop, too. My television has barely been switched on in a year. (Here is a huge way in which younger people are different from older people - they don't watch television). Oddly, though, I haven't given up on television as an art form, but I have modified the way in which I watch it. For series television, I now buy the DVD sets of complete seasons of television series and watch them on my laptop. Television changed as an artform in the 1980s. Prior to that most episodes of most series had stand alone plots, whereas since then there has been much more continuity from episode to episode. (Steven Bocho is usually given a lot of the credit for this, although it may have been an inevitable reaction to the widespread adoption of the VCR). This works okay in the modern age of VCRs, PVRs, repeats and the like, but I think having the whole season on DVD at the same time is actually a better way to watch modern TV series. And the laptop makes it much easier to squeeze into the spare moments of my life. And I have a much greater choice as to what to watch and when.
And for watching sport on television I either go to a pub or I tend to put the game in a window at the top of the screen on my desktop computer, which has a digital TV card in one of its PCI slots. What would be good would be some way of watching lvie sporting events in a window on my laptop screen while I was travelling, but we are not there on that one yet. Some kind of digital TV card for a laptop (problematic with the sort of antenna one needs I think) or high speed streaming service over some sort of wireless internet connection would be useful. I am sure we will see it, but not immediately
But all my music, all my correspondence, things like details of airline bookings and insurance policies, address details of my friends, various pieces of personal writing that are of value to me - they are all on my laptop hard drive. If hard drive failure were to occur, it would cause major problems for me. And hard drives fail far more often than any other computer component, particularly laptop hard drives that get jostled around and suffer more physical shocks than desktop drives.
Which is slightly scary, because it isn't backed up at all. This is bad, but I fear not especially uncommon. Backing up a laptop hard drive is a nuisance. My laptop doesn't have a DVD burner (although my next one undoubtedly will), and CDs and (heaven forbid) floppies aren't really big enough. I could backup over my home network, but this is pretty slow too. I could unplug the laptop hard drive, plug it into my desktop and then copy at IDE connection speeds, but this is too much of a hassle to do regularly. Or I could get a large external USB or Firewire hard drive and backup to that.
Oddly, I also bumped into this article yesterday afternoon. It was a response to the fact that Fujitsu yesterday announced a 120Gb 2.5 inch hard disk for laptops, the largest yet available in that form factor. The argument is a little curious - it first gives one of those "Who on earth is going to have 120Gb of data on a laptop?" and then proceeds more to an argument that having drives that big will encourage people to put too much data on them and cause greater disasters when the hard drives fail, and the lack of easy backup solutions makes having big laptop hard drives bad rather than good. I can't really agree with this - I can think of plenty of cool new audiovisual applications that will work better with 120Gb than 60Gb, and the fact is that a great deal of data in this world isn't backed up, laptop or desktop. The author of the article does suggest an interesting solution though. Installing two hard drives in a laptop with a RAID-1 configuration. (This means having two drives with identical data on them, so that if one drive fails you simply save the data from the other).
I'm not sure that this is terribly practical though, because putting a second hard drive in a laptop would use additional space and would thus make the laptop bigger and would also cause the laptop to use more power, defeating some of the purpose of having a laptop by making it less portable. And there is an easy backup solution for laptops - the abovementioned USB external hard drives and regular backups. The fact is that the only reason most of our laptop hard drives have not been backed up is because we couldn't be bothered. Crippling our machines because our drives haven't been backed up strikes me as silly. The solution is instead to improve the quality of our backups, which can relatively easily be done. (On the other hand Toshiba has recently announced a 1.8 inch 80Gb hard drive and a 60Gb is already shipping, two of which would take up about the same space as one 2.5 inch drive. However, that would give up the improvements that could be gained in terms of size and power consumption by using only one 1.8 inch drive. Some subcompact laptops do use 1.8 inch drives for this reason).
Which leads to the question of what I should do myself. I could buy a USB external drive and backup my laptop hard drive regularly. Or I could move my life - all my archives of e-mail, documents I have written, addresses, important documents and everything else over to the desktop computer, add a second hard drive and RAID-1 to the desktop, and be absolutely secure.
But this is far less convenient than using a laptop for this. And I have to remember to transfer stuff that I develop and put on the laptop over to the desktop.
Sounds like work. But hard drive failure would be a disaster.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Tuesday evening song lyrics
Summer Son by Texas, from the 1999 album "The Hush".
I'm tired of telling the story
Tired of telling it your way
Yeah I know what I saw
I know that I found the floor
Before you take my heart, reconsider
Before you take my heart, reconsider
I've opened the door
I've opened the door
Here comes the summer's son
He burns my skin
I ache again
I'm over you
I thought I had a dream to hold
Maybe that has gone
Your hands reach out and touch me still
But this feels so wrong
Before you take my heart, reconsider
Before you take my heart, reconsider
I've opened the door
I've opened the door
Here comes the summer's son
He burns my skin
I ache again
I'm over you
Here comes the winter's rain
To cleanse my skin
I wake again
I'm over you
Before you take my heart, reconsider
Before you take my heart, reconsider
I've opened the door
I've opened the door
Here comes the summer's son
He burns my skin
I ache again
I'm over you
Here comes the winter's rain
To cleanse my skin
I wake again
I'm over you
Here comes the summer's son
He burns my skin
I ache again
I'm over you
Here comes the winter's rain
To cleanse my skin
I wake again
I'm over you
Summer Son by Texas, from the 1999 album "The Hush".
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Back in London
Brief thoughts.
1) The Millau viaduct is simply mindblowing. You may know in advance how big and how high it is in terms of numbers, but when you see it it really blows you away. I have seen a lot of great works of engineering, but I cannot remember the last time I saw one that was simply as awe inspiring as this one.
2) After visiting places that produce fine food and drink, I have a tendency to buy the product in question in the shop on the way out. Rather predictably, this happened in Roquefort this afternoon. I thus have an impractically large block of cheese in my refrigerator.
3) In terms of what are the places where I have eaten the most overpriced food of the worst quality, the restaurant in the terminal at Toulouse airport this evening is going to be very hard to beat. (Many airport restaurants score highly on this score. None the less I recommend the airports at Rome and Bilbao as places where I have eaten excellent, reasonably priced food. It can be done.
4) Air travel is in many ways horrible. I had quite a few hassles and delays on this trip, and it was a little trying. None the less, for what it is it remains remarkable. This afternoon I drove across the Millau viaduct and went on a tour of somee of the caves in which cheese is ripened in Roquefort. Later I ate badly and expensively in Toulouse. I am now in my bed back in London.
Brief thoughts.
1) The Millau viaduct is simply mindblowing. You may know in advance how big and how high it is in terms of numbers, but when you see it it really blows you away. I have seen a lot of great works of engineering, but I cannot remember the last time I saw one that was simply as awe inspiring as this one.
2) After visiting places that produce fine food and drink, I have a tendency to buy the product in question in the shop on the way out. Rather predictably, this happened in Roquefort this afternoon. I thus have an impractically large block of cheese in my refrigerator.
3) In terms of what are the places where I have eaten the most overpriced food of the worst quality, the restaurant in the terminal at Toulouse airport this evening is going to be very hard to beat. (Many airport restaurants score highly on this score. None the less I recommend the airports at Rome and Bilbao as places where I have eaten excellent, reasonably priced food. It can be done.
4) Air travel is in many ways horrible. I had quite a few hassles and delays on this trip, and it was a little trying. None the less, for what it is it remains remarkable. This afternoon I drove across the Millau viaduct and went on a tour of somee of the caves in which cheese is ripened in Roquefort. Later I ate badly and expensively in Toulouse. I am now in my bed back in London.
Friday, March 04, 2005
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?
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?
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.
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