computer haiku

Various people have sifted through technical manuals with a syllable-counting program to find accidental haikus in them. There's one that seems to sum up my experience with all sorts of complex machines beautifully:

I suppose you have
to fiddle around a bit
to get this working

posted @ 6:58 PM -

Tory rebranding

Apparently the Conservative Party are rebranding as the party of the vulnerable and socially excluded, filling the vacuum left by Labour's transformation into the party of big business. I would like to believe them - after all this gap is more than a market niche, it's something that needs to be better spoken for in parliament - but there just doesn't seem to be any reason to. It's just the latest confirmation that politicians will say whatever their market research reccommends them to say, regardless of what they believe. And then they wonder why election turn-outs keep dropping....

posted @ 4:01 PM -

data paranoia

Worried about how secure your web hosting will be in the event of global thermo-nuclear war? Never mind, just use The Bunker

posted @ 2:09 PM -

stupid, stupid, stupid

posted @ 8:14 AM -

ABCNEWS.com : U.S. Will Hold 2,400 Warheads in Short-Term Reserve

I really thought the days of mutually assured destruction were behind us, but here's another announcement that makes it clear they are not....

posted @ 5:57 AM -

Mobiles phones and driving

A new study reports what I've suspected for a long time - mobile phones impair peoples' driving severely. And people still consider it an infringement of their freedom when banning talking on the phone while driving is suggested....

posted @ 12:27 PM -

Someone's trying to do this to my computer. My firewall has managed to stop them from actually crashing the machine, but it's slowed my internet connection to a crawl, and I may just have to go offline and wait until I get a new IP address (usually happens if I stay offline for an hour or two and then reconnect). It's very very annoying.

Whoever it is, it's not big and it's not clever. It's the lowest of script kiddie attacks that doesn't prove the slightest bit of intelligence on your part, doesn't give you anything, and isn't even working the way it's supposed to. All you've managed to do is irritate me. Please stop.

posted @ 9:23 AM -

Rebuilding Afghanistan

Jack Straw is not generally my favourite person. He's not even my favourite New Labour politician, and that's saying something, but today I read an article by him which I was highly impressed by.

The basic premise is If the main challenge throughout the 20th century came from states with too much power, the chief problem of the 21st may be states with too little, from which he goes on to develop a strong argument for not just leaving Afghanistan when the war is over, but actually taking the trouble to rebuild the country. There's a key sentence which is the main reason why I wanted to link to the story: An engaged global foreign policy is not a salve to liberal consciences but a survival mechanism for all societies.

None of this is really news, but it's nice to hear it from the foreign secretary of my country.

posted @ 4:50 AM -

you say you want a revolution....

I've been to 2 absolutely fascinating communist gatherings in the past week. One was a presentation by 2 Cuban youth activists about Cuba and the US blockade, and the other was by 3 UK activists about their recent tour of the DPR Korea. I must admit I actually find it amazing that there are still revolutionaries in this country, considering that the late 80s saw the very public failure of most of the world's Communist regimes, but of course they have explanations for all that, and of course they are eager to paint as rosy a picture as possible of the remaining Communist countries in the world. How far I believe them is quite different for the two countries.

Cuba

I have a fairly high opinion of Cuba, in that I know several people who have been there themselves, and there do seem to be many good things to say about the country. It's not wealthy, but considering that the huge market on its doorstep is closed off by the absurd US blockade it's done pretty well, and more striking than that is the high standard of living in relation its poverty. On objective indicators like adult literacy and life expectancy (which I have always felt are far better measures of quality of life than GNP) Cuba is not that far behind the UK, in spite of the fact that its economic indicators are close to the other Caribbean countries (where life expectancies are barely over 50).

We were treated to an interesting talk about the place by 2 Cubans, which felt much more like "hey look at how proud I am of my lovely homeland" than any political indoctrination. Then there was a question and answer session, which was actually quite irritating, but I'll come back to that later. One of my friends asked what the Cuban's had to say about Amnesty's criticisms of Cuba over the imprisonment of dissidents, and the answers were not really very satisfying - US attempts to undermine Cuba were used as justification. If it wasn't acceptable for McCarthy to lock up commies (and I can think of few bleaker periods in US history) then it also isn't acceptable for Castro to lock up non-commies. The same standard must apply....

All in all I was left with a slight reinforcement of the positive image I already had of Cuba, but still some nagging questions. I'm 100% convinced Cubans are better off because of the overthrow of Batista and the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, but would they have been even better off with a more open system of government? Freedom of speech seems to be regarded as a worthwhile thing to sacrifice in exchange for the achievements of the revolution, but is it really, considering that free speech and open government are the only long term restrictions on government excesses? What's going to happen when Castro dies - will someone emerge to be a Stalin to his Lenin, will the country gradually open up like China, or will his successor be a carbon copy like the two Kims in the DPRK? If Cuba is so great and that really is the whole picture, why do so many Cubans risk so much trying to get to Florida?

Democratic People's Republic of Korea

The DPRK is quite another matter. I have as yet to meet anybody from there, and the only people I know who have been there are themselves Marxists, so don't exactly amount to unbiased sources. I also don't know much about the place - these next couple of paragraphs will distil most of my knowledge, which you will probably agree is not very impressive. The impression I do have is that life is much harder for a North Korean than for a Cuban, and was that way even before the series of natural disasters in the late 90s that caused the dramatic food shortage.

The presentation was by a motley crew of local communists (up until 6 months ago I had never met anyone who would actually call themselves a communist) who had recently been to North Korea on a delegation. This of course means that they were hardly the most unbiased of observers, they couldn't really have that much of an idea of how living in the country feels (it's pretty clear from my own travels that a week in a country gives one some sort of flavour, but a limited one), and they would have been shown what their hosts (the government) wanted them to see.

They had some pretty good things to report, particularly about the DPRK's attitude to education - the central library (Grand People's Study House - picture below) Pyongyang which amounts to a far more genuinely open University than anything I've seen or heard about elsewhere. As well as a vast collection of books (including lots of books donated by overseas residents) and reading rooms, as any national library would have, there are open lectures, video-taped and TV broadcast lectures, and 'question-and-answer rooms' where authorities on particular subjects sit and wait for any individual to walk in and ask a question about anything, which they then have to do their best to answer.



In general Pyongyang sounds (and looks) like a good place (I don't want to say anything stronger than that on the basis of a few photos and a few highly biased opinions), but it was pretty clear that the delegation had not been anywhere else in Korea. At the risk of being over-cynical, that does sound awfully like they were just allowed to see the showpiece capital, and how shall I put this? If I were to show a Korean the City of London and nowhere else they'd have a pretty distorted image of the UK.....

Communists in the 21^st Century

What I actually found most interesting about both events were the people there. For starters there weren't many. I can't say I mourn the lack of interest in an ideal that has been tried and tested in living memory and found seriously lacking, but I do think it's a shame that people show so little interest in politics in general and in other countries' ways of life and ideas. After all, I wasn't there to hear things I agree with, I was there to educate myself about how a group of other people see the world.

I asked a question at the North Korea meeting (I wanted a simple clarification about the status of Korea between WW2 and the Korean War, just in terms of whether it was one country or two, but got a long lecture about how terrible life was at that time), and the chair pointed out (actually quite irrelevantly to the question, but just because he knows I don't share his beliefs) that he tends to assume the audience at such things consists entirely of Marxist-Leninists and sometimes he's wrong. Obviously he's not wrong that often, or he'd stop making the assumption....

This leads me on to my final observation, which is that people go to such things expecting to preach to the converted. Quite apart from being pointless, this lets people slip into really uselessly poor debating habits. The example that struck me most was when my friend asked about Amnesty's criticisms of Cuba. The Cuban delegate tried to answer his question, and while I wasn't very impressed with the answer I appreciated that the question had been addressed, and to some extent the disagreement was a clash of values. After that, the next half hour or so (until the chair finally banned further comments about Amnesty because they were such a dead end) was taken up by audience member after audience member (in spite of the small numbers - just about everyone felt they had to weigh in on this) criticising Amnesty, and targetting the criticisms quite personally at my friend. Not only were many of the criticisms plain wrong (they were very fond of using Amnesty's alleged refusal to criticise the US as 'proof' of Amnesty's non-neutrality, conveniently ignoring the fact that Amnesty frequently and vitriolically criticise the US), but more importantly they were completely irrelevant to the original point. Having been impressed by the presentation I was seriously fed up with the audience by the time the event finally wound up (I didn't want to walk out because it was as anthropologically interesting as it was irritating)....

I have loads more to say on these subjects, but I'm not convinced anyone else will even be interested in what I've written so far, this is possibly my longest post ever, and I'm losing patience with my computer, which crashed halfway through writing this, so I'll sign off now

posted @ 6:28 PM -

Ugandan testicle attack wife held

posted @ 9:54 AM -

am I going to Bristol or am I not? It's a little complicated now, because the project I should have been working on has been cancelled. I have to go back there on Friday to meet various people and see which of 2 possible alternatives appeals more. I think that I will get whichever I prefer out of these 2 (one of which definitely is interesting; I'm less sure about the other), but it's just a bit disappointing when I was sure I was going and now there is some uncertainty.

posted @ 7:40 AM -

HP merger

Of course I would choose my moment to go off and joing HP well, wouldn't I.... The shareholders will be voting tomorrow on whether the company should merge with Compaq, and only the interested parties are even claiming to have a clue which way the vote will go, while everyone else just concedes it will be a close run thing. I have no access to any privileged information about this - so far I've spent one afternoon at HP Labs, and the only people there who ventured any sort of prediction at all expected it to be as close as the last US Presidential ballot.

What I'm more interested in, seeing as the vote will be tomorrow and the results will be announced before I start work there (I'm still not sure of the exact date, but I'm expecting that to be 4-6 weeks away), is what either result will actually imply for the company. I'm only going there on a short term placement (finishing in early September), and HP Labs don't have an obvious duplication at Compaq, so I have little to worry about personally, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out. I have to say that the media are not optimistic: ZDNet reckon the whole process leading up to this vote has been damaging, The Economist couldn't disagree more about the process, reckoning the open-ness of debate to be very healthy, but is cautious about what a merger would actually achieve, and the Bay Area Mercury is totally set against the deal.

As for my own opinion, I really don't have a clue. I've read sensible sounding arguments about how the company needs to be bigger to challenge the likes of IBM, and I've read sensible sounding arguments about how the two companies will lose too much time over the actual organisation of the merger. In the end I'm as unsure about which would be the better result as I am about which will happen....

And as a postscript, while I was typing this I noticed another story from CNN Money, which implies that the vote-counting process will be even more complicated than for governmental elections, because each shareholder can send in successive different votes, each superseding the last, so the counters have to first make sure they only count the latest vote from each shareholder.

posted @ 12:59 PM -

is the web dragging down journalistic writing quality?

I'm getting increasingly annoyed by the shoddy standard of online journalism. I don't mean in terms of research or argument, because I don't think those are any worse online than on paper, but just poor presentation. There's lazy typography - subheadings in the same font and style as the body text - and generally appalling grammar and punctuation, not to mention spelling which is particularly inexcusable with the ubiquity of automated spelling checkers. What winds me up most though is when stories are just not finished properly, descending into the sort of note-form arguments that I would only expect to see at the end of exam papers.

Is it just me or is the general standard of writing and presentation in online news sources far worse than in newspapers?

posted @ 10:23 AM -

well I was going to write more today but I decided that getting a good long night's sleep is actually more important. Must start snoring before midnight or else my carriage will turn into a pumpkin. Or something.

posted @ 6:54 PM -

the end of an era

well, for me personally at least. My last term of being taught at Sussex finished on Friday, so after 6 years I will no longer have another seminar there. I have pretty close to the mix of feelings I expected to have about this - there's loads of good things about the place that I will miss, and particularly a significant number of people I like enough to miss but don't know well enough to expect to stay in contact with, but at the same time my flying of the nest is a year or so overdue. I'm only just beginning to appreciate how good a break this could be, because I'm also only just beginning to recover from a hectic term followed by two nights of unusual decadence (by my fairly tame standards at least).

The coming week is mostly time off for me, because I need it badly. I also need to sort my general health out - I'm not unwell, but I could be much healthier than I am right now - so I'll be swimming every morning, going to as much kung fu as I can, and probably laying off the booze till next weekend. No dramatic measures, because there's nothing that wrong, but I just feel a bit fat and bloated and lethargic, and I need to reverse that before the lethargy increases to the point where it's difficult to fix. Meanwhile I do have a return visit to Bristol on the agenda, hopefully this coming week, and a day of 'cultural awareness' training (probably a waste of time, but if it has any substance it could be helpful when I go travelling and if I end up working or studying abroad) to go to. I'm also really really looking forward to fixing the photos section of this site, and processing more pictures. If I get everything that's waiting in the queue online there'll be about double the number of photos there....

I've got lots more to write, as I weigh up what the future now holds for me (a very different and somewhat better picture than a week ago), but I've also been neglecting my friends, so I think I'll intersperse phone calls and personal emails to people with further posts here.

posted @ 2:50 PM -