Michael Jennings

Oooh

Roger Ebert has published another of my e-mails in his letters column. I have lost count how many times he has done this, but it is at least seven or eight I think. This time he only published to first part of the e-mail. I added some stories about buying Thunderbirds toys for children of friends of mine in Japan, but he doesn't appear to have had the space to print that.

Wednesday evening song lyrics

I never liked George Michael much
although they say he was the talented one.
Andrew Ridgley drew the map
that rescued me, took me to paradise

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

I had a tooth pulled as a child
I put it underneath my pillow
and when I looked the very next morning
There was a ten pound note

I took it to the nearest record shop
and put it down upon the counter
I've got to tell you what I know to be true
I bought my first record because of you

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

I loved everything
I loved to be around money
a daughter of negative equity
a child of Black Wednesday)

This is Sarah Nixey talking
Midi'd up and into the groove
I've got to tell you
what I know to be true

I didn't do too well at school
they said I couldn't concentrate
The day you flew off into the sunset
was the day my education was saved

then years later on Kensington High Street
I saw you drive a white convertible Golf GTI
carefully edging out into the traffic
just like a real live human being

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

Daddy lost everything
Our beautiful house
His beautiful sports car
His beautiful wife
I held his hand and told him
everything will be all right

This is Sarah Nixey talking
Midi'd up and into the groove
I've got to tell you
what I know to be true

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

-- Andrew Ridgley, from Black Box Recorder's third album Passionoia (2003). (Actually I think it is more Luke Haines speaking). And yes, I also remember 1992.

Redirection:

I have a Samizdata quote of the day on John Kerry. No time for any more blogging than that today.

Efficiency

At the request of a potential employer, I have been giving myself a crash course in the programming language S (the most common variants of which are named S+ and R, just to confuse people). I am an old C programmer, mainly, and this language is much higher level than that. Plus it is object oriented and more more function based than what I am used to. Still, this is quite impressive, and very easy to code.

qsort=function(a) if (length(a)<=1) a else c(qsort(a[a<a[1]]),a[1],qsort(a[a>a[1]]))

That's right, one line. Works for an array of any data type for which the logical comparison a<b makes sense, too.

Civilization

A new continental (or, more properly, just Belgian I think) style bar named the "Beer Circus" has recently opened in Croydon. It has around 15 Czech, Belgian,English (ie real ale) beers on tap, and over 150 bottled beers (mostly Belgian, but also a good selection of German and a few from other places).

Truly, a fine innovation. I asked the proprieter how long the bar had been open, and he said a couple of months, and that the business was doing very well.

Of course, it would be impossible for me to open such a bar in Sydney, as I would have to have a pub licence and these are finite in number and sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars each (thus meaning that if you have one, you have to open a huge soulless establishment also containing lots of slot machines to make a decent return on it). There would be no problem whatsoever if I wanted to open such an establishment in Melbourne, as former premier Jeff Kennett (who, whatever might be said for the man, didn't take any shit from anyone) reformed the laws a few years back.

No problem except for the logistical difficulties of importing the beer, anyway. If you want to run such a bar in London, you can stock it by driving a van to Belgium every now and then, filling it up with beer, and driving back. (Plus you have to then do some paperwork to make sure the appropriate taxes are paid). Doing that from Australia is a little harder.

Annoyances

Until recently, instant messaging has been dominated by programs such as MSN Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messaging. Until about a year ago I didn't bother with such programs, believing that real mean use IRC, or possibly the UNIX "talk" program. However, about a year ago, I gave in and started using these programs. (For anyone who is interested, I can be reached as "mjj12@btopenworld.com" on MSN Messenger, and "mjj122" on Yahoo instant Messenger).

Both these programs are based on centralised servers. There is a centralised database of information about you, and this centralised information also includes a contact list. When you log on from any computer in the world, your contact list is loaded onto your computer and appears on your screen. The downside is that the owner of the system has a centralised database of information about you, and that if something goes wrong with the server, you are screwed. Also, for high bandwidth communication such as voice (which these instant messaging programs also offer) going through a central server is perhaps not ideal from an efficiency point of view.

Which is why people on the internet have taken to Skype in a big was recently. Skpe is sold as principally a voice communication tool, with instant messaging as a secondary feature whereas earlier services have sold it the other way round, but I think a better way of looking at it is that Skype is the same sort of application with two things changed: firstly it uses a far better audio codec so the quality of voice communication is much better; secondly it is not centralised but is instead peer to peer; (thirdly it is also encrypted end to end, and this is good, but I think it is less important as a selling point).

The peer to peer part is good from the point of efficiency and privacy, but it causes one little foible. Because there is no central server, your contacts list can only be stored locally on your hard disk. (Also because there is no central server, the information that you have gone on or off line takes longer to reach all your contacts, as it has to propagate around the network to them via a non-direct route, too. Again, this is important but less of an issue than the first). This means that if you log on to Skype from a computer other than your usual one, you do not have your contacts list with you. Personally I have thre Skype installations in this room with me now: one on a laptop, one on the Windows partition of my desktop, and a third on the Linux partition of my desktop. (Another good thing about Skype is that the people behind it have done a Linux version, for which they have my sincere thanks). These have contacts lists consisting of different subsets of my actual list of contacts. I am slightly concerned about logging onto each and adding the same set of contacts again, because I think it may annoy my friends if they are asked repeatedly if I may add them as a contact. (Actually, if Skype is well designed then they will not be asked again, but I am not sure if it is in this regard).

The Skype people claim they are working on a solution to this type of problem. Hopefully this does not involve going back to the whole idea of a central server, but I fear it may. Thems the breaks, I guess.

Observation of the day

Cheap wine from Spain is often much better than cheap wine from France. Maybe this is due to the fact that when you visit Spain, Spanish people seem to start drinking red wine at breakfast time and then keep going all day, whereas in this day and age French people don't so much. I suspect that they did a century ago, however. If they did, does this mean that there has been a decline in French low end winemaking over the last century? Or is the relatively low quality of cheap French wine why they stopped?

Australia on the other hand doesn't really do cheap wine, or at least Australia does not export cheap wine. Australia does mid market wine, and has great quality control. (Australia also occasionally does fine wine, but only to a fairly small extent compared to the French or the Italians). The Australian wine industry's great triumph over the last 20 years is to have put its mid market wines on the British market (and to a lesser extent other markets such as Germany, Scandinavia and the United States) and to have moved people who were drinking low end French wine (or who weren't drinking wine at all) to mid market Australian wines.

And when I have more money (very soon, I hope) I may move back to mid market wines. But for now I am drinking a bottle of DOC Navarra 2002 for which I paid about 3ドル.50. This is no great sacrifice, because it is really quite pleasant.

Buying OEM hardware and software, and does this mean the high street model of Dixon/PCWorld is doomed?

I have expressed my frustration with the poor service and the ludicrous prices that one pays on the British high street before. On that occasion I observed that the retail electronics business is even worse than most. Part of this is that electronics is something that a lot of customers do not know very much about, and as a consequence many people are intimidated by salesmen. More of it is that for a variety of reasons it is very difficult to open competing high street stores in the UK, and this leads to rather questionable sales tactics. That subset of the electronics industry known as the computer industry is even worse, at least it is on the high street. The good thing is that the computer revolution itself has also opened alternative channels that are much more competitive.

One favourite tactic is for electronics and computer stores to advertise a product at a genuinely cheap price. However, when you get it out of the box it comes without a cable to connect it to your computer / home entertainment system / telephone socket / refrigerator. The store will have an appropriate cable available, but they will charge you some extraordinary number of pounds for a cable that costs a few pence to make. They make little money if any on the product, but the cable is almost entirely profit. The customer in many cases realises that there is something absurd about the price being charged, but lacks the technical knowledge to buy the right cable somewhere else. And in any event he doesn't know where the "somewhere else" is that he might buy it, as the high street isn't precisely full of alternate retail channels. The answer is that you can buy appropriate things in many weekend and weekday markets, computer fairs, sometimes little shops run by immigrants in downmarket areas of town. And of course you can buy them on the internet, but often the cost of shipping will cancel out the price advantage unless you buy something else at the same time and share the shipping costs. Another option is to go to a large branch of Tesco that sells a lot of goods in addition to food, where a good selection of such items are often found at very reasonable prices. But once again one must understand first what one needs.

(Shipping without a cable is actually more forgivable in high end products where there might be seven different connection options and nobody but you knows which one you are going to use. However, high end products usually ship with the cable for the simplest option. It is low end ones with only one option that most often ship without a cable).

Sometimes things get ridiculous. I have seen standard USB cables that sell for 15,ドル and I have seen standard telephone cables that sell for 8ドル or more. (Amusingly, in the latter case I also saw a telephone (that in this instance did include a cable) for sale in the same shop for 7ドル).

And it isn't just cables. If you go into Dixons or PC World (a chain of stores that belongs to the Dixons group and devotes itself entirely to computer stuff) then it is pretty normal for prices for large headline products to be vaguely reasonable although still substantially more than you can pay if you know how to shop round (and for prices of sale goods to sometimes be actually good), but for the prices of accessories such as PCI cards, networking hardware, memory and the like to be absolutely outrageous. Such items come in fancy packaging, sometimes look like they are gold plated, and the prices are just ridiculous.

As an example, I have just had to buy a PCI Firewire card for the computer I built recently for my landlady. It was a fairly common problem. She bought a digital video camera (for a good price, but not the latest model), discovered that the only way to connect it to her computer was via Firewire, and discovered that her new computer did not have a Firewire port. When writing this post I initially digressed to explain what the Firewire bus is, why Digital Video cameras often use it instead of USB (although not so much as they used to), why many PCs don't have Firewire as standard, and why the one I built didn't have it. However, this was too much of a digression so I posted it on Michael Jennings Extra). This was no huge problem, of course. I simply ordered a PCI Firewire card (cable included) from one of my favourite online suppliers for 13ドル.99 including postage, opened up the case of the computer and popped the card in one of the PCI slots. No trouble. Quite inexpensive.

However, imagine if my landlady had a computer without a Firewire port. She might well have popped into her local PC World, and explained the problem. What they would have done was steered her over to the section of the shop that sold PCI Firewire cards, picked one off the shelf. This Firewire PCI card came with gold coloured connectors, came in a very fancy looking package, and it cost 29ドル.99. Of course, it did not include a cable. On the next shelf, the salesman would have picked up a similarly packaged Firewire cable with gold coloured connectors, which cost 19ドル.99. So that is 50ドル. And of course, most people are not confident enought to open their PC case and take a bracket off the back of the case, and install a PCI card. So PC World would then have offered to install the card for another 20ドル or 30ドル (for five minutes work). So, the upgrade in this case would have cost 70ドル or 80,ドル about five times what it should have.

It's great if you can get away with that sort of thing.

Hardware and software manufacturers have long gone along with these sorts of practices, and typically they package their products in two different ways to take advantage. There is the "retail" version, which comes in fancy packaging and has connecters that are often gold in colour rather than silver because this looks good, and which costs ridiculous prices. And then there is also the "OEM" (Original Equipment Manufacturer) version, which comes in less fancy packaging (Often just a brown or white box), and is intended to be sold to PC builders and other tech savvy individuals. OEM products always include the necessary cables, screws, etc, because the customers (people who know what they are doing) are people who now how to go somewhere else. For all practical purposes the products are usually the same (although the licence conditions are sometimes different with software), and there are sometimes restrictions requiring you to buy other things at the same time to be eligible for OEM stuff. If you buy stuff on the internet you often get OEM stuff, because people who buy stuff this way know what they are doing and because customers cannot see the packaging anyway. (When "retail" versions are sold on the internet, they are often sold for much the same prices as "OEM" stuff). And if you buy stuff at a computer fair, you once again often get OEM stuff, which is what happens when your customers know what they are doing.

But, in the retail channels, something interesting is afoot. I will keep talking about PC World. In the back of many of the chain's shops, you now find a "component centre" which basically sells OEM stuff. I think the issue was that people like me would walk into a PC World store, and regardless of how quickly they needed it would not pay 50ドル for a Firewire Card and cable, because the cost was so outrageous. Often though, we would be prepared to pay a little extra for a product right now rather than waiting to receive it over the internet. So, we now have the "component centre" at PC World, sells basically identical stuff to what is sold elsewhere in the shop but without fancy packaging. (The component centre also sells motherboards, cases, power supplies, and other things for PC builders). For instance, they had a Firewire Card with a cable for 19ドル.99. Not as cheap as I would get it at a website or computer fair, but cheap enough that I would probably be prepared to buy it if I needed one in a hurry. (If I was providing service for people's PCs and they needed this installed right now, once again it would be cheap enough for me to do this). A simple Firewire cable was about 5ドル.00, once again quite reasonable, but not the cheapest one could find anywhere.

Presumably, if a not technological savvy person stumbles into PC world, they will be taken to the expensive, fancily packaged stuff. However, rather than turn a technically savvy person away they will now lead him to the component centre.

(I suspect that the component centre is also for such things as smart 15 year olds who want to build their own PCs but whose parents are a little wary about buying at computer fairs and/or over the internet. One can buy a complete set of PC components there for at least no more than the retail cost of an equivalent computer. The prices are still too expensive for a regular PC builder, but they are low enough to not be ridiculous).

Which is smart, if they can keep the two customer bases apart. The danger for their profit model is that their customers who would have bought the expensive stuff will find their way to the component centre instead and will buy the cheaper stuff, and their profit model will collapse. (For this to not happen their customers must remain ignorant). It is a common practice for old businesses to refuse to undercut themselves when new cheaper alternatives come along. Dixons/PCWorld do seem to recognise the threat of cheaper channels, and have responded somewhat.

And if you look at their website, one senses that this is perhaps where the real action is. My suspicion is that PC World have until now been selling very little on their website due to the fact that their prices are too high and people who shop online are more tech savvy and price sensitive than regular customers. For if you go to the website, you now see that this is divided in two the same way the physical store is. As well as a regular website there is a component store website. The sorts of stuff sold in the Component centre in the physical stores are not listed on the main website but are listed on the component centre website. Compare this with this for instance. (That second one is a very good price, actually). For now they have avoided putting the cheap Component store stuff on the main website, partly because in that case customers will type in what they want, see the cheap one and the expensive one, and just buy the cheap one.

Mainly, though, I think they are attempting to avoid having to answer an awkward question, which is "Why are things so much more expensive in your stores than on your website?" Hopefully on those occasions when the sorts of customers who buy the expensive stuff in stores come to a website, they will only see the main website and not notice the cheap stuff at the component website, while the people who genuinely would buy from the component website.

But it isn't going to work. Once you are on the web, everything is transparent. I doubt the separate websites business will last three months. The sites will be combined, and this and the ever growing component centres in stores are going to put real pressure on their business model, even for their physical stores. Which is good.

And the interesting thing is that the web prices seem genuinely competitive in a lot of cases. If Dixons / PCWorld were to make a genuinely aggressive move into the web retailing business that would be interesting. Their brand is well known, and they have a large chain of physical stores that people can take stuff to that doesn't work and/or which they do not know how to install themelves. Using the web for sales and the physical stores for returns and service makes a lot of sense (and not just in this industry). Except that the physical stores are in many instances too big, I fear. They may have to sublet some of the space.

A first time for everything

This evening I spent 45 minutes sitting in a stationary train on the Victoria line of the London Underground. Services had stopped "due to a suspicious unattended package on a train at Euston". This was very irritating (and in high summer the not air conditioned carriages of the London Underground were very uncomfortable) but at leat we were kept informed as to what was going on.

On the other hand, does the fact that I have experienced this mean that I am now a real Londoner?

Sorry for the lack of blogging

Life seems to be taking up my time, sadly. I finally saw Before Sunset, which I thought was magnificent. (It is simply the most romantic thing I have seen in years). It was shot on a very small budget, and it shows given that the film contains an assortment of continuity errors - particularly quite noticeable changes in the light between shots. This is what happens when you only have a few days to shoot, and the film supposedly takes place in real time. You have to shoot all day long, and noon simply does not look like the evening. I was right about the locations too. As well as being cinematic, I think the Promenade Plantee has another thing going for it if you are filming on a budget. Although it looks like a part and in fact it is a park, because it is long and narrow you only have to use a very physically small area at any time. If you are filming in an actual park, you have to cordon off a relatively large area in order to make sure that people in the background and the like are not getting in the way of the film.

And the film is a little geographically challenged. Jesse and Celine walk (and go by boat, and go by car) through various bits of Paris and appear to have a continuous conversation, but the places they walk to aren't actually close enough to walk through all of them in the time they have. So director Richard Linklatter cheats a little.

A few issues of continuity driven by budget don't matter in the end, though. This film is so character driven that the only things it genuinely needed were Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, director Richard Linklater and a good script, and it got all three. Apparently the first version of the script was not in real time, featured more locations, and had a bigger budget, but they were unable to film that because they couldn't raise the money.

But in the end it didn't matter at all.

Someone good is writing for the Economist

There was once a time when giants bestrode the earth

(Link via slashdot).

Thought for the day

If you are interviewing for a job, there is actually something to be said for being interviewed on one day by all the people you are likely to be working with. It does in many ways beat being called back to the office a number of different times to speak to different people. However, three hours of interviews (involving a total of five interviewers) without a break is pretty brutal just the same. Yes, I am sure many of my readers can describe worse experiences. I have had worse experiences personally. But this was still pretty hard going.

(I think I did well though. I'd rate myself about 50-50 for the job in question).

And Perry de Havilland did manage to ring my mobile in the middle of it in order to ask how my job search was going. No, I didn't take the call. Not a good time to forget to turn your phone off, just the same.

Lots of iPod hype this week.

Including the Newsweek cover story, of course. The iPod mini is now available in Europe, as are the new cheaper 20Gb and 40Gb iPods. It seems to be normal for Apple to update the product once a year, keep the 299,ドル 399,ドル and 499ドル price points, but improve the models. However, we now have 20Gb at the 299ドル point, 40Gb at the 399ドル point, and nothing at the 499ドル point. This is an interesting coda to Toshiba's announcement a month or so back that it was releasing a 1.8 inch 60Gb hard drive, and that Apple had placed a large order. Steve Jobs was clearly not happy at this sort of pre-announcement of a 60Gb iPod from Toshiba, and conspiracy theorists might conclude that the absence of a 60Gb iPod model now is in a sense payback to Toshiba for not keeping quiet.

Except that I don't actually believe this. I suspect that Toshiba is simply unable to provide the 60Gb drives in large enough quantities for now, and I am sure we will see a 60Gb iPod later in the year: probably just before Christmas.

Another interesting thing is whether we will see an update of the iPod mini before long. This of course uses a 4Gb 1 inch drive from Hitachi/IBM, but Apple has had trouble getting enough drives to satisfy the immense demand for the iPod mini. Interestingly, Seagate now has a 1 inch hard drive, and they are producing a 5Gb version. Presumably Hitachi will not like losing the largest one inch drive crown, and they will announce a bigger drive before too long. At that point, Apple will no doubt announce an iPod mini with a larger capacity. (And let's face it, the 4Gb capacity is the weakness of the iPod mini).

Or of course Apple could source its drives from multiple suppliers. Creative are basing an MP3 player on the Seagate drive, and for now that means they have the highest capacity player of that approximate size. Apple could release a 5Gb iPod mini based on the Seagate drive too, but I doubt they will. 5Gb is not really sufficiently bigger than 4Gb that they can really gain much leverage out of a "new, bigger capacity iPod mini". I suspect they will wait for a bigger drive from Hitachi, although if getting enough drives is the real problem, they might like to have another supplier. I suppose they could sell a 5Gb iPod mini with a dock and accessories that don't come with the 4Gb version as standard, so as to properly distinguish this from the 4Gb version. They did this with the 15Gb and 20Gb full size iPods last year after all.

The Modern World

Yesterday evening, I was at a party with the other London based contributors to the Samizdata blog, and it was a very pleasant evening. However, some of the foreign contributors couldn't make it (although Frank McGahon did make it over from Ireland) . Scott Wickstein was in Adelaide, of course, but I was able to do something quite interesting later in the evening, which was to get out my laptop, launch Skype, and get Scott at least into the conversation. My laptop has an internal speaker and an internal microphone, so all that was necessary was to say something vaguely near the laptop and he could hear us. And of course the laptop was running off batteries and was connected to the internet by WiFi, so the laptop was not connected to anything: we were just using it to talk to Scott in Australia.

A couple of non-Samizdata people found this impressive. Hell, I found this impressive, but one lady felt the need to come over and participate in the conversation merely because it was an interesting technological advance, I think.

Update: There are some photos of the party here. You can just see the back of my head in the top photo. My mother should note that I have been a good boy and had a haircut.

Redirection

I have a brief piece on Microsoft suing spammers over at Samizdata.

Forthcoming movies

This looks like it may be a fun little romantic comedy. From looking at the trailer, the plot appears to be "Once promising British tennis player played by Paul Bettany who never quite made it is being ignored as he plays his last Wimbledon. He meets sexy champion tennis player Kirsten Dunst on the court one day, something happens between them, he gets his drive back, and suddenly starts winning matches. All of England is watching as he makes the final and ....."

Of course, Hollywood cliche requires that in such a movie some obstacle must get in our hero's way and, forced to choose between the game and the girl at the end he realises that his ambitions on the court are nothing compared to true love, and the film ends with the couple running away on a bus oblivious to the tennis tournament. Or something like that.

And in many situations the British would be quite sympathetic to such a story.

However, this is Wimbledon. No Englishman has won it since 1936, and the desperation to see a British winner is reasonably strong at this point, as Tim Henman knows. If a British tennis player were to give up a chance to win the men's single title for a small thing like the love of a woman he would be torn to pieces, or at least mocked for all eternity. It is not possible for this movie to have a happy ending without Bettany's character actually winning Wimbledon, and I hope the film-makers know this.

Of course, such an English victory would take the film from "romantic comedy" territory to "outrageous and ridiculous fantasy" territory, but in comparison that is a small thing.

I love London

When you cross the eastern limit of the City of London, you enter the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. To the south you initially enter Whitechapel (most famous for being the location of Jack the Ripper's Victorian murders), to the north you come to Spitalfields, and Brick Lane in Spitalfields is where I am right now.

Spitalfields is London's first immigrant neighbourhood. In the 17th century it was the destination of Huguenots who fled France (the first mass migration to Britain in quite a few centuries). By the nineteenth century the Huguenots had integrated into Broader English society and Spitalfields was the destination for Jewish emigres from elsewhere in Europe. (Britain's first Bagel shop is a legacy from that period and is just across the road from where I am now).

In the twentieth century that pattern repeated, the Jews integrated into broader British society and moved elsewhere, and Spitalfields then filled up with Bangladeshis, who now dominate the area. Down the road is a building that has been both a church and a synagogue in its time, and which is now a mosque, the only building in Britain (I think) that has performed all three roles.

However, over the last decade, the area has gentrified, as inner city living has become more popular and as London has grown as a financial capital, and young childless people in particular have taken advantage of the proximity to the City of London. Brick Lane has filled with Bangladeshi restaurants catering to non-Bangladeshi customers as much or more than Bangladeshis, and the street has also filled up with bars, cafes, music venues, and it has generally become one of the hippest places in London.

However, it is still principally an immigrant (Bangladeshi) area. Local prosperity has flowed into the area though, and shops catering to young customers of various races have flowed up under the ruins of the Bishopsgate goods yard to the top end of Brick Lane, which until recently was rather run down and was only interesting when there were markets on Sundays. (To me, it feels like the way prosperity grew down the bottom end of King Street in Newtown in Sydney in the 1990s). The local Bangladeshi shopkeepers and the like are doing their best to cater to the hip young crowd as well as locals.

Which is why I am in a newly opened internet cafe in the top half of Brick Lane. This is clearly trying to cater both for the clientele that wants internet access and the clientele that wants coffee. They seem to be doing okay with the internet access, but on the coffee score they are mixed. I was served by a woman in a hajib, and the coffee is only so-so. (These Bangladeshis haven't quite got Italian by way of Seattle coffee right yet). The internet cafe section is filled with Dell machines with 15 inch TFT screens that look a couple of years old: I suspect that repackaging ex-office PCs and selling them second hand to internet cafes is a nice little business for someone. The seating is not as comfortable as it should be. The cafe breaks one of the cardinal laws of cafes, which is that it doesn't greatly matter whether you have table service or counter service (or whether you want the customers to pay at the beginning of the end) but you should make which arrangement that you are using very clear. (There is a nice selection of newspapers for me to read). There is free wireless, but I am not sure if it is provided in this shop (I doubt it) or if it is coming from somewhere else nearby.

There are other internet / coffee shops nearby, but they are run by white people and not Bangladeshis. Some of the Bangladeshis are trying to move into the trade, which is clearly good. And I am sure they will iron the bugs out soon enough.

More fun with satellite photographs



This one is Sydney, Australia. The city has unusual constraints on its growth, that are much easier to show via a photo like this than any other way.

Firstly, a national park was declared to the south of the city about 150 years ago. Combined with other land that is legally protected from development in a couple of other ways and which is contiguous to it, this makes up the green patch that follows the coast to the south of the city and which sort of juts inland a towards the south of the picture. The section of coastal plane (with the visible lake in the middle it) to the far south of the picture near the coast, is the city of Wollongong, which is where I grew up. (I grew up in the section to the north of it where the coastal plain narrows). The body of water close to the coast just to the north of the green section is Botany Bay, and the river that goes inland from it is the George's River. To the north of that is another body of water, and this is Sydney Harbour itself.

In any event because the national park was declared to the south of Sydney, the city was not permitted to grow south along the coast as would be expected.

To the west of the city of Sydney we find another green section, which is the Blue Mountains. This is extremely rugged country, and the mountains form a natural barrier to the growth of the city to the west. The blue patch towards the south of the mountains is Lake Burragarang, which is an artificial lake that provides Sydney's water supply. A little to the north of that is a light line going through the mountains from west to east. This is the Great Western Highway, which follows a high ridge across the mountains. There are towns along the highway, and my sister (hi Leonie) lives in one of these towns. Just to the north of this you can see a very deep valley the name of which temporarily escapes me. There is another road across the mountains along the next ridge, bits of which are visible in the photograph if you look carefully.

Whereas the edge of Sydney in the south is very clearly defined, to the north the edge is less clear. This is basically because that part of Sydney north of the harbour is also rugged country, even very close to the ocean. One walks through fairly ordinary looking (and upmarket - this is a prestigious area in which to live) suburbs, and at the end of the street one find's oneself standing on the edge of an immense canyon. So Sydney north of the harbour is a mixture of residential suburbs and forest and National Park all mixed in together. As you go further north it is more National Park and less residential suburb. In essence, the parks form a barrier to the growth of the city in the north as well, but in a slightly less clear cut and sudden way than in the south. (In the north, urban areas resume again once an area of national park and rugged country has been passed. This area (around the city of Gosford) is visible at the far north of the photo.

This all makes Sydney a curiously constrained city. It can't spread east because of the ocean. It can't spread north or south close to the ocean due to mainly manmade constraints. It can't spread west because there are mountains. Which means that Sydney's urban sprawl in recent years has been in both the north-westerly and the south-westerly directions, leading to the curious triangular shaped city you see in the photograph.

Why I don't particularly like Microsoft

I have been attempting to install Windows 2000 on the windows partition of my desktop PC. I booted up a copy of Windows XP using the backup disk for my Dell when I built the PC to test that I could get it to work, but that is not legal (and anyway it will stop working after 30 days). As it happens, the Windows 2000 copy I have is perfectly legal for me to use, and Windows 2000 is adequate for my uses. So fine.

However, the intallation crashes half way through the installation process, and gives me a black screen. Now a sensible installation process would stop rather than crash, but not in this case. As it happens, looking at the on screen text and pressing F6 at an appropriate time allows me to determine that the problem is that the installation CD does not contain an appropriate driver for the IDE controller on my motherboard (a Biostar M7VKB) and so cannot see my hard drive. (Somehow though, the BIOS was able to see enough to start the installation process from the CD-ROM drive, and this is being driven by the same IDE controller.

The solution to this problem is to obtain a driver for the IDE controller from my motherboard manufacturer and install this during the installation process. No real problem, except for that the only means of installation of such a driver is via a floppy. And as it happens, I don't have an internal floppy drive.

Why would I? By today's standards floppy drives hold ludicrously small amounts of data, and people who require portable storage use flash drives, CD or DVD burners, or even portable hard drives. (A USB portable hard drive based on Toshiba's new 1.8" minidrive would be fun). Those of us who wish to transfer files too and from our friends or from one computer that we own to another just use networks a lot of the time anyway. Many new computers these days do not include floppy drives.

However, the Windows 2000 installer will not allow a driver to be installed mid-installation by any other method. A sensible strategy would also allow the installation to take place by swapping the CD from which the installation is taking place out and replacing it with a CD containing the driver. This would work in all installations without fail, because the fact that you are making an installation at all implies that you have at least a CD-ROM drive (as indeed I do). (I also tried plugging a USB floppy into my floppy drive and seeing if that would work, but no. Recognising that drive was clearly something that came later in the installation process than installing the IDE driver.

But somehow Microsoft didn't think of that. The fact that essentially every PC had a floppy drive in 1999 was enough for them.
However, no. (And I suppose from a business point of view they would like me to buy a new copy of XP now rather than use an old but still perfectly legal copy of 2000). That in the future that it would both become less likely that people would have floppies and that they would be more likely to have motherboards with controllers that the software on the intallation CD was familiar with also apparently didn't seem to occur with them. (Another idea would have been to get the network software working first and then to

So if I want to install W2K on this PC, I am going to have to install a floppy drive. The regular place that I buy computer parts from online charges about 4ドル.00 for a floppy drive, but wiith shipping it is about 6ドル.00. The local Maplin Electronics store wants 9ドル.50. Not a lot of money, but I am trying to save money here. The trick is probably to find a friend with an old computer they are not using and ask if I can have a floppy drive. Not terribly hard (the world is full of old PCs lying around with perfectly fine floppy drives that are not being used) but it will probably take me a week or two for me to find one.

This sort of muddled thinking and lack of planning for the future is entirely typical of Microsoft. That they have consistently done things in such a half baked way and have still managed to conquer the world anyway rather baffles me. (Well actually I more or less do understand it - it just depresses me).

(Just for comparison, I tried also to install a Windows XP CD (ie without Service Pack 1) on the same system, and the same thing happened - it crashed half way through and careful checking determined that it could not see my IDE controller. Presumably something was updated between the original version of XP and SP1).

Update: The problem ultimately turned out not to be the ATA driver but instead to be an incompatible ACPI interface. This problem was fixed by disabling ACPI in the BIOS. On the other hand, if I had needed to update the driver, that ridiculous floppy only business would have still been the case.

Redirection

I have a piece on some particularly stupid ticket machines used to collect London bus fares over at Transport Blog.