St Bernadette of the Inland Revenue...

I'm currently on the phone to the tax office, but I have plenty of time to type this. Why? Am I not listening to their sage advice and instead choosing to adopt a cavalier attitude to my responsibilities? No, it's because I couldn't find out where on the online tax return to enter my payments on account for 2007-08. I called the local tax office and a very patient lady called Bernadette walked me through page after page. However, the box I need is plainly missing from my onscreen return while being visible on hers. I'm on hold while she shouts at a consultant from the company who implemented the online tax return system.

Calmly expressing her obvious frustration, the saintly Bernadette has just returned to tell me that the version of the tax return system she can see on her screen is different to the one used by the rest of us. The box I need has indeed been removed from the public version and payments on account are instead taken care of automatically.

She also apologised for the system running slowly, and theorised that it's because so many people are using it today. The reason seems to be that they've sent out a lot of letters telling people they need to pay some tax, but not telling them how much, so they're all calling in.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Chalk two points up to the consultants.

TO WHOMEVER IT MAY CONCERN...

This post is directed to the person who has been trying to hack into this blog.

You first visited on 19th November 2008 at 01:07.56, following a link from www.macclesfieldforum.co.uk. You're an NTL home broadband customer based in Macclesfield, and your fixed IP address ends in 156.202 Open a command prompt (it's under accessories), and type the word ipconfig to see the full thing and realise you're in serious trouble.

On 20th November, you accessed this blog via the proxin.cn proxy server, as you did on 20th December. On 22nd December, you tried to log into this account several times beginning at 20:30. You have been trying again this morning (at 12:15 and 12:17, Saturday 27th December). The blog's log files indicate that you have an interest in the post I made about Wilson Bowden and Debenhams, which you keep re-reading, as you do my profile.

Be aware that your attempts to gain access to this account are an offence under the UK's Computer Misuse Act. Your activities have been recorded in full, and the logs have been passed to NTL's security desk for further investigation.

It doesn't say "award-winning IT journalist" in my profile for nothing, you know.

Wilson Bowden and Debenhams...

Here's an curious thing. My home town is currently debating plans by Wilson Bowden for a £200 million redevelopment of the town centre, including a branch of troubled department store Debenhams.

Other than building a large department store in a small mill town (out of proportion and placed at one end of the town rather than as the centrepiece of the development and near to existing car parking), here's what's really curious about this.

I heard someone from Wilson Bowden on the radio this morning telling the community that they'd just finished a similar development in Wrexham. A bit of googling revealed firstly that not everyone is happy with what they've done there, and that secondly... there's a branch of Debenhams involved. With my curiosity piqued, I decided to do a wider search and discovered Wilson Bowden are either bidding to redevelop or are redeveloping in: Northwich, Rochdale, Barnsley, Macclesfield, and Blackpool. All these developments and plans involve opening a branch of, you guessed it, Debenhams. That's one hell of a coincidence, isn't it...

Book review: Getting Started with Arduino

The Arduino range of open source robot controllers is taking the worlds of both hobby and serious robotics by storm. Compressed onto a board smaller than a deck of playing cards is a full 20MHz computer with enough I/O lines and RAM to keep anyone happy. Being open source, you can download the plans and build one yourself, but for a ridiculously small amount of money, you can simply buy one ready built and tested from any of a number of suppliers.

Massimo Banzi is a co-founder of Arduino and the author of Getting Started with Arduino. He has a refreshing approach I think is best summed up by the inclusion of the front cover of seminal fanzine “Sniffin’ Glue” and by the phrase “punk electronics.” This is an ethos to which I personally subscribe. Learn to take basic electrical precautions so you don’t burn out the chip and simply try things.

To this end, Massimo advocates simply getting a breadboard and some wires, cannibalising old consumer equipment for parts, and hooking them up to an Arduino board to make something unique. To help, this book is packed with the basics, such as how to make an LED flash, how to bias a passive sensor, how to drive a motor with a power transistor, and so on.

Seasoned hobby roboticists will feel this book is a little basic for them, and they’d be right. Look at the title again; it’s a getting started guide and it’s a very good one. It takes the novice from the ethos behind Arduino through installing the IDE software and creating simple circuits. For good measure there are several appendices covering reading resistor codes, the Arduino language and even how to read a schematic.

Throughout the book are plenty of hand drawn illustrations that remind me strongly of Tim Hunkin’s exceptional work on “The Secret Life Of Machines”. Everything is clear, readable and above all accessible in a way that really does live up to the promise plastered on the front of “Sniffin’ Glue” issue 1: “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.” Substitute circuit for chord and “build a robot” for “form a band” and it’s possible to see that you don’t need a degree in electronics and you don’t need the resources of the Sony Aibo team to get started in robotics.

What are you waiting for?

So, farewell then...

The BBC reports that George W Bush is paying a surprise farewell visit to Iraq. I do hope it's to apologise. Okay, Saddam was a cruel tyrant, but the coalition caught the tiger of insurgency by the tail and it's difficult to see how exactly it can ever hope to extricate itself from the mess it's created other than by leaving a vacuum into which tyrants even worse than Saddam will surely pour. Sorry would be the decent thing to say as Bush walks away from the mess. Nuff said...

Getting started with Arduino...

I've just received a review copy of Massimo Banzi's new book, "Getting Started with Arduino". I'll review it properly in a later post, but from what I've seen so far, it looks like an excellent introduction to this fabulous piece of kit.

Just saying it doesn't make it so...

How evil do you have to be to claim that a deadly epidemic, whose outbreak is the direct result of your callous attitude towards millions of people, has actually been extinguished - while people continue to die from it? That's what's happening in Zimbabwe, and it has to stop.

The Times reports Robert Mugabe's televised speech in which he says: "I am happy to say our doctors have been assisted by others and WHO (the World Health Organization)... so now that there is no cholera.” This is a lie. As of Wednesday 10th December 2008, there were 16,403 cases of cholera in Zimbabwe, and there have been 783 deaths from the disease.

According to the report, Mugabe went on: "Because of cholera, Mr Brown, Mr Sarkozy and Mr Bush want military intervention. Now that there is no cholera, there is no need for war." Er... what?

Evolving the Mona Lisa...

Genetic algorithms are strange, almost creepy, but also remarkably cool. This, for instance, is a remarkably cool project by Roger Alsing which seeks to evolve an approximation of the original Mona Lisa using just 50 semi-transparent polygons.

Essentially, to use a genetic algorithm, you only need know what you're looking for in a solution to a problem - not how to solve it. The software does the rest.Genetic algorithms work using a set of parameters to control their output. By running the algorithm with a population of sets of these parameters and selecting those sets that give outputs that a re closest to the desired output, a "natural selection" routine breeds the next generation of parameter sets (adding slight mutations as it goes) and the genetic algorithm runs again. Eventually, a stable design emerges.

I can't help but notice that creationists are very quiet about genetic algorithms. Is there an "elephant in the room" here, I wonder?

Staying neutral...

PC World reports that Scott Cleland of Precursor LLC released a report last week claiming that Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for. Facts like this are used to argue for an end to net neutrality, but maybe there's a better way.

Put simply, an end to net neutrality would mean that people pay more the more bandwidth they use. This at first sight seems fair enough, but isn't it like saying that if you make more calls on your mobile phone, you'll be charged more? And what about if your web site becomes popular through no fault of your own and becomes "slashdotted"? What if you're the victim of low level botnet attack designed to bankrupt you through increased ISP bandwidth charges? Has no one considered this may be a vulnerability waiting to happen?

It's probably also worth speculating here that an end to net neutrality might potentially even see people being charged more by their ISPs for receiving more spam than average. It's improbable, but certainly possible.

So, perhaps rather than abandoning net neutrality to charge the likes of Google more due to its success, maybe it would be better to give such companies tax breaks for investing in companies that provide bandwidth in the first place so that they can in turn create more bandwidth. That way, everyone wins.

"...one giant leap for bearkind"

More proof, if proof be needed, that teddy bears are superior to humans. The BBC reports that four bears have become the first Teddynauts following their historic 2-hour sub-orbital flight aboard a helium weather balloon.

The bears took off from Cambridge University's Spaceflight centre and travelled 30km to the edge of space as part of the Nova 9 mission. There are some great pictures on the mission web site, the curvature of the Earth clearly visible behind them. Bears are natureally curious about space and one of the crew seems to have removed his helmet to get a better view of things. To get home, the bears had to wait for a lack of atmospheric pressure to burst the balloon before they could parachute safely back to Earth, landing near Ipswich.

Putting teddies in space might sound frivolous, but it's all in aid of serious science. The plan is to use a similar technique to enable a satellite to be put into orbit for about £1000. Using a rocket, getting into space from the ground is an expensive and dangerous undertaking, but launching a payload from from a balloon already touching the void is far easier.

Davenport Lyons...

Well, well... The Register reports that Atari has ended its association with attack dogs Davenport Lyons. Could this be because, like other companies are discovering, the idea of sending nastygrams to people who really shouldn't be allowed out on the internet isn't so good - or profitable.

In an undated press release on Davenport Lyons' web site, David Gore, a partner at the firm, says: “Illegal file-sharing is a very serious issue resulting in millions of pounds of losses to copyright owners. As downloading speeds and Internet penetration increase, this continues to be a worldwide problem across the media industry which increasingly relies on digital revenues. The damages and costs ordered by the Court are significant and should act as a deterrent. This shows that taking direct steps against infringers is an important and effective weapon in the battle against online piracy.”

The problem is, if law firms keep going for the technically incompetent without stopping to think about the ways in which they may have become unwitting P2P peers through infection, the bad publicity generated means this deterrent becomes increasingly meaningless as more people come forward to challenge their nastygrams. For example, by typing "Davenport Lyons" into Google, I found this thread on a consumer action forum suggesting ways to bog down such actions and otherwise fight back.

It can only be a matter of time before an employee of Davenport Lyons is found to be unwittingly illegally sharing files. As I said in October, the way forward is protection of the innocent from themselves, not their prosecution. That requires technology they can't forget to install or update. The ideal situation is Microsoft putting anti malware protection in the Windows kernel. Great idea, you'd think, but there's now a huge anti-virus industry predicated on them not doing so. It's my guess that not only is this a situation that won't go away, it'll get worse.

Zimbabwe on 18p a day...

The Guardian is reporting that the Zimbabwean army has for the first time rioted.

The report quotes a soldier who (for the pretty obvious reason that he wouldn't last long otherwise) wished to remain anonymous: "We have no food in the barracks. There is no medication in military hospitals, and we cannot access our money in the banks. Even if people are to riot, there would be no enthusiasm to stop them."

The Zimbabwean army has stopped feeding all but senior ranks. Desertions have nearly halved it's size from 40,000 to 26,000. Those who remain cannot get at their money simply because there aren't enough bank notes to go around. The law says you can withdraw a maximum of Z$500,000 a day - that's just 18p (about US$0.09).

Mugabe is capable of complete self-deception. He's a brutal man running a brutal regime. The reason for that brutality is power; when his power goes, he's a dead man and he knows it. So, he has to rely on those he can still afford to pay. When there's no one left to rely on , it'll be over for him, and that can only be a good thing.

It's been noted many times that if South Africa cuts electricity to Zimbabwe (it supplies pretty much all of it), Mugabe's stranglehold would be gone within a week and the country could begin to breathe again. It's also worth noting that this hasn't happened. You have to ask why.

Arduino pet robot head taking shape...

My ideas for an Arduino-based pet robot are slowly taking shape in spare minutes. I have a basic movement-based vision system up and running.

At the moment, it has basic (LDR-based) stereo light input, which feeds a weird real-time event integrator algorithm and some associated data structures - one per sensor. These feed a further algorithm which calculates the position data being sent to a servo upon which the two LDRs are mounted (revolving left and right in the the Y axis). The act of turning this "head" servo to indicate captured attention creates new input data itself, leading to complex feedback.

The whole thing is designed to produce nothing more controlled than emergent behaviour. For example, I never told it that if I sweep my hand in front of the sensors from left to right, the head should turn to follow it. Nor did I tell it that if I sweep my hand the other way the head should follow. For a laugh, I mounted the device in front of the computer's monitor, set the wallpaper to black and moved a small white window around. The head followed it, slowly losing interest when it stopped. I placed the device in front of a TV and let it track moving objects. It's weird to watch the head suddenly take an interest in things. At some point, I'll post a video.

The next phase is to add more LDRs to resolve movement in more detail, followed by a second servo to control the head's X axis (sothat it can look up and down), but already this project is getting very interesting.

The silent treatment...

He he.... do you get a lot of those "silent" phone calls from cold callers? Want to stop them permanently? Here's how. It takes a couple of months for them to stop, but I've done it, it's a lot of fun, and it worked for me.

You receive a silent call. Don't hang up. Every few seconds, keep inquiring, "Hello?" When someone eventually takes the call, keep on asking "Hello?", "Is there anyone there?" "Speak to me." etc. Never be tempted to make any noise other than you trying to hear a reply.

Basically, you're making it appear that there's no sound at your end - even if there's some background noise at your end. Sometimes, the other party will begin again. At other times they'll start again but louder. But the funniest for me is when they begin shouting to see if it clears the line. Have fun. Try asking: "Is this a dirty phone call? Eventually, the caller gives up and marks you down as a trouble maker. Do it a few times and the calls miraculously stop.

Sticking in the boot...

The Daily Mail: it just can't allow anyone their moment in the sun, can it? There always has to be a nasty, pointless little dig. Take the story about Rachel Riley, about to take over from Carol Vorderman on Countdown.

The main online headline is "Rachel Riley's Countdown to 'the coolest maths job in the world'. It's a feel good story of what can happen if you work hard and do your best, have a great personality and are universally liked. But look at the sidebar on the right of the page and there's different slant on the story:

"Countdown girl says it's the coolest job in the world... not surprising when you're getting £100k and still living with your parents. Rachel Riley is just 22."

So what if she's getting £100k for doing sums on telly. That's her job. So what if she's 22 and living at home? Those are her circumstances. Why is the Daily Mail trying to get its readership to think less of her remarkable achievement? Go to a newsagent on any given day. You'll discover that this is the Daily Mail's job. It's a nasty, selfish, mean-minded job.

And on, and on, and on...

Oh God! The Brand-Ross Dissonance is still rumbling on. This was a pre-recorded show. As a jobbing freelance writer, if I were to send in a piece of work that wasn't fit for printing, my editor would throw it back at me to be done again. Magazine articles can take a considerable amount of time to write, but this was just an hour of improvised radio. Why did no one think to simply tell those working on Brand's show it needed re-recording? After all, it's not a solo effort kept secret until transmission. Radio is a team effort.

UPDATE: According to a report in The Guardian, no one bothered to listen to Brand's show before broadcast. Oh dear...

When the music stops...

I've never seen BBC1's Saturday night sequin-fest "Strictly Come Dancing", so I was perplexed that one of the biggest breaking stories yesterday was the announcement that contestant John Sergeant has quit the contest. Now I know a little more, I'm not surprised he went.

The reports on today's news ran with clips of the judges really laying into him. It's not a serious competition; it's a popular entertainment show. It doesn't matter who wins. but it seems the judges forgot that. Does it matter if he looks like an embarrassed butler as he respectfully twirls his dance partner around? It's funny, and it's meant to be funny.

"If the joke wears thin," says Sergeant, "if in fact people begin to take it very seriously, and if people really are getting so wound up that it's very difficult to carry off the joke, then I think it is time to go."

After hearing a selection of the personal comments the judges threw at him week after week, I'm not surprised he decided to call it a day. Who wants to attempt comedy with that level of heckling going on?

Death by committee...

The case of "Baby P", who died with over 50 deliberately inflicted injuries on his body, is being called "tragic". It's not tragic at all. It's a bloody disgrace.

It's emerging that Baby P's death was occasioned by a catalogue of failure involving too many parties fighting each other, and which left a toddler in the care of people who were deliberately harming him. A foster place was found to take Baby P out of harms way as early as December 2006. He was actually placed in care for a while, but a social worker then returned him to his abusive parents after what ITN calls "a frank exchange of views". That implies office politics. If true, ask yourself who plays office politics with a child known to be being beaten up by his parents?

At a case conference, the police, who wanted Baby P placed in foster care for his own safety, actually allowed themselves to be overruled. They even signed a care plan that sent him home for further abuse. The BBC's "Panorama" programme even discovered documents that show social services had been over-optimistic about his mother's ability to care for Baby P, and had focused on the needs of the parents rather than a child who had been admitted to hospital several times with deliberately inflicted injuries.

There's a full timeline of this poor little sod's short and painful life on the BBC news site. If you can bear it, take a good look at the graphic of his facial injuries.

In the UK, people are sent to prison as punishment, not for punishment. While that's a standard that must be upheld in any decent society, I find myself on the brink of hoping the parents get what they bloody well deserve - but also hoping that the people who should have cared for Baby P don't get to walk away from their "mistake". I'm certain I'm not alone.

A code in the dose...

Why is it that I can go for five years without so much as a sniffle, then when I decide to start a blog, I get a real thumper behind the eyeballs? One or two people have been in touch to tell me I haven't posted for a few days. The reason is the streaming cold in the nose I caught at a party.

And why is it that when you have a cold, people ask what you're taking for it? The answer I give is nothing, and here's why: the only thing that slows a cold is keeping warm and sipping warm drinks. Rhinoviruses prefer cold conditions to multiply, so keeping your breathing apparatus temperature up a bit slows them down - sometimes to the degree that your immune system can get a lock on them and start blasting away. When asked a few days ago why I'm not taking a super-strength mega-vitamin, I couldn't resist misquoting a character from the sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" - mega-vitamins to treat a cold are just the recipe for very expensive urine.

Our Tesco is so large...

...I bought a branch of Sainsbury's there last week.

In a totalitarian regime, the state owns and controls everything. It sets quotas and prices for goods, services and wages. It owns and controls the means of production and sets the factory gate price of raw materials and finished goods. Everything is controlled to ensure that everything runs according to plan. Totalitarian regimes, unless they're seriously incompetent at all but repressing their own people (as in North Korea and Burma), also tend to be expansionist or at least keen on neutralising their neighbours.

It occurred to me recently that, at least from a capitalist perspective, there's a satirical parallel to be drawn between this and large UK supermarket chains. I'm not suggesting they're anything sinister; they're retail corporations with all that entails. But supermarkets have undeniably grown to become huge, multinational concerns, employing tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, and by effectively having the power to set factory gate prices, they control the means of producing food, clothing and so on in a large number of countries.

Supermarkets also have very strong core identities and values. For example, Tesco's corporate description of its values and purpose is enshrined in "The Tesco Way". It's just too obvious to create cheap satire comparing this and those of other supermarkets to "manifestos".

Okay, supermarkets are just shops, and like all retailers they're geared to producing profit, but will there come a time when the only shops, other than those serving niche markets, are predominantly supermarkets? I think we've all seen them move into small towns and gradually strangle much local commerce by providing under one roof all the goods and services traditionally provided by individual retailers. This is simply capitalism, but somehow it feels wrong, even if it is convenient.

When I was a kid and my grandparents visited, I remember my Granddad giving me 50p and saying, "Don't spend it all in the same shop". Increasingly, this is impossible.

Servos...

How sad (by normal standards, anyway) is it that I am gradually falling in love with my Arduino Diecimila robot controller?

I now have 6 tiny little Ultrafly ST-9 micro-servos, which simply plug into the PMW sockets on the Arduino. The Arduino servo library then allows you to simply send an angle to each and the servo whirs into position. How much simpler could this be?

The more I investigate the online Arduino community and discover the strange and interesting libraries people have written, the more I realise that open source hardware is a viable alternative to closed source, propriatary kit. I've long believed that open source software has the potential to become a major force in computing, and to a very great extent that faith is paying off. How long before somoene decides to create a seriously powerful open source computer, I wonder, or even a cluster of them? I'm not holding my breath, but I don't think we'll have to wait an eternity for the first models to appear either.

Taxi Please...

The Daily Mail reports with some glee that BBC radio presenter Sam Mason has been sacked after calling a taxi for her 14-year-old daughter one afternoon and requesting a non-Asian driver. The conversation was recorded and passed to The Sun. Mason apparently says, "A guy with a turban is going to freak her out. She's not used to Asians." When told that it would not be possible to service her request, she the apparently retorted: "You've managed it before."

Why am I commenting on this story? Well, some of the comments left on the Daily Mail's web page covering the story are interesting to say the least. Here's an example:

"Dont blame her,but in PC UK you have no freedoms any more."

...while having the freedom to say so, it seems. This correspondent's idea of freedom is about the race of the driver not the quality of service he offers.

"More selective discrimination PC rubbish. Bet there wouldn't be this fuss if she'd specifically asked for a female driver."

True, requesting a female driver could be about real fear, whereas this is about the race of the driver. So, why didn't Ms Mason simply ask if a female driver was available? Given that it's just a taxi ride and that the driver is immaterial, how can it be that someone in a turban will "freak out" a 14-year-old in this day and age? Clearly Ms Mason has no qualms about letting her daughter ride with an unknown male taxi driver - just not an "Asian" one.

"If it were me I wouldn't care if it had two heads," Mason is alleged to have said, "but it's my little girl we are talking about."

Black American comedian Reginald D Hunter once said that there are two kinds of racism. There's the racism that's just ignorance and doesn't really affect anyone, and there's the racism has consequences. It stops people getting housing, jobs and so on. She may not realise it, but by denying a fare to a perfectly good taxi driver on grounds of his race (or more accurately, religion), Ms Mason falls (perhaps unwittingly, but very definitely) into the second category. I think, however, I'll leave the last word on this to a twistedly self-rigteous comment left on the Daily Mail web site by someone calling himself "Peter". See if you can guess which of Hunter's categories he's in from what he says:

"What the PC brigade have done and are doing to this country is frightening. You'll find Ms.Harman and her troop at the root of much of it. We all have prejudices and that does not make us racist. Simply she didn't want a chap in a turban for her daughter."

Sainsbury's again...

My post yesterday about Sainsbury's latest TV ad campaign predicted a Christmas instalment where we'd be treated to an insight into the life of a fictitious family. Sure enough, last night there was the advert, introducing us to (if I remember them correctly) the fictitious shop worker's son Billy. We heard about his best friend, Auntie Jen, and even Billy's teacher. Why go to the trouble of inventing so many unseen characters? It's all in aid of nothing more than getting us to buy our mince pies at Sainsbury's and not Tescos. Price alone, it seems, is not enough. We must be made to feel as if we belong to get us spending. I wonder if it's possible to get too schmaltzy in Christmas adverts? With a recession looming and retailers fighting over dwindling disposible incomes, we may not have long to wait until we find out.

Definitely coming in on three engines...

Showbiz gossip site Digitalspy.co.uk is reporting that Salisbury Council has banned the phrase "Singing from the same hymn sheet" in case... wait for it... it offends atheists. I'm an atheist, well, not even an atheist really - I don't think about God enough to qualify - and the only offensive thing about the whole story is the assumption that I need protecting from something so pointlessly inconsequential.

When something as powerful as a local authority is so frightened that their employees may inadvertently cause offence with a common phrase whose meaning is innocent and perfectly well-understood, you have to wonder just how much arbitrary personal power that hands you - without you ever having to lift a finger to earn it. What fun could one have, what resources could one waste using this power for evil? With this kind of pointless language micromanagement and fear-based culture lurking in the coridors of minor elected power, the sky's the limit. It may be double plus non-good, to quote Orwell, but what a ridiculous laugh it would be to use political correctness deliberately against itself to make the point. Pick a phrase in common usage, officially demand that you're offended by it, and stand back to watch the fun.

This reminds me of the short time in 1994 when I worked on the IT support desk of a local water company. I was alone on the early shift one morning when a man from the quality assurance department came in with an apparently urgent need to discuss a few of the support records. This puzzled me. Why were QA looking at the support records. They had no hope of ever understanding them. It turned out that the man was indeed puzzled - about the phrase "the machine is down". I explained that it simply means a machine has locked up or has in some way crashed. The man from QA wanted to know if we could use a different phrase in future. I asked why and he said that "down" sounded a bit sexual. Seriously. No one but the other support staff would ever have cause to read these records, and they all knew what the phrase actually meant, but the man from QA wanted us to use the phrase "rendered inoperable" instead. I referred him to the IT manager, who, if my memory serves me correctly, laughed and asked the man from QA if he had anything better to do. That, perhaps, is the problem. The man from QA was employed to take pointless trivialities seriously, to pursue them and to report back. It was a stupid job, but it paid real money, which in turn paid a real mortgage and real taxes.

You're an idiot!

There's a Jerry Seinfeld line about magicians that goes something like: "Here's a coin. It's gone! You're an idiot! It's back! You're an idiot!". The idea is to poke fun at magicians who think it's all about showing how much smarter they are than the rest of us while actually being crap. But how about re-applying this line to the current Sainsbury's Adverts.

The current campaign follows a hassled but happy Sainsbury's employee. The only thing is, she's actually actress Tracy Brabin, who's probably most famous in the UK for being Tricia Armstrong in Coronation Street. There's nothing sinister about this; it's just an observation. Maybe Sainsbury's ad agency wanted to create a feeling of familiarity in viewers to keep them spending.

No doubt we'll be treated to the inevitable "preparing for Christmas is such a hassle" instalment of the campaign in the coming weeks. There'll be intimate moments and in-jokes to discover when the family are around the table, just like a real community. All this is completely faked of course, but some viewers will find themselves actually interested in how this mythical family works. Weird, isn't it.

It's just the latest in a long line of "believable" adverts. Remember Linda Bellingham in the Oxo ad campaigns? Talking to friends, however, it's clear that their default attitude to advertisers using famous actors to play "ordinary" people in their campaigns is changing. Maybe I have weird friends, but they seem to believe these types of ad are an insult to their intelligence.

"See this person you remember for that sitcom you liked? Well, this is him enjoying shopping in our store. You're an idiot!"

Fancy a pint?

Why would any company sell to the public at a loss? The BBC reports that supermarkets are doing just that with alcohol. They must stand to gain more out of it than they're losing or there'd be no point. The Beeb also reports that MPs want a ban on happy hours and a minimum price for booze. There's even an unhappy Superintendent from the Devon and Cornwall police force standing inexplicably in a rain storm, being interviewed by a reporter on BBC News 24 about it. Alcohol, it seems is this week's moral panic, but it's clearly not the common factor here. It's what some people do when drunk that's the problem.

I like a drink, in fact I like a lot of drink, but I've not seen any alcohol-related violence in years. The reason is where I drink. The people beating each other up in town centres at 3am on a Sunday morning didn't come from the backstreet boozers that closed at 11pm but behind whose curtains the landlord is still holding forth about the issues of the day with a few selected friends. The people causing social trouble have been drinking predominantly in one of the massive, impersonal chain pubs that stack the booze high and sell it cheap, need a massive security presence, and in some cases need to insist on a positive ID before allowing entry.

Here's another thing. If you set up a camera in a town centre late on Saturday night and wait, younger drinkers will act the fool in front of it. Maybe the sight of a camera captures the imagination of a generation not used to having their inhibitions lowered, and who have grown up with the idea that it's good to be on TV, regardless of context. If you're ITN and want a sure fire way of making the average Daily Mail reader tut in disgust, you film a report outside a big chain pub at chucking out time. People see the camera and it's as if they're reacting to a posy-hypnotic suggestion in some cases. They must goon about in front of it. Alcohol isn't a new invention. Neither are people. What is new is the context. Society itself has changed.

So, take P as being the population who drink, T as being a subset of P whose members cause trouble when drunk, and E as the establishments where T gets tanked up. Clearly, most of P isn't the problem. It never was. So, why are people saying all of P should have less access to alcohol to prevent T from doing their thing? Surely it's just T who should have less access.

Oh sh*t, I think I've just argued in favour of ID cards.

The Arduino Diecimila

Gadgets are guaranteed to give geeks a special tingly feeling, and robot controllers are a very special type of gadget. Was it William Morris who said that nothing useless can ever be truly beautiful? Whoever it was, he was spot on. By that definition, Robot controllers are immensely beautiful. What's more, they're not difficult to get into, and thanks to the open source hardware movement, they're an amazingly cheap method of making intelligent objects. Robot controllers typically contain tiny amounts of RAM, but because you're not fannying about trying to hoist a pointlessly resource hungry translucent user interface onto a graphics card that can outperform an 80's supercomputer, you don't need that much memory to do complex and genuinely cool things. Robot controllers also have plenty of input/output lines built in, waiting for you to poke the wires from sensors, buzzers, motors etc. into them to give your creation (whatever it is - and it doesn't have to be a robot) a sense of where it is, what's going on and how to control itself in the world. The rest is down to your creativity as a programmer.

I've just bought the Arduino Diecimila robot controller for just £17.60 from Cool Components. To the untrained eye, it looks like a very small and boring interface card for a PC. It's not. It's a full computer with some very special qualities. The chip at its heart is an Atmel Mega168, for instance. This is an industry standard microcontroller, which is basically a complete computer on a chip. It runs at 20MHz and, because it has a simple yet very comprehensive instruction set, it delivers a full 20 MIPS. The chip has 16K of non-volatile RAM on board to store its programs, 1K of volatile RAM to store variables while it's running, and 0.5K to store data when it's switched off. So, it can maintain a persistent state between battery changes - ideal for a robotic pet, wouldn't you say? but isn't the lack of RAM a problem?

No. Seriously. By programming like a real programmer, you can fit one hell of a lot of functionality into this beast. Think about it: you need to store a true/false (boolean) value, for example. Why would you need a 4-byte word to do that? Why not designate one byte to store 8 such booleans? See? Real programming; "tapping on tin" as they used to say is how it used to be done, before Windows came along and PCs became bloated playthings. Who actually needs an Intel Quad Core processor to read their email, for crying out loud?

Sorry, I got a bit ranty there. Anyway, by thinking like a proper programmer, the amount of "mind" you can squeeze into a microcontroller is phenomenal and the RAM seems huge. Want proof? Hundreds of millions of microcontrollers are used in car manufacture every year. They control everything from the dashboard to the injector system. They decide whether to deploy the air bags and tell the mechanic whether the wheels need balancing at service time. Your car may contain several dozen of them.

Everything about the Arduino Diecimila is open source, including the hardware. You can, if you wish, download the plans from the Arduino homepage, buy a Mega168 (they're around £3 retail!), a few resistors, capacitors and wires, solder the lot into a bit of veroboard, and hook it up to the serial port on your PC. You can program it directly from there using the free AVR Studio suite, which gives you the industry standard GCC C compiler, and a superb macro assembler if you want to get really code efficient. It also has a full simulator for a range of Atmel chips so you can test your code properly before squirting it onto the chip and watching it control your creation.

The Arduino Diecimila has 20 I/O lines. 6 can take analog inputs and convert them into 10-bit binary. 6 of the ports will do pulse width modulation, making them ideal for directly controlling servos. The others will accept things like infra-red diodes and photo-resistors directly, and have such high impedence, touching the end of a wire connected to them will cause the input to go high (ideal for touch sensors).

What's more, the Arduino Diecimila has a USB interface. This is used to program it, but there's also a library enabling you to write from the unit to a USB pen storage device. Is that enough non-volatile RAM for you?

So, what can you do with a robot controller? Well, the obvious thing is to make a robot, but there are plenty of other possibilities. I'm interested in making what I call an intelligent object; one that reacts intelligently to it's surroundings and to your interaction with it - a digital pet that goes WAY beyond the idea of a Tamagotchi, for want of a better phrase. One that learns from physical interaction. So far, the design can see light and infra red, it has a basic sense of touch, it can sense its orientation (and any movement), and hear basic sounds. It has light, sound and vibration as outputs at the moment and there are plans to give it a small LCD screen. It doesn't even move yet under its own steam, but the plan is to mount the sensors on a kind of "head" that sits atop a servo motor so that it can turn.

I'll be posting the results of my experiments over the coming months, and hopefully I'll have something basic running to show you soon. It's a big project and something I've never contemplated before, but I'm not doing it because it's easy. J.B Priestly once said that the secret to happiness is to be busy with unimportant things. I'm beginning to see what he meant.

P.S: I have no idea why the formatting of this post is different. I've tried everything. Sod it. Life's too short.

Begging to differ...

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says that people "can't wait" for ID cards to come in. Whoever is coming up to tell her this is, I'd like to suggest, not representative of the entire nation. Frankly, I don't believe it happens all that much.

Can anyone actually say what ID cards are for? Originally, we were told that they'll combat terrorism, but no one could explain how. Next, they were to confirm our identities when we need to do so (getting a passport, etc.) but we can already do that. Then they were to confirm our identities when making a purchase (chip & pin, anyone?) Now they're asserted as being simply a Good Thing. But, seeing as we will not be compelled to carry them, for whom are they a Good Thing?

Well, consider this: The total cost of implementing the ID card scheme now stands at £5.1 billion and the projected compulsory cost to every adult in the UK looks like being £60. Smith claims that the market for issuing passports and ID cards is set to be around to £200 million a year. Would I be cynical in thinking that this is about generating cash, not national security or to "help" us in some indefinable way?

Now, the serious point: ID cards are supposed to be uncrackable. That's fair enough, but as anyone who's ever thought about it for a short while may have noticed, the forms of ID we'll have to provide to get one of these super-duper cards are all less secure. It's like locking a safe inside another safe like a series of Russian Dolls. You still have to hide the key or combination to the outer safe somewhere. This is the eponymous weakest link. And, because security is only as strong as its weakest link, it's open to abuse - as Ms Smith found out this week when a group calling itself No2ID took a glass she'd been drinking from at a conference. This glass apparently has her fingerprints all over it.

So, do we, as Ms Smith asserts, really want to be forced to pay £60 for something that will languish in the back of the bits drawer at home? I think not. Maybe it's time I started a petition: The Campaign for Real Big Brother, calling on the government to either implement a proper, competent police state or to forget the whole idea. No bumbling about in the middle ground promising it will provide indefinable "benefits". It'd be a satirical campaign, of course, but like all satire it has a serious point. Stop wasting our time and money, Ms Smith. The people the terrorists want to blow up is the likes of you, not us, the poor sods they can and do get to. And yet, we're the ones being eyed suspiciously, 24/7.

Back To Wires, Back To Reality

I've never been a fan of wireless networks but now there's a real reason to mistrust them. Computer security researchers Erik Tews and Martin Beck have managed to partially crack the hitherto secure WPA encryption that should be used on all domestic wireless routers and cards. If you're using the older WEP encryption, please know that it's crackable in about a minute, the tools to do so are available online, and that the neighbour's geeky kid is possibly already aware of this - if he's not had a good look around your network already.

If you're reading this and have only limited computer knowledge, how long do you think it would have been before you'd have found out that WPA wasn't as secure as the man in the shop said? It's not like he's going to call you years after selling you a wireless router to warn you. When WPA is fully cracked, it'll give hackers (more correctly called "crackers") a whole new world to explore. More importantly, it'll give malicious individuals a new infection tool for worms.

The best solution to wireless insecurities is always going to be wires. They may be unsightly in some people's eyes, but at least your neighbours can't steal your broadband connection, or even spy on your internet usage.

The 9 Acres That Saved Humanity

The BBC reports that Bletchley Park has been thrown a bone in the form of £330,000 to perform essential maintenance on what is possibly the most important and symbolic 9 acres of land anywhere on the planet.

Let's be clear about this: if it wasn't for the code breaking work carried out at Bletchley Park during WWII, we wouldn't now be speaking German as plenty of people think; we'd never have been born at all. England and English culture as it existed would have been utterly destroyed. As it was, after the victory of El Alamein, helped in major part by decrypts of Rommel's secret orders, the allies never lost a battle. We knew what the German high command was ordering before its field commanders did.

When I visited in 2005, Bletchley was in a serious state of decay. The famous huts, where Turing, Welchman, Knox and the others struggled to solve the greatest intellectual chalenge of the age, were falling down. Tony Sale, however, was just putting the finishing touches to a Colossus. Out of interest, the original Colossus was designed and by Gordon Welchman and Tommy Flowers, not Alan Turing.

On the tour I attended, someone asked if the machine works. Sale said that yes it does, and that though they ran it for the morning tour, it was now a little too warm to risk the machine's delicate thermionic valves. Now, I have as much religious belief as the keyboard in front of me, but due to a lack of lunch, dehydration and heat, when I suddenly heard the subframe cracking as it cooled, I swear I came the closest I've ever been to a genuine religious experience. Colossus may look like an overstuffed store room, but to me it's a thing of genuine beauty and wonder.

I love Bletchley Park; if you value the fact that you exist at all, so should you. So should the Lottery Heritage Fund. Bletchley should be a place of pilgrimage. It's where the modern age began and where the Nazis were defeated. Frankly, if my home was on fire right now, the only things I'd save would be my teddy (of course) and the pine cone I found on the path leading from Bletchley station.

It's 2:30am GMT as I begin to write this post on November 5th 2008. Democrat Barack Obama has gained 195 votes against 76 for John McCain. Obama needs just 270 and he effectively rules the world unopposed for the next 4 years. Maybe the American civil war is finally over and this is the first true US General Election.

This was John McCain's only ever chance at being President, but it couldn't have come at a worse time. Someone had to stand for the Republicans, and I think he gave it a good shot - given that he must have known he only had at best a slim chance of winning. I reckon not many republicans would have agreed to give it a go. Fair play to him.

Here's my worry, and I'm sure it's nothing, but watching the US presidential coverage, I can't help remembering the feeling I had one balmy night in early May 1997. The witch's ghost was finally laid to rest and things, they told us, could only get better. Their definition of better turned out to be an interesting one to say the least, but as long as Obama isn't planning to launch New Democrats on the world, maybe things will start becoming a little less stupid on this damned planet.

Please don't forget to vote

UK voters may remember the night of April 9th 2002, when Labour were expected to landslide against the stagnation of the post-Thatcher years and yet another recession. The trouble is, they didn't win.

Instead of voting, I went to watch some rather poor quality jazz (Andy Shepard and In Commotion at Band on the Wall in Manchester, as I recall). I, like everyone else, felt confident I'd be waking up under a Labour government the next morning come what may. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Enough voters also seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion that there'd be a change of government and didn't vote. Somehow it seemed like it was just time for change. Maybe if enough people had voted the way they said they would and Neil Kinnock had become premier, New Labour would never have come into being. What a different world it may have been.

Nothing is a foregone conclusion in politics, specially at election time. So, if you want change in the US tonight, please for the good of your own happiness, GET OUT AND VOTE!

Security Begins At Home (Office)

Well, it's happened again; though the Department of Work and Pensions says there's nothing to worry about, millions of private identities are on the loose - again.

This time, a data stick containing the passwords of people who used the UK Government's Gateway system for everything from tax returns to fine payments was found - wait for it - in a pub car park. Do you want to know how many times the identities of UK citizens have been lost since the amazing bungle that saw 25 million child benefit claimants' details lost in the post last year?

According to the Daily Mail, the Information Commissioner says it's 277. That's data loss incidents, not lost identities.

A couple of months ago, I tried calculating the number of identities government contractors have lost for an article I was writing. My estimate was that about half of us have had our details lost (some of us multiple times) by the very people who should know better - contractors cleared to work on or engaged in managing supposedly secure UK government systems. But are these systems even secure in any meaningful sense when it's clearly possible to simply copy live, sensitive data to a USB pen drive, slip it in your pocket and leave the building so to speak, or when it's possible to take a laptop containing such data home and leave it to be stolen from the back of your car overnight?

The concept of "secure" when applied to government data systems seems increasingly to be a nonsense. What the hell was someone doing with live data in a pub car park anyway? This leads me to a very grave question; one I'd seriously rather not be asking, but one that needs asking.

How long until someone reads the data they find on a lost USB stick or stolen laptop, and realises it's worth far more than simply punting the hardware around the pubs or on eBay? What happens when someone with serious terrorist intentions buys such data and picks YOUR identity at random to buy the equipment for an atrocity? How do you explain to the very nervous anti-terrorism officer screaming and pointing a loaded machine gun at you that you're an innocent, law-abiding dupe, and that it's the government itself that's ultimately responsible? The answer is, you can't.

The rate at which the government is haemorraging our identities is horrific: 277 data loss incidents divided by 12 months is an average of 23 incidents a month or about 5 a week. Under any circumstances, this is completely unacceptable. In such apparently dangerous times, it's deeply and criminally incompetent to the point of recidivism. It's getting to the point where I'm seriously beginning to fear that not only will politicians but the civil service itself lose the confidence of the British public. What happens then? I shudder to think what stupidity may pass for a solution, or what dangerous new influences the country may fall under as we look for a quick fix to a terrible mess.

Instead of our Home Secretary insisting that we, the poor sods who form the great mass of innocent potential terrorism victims, must be monitored ever closer, the state should be watching those whose job it is to keep us safe. Because no one in Whitehall seems to have figured out who those people are, I'll spell it out. They must begin with the people we have no choice but to trust with all our identities. Ultimately, that's themselves.

It's the roof, silly...

Cannabis use in the UK has fallen since the drug was downgraded to Class C in January 2004 . That's not an opinion; it's a fact compiled by the Government itself. Illicit drug use in Britain is down across the board according to the British Crime Survey. But why would this apparent paradox be so?

Maybe, and this really is an opinion, all the people who were going to smoke dope anyway are still doing so, but those for whom the illegal status was the thrill failed to see it in such a glamorous light once downgraded. So, if downgrading shook out the market, why the hell is the UK government trying to reclassifying cannabis to class B again in January 2009? Does this sound sensible to you?

Apparently, the proposed reclassification is required because "skunk" - the powerful herbal variety of dope - is prevalent in the market and the Government want to be able to go after the farmers. Well... why don't they? After all, this is a government that's good at applying laws incorrectly. It recently applied the Anti-terrorism Act to seize Iceland's assets!

More properly, why not simply split out skunk from the more traditional and milder resinous form of the drug and reclassify it in isolation? Or split out skunk farming? After all, if it's genuinely cause and effect that downgrading led to lower use, surely putting all forms of dope back up to Class B will increase it's overall use again. I'm so confident of this happening, I'm actually thinking of putting £10 on at Ladbrokes. The problem is, it's so obvious, I doubt I'd get anything better than evens.

This muddle smacks (if you'll pardon the expression) of a man who on a Bank Holiday Sunday hears a dripping sound in his attic. He tells his neighbour that he plans to call a plumber out to fix the header tank. The neighbour looks into the attic and tells him he needs to fix the roof because that's the source of the leak, not the header tank. No, demands the householder: a plumber to fix the header tank is what he wants. In other words, only a fool begins with a conclusion, but it takes an even bigger fool to stick with it.

My hovercraft is full of eels...

The BBC reports on a sign erected by Swansea Council. In line with the Council's bilingual policy, it contains both English and Welsh versions of the same phrase.



















Nothing wrong with that, you may say... unless you can read Welsh. Translated, it reads, "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." What do they say about assumption being the mother of all cock-ups?

A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

Imagine how you'd feel if your web browser suddenly disappeared for 24 hours, or worse still, if you simply received an email from its developers saying, "Sorry, mate. No more browser, and by the way, all your bookmarks are gone too."

You'd be outraged, right? Now imagine that instead of it being your browser, its an entire office suite that disappears along with all your documents. Everything. Your fundamental ability to continue your business is affected. It's a good job software doesn't work like that, isn't it? The trouble is, it's beginning to do so in a very big, very frightening way, and I don't understand why.

Cloud computing is, "Worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," GNU founder and open source guru Richard Stallman told The Guardian recently. He may be a controversial figure, but I can't shake the feeling that he's right. You see, instead of keeping your infrastructure on your own server behind your own firewall, cloud computing involves handing everything to a vaguely-understood third party, accessing it using a web-based service, and trusting that everything will remain both safe and available.

According to the Cloud Computing Incidents Database (CCID) Wiki, such services have already experienced 12 major incidents this year. But here's the kicker: One service has actually closed down, taking a lot of people's data with it. The Linkup ceased trading on 8th August after what began as a simple data transfer from a legacy system. After losing an incredible 45% of data in the process, it seems to have simply shut up shop. Nice one, lads. Way to increase confidence in what Larry Ellison of Oracle has described as "complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

The steady stream of cloud computing service outages is gathering pace. The CCID Wiki shows just 2 incidents for 2007. At the time of writing, however, it shows that 10 of the 12 incidents recorded so far for 2008 occurred in the latter half of the year. Would you gamble on it sticking at 10 until New Year's Eve, with a drop in 2009?

Stallman's advice is to, "Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program," but it's not always easy to afford hardware when you're in a hurry to get a start-up off the ground and make your first million cheaply.

The evidence so far is that when you buy into cloud computing, you also buy exposure to any potential data storage, network and business continuity problems your service provider may have. Maybe the only way to limit that exposure is to use cloud computing (if you must) only for non-essential tasks. Like all things in life, you get what you pay for.

This is a story that is sure to run like a toddler's nose, but if I ever set up a company, I'll be paying for my own hardware, thank you very much.

Innocent Criminals

The BBC is following the story of a couple from Scotland who received a letter from Atari's UK attack dogs Davenport Lyons accusing them of illegally sharing a game called Race07. The letter demanded £500 not to prosecute. Fair enough, you might say, but there's a problem: Gill and Ken Murdock, aged 54 and 66 respectively, have never heard of the game, don't know what peer-to-peer file sharing is, and anyway, they don't play video games. I'm sure you can guess where this is going...

For those hell-bent on destroying the games industry by illegally dishing out the fruit of its labour for free, someone else's computer is a god-send. Simply trojan it with p2p software and store your stolen goods on it for others to take at will. The poor sap who owns the computer takes the blame. The trouble is, this is 2008, not 1998, and this simply shouldn't be happening.

The problem is the owners of the hijacked machines. Though they perceive the need and have the resources to acquire and hook up to broadband something that would put a Cray-2 to shame, some people seemingly don't perceive the need to secure it. What other reason could there be for a middle-aged couple being caught innocently ripping off Atari? This has to stop. We live in a time when perfectly good anti-virus software exists, and much of it is free, free and free.

So, what's the solution? To scare the population into protecting themselves by wrongly convicting a few until they get the point? To make it illegal not to take basic online security seriously? To insist on every Internet user having a yearly computer MOT? While the problem persists, software companies are going to lose out, and possibly even go bust. Chasing the file sharers doesn't work, and as the NLP lot are fond of saying, if what you're doing doesn't work, do something else. So, maybe it's time for the likes of Atari to be taking charge and teaming up with anti-virus companies to ensure that people like the Murdocks are safe to be let out on the Internet in the first place.

For reasons of cash flow if nothing else, that's not practical. To write operating systems that behave as if they were designed for use in 2008 rather than being shipped as an easily exploited work in progress also seems to have become impossible. An easier alternative might be to follow the example set by a group based around ETH Zurich. Their research into the number of out-of-date browsers still in use (it's a hell of a lot, and I'm willing to bet the Murdock's browser is one of them) led to the idea of creating software that tells you that it's out of date. The logical conclusion is to build this feature into Windows, so that after several attempts to get you to update, your computer will not perform any other networked function until you do so. Let's just hope Microsoft can get it together to implement something like this in a form that isn't badly holed below the waterline - again.