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.