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?