Life at The Sun...

The Sun reports that NASA has found life on Mars.

"ALIEN bugs are responsible for strong plumes of methane gas detected on Mars, it was claimed tonight. Nasa scientists say the gas emissions could have either a geological or biological source - as The Sun exclusively revealed today."

Exclusively, eh? Hmmm... In two sentences the hacks go from declaring life being found to offering two possibilities: life or geology. But since when has geology been life?

Here's the actual skinny form NASA: "Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif."

Finding life on Mars would be profound. Life at The Sun would be more useful. Still, no need to let facts get in the way of a good story, possibly the story of the age.

Any sufficiently advanced technology...

According to Digital Spy, the rapper "Coolio" has claimed on the UK's immensely tedious Celebrity Big Brother that "Computers aren't from this planet".

"All this technology. You believe it came from this planet? Bullsh*t! I don't think men are that smart. I think it came from somewhere else." Clearly, you're not that smart, Coolio - not by a very long way - but please don't lump all humanity under the same banner of idiocy.

The lack of education displayed by someone millions admire is staggering. It's also a testament to the need to fill the vacuum of ignorance with something, anything so obviously idiotic, and yet still actively t odecide to believe it completely. There are too many snake oil salesmen ready to fill such vacuums with easy-to-believe solutions, from creationism to homoeopathy and beyond (for some reason, "Dr" Gillian McKeith sprung to mind writing that last sentence). However, Coolio's lack of knowledge and understanding is interesting for the fact that he seems to have some vague awareness of how difficult it is to start from first principles, do proper science and create the modern world.

Who once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to primitive people? It's time to leave the superstition of the cave, Coolio, and to evolve a little! To paraphrase Douglas Adams: The secret is to keep bashing the rocks together.

That's a nice boiler you've got there...

...it'd be terrible if something happened to it.

British Gas is again trying to frighten householders with junk mail alerting them to the dire consequences of not taking out a maintenance contract to insure against boiler breakdown. Their latest attempt has just flopped onto my mat. On the front cover is a boiler repair bill, complete with invoice number. Inside it says "For once, we thought you'd like to see a boiler repair bill." Though there's a certain amount of plausible ambiguity in the wording, we're clearly being asked to imagine that the figures quoted on the bill can and will be a lot higher if we don't pay £13 a month, whether the boiler we own is brand new or 20 years old. That price is, I discovered after following the associated asterisk to the small print, only available to new customers for the first year, and is "subject to change". Oh, and "Evening and weekend calls cost 6p plus to 2ppm from a BT Calling Plan...". The acronym "ppm" means pounds per minute. That's outrageous, as is "6p plus".

After a certain age, boiler insurance is a good idea, but it's not a good idea to put the frighteners on people to get them to sign up. This literature is clearly designed to scare people. Well, bring it on, Sid. I don't care. In fact, I welcome a deluge of British Gas nastygrams, and here's why.

A postman I know says he's compelled to deliver junk mail given to him at the sorting office when it's not actually addressed to an individual. It's an offence for him not to deliver it, in fact. There's no opt out via the Mailing Preference Service, either. That's a great loophole, but it's backfired in British Gas' face. You see, where I live is all electric and I can change a fuse. So, British Gas are wasting their money. The question is, what would they give to know exactly which households in the UK are all-electric? £13 a month, perhaps? Only for the first year and subject to change, of course...

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?