Mr Brown’s Letter

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 062009
 

If I were close to someone who had been killed in action in Afghanistan, which would I rather receive ? A handwritten letter in poor handwriting and numerous misspellings ? Or a carefully worded letter, computer printed with a signature at the bottom.

Obviously I would rather receive neither – I would rather than someone close to me were still alive. But given the choice between the two letters, I would rather receive the handwritten one with misspellings and poor handwriting. A properly crafted letter that is computer printed is far less personal, and the wording is likely to be very bland. It would also feel like it was a form letter sent to everyone.

As for the poor handwriting and misspellings, a sensible person would not draw attention to that. There are often reasons why someone has poor spelling – for instance dyslexia. And someone with poor eyesight who probably relatively rarely writes by hand is likely to have poor handwriting.

Bean Counters Marching Across The Valley

 General  No Responses »
Nov 032009
 

54874

There are those who would say that Technology is responsible for these eyesores (the electrical pylons!) crawling across the countryside. They would be wrong. Technology presents a number of solutions (overhead pylons, underground cables, etc.) for distributing electricity and the bean counters decide that the most elegant and least ugly solution (underground cables) is too expensive.

Silent Running: Electric and Hybrid Cars Too Quiet ?

 General, Media  1 Response »
Nov 032009
 

You know I was going to jump up and down shouting I told you so … except I cannot find the post from ages ago where I pointed out that this might be a problem (extra points to anyone who finds the link!). The BBC has just had a story about the dangers to visually impaired people from “quiet cars” – hybrids and electric vehicles. Actually of course it is just about everyone who finds it helpful to hear cars coming – indeed I will listen to my iPod on “mono” in certain situations to ensure I get an early warning from the noise of approaching vehicles.

Whilst loud vehicles are an enormous pain and I certainly would not want to encourage their use. The person who invented car stereos loud enough to cause nearby buildings to shake – and yes they can get that loud – needs to be tied down and forced to listen to my choice of music for a few weeks. So called silent cars do also cause problems; in fact a certain amount of noise results from the tyres running along the road. We are used to relying on sound to assist us in locating moving vehicles; in some cases it is the only sense we can rely on.

Apparently Lotus engineers have come up with a nifty system that generates noise that varies according to the amount acceleration the driver is applying. Sorry guys, you’ve been sniffing petrol fumes too much. Whilst the driver may be impressed by the feedback he (or she) gets when they press the acceleration pedal, the rest of us are more interested in the speed of the vehicle. Sound effects for the driver are all very well (when played inside the car) but rather out of scope for this discussion.

It would not be difficult to make hybrid and electric cars generate a noise when they are moving nearly silently. And the most sensible thing to do is to standardise the noise generation before we end up with a confusing variety of different sounds and volumes. The simplest is to have a tone generated when a vehicle is moving that starts low in pitch at low speeds and rises in pitch as the speed increases. Think old-fashioned milk floats.

Looking At Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

 Computing  No Responses »
Nov 022009
 

So I quickly install the CD in a virtual machine, login, get delayed by doing something with a passphrase, install the “guest additions”, and reboot. But why doesn’t Ubuntu include the drivers for various different virtual machine environments ? It would certainly make it easier to quickly setup a machine to test the feasibility of switching or upgrading.

One tiny little niggle with the first boot – the passphrase request to “unlock” the encrypted drive (I wanted to say “unencrypt” there but of course it doesn’t actually do that) is a little less than obvious. It should perhaps be a little more “in your face” – a popup. And of course the new Ubuntu boot straight into X might look a little prettier than the previous mechanism, but it isn’t quite “geeky” enough for me (my OSX machines are set to boot in verbose mode to scare those who think the command line is scary). This new startup is supposedly significantly quicker than previous releases; I’m afraid I didn’t notice. Perhaps it is of concern more to others than to me, but I rarely restart my machines – my somewhat less than totally reliable main machine has been up for 7 days, so a faster boot time is not of great significance to me.

I couldn’t seem to find anything to tweak the desktop effects settings. Perhaps not that important, but sort of peculiar. I dare say there’s an addon to do that.

I next dove into “Software Centre” to find a couple of applications that I use, but couldn’t. Admittedly they are somewhat towards the geeky side of things, but they are not that unpopular (zsh and enlightenment). Dropping to a terminal window and they were quickly found using apt-cache. Perhaps the Software Centre intentionally hides things to make the default list of new application choices a little less scary ? Maybe, but it needs an easily found button to say “show more”. Of course the Synaptic package manager can still be found, so this isn’t a real problem although having two ways of installing/removing software could be.

After I installed my favourite window manager (Enlightenment for now), I went on to try setting it up in my usual way with a .xsession file. No luck! It seems that Ubuntu’s version of gdm has accidentally (?) removed this functionality. This is quite a serious problem for those who like to run seriously customised environments. Perhaps not Ubuntu’s major audience, but it seems rather unfortunate to remove this functionality as it will seriously annoy those like me who prefer their own environment.

Going back to the default environment, I take a quick look at Firefox to realise that there is no Flash plugin. A dive into the Software Centre fixes that, although it would have been nice to be taken through a “wizard” when starting Firefox for the first time to suggest installing a number of proprietary extensions (and explain why they are not installed by default). Not that it does not install with a good selection already, but a browser without flash is perhaps not what people are expecting (although there are advantages in not having flash or turning it on only for those pages you want it turned on for).

Browsing through the settings, and I find the theme browser which does not really offer much choice by default – you have to install some additional themes. The choice of backgrounds is fine, although I’m not too sure why the frog was included (I chose the falling coffee). The most obvious improvement here, would be to include a hint on how to include your own photos as a background – quite possibly the first thing that many want to do! At least the Font tab defaults to using a method of rendering suitable for LCD panels (I’m not sure if this is new with the Koala).

In the keyboard preferences, the Layout options are somewhat confusing. Admittedly the number of options here is bound to make it more confusing, and those who choose “Layout Options” are likely to be self-educated to some degree. However it may be worth looking again at how the options are described. Oddly enough the Mouse preferences shows an option to “Show mouse pointer position when Control is pressed” but does not allow you to enable it!

Going through the applications, most (without extensive testing) seem fine. However Empathy (the replacement for the Pidgin instant messaging client) does seem a little on the flaky side with a few “misfeatures” – for instance the “Room” dialog box is a little immature and it is not obvious what you should do with it. Are you supposed to know some sort of “server name” ? Seems a little odd.

This may get added to when I find the time and patience to do more, but I am sure there are plenty of other far more complete looks at Ubuntu 9.10 out there!

Professor Nutt’s Attack on UK Drugs Policy

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 012009
 

It is now clear that the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs is in danger of disintegration as additional members seem to be considering (or have) resigned in protest at the sacking of Professor Nutt and the seemingly arbitrary decisions made by the Government on the use of recreational drug use.  There has long been a suspicion that the Government’s (all UK governments and not just the most recent one!) decisions on which drugs should be legal and which ones illegal, is based more on which ones are acceptable to the establishment and which ones are not.

The UK’s system of drugs laws is based around three classes of drugs (A, B, and C) with a decreasing scale of punishments for misuse from the harshest for the use of the most harmful drugs (class A) to the lightest punishment for the least harmful (class C). Or rather it should be.

Both the classification of Ecstasy (as class A) and the re-classification of cannabis (from C to B) were made by ignoring the scientific advice and paying more attention to media hysteria. Both are classified higher than the risk of taking them justifies. What other drugs have been classified inappropriately?

If the government wants to make arbitrary decisions on drugs classifications, they need to get honest and get rid of the whole classification system. And they need to stop taking advice from scientists – taking advice and then ignoring it wastes a great deal of time on those who formulate the advice, and if the advice is ignored there is no point in getting it.

Alternatively, the government needs to accept the advice of the experts and get the politicians out of the loop. Even to go so far as to include legal drugs into the classification system. For instance why are not alcohol and tobacco not classified appropriately ? They could be classified according to their harm with a special note that they are legal for practical reasons.

Over the weekend, the criticisms of Professor Nutt can be split into two.

The first criticism is that he shouldn’t have said what he said as a government advisor. Well I’m sure Professor Nutt knows this, knew he would be sacked for saying what he said, and felt that he had to say it anyway. He has certainly managed to ignite a debate on the subject.

The second criticism is that he is wrong that drugs such as cannabis are less harmful than the drugs they are classified with. First of all Professor Nutt was not saying that cannabis is harmless; he was saying that it’s harm does not justify it being classified as class B (it should be C instead). Secondly those criticising him seem to think that their personal (bad) experience with cannabis invalidates the scientific evidence.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Scientific evidence (on drug use) is about moving beyond personal experience both good and bad, and getting to the truth on the level of risk. There are many who would claim that cannabis is harmless because it hasn’t caused them any harm (man), and some who would claim it is very harmful because it has harmed them. Both are wrong – cannabis is harmful, but the amount of harm considering the number of users is very low.

As an analogy, the use of aspirin can cause stomach ulcers, stomach bleeding, and tinnitus. Rather extreme for curing a little headache! Perhaps aspirin should be banned ? Of course not – the benefit far outweighs the risk.

In an ideal world, the current fuss over Professor Nutt’s lecture and drugs policy will result in seeing some sanity in drug prohibition – perhaps even we would see the legalisation of drugs (prohibition probably causes far more harm to society as a whole than the harm resulting from drug use). However it is more likely that we will see more gross stupidity.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries