Spam header of the day: "Jesus Christ To Star In Next Series Of Big Brother".

What'll the voice of Big Brother do? Call Jesus into the Bible Room? Perhaps it would just provide three loaves and five small fishes as the rations for the whole series. Whatever it is, the ratings certainly need a miracle!

Taking a break for handling the house server migration, I wandered up to the roof for a brief taste of evening sunlight. The sky was clear and bright, and the London brick of the houses shone red and yellow in the bright light of an English summer...

Putney, London
July 2008

I've been following an interesting chain of posts about the possibility of a Vingean Singularity across several sites, which culminates in this interesting comment from daveon:

Jo's comment that sparked this was: I don't think we'll ever get to the point where understanding the future would be like explaining Worldcon [i.e., the world science fiction annual convention] to a goldfish...

I'm less convinced partly because I've sat back and looked critically at my morning.  This morning I've had 3 conference calls, dozens of "conversations" in text in a variety of IM clients which clutter this nice new screen, sent some test messages and been involved in some email threads.  I would have trouble explaining to my mother, born 1931, that that was actually work.  I don't think this is going to get any better either.

This fits in with a long running conversation I've been having with several people (including the esteemed Mr Vinge), in which the point has been made that the human race has survived many singularities - from the agricultural revolution to global air travel.

It's an issue I think that's actually been widely accepted by society at large. After all, it's part of our comedy background noise already. There's a skit by, ISTR, Mitchell and Webb, where a stone chipper and a tool binder meet a technology evangelist for bronze. The characters find it hard to conceive of anything other than stone and hide, until one makes the conceptual leap to realise that he'll still be binding axe heads onto handles, while the stone chipper will be left behind to starve...

There's an example marypcb and I use that could easily be called "The Doorbell Singularity", and it's an interesting example of how quickly perceptual and societal changes ripple through the world. it's shaped by a simple question:

"What finger do you ring a doorbell with?"

If you're under seventeen (and living in the developed world), you'll probably say "My thumb". It turns out that the widespread use of texting and video games is shifting the pointing and pressing finger from the index finger to the thumb. What's also more surprising is that the change is rippling up the age spectrum at a rate of about two years every eighteen months. A thumb user can't conceive that the index finger is anything other than one used for typing on a keyboard.

Now that's a singularity, and it's catching up with the rest of us very fast indeed...

A kite surfer makes a high speed turn across a wave...

Highway 1, California
July 2008

The two colours of California at the height of summer.

Page Mill Road, California
July 2008

Seeing as the first trailer is out, I have to say: me!



I'm getting hopeful....

So here I am, a third of the way around the world from where I was this morning, soaking up the sun to deal with any jet lag.

Why is it that the simplest part of a journey often seems to be the hardest? District Line problems this morning meant I had to squeeze my suitcase into a crowded tube. I perched on the case and emulated every Londoner's totem animal: the sardine. Everything else was a doddle.The Heathrow Express expressed, and my newish Virgin Atlantic gold card got me through their dedicated fast track security line in no time at all. In fact there was enough time to get a cooked breakfast in the lounge, before hunting down my plane. An at the gate upgrade meant I had a comfortable flight in premium economy and a quick pass through immigration once we landed in San Francisco.

San Jose is warm and sunny, and my hotel room is the size of many London flats.

Tomorrow it's on with the grind, with the start of two days of workshops at Adobe.

Time to head back across a third of the world again for a few days.

I'm going to be in San Jose from tomorrow until Sunday, staying at the Fairmont (thanks to the folk who're bringing me out). I'm in meetings all of Wednesday and Thursday, but Friday and Saturday are looking pretty free. Anyone fancy meeting up at any point?

You've heard of the slow food movement. Now let me introduce you to the slow music movement. Its members don't know they're part of it, but they all have one thing in common: exquisitely crafted albums that appear years apart. Kraftwerk are one such band, and the UK's main proponent are the superb The Blue Nile.



They played a rare concert last night, one of a short series that recaps nearly 25 years of craftsmanship. It wasn't a big gig, in fact, compared to our last concert at a festival in Spain it was positively minute. But it was people who loved the band, who loved their music, and who'd managed to fight London's broken public transport infrastructure to reach the courtyard of Somerset House.



The concert ranged widely through the band's four albums, and introduced one new track (as well as a distinctly Blue Nilish take on "Strangers in the Night"). The atmosphere was electric, with an enraptured audience hanging on every perfect note.

( For the completists, the set list )

An excellent gig, and one which bodes well for further concerts (and more albums).

I've been blogging about my first experiences with the iPhone 2.0 software over at IT Pro:

I've been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple's implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO's iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

I've added plenty of images so you can see just what it all looks like. Here are a couple just to whet your appetites:





Go read the rest of the piece for the rest of the images!

Meanwhile Mary looked at one possible reason for buying an iPhone 3G - increased blocking of social networks inside the corporate firewall:

Sure the iPhone is cool, but how many people are buying a smartphone just to get Web access at work?

A lot of our friends who blog using LiveJournal (probably the most community-oriented blogging platform) have commented recently that they’re losing access to LiveJournal and other sites at work - so they’re buying a smartphone so they can carry on accessing them.

I keep wondering how much of the recent jump in smartphone Web browsing is down to phones being almost good enough, networks being almost fast enough and data plans being almost cheap enough - and how much of it is annoyed or paranoid people being forced to put their social network in their pocket to stay in touch during the working day.

Remember to make any comments over there!

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you'll find the image in the device's camera roll.)

There's nothing quite so determined as a small yellow cat that absolutely wants to be somewhere.

This was Calli other night, on her way in through the office window.

Putney, London
July 2008

I was just going through the spamtrap on our mail server to hunt for false positives (someone has to get their hands dirty with the stuff, and there are usually one or two in amongst the rubbish^*), and I noticed the latest tranche of Stormbot spam had generated headers were all war and rumours of war.

Storm currently pumps out spam with headers that pretend to be surprising news stories, with the intent that you'll click on the URI in the message and get hit by a drive-by malware download - and it really pumps them out. Most of the spam I see in the spamtrap these days is a mix of 419 and pharmacy scammery and Storm-bait messages.

And then I realised that there was an upside to this latest batch of Storm headlines: "What if they held a war and everyone thought it was spam?"

If only.

^*Which means IMF is giving us a false positive rate of below 0.3%. Not bad for a mailserver's built-in anti-spam tools)

Carrying a camera at all times is slowly becoming a habit. Remembering to take pictures of the neat things we see as we walk the familiar road to the Tube is something that's harder to do. Today we found a child's plastic policeman perched in the interstices of a fence. An ant was slowly crawling up its face, trying to find some food on the impermeable plastic bobby.

It was gone when we came home later in the afternoon.

Putney, London
July 2008

Nothing (at least techwise) gets more heated more quickly than a discussion about mobile phones - especially about smartphones. I've been thinking about this, and tying it in with some other thoughts and discussions I've been having on the smartphone as a tool for defining user context. The result is a possible reason why people rushed to sign up for iPhone upgrades yesterday, and why so many people felt let down and disappointed by O2's online store.

So why do people get so attached to their smartphones? The answer's quite simple. The smartphone is the first truly personal computer. PCs have claimed to be personal, and they certainly offer many of the features we want, but as they're tethered to a desk or a lap, they're not there with us all the time. Smartphones have become personally ubiquitous. They're with us from the moment we wake up (in a recent study a significant proportion of Blackberry users noted that they used their phones as alarm clocks), to the moment we go to sleep. They know where we are, they know what we're doing. They help us communicate with the people who matter to us, and they help us fend off those we don't want around. We use them to find out where we want to be, and to find out where other people are. In short, they've rapidly become an extension of who and what we are.

Do you get a twinge every time you lend a phone to a friend - or even a partner? You're handing over something much more personal and much more intimate than a diary, so it's no wonder you feel a strong attachment to a hunk of plastic and electronics.

But underneath it all we're not satisfied. Our smartphones have become so useful, so entwined with our lives, that we see every flaw, every minor bug as a strike against the device. Each of us has that perfect phone in our heads - the device that is so in tune with who we are and what we want that it becomes a seamless extension of our lives. And when our current phone fails to match up to that platonic ideal, we become disillusioned, even though we defend the device to all comers. We want our phone to be that ideal, and we want the people around us to believe that it is, that we've made the right choice. We forget that all phones are compromises, where the technology and the dreams of the designers are brought together in a device that will meet most of the needs of most of the people. It's the old 80/20 rule at work - but unfortunately that 20% will always include something that matters to someone.

Even so, at the end of that year or eighteen months with the phone we rush to the online shops and review sites and try to find the next smartphone to make part of our lives. We read the promises of the manufacturers and we plunge in to another intimate relationship. After all, this could be it, this could be the one true device that will mesh with everything you are and you want. We want to believe, as we want that personal ideal. That's why the iPhone upgrade mess yesterday was so important to so many people - there was already an emotional attachment to the ideal the iPhone 3G had become. When O2 was unable to deliver on its promises, people felt rejected and unwanted - as the object of their desires was now unavailable and distant. Taunted with a glimpse of the ideal they were thrown out Eden and left looking at the angel with the sword in the new found shape of a sold out notice on a web page.

I'm a mobile device agnostic. I have to be, as I write about them as part of my life. As a result I tend to carry two or three different devices at any one time. At the moment that's a one of the latest Blackberry Pearls, a first generation iPhone, and a HTC Kaiser running Windows Mobile 6.1 - though I can quickly get my hands on a handful of other devices with different operating systems and different form factors. They're all very different devices, all very different ways of working with personal information. Some work well as Internet browsing devices, some as messaging tools, and some as all-purpose computing platforms that you can fill with software you choose. What's interesting is that none of the design decisions made by the device developers are wrong - they all stem from different assumptions of what the end user wants. The choices that have been made follow logically from those initial assumptions. That's why there's no one-size-fits-all device out there, and why there's always going to be something better, something that scratches that itch that only you have.

Maybe you're a Blackberry user, or Symbian, or Windows Mobile, or iPhone. To be honest it doesn't really matter. What really matters is that you've got a device that works for you. There's no point in evangelising it to everyone around you - and even less point in denigrating someone else's choice. The device in your pocket or in your bag can only matter to you, as it's now part of your life. It's what works for you now - and it may not work for you tomorrow. The compromises you've made with the designers' compromises can only last so long, and soon enough you'll be looking for something new, for a new device to blend into your life.

After all, the one true smartphone (for you) has to be out there somewhere...

I'm guessing that most of you (at least of my EU readership) have already emailed your MEPs with a message roundly condemning the stealth attempts to pass legislation that will allow media companies to disconnect ordinary people from the Internet permanently just for the suspicion that they may be filesharing.

If you haven't may I join my voice to those urging you to do so? It won't take long and it will help preserve your rights online as well as saving the small and medium sized ISPs that do so much to keep Internet access prices competitive.

Here's my letter, which I've based on texts I've seen around the net (thanks to perlmonger for the opening and closing sections which are where I was getting stuck...):

I am writing to you as a constituent asking you to exert whatever influence you have with members of the IMCO and IMTR committees of the European Parliament to vote against amendments 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 that have been introduced into the Telecoms package.

These amendments were introduced under the influence of industry lobbyists whose interests are in the attempted maintenance of obsolete business models that have become unsustainable; not only that, but they are an attempt to subvert earlier rejection by Parliament of explicit legislation to the same ends. The proposed measures are disproportionate, unworkable in practice, violate privacy and personal data security and would lead to entire families being denied access to the internet through the presumed guilt of one member. The European Parliament has already voted against them - they should not be passed by hiding them inside other important and much needed legislation.

Not only are they disproportionate, putting the onus on ISPs to detect and implement the measures required by the amendments is both an unfair measure and technically unfeasable. Many UK ISPs are small or medium sized businesses, and do not have the funds required to invest in wholesale tracking of their users' actions. The amount of work required to implement these measures is large, and the techniques complex. The only organisations able to do this will be the incumbent carriers, reinforcing what is a de facto monopoly by putting small ISPs out of business.

There is, in fact, no way of identifying the difference between legitimate and illegitimate traffic in the manner described in the amendments. Many users use the same tools that are used to download copyright violations to install Linux, or get updates from Microsoft. If the tools proposed by the legislation aren't perfect these innocent users will be tarred with the same brush as anyone violating copyrights. Even if it is possible to determine the type of data being accessed, it's impossible to determine the actual state of the rights associated with it, or the intentions of the rights holders.

Innocent users also face the risk of having their home networks hijacked by third parties without their knowledge - and losing access as a result of third party actions. I'm more technically aware than most people, but it still took several weeks for me to find that someone elsewhere in my street was using filesharing software over my wireless network. Most home users don't have access to the tools or the skills to find and identify these situations, yet the proposed legislation will make them liable for whatever happens on their home wireless networks.

I'm a technology journalist by trade, but I come from a technical background and helped found one of the UK's first national ISPs, and also helped build the online presences of many major high street brands. The Internet has provided a boost to the economy, and these measures will reduce access to the Internet and by closing down small ISPs will increase the costs to the very users the European online economy needs.

The committees are scheduled to vote on this package tomorrow, 7th July, and I urge you to do what you can to have these amendments rejected and, failing that, to vote against the package yourself should it be presented for a vote by the Parliament as a whole.

I'm sorry that I'm sending this message with less than 24 hours to go, but I only found out about this today myself: so please do what you can to prevent these egregious and dangerous measures being codified into European law and to ensure that the European Parliament continues to represent the interests of its electors, even where those conflict with the short-term advantage of multinational corporations and their lobbyists.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Bisson

Remember you have a voice and a point of view, and it's one that deserves to be heard.

I've just ordered one of these beasties to use with any spare SATA drives that I come across. You just drop in a SATA drive (it works with both 3.5" and 2.5" drives), and the drive's ready to test, or you can use it to quickly extract the data you're looking for...



Nice and cheap, too.

It does make me think of more than one TV crime show, though. You could just see Sebastian Stark or Brenda Leigh Johnson sanctioning the use of one to get the data they need to put away the bad guys. And I'm sure Garcia has one or two of them in her office in Quantico...

A beach photo for a summer day.

Moss Landing, California
April 2008

Here's another round-up of links to our blog over at IT Pro (now with a nice shiny redesign). We tend to put a couple of pieces up there a week, and if you want to read them as soon as they're published, it's also syndicated on LJ as itpro_sandm.

Click on the titles to see the full posts, and please make any comments over there. Oh, and rate the posts too, please!

Green if but for the licenses

Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.

With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.

Intel predicts an all IA future, consigns CUDA to the footnotes

With Intel’s 40th birthday on the horizon (and with it the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor), Intel’s Pat Gelsinger took a few minutes yesterday to ruminate on the past, present and future - and to take a few questions.

Beginning with a look back to the i386, and the shift from 16 to 32-bit computing, Gelsinger pointed to a time of technical and industry transition, much like today. It was the point where Compaq moved ahead of IBM, and Windows and Microsoft began to shape the software industry. We’re in the middle of another shift at the moment, what Gelsinger called the “third era of Moore’s Law”.

O2: business iPhone 3G will sync to Exchange without iTunes

But you’ll still need iTunes on every desktop to install applications. Would you put that in your organization?
We spent Friday with Telefonica at their new headquarters in Madrid, a campus laid out around a lake to deal with the climate; solar panels, vanes that push the heat up, a tower in each corner and wide roofs to add shade plus wireless antenna sprouting in the flowerbeds like candelabra. Telefonica has technology plans for the networks it runs as well, which includes O2.

Even Telefonica can’t actually show off the new iPhone yet: O2’s Steve Alder kept his in his pocket and described it instead. What he did show off was the price: free if you pay £45 or £75 a month for the tariff or £99 if you want the cheapest £30 a month plan. Existing iPhone owners get the same deal, although you have to sign up for the full 18 month contract again. None of the plans let you use the iPhone as a modem with your laptop and the price for international roaming is a hefty £50 for 50MB of data.

Beyond the valley of the CPU

The white heat of technology in the 1980s was focussed on the BBC Micro. Not only was it the heftiest 8-bit machines around, its open bus made it possible to add more processing power. With everything from music machines to Z-80s running CP/M, the BBC Micro could share its keyboard with many different CPUs.

Those days are on their way back.

A nation of snoops and gossips

You have no privacy, Larry Ellison said a few years ago; get over it. Is that because of governments and security agencies keeping track of you - or because of how much personal information you hand out yourself? If you want to break into someone’s bank account, most of the ’secret questions’ used for security are probably answered on their Facebook account. And how about the information you give away when you sign up for a special offer or fill in a survey?

If you don’t remember to go tick the box to say it can’t go to third parties, some marketing companies will happily pass along anything they know about your religious beliefs (one in ten), ethnic background (one in seven) and sexual orientation (one in fourteen). And your mobile phone number and marital status… And if you don’t care who knows that, are you happy that one in four pass along your credit card details? Only 3% would hand over your national ID number if they had it - and they would keep secret your job performance, your biometrics - and possibly in light of the Facebook Beacon debacle, what movies you’ve rented.

The case of the disappearing disk space

Where has 32GB of disk space gone and how do I make Vista give it back, or there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When we’re on the road at conferences I take a fair few photographs, and I copy a lot of PowerPoints and PDFs onto my notebook, not to mention photographing products I’m reviewing, and then there’s recordings of interviews… It all takes up space, so when I got an 8 megapixel camera the day we drove into Death Valley I did wonder if disk space on my notebook might be a problem.

Join the (beta) community

TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.

Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.

Behind the scenes with the BallmerBot

The BallmerBot joined Bill Gates on stage at his last public keynote here at TechEd 2008 Developers in Orlando earlier this week. Waving an XBox Live lifetime subscription (Bill’s leaving gift from a grateful Microsoft, according to the latest version of the “Bill’s Last Day” video Microsoft first showed at CES), the robot waddled out of the wings looking like a cross between Johnny 5 and a Segway.

U-Bot 5’s new name may not be what the developers expected, but underneath the humour and the hype is a fascinating story of how PC technology and modern developer tools have simplified the development of what until recently would have been a very complex and very expensive piece of hardware.

In and out of the browser - how Microsoft and Google think differently

For years, I’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.

Spider web in the sunset.

I was experimenting with exposures and manual focus, and I'm quite pleased with the result. The only post processing I've done here is a simple crop.

Putney, London
July 2008

Our street's summer visitors are back as usual, screaming their way across the summer sky. Up on the roof to catch a summer sunset, I caught one as it zipped past my lens.

Putney, London
July 2008