Slashdot poll on the most respected IT pioneers

True. Except I’d bump Lovelace up a bit and Torvalds down a lot (but not below Steve Jobs). Oh, and disrespect to Slashdot for getting the grammar incorrect in the poll question (It’s ‘Which’, not ‘What’), saying ‘What’ makes you sound like a poorly educated chav from Crawley.

Dear Sir/Madam,
I’d like to make a complaint about the North Laines Dental Practice in general and Ilias Triantafyllou in particular. I’ve been a patient of this practice since an early age and throughout this time I’ve found it to be a generally very rude and stressful experience – not because of the dental work but because of the attitudes of the staff.

There is one receptionist in particular who is always very abrupt and sarcastic – I don’t know her name but she has been there for as long as I can remember. I understand that they’re probably under stress themselves, but surely the primary function of a receptionist is to make the patients feel welcome? Over the years I’ve gradually started to dread having to make the the phone call to book an appointment, for fear of being scolded for taking too long to decide on an appointment time or stumbling over my words and receiving a sarcastic and rude response.

I’d also like to make a specific complaint about Ilias Triantafyllou, who has been my dentist for the last couple of years. As a dentist he seems very competent, but his attitude and language is rude in the extreme – not just to me as a patient, but I’ve also witnessed him be incredibly rude and abrupt to his assistant. Unsurprisingly he seems to go through assistants at a rapid speed because presumably they get tired of being spoken-to so rudely and leave.

Furthermore, a few months ago I suffered from a tooth abscess which has required a number of visits, each time a temporary filling being put in until the tooth was ready for the final treatment. However, due to a failure of my mobile phone (and consequently the calendar on it), I wasn’t reminded of an appointment and consequently missed it. This was an honest and simple mistake and I haven’t missed any other appointments for the last couple of years at least (if not longer), upon phoning the surgery I was told that Ilias had “struck you off”, and that I would have to find another dentist. I explained that I was half way through a major treatment and asked if there was anything I could do to get them to finish it, and I was basically told that I could try writing to Ilias and requesting that he re-register me (by the same rude receptionist mentioned previously). I decided that I’d thoroughly had-it with this dental practice and decided to register at another one instead.

I’ve now waited a month for an assessment at The Albion Street Dental Practice, whilst still having a temporary filling in one of my teeth. Upon arriving for that assessment I explained that I was half way through a treatment and the dentist I saw there asked me why I’d left the previous dentist – I explained that I’d been “struck off” by Ilias for missing an appointment, and the dentist at the Albion Street surgery explained that they couldn’t strike me off for missing a single appointment in the middle of a treatment and that the Albion Street surgery were low on their quota of treatments so I’d have to wait a couple more months before anything would be done by them, and that I’d be better off going back to The North Laines surgery and having them finish the treatment there.

When comparing the Albion Street surgery with the North Laines Dental Practice the difference is stark – in the Albion Street practice the receptionists are friendly and polite, the dentist I saw was helpful. It even goes as far as the signs on the wall in the waiting room – in the North Laines practice the signs all warn you of things like “If you’re rude to our receptionists, we’ll strike you off”, “If you deface our property we’ll strike you off” etc, in comparison, at the Albion Street practice the signs are about making you feel welcome.

I’ve been unable to speak to the North Laines practice today because it was after 5pm by the time I got home from Albion Street, but I will be calling them first thing on Monday to make an appointment and complain directly to them about having been unfairly struck-off mid-treatment – I’m going to ask to see a dentist other than Ilias and hopefully get the treatment finished at the North Laines practice – I don’t wish to see Ilias again after having been struck off by him. After finishing the treatment at the North Laines practice I would like to move to the Albion Street practice as they have a much friendlier atmosphere.

I’m really writing this complaint after having seen what a dental practice should be like at Albion Street, I really feel that the North Laines practice needs some intervention to change the attitudes there and stop it being such a horrible place to visit.

For your information I am also publishing this complaint to my blog (URL in signature), and I may publish any response from you there as well unless you specifically request that I do not do so.

I look forward to your response.

Yours faithfully,

~Kieran Simkin

Is your kid a bit 'special'? Get her an iPad in case she pisses herself!

Congratulations Apple, you’ve made another Newton. I will go and fetch you some nice crayons.

It seems to me that pseudo-environmentalism has become the new religion – a doctrine that people blindly follow without really engaging their own minds. Blind faith is often dangerous, and just because something is being sold to you on the basis of being “environmentally friendly” does not mean that is necessarily true. In some cases your efforts may have no effect, in others they may actually be doing more harm than good. If you do not understand the implications of your actions, it is better to take no action at all than take an action which could potentially be harmful.

Let’s have a look at one completely laughable example: 10 Ways to Be an Energy-Efficient Facebook User, I wouldn’t really encourage you to click on that link because you’ll only be increasing advertiser revenue which is clearly what the entire article is aimed at doing – drawing traffic for the purpose of advertising. I’ll condense it all into one sentence for you: “Spend less time on Facebook”.

I’ll just give you one example of the absolute stupidity in that article:

“Hosting photos and video consumes energy, and most times the photos we upload to most services aren’t exactly works of art. It’s not that we shouldn’t share moments with our friends, but before uploading we should ask ourselves: is it worth it? Do we really need ten different versions of just our face? Do we need the minute-by-minute of a party or could we choose about the ten best pics? So share, but share with care.”

No, hosting photos and video consumes hard disk space, sitting there with your computer on deciding whether you really need to upload each photo consumes energy. If you want to conserve power whilst using your computer, follow this one simple rule: USE IT LESS!

Here’s another example, feel free to click on this link as it’s not generating anyone any advertising revenue (other than Facebook) – Blackout Facebook – this is a group aimed at convincing Facebook to change to a black background on the premise that it will reduce power consumption. There’s also a black version of Google called Blackle.

I would say that I have a pretty good understanding of how modern computer monitors work and I’m pretty confident that it doesn’t make any difference to power consumption what’s on the screen – the main part of the screen that consumes power in the vast majority of modern screens is the backlight, this will be on no matter what’s on the screen, the only way to reduce power consumption is to reduce the brightness of the backlight and this is not something that can be done by a website. In other words, on a normal TFT screen having a black background uses no less power than a white one.

Only on Plasma, OLED and old-fashioned CRT screens will the colour of the screen make any difference to the power consumption. Screens based on liquid crystal technology (like the vast majority of current TFTs) will have no measurable difference in power consumption.

Here’s one news article disputing the claim and here’s a a Youtube video conclusively proving there’s no difference.

I know these ideas (and Facebook groups) are relatively harmless, but the fact that people are blindly joining them without understanding the science is not a good thing. When the fate of the world is at stake and one false move could spell disaster, we wanna be absolutely sure that any changes we do make are actually going to help and not make things worse. Scientists have told us that global warming is a risk to our planet, and instead of taking a careful, considered and scientific approach to the problem, most people just seem to be flailing their arms around wildly. Doing this will not help and it’s liable to make the situation worse.

Seriously guys, I’m starting to lose respect for my friends when I see them joining these kinds of groups on Facebook. I’m actually starting to think I’m going to have to close my Facebook account because I can’t stand to lose respect for any more of my friends. It’s become fashionable to claim you’re “green”, and people see themselves as asserting their ‘caring’ nature by signing up to anything claiming to be helping the environment. I’ve got a piece of news that may come as a shock to you – just because something is claiming to help the environment does not mean it necessarily is, either because the person pushing it to you doesn’t fully understand the concepts, or in some more cynical cases, they’re actually just trying to sell you a product on the basis of it being branded as “green”.

Wearing your ‘green’ credentials on your sleeve does not necessarily make people think what a caring person you are, especially when you haven’t properly researched whether the thing you’re supporting is actually good for the environment. If you declare your support for something which is clearly technically incorrect (like Blackle), those more tech-savvy of your friends aren’t going to interpret that as you asserting your caring side, they’re going to interpret that as you behaving like a sheep, and a bit of an idiot. Sadly more and more of my friends are putting themselves into this category.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t care for the environment – I’m just saying that you better be damn sure that what you’re supporting is actually good for the environment before you declare your support for it. “Because it says so” isn’t a valid reason, many things claim to be good for the environment, a good proportion of them simply are not.

The reason a lot of this misinformation is about is because global warming and the environment has only recently entered the public consciousness, and in some cases scientists genuinely haven’t figured out what the most effective things we can do to help are yet. In some cases it’s not as black and white as you might think it is.

I will argue passionately against wind farms, and it’s not because someone’s threatening to erect one in my back garden, or even anywhere near me. I actually just believe that they do more harm to the environment than they do good, and this comes from a pretty solid understanding of the science and the maths, not some kind of abstract idea of being “environmentally friendly”. Just because some people are telling you that wind farms are the solution to the energy problem does not necessarily mean they are correct – it is okay to question people when they claim to be helping the environment – they may be wrong!

Sadly, the vitriol that comes from the pseudo-environmentalist hurd when you question one of their ‘beliefs’ is really quite sickening. I consider myself a scientist, and as such I’m always open to being proven wrong, if somebody comes to me with a well thought-out and considered argument against my position, I will always hear them out and I will never simply dismiss their belief without making some effort to rationally and logically disprove it. If they can provide a convincing proof that I am wrong, I will (eventually) accept that, I may argue passionately for my point of view right up until the very last minute, but when there is overwhelming evidence against me, I will admit defeat.

When presenting my opinions about wind farms, I’ve been met pretty much exclusively with anger, in most cases with dismissal, and in some cases with personal insult. I’ve had my argument called ‘utter crap’, and I personally have been called various names, all for daring to express a point of view that differs from the established pseudo-environmentalist dogma. And that’s what it’s starting to become, a dogma, a set of beliefs that its followers will not allow to be disputed. This is a seriously dangerous state of affairs, because what happens if that dogma makes some mistakes about the best course of action, and 20 years later we find ourselves in an even more worrying situation?

The only way we’re going to solve global warming and the energy crisis is with science, and that means you have to be open to hearing other people’s ideas – this is the very basis of science.

So what are my beliefs? Well, primarily I believe that nuclear power is the only real workable solution to the energy problem – it’s the only solution that will allow us to continue economic growth without completely fucking up the environment. Furthermore, as a landscape photographer, I don’t particularly want the landscapes I photograph to be peppered with wind turbines, particularly when I do not see them as a necessary form of electricity generation. When you can generate 500MW+ from a nuclear power station without causing any carbon footprint, why would you want to cover the landscape with hundreds of massive eye-sores that only generate a tiny fraction of that energy? To me, it’s as simple as that.

I’ve even done the maths:

UK’s current power consumption = 348,700,000 MWh/year.
Typical average output from one very large land-based wind turbine – 1MW.
8765 hours in a year, consequently one wind turbine outputs 8765MWh/year.
It would require 39,783 massive wind turbines to meet the UK’s current power requirements.
Consequently, if we were to replace all of our current power generating capacity with wind farms, and we were to assume that 50% of our 245000km² landmass was suitable for wind farm construction (probably a very optimistic estimate) we’d end up with a massive wind turbine every 3km² – in other words, wherever you are in the country, whatever direction you looked, all you’d be able to see is wind turbines, unless you were fortunate enough to live somewhere where there was no wind! Fuck that shit!

Building them off-shore would keep me happier as a photographer, but I don’t think it would particularly do the environment much good – think of all that concrete you have to sink to the sea bed just to support the things, surely that can’t be good for wildlife?

So I thought I’d create a Facebook group expressing these opinions, to see whether anyone actually agreed with me, and what response I would get from my own friends. I also wrote a long essay in the hope that I might be able to convince some of them to think twice before clicking the “Join Group” button on anything claiming to be ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’.

I didn’t expect many of my friends to join – nobody wants to be seen to stray from the flock, and I’m sure most of them didn’t even bother to read what I’d written, none of them have commented on it. So far 22 people have joined and about half of them are people I don’t even know. The sad truth is, hideously ugly environmentally dubious wind farms are infinitely more palatable to people than nuclear power, which they’re still fundamentally afraid of, partly because they simply don’t understand it. I hoped to convince a few people to question their assumptions about wind and nuclear power, but apparently it’s an uphill struggle even to get them to read what I have to say.

You can read the essay below and join the Facebook group here. Even if you disagree with me, for god’s sake have an opinion of your own and express it, don’t just blindly join any group claiming to be eco-friendly!

This group is dedicated to those (like me) who believe that nuclear power is the only viable and sensible solution to global warming and the energy crisis.

In order to match the power output currently provided by coal and gas power stations, we would literally have to carpet pretty much the entire surface of the planet with wind turbines and photovoltaic (solar) cells ‐ don’t believe me? do the maths yourself, it’s not hard.

The majority of renewable energy sources essentially depend on the sun to drive them ‐ either directly in the case of solar cells, or indirectly via convection currents in the case of wind turbines. One figure pseudo-environmentalists like to quote is the number of watt-hours of energy falling on our planet’s surface from the sun ‐ indeed it is a very high number. The problem is in conversion efficiency ‐ current solar cells are highly inefficient, turning only a few percent of the sun’s energy into usable electricity.

Wind turbines are even more inefficient because the energy from the sun first has to heat the atmosphere, then the temperature differential between warmer and colder parts of the planet has to cause a convection current which we call ‘wind’, and this wind then has to drive around blades which then drive a generator. Energy is lost at every stage of this process. I’m just trying to explain why, although a lot of energy falls on our planet from the sun, it’s not possible to harness even a tiny fraction of it using current technology.

The truth is, current renewable energy sources are hideously wasteful of the energy that comes to us from the sun. Well, ‘what we lose in inefficiency, we can make up for in scale ‐ after all, the energy’s free’, I hear you say. The problem with this is that the inefficiencies are so large, the scales have to be absolutely massive to compensate ‐ renewables, particularly wind and solar power are tremendously wasteful of land ‐ one of the UK’s most precious natural resources.

When we’re talking about wind turbines, they have to be both very large and very numerous. In order to generate the kind of energy we need, you’re talking about erecting structures the size of large buildings, everywhere ‐ particularly in the countryside. If we’re talking about solar cells, in order to get the kind of power we need, we’re going to need to cover pretty much every available inch of land with them. If we’re planning on replacing coal and oil, these renewable energy sources are probably going to need to cover what’s left of our unused land and eat into our farming land as well.. that’s the land that provides us with food. Some countries have lots of spare infertile land, the UK is not one of them.

Now you can argue that it’s a price we have to pay to save the world. The thing is, you’re talking about destroying what’s left of our open spaces, our remaining natural beauty and the last of our countryside, for what? To save nature? You’re talking about destroying nature to save it. Here’s the dark secret that nobody wants to admit; when we talk about building massive large scale wind farms, we’re not trying to save nature, we’re trying to save ourselves from running out of oil. We’re talking about continuing to abuse the natural world for the sake of producing energy to fuel the growth of human civilisation. You call that environmentalism? I call it the continued rape of our natural world.

In truth the only types of large-scale wind farms that are likely to get agreement in the UK are the off-shore kind. Now these may avoid the problem of spoiling our view of the countryside, but instead we’re talking about sinking massive slabs of concrete onto the seabed. I’m not a marine biologist, but I would think this would have even more of an impact on the environment than hillside wind farms.

But there’s more to it even than that; building these massive wind turbines requires a lot of resources ‐ lots of concrete and steel for their physical construction, copper for the windings of their generators and lots of energy to move all those resources to the construction site and assemble them into a turbine. Creating photovoltaic cells requires baking silicon at a few thousand degrees for several days, in some cases requires the use of toxic heavy metals like cadmium. And all of this costs money, lots and lots of money. Building these renewable power sources is not free environmentally ‐ we’re using a lot of natural resources, a lot of energy and a lot of money to produce them, and like all power stations, they have a limited lifetime.

I’m not arguing that harnessing the sun’s power to produce energy is in itself a bad idea, of course I’m not. Harnessing the sun’s power is one of the most important goals for scientists today. What I’m arguing is that none of the current technologies allow us to do it effectively enough to be worth wasting lots of our dwindling natural resources and limited budgets on building, not to mention ruining our countryside with row upon row of ugly wind turbines in the process.

I’d be willing to bet that the most viable source of power from the sun is a yet-to-be-invented organic chemical process not dissimilar to photosynthesis ‐ in other words the solar cells of the future will be ‘grown’, or synthesised in a lab from just hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. Plants have figured out a bloody good way to harness energy from the sun without all of the terrible drawbacks of current solar cells ‐ we’re pretty darn close to learning their secrets, and when we do, by all means plaster as much land as you want with the new solar cells. The point is, they’ll be so much more efficient that you won’t need nearly such a large surface area, and you won’t need to waste so many natural resources creating them because they’ll simply grow themselves out of our most abundant natural elements.

You might call that wishful thinking, but I would suggest that you read some of the most recent developments in the area of genetic engineering and quantum biology.

Of course biological solar cells aren’t the only promising future energy source. My bet is on nuclear fusion being the technology that allows mankind to grow beyond the limits of fossil fuel technology.

Let’s just have a quick explanation of Nuclear Fusion for those who don’t know:

Nuclear energy comes in two types ‐ Nuclear *Fission* and Nuclear *Fusion*. All current nuclear power stations are fission reactors ‐ nuclear fission takes a very heavy element (normally Uranium-235) and splits each atom into two lighter ones, giving off some energy in process. ‘Fission’ literally means splitting ‐ nuclear fission is the process of deriving energy from the splitting of an atom.

Nuclear fusion is the opposite ‐ you take two very light atoms (normally Deuterium and Tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen) and join them together into one heavier one (Helium). Nuclear fusion is the process of deriving energy from the joining together of two atoms. Fusion is the process that powers our sun ‐ not only that, but pretty much every atom in your body was once created inside the giant fusion reactor of a star ‐ fusion is the process by which all the heavier elements were created from Hydrogen.

There’s a number of problems with nuclear fission ‐ Uranium-235 is a rare isotope of an already rare element ‐ extracting Uranium from the ground is a risky business due to the obvious health risks, purifying it to extract the 0.72% that consists of the 235 isotope is a laborious and difficult process. Ultimately switching to nuclear fission would only buy us a limited amount of time after depleting the world’s oil resources before we depleted the world’s uranium resources ‐ however, this time is probably measured in hundreds of years (think how much uranium is currently in the thousands of warheads held by the US and Russia).

Any risk of nuclear disaster is pretty much eliminated with modern reactor design ‐ the problems that resulted in the Chernobyl disaster were down to very bad reactor design and the corner-cutting of the Soviet regime. In a modern reactor in a western country the potential for disaster is basically zero ‐ as designs are continually improved and refined, the tiny risk of catastrophe is getting smaller and smaller. However, to argue that it didn’t exist at all would be a lie ‐ it is merely an acceptable risk when faced with the alternatives.

And then we come to the problem of nuclear waste ‐ of course if we were comparing nuclear fission to the perfect green energy source, then this nuclear waste is a pretty significant negative in the nuclear column. However, the point is there is no green energy source that can even hope to generate the same power levels as coal, oil and gas ‐ nuclear is the only zero-carbon technology that even competes in the same scale.

Here’s the motherfucking crux of it ‐ no amount of windmills or solar panels will ever generate enough energy to fill the increasing demand. Right now we’re faced with the choice between fossil fuels and nuclear, renewables don’t even come into it. When we run out of fossil fuels, that choice is going to disappear and our only remaining option will be nuclear.

But let’s just compare nuclear (fission) and fossil fuels for a minute ‐ both depend on limited natural resources, one of which (uranium) is still in plentiful supply. Both generate highly dangerous waste ‐ if you’d like to argue that radioactive waste is worse than combustion products then I’d like to remind you that the pseudo-environmentalists are prophesying that global warming will cause the end of civilisation as we know it ‐ if that’s not equally dangerous as radioactive waste then I don’t know what is.

Then we have the fact that the waste produced from burning fossil fuels is a gas ‐ a gas that we are still continuing to just release into the atmosphere willy-nilly. It is true scientists are developing ‘carbon capture’ technologies, but doing this is difficult, it requires energy and it requires somewhere to put vast volumes of waste gasses. The problem is that the waste products are a gas by default ‐ this is in contrast to nuclear power ‐ the waste products are solid and when compared to the gases produced from combustion, they pale in insignificance.

To any pseudo-environmentalist who argues against nuclear power, I put this simple question: Where would you rather have your highly toxic waste products, in a box that you can bury in a hole, or floating around in the atmosphere?

And let’s just have a little look at the problem of energy demand and how it is that nuclear is the only power source that can hope to compete with coal:

One particularly worrying trend among pseudo-environmentalists is the suggestion that we should try to reduce our energy consumption. Let me explain why I think this is dangerous ‐ energy, more specifically the energy derived from fossil fuels has been the driving force in the technological revolution (and prior to that, the industrial revolution) ‐ mankind is currently enjoying a new renaissance ‐ a period in which technology is curing many diseases, lifetimes are extended, arts and culture are flourishing, quality of life and living standards are gradually increasing across the board, life is better now than it has ever been ‐ it is the cheap energy from fossil fuels that has driven all of these advances.

To suggest that we should reduce our energy consumption is like suggesting that we should return to the dark ages, that we should deliberately regress our culture and give up all of these advances we’ve made. Pseudo-environmentalists call this desire for continued economic growth ‘greed’, but it is not greedy to want to continue our current renaissance ‐ to continue to improve life expectancy, to continue to gradually eliminate poverty. Growth is one of the most basic attributes of all life, even single-celled organisms. If you watch a bacteria growing in a Petri dish it will continue to grow until it consumes all of its resources, and then it will die ‐ this basic behaviour is true of every life form ‐ it is absolutely fundamental to all life. To argue that we should somehow attempt to curb economic growth is like saying we should give up part of what makes us ‘alive’.

What we need to do is ensure our growth doesn’t risk tipping the natural balance of the world ‐ the reason so many plant and animal species are able to continue to co-exist is because there is a delicate balance between the growth of one species against the growth of another. Pollution as a result of fossil fuels risks upsetting that balance so we do need to do something about it, but that solution does not necessarily mean regressing our society to the point before the pollution began.

Reducing our energy usage is simply not necessary ‐ in a world where every megawatt consumed requires another square acre of land to be turned over to wind farms or solar cells then yes, reducing energy consumption is a priority. Not only is your ‘green’ energy going to destroy our environment, it’s also going to cause a regression to the dark ages, is that really what you want? Mankind has an ability to overcome its environmental limitations ‐ to jump out of the Petri dish and find new ways to grow and feed ourselves ‐ this ability isn’t unique to mankind, bacteria and viruses for example are constantly mutating to find new ways to survive in different environments.

Science has already provided us with a way to jump out of the Petri dish of fossil fuels ‐ we have a solution to the dwindling supply of oil, a tried and tested solution that is already available today ‐ the solution is nuclear power. It is nuclear power that will allow us to continue economic growth and extend this renaissance long into the future, and do it without having to turn over vast swathes of land to wind farms or solar cells. Nuclear power is by far the most environmentally friendly way of meeting our increasing demand for energy. Nuclear power is not simply an economic imperative, it’s a moral and social imperative too.

Now let’s explain how nuclear power is able to compete with, and potentially generate even more power than fossil fuels which are one of the most dense energy stores known to man. It actually starts with Einstein’s equation:

E=mc²

While the theory of relativity is pretty difficult to explain, the equation above is actually very easy to explain. What it says is that energy and mass (i.e. stuff, like atoms) are essentially the same thing and are interchangeable. You can convert stuff directly into energy, and you can convert energy directly into stuff ‐ if you think about it that’s a pretty powerful idea. But it gets even better:

The ‘E’ stands for energy, ‘m’ stands for mass (or weight) and ‘c’ represents the speed of light. Now if you were listening in high school physics, you’ll know that light travels pretty damn fast, in fact it travels the fastest it is possible to travel. 299,792,458 metres per second to be exact. So what Einstein’s equation is saying is that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light (which is a very big number) squared. In effect, for a tiny amount of mass, you can get a very large amount of energy.

And that’s how nuclear power works ‐ mass is being directly converted into energy, and that process produces a very large amount of energy for a very small amount of mass. So much so that the amount of nuclear fuel required is tiny compared to the amount of coal that is constantly poured into a coal-fired power plant, even though only a tiny fraction of the Uranium-235 fuel is converted directly to energy, the speed of light is so large, only a tiny amount of it needs to be. This is how nuclear bombs manage to be so powerful whilst still being small and light enough to go on a plane or submarine.

And now let’s revisit nuclear fusion ‐ you’ll remember that I mentioned that all current nuclear reactor are fission reactors, and that this has a number of drawbacks including scarcity of fuel, a tiny risk of catastrophic disaster and the main one ‐ lots of nasty long-lived nuclear waste. Some of the waste products from nuclear fission stay radioactive for thousands of years (although that is actually only a small portion of the total waste).

However, nuclear fusion promises to solve all of these problems. Fusion reactions are very difficult to get going and keep going, so there’s absolutely no risk of a run-away reaction causing a disaster, the main fuel is deuterium which is found abundantly in seawater and the volume of radioactive waste produced is much smaller than with fission, and more importantly, only stays radioactive for a couple of hundreds years instead of thousands.

What I’m trying to say here is that nuclear fusion is the power of the future, I can say this with a high degree of certainty. It has all the potential to generate massive amounts of energy without any of the drawbacks of current nuclear technology. Put your bloody windmills away and stop ruining the countryside, nuclear fusion will save us all.

That’s not to say there aren’t massive technical hurdles to overcome before it can be made to work on a large enough scale to actually generate power ‐ with nuclear fusion what you’re effectively trying to do is bottle the sun, but you have to bottle it in a container that doesn’t touch it at all ‐ if you touch it, the reaction will fizzle out ‐ this is why it’s inherently safe. The only way to contain the reaction like this is with giant superconducting magnets ‐ the most effective shape seems to be a doughnut or tokamak.

An international collaboration called ITER is currently under-way to build the last step before attempting a working power-generating fusion reactor. There’s a clearly defined roadmap to the commercialisation of fusion reactors but unfortunately it’s a slow process ‐ ITER won’t see ‘lights-on’ until 2018, and ITER is only there to provide data on how to build DEMO. DEMO will be the first power-generating fusion reactor ‐ once we reach that stage it’ll be full steam ahead towards rolling out fusion power generation worldwide.

We’re probably talking about at least 30 or 40 years before fusion power is a workable reality, so we’ve got an energy gap that we need to fill. I’m afraid that nuclear fission is the only way to do it ‐ it may be dirty but it’s a hell of a lot better than causing a run-away greenhouse effect.

Even filling the gap with nuclear fission is going to be a problem in the UK ‐ it takes time to build new reactors and many of our older reactors are reaching the end of their lifetimes, if we’re to decommission them whilst also reducing our carbon emissions we’re going to struggle to bring new nuclear power stations online quick enough to fill the gap. We should really have started building them towards the end of Tony Blair’s rein, as it is we’re still only in the early planning stages and progress is slow ‐ we’re at real risk of serious brownouts and power cuts, increased energy prices, energy rationing or perhaps even energy curfews if something isn’t done soon.

I’d just like to say one final thing on the name of this group ‐ a scientist would never call somebody who disagrees with them an idiot. The name of this group is a reaction to the group “Put a wind farm in my backyard if you like, because I’m not an idiot.” ‐ to me this group displays exactly the kind of pseudo-environmentalist mentality that we could really do without ‐ if you’re just going to join the flock of everyone else who’s saying the same thing without really understanding the issues yourself, and then call everyone who disagrees with you an idiot ‐ that’s simply not scientific, it’s dogmatic ‐ much like a religion ‐ you’re abdicating your own judgement and following group-think, and you’re doing it in a slightly arrogant and pompous way. Being an eco-mentalist doesn’t make you better than other people and it certainly doesn’t give you the right to look down upon people who disagree with you. Some may be idiots, but there are plenty who are not, I hope in this essay I’ve proven that you don’t have to be an idiot to disagree with wind farms, and that your own pseudo-environmentalism may in fact be doing more harm than good.

I care about the environment and global warming just as much as you, we just disagree on what should be done about it.

Kieran I am a producer for BBC South East. I came across your website when I was planning a walk in Cuckmere Haven with my family last weekend. We love the photographic gallery you are keeping of the changing coastline and would love to feature it on BBC South East.

Typically, at this time my mobile phone was completely buggered and it took about a week before I was actually able to successfully have a conversation with Siobhan on the phone. During this call Siobhan explained that they’d like to do a short feature on my project and film me up at at Cuckmere Haven actually doing some photography. Of course I was very enthusiastic about this because it’s great free publicity for my website.

Siobhan also explained why it is that the news we can actually receive in Brighton is so focused on Portsmouth and Southampton. Brighton actually marks the border between the BBC South and the BBC South East areas. I knew that BBC South’s studio was in Southampton, but it turns out they’ve only got one reporter in Brighton, in comparison to BBC South East’s two reporters – that’s right, the news show that we can’t even watch have more reporters in Brighton than the one we can watch.

This is one of my (many) pet peeves – it’s not just that BBC South Today are too Southampton-centric, I believe the producers actually take a rather disdainful attitude towards Brighton. Whenever Brighton’s featured – which happens quite rarely, it’s pretty much always some kind of story about drug addicts or homeless people. I get the impression the Southampton producers think that Brighton’s full of hippys, gays and druggies. Okay, it is.. but that’s a good thing! Nobody in Brighton gives a fuck about the latest big boat to have been launched in the Solent – I will actually heckle the TV when there’s a news story about some fucking boat. Brighton actually does have a lot of general-interest events happening in it, but they never get any coverage from BBC South.

Anyway, enough ranting about BBC South – thankfully it was actually BBC South East Today that wanted to feature me and I don’t have any rants about them because I’ve never actually seen it. In fact, I have nothing but positive words to say about BBC South East because everyone I dealt with there was very friendly and likable.

After having spoken to Siobhan and agreed to the filming, we were hit with over a month of solid rain, it would’ve been virtually impossible to film. Eventually it did let up and I got a call to arrange filming on December 15th. Shortly after I knackered my car driving to Bristol and back with no oil in it! I was a little bit worried at the time that my car was going to give out on me and I was going to get stuck half way there and end up late. Anyway, the car was fine (as it has been ever since) and I got there on time.

Upon arriving at the Hill Barn car park which is where I’d arranged to meet Robin Gibson the reporter and the Ben Leete the cameraman (who I would later find out goes by ‘Ben the geek‘ – obviously anybody who introduces themselves as a geek is gonna go down well with me).

Robin Gibson and Ben the geek

I was expecting a bit more of an entourage to be honest, more people, a van, anything, but it was just the two of them – I think Ben turned up in a Vauxhall Astra hire car, I didn’t see what Robin was driving but it was definitely a car – I guess this is how news reporting works, it needs to be lightweight in order to keep up with the news. Naturally the first thing I was looking at was their mode of transport, wheels are important yes! Apparently they would normally have had an editing suite in a van, but that van had broken down and was still in Brighton, hence the hire car.

On the way from the car park down to the coastguard cottages I tried to brief Robin with as much information about my project as possible so that he would be able to ask the right kinds of questions (and not catch me out of things I hadn’t prepared for). One of the things I was curious to try to see was whether he seemed happy with his job – let me explain that: Basically I knew my project would be the “human interest” story, or, to put it another way, the “and finally..” item (although it didn’t actually come at the end of the programme). I’ve noticed in TV news that sometimes you can detect an ever-so-slight hint of resentment in the reporter giving the “and finally..” piece, sometimes you can tell that they feel stupid reporting on these trivial stories and they’d rather be doing hard-nosed political reporting or something.

Well, I’m pleased to report that it was immediately obvious that Robin didn’t take that attitude (or if he does, his professionalism hides it bloody well). He seems to actually revel in the absurdity of some of the stories he covers. This made him instantly likable and very easy to chat to. I had watched the previous day’s episode of South East Today on the BBC website in which Robin’s report was on a bunch of nutters from Hampshire who like to dress up as some kind of demented horse and then hit it with a stick. Sorta like a life-sized piñata but instead of candy inside you’ve got the village idiot and when you hit it nothing comes out except perhaps some blood – looked to me like a thinly veiled excuse to beat a retarded man with a stick. I wish I could remember what it was called now so I could provide a link. It was actually Robin who mentioned this story in passing and without even the slightest hint of sarcasm of disdain! Jesus christ, I thought, this guy really does love interviewing crazy weirdos. Hats off to him and hats off to the Beeb for finding the right man for the job.

To be fair, they probably could’ve edited my interview to make me look like a crazy weirdo. After all, I kinda am one. I did say one pretty risqué thing on camera – Robin directly asked me if I was an environmentalist, to which I replied “No, quite the opposite, I don’t like to be told I shouldn’t drive my car” – I wouldn’t have minded too much if they had included that because it’s both controversial and true, although I’m aware it makes me look like a bit of a selfish cock – only to environmentalists though so I’m not worried about that. I think I might also have said that Cuckmere Haven was created by the victorians for the enjoyment of city folk – I’m kinda glad they didn’t include that because it also makes me look like a bit of a cock – an assertion like that requires a small history lesson to back it up which obviously I didn’t have time to give on camera.

Being in front of the camera is weird for me, I’m used to being behind the camera – I’m quite good behind a camera, I know what to say to make people relax and get the best photos, I’m also quite good at taking people by surprise and getting great action shots. In front of a camera however, I’m like a fish out of water.

Ben the geek

Actually the hardest part, and the part that I hadn’t really anticipated was that when you’re being filmed like this you’re constantly in conflict with your brain’s own “don’t repeat yourself” mechanism. What I mean by that is that I was trying to give Robin as much information about my project off-camera so that he could actually compile the report, that when I came to talk about it on-camera, I was fighting my brain’s own built-in mechanism not to repeat everything I’d just said. Of course then you have to do repeated re-takes and the same conversations from different angles with and without mics, it’s very easy to screw up the delivery on things and forget to mention things that you wanted to mention. I think one of the key skills needed to be a TV personality is the ability to erase your brain’s buffer of what you’ve just said and start at the beginning again, replaying the same conversation over and over until you get it right.

I did have few soundbites prepared in my head that I wanted to give on camera, but unfortunately due to the repeating-yourself problem I screwed up the delivery on my favourite one and it got edited out. Oh well, it’s not Cuckmere Haven-specific so I’m gonna save it for my next TV interview – I’d rather give it and get the delivery perfect than have it broadcast with me stuttering because it’s basically an explanation of my entire reason for doing photography in a couple of sentences. I’m not gonna say what it is, you’ll just have to wait until the next time someone asks me to do an interview. I did manage to get a couple of good soundbites out and I was happy with the final edit that got broadcast. And here it is:

The thing is, to me, this is a step on the ladder towards my final goal. Ultimately my goal is to get my images seen, not by thousands of people, but by millions of people, not for the sake of making money, but simply for the sake of getting my images seen. What’s the point in me risking my life driving up to Cuckmere Haven in the snow if nobody sees my images? My sights are set high – I’m aiming for thousands, even tens of thousands of visitors to my website per day, on this scale the BBC are actually a relatively small success. I want my images to be seen all over the world. I want to be the next Ansel Adams.

The Coastguard Cottages

Part of the task is to just get progressively better and better at the art of photography itself – I’m constantly working to improve the photos that I take and improve my website so that it displays them in the most effective manner, but an equal part of the problem is marketing – actually getting the website seen. I actually have a relatively strong internet marketing background, the majority of the companies I’ve worked for in the last 5 years have had a marketing slant. In some ways that’s part of the purpose of this website; I want to understand internet marketing and prove to myself that I can make it work on a large scale.

I’ve been doing lots of traditional internet marketing – this is primarily focused around building inbound links, writing content and basically getting people talking about my website. The most important thing really is getting people to link to you – this is necessary both in terms of building Google Pagerank and actually getting people to click on those links and visit your site. It’s really just a case of contacting the right people and asking them for links. I’m pretty good at traditional internet marketing like this, and I worked hard to get my website onto the first page of results for the term “Cuckmere Haven”, and it’s this that bought me the interest from the BBC.

The thing is, I know that traditional internet marketing will only take me so far – to achieve the level of success that I’m aiming for, what I need is viral marketing. This is a relatively new practice but I’ve already glimpsed at the awesome exposure it can bring and I’m now determined to get it right and catapult my website into the big league. Viral marketing is new because it relies upon the social element to many new websites like Youtube and Facebook that allow a person, upon seeing something that amuses or interests them to pass that thing along to their friends – when this process is repeated over and over again, it can reach a point of criticality – an ignition temperature if you like, a point at which the reaction continues under its own steam and thousands of new people are exposed to it every day. This is when you see the exponential growth curve that gives you the potential to reach basically everyone on the internet.

In the graph below you can see a very clear example of the power of viral marketing. This graph shows the number of my visitors to my website per week since I really started trying to market it back in April:

Visitors per week since April

Notice that there are two major peaks, the first peak in the last week of June actually represents a minor internet hit that I had on the social bookmarking sites with my timelapse videos. The second set of peaks at the end of the year represent the traffic I got from having my website mentioned on TV. Notice how the viral effect of a hit on the social bookmarking sites actually resulted in a higher spike in traffic than a TV appearance! The funny thing is, those timelapse videos were really only my experimentations with the medium, in preparation for a proper timelapse video that I intend to take at Cuckmere Haven in the summer – I never intended them to be seen by so many people!

Of course, there’s a little more to it than that – the hits I got from the timelapse event were mostly one-off visitors, I did gain some return visitors from this event but the vast majority of those 1000 visitors simply came to my site, watched my timelapse videos and then went away again, never to return. Furthermore, the fact that the timelapse videos caused a bigger spike on the graph is in part due to the resolution of the graph itself – the visitors to my timelapse page all came within a few days of each other, but during that time the number of hits started out low, gradually increased to a maximum point and then gradually fell off, returning almost back to its original level after 3 days. This is why you see one big spike on the graph – pretty much the entire sum of the traffic came within one week period, so they all fall within the same segment on the graph. This is in contrast to the traffic which I received as a result of the TV appearance – this followed a rather different curve. As the news broadcast went out my site experienced a sudden and rapid spike in traffic – this was people who had seen the report and then immediately decided to look at my site. The spike was so rapid that at its peak it was causing a noticable load on the server. This spike then gradually trailed off over the course of the evening as people went to bed. However, the increased traffic continued for many days after the event (and continues to this day) as people presumably recalled seeing the report and Googled for me whilst killing time at work. The BBC were also kind enough to provide a link to me from their website which resulted in many more clicks through to my site.

The other important thing to note is the relative value of these visitors – the timelapse visitors had no idea what my site was about, they were simply here to watch my timelapse videos, in contast; the visitors from the TV appearance had already been given a 2 minute introduction to my Cuckmere Haven project and had gone out of their way to look me up. This makes them significantly more valuable to me because they’re likely to spend longer browsing and come back at a later date to check for updates.

That said, even though viral traffic is less valuable than more targetted traffic, it has the potential for much greater exposure. Also, crucially, it’s within the reach of even a very small player like myself – you do not need a massive marketing team or budget to make viral work. Like all marketing however, it’s insanely unpredictable. I had absolutely no idea the timelapse videos were going to be a success, and the things I think have a good chance of being a viral success haven’t done nearly so well. In short, the only real approach to successful viral marketing is to throw lots of shit and hope that some of it sticks.

Mac users like to say that PC users are vulnerable to problems like viruses and malware. Actually on Windows you’re only vulnerable to these things if you behave like an idiot and click on anything that says “Free Smileys Here *wink* *wink*” (works on kids) or “Free Porn Here *wink* *wink*” (works on adults).

I don’t run any anti-virus software, anti-spyware or even a firewall (other than that provided by my NAT router) – these products are sold on the fear of getting fucked by some mythical “hacker” that probably doesn’t exist, they slow down your computer and you only need them if you’re an idiot. In reality it’s your own stupidity that will fuck you. That’s right, if I install anti-virus on your computer, it means I think you’re an idiot – normally because you have already proven that you are an idiot by getting infected with some form of malware.

My protection is not being an idiot and not clicking on things that are clearly evil. That protection has been enough to mean I’ve never been infected with malware, not in 17 years of using Windows. Actually that’s a lie, it did happen once, but that was because I was looking at a virus to see how it worked and I accidentally did a double-click when I meant to do a single-click, and that had the effect of installing the malware on my computer instead of inspecting its code – in other words it was down to my own stupidity.

The only reason Windows is more vulnerable to this stuff is because Windows is more commonly used than all other operating systems, so all the malware is written to run on Windows. If you click on the “Free Porn Here” link on a mac, the malware simply doesn’t work on your computer – you’re safe, but you’re still an idiot.

What Mac users really mean to say when they critisize Windows machines on security is “When I use a PC, I behave like an idiot and consequently get infected with all sorts of crap, Apple protect me from that crap by being incompatible with it.” – I wouldn’t really call that a decent security model to be honest.

I will go and get you some nice crayons.

David Cameron + Maggot

Saw this little photoshop jobbie as the cover image on the “I bet I can find a million people who DON’T want David Cameron as our PM” Facebook group and it made me smile.

The thing is, Gordon Brown is now so fucking embarassing that I’m beginning to believe that a Tory government might actually be what we need to sort our country out. I mean I don’t agree with any of their politics and I think Cameron’s a smarmy git, but if it’s a choice between Labour and the Conservatives, maybe the Tories will do a better job? I feel dirty saying it, but let’s just recap the things that Labour have done to fuck me off:

That’s just what I could be bothered to write down in 30 seconds – these are all exactly the kinds of things you’d expect of the Tories, except they took us by surprise because they came from Labour. At least you know what you’re getting with the Tories. Right now I’m wondering how exactly can they possibly be worse than Gordon?! .. I suppose they could declare war on Argentina…

The illegal war alone is enough to mean I won’t be voting for Labour for the forseeable future – not without a serious re-invention akin to ‘New Labour’, except they’d do better to resurrect old Labour heh. I’m well aware that the omission of a vote for Labour is effectively a vote for the Tories, but what choice do I have? I simply can’t vote for Labour after the illegal war. I won’t actually vote for the Tories either, I’m thinking at this stage I’m either not going to vote at all or I’m going to vote Liberal. What kind of democracy is this where every choice you have makes you feel physically sick?

In truth none of them can be trusted – they’re either evil, incompetent or both and I’ve completely lost any confidence in the current political system to sort it out. Nothing short of a revolution will rid us of these fucks.

Inspired by the image above, I wondered what would happen if you cross one melty-faced unelected dictator with another. Here’s my own playful little 5 minute photoshop jobbie:

I don't give a fuck about Israel, my face is melting!

Could be worse

And while I was at it, I figured I might as well put the Dark Lord Mandelson in a hoodie. Seriously, I don’t think I’m the only one who finds this guy fucking sinister.

The Dark Lord Mandy

And here’s what I think of Tony Blair and David Cameron:

Tony Blair / David Cameron - Same Difference

Whilst driving around I was very surprised to see that a lot of people don’t seem to have any idea how to drive in slippery conditions. While I don’t profess to be any kind of driving expert, I do know the correct way to drive under these conditions. The BBC aren’t particularly helping by repeatedly warning everyone not to go out and not providing particularly useful advice for when you do go out.

I don’t agree with the current trend of “Severe weather warnings” on the news pretty much every day; if it’s not snow it’s floods, or strong winds. In summer they issue a “Severe weather warning” for what we used to call “a lovely summer’s day” – it’s getting stupid, to quote Clarkson: “I know when I am hot!”. It’s just another way to make us afraid of being alive. It reminds me of the Mitchell and Webb sketch of a post-apocalyptic gameshow where the viewers are constantly reminded not to go outside due to some undisclosed danger. Watching the weather report these days, they might as well just say “It’s fuckin’ scary out there, don’t leave your house!” and be done with it. Get some fucking balls people!

In my opinion, particularly during snow and ice, we should be encouraged to go outside, because if more people were to go outside; that’s more people shoveling ice off the road, more tyres wearing the ice off, more cars generating heat and more people around to help dig you out if you get stuck etc. It would generally result in much safer conditions for all. If everybody’s locked in their homes, the roads really will be dangerous for the few brave souls who do venture out.

Have a read of the BBC’s advice for drivers – they bang on about checking your car to make sure there’s enough fuel and that everything’s working, but these are the kinds of checks that you should do every time you get in the car anyway. They might as well be saying duck and cover. The two most important pieces of advice are obscured down the bottom and aren’t explained clearly. Let me clarify this for any of you who do not know:

SELECT A HIGHER GEAR THAN YOU WOULD NORMALLY AND KEEP ENGINE REVS LOW – PULLING AWAY IN 2ND GEAR IS OFTEN A GOOD IDEA – IT IS BETTER TO STALL THAN SPIN YOUR WHEELS

BE VERY GENTLE WITH ALL THE CONTROLS, PARTICULARLY THE BRAKE AND ACCELERATOR – SMALL GENTLE MOVEMENTS ARE KEY

MAINTAIN A STEADY SPEED, DO NOT CRAWL ALONG AT 5 MILES AN HOUR, BUT KEEP YOUR SPEED DOWN AND ALLOW PLENTY OF STOPPING DISTANCE

Judging by the number of people I watched spinning their wheels and revving their engines in 1^st, it’s amazing how many people aren’t aware of these very basic tips. Of course you should bring a shovel and plenty of supplies as well, I also took a couple of old pieces of carpet to help me get out if I got stuck, but your goal should be not to get stuck in the first place and avoid making other people get stuck at all costs! The BBC’s entire section on “Before you leave” should be condensed into “check your car over paying particular attention to the tyres, bring lots of supplies (including fuel), warm clothes and a shovel to help get out if you get stuck” – to be honest this should be common sense. The most important advice that may not be common sense to a lot of people; ie, ‘use high gears’ is buried right the way down at the bottom of the page. No good!

I also had the opportunity to try out a tip that I picked up from the Arctic special of top gear – if you’re stuck, particularly on a hill facing upwards; try gently rocking backwards and forwards on the clutch (keeping engine revs low). It works, very well in fact; so well that once I’d got my car out from its parking space by clearing the snow with a shovel, I was able to drive around quite happily even on some quite treacherous roads without having to get out of the car and use the shovel even once.

It will make me very angry if you’re in front of me going uphill and driving very slowly – in order to keep traction going uphill you need to maintain a certain amount of speed and momentum; while you may feel safer driving very slowly, I will be seriously pissed off if I lose traction because of your over-paranoid driving. It is much safer and easier to go up a hill at 25mph in 4^th or 5^th than it is at 5mph in 2^nd.

And while we’re on the subject of bad drivers – I know that driving in the snow is hard and requires a lot of concentration, but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to stop indicating, in fact it makes indication all the more important because you have to start slowing down so far in advance of the turns. Several times yesterday drivers in front of me slowed down with no warning – in normal conditions I’ll let this slide, but in the snow doing so will provoke an angry honk of my horn. If you are not capable of driving without endangering the safety of other road users, you should not be on the road.

Before I move on to talking about my actual trip to Cuckmere Haven, I’d like to add one final tip of my own; If you find yourself gradually sliding backwards down a hill as I did when I moved my car onto flatter ground prior to the really heavy snowfall; remember that in most front-wheel drive cars the foot brake only brakes the front wheels and the hand brake only brakes the rear wheels – you can therefore double the amount of braking traction that you have by applying both the foot brake and the hand brake, in effect giving you four-wheel braking. This should only be attempted if you have already lost traction and are unable to regain it by lifting and re-applying the foot brake (or, if you have ABS and you can feel the ABS trying to work but failing). Using both brakes together like this saved me from bumping the neighbors car so I’m very thankful that I thought of it in time.

The UK's 'Big Freeze'

Since the start of what people seem to be calling ‘The big freeze’ (we’ve had snow on and off since the new year and there’s been a layer of snow on the ground pretty much constantly since then); I’ve been itching to get out to Cuckmere Haven and take some photographs of the snow – it’s not an opportunity you get very often so I want to take advantage of it. The first time it snowed unfortunately I’d left my car parked facing uphill on my road (which is actually a very steep gradient), I tried three days running and there was simply no way I could safely get it out until the snow melted. I was pretty disappointed because snow in England is normally a once-a-year event so I figured I’d missed it. Nevertheless, I decided that from now on in winter I always park facing downhill.

Fortunately we did get a 2 day gap in the snow long enough for it to melt and me to turn my car around. Then when I noticed it starting to snow again I immediately got in my car and moved it on to flat ground – at this point it had been snowing less than an hour and there was only a centimeter or so of snow on the ground. I figured it would be safe to drive up my road – not so, this is when I ended up sliding backwards down a hill. I now know that even in the slightest amount of snow or ice; my road is completely impassable to a 2-wheel-drive car, in the uphill direction at least – I think I probably would’ve been able to safely slide down it.

So anyway, I managed to get my car onto flat ground and parked safely. I was on double-yellows, but I figure when it’s snowing so badly you can’t see the lines and the place you would normally park is completely impassable, all parking nazi rules are off and you park wherever it is safe to do so. Apparently everyone else agrees with me because when I returned to my car every space on the double-yellows around me was full too and there was no ticket on my car.

I knew that the most dangerous parts of the journey to Cuckmere Haven would be the beginning and the very end. I decided that the safest route to take would be the coast road (the A259) – while it’s a lesser road than the A27 and I would normally go via the A27, taking the A27 route requires either using a small country road to get from the A27 to the coast (which normally I thoroughly enjoy driving on, but probably would’ve been impassable, or at least very dangerous in the snow), or the safer option: driving past Cuckmere Haven all the way to Eastbourne, then all the way through Eastbourne to the coast, and then back the other way again on the coast road. I figured the prospect of getting stuck somewhere in Eastbourne probably outweighed the prospect of getting stuck somewhere along the coast road, so it was safer and easier to just to straight to Cuckmere Haven on the A259.

Normally I avoid the A259 because it goes via Newhaven and I hate Newhaven for many reasons. The main one being that it causes a severe bottleneck every time a boat goes past – there’s a moving bridge that seems to spend more time closed to traffic than open. Why they can’t just build a proper permanent bridge that’s high enough for boats to go under, I don’t understand. However, this time the problem caused by newhaven was nothing to do with bridges or boats, it was the idiot drivers.

On the A259 just before you enter Newhaven from the Brighton direction there’s a gentle uphill gradient with a 40mph speed limit which then levels off and goes into a slightly steeper downhill gradient as you enter Newhaven town heading towards the docks. For some reason everyone in Newhaven felt the need to drive around at 5mph. This isn’t such a problem when you’re going downhill, but when the pussies going really slowly down the downhill bit of the road is causing a tailback that stretches into the uphill bit, then it is a problem. At 5mph you have virtually no momentum and it’s consequently very easy to lose traction. That kept happening, not only to me but to pretty much everyone in a 2-wheel drive car, when you add to that the fact that people don’t know how to do hill starts in slippery conditions (ie, use second gear) traffic was moving very slowly. The people in 4WDs were understandably quite pissed off and I saw at least two people going on to the wrong side of the road to go around the long line of 2-wheel-drive cars struggling to get up the hill. This is dangerous, and it’s caused by people going too slowly. If you don’t have the balls to maintain a decent speed in the snow, do us all a favour and stay off the roads before you cause a fucking accident. If you’re going at less than half the speed limit, that is probably dangerously slow, even in ice.

Anyway, when I came out the other side of Newhaven the idiocy mostly subsided and I had a very pleasurable drive the rest of the way to Cuckmere Haven. I was right about the beginning and the end being the most dangerous bits – getting from where I’d parked to the one-way system was a little slippery (although I’d deliberately parked on a main road not far from the centre of town), once on the one-way system conditions were fine and I felt confident driving around at my normal speed (allowing slightly greater stopping distances). Similarly, the conditions on the coast road were perfectly safe, and I felt confident at, or slightly below the speed limit. I resisted the temptation to exceed the speed limit in certain places as I would normally do, even though I think it would have been safe to do so – there’s no point taking undue risks.

When I got to Cuckmere Haven there were a couple of cars in the visitor centre car park, but they had obviously been there since before the snow fell. I was the only one to have driven there in the snow, it looked like a couple of cars had pulled into the car park to turn around but not stopped, or if they had stopped they’d gone by the time I’d got there. My automatic reaction was to drive over to my normal spot on the far side of the car park, but upon parking there I changed my mind and decided it was probably unwise to put a few hundred yards of untouched snow between myself and the main road. I therefore decided to move my car to the closest I could reasonably leave it to the car park entrance without actually blocking it. I also parked under a tree where the snow was thinnest so that if I did get stuck, I hopefully wouldn’t have to do too much shovelling.

My car in the visitor centre car park

The way I feel about my car now is like the guys on Top Gear describe after one of their road-trips in shit cars. I know my car’s a pile of junk: it didn’t cost much, it’s got a puny engine, doesn’t have any features like power steering, central locking, airbags or ABS and now it won’t start unless you know the correct technique, there’s a hole where the glove box used to be and what little power it did have is gone. But even so, you can sense that it just wants to keep going. Despite all its faults, it’s never let me down when I’ve needed it – the only time I’ve ever had to call out the AA was when Lisa locked the bloody key in it, the only time it’s failed to start completely was when I left the light on and ran the battery down, the car itself has never let me down and for that I love it.

I attribute most of that reliability to the fact that I made a very wise choice about which car to buy – Volkswagen are known for their reliability, and I bought exactly the right model for my price range. I couldn’t have made a better choice and I’m very smug about it – I should probably attribute at least some of this choice to Jezz – it was him that helped me pick the car and drove me to pick it up – some of the thanks should probably also go to Jezz’s dad who’s been a VW man all his life and probably indirectly influenced my choice to buy a Polo. I’ve been very happy with my Polo and will definitely buy a Volkswagen again, I’d quite like to upgrade to a Golf, and that may in fact be my next car.

I’ve always really loved and enjoyed driving, but it wasn’t until my trip to Cuckmere Haven in the snow that I realised I actually love my car as well. At first I found it hard to feel any attachment to a car which I know to not be particularly good, but after driving it for a year I’m definitely very attached. I know that its reliability is going to come to an end pretty soon and I’m going to be forced to replace it and I’m going to be sad to see the back of this car.

Here’s a picture of MOF all on its own at the Hill Barn car park. Notice the 4 tyre tracks in the snow rather than the usual 2. That’s because I was in a controlled 4-wheel drift when I parked, so each wheel was leaving its own track. It’s not often you get the opportunity to pull off stunts like that in public places without it being dangerous. Fun stuff

My car in the Hill Barn car park

I had planned to leave the car in the visitor centre car park and go to each location on foot, but after walking to the Foxhole campsite and taking the photos I wanted there, it would’ve been something like 3 or 4 miles walking in heavy snow to get to the coastguard cottages where I wanted to take the next set of photos. I was already starting to get a headache from the cold so I decided that was probably unwise and that I’d be better off risking the drive.

I knew it would be quite a risky drive up to the Hill Barn car park – the visitor centre car park is literally just off the A259 so even if I’d got stuck there it wouldn’t have taken too much work to clear the snow with my shovel and regain traction using the bits of carpet I’d bought. The Hill Barn car park is a completely different matter however, it’s tucked away up the back of Seaford, and there’s quite a steep track made of concrete slabs up to the car park itself which I knew wouldn’t have had many cars pass over it since the snow, there was a good chance I wouldn’t be able to get up there at all and would get properly stuck in the process of trying.

Driving up that track there was a rather scary moment when I thought I was gonna lose it, I was in 4^th and could feel the car loosing speed and beginning to splutter because 4^th is really too high for my car to get up that hill with the engine as fucked as it is, but I knew that changing down to third there was a good chance of spinning the wheels and going sliding back down the hill – it was a delicate balancing act between not stalling the car, not losing traction and maintaining enough speed to actually get up the hill. I think I shifted down to 3^rd at exactly the right time – I could literally feel that I was right at the edge of the capabilities of my car – if I’d downshifted any earlier I’d have spun the wheels, any later and I’d have stalled, neither of which would’ve been good at this particular moment. I was so happy when I got to the top that I had to execute a little drift manouver to celebrate.

The walk from Hill Barn down to the coastguard cottages was absolutely bleak – up on the top of the cliff the winds were much stronger and the snow was being driven towards me. A lot of the time the snow was coming down at close to 90 degrees – you can see this in the photos because the snow is settled on the side of things rather than the top, this is particularly apparent on benches and signposts. At Cuckmere Haven it’s not just the trees that are sideways, the snow is too!

The rescue helecopter went past and hovered literally a couple of meters away from me for a minute or so, probably wondering what the fuck I was doing and whether I was trying to kill myself heh. Annoyingly, just as I was about to take a photo of them, they flew away – just like fucking birds.

That reminds me, I was also gonna mention that I nearly got an amazing photo of a robin sitting in a snow-covered tree, except for the fact that I had my wide-angle lens on (as I always do) and needed to change to the telephoto in order to make the picture. This keeps happening – I never use the telephoto, except for when I see an animal that I want to photograph, at which point I struggle to switch lenses as quickly and quietly as possible, and by the time I’ve put the camera to my eye, I’m just quick enough to catch a glimpse of the damned animal scampering or flying away. I therefore conclude that a telephoto lens is basically useless to a landscape photographer unless you can afford to have two camera bodies and carry them both around with you the whole time. Annoying!

Anyway, by the time I got down to the coastguard cottages, the cold was really starting to bite, fortunately the Thermos of tea I’d bought with me was still hot despite having been dropped in the snow. I snapped the pictures I wanted as quickly as possible and hurridly returned to the car. I was going to go via Hope Gap, but decided there was a real chance this might’ve finished me off – Hope Gap is the best location for taking pictures of the full set of Seven Sisters, but the snow was so heavy that you could only barely make out Haven Brow let alone the rest of the Seven Sisters, the snowy cliff pictures will have to wait for another time.

Getting back down the track from Hill Barn was a lot easier than getting up it, although the amount of speed that I built-up was rather alarming. I didn’t dare try going down in 3rd or braking very heavily for risk losing front-wheel traction, and I managed to maintain good traction all the way down, but I must’ve been doing a good 45mph by the time I got to the bottom which was really quite scary. I suppose the other approach I could’ve tried would have been to crawl down as slowly as possible in 2nd, but that’s not really my style and I don’t really think it would’ve been much safer, I’d rather be going quickly and have a good degree of control over the car than be going slowly and sliding all over the place. However, one false move and that could’ve ended quite badly.

While I would encourage people to go out and drive during the snow, I wouldn’t really encourage the same level of brazen disregard for the risks of getting stuck in a snow drift that I have myself. Stick to main roads and don’t put yourself in any unnecessary danger. Do as I say, not as I do

I do consider myself a fairly safe and accomplished driver (considering I’ve only had my license for 1 year). I failed my test 3 times because I get very nervous under test conditions and that affects my ability to drive quite significantly – I was good enough to pass on the first attempt, I just didn’t. I’ve consequently had a lot more professional tuition than most people, and more than I really needed. I’ve also done a hell of a lot of driving since passing my test, as much as I can afford to do really – I just love driving. I’ve also had some low-friction tuition and driven a pretty wide variety of cars including front, rear and 4-wheel drive which has enabled me to be pretty confident driving in the snow. Once you have that confidence, driving in snow is actually bloody fun I had a great time sliding around.

Here you can see a selection of my Cuckmere Haven snow images:

Fence into frozen lake

Hill Barn

Bench and the coastguard cottages

After watching the BBC’s new wildlife documentary series ‘Life’ at 1080p, I’m going to have to change my mind. The photography in the series is stunning at standard definition, but at 1080p; it’s absolutely breathtaking. I’m now completely sold on it, and if a TV set were something I actually owned, I’d go out and buy a new one immediately so as to take advantage of it. Of course, TVs themselves are now obsolete anyway and I already own a very good quality computer monitor, so I won’t actually be buying any new hardware.

L1760TR Black

Speaking of my monitor; it’s worth saying a bit more about it – I bought an LG Flatron L1760TR and it’s probably my favourite IT purchase of the last 5 years. In my years of experience with computers, I’ve learned that your monitor is probably the most long-lived part of your computer – the lifetime of a monitor can easily be 10 years, whereas I’ll start itching to get a new computer after 1 or 2 (as I am right now). Your monitor is also something you spend a bloody long time staring at – it’s one of the most important interfaces between you and your computer. On this logic, I figured it was worth getting a bloody good monitor.

I picked the Flatron because it had a very high contrast ratio – the best available at the time (without resorting to ‘dynamic contrast’, which I don’t trust) and a decent resolution, it also has a fairly quick response rate which is useful for watching films and playing games. It’s a standard 4:3 aspect ratio – I don’t like the current tendancy towards wide-screen aspect ratios in computer monitors – while this may be more appropriate for watching films; for software development, photo manipulation and web browsing, to me at least, a more square aspect ratio is clearly a better choice. I’m also not fond of huge screens on a PC – I like to sit fairly close to my screen, between 2 and 3 feet away. Having a larger screen requires that you either move further away, or physically move your head in order to look to the corners (or move your eyeballs outside of their comfortable range). For these reasons I think that 17″ is the correct size for a PC screen.

After having had my Flatron for a couple of years I can say that I’m very happy with it – it was well worth every penny I spent on it (and there’s actually relatively few high-value purchases I could say that about). Compared to a cheaper monitor of the same size, the difference is drastic – at the last company I worked for I was given a laptop with a very poor quality screen and I would have found it completely unusuable for anything other than reading and writing text (fortunately that’s all I was ever required to do). I would encourage anyone buying a new PC to do as I have done and really splash out on their monitor – the rest of the computer is basically disposable, but a decent monitor is for keeps.

Just to give you an idea of how highly I’m praising my monitor I’ll compare it to my other most prized posession – my camera. I paid £500 for my current camera second-hand, if I’d bought it new I would’ve paid closer to £1000, and at that price I actually would have felt a little cheated – let me explain why.. I used to have the Canon 400D, which is basically Canon’s consumer-level SLR – when I bought mine (new) they were retailing for something like £450 – What I have now is the 40D, it’s like the 400D’s bigger brother; it’s basically the same camera except that it’s slightly larger, slightly heavier, more of it is made out of metal (rather than plastic) and it has an extra dial to allow you to control two variables at once instead of one. In terms of image quality, they’re basically the same. The point is, the 40D is almost twice the price of the 400D, but it’s only a ~20% better camera – that’s why I’d have felt cheated if I’d paid the full retail price. This is the case with many electronics products – as you spend more money, the return you get in terms of a better product are diminished. That’s why I’m so happy with my monitor – I could have had a 17″ monitor for half what I paid for mine, in other words I paid twice as much as I could’ve done, but unlike with my camera, with the monitor I actually got a monitor that was twice as good as one that’s half the price, in fact I’d say it’s more than that – maybe even three times as good.

While I’m on the topic of human-computer-interface – I place a lot of importance on the two other interfaces – the keyboard and mouse. My preference is for a “clicky” keyboard – this probably sets me apart from a lot of people because clicky keyboards are very much out of fashion at the moment and getting hold of one was problematic for me. The most well-known example of a clicky keyboard is the IBM Model M – in my opinion this is The One True Keyboard, every modern keyboard is shit in comparison. Sadly, you can’t seem to buy a new Model M anymore – they are apparently still made by a company called Unicomp, but when I attempted to buy one from them they never returned my e-mails. I ended up paying quite a lot of money to have an old one imported from clickykeyboards.com in the US – it’s dated 1996 and was still in its original packaging unopened and unused. Apparently a pallet of them had been found at the back of a warehouse somewhere – that’s a bloody long time for stock to go completely unnoticed in a warehouse!

IBM Model M - US Layout

This is exactly how my keyboard looks – it’s a US keyboard layout and it lacks the Windows keys. I don’t mind the US layout too much although the lack of a pound key is sometimes a little annoying – most of the time I’m typing £ instead of £ anyway. If I’m chatting to you online and you wonder why I keep saying ‘quid’ when referring to money, it’s because I don’t have a pound key. The only other minor annoyance is the lack of a Windows key, but the only thing I actually regularly use that for is Windows+D to hide all open windows, I do very occasionally use Windows+R to open the run dialog but I don’t really mind opening the start menu for that. I have an icon in my quicklaunch to minimise all windows so I’ve got used to the lack of a windows key now. I would’ve preferred a UK keyboard layout with a backwards-L shaped enter key and the Windows keys like the ones apparently sold by Unicomp, but Unicomp don’t seem to actually be in business anymore.

The technical name for the mechanism that causes the click is a “Buckling spring” – basically what it means is that there is a physical change in the amount of return pressure you feel from each key at exactly the point at which the key press is registered – if you gradually depress a key, the key becomes progressively harder to move until the point at which the key press is registered, at which point it immediately travels to the bottom of its movement and an audible click is heard (hence the name ‘clicky keyboard’). It also clicks again at the same point when you lift your finger, so for each key press you actually hear two clicks which makes it sound like you’re typing at twice the speed you actually are.

Actually the clicking is a mostly unwanted side-effect of the tactile feedback that you feel each time you press a key. Ideally the clicking would be a quite a lot quieter than it actually is – I simply wouldn’t be able to use this keyboard in a quiet office environment, it would piss too many people off. Similarly, using it at night in a house full of people who are sleeping can cause problems. However, to me tactile feedback is a very important part of human-computer interface design – I want to be able to feel whether I’ve successfully pressed a key or not – having that feeling allows me to type quicker. I’m a very fast typist even on a cheap keyboard, but on a clicky keyboard my typing speed is pretty close to the maximum achievable speed. I don’t doubt that the buckling spring technology could have been refined to make it quieter and more suitable for an office environment if it had remained in fashion. I’m hoping one day it will come back in, perhaps when IBM’s original patent expires. The Steampunk Keyboard might help with that (by the way, if anyone wants me to love them forever, buy me one of these).

HTC TyTn II

It’s the lack of tactile feedback that makes me so dead-set against iPhones – I hate them. In my opinion typing is something that should be done with physical buttons, not on a touchscreen – touchscreens are a decent replacement for a mouse on a mobile phone but they’re not a decent replacement for a keyboard. iPhone users claim that you ‘get used to it’, but I suspect that they are simply slow typers who are content with the fiddly practice of jabbing at tiny letters on a touchscreen. That’s not good enough for me, and that’s why I have an HTC TyTn II – it still has a large touchscreen like the iPhone, but it also has a proper QWERTY keyboard with actual real buttons that move when you press them.

I’m equally fussy with my mouse – while I don’t require one specific model, I do believe that there is one correct shape for a mouse and all other mouse shapes are wrong. Obviously a laser mouse is an absolute requirement – I couldn’t believe ball mice are still being made given the obvious advantages of optical technology, but surprisingly my dad’s PC came with one! That went straight in the bin. My mouse has buttons on the side for web browser forwards and backwards which I very rarely use, and it’s also possible to scroll left and right by pushing the mouse wheel with the side of your finger – I absolutely never do that and think it’s a pointless feature. However, another area where tactile feedback is necessary is the wheel – it should gently click as you roll it up and down.

The buttons on a mouse should click at exactly the point at which the mouse click is registered – obviously most mice do this, but that is because each button has a standard microswitch under it – funnily enough the mechanism inside the microswitch in a mouse is actually remarkably similar to the mechanism inside each key of an IBM Model M keyboard – in a mouse it was judged necessary to have that ‘clicky’ tactile feedback in the buttons – so necessary in fact that it entered the terminology as “clicking on something”. I really don’t understand why the clickyness was deemed necessary in mice but dropped in keyboards in favour of cheap and nasty ‘rubber dome’ technology, actually I do.. it’s because it’s possible to manufacture rubber dome keyboards so cheaply that they can retail for less than £2, a buckling spring keyboard will never be that cheap.

Logitech M400

Above you see the correct shape for a mouse, unless you actually have no right hand (in which case you probably want a mouse that is the exact mirror image of this one). Even as a left-handed person (which I am), it is incorrect to attempt to use a mouse with your left hand, even if you reverse the order of the buttons; for the simple reason that you’re breaking the de-facto standard and will consequently struggle to use anybody else’s computer.

I don’t believe in cordless mice or keyboards because I don’t like it when they run out, which they do, a lot. Either you have to replace batteries, or you have to dump the thing onto some kind of charging station, both of which interrupt you from whatever it is you’re doing. I do not like to be interrupted when I’m in the middle of a train of thought, in fact it’s a surefire way to put me in a very irritable mood. I won’t have a wireless keyboard or mouse until someone invents a power source that never runs out, or at least has a lifetime measured in years rather than days.

If you’re looking for holiday house rentals with a personal touch, this is the place to go.

I interpreted the responses to my change request as “We don’t agree with you enough to make the change”, where as what they actually meant was “We don’t agree with you strongly enough to be bothered to make the change ourselves” – the upshot of this being that when I went ahead and hacked the code myself to remove the annoying double-dash separator, the response I got was; “Could you finish the job and make this into a patch that can actually be merged back into the codebase?”. In other words, I got roped into fixing the problem properly.

In my previous entry I posted a patch that would allow you to remove the double-dash signature separator from Thunderbird if you were willing to recompile it from source yourself. I’ve now patched it properly so that there’s a new configuration option to allow anyone to change this setting at runtime – in other words I’ve done myself what I was trying to get the Thunderbird development team to do. My patch is now awaiting review and will hopefully be merged into the Thunderbird codebase in time to make the next major release (version 3).

I, as a developer, have added a feature to Thunderbird that I wanted, a feature that plenty of other people also wanted, but because no other developer had taken it upon himself to implement this feature; those who wanted it have been waiting 9 years! The point being, as a user, you only get the features you want if you’re also a developer, or if a developer happens to agree with you.

The change is actually pretty trivial – the default behaviour remains completely unchanged, and if you create a signature in Thunderbird it will still automatically add the double-dash separator before the signature. However, as a result of my patch, it will soon be possible to disable this irritating behaviour by manually setting a special configuration preference using Thunderbird’s built-in config editor. This is the preference you need to use (where ? is a number between 1 and the total number of identities you have set up) – it’s a boolean field, set it to true to disable the behaviour:

mail.identity.id?.suppress_signature_separator

And for the sake of completeness, below you’ll find the patch that I’ve submitted for inclusion in the next release of Thunderbird. Hopefully you won’t actually need to use this because it will be merged into the Thunderbird codebase.

diff -r 20c2d9e8e9b4 mailnews/base/public/nsIMsgIdentity.idl
--- a/mailnews/base/public/nsIMsgIdentity.idl	Thu Dec 31 13:43:40 2009 +0530
+++ b/mailnews/base/public/nsIMsgIdentity.idl	Sat Jan 02 20:00:55 2010 +0000
@@ -135,16 +135,21 @@ interface nsIMsgIdentity : nsISupports {
   attribute AString htmlSigText;

   /**
    * Does htmlSigText contain HTML? Use plain text if false.
    */
   attribute boolean htmlSigFormat;

   /**
+   * Suppress the double-dash signature separator
+   */
+  attribute boolean suppressSigSep;
+
+  /**
    * The encoded string representing the vcard.
    */
   attribute ACString escapedVCard;

   attribute boolean doFcc;
   /// URI for the fcc (Sent) folder
   attribute ACString fccFolder;
   attribute boolean fccReplyFollowsParent;
diff -r 20c2d9e8e9b4 mailnews/base/util/nsMsgIdentity.cpp
--- a/mailnews/base/util/nsMsgIdentity.cpp	Thu Dec 31 13:43:40 2009 +0530
+++ b/mailnews/base/util/nsMsgIdentity.cpp	Sat Jan 02 20:00:55 2010 +0000
@@ -193,16 +193,18 @@ NS_IMPL_IDPREF_BOOL(FccReplyFollowsParen
 NS_IMPL_IDPREF_STR(DraftsFolderPickerMode, "drafts_folder_picker_mode")
 NS_IMPL_IDPREF_STR(ArchivesFolderPickerMode, "archives_folder_picker_mode")
 NS_IMPL_IDPREF_STR(TmplFolderPickerMode, "tmpl_folder_picker_mode")

 NS_IMPL_IDPREF_BOOL(BccSelf, "bcc_self")
 NS_IMPL_IDPREF_BOOL(BccOthers, "bcc_other")
 NS_IMPL_IDPREF_STR (BccList, "bcc_other_list")

+NS_IMPL_IDPREF_BOOL(SuppressSigSep, "suppress_signature_separator")
+
 NS_IMETHODIMP
 nsMsgIdentity::GetDoBcc(PRBool *aValue)
 {
   nsresult rv = mPrefBranch->GetBoolPref("doBcc", aValue);
   if (NS_SUCCEEDED(rv))
     return rv;

   PRBool bccSelf = PR_FALSE;
@@ -571,16 +573,17 @@ nsMsgIdentity::Copy(nsIMsgIdentity *iden
     COPY_IDENTITY_INT_VALUE(identity,GetReplyOnTop,SetReplyOnTop)
     COPY_IDENTITY_BOOL_VALUE(identity,GetSigBottom,SetSigBottom)
     COPY_IDENTITY_BOOL_VALUE(identity,GetSigOnForward,SetSigOnForward)
     COPY_IDENTITY_BOOL_VALUE(identity,GetSigOnReply,SetSigOnReply)
     COPY_IDENTITY_INT_VALUE(identity,GetSignatureDate,SetSignatureDate)
     COPY_IDENTITY_BOOL_VALUE(identity,GetAttachVCard,SetAttachVCard)
     COPY_IDENTITY_STR_VALUE(identity,GetEscapedVCard,SetEscapedVCard)
     COPY_IDENTITY_STR_VALUE(identity,GetSmtpServerKey,SetSmtpServerKey)
+    COPY_IDENTITY_BOOL_VALUE(identity,GetSuppressSigSep,SetSuppressSigSep)
     return NS_OK;
 }

 NS_IMETHODIMP
 nsMsgIdentity::GetRequestReturnReceipt(PRBool *aVal)
 {
   NS_ENSURE_ARG_POINTER(aVal);

diff -r 20c2d9e8e9b4 mailnews/compose/src/nsMsgCompose.cpp
--- a/mailnews/compose/src/nsMsgCompose.cpp	Thu Dec 31 13:43:40 2009 +0530
+++ b/mailnews/compose/src/nsMsgCompose.cpp	Sat Jan 02 20:00:55 2010 +0000
@@ -4040,25 +4040,28 @@ nsMsgCompose::ProcessSignature(nsIMsgIde
   PRBool        attachFile = PR_FALSE;
   PRBool        useSigFile = PR_FALSE;
   PRBool        htmlSig = PR_FALSE;
   PRBool        imageSig = PR_FALSE;
   nsAutoString  sigData;
   nsAutoString sigOutput;
   PRInt32      reply_on_top = 0;
   PRBool       sig_bottom = PR_TRUE;
+  PRBool        suppressSigSep = PR_FALSE;

   nsCOMPtr sigFile;
   if (identity)
   {
     if (!CheckIncludeSignaturePrefs(identity))
       return NS_OK;

     identity->GetReplyOnTop(&reply_on_top);
     identity->GetSigBottom(&sig_bottom);
+    identity->GetSuppressSigSep(&suppressSigSep);
+
     rv = identity->GetAttachSignature(&attachFile);
     if (NS_SUCCEEDED(rv) && attachFile)
     {
       rv = identity->GetSignature(getter_AddRefs(sigFile));
       if (NS_SUCCEEDED(rv) && sigFile) {
         rv = sigFile->GetNativePath(sigNativePath);
         if (NS_SUCCEEDED(rv) && !sigNativePath.IsEmpty()) {
           PRBool exists = PR_FALSE;
@@ -4118,17 +4121,17 @@ nsMsgCompose::ProcessSignature(nsIMsgIde
   if (imageSig)
   {
     // We have an image signature. If we're using the in HTML composer, we
     // should put in the appropriate HTML for inclusion, otherwise, do nothing.
     if (m_composeHTML)
     {
       sigOutput.AppendLiteral(htmlBreak);
       sigOutput.AppendLiteral(htmlsigopen);
-      if (reply_on_top != 1 || sig_bottom || !aQuoted)
+      if (!suppressSigSep && reply_on_top != 1 || sig_bottom || !aQuoted)
         sigOutput.AppendLiteral(dashes);
       sigOutput.AppendLiteral(htmlBreak);
       sigOutput.AppendLiteral("");
@@ -4205,17 +4208,17 @@ nsMsgCompose::ProcessSignature(nsIMsgIde

     if ((reply_on_top != 1 || sig_bottom || !aQuoted) &&
         sigData.Find("\r-- \r", PR_TRUE) < 0 &&
         sigData.Find("\n-- \n", PR_TRUE) < 0 &&
         sigData.Find("\n-- \r", PR_TRUE) < 0)
     {
       nsDependentSubstring firstFourChars(sigData, 0, 4);

-      if (!(firstFourChars.EqualsLiteral("-- \n") ||
+      if (!suppressSigSep && !(firstFourChars.EqualsLiteral("-- \n") ||
             firstFourChars.EqualsLiteral("-- \r")))
       {
         sigOutput.AppendLiteral(dashes);

         if (!m_composeHTML || !htmlSig)
           sigOutput.AppendLiteral(CRLF);
         else if (m_composeHTML)
           sigOutput.AppendLiteral(htmlBreak);

Anyway, I wanted my e-mail client – Thunderbird (part of the Mozilla suite which includes the popular web browser Firefox) to automatically add the signature. So I created a signature file and set Thunderbird up to use it, but what I ended up with was this:

--
~Kieran Simkin

http://slinq.com/

Where did the double-dash come from? It wasn’t in my signature file, and I hadn’t typed it myself. So after a bit of fiddling I realised that Thunderbird was automatically adding the double-dash as a sort of signature separator, to indicate the end of the message and the start of the signature – it then uses this double dash to identify signatures and for some reason make them grey instead of black.

But I didn’t want that double dash… my signature starts with a ~, always has done and always will.. that’s just how my signature is and I don’t wish to change it. Having a double dash, then a linebreak, then a squiggle (~) then my name just looks wrong. I’ve always used a squiggle to indicate my signature because to me, that’s the most logical character to use. I don’t really care what other people are using because it’s a signature for fuck’s sake, it’s supposed to be unique.

So I set about trying to disable the double-dash separator so that my signature would look how I want it, only to find you can’t! That’s right, if you use automatic signatures in Thunderbird; you have to start your signature with a double-dash, there’s no way around it. Not only that, but it has to be a double dash followed by a linebreak – you can’t sign it ‘–Kieran’, the double dash has to be on a line on its own. Madness!

What I did find was this bug report of a user complaining of exactly the same annoyance… dated the year 2000! That’s a bug report 9 years old and (at the time) still open with 9 years worth of arguments about whether to fix the problem or not. Basically the argument hinges on the fact that using the double-dash to indicate the start of a signature is a legacy from Usenet when it apparently made it easier snip out people’s signatures when quoting them:

Section 4.3 of RFC 3676 says:

There is a long-standing convention in Usenet news which also commonly appears in Internet mail of using “– ” as the separator line between the body and the signature of a message.

This is, as far as I can tell, the only mention of the double-dash separator in any of the official standards documents. Just to be clear – RFCs have a very specific way of indicating when a piece of software should or shouldn’t do something (defined in RFC 2119):

The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

None of these keywords appear in any of the standards documents in relation to the double-dash signature separator; so we can say for definite that the official standards do not mandate the use of this separator. In other words, there’s nothing in the standards that say Thunderbird should be forcing the inclusion of the double dash before the start of a signature. The Thunderbird developers are of course free to encourage its use, and even use it by default, but there should really be some way of disabling it since it is not specifically required by the standards and there are plenty of people (ie, me) who don’t want it there.

Right, I thought, I’m gonna barge-in and kick these bloody opensource geeks into action. So I dive in with something deliberately confrontational (even though I knew it probably broke their ettiquette guidelines), after 9 years of pissing around they need a good kick up the arse:

Ugh this is absolutely typical of opensource development - 9 years of pointless
arguing and no action. 

There are lots of perfectly valid reasons why we may not want to have the --
separator. If you're concerned about breaking some "standard", just make it a
hidden config option - ie, one which cannot be changed via the GUI. I shouldn't
have to start hacking code to do something so basic!

Well, you can read their responses – more stupid arguing that basically boils down to this; “I’m not going to allow you to send e-mails without the double dash separator because it annoys me when I receive e-mails like that”. Well, it fucking annoys me when my e-mail client tries to enforce somebody else’s style guidelines on my e-mails!

The thing is, you’d think we were asking them to change the default behaviour.. we’re not, I’m not even asking that they add an option to the preferences screen to disable the double-dash. All I’m asking for is some way, any way, for me, as a “power user” to format my e-mails the way I bloody choose. I don’t care if I have to go and manually edit a configuration file or utter some black-magic encantation that only a geek would understand – I just want some way to disable that bloody double-dash.

And this is the biggest problem with opensource development – 9 times out of 10, those developers aren’t working for any specific company, they’re just working out of the goodness of their hearts. The problem with that is that it means they develop the software they want to develop, not necessarily the software people actually want to use. With some projects the two coincide nicely, with others a carefully designed organisational structure guides the developers in the right direction; sometimes (as in the case of the Linux kernel) that structure is autocratic, with a visionary leader at the top (ie Linus Torvalds) who understands what people want and leads the rest of the team in the right direction. Of course, problems do arise when the visionary leader gets it wrong (as Linus has been doing fairly consistently for the last 5 or so years).

So opensource developers tend to be selfish and pretty stubborn – if they think they’re right, they won’t let a little thing like logic or the will of their user-base change their mind. Opensource is both the cause-of, and solution-to this problem (a bit like alcohol); because the source code is available, if I think that the developers of a particular bit of software are being stubborn arseholes, I’m perfectly free to just say “screw you, I’ll fix it myself”, take their code and make whatever changes to it I like.

That’s basically what I’ve done in this instance – when I realised the developers were basically still living in the days of Usenet and that I could potentially spend hours trying to convince them to make the change, eventually a tipping point was reached where I realised it was going to be quicker to just fix the problem myself than it was to get them to fix it for me. I would’ve liked to have got them to fix it in the actual codebase, because I think it’s stupid that people be forced to format their signatures in a certain way. Given that they’ve made it clear that was going to be a complete pain in the arse, I just downloaded the Thunderbird source code, found the bit of code that inserts the double-dash and deleted it. The entire process took about 15 minutes – less time than I spent arguing with the idiots on their bug tracker.

So here it is, my patch to Thunderbird to stop it adding double-dashes before your signature:

--- D:/Documents and Settings/Kieran/My Documents/nsMsgCompose.cpp.orig	Fri Feb  3 14:18:18 2006
+++ D:/Documents and Settings/Kieran/My Documents/nsMsgCompose.cpp	Fri Jan  1 20:17:11 2010
@@ -3695,6 +3695,11 @@
       if (!(firstFourChars.EqualsLiteral("-- \n") ||
             firstFourChars.EqualsLiteral("-- \r")))
       {
+	      /*
+	       * Disable stupid double dash signature separator
+	       * ~ Kieran Simkin
+	       * http://slinq.com/
+	       *
         sigOutput.AppendLiteral(dashes);

         if (!m_composeHTML || !htmlSig)
@@ -3702,6 +3707,7 @@
         else if (m_composeHTML)
           sigOutput.AppendLiteral(htmlBreak);
       }
+      */
     }

     sigOutput.Append(sigData);

This is a unified diff file that should be applied to the file mozilla\mailnews\compose\src\nsMsgCompose.cpp within the Mozilla source tree – you can then compile Thunderbird in the normal way and you’ll get a version that doesn’t have the stupid double dash behaviour. I can’t be bothered to do binary builds, if you want my patch, you’re gonna have to compile it yourself. Have fun.

It’s about “The American Dream” – I used to think the American dream was about having a suburban house with a white picket fence, two kids, a dog and an SUV – now I think I understand it better – I define the American dream as the positive perception of upwards mobility. The American Dream to me means believing that if you want something enough and you work hard enough for it, you will get it. That belief is absolutely core to American culture – whether the individual actually has that upwards mobility or not, the belief that it’s there is ingrained into the media, it’s there in the public’s collective consciousness. The suburban house with the picket fence only comes into it because (sadly), that’s what a lot of people aspire to.

Now I don’t need you to tell me about all the poverty in America, or the racism that means many people in America don’t actually have any real degree of upwards mobility, I’m well aware of all that thanks.

The point is that there’s a difference in perception of upwards mobility between America and Europe, and it’s pretty significant – it pervades everything we do. In Britain if someone drives past in a nice car, we immediately think “wanker”. In America you think “Wow, they’re successful, I wish I were successful like them, maybe if I work harder I can be”. Obviously this is not true of every individual, but it is true as a generalisation. It also goes some way towards explaining why Americans have trouble understanding our sarcasm – in Britain success is something to poke fun at, in America it’s something to aspire towards.

If you think about it it’s not really hard to explain where this difference may have arisen from – in Europe we’ve had hundreds of years of feudal rule and a rigid class system. For a long time we’ve been in the position where the people with the money and the power don’t really deserve to have that money and power – they got it because it was handed down to them, and the masses under them have always looked upwards with a sense of resentment and anger. For the proletariat to advance upwards to become land-owners was pretty much unheard-of until the last couple of hundred years. In other words, we’ve evolved to where we are today from a point where there was basically no upwards mobility – this is in contrast to America; they went straight from nothing to essentially what we have today.

This is why the British are so good at poking fun at those above us; we’ve had hundreds of years of practice. Although we’re not really tightly bound by the class system anymore, it’s still part of our collective psyche – we still harbour that bitterness and resentment of those who are successful, and the reason we feel that way is because we don’t feel that we can be them, we feel like those who have the success are in some way separate from us, they are not simply normal people who have become successful, they were born successful. While the degree of upwards mobility present in modern society has certainly increased, the class system is certainly still in existence.

America’s different because it’s a relatively new country, so those with the success haven’t had much time to fully entrench their positions yet; a rigid class system hasn’t developed yet. That’s not to say it won’t – it just hasn’t yet. In such a large country with so many natural resources and so much land; there’s a lot of opportunities out there for someone with the determination to exploit them. This is what gives Americans their go-getter attitude – there really is a lot of opportunity out there and there’s no established class of successful people using their money and power to lord it over the proletariat. Well, that’s not entirely true – there certainly is a sort of bourgeois aristocracy developing in America, but it hasn’t really entered the public consciousness yet – the idea of the American dream is still the pervasive force.

When your attitude to success is admiration rather than jealousy, that affects the way you respond to people – the guy driving past in a nice car isn’t someone to shout ‘wanker’ at anymore, he’s another person just like you. Americans have a lot more respect for each other than we do over here, and I attribute that to their lack of jealousy.

When I look at people in Britain, what I see is that people tend get themselves into a position where they feel just-about-comfortable, and then any drive to be successful disappears and they spend their entire life hanging on in quiet desperation. What I see in Britain is a country full of people who basically hate their job and, consequently; they hate their life. We’re all just ‘making do’, because that is what our culture tells us to do – in the past there was pretty much fuck-all chance of us moving up in the world, so we needed to learn to be happy with what we’ve got.

That’s why we have such a heavy culture of ‘binge-drinking’ in Britain (although I hate that term) – we drink to forget the fact that we hate our lives. You spend all week hating your life, looking forward to Friday when you can get absolutely obliterated on drink, drugs and tobacco – that is the British way. It works pretty well actually, I think many people even have themselves convinced that they’re content with their lives. It also has the added bonus of shortening your lifespan so you can get it over with quickly. That is what I see all around me – pretty much everyone I know in full-time employment works this way. There are exceptions of course; people who actually enjoy their job do exist but they’re few and far between.

The thing is, I don’t think there really is any difference in the number of opportunities that are available to people in Britain versus America – the difference is in the perception of that opportunity. Here we still hold on to the belief that we’re bound by the class system – that we have to be happy with what we’ve got, because that’s all we can ever have. In America they don’t have that notion, you can have as much as you can earn, the sky’s the limit.

What we need to do in Britain is break down the perception that wealth and power is something you inherit and replace it with the idea that you can earn success by hard work. It’s this fundamental problem with our own collective perception of the value of hard work that’s holding us back as a country and could ultimately be our downfall.

I think the Mars rovers are a great little microcosm of the problem as I’m trying to describe it – the American rovers called Spirit and Opportunity – an unreserved success. Beagle II ? Not so good.. Why? Because we named it after a fucking breed of dog! The point is, both the Americans and the Europeans had the opportunity to land on the surface of Mars, but we cocked it up because we don’t have the same level of self-belief that the Americans have.

Our monarchy is the ultimate symbol of inherited power and wealth – it speaks volumes about our society that we still can’t seem to bear to rid ourselves of the queen. Aside from the fact that the queen is a leech on public funds and serves no real purpose, I’d argue that the negative effect she’s having on our economy extends far further than any direct burden she may place on the taxpayer. Our queen is the ultimate symbol of bourgeois aristocracy, of undeserved inherited wealth – her position as the official head of our country is a silent message to the proletariat – it says “be happy with what you’ve got, because you can’t ever hope to have as much as those with the good fortune to have been born into the right family”.

So how can a country with such an entrenched class system hope to rid itself of these shackles? America is lucky because it’s a new country – it doesn’t carry the burden of thousands of years of history. We’re stuck with what we’ve got, so how do we change it? One word; revolution. It worked in Soviet Russia – they overturned hundreds of years of Tzarist rule in one fell-swoop. It did work, and for a while it made them a super-power on a par with America.

But I’m not advocating a communist revolution, far from it – clearly communism doesn’t work. I’m not a communist, I’m not even a socialist. I’d describe myself as a militant liberal capitalist; what we need is less government, not more. We need a revolution to rid ourselves of the upper-class leeches who are sitting on pots of undeserved wealth. We also need to rid ourselves of the burden of a government who has become too greedy; they take every possible opportunity to dip into our pockets to fund an increasing number of initiatives designed to remove our freedoms; it’s got to stop! We are paying them to fuck us over, it’s twisted.

REVOLUTION!

Here’s the episode on the telephone from my favourite TV series; Tim Hunkin’s Secret Life of Machines:

There will always be a need for people to have voice conversations with each other. Even now that video-calling has become cheap and fairly reliable, most people would still rather not be seen – you simply don’t want to have to worry about your appearance every time you answer the phone. Text-based chat (SMS/E-mail etc) may be gaining popularity at the moment, but I seriously doubt they will ever completely replace the need for voice conversation.

So we’ll always need voice calls, so we’ll always be stuck with the current phone network, right? well, the need to have a voice conversation is still there, but the communication network that carries it is changing significantly.

The original analog phone system was built on the concept of having a real analog circuit open between two lines – the audio signal is carried as a variation in voltage on the line, much in the same way audio is carried from your iPod to your headphones, or from your hi-fi to its speakers.

Back in the early days of the phone network, the entire system was built on analog circuits, originaly they were ’switched’ manually by operators – the operators would have a plug board in front of them, when you wanted to make a call you would pick up your phone and ask the operator to connect you, connecting you in this case really was a physical connection of one plug on the board to another via a piece of cable not unlike a headphone jack -> headphone jack cable. If you wanted to place a long-distance call, your local operator would contact the operator at the remote exchange and request that she connect her plug board to the destination party. The ringing of the phone was initiated manually by the operator at the destination end of the call.

Eventually complex relays became available that made the operators obsolete. However, these mechanical devices still operated on much the same principal as the operators – a physical analog connection was made between two lines by selecting out of a number of possible contacts. Instead of the operators making the connections by hand, the relays simply make them using electromagnets to move a selector arm around a 2-dimensional array of metal contacts. As well as switching, there’s another important concept at work here – the exchanges need to be told how to switch – information about the destination of each call needs to be passed from the original caller all the way through to the destination exchange – this is called signalling. In the early days of analog exchanges, this signalling was done by one person literally asking another to switch their call – first by the original caller asking their local operator to connect them to their destination, and in the case of a long-distance call, their local operator would then ask one or more intermediary operators to pass the call along. When relays replaced operators, this signalling was done by electrical pulses sent over the line rather than actual humans talking to each other.

When transistors replaced relays, the signalling was done with tones rather than electrical pulses – there was a transition period where phones were available with a switch to use either tone or pulse dialling. Pulse dialling was originally achieved using a rotor that reset its position back to zero when you stopped turning it. This way the number 9 would result in 10 electrical pulses, the number zero would result in one pulse.

The pulses that are sent down the line are actually exactly the same as hanging up the phone – a phone line consists of two wires, and when the phone is on the hook; those wires are simply conected together in a loop. On old rotary dial phones, the rotor is basically hanging up the phone and then picking it up again in a series of pulses. New phone exchanges still support the old dialling process (so old phones still work), and because of this even on the most recent normal fixed-line telephones it’s possible to dial the operator by simply tapping the hangup button twice in quick succession, then again two more times at a slower rate – the pulse code for the number 100. You could theoretically dial any number like this, but it would be rather laborious and error-prone.

When the signalling changed from one person asking another to connect the call to a series of automatic pulses; one pretty major mistake was made: The signalling was still done over the same connection as the actual voice call. This is fine when it’s my telephone signalling the exchange which number it wishes to dial, but it’s a little bit more of a problem when the signalling when it’s the signalling between exchanges.

When we moved from electronic relays to transistor-based switching the same mistake was made, the signalling was ‘in-band’, even between exchanges; this means that when one exchange is asking another to make a connection, it does it by sending a series of tones down the line, much in the same way your normal landline telephone signals the exchange by sending DTMF tones. DTMF stands for dual-tone multi-frequency – these are the tones that normal phones make when you dial a number, each tone basically consists of two different frequencies. The exchange interprets the combinations of frequencies as numbers and routes the call through a series of transistors accordingly. It’s basically the same process as with the relays, but transistors are used for switching instead.

One such inter-exchange signalling system is CCITT5 – this was used commonly on early transistor exchanges, the exchanges basically signal the calls to each other in much the same way as your normal land line phone signals the exchange now; through a series of tones with specific frequencies. The two key frequencies used for much of the signalling are there are 2400Hz (sieze) and 2600Hz (clear to send). The number 2600 has become so ingrained in hacking culture that you’ll see it pop-up all over the place (including Windows build numbers!).

The CCITT5 (or C5) handshaking process works like this; imagine a line between two exchanges that is not in use – in this state the line is completely silent. Now a call comes in on one exchange (we’ll call this the originating exchange) that needs to be routed via this line to the other exchange (we’ll call this the destination exchange). The originating exchange first sends 2400Hz (sieze) to indicate that it wishes to open the line. The destination exchange acknowledges the sieze request by sending 2600Hz (clear-to-send) – when the originating exchange hears 2600Hz it knows the line is ready and stops sending the sieze tone. The destination exchange recognises that the sieze is complete by ceasing the clear-to-send tone. The line is then silent again, but the destination exchange is now in a state where it’s ready to receive a destination number – this number could be for the telephone of a person who is connected to the destination exchange, or it could be the number of another exchange – in this way a call can hop from one exchange to another, and indeed this is how calls are routed long-distance. The originating exchange dials the destination number using a combination of two different tones for each digit in exactly the same way a modern phone. When the call is over a clear tone is sent, both 2400Hz and 2600Hz are sent together (this is called clear-forward) to indicate that the line is now idle and ready for another call.

Phone hackers learned to use this in-band signalling to their advantage – if you send clear-forward to a C5 exchange whilst you are in the middle of a call (even from your home phone or mobile), it thinks you’re another exchange signalling that the call is over and the line is dead, it will then accept a sieze followed by any dialling command from you, as if you were the originating exchange. This basically gives you the same control over the network that an operator would have had in the days of plug-boards. You can route your call anywhere, do anything – you’re a trusted user of the system. And the way you control it is with a blue-box – this is the name for the DIY dialling devices that phone hackers made in order to take advantage of this flaw in the signalling. It’s very much like the keypad on a normal phone (with a few extra keys), each key plays a combination of tones that can be used to perform any signalling operation on the remote exchange. The process of using a blue-box to sieze control of a phone exchange (possibly for the purposes of committing toll fraud) is called blue boxing.

As a phone hacker, the tone that you’d be looking out for is a sort of high pitched ‘cheep’ or ‘chirp’ noise – if you heard this tone immediately after the number you called had picked-up, you knew you had a C5 exchange on the other end of the line. The tone you’re listening for is actually a 2400Hz tone (in this context just called ‘answer’) – in other words; the destination exchange also uses 2400Hz to signal that a call has been successfully connected. Upon hearing 2400Hz from the destination exchange, you’d then play your own clear-forward tone (2400Hz+2600Hz), followed a sieze (2400Hz) and hopefully hear a 2600Hz clear-to-send response, after this you’re free to use the C5 tones to dial any destination number on the network (including another exchange).

For the sake of completeness, here’s a table of the different combinations of 2400 and 2600 tones:

These are the CCITT5 signalling tones that are used for actually dialling numbers:

A blue box is simply a home-made tone generator device with keys for each of the tone combinations listed above. Tone generator integrated circuits have been available for many years, this put blue boxing within the capabilities of any determined amateur with a soldering iron and a lot of patience. Using a blue box it is possible to place long distance calls for free, and indeed many people did use it for this purpose, however, blue boxing is more than that – blue boxing is phone hacking in its original and purest form.

You’ll notice there’s a few extra keys you wouldn’t have on a normal phone handset – KP1 and KP2 are used for selecting national or international (transit) routing respectively (KP stands for key prefix). Code 11 and 12 are used for calling the operator, and the ST tone is used to signal the end of dialing. Dialling starts with an optional key prefix, followed by a call options digit (used for example to select operator language), followed by the actual number to dial and finally ST to indicate the end of dialling. If you wanted to dial the national number 715-2550255, a C5 dialling sequence might look like this:

KP1-0-715-2550255-ST

Last I checked (~2001), blueboxing was still alive and well. In 2001, exchanges that used C5 signalling were still in existence in various parts of the world (mainly developing countries). There will always be ways to place calls to these parts of the world for free, in other words – while CCITT5 signalling still exists anywhere on the phone network, blueboxing will still be possible, although increasingly difficult. So difficult now that I doubt all but the most oldsk00l of phone hackers even attempt it. However, there are opensource implementations of the C5 standard available, so these days you can install your own phone server and bluebox legally to your heart’s content. Project MF is a C5 implementation for the Asterisk phone server, and you can dial into their test system on (US) +1-630-485-2995. There is also an implementation for Linux-Call-Router, and a test system is avilable from Blueboxing.org – you can dial into this one on (Germany) +49-4644-9737083 – try it, listen for the 2400Hz ‘answer’ tone.

As of 2001, finding exchanges in the wild that used C5 wasn’t too much of a problem – the problem was in getting the C5 signalling tones past intermediate exchanges. All the tones necessary for C5 signalling are blocked with increasing sophistication as soon as the call leaves the country – when you’ve found a C5 exchange, getting your signalling tones through to it in a form that will still trigger its switching behaviour is pretty much impossible without serious black magic. I don’t doubt that some are capable, not me. It won’t be long before C5 is completely gone from the network and blueboxing made impossible anyway.

Now pretty much all signalling is done out-of-band; this means the information about how the call should be routed is sent over a different channel to the actual call itself. The way that this normally works is that you have a separate line dedicated to doing the signalling for multiple actual phone lines – each signalling instruction also contains a reference to which line it refers. This is called common channel signalling – using a dedicated channel for signalling like this prevents you (as a telco customer) from being able to inject your own signalling information into the network and change the way your call flows through it. You can see why telcos would be reluctant to implement this – it requires that they have an additional line that cannot be used for actual voice calls. In the early days, that separate signalling channel must have seemed like an unnecessary hit to the telco’s bottom line. It was only once toll fraud as a result of blue boxing became a serious problem that common channel signalling saw wide deployment.

Common channel signalling is still in widespread use today – the example you’re most likely to have heard of is ISDN. No, I’m not talking about the type of ISDN that you used to be fobbed off with if you asked for a decent internet connection – that died with the dawn of broadband. ISDN-PRI is actually a signalling protocol still in common use by companies with many phone lines. In Europe, ISDN-PRI is typically carried over an E-carrier – commonly an E1 line. An E1 line consists of two physical pairs of wires (ie two normal phone lines, or four actual wires) to your local phone exchange. An E1 is a digital data link to your local phone exchange which gives a total of 2.048 Mbit/s of bandwidth in both directions (full-duplex), higher E numbers are also available which give more bandwidth.

In the US, a similar system is used called a T-carrier – this works on the same basic principals but gives a total bandwidth of 1.544 Mbit/s. You can read Wikipedia if you want to know the differences between the two standards.

In the days prior to common availability of broadband internet services, E1 and T1 lines were commonly used to carry internet data for companies who required faster than 56k/s internet access. They can also be used to carry point-to-point data – for example when a company needs to connect two offices together with a “high speed” link – rather than having two 56k modems connected to phone lines and having one modem dial the other, you can have an E1 line at both locations and transfer data between them at 2.048 Mbit/s rather than 56k. However, now that much faster internet speeds are available cheaply via DSL and cable, these uses for T and E carriers are all-but obsolete.

However, T and E carriers continue to survive for their original purpose – to carry voice calls. When they’re used for this purpose, the protocol that runs over the digital link is called ISDN-PRI. ISDN-PRI divides the link bandwidth up into a number of separate channels – in ISDN terminology these are either D-channels (signalling) or B-channels (bearer) – When ISDN-PRI is run over an E1, you get 30 B-channels and 1 D-channel – in other words the 2.048 Mbit/s of bandwidth is split into 30 separate voice channels of 64kbit/s and one common signalling channel also at 64kbit/s. Over T1 you get 23 B-channels and 1 D-channel. The bearer channels can be used to carry data or voice, but most commonly they carry voice using G.711 encoding. A single 64kbit/s channel in telecoms terminology is called a DS0.

The signalling channel (the D-channel in ISDN) runs a signalling protocol called Q.931 – although this is a digital protocol with perhaps more in common with modern internet protocols, there are definitely some similarities to the old C5 way. Here’s a list of some of the Q.931 messages copied from Wikipedia:

• SETUP (indicating the establishment of a connection)
• CALL PROCEEDING (indicating that the call is being processed by the destination terminal)
• ALERTING (tells the calling party that the destination terminal is ringing)
• CONNECT (sent back to the calling party indicating that the intended destination has answered the call)
• DISCONNECT (sent to indicate a request to terminate the connection, by the end that seeks to terminate)
• RELEASE (sent in response to the disconnect request indicating that the call is to be terminated).
• RELEASE COMPLETE (sent by the receiver of the release to complete the handshake).

Although these messages are sent digitally over the D-channel rather than as audible tones, you can see that they’re remarkably similar to the functions provided by the 2400Hz and 2600Hz tones in CCITT5.

In England at least, E1 lines running ISDN-PRI are the primary way most small/medium sized companies connect to the phone network – the same applies in America with T1 and Japan with J1. Most companies will normally have one or more E1 lines – in England, BT brand these as ‘ISDN30′, because you get 30 voice channels – it’s the equivalent of having 30 standard analog phone lines (except that they’re carried digitally over four wires instead of the 60 wires that would be required to carry 30 analog lines). However, that doesn’t stop BT charging you basically the same amount they would charge if you did have 30 individual analog phone lines.

In order make use of an ISDN30, a business needs to attach it to a PBX (Private Branch eXchange). This is normally a special piece of hardware which basically works like a minature telephone exchange – it’s the PBX that gives you local telephone extensions so that members of staff can call each other using a 3 or 4 digit extension number. PBXs often also provide voicemail, call forwarding, conferencing and various other features.

It’s the PBX that’s responsible for providing the physical sockets that each person’s desk phone would plug into. However, these are not actual phone lines in the normal sense of the term, in fact, often, although they may resemble phone sockets, they may be running a communication protocol which doesn’t even closely resemble the one that a normal analog telephone would use. Because a PBX’s internal extensions and the phones that go with them are normally made by the same company as the PBX itself, there’s no requirement that they be compatible with normal phones, some are, but many are not. In fact, many modern PBXs don’t even provide phone sockets at all – the phones simply plug into the same network sockets as the computers, and all of the company’s phone calls pass over the same local area network as their internet traffic (but more on that later).

Having a PBX has many advantages; a company may only have 30 channels available on its ISDN line, but this does not limit them to only having 30 extensions on their PBX, you may have as many internal extensions and phones as you require. In fact, it’s conceivable that you could run a PBX without ever connecting it to the proper phone network – however, on such a system you would only ever be able to place internal calls. ISDN channels are only used when a call to (or from) the outside world is actually in progress – in other words, you may have 1000 internal extensions, and theoretically if they were all used for internal calls you could use all of them at once (although most PBXs would probably die if you tried that), however, if you only had one E1, a maximum of 30 of your staff could be on calls to the outside world at once – any more than that and you get a busy tone.

The other thing to note is that ISDN lines are completely decoupled from actual phone numbers – you could have 30 ISDN channels but only one actual incoming number (common in call centres), or indeed only 30 channels but many hundreds of incoming numbers (common in large companies where each member of staff has their own direct dial number).

So that’s the state of play currently – most companies have one or more E1 lines and a dedicated, specialist piece of hardware called a PBX that handles all of their internal phone lines. PBXs are great things and the business benefits of having one are numerous. However, there’s a problem – PBXs are sophisticated bits of hardware, and they’re expensive, very expensive. The least you can reasonably expect to spend on one is about £10,000 and that would be for a very basic system and a company of approx 15 staff with phones. As the size of the system increases; the cost rapidly escalates, a PBX is a major infrastructure cost for most businesses.

This brings me nicely onto the future of telephony – VoIP. However, at the heart of VoIP is perhaps something even more important. The move to VoIP is a product of the fact that it’s now possible to implement an entire PBX system in software and have it run on commodity hardware. The benefits of using commodity hardware are significant for the PBX vendors – rather than having to spend lots of money on RnD for hardware designs, a big section of the hardware development team can be replaced with software development; it’s a lot cheaper to do software development than hardware development, and implementing the majority of the system in software allows the PBX vendor to rapidly respond to changing requirements.

One side-effect of this move to software-based PBXs is that it suddenly makes a lot more sense to carry the actual internal calls over the company’s LAN rather than have the PBX provide its own array of phone sockets. Normally on an old style PBX, the PBX itself would have a row of sockets on the front of it which would be connected via patch panels to the actual wall sockets by people’s desks. These wall sockets are almost always wired with Cat5 cable and terminated with RJ45 sockets – this setup is good for both phone lines and network sockets (a US style RJ11 phone jack will still fit into the larger RJ45 network sockets), the difference being that phone sockets were patched in to the company PBX and the network sockets would be patched into a normal ethernet network hub or switch. When your PBX is running software, it suddenly becomes much more sensible to just have all of your sockets wired in to an ethernet network and have the PBX communicate with the phones over that. This simplifies the actual physical wiring of the network and removes the need to have any bespoke switching hardware in the PBX itself – the PBX is effectively becomes just a normal server in a rackmount enclosure.

At one of the companies I’ve previously worked at, when I arrived the system they were running was a normal server in a tower case with an E1 interface card – this was just a PCI card that allowed the server to connect directly to the incoming ISDN30 line. In a lot of cases this is all you need to effectively provide everything that an old PBX would do. Many companies will opt to purchase separate power-over-ethernet (PoE) hubs to use for the phone sockets – using a PoE hub will allow you to power each desk phone via the ethernet cable rather than having to plug-in separate power adaptors. The ethernet sockets that a PoE hub provide are exactly the same as normal network sockets except for the fact that they also carry a significant amount of power. If an entirely separate ethernet switch isn’t used for the phones, VLAN tagging often will be – good security design dictates that the phones should be separated in some way from the normal PC network.

The phones themselves on a VoIP network are actually proper network devices with their own IP address and in many cases a web server and control panel application on each phone to allow you to configure them. Both the signalling and the actual voice call are carried over the internet protocol (IP) network. This is an important step away from the original architecture of the public switched telephone network (the PSTN). Until now, the PSTN has always been built on the concept of a circuit-switched network – in other words, when a call is placed from one point to another, an actual open circuit exists between those two places allowing voice communication in either direction. Setting up a call consists of a process of actually switching circuits like in the days of plug boards, it’s just done digitally these days. However, the move towards VoIP means that our voice calls are going to be carried over ethernet, and ethernet is a packet-switched network.

If there is one feature of the core technology of the internet that played the biggest part in its success, it’s the packet switching. The idea with packet switching is that everything is sent over the network as a small packet of data. Each packet starts with a header containing the source and destination of the packet and various other meta-information – this is then followed by the packet payload; the data itself. If the amount of data that needs to be sent exceeds the size of a packet, it is split into multiple packets such that the size of an individual packet never exceeds a fixed amount. If a stream of data needs to be sent (as in the case of voice telephone call) the stream of data is still divided into a set of small packets which are sent out one after another.

The benefits of sending your data encoded in packets like this aren’t immediately obvious until you consider the impact this has on the way that switching can be done. With a circuit-switched network like the PSTN, switching only happens at the beginning and end of each call, for the duration of the call itself the circuit remains open and no switching happens. However, with packet switching, because each packet of data can be treated independently; switching can happen on a per-packet basis millions of times per second. This has the spectacular side-effect of allowing you to use the same line to be connected to many different destinations at once – it’s packet switching that’s allowing you to have an instant messenger and a web browser running at the same time and sharing the same internet connection despite the fact that they’re connecting to different destinations – doing that on the phone network alone is not easy. The really great thing about packet switching is that you can still send normal streams of data over it – it’s like being able to be on the phone to 100 different places at once using only one phone.

Packet switching also allows you to make better use of your bandwidth because an entire line is rarely being fully-tied up by a single connection in the way that it is with a circuit switched network. It’s these properties that made packet switching one of the key enabling technologies for the evolution of the internet, and lead to ethernet becoming ubiquitous on internal company networks. Because ethernet is now so ubiquitous, using it for normal office desk phones instead of dedicated phone sockets is a very sensible and real possibility – the hardware inside the phones has advanced to the point where it’s quite reasonable to expect them to run a web server and other layer 7 protocols – VoIP phones are now comprable in price terms to their equivalent non-VoIP counterparts. For example at the time of writing it is possible to get a decent VoIP desk phone for approx £75 and a decent basic handset for £40 – this is about what you can expect to pay for non-VoIP phones with equivalent features.

Once internal calls are being carried over ethernet the next logical step is to rid yourself of the E1 line and have telephone calls routed over the same line as the internet connection. This effectively allows a business to replace its expensive E1 or T1 leased-line with a normal business class DSL line. DSL will typically handle more concurrent calls than an E1 as well because it’s not limited to 2.048 Mbit/s. Because of the internet, we’re no longer limited to routing our calls to whichever telco happens to provide E1 lines in our area – as long as we have a decent connection to the internet, we can route our telephone calls over that to one of many VoIP providers. Routing the call over the internet allows it to be sent back onto the PSTN at the closest possible point to the destination number, meaning you can often benefit from local-rate calls in the vast majority of countries in the world (this is achieved with least-cost-routing).

A VoIP provider will take care of least-cost-routing for you (although you can use multiple VoIP providers and set up your own least-cost-routing to use whichever’s cheapest for each call). A VoIP provider will also offer incoming numbers from a variety of countries and various different incoming local rate, toll free, premium rate numbers as well. The way this works is that when a call is made to one of your incoming numbers, the VoIP provider makes a connection over the internet to your phone server and streams the call over that. When you want to dial out to the phone network, your phone server makes a connection to the VoIP provider, says “can I dial this number please?”, sends the number and then waits to be connected, both the signalling and the voice call itself are carried as streams over the internet.

Notice how I’ve switched from saying PBX to “phone server” – that’s because modern PBXs aren’t really specialist hardware anymore, they’re just normal servers like any other – if we’ve done away with the E1 interface because calls are being sent over the internet, we’ve done away with the need to have an array of sockets on the front because the phones are connecting to the server over the LAN instead of being connected directly to it – there’s actually no specialist hardware left in the PBX at all, it’s all done in software over a normal IP network.

There are a number of software-only PBX systems cropping up, some of which are free and open-source. The most complete and well-known of these is Asterisk. Asterisk basically provides pretty much all of the features you’d get on an enterprise phone system costing tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds, but Asterisk is free and can be installed on any normal server. In fact, an entire server isn’t even necessary these days – at Digital Crocus we’re currently running our phone system as an Asterisk installation within its own Ubuntu Server installation which is running as a virtual machine under VirtualBox on one of our virtualization nodes. We were originally using Solaris as our host operating system for VirtualBox but have recently (happily) moved to Ubuntu Server for this purpose. We’re still using good old FreeBSD for our normal web hosting environment however.

Running Asterisk under virtualization probably isn’t to be recommended at this stage, neither Asterisk nor virtualisation technology are mature enough to work flawlessly with each other – we had some pretty severe timing issues under a Solaris host which haven’t gone entirely by moving to the Ubuntu host although they are significantly improved – we also got some joy by tweaking the kernel timer options under the guest operating system.

Annoyingly, even if you aren’t planning on hooking up your Asterisk server to an ISDN termination and consequently don’t actually need any specialist hardware drivers, you still seem to need a load of Asterisk stuff loaded into the kernel in order to make the timing work properly. I’m guessing this is a legacy from the fact that Asterisk was built to always have the Zaptel (now ‘DAHDI’) ISDN drivers loaded and rely on them for timing information, then when the Asterisk developers came to realise they’d want to run Asterisk without having a physical ISDN interface; their code already relied heavily on the ISDN timing information which can’t be easily emulated without putting some code in kernel space.

Anyway, the upshot of it seems to be that Asterisk relies on a kernel module for accurate timing information and without it (or with it being wrong) any playback of audio sounds garbled and shit. Asterisk will run without the kernel timing driver but doesn’t seem to work very well, certainly not under virtualisation. With the Asterisk DAHDI driver loaded, under an old version of VirtualBox on Solaris the timing information was completely bolloxed and sounded worse than using no kernel timing driver at all. Some joy was had by tweaking the kernel clock source but playback quality was still poor. Moving to the latest version of VirtualBox and an Ubuntu host OS improved things drastically and playback quality is still jittery but within acceptable limits.

There are other problems with Asterisk, some of which are the kind that a certain kind of geek revels in; There’s no decent graphical configuration engine – you can either configure it with a very basic web control panel, or it’s manually editing config files I’m afraid. Asterisk’s config files are sorta medium complex – not really any worse than most daemons like Apache or Bind for example. Asterisk’s configuration isn’t quite as bad as Exim’s or (eew) Sendmail’s – in other words you don’t need to be a total guru to set up a simple working installation of Asterisk.

However, the real troubles come when you inevitably encounter some bizarre and unexplained problem – these kinds of problems crop up on every system, but Asterisk certainly has its fair share. The problem with Asterisk is that it doesn’t make debugging problems easy – that’s not to say it doesn’t give you plenty of debugging output, it can and will, it’s just that interpreting this debugging output is pretty difficult to read for the novice – it’s a hybrid of computer terminology and phone terminology – because these two technologies have grown up semi-separately, they’ve developed their own sets of techie lingo. In Asterisk the two are sorta mashed together in such a way as to make it necessary to understand both sets of lingo fairly well, as well as have a fairly good understanding of how Asterisk actually works internally before you really stand a chance at understanding any of the debugging output.

What I’m getting at really is that in order to get the best out of Asterisk, you basically need to become an Asterisk developer – you need to have a good understanding of how it works and not be afraid of fiddling with it until you get the results you need. That’s not to say that it’s particularly hard – I would think that any fairly experienced system administrator would be able to gain a good understanding of Asterisk within a few months of playing with it. However, it does require a significant investment of time.

If you’ve got the time to learn it, or you have someone on the team who already knows Asterisk, you can basically have an enterprise-class phone system for the cost of one server and a few hours work, and then a nominal fee for each handset. Asterisk puts enterprise-class phone systems into the hands of tiny companies, if they have the necessary expertise. That’s basically what I’ve set up for Digital Crocus – an Asterisk server in a virtual machine with various incoming numbers (0845s in the UK as well as a couple of regional numbers). My direct line is 01273929209 – if you call this number your call will first be routed to our Asterisk server in telehouse, our Asterisk server will then try first my VoIP phone, and then if that’s uncontactable or there’s no answer, it’ll try my mobile. All of this is done transparently and all you’ll hear while this is happening is a ringing tone. If you call one of the 0845 numbers for Digital Crocus, you get hold music.

As for phone handsets, there’s two VoIP handsets that I’m familiar with, they are the Grandstream GXP2000 – this is a pretty standard office desk phone – it supports up to 4 concurrent calls, has a fairly decent speakerphone and offers all the functionality you’d expect from a desk phone and costs about the same as you’d expect to pay for an equivalent non-VoIP phone. There are some known issues with Grandstream firmware and I did find myself having to flash these phones quite a lot, however, I don’t have much of a problem with that – they’re complex devices, VoIP is new technology and it’s not quite stable yet.

Grandstream GXP2000

I’ve also recently bought myself a Siemens A580IP DECT phone for home use – this is a standard cordless phone – it comes in three parts; the phone itself, the charging station and the IP base-station. This is handy because it allows me to plug in the base-station part to my ADSL router downstairs but still have the charging station upstairs where I want the actual phone. The handset itself is an unremarkable DECT cordless handset – it feels fairly well-built and the call quality seems fine.

Siemens A580IP

However, any VoIP phone will suffer if it’s sharing bandwidth with P2P file sharing software like Bittorrent – under such conditions call quality will degrade noticably. Fortunately this isn’t too much of a problem for me because it’s rare that I use file sharing software – on the occasions when I do need to make a VoIP call and my ADSL line is saturated, I can always quit whatever’s using it until the call is over. However, a better solution to this problem is to use a broadband router that supports priority queuing – basically the ADSL or cable modem needs to know that it should prioritise VoIP traffic over everything else. In other words, no matter what else is in the queue, VoIP packets should always jump to the front of the queue. The easiest way to achieve this is to use a router with VoIP built-in – Draytek offer a number of excellent routers with VoIP capabilities.

To anyone who argues that baked beans are not a proper ingredient, I argue that they’re as valid as any ingredient that comes in a tin and are available so cheaply that in England at least, they basically constitute a subsistence food like rice or cereals.

First cook up the baked potato in the normal way (don’t piss around with a microwave, bake it properly), stick it on a piece of tin foil so you don’t have to wash up a baking tray. A few minutes before the potato is done, bang the baked beans in a pan with approx 2 table spoons of garlic olive oil, two of garlic puree and a good strong sprinkling of chilli flakes, black pepper and a touch of sea salt. You don’t need to waste any time by actually measuring anything, just do it all by eye. The recipe assumes two large baked potatos and a normal sized can of baked beans, for a single potato and a small can of beans, use 1 tablespoon of each. I have no problem with adding more salt to baked beans even though they’re already salty, tell me it’s unhealthy all you want; I don’t care. I personally stop short of actually adding MSG to the mix, but if cheap chinese take-aways are your thing, go ahead and buy a sachet of crystalline mono-sodium glutamate, it tastes good and guarantees an empty plate.

I find using a combination of garlic puree and garlic olive oil gives you a full garlic flavour without having to peel fresh garlic every time. To make garlic olive oil I simply buy a litre of supermarket-brand olive oil and stick three peeled garlic bulbs in it and leave for a couple of weeks. I use this in place of normal olive oil for any recipe that requires fat and suits the garlic flavour. I tend to also use garlic puree in combination with garlic olive oil – it comes in a toothpaste tube like tomato puree and is available at most supermarkets and keeps for months in the fridge. Using these two ingredients together seems to be as-good, if not better than using fresh garlic in the majority of cases. Using either one alone seems to result in a rather flat garlic flavour that isn’t as full as the taste of fresh garlic, however I would challenge anyone to be able to tell the difference between freshly peeled garlic and the olive oil + puree combo – I certainly can’t.

Similarly, for a lot of recipes, buying and preparing fresh chillies is an unnecessary waste of time when all you want to do is add some heat to a dish. For this purpose I use chilly flakes in a shaker or dried chillies in a grinder (or both together) in combination with a good amount of freshly cracked black pepper, in a lot of cases this is enough to add the heat you need without having to go to the hassle of preparing fresh chillies. It’s particularly useful in the case of this receipe because it means that the only really fresh ingredients you need are the potato, cheese and butter. You don’t even need to use a chopping board or kitchen knife – minimise washing up; always a primary objective.

I prepare the potato by cutting it in half so as to expose the maximum surface area of the potato, criss-crossing each half with a knife, adding real butter and more sea salt, black pepper and chilly flakes. I then grate mature cheddar directly on each half and pour the baked bean mixture over the top so that it melts the cheese and butter and creates a gooey mixture of carbohydratey, fatty goodness, packed full of flavour, energy and fat. Yum yum. It’s important to use a robust mature cheddar – I buy mine from a farm shop whenever I can, or use Cathedral City when it’s all that’s available. For utter indulgence I would go for a rich creamy stilton or a combination of stilton and cheddar. You can use any strong cheese really, but it doesn’t work nearly as well with weaker flavoured mild cheddar and I wouldn’t even think of trying it with mozzarella or cream cheese. You need a strong cheese to balance the strong flavours of the garlic and the beans.

The most important thing about this meal is that it’s fairly cheap, very quick to prepare (and clear-up after) and most importantly; doesn’t compromise on flavour. Although there’s quite a lot of saturated fat in the butter and cheese, it’s balanced a little by the unsaturated fat in the olive oil and we avoid potentially nasty trans-fatty acids from margarine. I’m not wholey sold on the argument that lots of salt is particularly bad for you so I happily throw loads into this recipe although I’m not arguing that to do so in every meal would be a good idea. The baked beans and chilly sit nicely in your belly and keep you warm for a while which is particularly pleasing at this time of year. Nice. Now all you need is a beautiful single malt and you’re all set for laying around doing nothing and watching the normal Christmas bullshit on TV.

In simple terms the conclusion of the linked blog entry is that if you cram a bus full of people; it’s more efficient, but if you compare a full car to a half-empty bus, the balance tips in favour of the car. The important thing really is that the numbers are in the same order of magnitude – buses are not a magical fix-all solution to the polution caused by cars, nor are trains.

The important thing in determining the efficiency of any vehicle in terms of “miles-per-gallon-per-passenger” is the weight of the vehicle in comparison to the weight of the passengers. This is simple physics. A big heavy bus takes a lot more energy to move than a small, lightweight car. The bus only wins on efficiency when all that extra weight is being used to move a large number of people, otherwise you’re just moving around a big hunk of metal for no purpose and that is seriously wasteful.

So the conclusion is that buses should be crammed full at all times. I can see a couple of problems with this. Firstly; people do not like to be crammed into small spaces with strangers, it’s simply not a pleasurable experience. I guess the environmentalists would argue that this is a price we have to pay to protect the planet. Not true. Secondly; part of running a bus service requires that you run buses half-emtpy a lot of the time. For a bus service to be considered worthwhile, I have to be able to go to my local bus stop at pretty much any time and reasonably expect to get on a bus fairly soon. Achieving that requires that you run buses at the off-peak times. You cannot simply stop running buses when it isn’t efficient or profitable to do so – even if those empty buses do not make direct profit to the bus company, to stop running them would devalue their entire service as a whole. Empty buses are sorta like a loss-leader for the bus company and one they can’t do without.

Besides, if the future is to be one in which people are transported around crammed in tighter than cattle taken to be slaughtered and we can only travel at the same time as everyone else, I’d rather take my chances with global warming thanks.

Driving for me is one of the few simple pleasures in life. Although obviously personal motorized transport is only a very recent thing in terms of the history of mankind, and cars themselves are technological marvels; the actual act of driving itself is a very simple, physical thing. Driving talks to the lower-level, primeval parts of your brain – it says “I’m free”, and “I’m in control”, occasionally interspersed with “This is fun” and “Wow that’s beautiful” and sometimes even “This is dangerous”. To me those are all very simple emotions and they’re often sadly lacking in modern society.

We’re basically not free – we have the government interfering with our lives to an increasing degree on one hand, we have the media trying to manipulate us on the other, and we have the eco-mentalists sitting on our shoulder telling us we should feel guilty for bascically everything we do and to top it all off; we’re bound to work for 8 hours a day just so we can afford to continue our own miserable little existence. No, we’re not free, not at all. We’re born into bondage, the bondage of a modern capitalist consumer-based society.

In such an oppressive authoritarian society it’s crucially important to try to maintain some sense of freedom and control. This is why I would fight to the death to protect the motorist. Behind the steering wheel of a car is one of the few times you can inject a sense of freedom and self-determination into your life.

The eco-mentals are only the latest in a line of people to attack motorists. If it’s not complaints about pollution, it’s not-in-my-backyard complaints about the construction of roads, or how we’re a danger to cyclists (I’m sorry but you’re the one who’s riding around our roads on an insufficient vehicle, the fact that you haven’t got a metal box around you to protect you isn’t my problem).

I’ve basically got myself into the position where I’m working as a software developer for a fairly large company who run their entire operations from a single piece of bespoke software written in PHP. The company, like many, has undergone a rapid period of expansion and the system has had to grow with them. A single developer has been there since the beginning and was responsible for most of the early groundwork that makes the system what it is today.

The problem is, while the programming techniques that were being used at the beginning of the system’s design may have been just about acceptable for a small business, there are mistakes being made that will turn a large system like this into a complete nightmare to work with, develop for or maintain. The longer it goes on, the worse it gets, and eventually the day will come when the system can’t cope anymore, either because it’s so bug ridden it’s virtually unfixable, or because simply keeping it all working takes so much time that no new development ever happens.

When the system gets to this stage, there’s really no choice but to rip it out and start again. By this time it’s normally too late to built a completely new system right from the ground up – too costly, but what tends to end up happening is that the company will replace it all with something like SAP – an off-the-shelf solution which does most of what’s needed, then the specific requirements of the company are bolted on via various APIs. Companies like SAP and Oracle make their money from coming into companies that have messy broken systems and replacing them with a generic product tailored to their specific needs.

The problem is – the generic solution is never as good as an entirely custom one can potentially be. If you can keep all development work in-house it’s a Good Thing, because it gives the business more flexibility to adapt to changing requirements. Moving to SAP is a last resort – SAP has its own set of problems and the task of installing it can be pretty immense – companies only do this when their own system has got so fucked that they basically can’t work with it anymore. That’s what’s going to happen to this company if nothing changes.

In an ideal world, it would be a simple matter of just pointing out the things that were being done wrong and putting them right. It’s never feasible to go back and change all the existing code, but you can at least make sure you’re doing things right in future and that any code that’s changed is updated to do things properly. Gradually you can eventually transform a very messy system into something that’s much more manageable.

However, it’s not as simple as that. I’ve been hired as a developer, not a team leader, not head developer, not a manager, just a developer. The guy who is leading the development team, the one who is responsible for the awful state of the code, is obviously not going to respond well to being told that he’s doing everything wrong. There’s really no nice way to put it – the code is badly designed, badly structured, badly laid out, badly organised. There’s bascially nothing good about it.

The thing is, I’m sure the developers in the team are perfectly capable and they’d produce good code if they were being guided by an experienced developer who knew what he was doing. Because they’ve got someone who’s basically made it up as he went along they haven’t got that guiding influence to lead them in the right direction, in fact they’re being lead in the wrong direction.

After trying gently to get some relatively small issues fixed and encountering fierce resistance from the lead developer, this morning I was in a crap mood and got another e-mail from him placing more obstacles in my way I basically flipped. I had been planning on sitting down with the guys I share an office with (this doesn’t include the lead developer, he’s in Australia) and talking it out with them. But yeah, my annoyance got the better of me and I decided to take him head-on.

Since starting a little over a month ago it’s become increasingly apparent to me that nothing is ever going to get sorted out in this company whilst the current lead developer is still in charge, unless he has a serious change in attitude which I’m guessing is unlikely. The only real option for me is to attempt to expose his failings and essentially try to de-throne him. This is a pretty big undertaking and quite stressful for me, but I don’t see that I have any other choice, I can’t just pretend there’s nothing wrong because that goes against my professional standards.

Worst case scenario I have to leave the company, but I’m not really too worried about that. I haven’t been there that long and I had more than one job offer before I started. I actually chose this company because I liked the atmosphere. I still like the atmosphere, but if I’m gonna have to put up with working for someone who just doesn’t get it, that kinda kills it. That’s kinda why I figured I’d skip everyone else and go straight to the source of the problem – I’ve got a lot less to lose from confronting him than everyone else, they’re more heavily invested in the company than me.

What I did was send an e-mail to the entire team basically laying into the terrible quality of the code. I tried the softly softly approach, now I’m trying the “this shit is terrible, you need to fix it else you risk losing big amounts of money for the company” approach. I explained some of the absolutely fundamental mistakes that were being made and gave suggestions on changes that can be implemented. I didn’t pull any punches either – I had to emphasize how shockingly bad the code really is. This code introduces an extra 7 dimensions into the scale of how bad code can get. Those weren’t the words I used, but I might as well have.

I didn’t target much of the critisizm directly at the team leader but it’s clear that it was mainly aimed at him, the e-mail I sent was in a reply to an e-mail from him to me, but I sent it to the whole team. I know he’s not going to like the fact that I sent it out as a group e-mail to everyone, but the point is that it’s not really him that I’m trying to convince, I’ve given up on him and I’m just trying to convince everyone else that the lead doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I’m quite surprised that he seems to have managed to obscure the fact that the code’s so bad from the people in charge. He must’ve done some serious pulling of wool over eyes to get away with it for so long. I just hope his bullshit isn’t so deeply set in that nobody’s willing to listen to reason

Pripyat - Image courtesy of KiddofSpeed

It’s particularly resonant to me because I strongly believe that nuclear power will save mankind from global warming and one day bring about a second renaissance – a time in which we are freed by abundant cheap energy to focus on matters of art and philosophy. It’s incidents like Chernobyl that have resulted in the fear of nuclear power that western culture still holds today, the Chernobyl disaster may yet end the world – not from the initial fallout, but from the lasting impact it has had on our culture. We’re so afraid of nuclear power now that by the time we embrace it as our only solution to the worstening energy crisis, it may be too late and we may have already triggered a run-away greenhouse effect.

Chernobyl is also unique in the fact that it has created a sort of modern-day pompeii – the town of Pripyat has barely seen the hand of man since the day of the disaster. The clocks literally stopped, and everything is preserved as it was. This is almost the polar opposite of my Cuckmere Haven project – the Cuckmere Haven project is about capturing something that may not be there for much longer. The Chernobyl project is about capturing a landscape in which time stands still. That’s where the root of photography is for me – photography is about time – the act of taking a photograph is the act of fixing a moment in time – pinning it down so that it can’t be changed.

When I use the word “fixing”, the defininition I intend is this; to fix something means to make it static, to preserve it as-is. In the days of the chemical darkroom; fixing is the last stage of the process – to expose the film or paper to light before fixing would ruin it, it’s the fixing process that makes the image permanent.

In psychology we talk about “Flashbulb memories” – it’s the idea that when a memory has particular emotional significance, we remember it in much greater detail than we do other things. The classic example in America is that everybody remembers where they were the day they found out JFK had been shot. A more recent example might be that everybody remembers what they were doing at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The idea that a significant emotional event can have a fixing effect on memory is an interesting one – it’s almost like the strength of the emotion causes your brain to take a photograph (I guess that’s why it’s called flashbulb memory).

I see the Chernobyl disaster as one of those key fixing events in modern history; it is a moment fixed in time, and in the memories of many thousands of people, it is a single moment that changed global culture permanently. That’s not all it is; Chernobyl is unique because it’s a ‘fixing event’ that has fixed not only a time in history, but it has also fixed a large area of what is now the Ukraine. Chernobyl is like a photograph that has already been taken, the original image is lost, never to be seen again, but in its place we have this static representation of reality – this enduring symbol of an event that has happened, fixed permanently in time.

KiddofSpeed is a big inspiration – not so much for her pictures, but for her words. For somebody with a fairly weak grasp of the english language; she uses it in highly intelligent and emotional way. Her photos are not the best by a long way, but her narrative is very personal and evocative. It was reading her website several years ago that opened my eyes to the possibility that you could actually visit the exclusion zone without putting yourself at serious risk. With a guide and a Geiger counter it is perfectly safe, and in my opinion well worth any minor risk of growing two heads.

If you’re interested in seeing the best photos of the Prypyat, the two best sources are EnglishRussia.com and Pripyat.com.

Prometheus and the fire of the gods

With the advance of Web 2.0 technologies, an increasing number of applications are being written to run in the browser. One day an entirely browser-based OS could potentially even replace Windows. One day all our data and applications may exist in the cloud and every other device we use is simply a browser terminal.. That said, people have been trying to make thin-client systems work for quite a while and it has yet to see any real success. The version of Chromium that I’m looking at is a pre-release developer preview (version 0.4.22.8).

You can now download Chrome OS virtual hard disk images for VMWare and VirtualBox here – this allows you to run it on a virtual machine and play with it without having to install it over the top of your existing OS. I picked VirtualBox because it’s free and works fairly well, VMWare works slightly better but it’s not free (a free trial is available though which might be all you need).

I set up VirtualBox on my Windows Vista laptop and set up a Virtual Machine with 512mb of RAM and the operating system type set to Linux/Ubuntu. I first tried the VirtualBox chrome-os-v0.4.22.8-gdgt.vdi image file (this is the one that it says is for VirtualBox) but this just presented with a black screen that stayed black forever. I then tried chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk which is the VMWare image – this worked, so for some reason with this particular build you have to use the VMWare image even in VirtualBox.

Here’s the first thing you see when it boots (and it seems to boot fairly quickly):

Chromium OS Login Screen

You can login with any Google ID – I used the same account I use to view the Google Analytics for this site. The OS seems to just assume it’s connected to a network and can get an IP address via DHCP, I haven’t tested what it does if you disable the network connection in VirtualBox.

Here’s the first thing you see after you login:

Chrome OS Startup Screen

This is what you get if you click on the tab in the top left corner with the Chrome icon on it, you can also see I’ve got an incognito tab open as well:

Chrome OS Welcome to Google

The screenshot below shows what happens when you click on the icon in the top right corner of the screen – the other two icons bring up smaller menus for battery life and network connectivity. At this stage is doesn’t look like you get much control over how the network is set up, but I’m sure that’ll come in later versions.

Chrome Top Right Corner Menu

Here’s what comes up if you click “About Chromium”:

Chromium About Dialog

When you click on ‘Options’, you’re presented with these tabs:

Chrome Under the Hood

It’s at this point that you realise quite how basic Chrome OS really is – it is just an X server running Chrome and nothing else. The really basic tabbed configuration screen you see above looks to be written in GTK and they haven’t even bothered to put a GTK theme on it yet.

With a lot more work on the user interface, Chrome OS could be a viable alternative platform for a lot of people, but it’s a long way off that goal – there’s no indication of whether your preferences are being stored locally, or in the “Google” cloud – similarly, are downloaded files going to my local machine or the cloud? I should be able to choose. And this horrible grey GTK theme should’ve been one of the first things to go:

Chromium OS Config Dialog

I could find no way to change the screen resolution or keyboard layout which made it pretty frustrating to be confined to a tiny window with a US keyboard layout.

You can skin Chrome OS with normal Chrome skins so you can have it in a variety of revolting colours (many of which make the Chrome OS icons in the top right corner of the screen almost invisible). However, changing the Chrome theme has no effect on the GTK theme, so the menus and dialogs remain grey:

Chrome OS Themes

Because the Chrome browser looked so good right from its early betas, I was kinda expecting a bit more from Chrome OS. Chrome OS has been made available to the public way before it’s anywhere close to being a usable platform – they don’t even seem to have properly decided on a name for it yet; within the OS it’s called Chromium, but the filenames of the virtual images I downloaded call it Chrome OS. Whatever it’s called, you can see they’re heading in the right kind of direction but there’s huge amounts of work still to be done before it’ll start seeing mass-adoption.

So there you have it – my conclusion is that it looks promising and we may even have a serious contender to Windows one day, but that day is still quite a long way off.

I’ve also addressed a problem with the printable PDF picture books. Until now it has only been possible to download low-resolution versions of the full album or keyword. The only way to get high-resolution printable PDFs until now has been to print each image individually. The reason for this is because the printable PDFs are generated on-the-fly as they’re requested, unfortunately to do this with albums containing many high resolution images, it simply takes too long. I got around this problem by generating lower-resolution versions, however, these are not really ideal because the poor quality will be noticable in a decent print.

Let’s be clear – until now the only way to get a printable PDF containing high resolution images was to print each image individually – the picture books containing more than one image were all low-resolution. This is still the case if you request a specific picture book from within a gallery, but I’m now also making available various pre-compiled high-resolution PDF picture books. If you want to print lots of my images at the best possible quality, this is the way to do it.

I’ve also added a new Cuckmere Haven gallery – this time I started out in the village of Alfriston and photographed various village landmarks, I then continued-on to Cuckmere Haven to photograph sunset. Here’s a few of my favourite images from the album:

Sloe Lane

Landscape

Fence