As his fellow-Twitterers know, Rory Cellan-Jones has been grappling all week with getting 802.11n networking to work in his home. He’s now written an entertaining blog post on his experiences. Sample:

So then I got in touch with a real expert – a man who works for one of the big router firms. He immediately diagnosed my problem – I’d put the wrong kind of security on. It turns out that WEP just doesn’t work with ‘n’ routers – or rather it does but it throttles them back to ‘g’ speeds. It only works at full speed if you have no encryption or use one of the WPA options.

So why on earth does the router company allow you to choose WEP? He explained that they’d originally shipped the shiny new routers without it but there had been a consumer backlash. My router man also confirmed that the 802.11n standard hasn't been finalised yet, so there’s the possibility that some bits of kit won’t work with others, even if theoretically they are both using 802.11n.

He got it to work btw — eventually.

… in 1979, America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred inside the Unit Two reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.

Lovely cartoon in current issue of the New Yorker. It shows two tramps. “In my day”, one is saying, “there was no reward for incompetence”.

Lovely blog post by Andrew Brown.

You know that feeling when you are sitting on the floor by the dusty disassembled guts of a computer and nothing works at all? It won’t even give a healthy cheep on startup? And then, slowly, it all comes together, until everything works, except, perhaps, sound, and you change something to fix that, and then nothing works at all again: you’re back in the smell of dust and silence and you can’t undo?

You will swear, when you finally recover, never to upgrade anything again. Yet you will. And I don’t know why, or didn’t, until I stumbled on a lovely passage in Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, still the best book I know about the psychology of nerding…

He’s right about Ullman IMHO. Go to the link and read on.

Wow! Fascinating Reuters report.

ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss private banks are banning their top executives from traveling abroad, even to France and Germany, because of fears they will be detained as part of a global crackdown on bank secrecy, the Financial Times reported.

The newspaper quoted an unnamed head of a leading private bank in Geneva as saying steps by countries like the United States and Germany to fight tax evasion meant banks felt they had to limit travel to protect employees.

It cited four unnamed sources in the Geneva private banking industry as saying some banks were introducing total travel bans for staff, even for neighboring European countries.

“Private bankers aren’t even traveling to France. The partners are not leaving Geneva at all,” the FT quoted one senior industry figure as saying.

Still, it gives them a chance to spend more time with their money.

One of my sons (Pete) spotted this in a well-known Cambridge second-hand bookshop. After an urgent phone call from his Dad, his brother went in and photographed it. Simply too good to miss.

What I’m hoping for, of course, is that the bookseller becomes so desperate to get rid of it that he offers to pay people to take it away.

Sometimes, things happen that restore one’s faith in humanity. Here’s a report of one such event.

It seems that two unorthodox portraits of Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), suddenly appeared in two of Dublin’s leading galleries. One in the National Gallery showed the Taoiseach on the toilet, and another in the Royal Hibernian Gallery (above) showing him holding his Y-fronts. According to the report, the pictures

appeared mysteriously in Dublin among paintings of the country’s other famous citizens in more decorous poses.

The Irish media speculated that the prankster had created the artworks in an attempt to lift the nation’s spirits at a time of deep economic gloom. Judging by the chuckles of visitors and comments inundating the blogosphere, the stunt worked.

“Biffo on the bog”, was one gleeful response, referring to the Taoiseach by his nickname, which stands for “Big Ignorant F***er from Offaly”.

The artist reportedly walked calmly into the National Gallery carrying a shoulder bag. He then affixed a prepared caption for the picture to a free space among portraits of Michael Collins, William Butler Yeats and Bono, before hanging his canvas, undisturbed by security.

There’s been the most ludicrous over-reaction by the government to this — as reported by, e.g. the Irish Times. RTE, the national TV station, cravenly apologised for reporting the incident after a complaint from the government’s Press Secretary (who happens to be a namesake of mine). What it shows, of course, is the power of ridicule. The moral authority of the Catholic church in Ireland never recovered from the revelation that the Bishop of Kerry had not only been screwing a handsome dame (and fathering a child) but that he had been doing it in the back of a Lancia saloon! This led to a wonderful explosion in Bishop Casey jokes (e.g. Q. “What’s the correct form of address for the Bishop of Kerry?” A. “Dad.”) Cowen was already looking ridiculous as a result of the implosion of the Irish banking system. Now he’s a real laughing stock.

Here’s something I ought to have known, but didn’t until I heard an art critic on Radio 4 talking about it this morning. This report dates from February 2003.

In an act with extraordinary historical resonance, United Nations officials covered up a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war mural “Guernica” during US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5 presentation of the American case for war against Iraq.

Picasso’s painting commemorates a small Basque village bombed by German forces in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The painter, in desolate black, white and grey, depicts a nightmarish scene of men, women, children and animals under bombardment. The twisted, writhing forms include images of a screaming mother holding a dead child, a corpse with wide-open eyes and a gored horse. Art historian Herbert Read described the work as “a cry of outrage and horror amplified by a great genius.”

The reproduction has hung outside the Security Council chamber at UN headquarters in New York since its donation by the estate of Nelson A. Rockefeller in 1985. As the council gathered to hear Powell on Wednesday, workers placed a blue curtain and flags of the council’s member countries in front of the tapestry.

UN officials claimed that the cover-up was simply a matter of creating a more effective backdrop for the television cameras. “When we do have large crowds we put the flags up and the UN logo in front of the tapestry,” asserted Stephane Dujarric. New York Newsday, however, reported that “Diplomats at the United Nations, speaking on condition they not be named, have been quoted in recent days telling journalists that they believe the United States leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other US diplomats argued for war on Iraq.”

This is an extraordinary story. It reminds me of the anecdote (possibly apocryphal?) of a German diplomat looking intently at the painting and then turning to Picasso. “Did you do this?” he asked. “No”, replied the painter, “you did”. As the Italians say, if it’s not true tehn it ought to be.

Well, well. So Charles D was a perfectly normal undergraduate for his day.

Two hundred years after Charles Darwin’s birth, historians have gained new insight into his days as a student at Cambridge after unearthing bills that record intimate details of how he spent his money.

The revolutionary scientist was, it would appear, ahead of his time in his willingness to pay extra to supplement his daily intake of vegetables. And, as one would expect of a 19th-century gentleman, he was happy to pay others to carry out menial tasks for him, such as stoking his fire and polishing his shoes.

But there is little to suggest that he bought many books, or that he did much else to further his studies. The evolutionist famously spent little of his time studying or in lectures, preferring to shoot, ride and collect beetles.

The records, which were found in six previously overlooked college books, are due to be published online tomorrow on the Complete Works of Charles Darwin website (darwin-online.org.uk). They allow historians to pinpoint the date of his arrival at Christ’s College (26 January 1828), as well as providing previously unknown detail of his undergraduate life.

Darwin’s time at Cambridge, from 1828 to 1831 – which he would later describe as “the most joyful of my happy life” – is also one for which there is a comparative shortage of information. “Before this, we didn’t really know very much about Darwin’s daily life at Cambridge at all,” said Dr John van Wyhe, director of the Darwin website. “It had been assumed that there were no significant traces of his time here left to discover, which meant that we were short of information about one of the most formative parts of his life.

Now, in his 200th anniversary year, we have found a real treasure trove right in the middle of Cambridge.”

As it happens, I was in the Zoology Museum the other night, at the launch of the Cambridge Science Festival, when I came on some display cases showing some of Darwin’s finches (above) and the beetle collection he amassed during his time as a student (below).

There’s something magical about coming face to face with objects like this. They have the ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin used to go on about in The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Thought you’d be impressed by my artistic ability. (But see here for the explanation.)