Blues

Steve Weber’s book on Open Source

Steve Weber has written a really insightful book about the open source phenomenon. I’ve written my Observer column this week about the phenomenon and Steve’s book.

D-Day commemoration — a strange anomaly

I’m listening to BBC Radio coverage of the anniversary celebrations, and also watching it on BBC TV. Interesting fact: the TV coverage is lagged by about a second. This is probably because the authorities want to be able to pull the TV plug instantly if there’s a terrorist attack. Now that’s what I call planning.

Update: Message from a technologically informed reader (Dave Hill) says “Methinks you’re working overtime on this one, John. It’s more likely simply that the delay is caused by the fact that the TV is carried on a DVB (Digital Video) link and there is an inherent coding delay of about 16 frames (at 25 frames/sec). Even if the radio commentary is also on a digital link, the coding delay is much less. It’s made even worse if you’re then watching on Sky Digital (because of an extra encode/decode *and* the uplink/downlink path of 44,000 km) and on Freeview Terrestrial (because of the extra encode/decode).”

Rats! The slaughter of a beautiful conspiracy theory by an ugly fact (to paraphrase TH Huxley). Sigh.

Ronald Reagan

So Ronald Reagan is dead. One is tempted to respond — as Dorothy Parker famously did when informed of the death of Calvin Coolidge, “How can they tell?” — but that would be tasteless, given that he had Alzheimer’s, a fate I would not wish upon anybody.

Still… The wave of sentimental tosh unleashed by news of his death is a bit hard to take. Gore Vidal used to call Reagan “the Acting President of the United States”, which always seemed to me the best description of a guy who made even the indolent Dubya look like a keen intern. You think I jest? Well, here’s an excerpt from Lou Cannon’s affectionate biography:

“On the afternoon before the 1983 economic summit of the world’s industrialized democracies in Colonial Williamsburg, White House Chief of Staff James Baker stopped off at Providence Hall, where the Reagans were staying, bringing with him a thick briefing book on the upcoming meetings. Baker, then on his way to a tennis game, had carefully checked through the book to see that it contained everything Reagan needed to know without going into too much detail. He was concerned about Reagan’s performance at the summit, which had attracted hundreds of journalists from around the world and been advertised in advance by the White House as an administration triumph. But when Baker returned to Providence Hall the next morning, he found the briefing book unopened on the table where he had deposited it. He knew immediately that Reagan hadn’t even glanced at it, and he couldn’t believe it. In an hour Reagan would be presiding over the first meeting of the economic summit, the only one held int he United States during his presidency. Uncharacteristically, Baker asked Reagan why he hadn’t cracked the briefing book. ‘Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night,’ Reagan said calmly”.

And Gannon’s is an affectionate biography.

Two things are especially galling about the obituarists’ charitable amnesia. The first is the way nobody mentions the Savings and Loan scandal, the biggest corporate swindle in US history (at least up to Enron), which was directly attributable to Reagan’s tolerance of private capital, and the way his regime funded (sometimes illegally, as in the Iran/Contra business) some of the nastiest guerrilla movements ever seen. The second is the almost universal acceptance of the proposition that Reagan caused the collapse of the Soviet Union by massively increasing US military spending, thereby bankrupting the ‘Evil Empire’. I’ve never seen any convincing empirical evidence for this: the Soviet Union was falling apart because it couldn’t provide any kinds of goods — not just military hardware — and was incapable of modernising because authoritarian regimes cannot embrace information technology. And of course Reagan’s allegedly masterful strategy had the useful side-benefit of boosting the fortunes of the US aerospace and weapons manufacturers who contributed so generously to his campaigns.

Britain’s bloody football culture

Photographed in a Cambridge sports-goods store the other day. I think it’s an ad for a new line of Umbro sportswear, and that the guy is wearing an England shirt. An appropriate precursor to Euro 2004? What is wrong with this country? What makes a sportswear manufacturer apparently glorify football hooliganism?

Gasoline prices: the US perspective

From the Economist of May 29th.

Sun rises on (to?) Open Source

Lots of reports — e.g. this in the NYT — that Sun Microsystems is planning to release its crown jewels (the Solaris operating system) in an open source format. The reports make the company’s position seem completely incoherent, so may be complete hooey. (But most quote the Sun COO as making noises in the open source direction.) Ironically, this development coincides with Sun’s new rapprochment with Microsoft. From my point of view, any convert to open source is welcome, but Sun must be getting desperate to be thinking about it. It’s the way Linux has undermined their ‘natural’ markets that’s at the root of their problems. In which case, they may have missed the boat. Pity. Sun was such a good company, once. But then, so was DEC.

Windows XP and WiFi: the unsolved mystery

From Wired:

“Here are the symptoms of the problem: A Wi-Fi-enabled computer running Windows XP is working fine one minute, pulling up Web pages and processing e-mail. Then, for no reason, the connection drops, websites fail to come up and the e-mail flow stops. The small wireless connection icon in the taskbar says the signal from the access point is strong, so the problem isn’t that the user wandered out of radio range. The icon even shows that the computer’s Wi-Fi hardware is sending information to the access point — it’s just not getting anything back. And manual attempts to re-establish the connection through XP’s built-in wireless configuration tool won’t do the trick. Even more bizarre, the connection sometimes comes back on its own.

From anecdotal evidence, most users assume the problem is with the Wi-Fi hardware. But the trouble seems to arise from a tool in Windows XP called Wireless Zero Configuration, a feature that was meant to do away with the mishmash of software drivers and configuration utilities.”

Microsoft disputes the notion that there’s a problem with the way Windows XP works with Wi-Fi.

“We don’t have data that suggests Windows XP drops wireless connections more than any other system,” said Greg Sullivan, the lead product manager in Microsoft’s Windows division.

Er, I can supply some data?. (Just trying to be helpful, you understand.) We have a Sony Vaio running XP, and we have often experienced the WiFi black hole problem. But we also have several Apple laptops, and I can’t recall an occasion when any of them dropped a connection, except when we’ve had power-cuts and the wireless base-station went down.

In the interest of fairness, though, I should say that connecting to a WiFi net is considerably easier with XP than with other versions of Windows. Now all MS has to do is make sure it holds onto the connection.

After train crashes, what next?

Why bus crashes of course.

Spotted by Bill Thompson (now there’s a really famous Blogger) on a London bus.

Spinning it out

Sometimes one wonders about the New York Times. I read it most days on the Web, and find it useful and exasperating in equal measure. Being accustomed to writing for a British newspaper — where there is always desperate competition for space — I’m irritated by the way NYT journalists are allowed to spin their stuff out. Witness this piece in today’s Times which takes forever to say two things: (a) Google has a lot of PhDs working for it, actively recruits only PhDs and builds research and development into their daily jobs; (b) Microsoft doesn’t especially require recruits to have PhDs, and corrals its R&D into a separate research division. On a British newspaper it would be a 400-word piece at most. But then, we operate in a viciously competitive market, whereas the NYT has a near-monopoly in its market.