St John’s Point, Donegal. Yesterday evening.
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Westward Ho!
The view from Muckross beach this evening.
Sarkozy’s charm offensive
We arrived in Ireland on Monday morning. So too did the French President, but there was rather more fuss about him. Virtually everyone in the country had been seething about reports (which were, of course, denied) that he had said to his advisers after news of the Referendum result reached Paris that “the Irish will just have to vote again”. Miriam Lord, the Irish Times sketch-writer wrote an amusing account of Le Prez’s visit. It closes thus:
“I do not regret for one second having come over,” cooed Nicolas, who was charm personified. You could see he has charisma, and he has a nice smile, mused the ladies. Très distingué .
“Three-minute man,” sniffed the lads.
It went swimmingly, until the president protested that he couldn’t force the Irish to do anything.
“Have you seen the size of the Irish Taoiseach, talking about shaking up. He’s not a man you shake up easily, or shake down for that matter. Do I look as if I’ve been shaken in any way?” he said, to a sharp intake of breath from the locals.
Right enough, beside the diminutive Sarko, Biffo looked a bit like the Queen of Tonga.
The offensive was working a treat. Our Taoiseach is a “brave, courageous man” and “Ireland is a a warm country with a tradition of hospitality, a great country”. Then it was over. But not before Nicolas, who is very touchy-feely, had caressed Brian’s hand. The Taoiseach put them behind his back in case it happened again. Then, the French president made a lunge for Biffo and kissed him on both cheeks.
Biffo air-kissed gamely, making a disconcerting sloshing noise, but you could see he was mortified. He’ll be the laughing stock of Clara, but at least he can say he puckered up for Ireland.
A French kiss for an Irish Taoiseach on the steps of Government Buildings.
That’s Europe for you.
Footnote: Clara, in Offaly, is the Taoiseach’s home town, where — up to now at least — he has been much admired.
Lotus Notes: the Marmite of the IT world
Charles Arthur has a nice post on the effect that Lotus Notes has on otherwise normal people.
I’ve just come across a new (to me) site: I Hate Lotus Notes which, um, does pretty much what it says on the tin.
What’s always interesting though is that pro-Notes people who will leap into these pits of hating and try, vainly, to tell people that the fact they’re hating Notes is because (1) they haven’t had enough training (2) it’s not an email program, it’s an application development platform (3) they’re using an old version – the latest version, v. [What you’re using 2] solves all those problems (4) it’s better than Outlook, anyway (5) all of the above.
I think it’s still telling that Notes 6.5.5, which dates from December 2005, still doesn’t support the scroll wheel on the mouse on OSX – which has done so from its start, a mere four and a half years earlier.
But you have to admire the determination of the pro-Notes brigade. They’re like people defending the right to smoke in crowded spaces: everyone else is wrong, it’s just them who can see the right way to run the world.
I’ve seen both sides recently. My university Faculty has merged with another one which long ago surrendered its IT to a team of Lotus Notes True Believers. To me, the product seems so dated and kludgy: it’s the epitome of 1980s, DOS-inspired software. And yet the True Believers are deeply attached to it in the way that Jehovah’s Witnesses are to the Watchtower. They are unfailingly courteous and willing as they patiently explain that Notes can be made to do virtually anything you want; but when one explains that a teaspoon can also be used to dig one’s garden they look blank: they don’t get it.
One of the comments on Charles’s post gets it right: Notes is “the marmite of the IT world”.
Er, don’t get me started on Marmite.
The Changing Newsroom
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced an interesting report on “the changing newsroom”.
Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.
The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.
Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years…
Thoughtful piece of work. Worth reading in full.
Oyster card hack can be revealed
Bet this wouldn’t happen in the US. The Register reports that:
Dutch researchers will be able to publish their controversial report on the Mifare Classic (Oyster) RFID chip in October, a Dutch judge ruled today.
Researchers from Radboud University in Nijmegen revealed two weeks ago they had cracked and cloned London’s Oyster travelcard and the Dutch public transportation travelcard, which is based on the same RFID chip. Attackers can scan a card reading unit, collect the cryptographic key that protects security and upload it to a laptop. Details are then transferred to a blank card, which can be used for free travel.
Around one billion of these cards have been sold worldwide. The card is also widely used to gain access to government departments, schools and hospitals around Britain.
Chipmaker NXP – formerly Philips Semiconductors – had taken Radboud University to court to prevent researchers publishing their controversial report on the chip during a the European computer security conference in Spain this autumn. Spokesperson for NXP Martijn van der Linden said that publishing the report would be “irresponsible” – understandably, the company fears criminals will be able to attack Mifare Classic-based systems.
However, the judge today ruled that freedom of speech outweighs the commercial interest of NXP, as “the publication of scientific studies carries a lot of weight in a democratic society”.
The researchers have always said they don’t intend to include details of how to clone the card and that publications could prevent similar errors occurring in the future. NXP says it is disappointed with the ruling…
I bet they are.
Dublin airport ‘crippled by flakey network card’
From The Register…
An air traffic control fault that brought Dublin airport to its knees last week has been traced to an intermittently flakey network card.
Sadly, while the problem was simple enough to diagnose, it’ll be weeks before the airport’s air traffic control system will be able to run at full capacity.
The system went for a little lie down last Wednesday, and while it was back up and running soon enough concerns over its capacity meant authorities had to slash the number of flights in and out of the airport.
It wasn’t until Wednesday that the Irish Aviation Authority was prepared to say “operations at Dublin Airport are now generally meeting demand” though “some minor delays may be experienced at peak times”.
Thales ATM, the makers of Dublin’s ATC system, conducted a review of the system, and after crawling around the airport with their little torches, “confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy”. The flakey card had been responsible for previous problems since June 2.
Apparently, Thales ATM stated ”that in ten similar Air Traffic Control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported”.
So, problem solved? Er, sadly not. The IAA has slapped in further monitoring tools, and plans “an enhancement” to the failure recovery system. But whatever happens, the system will need to be revalidated, which could take weeks. In the meantime, it will “slowly add capacity“, but for safety reasons “will not operate the system to its limit until the system has been re-validated”.
The Irish Times ran several pieces on the ensuing chaos, including this one which, en passant, contained a gem of a quote from RyanAir’s CEO.
Another contentious issue for passengers and airlines is compensation. Under European consumer regulations, passengers must be offered help free of charge while awaiting a rerouted flight, with meals, accommodation if necessary, transport between the airport and accommodation and telephone calls provided. But some airlines resent having to reimburse the cost of disruption which was not their fault. When asked yesterday about his passengers’ complaints that they weren’t offered the courtesy of a cup of a tea or a taxi fare to their hotel, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said: “Personally, I think that’s a load of nonsense. You paid an airfare of €40. You saved around €150. Buy your own cup of tea . . . Why are we providing cups of tea because the IAA can’t run a radar system properly?”
Cloud computing terminals worry the PC industry
And so they should. The PC is being commoditized. This from today’s New York Times.
SAN FRANCISCO — The personal computer industry is poised to sell tens of millions of small, energy-efficient Internet-centric devices. Curiously, some of the biggest companies in the business consider this bad news.
In a tale of sales success breeding resentment, computer companies are wary of the new breed of computers because their low price could threaten PC makers’ already thin profit margins.
The new computers, often called netbooks, have scant onboard memory. They use energy-sipping computer chips. They are intended largely for surfing Web sites and checking e-mail. The price is small too, with some selling for as little as $300.
The companies that pioneered the category were small too, like Asus and Everex, both of Taiwan…
What’s strange is that anyone should be surprised by this. It’s been obvious for years that this is what would happen. Outside of the luxury markets, a technology is always commoditized if there’s sufficient demand for what it offers or provides.
Leopard takes on crocodile — and wins
First there was Obama taking on Hilary Clinton. Now this. Whatever next?
Robotic panoramas
Hmmm… I’d like to try one of these…
A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas — whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.
Viewers can explore a panorama in detail when it is displayed on a computer screen, clicking on any part of the image and then zooming in for crisp close-ups. You can move from an overall shot of the forest, for instance, to an image of one small moth resting on the side of a single tree trunk.
Examples here. They’re claiming a price under $500 for the production model. It’ll sell.