“Good, fast or cheap. Choose any two.”

And

“Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”.

After two years with Vodafone, I switched to Hutchison’s 3 mobile service. It was only after that I was to realise that this was a BIG step backwards. Read on for more details.
(more…)

I returned recently from a workshop in Vienna, and one of the attendees was telling me about having been placed on one of the exit/emergency rows right at the front of the plane, but in the middle seat. The actual seat next to the emergency exit had been given to a Chinese gent. Halfway into the flight, when they started bringing the meals around, this person I was talking to had unfolded his stowaway table, which, due to them being in the first row, was in the armrest. The Chinese guy then, looking around for something to unfold or hit to get at his table, reaches for the lever of the emergency exit! Both the flight attendant and this guy who told me this had then lunged at him, to stop him.

Very surprising that they’d just put someone beside the emergency exit without checking to make sure that he/she is in fact capable of attending properly to the exit. On the flight back, I was also placed on the window seat next to the emergency exit without being told so at check-in, but at least the flight-attendent then came by and checked to make sure I was aware of what is required.

Having finally finished Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack! Adventure, I found an interesting reference about the 1911 version of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which found me googling today to find the entire encyclopædia online. It is available in the public domain due to its copyright having expired. One reason why the 1911 edition is so different and considered to be the greatest edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is because experts in particular areas wrote the articles corresponding to their areas. For example: Henry Ford wrote the article on mass production.

And so I found an OCR’d, non-proofread version of the 1911 Britannica, as well as a Wikipedia entry about the 1911 edition.

I was sharing the links which were the consequence of the following story with people, when Max suggested that I put it up here, so here it is.

You probably know the song:

99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer,
Take one down and pass it around.
98 bottles of beer on the wall.

Well, I was searching for a program to generate the entire song, when I
happened to stumble upon a page which contains (at last count)
programs in 621 different languages to generate the beer song!

Exploring the site found entries written in standard languages like BASIC (of course), Pascal, C, C++, etc., and also entries using PostScript, bash, sed, etc! I knew PostScript was a full-featured programming language, but had never really read up much on this capability. Having got the initial prod from the Beer entry, did some more exploring and found a page called the
First Guide to PostScript. And from there, onwards to
PS-HTTPD - a webserver written in PostScript!

So, armed with this knowledge, I think it’s finally possible to achieve a task we were investigating a few years before at the company I used to work for: install a version of SETI@Home to run on the HP Colour Laserprinter! It’d be a PostScript program. Send it to the printer, and a few hours later, the printer would finally print out a sheet of paper - a printout of the analysis of the data packet that it examined.

Every culture has something that they seem obsessed about, and for the Brits, it seems to be fire. Or rather, preventing fire. Of course, given history and the Great Fire of London back in September 1666, they have a reason to worry - but are they carrying it to extremes?

Everywhere you go, you see large fire-doors, clearly marked as “Fire doors” in case you would happen to miss such an obvious fact. Fire extinguishers, fire hoses, fire exits, you name it, London’s got it.

There’s also the habit of the irregular fire drills. I’m not saying that this is bad - except that they manage to pick the most awkward times to do the drills. A friend once had cycled to college in the pouring rain, had changed into fresh, dry clothes he’d brought with him, and had been downstairs when the fire-alarm went off. And here he was, out in the rain again, getting drenched - in the dry clothes which he’d been looking forward to wearing when he got to college, out of the rain.
The college also has fire-hoses located strategically all over the building - the only problem is, almost ALL of these hoses which I’ve seen over the past few days have had an “Out of Order - Do not use” sign posted on them!

I’m always seeing things in London that I think are totally daft, but this really takes the cake. A few months ago, Canary Wharf closed off the route many people normally take to travel to and from the tube station, and made an alternate route available, which takes one through the foyer of a building.

This building of course had doors - nice revolving ones; actually, AUTOMATED revolving doors - they turn by themselves, and their speed can’t be influenced by anyone pushing any harder. The only problem was that they turned WAY too slowly, so people got frustrated crawling through these instead of passing/walking through in a second as is usual. So you’d see the these doors spinning by themselves, as a steady stream of people headed for the constantly open emergency exits - causing a nice draught to go through the entire building (which is actually the reason for revolving doors - revolving doors were installed in skyrise buildings initially because of the problems with a draught with any other kind of door). Plus, on an extremely windy night, the building would be completely empty, but you’d see the force of the wind setting off the doors, and they’d be spinning in a ghostly manner, with not a soul in sight.

Whoever owns the building did take the hint, though, so they removed the motors, and the doors were then normal revolving doors - push to revolve.

Any praise people had for this change quickly disappeared, as a week later the people noticed that the doors were spinning by themselves again - although this time the doors were indeed moving much faster than earlier. This seemed like a step in the right direction, except that people quickly found out the hard way that the doors had a habit of stopping while people were still inside them, causing them to bang painfully against the doors. Plus, you never knew if the doors were in fact working, but waiting stopped, or if the doors were not working at all. Pushing on the door to activate the door usually took it few seconds to start spinning again. You can imagine what happened next - the doors were again left unused, and the emergency doors were constantly open.

A few weeks later, there were notes posted up saying “Please use the revolving doors” - and as one approached them - lo and behold - the doors would start spinning without you even touching them. They had finally installed proximity sensors, and the doors would keep on turning until it knew everyone was clear.

It’s been some weeks now, and everyone is still using the revolving doors. Whether it’s due to them finally working properly, or people just having plain given up, I don’t know. But this story makes me recall the doors with their pleasing disposition from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

Let’s see how long this continues, before they decide to tinker with the doors again….

Just installed Movable type, and testing to see what exactly it can do, and how it can be integrated into the rest of the site…