June 2009 - Posts
“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.”
T.S.Elliot (I discovered this inscription on a feature at Baylands Country Park, Sunnyvale, California)
You know, we take a lot for granted in Britain. We complain about how bad things are, but there are a few things we’ve got really right. I lived in America for 4 years, and much as I enjoyed that time, it gave me a new perspective on my home country.
One thing we got relatively right is the National Health Service, free at the point of delivery. OK, it has its problems, but when is the last time you thought twice about going to see the doctor? When is the last time you worried about how to pay for your healthcare? Imagine you turn up at A&E, you already have a big bill for the ambulance ride, now the nurse wants to see your insurance papers before they will treat you. Just at the time you are weak and vulnerable, the system puts pressure on you. The theory is that you have healthcare insurance, but the reality is that many people can’t afford it or think they don’t need it. Americans are just starting to wake up to this, as the healthcare industry has weaselled its way to the point where many middle-class Americans can no longer afford decent healthcare plans, or the ones they have are junk.
Second on my list is ‘aunty’. The British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC, because of the unique way it is funded, is one of the very few companies that is actually in the business of delivering quality TV and radio programmes. Almost all the other channels are in a different business – that of delivering an audience to advertisers. Even organisations like NPR (National Public Radio) in America have to constantly tout for donations to keep running. Things are no different on the Internet, where users have a love-hate relationship with the ad-funded business model. The BBC is one of the world’s last bastions of advertising-free content. We must hang on to this institution at all costs, because institutions like this can only be created under special circumstances. Once lost, an organisation like the BBC will probably never arise again.
There are other things, too, like democracy and freedom of speech, social security, relatively open government, consumer protection laws, a police force relatively free from corruption, a reasonable justice system, real ale, aversion to GM crops and so on. None of these items I list is perfect by any means, but compared to what some countries have, I’ll take it. Rule, Britannia!
Inspired by the Met Office’s Climate Projections 2009, I decided to try my own climate predictions. 
I found a dataset on the Met Office web site listing mean temperatures in central England from 1659 to 2009. I decided to do a bit of analysis. I pasted the data into Excel 2007 and produced this graph.
Interesting how winter temperatures are much more variable than summer ones.
I fitted a liner trend line over the annual average temperature and projected out 100 years. This predicts an increase of just under half a degree in the next hundred years, which (interestingly) will actually be _lower_ that our current average temperatures, because were are currently in a period of unusually warm years.
It’s tempting to look at the last few data points and think that they seem to be trending upwards, but that’s a dangerous assumption. If you saw this section of the chart in isolation, for example, you might think there was a climate catastrophe going on.
An increase of about 3.5 degrees! This data is 1698 to 1733, when annual average temperatures rose steadily from 7.63 to 10.47 degrees. Global warming? No. Just a local anomaly, occurring waaay before widespread use of fossil fuels.
No doubt my analyses are somewhat oversimplified. The Met Office apparently disagrees with my findings, according to UK Climate Predictions 2009 (UKCP09), which predicts hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters coupled with more frequent extreme weather. You can see Dr. Vicky Pope explaining some of the science behind the paper in this video. They have much bigger computers and a bigger budget than me, but I’ve always thought that the weathermen would do at least as good a job if they just looked out of the window occasionally ;-)
Having problems with your sleep? Well, I can’t help you with that. Try reading an RFC or something.
However, if it’s your computer that will not go to sleep, I have a suggestion. In the network adapter’s properties is a Power Management tab. There are three checkboxes that control Wake-On-LAN.
Make sure the last (indented) checkbox is checked. Otherwise your computer will wake up when anything on the network tries to communicate with it.
If you don’t have a managed network and you never need your computer to wake up, then you can clear the bottom two checkboxes completely.
If, when you put your computer to sleep, it immediately wakes up again, this could be one possible reason for that.
So get your skates on! Until 30th June you can purchase Office 2007 Ultimate for just £38.95, that’s 91% discount.
The only requirement is that you have a valid .ac.uk email address.
With the #fixoutlook activity about Outlook 2010’s email rendering engine recently, there are plenty of blog posts offering opinions on how to improve things. But you can’t read many posts without finding a comment from someone about how they hate HTML email and plain text is good enough, thank you very much!
Have these people been living under a rock? Colour, formatting and graphics are not a luxury, they are basic necessities! HTML makes email so much more expressive, the ability to add colour and include images inline with the text gives the sender the ability to make an email so much more meaningful, to convey context and deeper meaning. I could never go back to plain text email. Take this example email on the right (click for full size) that I recently sent to a mailing list. How much harder would that email have been to write – or to read – without the inline image?
Remember my prediction that Twitter is doomed?
Well that may have been a tad strong, but according to @astronomy, things are starting to go downhill.
I was doing a map search today and started off in Bing, ending up in Microsoft’s recently-acquired Multimap aka Bing Maps. The screen shot shows the portion of my screen real-estate that is taken up by usable map display. That’s got to be about one fifth of my display. Compare that to Google Maps.
| Multimap / Bing Maps | Google Maps |
 |  |
So the primary reason I went to this site is to see a map. You’d think perhaps the map display would be the most prominent thing on the page, but no. Maybe this would be acceptable if two thirds of my display was taken up by the map, as it is in Google Maps. But no, a tiny little porthole with a frankly useless map segment is all I get. The rest of the screen is taken up with animated, flashing, blinking, spamming banner ads that distract attention and make it really hard to concentrate on the map and the right hand column is completely wasted. Compare to Google Maps: nothing moves except the map. No flickering banner ads, the map is large and goes all the way to the edge of the screen. The links in the left hand column are discreet and directly relevant to the location I searched for.
When you adopt the ad-funded business model, that subtly changes the business you are really in. Multimap and Google are of course not really in the business of delivering maps, they are in the business of delivering an audience to advertisers. The implementation couldn’t be more different though. Multimap doesn't provide me with the service I went there for – at least not in any meaningful way – and the advertising is very ‘in your face’. Google’s service is clean and uncluttered and provides me with the service I was seeking in a usable and useful way. The advertising is there but it’s discreet.
When creating an online presence, make sure you know what business you are really in and that you don’t bait-and-switch your customers.
A little while ago I blogged that I was concerned about the missing evidence linking global warming to the activity of humankind. There are plenty of people who will show you all sorts of evidence that the Earth's climate is changing – and with that I agree. However, what then generally happens is that they make a massive unsupported leap of reasoning and conclude that “it must be all our fault”. That’s just a massive conceit. There are forces in play that are far greater than human influence – literally astronomical – and which we have absolutely no hope of controlling. The configuration of the solar system; the output of The Sun; the position of Earth’s tectonic plates, volcanism and life itself.
I am aware that this is not a very popular opinion at the moment. We seem to be gripped by climate change frenzy. However, it seems I am not alone. The Global Warming Petition Project is a group of scientist who share my concerns. More than 31,000 scientists have petitioned the United States government not to rush into signing any treaties such as Kyoto. When I first read this petition, I had my doubts. Internet petitions are notoriously easy to set up and manipulate, but the more one investigates the more convincing it gets. The scientists signed a real paper petition, in ink, which then had to be mailed in. No one-click convenience. But the most convincing part is the 20 page paper circulated with the petition. The paper is clear, easy to understand, informative, credible, cites its sources and shows that the current climate change was already in progress long before humans began to use fossil fuels extensively. It conludes:
I have never seen any such evidence complete with source citations linking human activity to global warming.
That’s not to say that climate change isn't a problem. That’s not a license to continue to squander our finite fossil fuel resources. That’s not to say that we should stop developing sources of sustainable energy. But those are different issues. I am convinced that the climate is changing; that fossil fuels are running out; that population growth is putting pressure on the ecosystem and the economy. I’m not convinced that global warming is our worst problem, nor that it’s all our fault. I’m not convinced that governments are currently acting on the best evidence. I would love for someone to produce a rebuttal of this paper, complete with source citations. But I don’t think it is going to happen. I just don’t think the evidence is there. If you disagree with me, then excellent. Let’s have the debate. Convince me I’m wrong.
Microsoft’s new Business Resource Centre provides personalised help, support, training, articles and tips customised specifically for you and the products you have. I particularly like some of the Office 2007 videos particulary the advanced version showing SharePoint integration.
Richard Tubb of NetLink IT has written on his blog – TubbBlog – about a recent venture where several partners from the Small Business Specialist Community came together to deliver a large, high quality service that would have been out of reach of any individual organisation. Richard’s report is a shining example of the power of The Community and really encapsulates what the Small Business Specilalist Community is all about.
A great example of Microsoft Partners collaborating to deliver value
Well done Richard & co – this all reflects very well indeed on everyone involved, and the community as a whole.
Microsoft will deliver Release to Manufacturing (RTM) code to partners in the second half of July. Windows 7 will become generally available on Oct. 22, 2009, and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be broadly available at the same time.
Windows Server 2008 R2 was previously known as Windows 7 Server. More details at the UK SBSC Blog.
Yellowstone National Park
This Windows 7 desktop theme features the magical landscape of Yellowstone National Park, centred on Wyoming, USA. The park also extends into Montana to the north and Idaho to the west.
The whole area is a boiling cauldron of geothermal activity, having more geysers and geothermal features than the rest of the world put together. The terrible geological history and probable future of the area make it a fascinating yet foreboding place to visit.
Grace and I visited Yellowstone in November 2001, in the last days before the park closed for the winter snow season. We camped on the snow-covered shores of Lake Lewis near the south entrance, to the sound of wolves howling in the distance. We explored the park towards the north, exiting the north entrance into Gardiner, Montana, where we were treated to a display of the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights). Even though the Montana border is at only 45 degrees latitude, compared to the UK’s 51 degrees (at London), the Aurora is much more common there because the magnetic north pole is offset towards Canada and north America. These wallpaper images were all taken by me using my Kodak DC-290 digital camera. All photos are Copyright © 2001 Timothy P. Long, please do not redistribute.
Tim Heuer has written a good developer-level guide to the new features in Silverlight 3 - A guide to Silverlight 3 new features. It’s a lengthy post which hints at the depth and breadth of the juicy goodness contained in SL3. Tim’s post also lists the tools you’ll need to download and install to get started developing SL3 applications.
I saw a demo of some of the new features at an event in Swansea the other day, the main things that stood out from the demos were full 3D support using GPU acceleration, cross-window operation (allowing multiple browser windows to collaborate) and ‘out-of-the-browser’ support, enabling Silverlight applications to look like ordinary desktop applications (but of course still being web-based and cross-platform/cross-browser).
Silverlight 1 passed most people by. It laid a lot of foundation work but was nothing revolutionary.
Silverlight 2 was a significant development that directly challenged technologies like Flash. The big win here is that Silverlight is based on a solid foundation of programming languages and development tools, unlike Flash which started off as an animation engine and added scripting and programmability almost as an afterthought.
Silverlight 3 will consolidate on that foundation and add more controls, hardware acceleration and better support for data binding and multi-tier applications. I can see Silverlight being the natural technology of choice for developing the client side for things like Dynamics CRM. Mike Harsh, one of the Silverlight team, has released a sample application complete with source code (screen shot). Slidentity is a sort of PowerPoint editor and viewer which shows off a number of new SL3 features: out-of-browser experience, 3D perspective effects (slide transitions) with full hardware GPU acceleration, the ability to save and load documents into protected storage on the local hard drive and the ability to work disconnected from the Internet.
Dell Latitude XT2 Tablet
I know I’m sounding really geeky here, but I don’t care! For me, the XT2 is game changing. I’ve previously blogged about the compromises inherent in various form factors and how I thought the XT2 was a step forward. I’ve used a tablet PC for some years now, but always missed the ability to prod the screen with my fingers. The XT2 is the first tablet PC with multi-touch technology, which is supported natively in Windows 7.
A couple of days ago I attended a Microsoft event at the Technium in Swansea, a technical overview of Cloud Computing, web technology and BizSpark. It was a great event for many reasons, because the material was interesting and because I had the chance to catch up with some old colleagues (Delme, Jim and Brian) who I worked with in my first job out of university. What got me excited was the fact that one of the Microsoft guys had an XT2 and I was able to try it out. I had fun zooming in and out on IE8 web pages using the “pinch” gesture and painting with several fingers in Windows Paint. Pointing to things on screen with a finger is so much more intuitive end efficient than using a mouse. The XT2 is compact, a little over half the size of some laptops, lightweight at 1.6Kg, and has an almost-full-size keyboard. I really think Dell has hit the sweet spot with this one. At £1200, it costs no more than my current Acer Travelmate C310 cost me 4 years ago and is less than half the weight.
Dave, Keith & colleague, your sessions were all very interesting, but I’m sorry – the Latitude XT2 was the accidental star of the show. This is definitely going in my next letter to Santa.
In the late 1980s or early 90s I remember agonizing over downloading 100K GIF images because they were so large and took ages on my 1200 baud Hayes SmartModem. Back in those days I was running Windows 3.11 Workgroup Edition on a PC with 640K of RAM. I remember pleading with my boss to let me upgrade to 2Mb, he really made me work hard for that 2Mb. It required an expansion card just to hold all the memory chips (there were no DIMMs in those days, I’m not sure if SIMMs had been invented, I think memory still had legs back then).
I was looking on the MSDN web site today and I noticed that it is still possible to download Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS 6.2. I thought, for fun, I’ll download it and see if I can get it working in a virtual machine. Well, that turned out to be a non-starter. Anyway, the amazing thing was that the whole of Windows 3.11 downloaded in about 8 seconds. 8 Seconds! I was so taken aback that I had to check several times that I had the whole download. I’m also downloading a Windows 7 image right now and it’s predicting a total download time of about 36 minutes at roughly 10Mbps. I couldn’t help but compare and contrast. Windows 3.11 was 5.5Mb, Windows 7 is about 2414Mb. That makes Windows 7 almost 440 times the size of Windows 3.11. That's a very rough estimate of course, different compression techniques and so on make it difficult to do a direct comparison, but it kind of puts into perspective how much Windows has developed over the last 20 years.
The other interesting comparison is the 1200 baud (bits per second) modem vs. the 24Mbps ADSL modem that I have today, working on the very same pair of copper wires. That's over 20,000 times faster. Back then, Windows 3.11 would have taken over 10 hours to download, vs. 8 seconds today. Amazing.
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