THIS WEBLOG HAS MOVED

2 January 2005

This weblog is now being continued at: http://radio.weblogs.com/0142957/

Please take a look.

Who is this woman?

9 December 2004

Who is she and why is someone emailing me her picture?

Haircut

Sloppy Software

3 December 2004

Having just commented about the frightening reliance on Windows by the UK armed forces we now low learn that the Benefits system has gone tits up because of a Windows 'upgrade'.

Pension and benefit payments face disruption after what is being described as the biggest computer crash in government history left as many as 80,000 civil servants staring at blank screens and reverting to writing out giro cheques by hand in the latest blow to a hi-tech Whitehall revolution. [The Guardian]

Lurking in the background is EDS, an American IT company well-known for several unfortunate mishaps in the UK. There is some talk that they might be let loose on the forthcoming ID card, or Entitlement Card, as I believe we'll have to call it. In fact, if you do a Google search for 'EDS cockups', you can get quite an insight into the fastidiousness of this company when it comes to IT.

A COMPUTER PROGRAM that was intended to speed up royalty payments to over 300,000 American Indians lost details of the payment but the US Interior Department hid facts from a judge presiding over an inquiry, it has emerged. And instead of producing accurate figures from the buggy system, the Interior Department used an alternative set of figures cooked up by giant computer firm EDS. [The Enquirer]

And also keeping their heads down are the good people of Microsoft

Some 80,000 computers at the Department for Work and Pensions went down during 'a routine software upgrade' of its Microsoft machines this week. Staff at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) were unable to use their PCs this week after a routine software upgrade knocked out 80 percent of the PC in the sprawling department, which numbers some 100,000 employees...Microsoft said that the issue has now been fully resolved, but was unable to provide any information on what caused the crash. [ZDnet UK]

If you use Windows and are getting fed up with all of this try an alternative approach to computing.

Open Windows

23 November 2004

In this week's New Scientist there is a short anecdote about the use of Windows in car engine management.

Our colleague agreed to do exactly that, but for peace of mind he asked what to do if the engine stopped again before the car had reached a garage. "Turn off the engine, take out the ignition key to shut down the electronics, and restart", the engineer explained. "That should do it."

This is a rather frightening development. But far more worrying is that the UK armed forces are also using Windows.

Anyone with elementary knowledge of computer science can see that Microsoft Windows, as described here by Gates, is inherently insecure by design.

Just imagine at the height of battle as you're about to launch your missiles you get the helpful message:

"Windows has performed an illegal operation."

ASDA depression

19 November 2004

Today is 19 November and I visited my local ASDA store to be harassed by gnomes, fairies, wicked witches and (for some odd reason) a cowboy. There was even a furious looking young man dressed as snow white. He looked soooo unhappy. Yes, it's the annual consumer sales period, known as Christmas, (actually a whole month away till the day itself). I won't go on, there's enough people moaning about it without me adding to the pain. I don't often shop at ASDA; I hate the brash, bright clumsiness of the stores' layout and more than anything else the sodding blather of ASDA FM urging me to buy more, save more... Later I visited the congenial emptiness of the Co-Op store across town. No pixies or grumpy Snow Whites there. Thank the Lord and pass the tangerine.

Disclaim aclaim

9 November 2004

Nice to see a site that isn't afraid to unbalance the zeitgeist and be contrarian.

Kerb wobble

30 October 2004

So there I was in the foyer of a large grammar school. The entrance door had locked behind me and the door leading into the school proper was similarly secure. In the 10 feet between the two doors was a stack of stainless steel lockers and a teacher giving a cello lesson to an embarrassed ten-year old girl. I smiled sweetly and suddenly found great interest in the patterned wallpaper as the girl scraped out her scales. Obviously space was a little tight this morning. Eventually the man I had come to see rescued me and I no longer had to endure the sweet sounds of cello murder. No. I had the far more impressive task of examining a wobbly kerbstone that had caused £500-worth of damage to the underside of a car.

Whoosh, flash, switch off

16 October 2004

There's this thing that television production companies do in their documentaries. I call it the 'whoosh-flash'. It tends to occur when the director wants to change scenes. It's just so 20th century to just cut from one scene to another, the same effect you get when you just look from one object to another with your own eyes. No, that's just too easy. I mean, you're directing a modern documentary. You've got all these qualifications from art and design colleges. You've got to jazz it up a bit, just show-off a bit, y'know. So what you do between cuts is have someone stick a whoosh sound on the soundtrack and then do a whiteout - just half a second will do. Hey Presto! Instead of a boring cut you have a 'whoosh-flash' cut!

There is a slight problem with this, and I may be being a little picky, but for the viewer the whoosh-flash pretty soon starts to pale. It becomes irritating because it's unnecessary, it adds nothing to the imparting of knowledge and it simply detracts from the programme itself. It looks like a first year design student got hold of the tapes and decided to take the piss.

One of the big culprits is the once renowned now derided Horizon, made by the BBC. It's become infected by the whoosh-flash, unnecessary dramatisations, inappropriate mood music and over-dramatic commentary.

Just go and look at The World At War for the classic documentary and see why that works and the modern 21st century pap doesn't. Horizon and its ilk treat the viewer as a passive moron who needs a constant moving canvas and the occasional jolt for stimulation. The World at War treated the viewer with respect, with an attention span longer than two minutes.