Category Archives: General

Below average

In the UK we’re getting more and more stretches of road with ‘average speed checks’. Rather than simply measuring your speed as you pass a particular camera (or a particular policeman), your time over a distance between cameras – typically a few miles – is measured and you’re fined if your average speed exceeds the limit.

I’m not very keen on this, and I have some concerns about the amount of time I then spend looking at my speedometer, but I must admit the system does seem to do its job rather well; I imagine it will become the norm on most of our roads in due course.

Now, averages are funny things, of course. If you’re stuck in traffic for half the distance between two cameras, and moving at half the speed limit, you could then go infinitely fast for the other half and still be within the appropriate average. I imagine the authorities are banking on people not realising this.

Yesterday, as I drove a long stretch of monitored road, I was thinking about creating a system which would let you know what your personal real effective speed limit was at any time. It would need to know the positions of the cameras, but such a database could be built pretty quickly.

And then I realised that my car already has a partial solution built in: a ‘trip’ facility which can tell me the average speed over the length of the trip.

I just needed to press the trip-reset button as I went under a camera, and then I had a nice simple way to keep my average speed within limits until I reached the next one.

So until my next company, Below Average Inc., builds the full all-singing, all-dancing speed management product, this is very handy!

Friends in low places

Any idea what this is?

It’s a punt pole, with my camera attached to the end using a Gorillapod. Look, here’s a close-up:

And why, you might ask, would you want to do this?

Well, when my pal Bill Thompson organised this year’s geek punting picnic, PuntCon, I felt I needed to find a suitably geeky way to take a photo of the gathering. So I put my camera on a timer and raised the pole. It’s a bit tricky to aim, but here is at least a part of the group:

Many thanks to Bill (and everyone else) for a most enjoyable afternoon.

Blog beginnings

My friend and colleague Ray Gordon has a new blog. Ray is a very good electronic engineer and a very successful businessman; if he takes to this new medium it should be interesting.

Anyway, in his very first post, he released some of his software into the public domain. It allows a Microchip PIC to emulate a USB Mass-storage device. Esoteric stuff, but trust me, there are people out there who will be most grateful for this – it’s a great start!

A little bit.ly

You probably know TinyURL, which takes nasty long URLs like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=edale,+derbyshire&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=44.25371,60.46875&ie=UTF8&ll=53.360285,-1.816006&spn=0.065462,0.118103&t=h&z=13&iwloc=addr

and gives you a nice shorthand version like this:

http://tinyurl.com/67laca

which does the same thing, and is much easier to put in emails, or read over the phone.

Well, a new service has just launched called Bit.ly (no doubt starting a new craze in Libyan domain names) which does much the same kind of thing, and a whole lot more. Bit.ly links look much the same:

http://bit.ly/1pXdd2

but for more information about why it’s different, see this post. It looks good.

But TinyURL has been around for ever and has proved very reliable; it’ll be interesting to see if this new pretender can usurp it…

Pooter posts

Oh, and talking of trying old classics in new media… Kevan Davis has made George Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody available as a blog at diaryofanobody.net. Nicely done.

I wonder if Pooter would have approved.

Click and clack

Mmm. A classic American public radio show – Car Talk – is making its way onto television, in a new series using animated versions of its hosts, the Magliozzi brothers. I’m quite a fan, though only an occasional listener, but I really wonder about its viability in that medium.

Still, I wish them all the best… after thirty years of making people laugh, they deserve all the success they can get.

CNN has the story. Those of us in other parts of the world can hear the radio show on the Car Talk site.

Illuminati

OK – apologies for the rant… Is it just me, or have light bulbs really gone downhill in recent years? It seems as if scarcely a week goes by without me having to replace one.

I’m sure it wasn’t like that in my childhood. I don’t think we have more in our house than my parents had in theirs, or that we use them more. Perhaps we have a higher proportion of ‘strange’ ones – spotlights, candles, globes… and these varieties haven’t evolved to the same degree as the common-or-garden species?

The worst ones seem to be Philips, but most of the places we shop don’t seem to sell anybody else’s any more. The Philips spotlight bulb I’ve just replaced after a couple of months claimed to have a one year lifetime (based on 3 hours’ use per day). Even if it had managed that, it doesn’t seem like a great achievement, in this day and age.

The low-energy ones often do rather better, as they should, given their cost, but I’m too fond of dimmer switches to be able to change to those in any wholehearted way, and I’m still rather dubious about whether the true environmental benefits over their lifetime, if any, justify the cost and inconvenience…

So tell me, am I just becoming old and cranky, or does somebody still make a good old 60-watter the way they used to when I were a lad?

Seeking the bubble reputation

Adrian van den Heever tells me he has been wondering what to do with all those bottles of champagne he opens but doesn’t finish in one evening; it seems a pity to let the fizz go to waste. The obvious solution – inviting me around to help polish them off – doesn’t work quite so well now he’s in Palo Alto.

So he sought out local expertise and found that some research on the subject had been done at Stanford – almost within walking distance, which is probably just as well.

This is what they found out.

Internet independence

I was visiting the London office of a large internet company today and was planning to demonstrate CODA to them, so was a little distressed when I arrived to discover that their corporate internet connection was down, and they had no connectivity!

It all worked out well, though, because somebody in the group had recently bought a Netgear MBM621 – a 3G-to-ethernet router.

We plugged the CODA kit and my laptop into this, and It Just Worked ™. What’s more, the performance was remarkably good. It would be interesting to see whether it worked well outside the confines of central London, but in this situation, it was a real godsend.

This type of device could be a game-changer; exhibition centres often charge exhibitors phenomenal amounts for internet connections at their stands, for example. That little scam may not be viable for much longer.

Netgear call this little box a ‘modem’, but it’s more of a router; it does DHCP and NAT, and the only downside I could see was that it only has one ethernet port, so you need a switch if you’re plugging in more than one device.

Well worth investigating if you need to set up an impromptu network somewhere.

Technology quiz

Here’s a question for you. Which company was responsible for building the first business computer?

IBM, perhaps? Data General? DEC? or Lyons (the British tea company)?

Yes! Well guessed! It was Lyons.

The New York Times tells the story of David Caminer, who worked with Maurice Wilkes to create the LEO, and who died this month.

Build version numbering with Git

The ‘Git’ version-control system is used to develop the Linux kernel, amongst other things, and it’s the most powerful one I’ve used. (And I’m old enough to remember SCCS :-)) It takes some work to get your head around Git, but we’re now using it to develop our CODA system, and it’s been well worth it.

Michael came up with a nice way to number our build versions and has written it up on his blog – might be of interest if you’re using Git already.

If you aren’t, Randall Schwarz’s talk is a good intro.

Mobile thinking

Gordon Brown said recently that improving social mobility is a “national crusade” in which Labour has not made enough progress.

I thought the BBC’s The Week In Westminster programme had some interesting comments from Matthew Taylor, a former advisor to Tony Blair:

I think we should be more critical than we are about the concept of ‘social mobility’, and I think we should set it against the concept of ‘equity’. You can have a society which is socially mobile but very unequal; you can equally have a society that isn’t terribly mobile but where there are high levels of equality, and probably, the evidence suggests, the thing that makes us content overall as a society is more equality than it is mobility, because the pure concept of social mobility means that for everybody who goes up, someone comes down, and generally speaking we’re more frightened about coming down than we are excited about going up.

Politicians talk about social mobility because it’s so much easier to talk about than ‘redistribution’, and because people only understand social mobility as an ‘upward’ concept. If people really thought through was was meant, for example, by a society that was quite happy to let unintelligent middle-class children not succeed then I think people might not see this concept through such rose-tinted spectacles.

For the next few days you can hear the interview here. This segment starts around 21:56 mins in.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser