This blog started off as an experiment - an investigation into weblogs, which
is why there are links to material about weblogs further down. There are also
links to wikis which are also of interest, and to other communications
tools and pages.
Another interest, though often not expressed directly in the text, is
the development of so-called content and knowledge management tools.
Other strong content themes are music and opera, theatre, books,
media including tv and films, travel
and a modicum of science, with occasional references to art, photography and poetry,
reflecting some of the interests of the author. It is
possible that more scientific and technical material appears in
dave2002.alt.
This weblog also is a vehicle for experimenting with weblog
design, and for familiarisation with tools such as css, xml etc. A quirk is that
sometimes, following
e.e.cummings, words are written in lower case.
Some links cross refer to dave2002.alt,
which was used while maintaining this page, and which may also contain more
technical details relating to weblog production, or more details of scientific
or mathematical interest.
At times dave2002.alt functions
as a meta-blog.
viewing this page
If you don't see any entries, try maximising the page, or making it wider or reducing the font size.
The page template has been changed to use stylesheets instead of tables,
and this may move text where you don't expect it!
If you still can't see the text, switch browsers or leave and come back later, and with luck everything will magically be fixed. Sometimes temporary text objects cause the layout to be distorted.
It does display differently in different browsers: currently has acceptable results in IE, and Opera.
Still experimenting!
This site is designed to be viewable in most major browsers.
note: search engines
Search engines such as google do not always identify the correct page within this weblog as the result of a search.
The solution, if this happens to you, is to use the search engine on this site, and note also that it indexes forward in time as well as backwards, so you are likely to find what you want if it exists!
I've used zonealarm for years, and as a product I still think it's good. I even paid for pro versions for a couple of years, though I wasn't really sure whether they were significantly better than the free version.
Last year, when my subscriptions ran out I just couldn't be bothered to pay again. I don't know whether that's good or bad! I've inherited other machines, and maintain a couple more, so I don't really want to have to pay for new firewalls if I can avoid that. I wouldn't mind paying a modest amount for all the machines I have (let's say around 4-5) right now, but I really don't want to pay a lot.
I notice that zonealarm are now trying to do linked deals with other organisations before supplying free firewalls or updates. This has somewhat irritated me, so I've installed the kerio (sunbelt) firewall on one machine - which seems fine, and the comodo firewall on another - which has a few problems (it's if anything over secure) - but basically pretty good. I've also got a version of kaspersky's system via a magazine, which I'm intending to install soon.
I really think that zonealarm are losing it - they have had (mostly - one version I used was a bummer) a good product, but I'm now happy to switch to other products.
google has now introduced a new service called documents and spreadsheets, which provide on-line, web-based text editors and spreadsheets. Some of the features have been inherited from writely. Unfortunately it seems to me that the migration of users and documents from the previous writely system has not been handled well, and some users, including myself, may find it hard to locate previously created work.
When yahoo incorporated flickr earlier on, the migration seems to have been relatively painless, but google appear to have made serious mistakes with the migration from writely.
What do you think when you turn on a light switch, or put the key to start your car?
Probably not a lot, other than you "need" light or to travel somewhere.
I've put the word need in quotes, as more often the phrase "want to have" might be more appropriate.
Do you ever think about other consequences of your actions?
There are some differences between turning on a light bulb and starting your car.
If you use your car, most of the pollution which arises is in the vicinity of the vehicle,
so as you drive you are polluting the areas around you.
Driving a car is also generally more demanding on energy than a single light bulb.
When you turn on a light you are taking power from the electricity grid,
and this has consequences elsewhere.
In the uk these consequences do not appear to most of us to be severe, as the uk is relatively unpolluted.
In china the situation is different.
China has the worst polluted cities and regions in the world.
Turning on a light bulb in beijing or shanghai has effects on other people living outside those cities.
Currently a large part of china's energy supplies for some large cities are provided by coal fired power stations,
which are very polluting.
Cities such as datong which is also well known for its
world heritage site
are unpleasant to live in, though the people who live there may have little choice. Most pictures are unlikely to
show the degree of dirt and grime, and give an impression of the pollution.
The chinese government is aware of some problems, and is trying to clean up the environment,
but it will be a huge task.
There is a push to clean up the environment around beijing and other important centres for the
2008 olympics,
though this may have consequences for other regions,
since most visitors will only go to the largest cities,
and it's possible that the pollution will get worse in other cities which are less likely to be visited.
There are other issues about energy consumption which we tend not to think about in the uk
where many of us use electricity and cars with little thought.
In china many people still walk or use bicycles.
Some would probably rather use motor bikes or cars, and have a more western style of life.
Yet if the large body of the chinese population (currently around 1.3 billion people)
all wanted to behave like that, even if they could,
that would be even more damaging for the environment, even if some of the pollution problems
could be partially solved, as they would be likely then to produce more pollution as a country than the USA.
Note: At the time of writing the pitas site is not updating properly, so some of the links have been lost.
They will be put in later, when the site is more reliable.
Choosing a chinese name may be a useful thing to do for someone who is not chinese, though there may be some pitfalls. The recommendation appears to be to enlist the help of someone who is a native chinese speaker, and who knows you. There are also companies which will do it for you - I don't know how good they are.
There's a fun tool for generating chinese names.
It's also clear that there can be problems with converting chinese names into western languages. Is Chan really a different name from Chen or Chung? What about Chan Wong - could it be Wong Chan? This article addresses some of the issues.
AT 5.30 am this morning the bbc put out the radio 4 uk theme written by fritz spiegl for the last time. You can listen to the original theme here and also find out a bit more about fritz. There is also a new single
which contains the theme, plus "sailing by", and it's available from several outputs. The single was produced in an attempt to save the theme, but this was unsuccessful. The theme can also be downloaded from the single for a very modest sum from the iTunes website. I really can't hear too much difference between the new and the old versions, though the new version is much better recorded. The sound of the cor anglais is different in the two versions, though I can't say I really prefer one over the other. There are slight differences in the brass and string sounds too, but really there is not much to choose between them.
I think it was a mistake to abandon a musical start to the day, though I actually do think this particular piece may have been past its sell by date. Perhaps it could feature in future last night of the proms concerts as an extra item?
The site at zhongwen.com has an interesting idea. Every few minutes the site features a new chinese character. I think in order for this to work you may have to refresh your web browser, but here is an example:
The bbc is playing the whole of wagner's ring cycle today. So far it's not bad, though some are obviously finding it torture to judge by the comments on various message boards.
The bbc is promoting a distributed computing climate change experiment, which is potentially interesting. This runs using software developed at berkeley, called boinc. I've tried a few of these boinc projects before, but this one is really big. This presents quite a number of problems. Firstly to be useful each computer has to be active for a very long time. The experiment works by running a climate model to simulate years from 1920 to 2080, and on my computer which is perhaps not too atypical it takes about a day to run each year. Thus it should take about 160 days to complete the whole thing.
Personally I think the design of the experiment is very flawed, because it is not reliable enough. The software I'm running is apparently the previous version which was discovered to be less than 100% reliable. I should have updated it last time it crashed, but I didn't. However that's no problem, because it seems to have crashed again, and I might as well restart it. I can't understand why they didn't design the experiment with state changes saved on the server to allow for restarts. An alternative, though perhaps less good, would have been to provide an automatic restart feature on each user's machine. I suppose one reason for not storing the state centrally might be that each model state could be large - but I really don't know. If that's the case then states should be kept locally to keep the network traffic low. Currently my directory with data in is over 1 Gbyte, but it should compress down, and I don't think it's all data. To be precise currently the folder contains 1,277,263,872 bytes (1.18Gbytes) and I was able to compress it down to 385,187 kbytes (about 385 Mbytes). If most of this is needed to maintain the state of each model, then transferring this up/down even in compressed form could put quite a load on the network, so maybe the designers did get it right.
There are help forums/message boards, but it's taken me several days to realise that there are several. I've had helpful comments from one of these, but even the boards seem to have problems. I registered and posted, but now the board seems not to recognise me at all.
I think I've still got time to get this right and do the complete run, but it'll require a bit more effort. There are procedures for doing backups which allow restart. I'm only just beginning to sort this out. Someone has now written a script to automate the process, but it's not claimed to be ultra reliable. This project may eventually get somewhere, but it does seem to have quite a few flaws, both in the software and also in the communications and instructions.
In the process of doing this I discovered a few other useful things though. Firstly I can now monitor the temperature on this machine using a neat tool called motherboard monitor. Sadly this is no longer supported, though if you have a motherboard which is compatible it seems to work well. I have several machines, and on one, based on an MSI-6385 board the temperatures reported (centigrade) went over 100 degrees. I figured that this was probably an error, so I manually reconfigured the sensor for the CPU to point to Winbond 2 Diode, rather than the present value for that board. I hope that was just a configuration error for this board, as now the temperatures reported are much more reasonable. Running the climate change programs really does push the temperature up. I had the temperature on this machine (this has an MSI 6533 ,motherboard) up to 55 degrees a few days ago, but then I installed more memory (probably irrelevant) and while doing that I took the opportunity to vacuum out the fan and heatsink. The temperatures now seem to be below 50 degrees.
If you do decide to run the program - and I'd recommend giving it a try - then it is worth downloading this temperature monitoring tool and checking your machine's temperature. The rise in temperature when the program is running is definitely noticeable. If the temperatures are higher than (say) 55 degrees it is worth checking your hardware carefully, and making sure that fans are clean and working, and that vents are not blocked. However if the readings are ludicrously high suspect a faulty sensor, or an incorrect sensor setting in the configuration files.
If you live in a hot country, or have your central heating on a lot, or you haven't cleaned out your computer case for a few years, then I think it's easily possible to reduce your cpu temperature by 5 degrees by cleaning. Perhaps for most of us this isn't necessary so often, as most of us don't run our machines at full CPU all the time, but if you do know how to open up your machine and run a vacuum cleaner over it carefully then you will probably improve its ability to handle higher loads. Definitely worth doing.
I'm not planning to join the brigades of overclockers, but I've also discovered that system stress testing is something that those guys do, and one of the most popular programs for that is prime95 which is actually a program for finding (most probably mersenne) prime numbers. Apparently the stress procedure is to run this program for at least 10 hours to see if it crashes. This is not a guarantee of reliability, but it seems that many systems will give up on this program within 10 hours. I've not tried yet, but obviously I should if I'm going to hang in with the climate experiment.
ps: Since I first wrote this I've noticed that my model has "come back" - again! I don't know where it went, but since I restarted it a few days ago it would appear not to have crashed. The worrying thing is that the program may "disappear" for several hours, with no response to the graphics - which is supposed to be symptomatic of failure, but then may re-appear later on. If it really crashes again I'll have to download the apparently more reliable latest version of the software, but I hope I won't have to. I really think I'm going to have to get to grips with backing up the data periodically, which is not something which has been advertised too widely, apart from on the forums. This is going to require something of the order of an additional 1 Gbyte for each image I think.
I nearly missed this. swedish radio is sending out a new dedicated internet radio channel which they call mozart.
The music is lovely. Each day they broadcast a selection of mozart's works in runs of about 8 hours, so if you miss anything the first time round you'll have two more tries.
It looks as though it's got a few more days to go, and then I'm guessing it'll disappear. If you read this in time, then do try it out.
If you have problems with ths site, then note the following:
"spellistor" is the swedish word for "play lists", "hem" means "home". You can get the whole thing running by clicking on "webbradio". There is "hjälp" available ("help"), but it's in swedish. There are direct links to the streams for use in different players, which can definitely be useful. It works in the web based player, and also in real player and windows media player. The quality is good providing you don't drop into the low bit rate streams. I think it is easiest to use the list of stream links to avoid problems with low bit rates.
over the top Saturday, March 11, 2006 -- 09:14 a.m.
Have we reached the top of the blogging wave? Is it all downhill from now on? This article suggests that weblogs are now on the decline.
Don't you just get fed up with some web interfaces? Many look as though they've been deliberately designed to prevent users getting through to the organisation which was responsible for them. For example, amazon uk has a good website which will help you to order stuff, but if you have any problems .... try to find the right web page! Even if you do find a page which allows you to send an email, the chances are that it won't actually work - no doubt there's some excuse about cookies and privacy etc. I tried twice - initially with firefox, and then with the "always works" internet explorer. No luck!
However, just in case you also have the same problem with this firm, there are some telephone numbers, though as with the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, no doubt they are written on tablets a few light years away.
If you have this problem, then here are the numbers ...
> Customer Service can be reached from Monday to Saturday,
> 8:00 am -- 6:00 pm (GMT)
>
> Phone: 0800 279 6620 (from within the UK)
> +44 20 8636 9451 (outside the UK)
>
> Fax: 0800 279 6630 (from within the UK)
> +44 20 8636 9401 (outside the UK)
>
Boring isn't it? Here I am telling you about tax filing deadlines! I used to not bother myself, until the inland revenue, as it called itself then, started to fine people £100 for not filing in time. I've not been fined yet, though apparently around a million people don't get their forms in on time. Obviously if you can afford the £100 and you've got better things to do you'll not worry, but most people might find £100 useful.
So, when do the wretched things have to be in? By the end of this month - January 31st - you should have sent in your tax return. Strictly it should have arrived at your tax office by then. You can also file on-line, and this is quick. However, if you haven't already registered for the on-line service there is almost certainly not enough time left to do that now. If you've forgotten your password or username try to get them asap, but again, it's unlikely that you'll get them back in time. Next year maybe!
Some of us don't have to fill the forms in, if the hmrc as it now calls itself, decides that our affairs are so boring that they don't need to check each year. If you've not been automatically sent a form you are probably ok, though as always with such bureaucratic organisations, if they decide that you should have had one and filled it in etc. they think it's your responsibility to have let them know. My guess is that if this happens they'll most likely just ask you to fill in the form, and may waive the fine, but if they've sent you one to fill in then they're watching you and you've got no easy excuse if you don't reply to them.
So, what should you do? If you've sent one back already that's good. They shouldn't fine you for that should they!
If you've sent one back, but there are problems, you should deal with the problems as soon as possible. However, they shouldn't fine you, as you have complied with their filing request.
If you've still got a blank copy of the form floating around somewhere, go and find it, fill it in, and post it..
If you've lost the form, you can request another copy from your tax office, but you'll have to do so pdq - phone them, or visit them if you are nearby - don't write - it'll take too long.
This is very useful if you have been sent the short form as this is much easier to fill in. Your tax office can tell you about this. If that was the case you should get onto them asap, and get that short form. The short form is not available any other way. Otherwise all is not lost, as the complete forms are available from the hmrc website - just download them, and print them off, and fill them in etc. You can start with these two:
You might need to check out some of the other forms - but that'll get you started.
V. boring, but you might do it for £100 mightn't you.
The long forms are considerably more tedious to fill in. You can estimate some values. For example, if you've a bank and a few building society accounts, and you've only earned (say) around £25 interest in the year, just aggregate the lot, and put down £25 - mark it "estimated". Don't cheat - it's not worth it, but it's really not worth chasing up all those accounts which pay out 5 pence per year - nobody really cares. If in doubt overestimate a bit - it'll still be cheaper than paying a fine for not supplying the information.
If you can do all this in time, then you'll avoid the £100 fine, though you may have a tax bill to pay, and that may incur interest if you don't pay it also by January 31st, though that will probably be a lot less than the £100 if you behave like an ostrich.
I had major problems with the uk tax forms this year. I tried to use the online service, but I didn't have the username and password which I set up years ago. It took weeks to get these sent to me, by which time I'd missed the end of january deadline for on-line filing with the opportunity to have tax adjusted via my tax code. I gained access to the on-line service at the end of january, the day after the deadline.
When I gained access I watched the calculation, and noticed that I'd have to pay tax - not an enormous amount, but nevertheless more than I would have liked. I decided to fill in the short form.
After a while I received a letter back, requesting a truly HUGE amount. I wrote a complaining letter, but fortunately it was saturday afternoon, so I didn't post it. Then I noticed that I hadn't filled in one of the boxes on the form, so I changed my plan. Before sending in the updated information to the uk tax office, I decided to make a spreadsheet to calculate what I should pay them. I am not guaranteeing that this spreadsheet is correct, but I thought that others may benefit from it, so I'm making it available.
In the list of spreadsheets below, the spreadsheets should all be identical, apart from the details which are personalised. Thus if the details are changed, the spreadsheet should still work.
Janet Jones - pensioner, with a large savings income
There are also notes to be read in conjunction with these, which should also be downloaded.
PS: I'll be loading up some more of the spreadsheets shortly. I need to make a correction for people with very low incomes to avoid negative values. I have now done this but only uploaded the new template for Ben Student.
I'll gradually replace the others in time.
The calculations should be correct for most people who fill in the short tax form for 2004-5. However if you are a pensioner earning more than 19500 the calculations will not be correct, since the allowance has not been adjusted. A warning will be given by the spreadsheet if this applies to you.
These spreadsheets are provided "AS IS" with no warranty.
If you find a very obvious problem, please put a comment below.
I have been planning to revamp this site, and now could be as good a time as any, but there are always too many other things to do!
In the meantime take a look at the british library'spages which now have mozart's manuscripts plus some audio. It works ok for dial up users, though at present there seem to be some slight problems for broadband users. If you are a broadband user you might find that you can get it to work if you select the dial up option. Of course, this could all be a problem with my browser ....
ps: happy new year!
recordings Wednesday, December 28, 2005 -- 02:30 p.m.
I figure that some people might need help with recording internet radio streams. rm recorder is a good tool for working with real audio streams. One snag is finding the rtsp urls which are needed to make this work. Often these are hidden away, and many providers do not make it too easy to find them.
However there are tools, such as urlsnooper(2) which can track down media streams, and once these have been found it should be feasible to load them into rm recorder or wm recorder.
There are some really good lists of internet radio stations, including surfmusic.
[I'll come back and edit this in little while, as I've other lists ...]
The bbc is currently on a mission to play through all the currently known works by js bach, and is calling this enterprise a bach christmas. You can listen to this on the live radio feed from the website, or on regular broadcast channels if you live in the uk.
So far it's going well, though there is some dissension on the message boards.
The beeb is starting to wind us up towards its forthcoming presentation of all j.s. bach's works on radio 3. This will start next friday evening - 16th december and finish about 10 days later.
They've also put up some decent pages about bach and an advent calendar for the countdown.
I suspect that some will switch off altogether, others will dip in from time to time, and some will have their radios on all the time.
I think it's a good idea, though you'll have to use cds, listen to other stations, or other means of musical nourishment if you don't want to listen to bach over christmas.
I couldn't possibly encourage anyone to record all this material, because of copyright issues, though recording some for personal use may be legal. You can do this with various technology, including cassette recorders, cd recorders, and a computer with a large hard drive. For recording with a computer tools such as audacity and total recorder are good. audacity will probably generate large files, while total recorder can do various forms of compression on the fly. This includes doing mp3 compression, which if done in vbr mode using rates from around 160kbps to 320 kbps will give good enough quality for most people - and in any case strictly this may be more than the quality of the broadcast so perhaps unnecessary. It is possible to get around 8-10 hours of music onto 1 Gbyte of storage space using the mp3 compression at reasonable enough quality. Avoid going as low as 128kbps with mp3 unless you really have to.
Alternative methods of recording are to use stream recorder tools such as wm recorder and rm recorder, and to record from internet radio streams. These won't work well with the bbc's output though, because the audio quality is relatively poor, so they should only be used as a backup, or if you don't live in an area where you can receive a broadcast signal either on dab, dvb-t or satellite. This will be the only way that most people outside the uk will be able to receive this.
Yet another way is to use a dab or dvb-t card for your computer, and use the software which comes with that. Mac users will have to look around for different equipment, or find drivers which will work with kit made for pcs.
alistair hinton's quintet is to be broadcast tonight on bbc radio 3. It is also available on the internet via the bbc radio player. It is in fact a broadcast of 3 cds which last around 3 hours, and the quintet is not quite what it seems, for it also employs a soprano. It has received good reviews elsewhere. I'll add my impressions later.
Just over a week ago I went to a recording of robert simpson's 5th symphony. I meant to say how I found it at the time, and to point to the broadcast. It was extremely well performed. I now see that the broadcast is coming up really soon - today - at 18.30 on performance on 3 on radio 3. It'll probably still be available for a few days in the listen again mode, but this performance was awesomely dynamic and loud in places and the conductor and orchestra were excellent. Even dab will not do it justice.
If you are in the uk try to listen on dab or freeview, otherwise try the broadcast using the bbc's internet radio player.
I'll certainly try these again, so will listen.
energy saving Tuesday, November 29, 2005 -- 07:33 a.m.
newsnight had an interesting short video last night about energy saving and attitudes to it in the uk.
Click on the text which says: "Although Monday's show is unavailable, you can click here to watch Susan Watts' report on climate change" - this is next to a picture of the world.
It's surprising how many people think that they can't
do anything to help reduce energy consumption. We're all more or less guilty - but some of us are more ignorant of what we are doing than others.
Having said that, I often leave my computer on overnight. I do have some energy saving
lightbulbs though, and in the next few years watch out for solid state lights - which will be very efficient.
I wish the bbc would leave videos like this up for longer periods - a week at least.
I generally like amazon,
but I have recently been disappointed with them. I feel that they are not giving honest reviews on their web sites, and most users will not know about this. I bought a western digital hard drive from them for just under £100. It was one rather like this one.
Like almost all the other reviewers I thought it was brilliant. I would have given it *****. That lasted 8-9 days, then it wouldn't go any more. I did lose some data, but nothing earth shattering - pity - but there it was.
Amazon took the unit back, and refunded (I hope ... must check again) my money - no problem there.
Then I wrote a review for amazon's web site, pointing out that using drives like this for backup is not guaranteed, and users could eventually be disappointed. It was not posted on their site. I wrote several more, in the same vein. So far I've not seen my review, and the average rating for this item is *****, so my single star (*) presumably has been ignored completely. I do not "have it in" for amazon or even western digital. I replaced the hard drive with a la cie unit from ebuyer, and this is significantly noisier than the western digital unit, and doesn't (I think) stack vertically - I'm not risking it anyway. However - it is still going - after many hours of continuous operation. As I said in my reviews for amazon, mine was probably just a relatively rare bad unit, and most users won't have a problem, but it would be misleading to suggest that nobody has problems, and in particular anyone who uses devices such as these to backup important data might find that they get let down.
Obviously I shouldn't have joked to a friend that the new backup unit would probably fail before the drive it was to backup - because that's exactly what happened. The good thing is that it failed quickly, before I loaded it with a lot of vital data.
After all this, and amazon's repeated ignoring of my review, I went to their web site to see if I could take this further. There is an option to ask why amazon does not publish reviews, so I used that. I am still waiting for a reply. Amazon have completely ignored this. The state of the reviews is now difficult to determine, as currently there are 39 reviews - perhaps including mine - but they don't display when the page is activated. Maybe they did get round to publishing it, but maybe not - I can't tell.
Is there a message from this? Yes - there are two at least.
As stated, any hard drive can fail - even a brand new one, so one should never rely absolutely on one, even from a reputable manufacturer - and I include western digital here. I make multiple copies on different machines, and I've bought a new dvd burner to burn cds and dvds which I use regularly. I know that these may fail, but they probably won't fail too rapidly, and they can be used to restore data if there's a problem in the short term.
Don't believe all the reviews you see on sites such as amazon's - the supplier may be filtering reviews without giving anyone any reason. Most of you won't know.
What do I think of western digital? Difficult to say! I would buy another unit - as mine was much quieter than the one I have replaced it with - and it was good value, and it was probably just a rare bad unit. Most users will probably not have a problem, but everyone should take care and not assume that any data is secure on any disk drive from any manufacturer.
drm (digital radio mondiale) is a collection of organisations which are intending to produce new am digital radios. See the recent press release. I have to say that at this time I can't quite see the point, though technically it is interesting. What advantages will this have over dab or other forms of broadcasting? worldspace have been promoting digital satellite broadcasting for several years, and it works, though the quality is not great. For some applications quality is not a big issue - but I still can't really see why there is thought to be a need to invest in amplitude modulation broadcasting.
