Train Announcements

Living in the UK for 8 years, specifically London, opened my eyes to train announcements. In fact Londoners take great pride in the nature of the quirky announcements that happen on the Underground ( Living in Ealing we had a particular announcer that loved the sound of his own voice and used to regularly entertain the entire station with his antics.) and there are many sites around that list some of the antics. For the sake of those with some interest here's a link that contain a few amusing ones.
Now I'm back in Australia and I'm wondering how Cityrail can have mismanaged the trains infrastructure such that it is impossible to even hear the announcements. I'm currently catching trains for ~2 hours a day and so each day I'm in a position to hear various announcements, some of them important (it seems fairly commonplace for trains in Sydney to have their destinations changed mid-route so that if you don't hear the announcement you can often be caught out!) and yet without fail, I've been unable to hear any announcements clearly. It seems that there are a few problems. Firstly the speaker volume on most of the trains is set so low that you'd need a bionic ear to hear a thing. Secondly, there aren't enough speakers around, and so unless you're near one of the few that is in working order, you're just SOL. Finally it would appear that Cityrail need to invest some money in public speaking classes for their train drivers as the majority of them seem to be intimidated by using the speaker and invariably mumble, rush and shorten what they are trying to say in an effort to have it done as quickly as possible. In 2010, surrounded by technology with technology playing an ever increasing role in our lives it's a little disconcerting to see that in some area's we still can't even get the ~60 year old technology implementation right.

Upgrade path

As most technologist will tell you, the first thing to do when you get a new gadget is to upgrade it to the latest software and bios version. So this was in my mind when I recently upgraded my phone to a new Nokia 6500 classic. I promptly downloaded the software to manage the phone and at the same time downloaded the software to update the phone itself. I started off by transferring the phone numbers on my old phone to it's sim card, then i put the old sim card into the new phone and moved the numbers from the sim to the new phone. Then I put the new sim in my new phone and moved the numbers from the phone to the sim card. My idea being that I prefer the numbers on the sim card rather then the phone in case something happens to it (reasoning that it is more likely the phone would get broken then the sim card inside of it, besides I'd be able to put the sim card in another phone and still have access to my numbers). So there I was with my new sim card in my new phone with all my numbers on it. At this point I decided to back up my phone using the supplied software from nokia. That done, I decided to try and finally fix all the spelling mistakes in my address book and update some numbers. I was a bit annoyed to discover that while the software on my computer was able to manage other aspects of my new phone just fine, when it came to getting the numbers out of it and allowing me to edit them on the software on my computer, it just wasn't working. There appeared to be some bug, so before I started to try and solve that I decided to upgrade to the latest version. Big mistake.
I downloaded the new software for the new phone and updated it. I once again tried to manage the names and numbers in the phone with the software on my computer only to find that the bug had persisted and in fact got worse. Now instead of seeing maybe 25% of the numbers that were in the phone, I could see 2. I decided to try and create a new number and push it to the phone to see if that would help. I promptly added a number and asked it to synchronize. Just as promptly the phone deleted ALL numbers on the phone and synchronized the new number. Annoyed but not panicked, I thought I'd simply restore from backup all of my numbers, because I realized at this point that by moving the numbers off my old sim to the new phone I had ofcourse deleted them from the old sim. The only copy of my numbers now resided in my back up of the phones configuration. Well I'm sure you can guess what happened then. I restored from backup but the bug seemed to have taken residence in no uncertain fashion and ate all of the numbers. When it was done restoring I had 2 numbers in the phone. Thanks Nokia, thanks very much.

If you're reading this please drop me a line with your contact details because chances are I don't have them any longer.

Keeping things cold

After almost 5 years living in England you'd think that I'd be used to all the little differences here from back in Australia, however, even after all this time there are some things that still have the ability to wind me up and cause me to shake my head. One I just ran into again was trying to buy a cold drink.

I accept that growing up in Australia my perspective is a bit borked, after all most Australians are taught at a young age that if you get something out of the fridge, you use it, then put it straight back as it's too hot to leave anything out for too long. That aside though europeans (it's not just the Brits that suffer from this) have real issues at the other extreme. For some reason, I'd guess it was initially to save on power or perhaps floor space, shopkeepers over here have traditionally decided to not buy refridgerators, but rather, to buy "cool shelves". This idea was questionable at it's inception but certainly after I'd guess 50 odd years of evolution has now reached a state of complete and utter uselessness. For those of you that don't know what a cooling shelf is, it is much like a fridge, but sawn in half and with the cooling element at the base rather then behind. The result is a completely open air contraption that tries to cool from the bottom. Now physics aside about hot air rising and all that, it's curious that the concept of keeping a static amount of air in place and cooling it to a set temperature seems to have escaped my european brethren, and not surprisingly the cooling shelves have a net effect of, IF you're lucky, lowering the temperature of items placed in them by about 1 degree. Unfortunately the state of most cooling shelves is fairly abysmal, most are broken and filthy, few actually work as they should at the best of times. What's the issue I hear many euro readers thinking, well the issue my friends is that it doesn't COOL the damn drinks!

The issue with temperature is not limited to drinks though. It was with initial surprise, followed by amusement and then outright incredulity that I met the assertion that Air Conditioning is bad and makes you sick. As every Australian knows, life without AC in Australia is unbearable, trying to work in stifling heat is just a nightmare, yes now and again if you're in the habit of walking in and out of AC'd buildings hundreds of times in a day, and you're run down, and you're stressed and the first 4 moons of gemini align, you might get sick from the temperature changes. Yes it's also possible that you can get outbreaks of legionaires disease and a few other air bourne nasties, but given that a large chunk of the worlds working population in the first world works in Air Conditioned buildings, it seems a little far fetched to think that they are a death trap, talk to the average european though and you'll get a completely different picture. Almost without exception every european I've met, when the subject of AC comes up, they cross themselves to ward off the devil and start swapping stories about how one of their friends got sick from it (almost how aussies swap stories about how close they've come to being attacked by a shark / croc). Try to point out that they might be exaggerating the risks or that AC is actually good, and you're immediately excommunicated from the conversation, but back to my drink.

Now again I can only assume that in the past europe was actually a REALLY cold place, so cold in fact that inside a store, on a cooling shelf without real refridgeration it was reasonable to expect things to be kept at 4 degrees. I'm dubious that this was ever the case but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt (I don't know too many shops that don't run a heater inside the store during Winter). That was the past, possibly, now though I can assure you that most of Europe and certainly not many parts of London actually even get that cold let alone consistently. Instead, like today, it was about 15 degree's and I was after a cold drink. I walk into the local store and low and behold all their drinks are actually HOTTER then room temperature as their cold shelves don't work and they've got a heater going in the store. It took me going to about 4 local shops before I found one that actually had a fridge and consequently was able to serve me a drink that was cold. Europeans are a worried lot, they are panicking about global warming more then most other groups of people, now I understand why, it's going to be damn hard to get a cold drink in this part of the world in the future.

Poetic Justice

As i sat there last night with the remains of a "easy to open" packet in my hand I contemplated the following.

Wouldn't it be poetic justice if you were somehow able to get the people in charge of picking stock for the supermarkets to actually try and use the stock they themselves pick. The case in point was with ham. Now unlike the rest of the civilized world it is next to impossible to buy fresh meat from a butchers in London, instead you need to go to your local supermarket and buy packaged meat. Now I've noticed a trend with this packaging, it boldly proclaims that it is "easy to open" or "Resealable" and presumably that is a big selling or marketing point for said product. Of course as anyone will attest, trying to open said products is next to impossible, invariably ending in frustration, swearing and little bits of plastic sheets all over the kitchen. I mean seriously what moron uses glue with an adhesive strength stronger then that of the damn plastic sheet in the first place? So I for one would absolutely LOVE to get the stock choosers down on the floor, and see them trying to open their damn products.

Sickness

I've never understood the majority of peoples actions when they get sick. At work I see the following behaviour all the time. Someone comes in, and they are clearly coming down with a cold, headache, coughing, red eyes and generally not well. Funnily enough they rarely complain, except to reply that yes they're not feeling well, when directly questioned. They'll last that day, even coming in the next on many occasions, and then end up going home sick for a day. The day after they were at home they'll be back at work either still sick, or JUST starting to recover. Usually a day or two after that someone else in close proximity to them gets sick and the cycle repeats itself.

Now I'll freely admit my work ethic isn't as strong as some people's but I just don't undertsand the above scenario. I've been sick about 6 days in 15 years now, so I guess I'm a little biased but I suspect that my actions have a large part of why that number is so low. When I start to feel unwell, it's unusual, and guess what? At that point in time I call in sick, relax, have vitamins, eat well, sleep and generally look after myself. The next day I'm normally fine and I trundle into work. I'd guess that I feel unwell about 4 times a year, which starts to fit into normal metrics on average sickness levels. What I don't understand is why do people let themselves get so sick so as to have to take time off work, often for extended periods of time? Why, when they are sick do they try and "soldier on" ? I work in high powered positions and I've basically NEVER, in my entire career, seen anyone who a company couldn't do without for a couple of days. Why, when they are still sick, do they come in to work and infect other people? What is it about sickness that causes otherwise sensible people to forgo logic and just act like idiots?

Accurate Cold

It has recently got a little colder in Europe, which has resulted in the usual round of eveyone complaining about how cold it is and how out of character for this time of year etc etc. The fact that it is the middle of Winter and the coldest time of the year and only recently dropped below 3 degrees celcius seems to have escaped them, I mean if its not meant to be cold at this time of the year when is it? Of course the answer is, that most people NEVER want it to be cold, but I'm getting used to that idea now after being subjected to it for 29 years. What I find it really hard to get used to is that the various news agencies around the world are buying into the cold mania and losing all ability to give accurate reports. A good example is the recent Russian "cold snap".
It seems that around a week or so ago Russia, or more accurately, the Moscow region was subjected to unusually cold weather. The weather was so bad that many people died from freezing to death and all kinds of emergency measures were brought into place. I don't for a moment suggest that this was not the case, but what I found interesting was the disparity of reporting on the event. This disparity fell into two main categories. The first, was the difference in recorded temperature. A friend of mine said that he read in the German media that it reached -39 degrees celcius, a quick search on the net found this article which says -24 degrees, this article that says -31 and yet another article that doesn't give a precise temperature at all. I find it absolutely amazing that these articles, most from fairly reputable news sources can have such a discrepancy about the temperature of Moscow, the largest city in Russia, but it doesn't end there.
The second way in which things differ from article to article is of course the records. Society now seems fascinated with records. Every day we have to beat more and more records and something isn't viewed as news worthy unless it does so. I guess with that in mind it should come as no surprise that almost every article about the cold weather seems to feel a need to mention how it breaks some kind of record. What was amusing to me was that once again, despite a large chunk of evidence and recorded fact each report comes up with differing "coldest day in Moscow" and how, depending on the widely varying temperature that it was on those days, how it was broken or almost broken. How can it possibly be that there is such disagreement about an event that happened a few days ago, in a large city? I suspect the answer ties into the fact that almost all europeans seem to be fixated on the weather and the natural human tendancy to exaggerate.
While I'm on the subject of cold weather, perhaps a reader can explain to me why the following (admittedly a somewhat unsavoury topic but nonetheless curious) seems to never occur, visible farts. I've lived in some colder part of the world for a while now, certainly I've been in weather that was cold enough to freeze breath very often and yet i've noticed that you never, ever, see anyones farts. This was highlighted to me recently as I was standing at a bus stop with one other person in front of me with his back to me. I quite audibly heard the guy fart, but despite being a sub zero day, was unable to see a thing. The only explanation I was able to come up with is that breath was visible due to the moisture content and perhaps farts were invisible as they did not have enough moisture. I asked a few canadian friends of mine about the subject and (after the laughing stopped) they too were also unable to remember ever "seeing" a fart, despite the fact that where they grew up it was below freezing for vast amounts of the year. Please leave a comment if you think you know the answer to this conundrum :)

Listening

I'm in a fairly bellicose mood this morning so I thought I get a few rants out. Let me give a snippet of a recent phone conversation:
Phone rings
I pick up the phone and say "Shamsuls phone, Ben speaking, How can I help you?"
voice "Is this Shamsul?"

This phonecall is completely typical when I answer the phone for someone else. Now I accept that perhaps I am not always the most clear speaking person, so after it happened a few times I made a concious effort to enunciate and yet still the problem persisted. Then I realised that either the person calling was either unable to think fast enough to deal with the fact that someone else was answering the phone rather then the person they intended on speaking with and they needed the gap in the conversation by getting me to repeat information that they already knew OR that they just didn't listen. Given that its really not THAT challenging to adapt to someone else answering the phone I assume its people not listening. This I must admit I found a little bizare, that was until I went into the local sandwich shop.
Sandwich person "Hi sir, what would you like?"
Ben "Could I have a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwitch please"
Sandwich person "Would you like white bread sir?"
Ben "Yes, thats fine"
Sandwich person "Would you like butter on that sir?"
Ben "Yes"
Sandwich person "What would you like on that sir?"
Ben "Ham, cheese and tomato please"
Sandwich person "Salt and pepper sir?"
Ben "no thanks"
Sandwich person "With crusts sir"
Ben " yes please"
Sandwich person "How would you like that cut sir?"

Now if you examine the above conversation you will notice that although they actually ASKED me at the start of the exchange what I wanted, they didn't actually listen to my reply and consequently I had to tell them again. I have noticed that it seems to be the norm in our society to ask questions but not listen to the answer. Why has this come about? Of course another amusing side note is that even when I go back into the same sandwitch shop and ask for "a ham, cheese and tomato sandwitch on white bread with butter and no salt and pepper" I not only get a strange look but I get asked the same questions anyway.

Windows and temp files

As anyone that knows me can appreciate I am not a fan of windows. For some time now there has been only ONE thing that windows can do that I can't really do properly in Linux and that is play games. In particular Linux is rarely capable of playing any of the MMORPGs that I like to play, so to that end on my desktop machine I keep a couple of partitions free and install windows on them. Generally I install windows on its own partition, one that I can just blow away and reinstall every few months when the seemingly inevitable corruption sets in, and another which just stores things like the games themselves. I recently had cause to burn a dvd from an image I had stored on another machine, but given I was playing a game at the time I thought I would simply copy it across to my storage partition and burn it. Unfortunately upon examination I discovered I only had 1.5 GB of space free on my storage partition and the dvd image was 4.5gb. I started to look at data I had stored on the partition under the hopes that I could find something to delete and thus make enough room to copy the image over. Now here I will digress a little and point out that I HATE how by default windows won't let you do anything irrevocable, by that I mean, in a default windows install its a 4 step operation to really delete a file. You start off saying, delete that, then it says are you sure, then it puts it in the trashbin and then you have to delete the trashbin, then there is the automatic system snapshots and other things that go on. The long and short of it is that windows very effectively protects from the normal user making a fuck up and thus from that perspective I guess its a good thing, the problem starts when the user isn't the normal user. In my case when I ask the OS to delete something I expect it to be delete, right then right there, I don't want to have to go through hoops to get it to do that. Why not have this inbuilt protection? We all make mistakes I hear some of you say, well thats true we do but this protection comes at a cost, space. You see by making sure that you arn't really deleting the files windows has to store copies of the things that you delete everywhere, in our typical example there is the copy of the file in the trashbin and in the system snapshot. Now while thats fine if you have a HEAP of space, in my case I actively USE the 1.5tb of space i have on my network and I am not keen on windows wasting a significant portion of the space I make available to it on protecting me from mistakes (in reality I can restore things that I accidently delete even with all these things turned off, its just a pain). Theres the background now to continue with my main story. Anyway there I was poring through the partition trying to find something to delete and I noticed an option in the properties section that starts a windows cleanup wizard and I thought "its been years since I tried a util like that maybe its actually decent by now", so I started it up. Immediately I was presented with some choices about what kind of files it should look for / delete and being very cautious I only ticked the option I thought to be the least important, the one called "temporary files". After marking it I clicked the wonderful "Next" button and the system started to whir. I waited for about 10 seconds and then I started to think it was a little odd, it shouldn't take that long to find and list the temporary files for me, I waited another 20 seconds and then it proudly finished. It was about then that i noticed the terrible truth, windows in all its wisdom had decided that a "temporary file" was rather then the generally accepted use of the term meaning "a file that is generated during the course of normal use by an application and deleted at the end of the applications running" was actually in fact "any file that wasn't registered as belonging to a program as registered by the master install application list. This meant that because the majority of information was things like backups of my cd collection, games that were installed before the latest reinstall of windows (which resides on another partition for this very reason) were considered "temporary" and the result? All of them were deleted. Thanks a fucking bunch windows.

Frustration

A friend of mine recently had an experience with his bank. I find it interesting peoples responses to such incidents, personally I would have had the bank manager explaining to me why I can't access my own money and, if nothing further happened, I would have had the bank in court. Not that I would expect to actually achieve anything but because that kind of behaviour pisses me off SO much that I am happy to lose some time and money just to make a point.

Uptime

It seems appropriate after my recent blog about downtime to have one about uptime, especially as the lack of it recently has seen my frustration levels rise. While there are an ever increasing amount of "admins" in IT, it seems that there are an ever decreasing amount of enterprise admins. By enterprise I mean admins that know how to look after large sites and ensure uptime. That doesn't mean just making sure that the boxes are patched and functioning, but also that the design of the network and services can scale, respond to short, sharp spikes in load and generally be reliable at all times. I mean admins that know what it's like to lose thousands of pounds per second when your service is down and know how to avoid it. I say this because of two experiences in the last two days.

The first experience there was with world of warcraft. This is a new game that is set to be the next BIG thing in MMORPGs. Now for some time, Blizzard, the company that makes WoW, have been saying that they will have an "open" beta, meaning that the general public will get a chance to test the game before Blizzard marks it as ready for general consumption and final release. This is a great opportunity for people who might be interested in the game and try it out, people like me :) Now the problem with this is that the client to connect to WoW is 2.5gb, and when you have thousands of testers wanting to play that is a LOT of bandwidth needed to give each user a copy. Blizzard being scared of trying to host something like that themselves took a different route. What they did was told fileplanet that if they hosted the signup for the open beta, they would give fileplanet exclusive rights over the beta by giving them a whole heap of keys (that is the ability to actually get INTO the open beta, because while it is "open" in reality there were limited amount of positions to be filled). Fileplanet accepted and promptly started offering deals to "subscribe to fileplanet" and at the same time get "free entrance into the WoW beta". A wonderful marketing opportunity for them and Blizzard doesn't have to host it. A win all round yes? well actually NO. The problem was quite simple, despite the fact that fileplanet had obviously sold Blizzard on the idea based on their ability to host something like this, they quite clearly didn't have the skills to do it. Let me explain.

Now to jump forward a bit it turns out that the idea of anyone trying to serve out 2.5gb of data to a huge amount of yearning gamers frightened everyone involved so they came up with an interesting way around the problem by making the client you used to download the game client a custom built bit torrent client. For those of you that don't know what bit torrent is I encourage you to go its site and check it out, but for the purposes of this rant its enough to say how it works is that instead of having to download the 2.5gb from one server run by a company, instead you end up grabbing the file from other people who are downloading it as well thus allieviating the load on the companies servers. Now bearing this in mind we see fileplanet only had to do a few things:
1. provide an interface to sign up to the open beta. This was in the form on ONE webpage form which took some details you put in and dumped them into a database.
2. send the new signee a client with which to download the game (the aforementioned bittorrent client).
Now I happened to be up when the open beta finally went live and so I immediately headed over to get my key and sign up. Imagine my surprise when the company that had sold this entire idea to blizzard because of the power and size of their site, had fallen into a complete heap. For a start the web page just stopped, I mean completely halted. Then the errors started. It turned out the entire fileplanet site is run on some stupid conglomeration of MS .NET technology that quite clearly was simply not up to the task of servicing that many requests. Over the new 30 minutes I saw errors from the .NET technology, errors from the webservers, errors from the database, errors from protocols (ie timeouts) and just about everything else that could break did. Whats more you could almost SEE their technicians running around randomly restarting things and by the time they had moved on to the next broken component the first one had died under the load because it wasn't able to talk to anything else ( any decent admin would take the entire site offline, do what is needed then bring it all back at once). It would have been comical if it wasn't for the fact that I was trying to get some information out of this mess. The site was still useless a solid 8 hours later when I got up (on a different note I was able to get my key but that was because I sat there spamming a query into their DB when I knew it finally came up for a few seconds :). The whole incident really killed any faith I had in even large sites doing things "right".

The next incident that fired me up was the release of Firefox version 1 yesterday. Now this is the long awaited release of what I personally think is the best browser around right now and so I was keen to get my hands on the new version. Much to my chargrin when I went to www.mozilla.org it had slowed to a crawl, it took over 3 minutes to render one page. I was quite shocked because I always tend to think better of my free software friends then those that run MS apps but it seemed that the problem was not specific to an architecture but rather, simply a lack of good admins (I group architects in the group as admins as a good admin will do both). Now to be fair to mozilla.org it is possible that the load they experienced was simply NOT feasible to plan for, and at least their site was still working, albeit incredibly slowly. It is also possible that they knew their site would not deal with the load and that their design was near perfect BUT that they didn't have the money to setup the right infrastructure to deal with it, but I don't think so. Fileplanet certainly doesn't have that excuse as they are a commercial organisation dedicated to doing events like the WoW openbeta.

Where are all the admins?

Heating

Europeans have a phobia about air conditioning. It was one of the more amusing things when I first discovered it, I was talking at the Goethe Institut in Berlin with a bunch of Spanish women at the time and the topic came up and I started to say how good air conditioning was (it was 30 degrees + in Berlin at the time) when they all started to say that it was bad and caused all kinds of health conditions. Now anyone that has been to Australia will attest that most Australians live in air conditioning, especially at the work place, so to have these Spaniards (and shortly thereafter almost every european within hearing joined in on the argument) say that it was very bad for you caused me to break out in laughter. Now the fact may be that air conditioning isn't GOOD for your health but to say that it is bad strikes me as being irrational, after all I have never heard of anyone getting sick from air conditioning, sure the very occasional case of legionaires disease, and the more common shock of entering a cool room after being outside in the blazing Australian sun, but never anyone having serious issues, and certainly I myself had never been sick from Air conditioning. Anyway that was my first discussion about heating in Europe.

Having just got back from Prague this all came back to my mind because I have spent the last few days in such excessively overheated environments that I am now wondering if Europeans don't have any ability to regulate their own body temperature at all or, that they are all living in the past when Europe was actually cold and they needed that level of heating, and now, although they quite clearly don't, no one has bothered to play with the automated heating in the last 20 years and they continue to just heat everything to baking temperature. For the entire time I was in Prague it didn't get below 13 or so degrees. This is not what I call a "cold" temperature, in fact during most days it sat at around 18 degrees, which is mild by anyones standards. Yet despite this fact every single place you walk into has the heating on full ball, at one shop where I could see the thermeter it was over 26 degrees! This problem is just compounded if it ever does actually get a little cold. At one point in my old workplace it was 8 degrees outside and 29 inside! Now try to tell me that such huge differences in temperature is good for you, or that you can even work in such hot tubs! This all ties into my theory that Europe just doesn't have the cold weather that it used to do (eg winters during WWII) but that the people still think its a transient thing.

Spam

Spam normally means unsolicited email, but what has me shaking my head today is "comment spam". Get this, someone had enough spare time to write a few bots to examine rss feeds and then follow them back to their webpage origin and start posting random comments on blogs. Now the bots are not dumb, they use open proxies and constantly change their ips, the actual content of the comments is normally fairly meaningless and sometimes random, BUT the url that they use is the actual spam. In my case I already have a poker spam bot spamming my blog thats been up all of a few days. Naturally I have now put some mechanisms in place to stop it but it never ceases to amaze me that people think by putting a comment in an ordinary person's blog that they will somehow generate clicks. sigh

Opening Hours

Someone explain to me how it is that the majority of service industries can only manage to open 10-4 each day and still survive? Why is it that the majority of the work force manages to work at LEAST 9-5 and yet banks, post offices, any government department can only manage to staff themselves for a few hours a day. What's more someone explain to me how shops manage to make a profit when most of their clientele are still at work! I really don't get it, I feel like shouting to all the shops that are closed when I finish work at 6:30 to stay open for another hour or two and I would actually be able to buy something from them! I can't be the only one in this predicament.

zaurus

I have been wondering what to do about mobile technology for a while, by that I mean do you buy a telephone that is also a pda and mp3 player? or do you buy a pda that is also a mp3 player and a phone ? I always like to have best of breed products so the key question was do i sacrifice quality by combining all three into one function? For a long time now I have been very tempted to buy a zaurus, but I have put it off rationalising that I should wait for the next model because while the current model at the time didn't have inbuilt bluetooth, wireless and was running a slow cpu. Much to my relief a new zaurus has come out and, lo and behold, it has almost precisely the same specs as the old one except that now it has a pitiful 4gb hd in it! This has really put an end to my considerations about buying a pda for some time, as I am really only interested in PDAs that run linux as that best integrates with my existing infrastructure. I am still in shock though that sharp would bring out a new model, with all its associated costs, with a tiny increase in cpu speed, a pathetic hd, and still no inbuilt wifi or bluetooth. Their official reasoning is that they are focussing on the Japanese market, but this seems rather shortsighted to me, and besides talking to my friends in Japan they say that wifi is important over there anyway!

Now I have to wait for another decent linux based pda (or pda I can make linux run on well, not have to shoe horn it in like a ipaq).

Email

Email is another topic of interest / rants for me. Few things have had such a great impact on the modern way of life as email and yet we still can't even agree on the term to use! Being a unix user, I was educated early on in how to use email correctly which involved a whole ettiquette (or should that be nettiquette?). This involved not topposting and quoting correctly. It seems that increasingly few people that use email have any idea on how to post so that their message is conveyed as legibly as possible, resulting in a mismatch of horrid text, formatted in all kinds of ways and entire messages quoted, when really all that was relevant was a line or two.
Reading through my inbox this morning I wonder if in my role as security admin I can enforce a policy on how to email :)

Browsing

I have never liked the term "surfing", as an Australian it doesn't exactly have many connotations with the electronic world, besides which it reeks of lameness. Instead I browse, although I have to admit I am not really what you would call a power browser, still I do spend some time each day looking up various things. I am inspired to write this because of two pet hates, browsers and badly designed webpages.

As a long time user of Linux I have been frustrated over the years by the lack of support for non IE browsers and while it is getting better (MS have done such a bad job with IE that people are actually leaving it in droves) there is still nothing more frustrating then going to a webpage and being told that "your browser is not able to view this site, please upgrade to IE 5+ and try again". Firstly I have no idea what they think IE 5+ can do that firefox can't but chances are they just do the check and reject you based on your user agent (the string that your browser sends to the server to identify itself and its capabilities). In reality you can probably view the site just fine, but because of some silly web designer who thought it was "kewl" to include a check and ban you, you can't view a thing. The other more frustrating thing is when you hit a web page and it is so heavily customised for IE that it really doesn't render at all in anything else. I know I am not alone in this, in fact over the years I have seen many amusing posts about this kind of thing, but it still never fails to frustrate you when you are on the receiving end. Personally I browse for information, and I want that information presented to me in an accessible, available manner, I don't want to have to dig through reems of shit, install 4 plugins and then spend 5 minutes digging through the site to find that information.

Browsers are another surprising thing for me. People continue to use IE. Think about that. This is a product that is so bad that even MS are completely rewriting it and have stopped releasing it as a stand alone product (although that was also due to their antitrust case) It has more security holes then any other browser in existance and probably more then most OSs. Now compare that with a product like Firefox. Firefox is a complete rewrite of Mozilla and has huge improvements over its predecessor. Aside from how good the rendering function is its the features that really set firefox apart, and even though many other browsers are now catching up to them (things like tabbed browsing etc are all firefox innovations AFAIK) there is one thing that still really sets firefox apart, plugins. Plugins allow you to turn your mild mannered browser into a superman of browsing kind. There are so many plugins out there that you can do almost anything you can imagine with them, from turning firefox into a rss reader, to doing dictionary checks with a click, to mouse gestures, to traffic shaping downloads there is a lot there. Click on the firefox link in my "Things I use" section and go see what I mean.