Archive for January, 2007
Feed weirdness
The RSS feeds from this blog are misbehaving: while they should all be full feeds (ie, each entry is the full post rather than a summary) the RSS 2.0 one is only serving up article summaries. For the time being I’d recommend the RSS 0.92 link or the Atom 0.3 link.
If any WordPress users are kicking about, I’d appreciate your advice: the blog settings are full-feed and I can’t find any option or setting that would make one feed abbreviated.
“U.S.: Killer confesses to 3 more child killings”
Not a news story; a spam subject line. I know it’s a transparent attempt to get through spam filters (and it doesn’t work, because I have SUPER SPAMSIEVE POWER!) but over the last few days there have been lots of these, with a distinct emphasis on violent killings. I suspect that says something rather depressing about human nature.
Mind you, I’m still getting surreal ones too: “Sea lion misses water, ends up on dairy farm - video”, anyone? And of course there are still plenty of messages telling me that I have a small penis, only some of which were written by Mrs Bigmouth.
Survey finds that most Brits are idiots
An overwhelming majority of people in Britain are willing to surrender civil liberties to help tackle the threat of terrorism, the nation’s leading social research institute will disclose today.The survey found seven in every 10 people think compulsory identity cards for all adults would be “a price worth paying” to reduce the threat of terrorism. Eight in 10 say the authorities should be able to tap the phones of people suspected of involvement in terrorism, open their mail and impose electronic tagging or home curfews.
The sweet smell of hypocrisy
This is the cover of this week’s Now magazine:
It’s pretty appalling, but the worst bit is the editor’s letter. As it explains, Now employed Jade Goody as a columnist until November of last year, and her contract is well and truly terminated. The implication is that Now has sacked her because of her Big Brother performance, presumably by using a time machine, and the ed’s letter basically says “we employed her but we didn’t realise that she’s more evil than Hitler. Burn the witch!”
There’s a sad irony here: Now’s appalled at what it sees as Goody’s bullying behaviour, so it’s decided to, er, bully her. Given that Jade isn’t the sharpest tool in the box and is hardly the most secure person in the world, this kind of vilification might have a very unhappy ending.
New WordPress version available
If you’re using WordPress to power your blog, there’s a brand new version available with a better post editor and lots of goodies. More information here.
Please don’t put blogs in my news feeds
Aggregators - sites that combine information from multiple sources and serve it up in one place - are enormously handy things, and one of my favourite ones is NewsNow.co.uk. It’s a simple idea that works well: news feeds from various sources, big and small, organised into category. Brilliant.
It’s not perfect, of course. Nothing is. In the case of NewsNow there’s always been lots of duplication, because different news sources tend to cover the same stories as one another; you get the odd problem with ancient articles popping up as brand new ones because of site malarkey; and quite a few of the linked headlines are to registration-only sites. But worst of all, over the last few months it seems to be giving blogs the same weight as news sources.
I like blogs. I read loads of them. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, blogs aren’t news: they’re commenting on news, or on things that have nothing to do with news. That’s great - in fact, that’s what I like about them - but it’s really annoying when you’re looking for hard news and just get screens full of shite. For example, the top story on NewsNow’s internet section yesterday was a blog post which basically said:
Here’s a mouse mat. It’s a new mouse mat. Do people still use mouse mats? I don’t use a mouse mat. Do you use a mouse mat? If you do use mouse mats, this is a new mouse mat. But I don’t use mouse mats, so I wouldn’t buy this. But if I did use mouse mats, I might buy this mouse mat.
The most important technology story in the WHOLE WORLD!!!!!111111
It’s been bugging me for ages, and the reason it happens is obvious: the NewsNow system is entirely automated, and like most automated things it’s as dumb as concrete. What’s missing is people to make fine judgements about what is and what isn’t relevant - or if that’s not doable, a button that enables you to filter out the blogs (or the news sites, if it’s blogs you want to find).
Citroen Xsara Picasso owners are the worst drivers in the world
This is one of those theories I can’t prove, but which I know in my gut is right: Citroen Picasso owners are the worst drivers in the world. I’m not being funny, either: when I see one I start driving like one of those Institute of Advanced Motorists chaps who drives on the basis that other road users are actively trying to kill you. If they’re driving a Picasso, they are.
To take just one (of very many) examples, I was behind one yesterday as we turned on to a motorway slip road. “Did I ever tell you my theory that Picasso drivers are the worst drivers in the world?” I asked Mrs Bigmouth. As she was about to reply, the Citroen misjudged the corner, mounted the kerb, came back on to the road and wobbled alarmingly. We kept well back as it weaved its way down the slip road and joined the motorway, and as soon as it was safe I dropped a gear and pulled into the next lane. At which point the Picasso tried to drive into the side of my car. The driver didn’t look, didn’t indicate, and appeared to be playing with the centre console of her car. She was driving at 70-plus miles per hour and seemed completely unaware of anything outside the car.
If I didn’t have a long track record of Xsara drivers trying to kill me, I wouldn’t have been anticipating kamikaze moves and I probably wouldn’t be here.
I think what makes Picasso drivers so dangerous is that other bad drivers are predictable. The middle manager in the C-class Merc will always drive like a wanker; the sales rep in the 3-series will always drive as if he’s in a war; the 4×4 with the blacked-out windows (a) can’t see you (b) is wrestling with suspension that turns even the smoothest road into a bouncy castle and (c) is racing to a drug deal / to pick the kids up from private school; the ned in the Max Power Corsa will always attempt dangerous overtaking, undertaking and general wombling. But Picasso drivers are just mental, alternating between raw aggression, utter terror, attempted suicide and formula one racing every few seconds.
I know a few Xsara owners, and outside their cars they’re lovely. Nice. Normal, even. But put them behind the wheel and they become nuts. There’s got to be a reason for it, but I’m buggered if I know what it is.
[photopress:76_crash.jpg,full,pp_image]
Image: A Citroen Picasso being driven normally
The doggy destroyer
One for the dog owners… any ideas how to stop a dog being destructive for no good reason? We’ve been through the “I have teeth and must destroy things!” period and Megan’s been fine for months, but all of a sudden she’s discovered the joys of eating things again. If we leave her for as little as an hour we’ll come back and find something shredded: so far the total includes an address book, stacks of newspapers, a dozen magazines, three books, a phone book, the Yellow Pages, a catalogue and a CD case.
She knows she’s done something wrong - and we know before we see it, because she hides when we come home - but I’ve no idea what to do about it other than hope it’s a phase she’ll grow out of and hide everything in the meantime. Any ideas?
Another mobile phone study
This one’s important: it’s looking at long-term use of phones. I interviewed the man behind the proposed new study, Professor Lawrie Challis, for last month’s PC Plus story on electrosensitivity and other tech-related health scares, and he’s a great example of how the “no evidence” side of health issues should be addressed (he’s a great interviewee, too. I could have filled the magazine ten times over with his interview alone). Here’s a quick extract from the PC Plus feature where he talks about the evidence for mobile-related nasties:
“We’ve studied a whole raft of things from blood pressure to memory, attention, hormone levels, balance, inner ear function…” he says. “And so far, we’ve found absolutely nothing, which is consistent with other studies that have been carried out. Ours is the biggest study of its type, and I think it’s fairly clear that there are no short-term effects on the brain’s function… none of the studies we have supported, nor the other studies that have come out around the world, have found any connection between mobile use and brain cancers or brain tumours.”
There’s a fairly big caveat, though. As Professor Challis points out, studies have looked at people who’ve been using mobile phones for fewer than 10 years - largely because mobiles weren’t widespread before then - but “nearly all cancers take more than ten years to develop”. In a few cases, where people have been using mobiles for more than ten years, “there seems to be a very small correlation between brain tumours and mobile phone use.” However, that correlation could be experimental bias or a statistical anomaly.
“There are still holes in what we know,” Professor Challis says.
In essence, then, we’ve looked and looked again and there’s no evidence of any danger, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep looking.
In defence of the iPhone
I’m going to be on Radio Scotland’s MacAulay and Co to talk about mobile phones on Tuesday morning. The piece is partly because of the iPhone hype, and partly because of a PayPal survey that suggests a majority of Brits have no idea how to use their various gadgets. According to the survey, phones are the worst offenders - and I’d agree, because in my experience most phones are exceptionally unfriendly. You get used to their quirks over time, but there’s still a fairly hefty learning curve involved, especially if you want to do useful things such as get online. Too many phones seem to have been designed from a tech-centric perspective rather than a user-centric one, which is why even committed geeks turn the air blue when trying to make their phones do something useful.
Here’s a simple illustration of the problem: predictive text. Different firms use different keys, so even when phones have identical keypads the buttons do different things depending on whether you’re using a Sony, a Samsung, a Moto or a Nokia. Then there are differences between the predictive text systems, so the Sony Ericcson W950 loves turning the short word you’re trying to get into a huge long word you don’t want and have to delete. And there are differences between different models from the same manufacturer, so the predictive text on a SE W810 is slightly different from the system on the W950. And that’s before you get to the weird interface decisions, such as the W950’s use of the Blackberry-style thumbwheel for word selection, which is unintuitive when your fingers are on the keypad.
And that’s just texting, one of the simplest things our phones can do. Things get much worse when you start messing around with browsers (which is why I reckon everyone should dump their phone browser and use Opera Mini or Mobile instead. Unlike far too many phone browsers, Opera actually makes sense).
Reading the results of the PayPal survey and thinking about the various gadget niggles that really piss me off, it’s made me think that I’ve probably been too negative about the iPhone, particularly in the .net podcast where I took the role of Reality Distortion Field escapee.
For all its flaws - and, unless you’re a real fanboy, there are some pretty obvious ones - the iPhone’s really important feature is its interface (I’m not just saying this from screenshots - the MacFormat chaps have had a proper play with the iPhone and they’re extremely impressed). While in many respects the iPhone does much the same thing that Windows Mobile devices have done for years, the big difference between the Apple version and other firms’ versions is that its interface won’t be shite.