| More cars |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|08:54 am] |
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OK, now they won't give us a hire car because my wife has only been driving 1 month. Grrrrr. |
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| Cars |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|07:56 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
I bought a new car for my wife. It broke down after a few weeks, would not start. I gently rocked it, as I'd seen someone do this to a car before and it started. Unfortunately, the engine management warning light was lit amber, so we knew there was a problem. Lo and behold the car lasted until we got to our destination but when it was time to leave it would not start so we called the vehicle recovery company and their man managed to restart it so we could drive it home. He said we should take it to the dealer immediately but there was a problem with that. The dealer wouldn't accept it, they said the recovery man had reset the fault log and so they could not fix it, even though the recovery man had written down the entire contents of the fault log on paper.
So we continued to use the car, knowing that it might fail at any time. The car broke down again, this time during rush hour on a busy major road as my wife was driving home from work, alone. Again the recovery company got the engine running again but with the aim of getting the car to the nearest dealer. During this trip they followed behind in the recovery van and a good job too, the car engine shut down at 50mph causing my wife to have to take urgent action to stop safely. The car engine would not be revived this time and it was towed to a dealer about 35 miles from home and my wife was left to find her own way home using a combination of public transport and a taxi, finally getting back from work about 3 hours later than anticipated.
Today we should receive a courtesy replacement vehicle and find out what the dealer is going to do with our month old car.
The whole episode has been unsatisfactory, the dealer had a chance to examine our car and refused because of something the recovery man did. That is not our problem as owners of the car, it's under warranty and even the recovery company is part of the manufacturer's warranty scheme so anything that went wrong during that phase should be covered by them and not us. This includes recovery people not following proper procedure.
The "engine braking" effect that happens when the engine suddenly and unexpectedly shuts down is quite violent and if it had happened on a motorway at 70mph there would likely have been some sort of incident. I don't think it is acceptable that the dealer would not look at the car until something equivalent had happened which strikes me as irresponsible and dangerous.
To summarise: Grrr. |
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| Mobile Phones |
[Mar. 1st, 2009|08:05 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | phones | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  amused | ] |
They're not very good, really. Most of the lack of good is down to greedy network operators but the handset designers are guilty of massive oversights in their rush to create the next trendy waste of the earth's precious resources.
1. The iPhone: In this case Apple's hobbled implementation of its own hardware is a double edged sword. It eases the path to simplicity that makes the phone a joy to use and breaks the path to compatibility with various things that other phones do easily. Amazingly, unless you fall into particular niches this doesn't matter. I still can't bring myself to buy one, though.
2. The G1: This is a cheap smartphone running the relatively open Linux based Android platform. The hardware has reasonably specs but key things are missing or half-baked in implementation. It doesn't even have a 3.5mm jack. What were they thinking? People actually enjoy carrying around crazy adapters?
3. My old k800i: Annoying menu structure that really requires you to learn the habit of always leaving the phone at the equivalent of C:\ because the keylock keystrokes cause mayhem if you do them on any other menu. Great hardware in a needlessly blocky case, camera with a daft sliding lens cover that is tougher than expected but still catches on things. Really excellent radio quality, though and quite good at being an actual phone even if the ringer is a bit too quiet. Quite a full Bluetooth implementation, no fancy stereo headset support though, unless I'm mistaken.
4. My new and freshly retired Samsung Tocco: This is the worst mobile phone I've ever used and I've used some pretty dire phones. Bluetooth is quirky, doesn't seem to have PAN support. Touch screen is utterly useless. Menu structure considerably worse that the rubbish k800i, with Bluetooth settings placed as if at random in the Applications menu. Poorly translated popup dialogues and confirmers that seem to serve no useful purpose, having to click "save" when you change any settings instead of just navigating away (like a really poorly written Windows application, but without the excuses). Camera that is mediocre in the extreme, particularly at video. Call quality that could be best described as diabolical, signal meter that lies, battery meter that lies, address book that requires about 6 operations to edit one field of one contact. It's like a phone designed by someone who *enjoyed* using its awful touch screen.
I made the mistake of accepting a free upgrade that was considerably worse than the phone it replaced. I did this because of iPhone envy. Various iPhone applications, including Safari, were making me increasingly unhappy with my old and simple phone. So if anyone is interested in buying my Samsung Tocco, it's going cheap. Ideal for masochists. |
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| White macbook audio |
[Feb. 7th, 2009|05:43 pm] |
I've read complaints about the quality of the audio that comes from Apple products built-in DACs and I've found it a bit suspect at times. Today I was listening to Weird Fishes by Radiohead on iTunes (ripped from my CD and encoded to mp3 at the highest bitrate that iTunes will use). I spotted quite a lot of distortion in addition to the deliberate stuff that Radiohead put there, so I did something that is counter-intuitive to an audio engineer, I turned up the Mac's master volume all the way and backed up the passive attenuator that I have between my power amp and the Mac's line out. The distortion went away and it started to sound more like the CD.
Seems that the distortion is coming from whatever algorithm Apple uses to scale down the words going to the DAC.
I was reading this post and its replies on analogueindustries.com which mentions summing buses in DAWs sounding different. This should be mathematically impossible, but clearly people are hearing differences which suggests that summing isn't what's happening.
Summing results in larger magnitude words than the bit depth of any of the sources, the Mac's volume control will always do the opposite of that. So, adding and subtraction is what we're talking about.
It's fair enough that if I do a lot of subtraction with the volume control, the number of bits left to represent the signal will be reduced and distortion, or more accurately aliasing, is inevitable. This isn't what I'm hearing. I'm talking about maybe 6dB down and what sounds like >10% thd (I could probably measure it if I didn't have better things to do like go to the pub shortly). It's also fair enough that a summing bus will need to do calculations at a great bit depth and then potentially be attenuated in order to fit into the available number of bits, so there could be subtraction going on at the final stage. It's still a linear and non time dependent transformation, I can't see how people have implemented it in ways that cause audible problems.
Baffled. |
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| False alarm |
[Jan. 21st, 2009|05:31 pm] |
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The ebay seller that could so easily have not been legit turned out to be normal, at least in the "really having item for sale" department. In the "shipping item in a flight case electrical-taped closed with address label sellotaped to it" department there were small problems. Firstly I'm amazed the item was still in the flight case when it arrived and secondly the item turned up rather scratched at the insides of the rather elderly case had self-destructed in the parcel force van and some big nails wandered around the front panel a bit. It's fine though, the item is fully functional and in mint condition apart from the maker's name being rendered nearly being unreadable thanks to the nails. It was a bargain, so I shouldn't complain. I am happy with it. ebay once again proves to be scarier than necessary. |
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| Bloody ebay |
[Jan. 15th, 2009|11:10 pm] |
Probably just got scammed on ebay *again*. It's impossible to spot hacked auctions until after you've paid, the seller has great feedback that is bang up to date, is selling items that seem to fit in with their history of buying and selling at a price that isn't too good to be true but is rather cheap. Then when you pay with paypal and the seller who is listed as "from a town in the midlands" has a .ru email address. Nice. Stay classy, ebay!
What I don't get is why ebay doesn't have an indication that the paypal details for a seller have recently changed, or better still, recently changed to a webmail provider in russia! |
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| Cycling on the cycle path |
[Jan. 15th, 2009|03:29 pm] |
As I was cycling towards the Esso filling station a PCSO was striding towards me with his stopping arm raised, so I stopped.
He asked me if I was aware that it was still an offence to ride a bicycle on a pavement. I had to point out the shared use cycle path sign that was barely 3 metres from his head but behind him. The pavement is also marked out with dotted give way lines at the drop kerbs and those parallelograms of white paint that they put around poles. I was surprised he didn't notice this. He offered a polite retraction, which was nice.
I was less surprised that he didn't notice the truck and trailer that was dangerously parked half on and half off the cycle path at the entrance to the filling station about 6 metres from us, in the direction from which he had come. There was barely room for a pedestrian to squeeze past it on the pavement and any who did would be totally blind to traffic entering the filling station. I suggested that the PCSO may have overlooked this and he seemed to nod in agreement but didn't actually do anything about it. At this point a lady on her way to a job interview asked me for directions, having passed the PCSO.
If a police officer (and presumably a PCSO too) advises you not to do something, even though it's perfectly legal, you really do have to obey on grounds of public safety or whatever but there are fewer scenarios where challenging that advice should be forbidden. It's not a problem with small matters, but it can be a problem in more serious situations where the Police advice seems illogical and there is lethal force involved. Being a police officer seems to involve constantly making split-second decisions based on what can often be incomplete information. Sometimes these decisions are mistakes but can be interpreted as aggression and the whole situation turns into widespread civil unrest.
Sometimes the mistakes involve innocent and rather baffled people being shot dead. It's one of those human thought process bias flaws, but it's also about individuals not being observant enough. |
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| Bridisco returns |
[Jan. 12th, 2009|04:14 pm] |
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The BDC and Bridisco websites are now displaying a holding page after a weekend holiday. Micromark hasn't returned but maybe it will. So, it looks as though the company has been saved although until I see a press release I'll not count any chickens, not that I have any chickens personally involved. Let's hope more businesses are able to beat the downturn and fight back against the unfavourable credit situation. |
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| Javascript too far |
[Jan. 11th, 2009|09:32 pm] |
I've just found something that contains this...
<script type="text/javascript" src="z80/z80_full.js" />
In fact it contains a complete ZX Spectrum! |
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| Bridisco vanishes from the internet |
[Jan. 9th, 2009|10:30 pm] |
It could be a temporary blip but the websites of the companies in the BDC group that I wrote about in November have all become unavailable. It looks like the servers are down or a router has been switched off between the servers and the internet. I could be reading too much into this but I noticed that the website of Micromark had a "factory clearance" offer going on a few days ago and did not appear on the parent company front page as a link any more.
EDIT: The annoying snapshot thumbnailer has a cached version of the BDC homepage containing a set of temporary links to the various group member sites. I wonder how long that was around for, certainly seems to have gone now. |
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| Place of learning. Oh, really. |
[Jan. 3rd, 2009|09:20 pm] |
So a collection of school stakeholders has realigned the cognitive index of their educational entity such that it is no longer known as a school but rather a place of learning.
I am going to have to think about this for a while, since it's none of my business.
A school implies a number of pupils or younger stakeholders sharing a building or an enclosing superstructure or superstructures. This has been deemed inadequate and quite rightly so, since it's possible to conduct lessons outside the building for instance, in the playground or the staff car park. Using "Place" shifts the emphasis to the general area where learning is happening rather than the building or indeed the collection of younger stakeholders. Learning is a rather more controversial term as it passes over the opportunity to celebrate the existential aspects of being a younger stakeholder. It is just another example of spin, like changing the "of" in most government departments to "for" to make them sound proactive rather than reactive or prescriptive. This also happened to London Transport, which eventually turned into Transport For London, as though at some stage it had been secretly plotting to sabotage unauthorised forms of transport that were not approved by the state.
My hope is that at some stage in the distant future the people responsible for this redundant name change will realise that words can be subtle and using more words merely to avoid a particular word is not a sign of being educated and having understood the power of words. Their actions make them appear ignorant and insensitive. School means many things and anyone who passes through their place of learning will still refer to it as a school. |
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| Happy year increment |
[Jan. 1st, 2009|12:05 am] |
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And at this time, spare a thought for Microsoft's Zune. |
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| Too big to fail |
[Dec. 30th, 2008|03:21 pm] |
I am curious about what would happen if one of the so-called too big to fail corporations failed. There are media predictions of widespread chaos and unrest but I reckon it'd be a non-event or more accurately a cascading series of non-events as the enterprises built on the premise that the status quo should be maintained at all costs fade away. After the dust settled people would realise that they need to have a degree of organisation in order to maintain fuel and food supplies and this would be improvised at first and replaced with something more efficient quite swiftly. There are simply too many opportunities for new business success in a situation where a series of big corporate failures have occurred. This is how the capitalist system is supposed to operate, too, i businesses that fail whether it be due to loss of trust (the underlying problem with most of the too-big-to-fail businesses) or business model obsolescence.
It's maddening that the broken, untrustworthy businesses are being propped up by governments, this is entirely daft. It protects the people who are responsible for the loss of trust. This isn't one group, either, which is why the scale of the problem is so hard to understand.
We have those people who did not adapt their business rapidly enough to meet the needs of investors and consumers. Another group of people with the big ideas that served only to provide more money for shareholders by bamboozlement of dim-witted investors. Greed changed from being an incentive to being the only factor to take into consideration, the product became irrelevant because in many cases there wasn't one. It's the difference between pulling off the old practical trick of fractional reserves and plain and simple deception. At some point everyone in the financial services industry believed that they were genuinely capable of creating real money out of nothing, a trick that only works within the tighter confines of the traditional banking model and not so well in the longer term when you throw in concepts that are based on near zero-knowledge risk analysis, something that you'd see in a bookmakers. Add in regulation that was aimed at technical rather than ethical danger areas and you create a new industry in engineering financial time-bombs, though I doubt they were ever marketed in that way. You end up with regulations that themselves expect a degree of normality that is impossible to provide once the system becomes unstable.
Because business expects the world to behave in a way that requires suspension of disbelief there's a big problem when things start getting real. It's a single point of failure problem, in engineering terms. The point of failure being the human brain's ability to believe because it wants to believe. I think it's called optimism and it's a double-edged sword. This is what the modern financial system is built on, isn't it?
The same optimism that caused the design weaknesses could fundamentally save the system, but only if the other edge of the sword is allowed to chop through the dead wood. Dead wood that contains many of the ideas and institutions that have been taken for granted for the past 70 years. Dead wood that is too big to fail.
I must stop writing this pompous nonsense, but it gets it out of my system. |
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| Christmas Presents |
[Dec. 26th, 2008|02:08 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  cheerful | ] |
I've received a whole loads of CDs with strange stuff on them, some I asked for and some I didn't. The ones I asked for are great, the ones I didn't are made of concentrated enjoyment. For me at least, I think they may be driving my wife potty. |
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| No excuses |
[Dec. 24th, 2008|12:28 pm] |
So it's worse than I thought, the mighty Boots can't even protect its supply chain from fake goods. Toothpaste supplied by a reputable supplier was found to be fake which means that reputable suppliers and reputable High Street names like Boots aren't particularly different from buying from the off-brand pound shops, internet or car boot sale. Great work, everyone involved, thanks to you the consumer can't trust anyone.
To add to the Christas cheer it seems that Zavvi has finally gone into administration. This was overdue. Any music store that shuts down its website in the pre-Christmas season has got to be about to implode.
Which is next? WHSmith is high on the list, it's like Woolworths in that it's trying to do too much and is failing dismally at all of it. It's also not particularly cheap as was pointed out to me the other day by a Waterstone's employee. I'm tempted to add Boots, but it's probably a little soon for that, even if they have demonstrated spectacular incompetence in allowing fake Colgate onto their shelves.
Loads of people are saying B&Q, which isn't really High Street. I reckon Homebase would go before B&Q. Trying to think of other High Street stores is getting harder!
DSGi (Currys and all that other crap) is pretty likely to fail, I reckon. We'll see.
This has been another depressing post. I'm sure there'll be a good one along in the new Year. |
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| Darkness |
[Dec. 23rd, 2008|03:39 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  depressed | ] |
It's really dark outside, even darker inside. |
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| oh, the point of that post |
[Dec. 22nd, 2008|10:12 am] |
There's no point in having better ID for people or things because humans don't relate to exact identities, we have an inherent defect that makes uniqueness hard to understand or something.
The only way we live together is by trusting each other, not by attempting to devise a looney system of artificial trust. ID systems are doomed to fail or be exploited to such an extent that they undermine the very trust they were put there to enforce in the first place.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that you can't enforce trust. Trust just is. |
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| People need to understand information |
[Dec. 22nd, 2008|08:56 am] |
I've noticed stories about cloning of things, such as credit cards, documents or vehicle registration plates increasing recently. There's a problem with our understanding of data and information and how it all links together.
Example: We live in a house with a shared parking area, a few years ago vehicles would sporadically appear in this area and be left for up to a week then vanish. On closer scrutiny there was almost always something just a tiny bit suspect about them, perhaps invalid or fake tax discs, damage typical of use in crime (either for breaking down doors or escaping cross country, that kind of stuff) or the most suspect one - evidence of fake vehicle registration number plates.
When I called the police about these vehicles it was never accepted that my observations of things like self-adhesive pads on the visible side of existing plates or broken shards of number plate in the footwell was even slightly suspect but actually this could've been a policy-based attempt by the police to ensure that information leakage doesn't occur. Who, exactly, would not consider that fake plates could be used by criminals?
In one case, the police telephone operator seemed incredulous that I'd be concerned about a van which had obviously been driven through a shop window and whose crudely attached fake number plate had actually dropped off and was lying on the ground with another front plate visible in the passenger side footwell.
Even though I was only supplying raw data to the police, the presence of the vehicle, the unusual situation with the plates, the invalid tax, the fresh damage.
The data clearly turned into information pretty quickly as in each case the vehicles were towed in just a few hours.
A few years later, we have more prevalent use of ANPRS, which automatically logs the plates of passing vehicles and can perform realtime checks with various vehicle databases to detect crime. You can't even dispose of household rubbish without being scanned, where we live. Thing is, the media is not really picking up on the nonsense of using this single factor for identity. In fact, it's only just picking up on the stories at all. It may be really annoying to receive court summons because someone has been using a clone of your plate but it gets trickier if the plate matches your vehicle model and colour and the driver also matches your appearance. None of those things are terribly hard to clone if the criminal collects their own data.
For instance, if you worked in a shopping mall and had access to the CCTV from the parking area you could run your own profiling operation by spotting the ethnicity, gender and height of the vehicle owner, run OCR on the plates as the vehicle exits or enters through the barriers. You could even work out which stores the vehicle owner had visited by identifying the branding on bags they were carrying. Once you had done that you'd have more information than the courts need to make a convincing case that "the other guy" was the driver when you were speeding.
Securing the CCTV won't help. Even if you didn't have access to the official CCTV, you could easily improvise as there are plenty of very low cost image/video capture devices around.
The criminal, like a direct marketing guru, could have a very good understanding of the value of information. The average person, it seems, does not have an understanding, does not have a willingness or acceptance of the power of information and would prefer to continue to live as they always have. This is a big problem for a few reasons.
Politicians are just average people. They don't necessarily have a deep understanding of issues, the decisions they make are based on heavily filtered, brewed, simmered and generally as far removed from raw data as it's possible to get. This kind of information has almost no value left in it. This information is often politically expedient rather than factual. Decisions are then based on this selective information. There is, in fact, now an agency responsible for ensuring that information collated by the government and released to the public is free from various biases, what it doesn't do is prevent the politicians from consuming their own information in a biased way but how can you stop that?
There is an increasing trend to have the number plates of cars in images that are shown in public obfuscated to deter cloning. I've done it myself on images I've posted on flickr but I'm not convinced that it does anything except make me feel better. It's just so trivial to create a very comprehensive underground vehicle image database using inexpensive technology and cheap labour, the whole "public images" thing is a red herring.
The only solution that I can think of at the moment would be to leave the plates as they are but make the vehicles carry challenge/response transponders and ideally one other form of identity. It'd be unpopular because of the privacy issues, but it's the only sane thing to do. Technology has moved on to the point that the physical appearance of a car isn't unique enough to use as an identifier.
And this is where the whole debate shifts to ID cards. The only way to do them right is to do challenge/response on the card and to biometrically lock the card to the person in such a way that it can only be confirmed as locked or otherwise. This biometric data must NEVER leave the card. The moment it's stored in a central database it becomes extremely vulnerable. Like a car a person can carry a transponder but without biometric linking this transponder is going to be pretty much useless. Our cats both have them and our cat flap recognises them electronically and lets them in, keeping other cats out. These cat transponders are dumb as toast, designed to power themselves up as the challenge and to spew an unchanging string of binary as a response. They're very easy to copy but luckily none of the other cats have figured out enough about RF engineering yet and the cat food is safe.
If you attempted to copy a challenge/response that included factors based on biometrics, you'd have to copy the physical characteristics of the original owner. The problem here is that you'd have to perform the same biometric tests, or at least some of them (assuming you also had multiple levels of trust built into the algorithm), to validate the response. So what happens? Even when this system is implemented there's a tendency to misunderstand it and use the lowest trust level in lieu of the higher ones. An example of this also happened to me when I was eventually banned from a data centre for demonstrating the flaw. I had been allowed into the data centre based purely on association with other people, eventually getting my own photo ID which I had used a number of times to enter. The flaw being that the procedure should've prevented me getting a photo ID until I'd supplied a palm print as the primary method of entry was by palm print. I had been circumventing this based on my photo ID and knowledge of the company I worked for. When, one day when I was in a hurry I was not allowed to enter based on the same credentials I'd been using for several months I was told that I could provide a palm print immediately to get access. I refused as this was completely ridiculous, I had no ID with me and this meant their procedure for palm prints would be invalid anyway. Admittedly I lost my cool at this point and just walked through the security gate when they opened it for someone else to further indicate how dumb their security setup was, which was a bad move that eventually got me banned and their security comprehensively reviewed. Would never join a club that'd have me as a member anyway though...
The problem is that humans don't really do multi-factor security very well, small defects in procedure can create enormous holes. Single factor is insecure to start with and relies more on implied social contracts.
And this is where the news that bailiffs can smash your door down and beat you up in your own home kicks the whole shebang to a new level of bizarre. Not only do debt recovery companies often get the debt part wrong (I've had letters claiming I owe money when I don't, for instance) but they often get the identity of the defaulter wrong either because it's fake or outdated. If there's a better recipe for causing civil unrest I'm sure I don't know what it is.
Send in the unicorns. |
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| Spotting counterfeit goods |
[Dec. 21st, 2008|11:13 am] |
As the High Street fades away and online purchases take over, how can we spot fakes?
If you walk into a reputable shop you're usually presented with goods that have come from a relatively secure and heavily audited supply chain. The chances are these things are the genuine article. If you buy online you may be relying on reputation. In many sectors reputation can be decent even with fake goods if the quality is high enough, so it's not a single deciding factor. I reckon it's going to be increasingly difficult to spot fakes and so there will be more and better fakes.
If that wasn't enough, I spotted the brand reputation changes happening from the High street yesterday. Shopping in B&Q for a Christmas tree I wandered into the light bulb section and saw that the two prevalent brands for energy saving technology were new brands I'd never heard of including the confusing "Megaman" brand which seems to be the Behringer of the lighting world. Apparently we now have to trust something that sounds like a cartoon character instead of a corporation. Why the likes of Philips, Osram or GE didn't buy these upstarts is probably one of the questions that will be asked of the administrators who are called in to sell off their remaining assets, eventually. The banks probably didn't believe technological change could happen that fast but I'll leave that discussion to someone who has researched it.
In this crazy future world we should be buying things which we don't understand that are made by companies we've never heard of from people we've never met using money that we've borrowed from ourselves. Or something like that! |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 20th, 2008|05:27 pm] |
I'm still struggling towards releasing my PHP framework for databases that are real databases. It's still known as Working Title Framework, the problem is I keep adding code to it within a specific project but it's generic code that doesn't belong to anything other than the framework. I need to get a separate repository going so everything stays in its own place.
Maybe by mid-January I'll have it sufficiently self-contained to release. My brother has pointed out that it's currently nearly impenetrable to anyone who doesn't have a lot of ORM/CMS experience and to get around this I need to bundle a few real world example applications based on the framework, so I'll have to invent these as well.
Meanwhile, the economy continues to reveal its true self to the masses just like a previously cloaked tormented sci-fi monster. People don't know whether to feel sorry for it or shoot it. |
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