The Electric Wand : Random Stuff

Ferrari powered by Sharepoint

Ewan — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:07:00 GMT

I noticed that the Sharepoint case study for Ferrari today, posted at the end of July – link here. The case study includes a cool video hosted in a nice Silverlight player – looks really slick and well worth a look, especially if you’re one of the Tifosi or just like Ferrari road cars.

On a related note, if you’re a fan, check out one of the best car-related ads I think I’ve ever seen – Shell host a high-quality streaming version of it on their site:

The noise of the flat-12 F312B driving through Hong Kong makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up every time I’ve watched it…

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Ewan — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:35:51 GMT

Firstly, apologies for the silence in recent weeks – it’s been a busy time and, well, y’know. Once you’re a week or two behind blog posting, you might as well be a month or two behind…

Anyway. Lots has happened IT-wise in the last few months. Windows 7 press seems to be going well (shock, even some Mac users think it’s not awful, though maybe it’s too Mac like…), and the RTM last week [from our annual sales conference held this year in Atlanta, in past years the source of the various Ballmer videos that can be found online] has the potential to kick-start a new wave of PC innovation in both hardware and software.

The iPhone 3GS has launched to near universal acclaim, even if it costs £1700 to upgrade for existing fans. Hats off to Apple on another great product release – Windows Mobile is now so far behind it’s almost an also-ran: despite some great devices like the HTC Snap, which I had a play with the other day … that, for me, is the ideal device: I've never got on that well with ‘touch’, and a slim, 3G device with a decent keyboard is hard to beat.

The buzz in the press a few weeks ago (and inspiration for the title of this post) concerned Google’s Chrome OS. Essentially, a Linux kernel fused to a Chrome browser, with enough drivers to make it work on various bits of hardware (principally Intel based netbooks), at least as far as I can tell. Maybe I’m missing the point, but I don’t see it as being all that revolutionary, or even all that functional… and others appear to be saying the same thing.

Things get more complicated, though, when trying to understand Google’s plan for where this OS/browser fusion is going – especially when thinking about the Native Client project, which aims to provide a way of executing rich client code natively on the host PC rather than going through JavaScript or similar.

It seems that Google is putting a lot of effort into reinventing the Operating System, even though there are plenty of good ones out there already… but to what end? Is the end result going to be more “open”? More secure (than Windows, or Mac, or any of the major Linux distros)? Or is it just that Google wants to control everything the end users do, and what data they do it with?

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) wrote about a previously hyped revolution in the way we’ll all work, the Network Computer. 10 years ago, the story was that all our apps would move to a new paradigm, be written in Java, and delivered to the Network Computer – NC – on demand. The PC model was dead.

Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) was a driving force behind that initiative, at Sun. Maybe he thinks it’s time to try again?

I had to laugh at the brilliant Fake Steve Jobs’ “Dear Eric” post, highlighting something of the impending conflict of interest between erstwhile partners, GOOG and AAPL, as the anti-trust investigators start circling and looking for transgressions. With Google and Apple competing on mobile device OSs, potentially on desktop OSs and on browsers (although Chrome currently does use the same heart as Safari), how long before they start putting clear air between themselves in other areas? Maybe we’ll see Apple putting their arms around other search engines, and not hard-coding Google as the provider in Safari?

Last year, Wired magazine mocked the “Don’t be Evil” motto, by featuring an “Evil Meter” – maybe it’s time for an update?

Formula 1 back on the BBC – only 2 weeks to go…

Ewan — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:09:51 GMT

I haven’t been looking forward to an F1 season as much, for ages – since the Damon Hill years, probably. A number of things are helping to build anticipation:

Rule Changes – this year, the FIA has torn up the rule book somewhat by resizing aero components of the cars, introduced hybrid-style energy recovery from braking, moved back to slicks etc.

The best explanation I’ve seen of all of the changes comes from a cool video from Red Bull…

Honda/Brawn GP looking good – I’m a Honda fan. I like Ross Brawn. I think Jenson Button has been unlucky with the car/team selection for years, and Rubino is the most experienced (and some say, the nicest guy) of all the drivers on the grid. They deserve to do well – and reports from the latest testing indicate they’ve nearly a second faster than everyone else, with defending champ Lewis Hamilton’s Mclaren team looking very much like they’re on the back foot. You can be sure that the Woking lads & lasses won’t be willing to give up the title without a fight…
BBC Footage – Brundle. Good. Coulthard. Great. Jordan. Legend. Oh, and the trailer footage …

… forward to 00:50s into the clip and you’ll find perhaps the best thing about F1 coming back to the BBC…

The Chain.

Sorted…

Sign of the times: new car registrations

Ewan — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:26:00 GMT

I recall the 1st of August in years gone by, as the day that new car registrations would be released – in the UK, if you didn’t know, car registration numbers are centrally issued and every year, the prefix or suffix letter used to advance. For a young boy, it was really quite exciting to spot the first cars with the new registration, and people buying new cars would wait to take delivery on the 1st August, so their pride & joy would have the latest ‘plate.

A few years ago, the system changed (to try to smooth demand out a bit more, so there wasn’t a huge spike in new car registrations in August, but a dearth in June/July…), to being twice a year, on 1st March and 1st September. The prefix/suffix letter scheme also changed to be a numerical advancement, based on the year.

It’s now the 12th March and I’ve yet to see an “09” registration, even though I’ve been travelling on the motorways most days, and for the last few (since realising this), I’ve been actively looking, but found nothing…

Is this a barmoter of the economic slowdown?

Happy 1,234,567,890 seconds since 1/1/1970

Ewan — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:33:00 GMT

Well there’s a thing. CNET reported that today officially marks the 1.2-odd billion seconds past the beginning of 1970, a standard that’s used in UNIX (and by the C programming language) as the basis for all time measurements. If you’re reading this before 23:31:30 on Friday 13/2/09 then you can see the countdown clock on http://coolepochcountdown.com/. Who knows what will happen after?

Actually, let’s hope they figure out how to patch all Unix (or 32-bit C) systems before 03:14:08 19th January 2038, otherwise we could all be in big trouble. Unix time is typically represented by a signed 32-bit integer (so has 2^31 positive values, ergo 2,147,483,648), and maybe we’ll be dealing with Y2k38 or something like that.

Apparently there was some debate about whether to use a signed or unsigned integer here – Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C and co-creator of Unix) figured it would be quite nice to numerically represent all the days he would live (since he was born in 1941, and if they’d used an unsigned integer, then time would have started in 1970 …)

Fortunately, modern Windows systems aren’t quite so dependent on this time code, though it is still heavily used. If you’re really interested in this field, there’s a comprehensive post on the oldnewthing MSDN blog. Turns out the Common Language Runtime (bedrock of .NET development) counts in 100-nanosecond intervals since the 1st of January “0001”.

Cor.

Look what I found in my loft: a 9-year old netbook

Ewan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:56:00 GMT

I splashed out a week or two ago, and bought a Samsung NC10 netbook – a bargain at under £300, and it runs Windows 7 really well.

Impressed with the size and utility of the thing, I recalled a forerunner of the netbook, so went rooting around in my “box of old technology that it pretty much useless but cost money so I can’t ever throw it away”, in the loft.

I came across an old laptop that in its time was known as a “sub-notebook”: we got two of these machines courtesy of Sony, to demonstrate Exchange 2000, specifically the Conferencing Server version, at a big partner event in Birmingham. It was, to date, the biggest audience I’ve ever stood in front of, at about 1,400 people. I had a few minutes to demo the still-in-beta Exchange 2000, and would be doing it jointly with the host for the conference, Jonathan Ross (gulp).

Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server – aka “Jasper”

I’m now struggling to remember when this was, but since Exchange 2000 released in November 2000 (as discovered by the very useful Microsoft Support Lifecycle page), I reckon it must have been early/mid-2000, which would mean the little Vaio has to be at least 8 or 9 years old.

Sony Vaio PCG-C1XN

The two Vaios we had were great – well, great for the time anyway, although even then they were very functionally compromised even when new. The one thing you could say about the machine was it was small, and cool.

Certainly not fast – a 266MHz Celeron CPU (a cut down Pentium II, in essence, for our younger readers), 64Mb of RAM and a 6.4Gb hard disk.

The machines originally came with Windows 98, but we decided to put Windows 2000 on them for the demo; subsequently, I upgraded it to Windows XP and it’s probably a bit too much for the little mite. Suffice to say, it won’t be getting any further along the Windows evolutionary scale.

Other features of note were the webcam (one of – if not the – first laptops to come with one built in, which was the reason we wanted them for the Conferencing demo). A single USB port, FireWire (or iLink as Sony insisted on calling it), a PCMCIA slot, infra-red (you don’t get that any more now, do you?) and a dongle which had composite-video and VGA, complete the mix.

So for our demo we had to install an early Wifi network (it might have been the very first 802.11b from Compaq, costing hundreds of pounds for the router and at least £100 per PCMCIA card). All of this for 8 minutes of Woss-y glory, swept away in the sands of time.

Sony never did ask for it back – I hung onto one, and Steve kept the other. I bet he’s still got it somewhere too.

Dust the old girl off

Enough of this misty eyed nonsense. Amazingly, on plugging the machine in and powering up (apart from my going into the BIOS and setting the clock), it started to resume from hibernate – and dropped me back into the logon prompt for WinXP. I had some head scratching to do, to remember the password – but when I logged in, it was the first time for 6 years and 3 months.

Surprisingly, the Vaio is about the same thickness as my Samsung, so it doesn’t look quite as archaic as you might expect a 9-year old laptop to.

It could even be called a “Netbook”, except there’s no networking on the thing – certainly no wireless, and even dial-up would have required an old modem like the Xircom PCMCIA card I literally just found in my office drawer.

Probably the biggest difference is the price when new. Adjusting for inflation and taking into account what the Vaio would have originally cost, it’s probably nearer £3,000 than the £300 for my NC10.

That’s Moore’s law for ya.

Top ten things for to do in 2009

Ewan — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:38:08 GMT

It seems this time of year brings out the soothsayer in lots of IT journalists and analysts, if the volume of “ten things to do” articles is anything to go by.

Mary-Jo Foley posted a couple of weeks ago on what she thought Microsoft might/should do this year.

Don Reisinger over at CNet gives his 5 predictions for home technology this year (no real surprises).

But, the funniest predictions article I’ve read in a while comes from Infoworld, regarding what Apple needs to do in 2009. Mitch Wagner compares Steve Jobs to Willy Wonka…

And that's the real reason Steve Jobs didn't attend Macworld this year. He hinted he skipped it for health reasons. But the real reason is that he's on an overseas excursion, looking for Oompa Loompas he can replace Apple's employees with.

Priceless :)

How to wash your car properly

Ewan — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Another post from the "Random Stuff" category. Just over a year ago, I wrote on how to cook the perfect fillet steak, and amusingly, it's by far the most-read post on this blog - by a factor of more than two...

So here's another one for the New Year, and it's about one of those ordinary jobs which some of us don't do often enough, and others do it to a point of obsession: I'm talking about washing the motor.

There are few things more bonding between a man and his car than giving it a good clean. I mean, you get to see all the lines up close and from angles you wouldn't normally spend any time looking at. I know it might sound a bit sad, but hand-washing the car gives you a rare chance to check out there aren't problems with it up close - stone chips, maybe, kerbed alloys, unexplained dings etc.

Uber-petrolhead Jay Leno apparently likes to plonk a chair in the middle of his garage and enjoy looking at his extensive collection, with a glass of wine. I can totally see where he's coming from, though kneeling in a puddle next to your own Pride & Joy is probably the nearest most mortals will get to Jay's experience.

So, here are my own tips for car washing, culled from many car owners' forums discussions on detailing, waxing, washing etc. It might sound like something that's in the realm of the bleedin' obvious, but a few of these tips made a big difference to me in time, effort and end result.

Firstly, some do's & don'ts...

Don't use an automatic car wash - the jetwash might be OK if your car is really filthy, but unless you dry the car off quickly, you'll leave more muck still on than the jet will lift off. You need to be careful using a high-pressure jet anyway (either domestic or professional) on seals and other delicate areas.

And don't even go near a rotating-brush car wash unless you really don't care about scratching the car to bits.

I know a guy who took his estate car through the car wash and when the up-and-over brush got to the back of the car, it ripped his rear wiper off. Then proceeded to batter the roof and bonnet with the wiper that was now embedded in the brush... ba-da-ba-da-ba-daaa... all the way through its return to the front. Cost his insurance company a fortune to put right.

I've heard of the same thing happen with car aerials that people forgot to remove, and the aerial stayed wrapped in the brush, only to knock dents all over the next customer's car...

Get a big pack of microfibre cloths - Costco do 30-packs for about £12, and it's a worthy investment. I'd recommend using microfibre mitts for the actual washing too; more of that in a minute.
DO NOT use washing up liquid. It contains salt and is bad for your paintwork, which will end up with a dull finish.
DO use a decent car shampoo - you could go crazy and spend a fortune, but I've been happy with standard Halfords car wash, and the 5L bottle lasted for years. Maybe when it runs out I'll try something else, as recommended by AutoExpress.
DO NOT use a sponge. They just trap all the muck that you take off the car and redistribute it elsewhere, and if you get grit trapped in the sponge, you run the risk of scoring the paintwork.

Instead of a sponge, try using microfibre wash mitts - the good ones will have an elastic cuff to keep it on your hand, and will be dry-lined so you can plunge your hand into a bucket of hot (or freezing cold) water and not get wet.
Don't bother with chamois leathers - they're often either too dry or too wet to be really effective, and you spend the whole time wringing them out. I find a couple of microfibre cloths are every bit as good.
Don't use abrasive (acidic) alloy wheel cleaners - use the same process to clean your alloys that you'd use for the rest of the car, although you might want to give the wheels a going over with a soft brush first (I have a brush that was originally sold as for the bodywork, but have only ever used on the wheels).
If you have what are referred to as "bonded contaminants" (like tar or tree sap), use a clay bar like Meguiars Quik Clay to remove them. This contains a bar (like a small bar of soap), which is rubbed on the paintwork and will lift pretty much anything stuck to the surface without scratching or damaging the paint itself. You simply spray on the "detailing spray" as lubricant then gently rub the clay bar back and forward - it's almost like magic. I tend to use it after washing if I notice something stuck to the paint, but also go over the whole car once a year to lift other gunk and restore the finish, before giving it a good wax. Here's a video of Meguiars and Jay Leno talking about the clay bar.
Don't scrimp on the wax; a few years ago a well-known cleaning products company made a thing that you were supposed to just attach to the end of a hosepipe and it cleaned and waxed the car "in a Flash". Unsurprisingly, it seems to no longer be available... guess the results weren't quite as expected...

Anyway, I use two different waxes depending on the car - Meguiars NXT Tech Wax on darker cars, and for my red car, use Bilt Hamber Auto Balm - it really brings up the colour beautifully. Both are easy to apply and make a huge difference to the finish.
You might want to invest in some good glass cleaner - Meguiars or Rainex would do the trick, though Windolene might be just as effective - though I'm not sure Windolene's dilute Sodium Hydroxide and Polyacrylic Acid would be a good thing for the rubber seals around the windows...

Finally, here's my technique... what you'll need:

2 x dry, clean, microfibre cloths
2 x dry, clean, microfibre wash mitts
1 x bucket of hot, soapy water
1 x bucket of cold, clean water
1 x soft bristled brush

Start with one wash mitt and the hot water - working from the top of the car down to the bottom of the windows, apply evenly (not slopping too much water around if you can help it). After each panel, dunk the mitt into your cold water bucket and wring it out; you'll be amazed how quickly that water gets dirty. The key here is that we want to take the muck off the car, not simply spread it around - rinsing the mitt regularly helps enormously.

After doing the roof, glass and mirrors, clean the bonnet/front end, the boot and then the doors. Basically, do the dirtiest bits last (usually along the door sills or the very bottom of the car below the boot). Clean the wheels using the same soapy water and the brush.

Empty both the remnants of the soapy water and the now-murky "clean" water bucket and rinse the buckets. Fill one with cold, clean water and gradually splash it all over the car to wash away any residue of the soapy water.

Take the other (dry) mitt and go over the whole car, drying it off - don't worry too much about leaving streaks: the point here is to lift off the majority of the remaining water. Once you've done that, go over the whole car with one of the microfibre cloths and take the rest of the water off. Finally, take the remaining MF cloth and polish up the windows and go over the bodywork to ensure a streak-free finish.

This whole process probably takes 30 minutes, though it will obviously vary depending on the size and degree of filth of your car. It's best to do this when the car's not in direct sunlight and it's not too warm - otherwise you'll get evaporation to contend with, and all manner of streaks will appear before you finished even the first step of washing the car.

Right, that's that. I'm off to get my anorak off...

Border Lines in Word & Outlook

Ewan — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:10:00 GMT

OK, I've been bad. Let my blog -

which I used to update fairly frequently, though not the multi-posts-per-day, at-any-hour-of-the-day type thing that Steve Clayton does. Maybe that's why he wins awards and I don't :)

- wither and dry up. I got a new job about a year ago which means I'm now less hands-on with technology (ie. am now dispensable middle-management overhead), and that's certainly not helped.

Anyway, New Year's resolution is to try to keep it up to date a bit more, with tips & tricks, snippets of interesting news and maybe the odd essay on stuff that I think might be important.

Making lines in Word & Outlook

Today's tip is something I came across by accident and use all the time. Since modern versions of Outlook use Word under the covers as their editor, it applies all through the program. It's a way to create "Border Lines" quickly.

My favourite use for it is when you're updating a meeting in the calendar and you want to give the attendees a short explanation of why you're moving the time, changing the agenda etc. Best place to do that is right at the top of the body text, and a nice line between the original and what's new provides clear separation.

The tip is - if you type three dashes "---" and press Enter, the Word engine replaces the dashes with a horizonal line that spans the width of the document/appointment/email. Example:

Some wisdom

---

Some more wisdom

... hit enter at the dashes and it becomes

Imperialism, Metric-centricity and Live Search

Ewan — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:51:13 GMT

I'm a child of a mixed up time when it comes to measures and the likes. I am feet and inches tall, stones and pounds heavy, when it's cold outside, it's below zero degrees, but when it's hot, it's in the 80s.

I learned small measurement in mms and cms, so have no real idea of how big an inch is, but long distances are thought of in miles (and petrol is bought in litres to go into a car which reports how many miles per gallon it's getting).

Now and again, I'll need to try & recall how many chains there are in a fathom, or ounces per metric tonne, and typically call on the services of a search engine. That used to be searching for something like:

... where we'd normally get taken to a site in the results, which has a wizard of its own to do the calculation. Often times, the reason I want to convert something is because I'm already doing a calculation and I just need to know the ratios involved...

Which is why I love the little innovation that Live Search introduced:

Right at the top of the results list, there you have it - dead right this is useful :)

Seadragon begets Silverlight "Deep Zoom"

Ewan — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:37:02 GMT

There's a headline that might baffle...

Seadragon Inc was a Seattle-based software company who had done a load of work on handling vast quantities of imagery and being able to manipulate the data in real-time, on-screen. Microsoft acquired Seadragon and has been beavering away behind the scenes to finesse the technology further and to integrate it into other means of delivery - if you haven't seen it, check out the awesome demo done by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at last year's TED conference:

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

Well, the Seadragon technology gets closer to being available as part of Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1, now referred to as "Deep Zoom". It was announced recently at Mix08, and I must have missed the significance of this piece but when I saw the first Deep Zoom demo site, I thought "Wow".

One of the demos at the Mix08 conference in Vegas last week, was of a pretty amazing site put up by Hard Rock Cafe, showcasing some of the rock memorabilia they have - mosey over to http://memorabilia.hardrock.com and you'll get prompted to install Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 if you want.

The Hard Rock site was built from the ground up in one month, and contains many gigabytes of visual imagery. Not that you'd notice when you visit for the first time having installed Silverlight 2.0...

The back end of the Memorabilia site uses Sharepoint for its content management, although the front end is all custom in Silverlight. There was a parallel announcement at MIX about the Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint, more details here.

No more to say about this other than it's really, really, cool. Combine the early delivery of stuff like the Hard Rock Cafe demo site, with Blaise's idea in the TED Video about how this technology could be used to present information in a non-linear way - imagine being able to zoom into the full stop at the end of a sentence to get pages and pages more detail about what the sentence contained - and the future way that web pages could be delivered to us might be very different from the linear, monolithic way a lot of information is presented today.

Exciting, isn't it?

More info on "Deep Zoom:

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2008/03/09/silverlight-deep-zoom-goodies.aspx

http://labs.live.com/Silverlight+2+Deep+Zoom.aspx

http://joestegman.members.winisp.net/DeepZoom/

http://www.vertigo.com/DeepZoom.aspx

Deep Zoom composer tool preview

Bird's Eye view on Live maps - how cool is that?

Ewan — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:02:23 GMT

The Windows Live search team did a pretty major update (a few months ago) to a number of elements of the search engine at live.com, but one of the nicest is the maps integration. Type in a postcode, a place or business name and click on Maps and you'll hopefully go straight there...

As the Virtual Earth technology behind the Live Maps site improves, and as the quality of the data behind it gets better too, I've noticed quite a few sites shift to using it, sometime away from other mapping services like Google Maps or Multimap (which Microsoft recently acquired, so that may have something to do with it).

Whilst shooting the breeze on the web the other day, I thought I'd check out Rightmove to nose through a list of property that's for sale near my home (having found Rightmove and PropertyFinder, Google Earth and Virtual Earth so valuable when I was house-hunting a couple of years ago). Rightmove now has a service called "AboutMyPlace" which is shown in response to searches of an area, but also pinpointing the exact location of specific property that's for sale.

Anyway, I found a house not far from mine which was for sale; on the AboutMyPlace site, I was quite impressed to see their use of Virtual Earth, then saw that Bird's Eye view was available...

View from AboutMyPlace, showing the Virtual Earth UI

I hadn't realised that Bird's Eye view had been improved so much, or that its reach had been so expanded - previously, it was really just major cities and the likes which got it, but during last summer, it's clear that planes have been criss-crossing the UK and taking some really good quality pictures from multiple angles (so you can rotate the view)...

Now I can see my own house (and all of the neighbours' too!) in a while new way - it's amazing, and can drain hours out of your day if you're not careful.

Here's Microsoft's TVP just as one example (try it for yourself by searching for RG6 1WG and clicking on Bird's Eye view)

Now isn't that good?

I need some Flo Control - or Arnie Control, more like

Ewan — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:31:23 GMT

Regulars may remember the trouble my PC was having with Arnie the cat... well I could use some more technology in and around the house to solve another little problem.

Arnie & his sister have now got quite big - they're just over a year old, so fully-functional adult cats (well, not entirely fully functional, if you know what I mean), with a keen sense of how to catch, kill and sometimes eat quite a bit of the local rodent population (which given that we live in the country, is quite high).

Now it's not much fun catching live mice that have been hauled in through the cat flap, it's not a great deal better picking up the (sometimes partially consumed) cadavers of others, and I'm sure it's not exactly a great time for the poor little meeces either.

Today, we spent some time dragging the fridge out to locate where the stink was coming from - and eventually located a long-dead mouse underneath. Less than an hour later, whilst we were sitting in the kitchen having lunch, Arnie came steaming through the flap with his latest victim in his gob - prompting stern and immediate attention, in slamming doors, shooing him back outside again etc.

So, a solution must be found.

A few years ago, I came across an intriguing project called Flo Control, where someone had rigged up a PC to the cat flap and performed facial recognition on the cat that was trying to come into the house - in this case, a cat called Flo. If Flo was alone, the flap would open, but if she was carrying anything in her mouth, it would stay resolutely shut.

It seems the guys behind Flo Control think that processor technology has come on so much in recent times, that it will be possible to release a box that fits to the door, without needing the PC attached.

The current solution looks pretty cumbersome - not just with the PC attached, but the box on the other side of the door. It essentially takes a snapshot of the silhouette of whatever sticks it head towards the flap, and then uses shape recognition technology to decide whether to open the door or not...


All clear, Flo	Not so fast, buster...

I Want one of those

This kind of idea could even be a winner for the likes of Dragons' Den - I'd be quite happy (as a consumer) to pay ~£100 for something like this, and since there are reckoned to be more than 6 million cat owning households in the UK, there's clearly an opportunity in this country alone. Magnetic flaps which only allow a cat wearing a specific collar to come in & out cost about £40, so it's not outrageous to think people would spend a good bit more.

A basic device would have a mini-USB port that could take a laptop controlling it (to check on settings etc), would have a rechargeable battery and a simple training mechanism where the cat is plonked on the other side, and (like those fingerprint recognition devices) a few attempts of cat coming in are used to let the device's cheapo camera figure out what "normal" looks like.

Deluxe editions might be inobtrusively mains-powered, offering the delight of being able WiFi attached, so you could help train it, provide a log of when the cat came in & out (and even which cat it was, if you have a collection) etc etc. Even get alerted on your PC if the cat's trying to come in but the flap's not sure if he is solo or accompanied...

Added finesse could even be automatic timing control - eg. cats can't leave the flap after 9pm but if they're still outside, then can come in until 11pm after which it closes for the night...

Is this a great example of a techy toy, or something that only a techie could dream up but which could find a following in the general populace? Or another "seems like a good idea at the time" gadget that would gather dust in one of those catalogues full of things you didn't know you needed, that fall out of the Sunday papers..?

Happy New Year!

Fun and games with identity (and keeping it safe)

Ewan — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:54:04 GMT

I was going to title this post, "the Wizard of Id" but decided against it.

It hasn't been a great week for the UK government's HMRC (Revenue & Customs) department, who admitted losing a couple of CDs which had an unencrypted export of the name, address, national insurance number and in some case, bank account details, of some 25m UK citizens, including every child registered for Child Benefit.

The media has gone to town on the department, decrying "how could this possibly happen?" and demanding the head of whoever is responsible. The chairman of HMRC has already resigned, and it wouldn't surprise anyone if other follow.

More info on the story from the BBC.

The public consciousness

There are many questions about the whole sorry affair - such as, why on earth the National Audit Office needed the information in the first place, why HMRC decided to send it on CD rather than using the Government Secure Intranet (GSI) to transfer it, and why it would have been such a big job to filter out bank account information as had been suggested at one point. The Telegraph seems to think it would be at a cost of £5,000 to clean the data up, and take a software engineer a week. I'd be surprised if the content isn't just a giant CSV file or similar; it should be a matter of loading into Excel 2007, deleting the columns to do with bank accounts, then saving again. If HMRC (or anyone else) wants to pay me 5 grand for doing that, I'm at your service.

What is interesting is the raising of the threat of identity theft in the public's mind, from the sudden over-reaction of many to the casual indifference of most, at least until the story broke. Some newspapers have reported of large numbers of customers resetting their bank account PINs, and even wondering if they should move banks...

I personally shred every piece of correspondence which has my name and address in it, unless I need to keep it, and am generally pretty careful about identity. If someone did get hold of my name, address, date of birth, mother's maiden name, bank account details etc, then it's always possible they could mount a serious attempt to compromise my online banking - so the passwords and PINs are always unlinked to anything surrounding them... I wonder how many parents have bank cards with the PIN formed from their child's date of birth?

I remember reading Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity a couple of years ago and being impressed with the clarity, succinctness and yet completeness of what he said. If you've never read Kim's work, go and check out the paper now or just check out the laws as bullet points.

It turns out the UK government breaks every single one of those laws at some level. And the press were saying that the HMRC crisis is a nail in the coffin for national ID cards... at least implementing an ID card system might give the government the opportunity to sort out how it deals with users' data...

NASA's new server - with 4Tb of RAM and 2048 CPU cores

Ewan — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:07:40 GMT

Wow. George Ou from ZDNet wrote yesterday about NASA's new supercomputer, the most powerful single node computer in the world. It comprises 1024 dual-core Itanium2 CPUs with 4Tb of memory.

The article doesn't say what OS the beast is running, but one of the comments says that they have used a custom kernel based on RedHat (since the standard kernel won't scale to that number of CPUs).

Since Windows is (still) available for the Itanium architecture, I bet it would be possible to run Win2003 or maybe 2008 on this box. It makes more economic sense, though, to have more servers running fewer CPUs and scaling "out" rather than "up"... but if you you could run Windows on this box, Solitaire really would fly :-)