How do you like them Apples

Its tipping into autumn and the first golden harvest is in the shops. Apples. Apples for me are a childhood fruit. Cases of sweet Cox’s Orange and Pippins in the laundry waiting for us kids. Not that we were allowed them exactly but we kids were not expressly forbidden from eating them. So rather like Captain Cook who got his crew to drink lime juice by offering it to the officers first, the semi out of bounds apples created an attraction as children we could not resist. We would steal into the laundry and slowly or quickly depending on the variety the box of apples would empty. Empty to our parents secret delight.

Rich crisp apples, bursting with crunch and golden flavour, bitter Granny Smiths tart cooking apples, giant Sundowner or Fuji, trays of Golden Delicious, or Braeburns, Gala or and a multitude of cultivars lost to memory. These were brought from road side stalls on many weekend car trips. Then there were apples that grew in the garden, The cooking tree and the eating tree always small always sweet. All these apples were hard and crunchy and utterly utterly delicious.

But now I live in the suburbs and the suburbs apples are not a convenient stroll to the backyard, they are a longer ride to the supermarket away. And here lies the problem. Will the super market apple be that sweet crunchy juicy wonder of childhood or a sad mealy killed thing not worthy of the name Apple. Long supply chains, and controlled temperature storage means buying an apple is act of hope and faith, over common sense.

My supermarket has a supply chain that starts with the apple grower being crushed back to a peasant existence, harried truck drivers earning minimum wage, corrupt buyers, giant warehouses and days of waiting. All this behemoth of a system serves to crush the life and flavour and value our of everything. My poor apple stands almost no chance. But I still hope.
So while I sit writing there is a shiny red Gala apple on my desk. A new seasons Gala fresh from the orchards of Tasmania. I am wondering do I bite the waiting apple. The apple sitting so seductively on my desk. Do I taste autumn’s wonder. Will I be delighted or dashed.

Will I be one of the fresh food people or will the supermarkets practices have delivered me a sad apple experience. The supermarkets marketing team have sold me the sizzle, they are Fresh Food People, striving to deliver the very best. But do they? Will the shiny apple live up to the fresh and quality claims of the marketing department or is the promise only a distant cousin to the reality.

I hesitate then bite in. Sadly the only people having the fresh food experience are the marketing team at Woolworth’s. The actual apple is a sad floury disappointment. Was it worth crushing the grower, was it worth the contracts with the harried drivers was it worth your corrupt buyers. Was all the necessary when all it resulted in was disappointment.

The fresh food people is an empty marketing promise. The happy smiling mothers a marketing myth. The smiling children are being raised on sad mealy pap.

It must be time for me to start taking long journeys in the countryside, there I may meet truly fresh food people and the sweet delicious crunch of an apple.

Vale Top Gear

I watched Top Gear last night, having finally landed on 9. It was last years show all over again, three cartoon characters acting out their parts. There is the Captain clueless pastiche, the Richard Hammond boyish man to take home to mum, and the lovable bastard Jeremy Clarkson. As usual they swanned around in some uber cars doing a promo for both the cars and a country. The producers apparently dreamed up something for them to do. What, I failed to notice as this was the same show I had seen before and before and before, just the place and the motors had changed.

Who really cars about cartoon figures driving unobtainable super cars and wait for it telling us they are good. No shit. But then lets cut to the bad side, again Captain clueless had to put up with work place bullying, the Bastard brought him a car he rather liked and then the car was crushed by a truck. What a thigh slapper. We all know that work place bullying is just a golly good jape, not the kind of thing that can drive people to despair, suicide and worse. No we are British dam it and we were raised on hazing and its all just good fun. And then of course there was racing super cars on the freeway. Or as we call it it in Australia hooning. The anti hoon laws would have seen Clarskon et al with confiscated cars and loss of licence, but hell we are British and this is just a golly good romp.

Whilst it must be fun to shiz around in male fantasy objects, rather like other sad middle aged bastards going out with a twenty something on the arm its rather tedious as entertainment. Especially when the car industry world wide is on the cusp of some very interesting change. Lots of manufacturers are bringing out hybrids, electric vehicles, ultra efficient vehicles and the like. This is a moment in history when the car is doing something really interesting, but brand Top Gear is not having a bar of it. They are still gadding about in new fastomobiles oh and nourishing the other brand staple destroying old vehicles as stunts.

Admittedly some of the stunts were rather good, a rocket powered mini was fun, but the parts the cartoon characters played in all of this was negligible. In reality they got out of the way whilst some labcoat types built a rocket car and fired it down a ski ramp. I liked it, in a kind of pointless celebration of consumption for the sheer joy of destruction. Kind of like smashing old tellys at the dump when I was 15. Hmmm no wait smashing tellies was way more fun. Isn’t the stunt aspect of this show just a little too contrived now. More laborious than fun, more where the dead hands of the producers can be seen.

Top Gear the brand was fun once, but another series of the same show, after another series of the same show, it really is sad old middle aged blokes with 20 year old dates. You know they are trying to say something or other, just who can be bothered getting close enough to find out what.

Its Not Me Its You

A cautionary tale where the author falls out of love and breaks up with Apple.

It all started when my mac had the strangest hiccup, it lost all the user accounts. After some hackery I managed to re-enable a user account and then restore from time machine. All was good, though of course many hours had been wasted. Tragedy was to follow. At some point I had used iTunes when not me. This caused ITunes to think I was a new computer. It started to sulk. The sulking grew into a full scale tantrum of the I am locking myself in the bedroom and never coming out variety when the main machine was finally restored. iTunes had a hissy fit and its notoriously unreliable database declared that it knew noting about my iPhone nor my music collection. In short it was foobared beyond all belief. Being an idiot I tried to recover this situation, rather akin to standing outside the bedroom door and arguing through it. Never a winning position. I tried various repair strategies each more grievous than the last. What I should have done was build a brand new iTunes database.

Finally I have a music collection again, all my careful editing and play history and ... was gone but I had my music back. Well almost. Al the recent stuff I had downloaded was not there. Great I thought Apple is the cloud they will give me copies of what I had brought from them. Will they what. Nope it turns out somewhere in the voluminous terms of service that you download it once and Apple is done with you.Loose it and you buy it again. Silly me. I thought I was purchasing a license to listen and not a file. That’s what much of the rest of the terms of service suggest. Apple are strong on this one. The helpful person at Apple support pointed me to the Terms of Service. They were very polite in telling me I could go fuck myself.

Now I know I should have read and understood the terms of service, but honestly does anyone do that. If we all stopped to read every TOS and EULA and other agreement we would never get anything done. Its clear what they all say, “If it works lucky you, if it breaks sucks to be you” oh and “All your rights are belong to us”, of course all that stuff is written by lawyers so it won’t be so obvious that you are agreeing to allow yourself to be screwed sideways.

But wait, I went to the other places I have been buying music, Aimie St and low and behold I could re-download my library. Amazon however has the same suck policy as Apple.

So that’s it for me iTunes we and you are parting ways, you are not my go to source for music. The other guys sell it cheaper, here in Australia much much cheaper and they all offer a better service. Actually in my situation they offer a service whereas you iTunes do not.

Now I know what you are saying. I should have it backed up yada yada yada, and of course you are right. I should have backed it up. In fact I did have a backup, albeit a bit old and not of the iTunes database, I just wrongly thought that iTunes had my back when it didn’t. I have recovered all the music I had lost sans what was brought from the Apple Store. So yes I will be backing up iTunes from now on. I am sure that this fragile database will shit itself again, something it seems content to do every 12 months or so. But most importantly I won’t be purchase songs from Apple anymore.

You see its not me, its you, your shit broke, it wasted my time, and then you pointed out some minor clause in the pre nup and said 'Sucks to be you dude". You broke my trust and you won’t win it back. So we are parting ways, I am going with the other sellers of the world, or as a last resort I might hook up with that racy new source. Yeah bit-torrent baby, I hear that don’t even have an EULA.

Post rant note: After a while it occurred to me that iTunes might not totally be at fault here. That it might be those clueless assholes known as Music Executives and it could be that that is where I sheet home the blame. But wait I have found an even better solution, the second hand CD. Witht he second hand CD I get a backup albeit a massive physical device for such a tiny amount of data, but a backup nevertheless and I get to say to the music industry. Screw me now assholes, and I get to say to iTunes. Two fingers dudes. So lets turn our backs on the nice shinny modern concept of buying online. Its physical for me from now on. Why? Cause all you clever bastards wearing oh so cool black Armarni suits and snorting coke from the belly buttons of 400 dollar per hour hookers, or so I heard, you bastards wrote some T&Cs that made me very angry. In fact you tried to steal from me with your oh so clever lawyers and your cunning shit eating grins and your slippery language. And so black suited ones I reject you and your world. Im off to the pub to listen to music old school, Live

The 'computer' for the rest of us

When the iPad came out I suffered a flush of extreme disappointment. This just wasn’t what I had imaged or hoped for. Could Apple be wrong? But since then I have begun to think hard about what an iPad could be good for. Most people I know use their computers extensively for one thing. They are writing a document or emailing or surfing the web. The multitasking aspect of today’s windows and mac platform, many users scrub around by making the computer appear as if it is doing one thing. Instinctively users try to de-abstract the complexity of the modern UI into a single task mode.

Watching my Dad (who is 85) he gets intensely annoyed when mail or some other thing tries to grab his attention when he is surfing the web. Tabbing through windows is a simple recipe for getting lost. In fact I hear him and my mum (who is 80) say things like “oh I lost that”. Or “the computer ate it”. Or “its just gone”. They really man some window is over the top of it, they find the idea and the complexity of app switching confusing and for them unnecessary.

The iPad is the computer for them. It does one thing at a time. There is limited multitasking but what can multitask has had some deep thinking go into it.

I don’t think the iPad is just for old people. I think its for people who want simplicity. Who want to make the choice to change task. Who like modality and want to be in control of when they change mode. Geeks aside I think that is computing for most of us.

But if the idea of a single task computer is to take off then developers are going to have to change.

Take me the other night, I am at the bar with friends, we are watching several sports on big screens but just a little too far away to read the score and so I have ESPN CricInfo out an iPhone app so I can watch the score of the Australia Pakistan game (Australia won by the way). But then the demand was for what was going on in the tennis so I opened the Australian Open app. Each of these are a fine app. But they both do the same thing. They open with a splash screen, they present me an app navigation widget and then let me get to the game I am interested in. After several swaps between the two I was sick of splash navigate wait for score, splash navigate wait for score.

How much better would both be if they remembered my state, showed me where I was exactly where I left off. In other words the app abstracts the start-up process, and let me carry on as though I had never stopped using the app. On a bigger screen like the iPad you could even add in some dancing baloney to indicate something was going on.

This is where I think the iPad will take us, more immersive but more focused applications doing one thing at a time, and maintaining their state between invocations. Multitasking will still be there but it will be under the covers.

I don’t think we will ever see multitasking in user land. And why should we. Once we have multitasking then now we have a task switcher and an app to really kill a task that won’t die and on and on. We have apps that think they wan’t your attention and so they jump or hoot or holler or otherwise distract. Taking all that complexity and abstracting it away makes the iPad a much simpler device. Making you finger into the mouse removes another impediment, throwing out the keyboard another impediment. Each of these abstractions on its own doesn’t add up to much, collectively they are powerful.

The addition of an accessory keyboard is an acknowledgment that no onscreen keyboard can yet compete with a really tactile key clicking bio feedback that is the modern key board we know, and in my case love. It is also saying that this is a device that can be used for more than reading. This is a creational device. What I wonder is will the keyboard work with an iPhone. I hope so as fro me that would be really nice.

So from disappointment I have moved into the camp of the computer for most of us. Do I won’t an iPad, yes I do. I really want a book reader and I am sure that the iPad is going be the best reader that there is. But its going to be much more than this. Its going to be the device that lets us re-imagine the computer, from geek box to appliance. I for one hail our new appliance overlords apologies to kent brokman

More phone company idiocy

So I am using my phone hard. Really hard. Its event time and I am phoning everyone and everyone is phoning me.

Then I get an email from Virgin “Hi Mark, you're approaching your agreed credit limit. You should consider making a payment over the web or by phone on 1300 555 100, thank you.” What the ... does this mean I wonder. I do nothing an event is raging around me though I am a bit worried that I have either run up a massive bill or my phone is about to die. Either or both are bad.

I ring the hell desk at Virgin. The explanation goes something like this. I have used up 75% of my credit limit. That is 75% of $750.00 (or thereabouts) so 560.00 of my credit is gone. I have used 530 dollars of the telcos imaginary money according to their system. And this is where it all gets insane, I have a plan 70 real dollars gets me 540 imaginary telco dollars. So even though I don’t owe any money to the phone company, my bill comes in two days, the telco want me to pay off some of the 540 imaginary dollars as it is near my credit limit of 750 dollars (real not imaginary) but when i get my bill it will be for 70 dollars.

So once my bill is struck the amount I owe goes from 540 imaginary dollars to 70 real ones and my credit limit is no longer "in danger"

This I need not pay for a couple of months as now instead of being 520 dollars into my credit limit I am only 70 into my credit limit.

Are you confused, I know I was. Telcos and their mind warping imaginary dollar amounts its just doing my head in.

Hell i might have this explanation wrong. It was so confusing and I think I was talking to someone in Manila so understanding both theirs and mine was reduced. I might have firmly grasped the rough end of the pineapple. Or I might have strayed into Telco land where capped is unlimited, where unlimited is capped, where huge is small and where words mean just what the white queen wants them to mean.

Sigh

iPhone OS impovments

Things I would like from the next iPhone OS.

First though this list reads as the list of shortcomings, the whinge whinge whinge list, and it is. But I love my little white soap bar of a phone. This list is really a love poem, not of the sort I Love You let me count the ways but the other sort. I would love you better little soap bar if you just put on that sexy new dress I brought you. Oh wait I have mixed my fantasies. So this is a list that should be read as a way to improve the phone. Have a read you may agree or disagree.

Background tasks

Background tasks have been ‘banned’ as its bad for battery life. But I find that argument a little simplistic not to mention paternalistic. Take my morning walk, I would love to track it whilst using one of the several pedometers available, or a GPS tracking application oh and I would like to listen to some tunes whilst I am walking. Well with the Jesus phone that can’t be done. I think I should be the one in control of my battery life. I admit its pretty poor but there are lots of times and tasks that I would make the trade off

Email client

For my sins I have a number of email addresses and I have all of them on my phone. When a message arrives or I check my phone I have to go through mail box after mailbox clicking around to see all my messages.

This is annoying open mail app, choose the account, choose the InBox, Open the message, read messages, back to the message list, back to the list of mail boxes, back to the list of accounts, choose the next account. Oh the humanity.

Give me a view that is the same as Mail.App so I can see all of my messages at once. Make the screen that lists which mail box to look at be an option, 99% of the time I want to look in the inbox.

Apple are supposed to be usability champions but this feels clunky.

Oh and while we are at it fix the bug that causes the iPhone to make IMAP accounts have INBOX/INBOX/INBOX... its very annoying.

Notification Service

I have Skype, Mail lots of accounts, SMS, a couple of chat services and several things that do notifications, albeit not often. When my phone churps to tell me that something new has arrived I get to play the who made that noise game. Why not have a notification panel that tells me all of the things that I have that have happened on my phone. If you need a reference implementation the Android one is pretty good.

Sync service

I use several things that sync between the iPhone and my Mac. Each one I have to start it, start its companion and synch. I should be able to enroll these in syncing and have the mac/mobile me synch them all.

Better Phone

Why on earth do my phone contacts show me contacts with no phone numbers. WHY? It is crazy. Why does my phone fail to pick up calls after a period of time. Why does my phone sometimes take 30-40 seconds to hang up a call. What is the software doing in that time

Better syncing of contacts

If as I do you have contacts with an email address only, I add these to my contact list, the syncing service gradually amalgamates these together. I have to go and un-munge them. Now this is probably just a bug, annoying though.

Much better handling of photos

To get photos from my phone I have to use Aperture or iPhoto which treats the phone as an attached storage device. Albeit one that only takes photos. This is the only way to see these photos. The phone don’t appear as an attached device in finder.

I would prefer if the phone showed up as a disk. I could even wear having to have it as a read only device since Apple seem gung ho on not allowing me to store files on the iPhone. Of course I can store files with several different 3rd party applications so that problem is solved. I just don’t want to have to use the tools that Apple anoints to get my pictures off the phone.

Then if I want to get photos back onto my phone I have to place them in a particular spot, and tell iTunes I would like to sync that folder. This is clumsy. I quite like doing a photo shoot and slurping the top 10-20 shots onto my phone to use as a brag book. To do this I have to

1. Import the photos into Aperture, then do the aperture thing and find my ‘braggable’ pics. Apple can’t fix that process.
2. Export these to a directory
3. Start iTunes and sync these

That’s a lot of steps. And notice how non asynchronous the whole thing is. One way to get pictures from the iPhone and entirely different way to get them back onto the iPhone.

Another thing I would like to be able to do is to upload photos directly to the web. Currently an upload button a website is useless. With the ability to access the photos stored on my iPhone I could take a picture and upload it directly to the web. Because that feature doesn’t exist a plethora of applications have appeared where their only job is to interface with some service or other like FaceBook or Flickr and allow uploading of photos. Doesn’t help me post to my particular web-site. Here I have to

1. Plug in my phone
2. Start Aperture
3. Download photos from the iPhone
4. Export from Aperture
5. Upload to my website

Again that is a lot of steps, wouldn’t it be great if I could

1. Plug my phone in and then when uploading see the photos that were on my iphone
2. From a website that has an upload button allow me to select photos from my phone
3. All of the above

Keyboard

I would love this in way that is quite unnatural unethical and probably illegal in some states to be able to have an external keyboard. I am quite happy to write short notes on my phone but a longer piece like this is out of the question. If I could pull out a fold-up blue-tooth keyboard from my man bag I would have a so much better device. In fact this would eliminate for me the need for a laptop most of the time.
Of course that would require Apple to provide a device driver and it seems that Apple doesn’t want to do this. It is a shame as an external keyboard would make the iphone so so much more capable.

iTunes/ iTunes Store

OK so there are 35,000, 50,000, 100,000 a trillion billion applications in the iTunes store. Good luck finding the one that you want. Searching for an application sucks, deciding on which of several competing applications you would like to choose sucks.

I would like to be able to search, in a constructive sort of way. Tag items so that I can then compare all my tagged items.

I would like a deeper taxonomy than iTunes currently supports. 20 categories is fine as a top level. But take one category Books. That’s right the entity of literature is covered by a single taxa. So after choosing books you are limited to paid or free. Anyone with an app in this space and there are 520 odd is struggling to rise to the top. There are some categories that are further sub-divided for example games.

Clearly this is a hard problem, I am sure that the designers of the App store didn’t anticipate that they would quickly have 100s of thousands of applications. I am sure that their model of records with bands, composers and genres was going to work. Sadly it doesn’t so a task for Apple in 2010 is to devise a better way to allow users to sift through applications and find what they want.

Understanding Darwin : A journey

I was 12 precocious and certain of what I knew. I was arguing in the take no prisoners mode of all 12 year olds. The argument was that we humans are animals. Certain that I was right I appealed to my teacher. She replied not as I expected that indeed humans were animals but with the much older idea that we were a creature of special dominion and that this made us not animals. Now clearly I am paraphrasing as what the teacher actually said is long gone. All that remains is my bewilderment that something so obviously true, we share the same limbs, fur, lungs hearts and all the other bits as all the mammals that we had to be animals. That and that first delicious moment where you know you know that your teachers are wrong and you are right.

It is the 150 year anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species and I have been thinking a lot about how this book impacted my life. And thinking it was so interesting that a book which was fundamental to science should 120 years after it was published (I was 12 a while ago) would still not be understood by the teachers of 12 year olds.

At the same school, a reasonably progressive middle class school we had religious instruction once a week. I hated it. I wanted out but my parents insisted. One of the arguments a couple of us had was that if evolution took place, what need for God. This is a good question. We got brushed off with the argument ‘God started it’ scientists will tell us how it progressed. Naturally being 12 we were a bit caught up with the idea that science was refuting the literal Bible. Religious instruction though rather than cutting to the nub of the question, a question that had so concerned Darwin that he delayed publication for years. If there is a natural mechanism for selection what need for God. Indeed could God be a creator in any real sense. This question was side-stepped by the local Anglican and Presbyterian ministers and instead we were fobbed off with one of the more unreliable defenses for God’s existence. Its unreliable in the sense that if God is the spark, the giving life a shove to get it started and then he (I am sure my 12 year olds god was a HE) sits back and watches. This doesn’t seem like a very interesting or useful God.

What could have been an interesting and enlightening teaching moment was instead treated as a way to get the annoying boys to shut up. But on the plus side for me it was the first real worm of doubt. If God had to pushed back to the dawn of time, perhaps event to the dawn of creation he didn’t seem very useful.
Finally blissful day we headed for high school and I got to do something approaching real science well as seen from a 13 year olds world view. There were bunsen burners and microscopes. It was very exciting. Here again Darwinian theory was flinched from. I never remember any biology that talked about evolution except in the broadest sense. We instead concentrated on the mechanism of this cell, or that animal. Looking back I now wonder was the long shadow that the Scopes Monkey Trial and the general pervasive view of religiosity in the community preventing my teachers explaining the grand unifying theory of everything for biologists, or was it their own fears and prejudices.
Of course it was high school and I am looking back through the lens of years. Perhaps I was simply not paying attention those days. I hope so but I don’t think that was the case.

It was not until university that I started to get to grips with the real Darwin, and of all the strange places to find his theory it was in the philosophy that I first really got to grips with Darwin. A debate on the philosophical nature of natural selection. Essentially we debated two ideas as modifications. One was the then popular idea of punctuated evolution. We looked at this with philosophers eyes but sadly I must report not with many of the necessary supporting facts. We never really understood the scale of geological time. And this being under-grad stuff was constantly hampered by peoples religious notions. Maybe God had leapt in and done it being a favorite. This used to drive me bonkers. Of course it is validly possible that this is the explanation. But Occam’s Razor people.

When you are discussing two fine grained theories of any sort, and someone jumps in with a whole left field theory wildly outside of the current discussion it doesn’t make them wrong, but it rarely makes them right and certainly doesn’t help the present discussion.

So it was philosophy and then geology that finally turned me into a Darwinist. It has taken 15 years of teaching before I finally got to having presented to me one of the greatest theories of everything. Outside of General Theory of Relativity in physics it really is sciences other great unifying theory of stuff.

I wonder in this 150th year of the Origin of Species if it took so long for me to get to that Darwinian understanding because of the competing Dark Ages nostrums. That of a creator God. I hope now that that wasn’t the reason, but looking back I consider that it most probably was.

Nothing to Hide

X Ray Monatge

I visited my rheumatologist this week and he gave me a set of X-Rays. It is interesting to see that my Ankylosing Spondylitis is progressing.

It makes an interesting picture to see yourself both from the outside, and the inside. If you look you can see the parts of my spine that are fused together. But more hopefully you can see the parts that are not. And of course you really get to see that I am a bit hunched.

The fastest bike in Fitzroy

I happened across this

No idea how or why but I liked it

The fastest bike in Fitzroy

Unpardonable Sin

The clouds were massing over Melbourne, dark and full of rain. Opening my trusty iPhone, thumbed to the OzWeather app and the weather radar told me I was about to get very wet. Time for a coffee so I flicked on to to Melbourne Coffee. Great there was coffee and close.

I slipped into the little cafe, Rosamond one of those ultra cool cafes squeezed into a space that probably formally contained broken furniture and dust. Now it has a booming sound-track and delightful smells. I briefly caught the eye of the man behind the bar, do I sit I asked. He nodded.

So I sat, got my book, found my place. Started to read, the sound track changed. Some Piaf. The weather promised on the radar arrived with a crash and the room flared with lightening. The waiting staff stopped to watch and then carried on clearing tables around me. I read on, the track changed again, Some German experimental band that even Shazam didn’t know of. By now the weather was passing, I had caught the eye of and smiled at several waiters, how many were there in this tiny basement I wondered. Would anyone bring me a drink, anyone?

Eventually the rain passed and I began to think that nothing was holding me back, no coffee, no water, no rain outside. I could just leave. It had been a pleasant 15 minutes but would have been oh so much better if I had rated higher than clearing tables. If I rated higher than looking at the rain, or restocking the shelves. But I didn’t I didn’t rate at all.

Eventually I got a coffee, drank it and left. “See you soon” was called out as I left. I just smiled to myself muttering unpardonable sin. Note this ultra cool baristas with experimental German bands, cool lighting and a funky space, all these things don’t count if you can’t be bothered serving your customers. I tried you failed.

Full disclosure: The coffee when it arrived was good

Myki Fail

Signs of failure

Myki Failure

This was shown on every reader in my tram. Lucky I don’t have a Myki yet

Myki Failure 2

This was shown on all but one reader on the tram. Multiple failure modes?

Protecting politicians from children

This is a serious piece about a serious subject. The Working with Children Act is Victorian legislation that puts a walled garden around Victoria’s children to ensure that all who work with children are safe. In the process Victoria moves another small step toward a totalitarian state.

Working with Children is built on a simple assumption. Check everyone! An absence of proof is a presumption of a proof of absence. The system works like this . You fill out a form authorising the state to run police checks on you, and checks with various professional bodies. The state then certifies you in the form of a card with an identifier. You provide the identifier to employer and voluntary organisations where you may come in contact with children

Lets be clear, crimes against children, particularly sexual crimes are abhorrent. Not right thinking person would condone these crimes.

It does not follow that right thinking people might not be deeply troubled by the Victorian WWC act. The act requires that every person who professionally or voluntarily comes in contact with a child has a police check. Not doing so is a criminal offence. To build the walled garden, every individual must prove to the state who they are and where they live, in return the state will provide evidence in the form of a certificate that the person has a criminal and sexual history that the state approves of. The state will provide proof that you don’t do what you didn’t claim that you did do. It will issue a certificate of absence of proof, this certificate will the be presumed to be a proof of absence and you will be admitted to the walled garden.

This attempt to build a walled garden is laudable; if it works. Currently of the 523 thousand checks that have been carried out 0.085 percent have returned negative. Of those 324 negative checks 34 or 10% have been overturned on appeal to VCAT. There are also another 477 in the process of going from positive to negative.

Is it reasonable for the state to turn into criminals any adult that associates with children not their own in order to identify such a paltry number of perverts. I am sure that the state would argue on the contrary, they have provided proof of 522 thousand innocent people. But of course as we know, absence of proof is not proof of absence.

It is reasonable to question if such a huge and expensive program is effective. Are children protected by this scheme. One estimate of the cost of each certificate is $300. For a medium organisation with 500 hundred members who need a check the cost to the state for that organisation is $150,000. For most volunteer organisations an entire years budget and then some. Is that level of expenditure protecting children. Is it the most effective protection that could be purchased for this expenditure.

It seems to me that if you are a sexual pervert, and object of your perversion is children that there are many ways around this scheme. I am not going to detail the ways that I have thought of. Why give perverts a leg up. But just as a for instance, steal a card. There are many other ways around the process. And the thing is we are talking about sex. One of the biggest drivers that people have. If there is a weakness some desperate pervert will find it.

That is the trouble with a walled garden approach such as the WWC Act. Once you have a pass you are allowed in. If you want to subvert the system then one avenue of attack will be to get hold of a pass (possibly illegally). Once obtained many employers etc can be easily lulled into a state of security by the knowledge that you are certified.

So if the card per se doesn’t protect children, who does it protect.

Organisations are protected if they act in good faith. I think that is likely to mean that providing the organisation has done the right thing they have protection. But this is hugely expensive and time consuming. One voluntary organisation that I am involved with has spent scores of hours ensuring that the program is complied with. It is quite unclear how much volunteer organisation have to to do to prove compliance. What is very clear is what happens if they do not. 20,000 fine.

So if children are not protected and organisations are only just covered provided they have worked hard who is protected. The state of course and the chief representatives of the state. The next time some sick priest interferes with a choir boy, yes I know vicious hyperbole, the state in the form of the minister will be able to point to the working with children system and sheet blame to either the checkers or the organisation.

But what of us, the body politic. I know I don’t want this certificate. But the regime puts me in a bind. I either comply, or I stop volunteering, I withdraw from society. The state in its totalitarian majesty is forcing me to prove via its certificate, that I don’t do what I have never done. When I stood being questioned in the Post Office I knew a little bit of me was dying. I knew that I was giving up the previous presumption of innocence for a certificate. I knew I was being labelled as safe. And at the same time a part of our society was dying. A tiny freedom to not have the state in our lives and vetting and validating us was being taken away. Sure it was for a good cause. We all want children protected. No one could deny that. But I couldn’t overcome the sickening feeling of standing at the top of the long slope staring down into a totalitarian regime.

So if not children being protected, and not organisations who are we being certified for? The people best protected by this system are mandarins and their masters. The Victorian Working with Children system does indeed protect politicians from being buggered by children.

Crimes against children are unacceptable. In no way am i implying any support for pedophiles or other perpetrators of crimes against children. I am saying that system devised offers children no protection, is hugely expensive and most probably ineffectual.

Creationists are the proof that intelligent design isn't

Making out like a bandit.

My phone is provided by Virgin Mobile. They make out like a bandit. I pay a massive (for me) contract 70:00 PCM and for that they give me all I can eat.

Well almost all I can eat. I had reason to call the help desk, and guess what the help desk is a 1300 number, and under make out like a bandit rules, 1300 numbers are not covered by the all you can eat.

Anyway here is me late at night, minutes before the help desk is to close at 11:00 pm and I am waiting in the queue. First I get an add to buy a new phone then an assurance that my call is important to them.. Then a bit more advertising. 1:19 seconds before I get to push the first button. 3 Buttons and 8 seconds later I am talking to an actual person who solves my problem. Yeah.

Then I made a mistake. I complained about the waited 1:19 seconds of adds and other nonsense.

Eventually a few days later a charming lady hailing from Manila called me back about my complaint. i explained about the wasted 1 minute and 19 seconds. First the charming lady told me that’s what they do in Manila, not that important to me I explained as I was in Australia and no mater how many carriers did this I was still not happy.

After all 1 minute and 19 seconds is nothing. But multiply that by all the people who call a help desk and Virgin mobile have made quite a lot of money.

The lady from manila went through various explanations, people like adds, it helps people, it was to manage their queue. Each of which I disagreed with. She couldn’t tell me what the queue loading was at the time of my call, or event the typical queue loading at the time I called form a historical basis, she couldn’t tell me what survey described the number of people who liked listening to adds rather than have their problem fixed. The one thing she could tell me was that my call only cost a flat 25 cents. But sadly in that respect she was wrong. Its 25 cents down and then a per minute charge.

I know that it is almost pointless to rail against telcos. But really this is so close to stealing. I rang for help not an add and they charged me a per minute fee to listen to the add, and when I complained they basically told me that people love this and I should suck it up.

I say we should all complain. Tell our telcos. Stop enough. Get your hand out of my pocket and stop with the little messages. Stop stealing.

What woolies sells for fathers day

What Woolworths really thing of fathers.

Bag of onions Dad. Sure son don't mind if I do.

Yes that’s right kids dad really wants a bag of onions.

State change. The Horror

I am writing this using .... some text processor or other. It doesn’t matter as almost all computer text processors are the same. They are inherently modal and expose the underlying abstraction of the computer. The abstraction leaks through.
Computers have two sorts of memory or storage. Long term (a disk or whatever) and short term working memory.
To work with an item we extract it from long term storage, bring it into short term working memory where we work on it. When we are done we reverse the process.

And this sucks!

We are forced to change the items state and we never ever want to. There would be be almost no-one who has used computers who hasn’t lost work, either because they forgot to save it, or the program crashed, or they shut the program down without saving, or the computer crashed. or a cat came and cat typed.
In other words we had got to a point in our work that was useful but because we hadn’t changed the state of the item we lost what we had done.

To fix the problems with the abstraction all sorts of “features” or work arounds have been added to programs. Warning you if you leave a program and work is unsaved, automated saving at some interval, on and on.

But all of this begs the question. Why expose the abstraction at all. Why should I ever have to save my work?

In my ideal program it would work like this.

1. I open the program.
2. It loads what I was last working on, bringing the working set back to where it was when i left
3. I work away. As I am working the program saves my changes silently without asking little bit be little bit.
4. When I am done I shut the program

During use I might

• Close a piece of work (a file)
• Open a piece of work, retrieving a file. Here I would like something else. Programs know the files that they have worked on, and they know (mostly) the files that they can work on. Give me a rich history of files I have worked on. Not a most recent list with 10 or so files but something more akin to Safari or Firefox’s history with a deep look at what I did and when.
• Create a new piece of work (a file) when I do the creation process the program asks me where I would like to store it and what it should be called.

There is one case where the current abstraction does help us, and that is the ability to go. Woops, broke things better just close this and loose whatever changes I have just made. The new model needs a similar feature. I propose that each program would keep an undo stack, it could work like the undo feature in many programs, for example photoshop. As a nice addition you could be able to create a save point. For example suppose you are about to do a major bit of editing, but you are not sure of the outcome. Create a snapshot, do your editing and if it doesn’t work out go back to the snapshot. Photshop has a good implementation of this feature.

So in summary.

• Never have to save my work ever.
• Better history of changes made.
• Better history of what I have worked on in the past.

It's the frogs I am concerned with

It is said that frogs all over the world are disappearing; that frogs may be the canaries in the coal mine. Now if frogs are the canaries of the 21st century then we may be in a bit of trouble. Because to stretch an analogy that started off bad into a worse place, the coal mine is the planet. The one planet we all share. Us the frogs and all the other higher animals.

Viruses Yeast and Bacteria have no concerns, well except the ones that are adapted to depend on the higher order animals. The little single cell organisms are going to go on just fine no mater what we do to the planet. Warm it up, frease it. Pollute it out of all recognition, we may doom ourselves but life will go on.

Us on the other hand, we may just be toasting us.

That of course gets me to the real point of this blog. ETS or Emissions Trading Scheme. It is billed by the opposition as the thing that will doom the Australian economy and so it must be resisted at all costs. From which we might conclude that the opposition is not made up of higher order animals. And judging by Malcom Turnball’s approval figures lots of the public seem to think so too.

The ETS though is not the panacea that the government is holding it out to be. It doesn’t stop carbon pollution, no quite the opposite. It turns pollution into a commodity and then that commodity can be traded. Then by magic the power of the almighty market will solve global warming. I am reminded of another TLA with Global in it. The Global Financial Crisis, where markets failed and failed spectacularly, and that was only money. Now we are talking the future of the planet and all who live on it, or in it, in the case of coal miners.

Is the market the best that we can come up with. The answer is no and obviously no, but the ETS is a don’t scare the horses option. Its a business as usual nothing to worry about, would you like to buy these nice shiny new carbon certificates. What are they exactly, well they are either a license to pollute or more weirdly they are a certificate to say that I didn’t pollute but I would have. For example I have a forest, but I won’t cut it down so give me a certificate for what i could do but won’t. I wonder if I buy a big lump of something made of carbon can I get a credit for not burning it. And here is where those clever chaps that brought you the GFC get involved. If they can create a carbon credit, then under the ETS there is something to sell and to trade. Clearly the clever thing to do is to find a way of making cheap cheap carbon credits and then go on to living high on the hog. Caviar anyone? I would old chap but the model off whose back I was eating got up and walked away.

One such band of buccaneers rang me to offer me a deal. They would replace all my lightbulbs with energy efficient ones and claim the carbon credits. Apparently this was a viable business. I declined not because I think the idea is bad but all my lightbulbs that can have become energy efficient.

This offer felt to me like someone gaming the system. Creating a credit that they could sell. But when the indicative carbon price being talked of in Australia is 20-30 dollars per tonne. So I have at any one time 4 lights operating for 6 hours per day. So 24 hours of 100 watts of energy input. This will equate to 25 watts using CFLs. Assuming that the life of these CFLs is 10,000 hours then in their lifetime I will have saved 4 × 10,000 × 75 watt/hours of energy or 3000 kWatt hours of energy. This produces 3.93 tonnes of carbon in the lifetime of the 4 bulbs which should equate to 80 dollars of possible credits. For this sum the supplier was offering to change all the bulbs in my house and replace shower heads as well. How can this add up. They were offering to replace the 20 bulbs in the house, not just the 4 I use at any one time so at 5 bucks a pop that is 100 dollars and they were offering to install them for free. It just doesn’t add up so I suspect gaming.

And that of course is one of the central problem with an ETS; It has so so many ways to game the system. From getting your emissions assessed too low. Finding dubious savings and converting these to tradable certificates. Creating certificates from not doing things. All ways to make money without lowering emissions one iota.

Business is so terrified as personified by the Liberals that it must be protected at all costs. The new rhetoric is trade exposed carbon businesses. Big polluters would be another way of label these businesses. The Liberals want to nullify the effect of the ETS on this type of business and so to a large extent does the government. They do it by giving away tax credits to these businesses. Given that the credit is a tradable item this is the same as the government handing out cash. So if you are busy making cash by buggering the planet, noting to worry old bean, here is a bucket load of cash now off you go. You might want to use the cash to go see some polar bears while you can.

The opposition seems to be running a line that works like this.

We should do something but only if everyone else does it too. In other words, business first, then the environment. From this it is deducible that in the Liberals view we should not act as a matter of urgency. We don’t have a moral duty to act.Indeed if we act at all then it should be when there is no disadvantage to us.

This is stupid. We have the capacity to act, we have a need to act, we are the worlds 7th largest energy exporter (or the worlds 7th largest pollution exporter. We generate some 2% of the worlds CO2 emissions but there are only 20 million of us. We like the rest of the industrial world have been polluting for a long time.

There is no sense that this is the biggest thing to face these politicians. A thing that is big or bigger than the last world wars. A thing that will require the skill and ingenuity and hard work and self sacrifice of everyone to solve. No our elected leaders and even more the opposition see it as an opportunity to get one over on each other. Such sad vainglorious fools. One or other of them will win but what a Pyrrhic victory. Won the parliamentary war but lost the planet in the process.

With leaders so underwhelming multiplied out over the world, the inherent distrust in all of the world of the rest of it it is hard to see how Global Warming is going to be tackled. All we can hope is that we higher order animals get to survive. Shame about the frogs.

Brighton Beauties

I went to Brighton to meet a friend for dinner. While I was there I couldn’t resist the bathing boxes.

It was one of those beautiful winter days when everything is clear and sharp and warm. 21 degrees in August, ‘take that climate deniers’. Anyway I was waiting for the last of the evening light and for it to come out from behind the one cloud it was behind. And just when I thought I was going to have to leave to make my dinner appointment out popped the sun.

Brighton bathing boxes

Brighton bathing boxes

Brighton bathing boxes

Woolworths shopping joy

Just a quickie shopping run for dinner. I had a recipe in mind, and just in case Woolies didn’t have the ingredients I wanted an alternate and an alternate alternate.

So I wisked around and picked up bits until I tried to find baking paper. I asked a slack jawed simpleton otherwise known as a shelf stacker. He didn’t know what baking paper was never mind where it was. The next glassy eyed boob said they didn’t have any. Possible I suppose woolies is pretty crap after all but somehow I doubted it.

So as you can imagine by the time I queued at the deli counter I was not in the best mood. My mood wasn’t helped by watching one guy serve six while other staff skulked in the back. Doing whatever it is that skulking deli staff do. Probably avoiding work.

By the time I got to what I thought was the front of the queue I was a bit pissed off with waiting, not as pissed off as the guy I apparently jumped in front of. Probably my fault. i suggested rather loudly how about rousting out the skulkers. Apparently asking for service at woolies is a big big no no.

I was given to understand in no uncertain terms that this was a bad idea. Seems that at woolies the customer is seldom right and not to be helped.

I gave up on the deli, the baking paper and modified the recipe I was going to make. Thanks woolies you have exceeded your sub par standards yet again.

What can I say. Long day, tired, a last straw moment. I think you will agree it does come over as uber whinny. Its a super-market, get over it, I now want to say. But I will let this stand. Pitying tone and all.

Next time I brave the “Fresh food people” I dial my expectations down, something like trying to beat door to door evangelists in an argument. You know you can’t win. You know you shouldn’t. But you do.

If I remind myself that this is what super-market shopping is like, then when its over I will feel better and not have to put a bitter rant on my site.

Fire at Silver Top Taxis Collingwood

This morning Jul 28th there was a fire at Silver Top Taxis. I manged these photos before crowd control pushed us back.

IRB Practice Lorne

I got a lift down to Lorne for the AGM courtesy of Richard Knight. The downside if you can call it that was that we left Melbourne at 8am so that we could get to Lorne early. The reason. IRB practice. So I took the opportunity to practice as well, taking a few photos of the IRB girls and boys in action.

There was not much surf so it took some special efforts to get the boats airborne. I leave you to judge for yourself, but I think the shots turned out well.

IRB 1

IRB 2

IRB 3 Picking up a patient

Almost got the prop clear of the water

List Matching

Find matches within a list. How hard could this be?

For the surf clubs software I wanted to be able to find duplicates of competitors. First a little background to explain the problem and why I was trying to find a good solution.

Each year we run an event, a run and a swim. Competitors log into their account and enter one or both events. Over time this builds up a history of the competitor’s entries. All well and good, but in the first few years we didn’t have accounts so a competitor would have registered themselves afresh each year. Often if people forget their account details they simply create a new account and off they go. We are adding some features to address this issue but that is another story.

So we have accounts and ideally we would like to be able to match up the accounts, and merge them, keeping the newer details and doing away with the old details. And thus a competitor’s swim history would grow. Our competitors like this feature, they enjoy seeing their swim and run history. Having this history scattered amongst several accounts is not a desirable thing.

Solution One

This is a relatively simple matching problem, I have over the years had several solutions to this problem, some good, some less so but none that were truly excellent. I now think I have a very good solution, verging on the excellent.
The first solution was to try and build an in memory matching model, this matched A with B and so on, at the end a web of links was created. This worked OK for a couple of years but as the size of the database grew and memory didn’t it began to fail with out of memory errors.

Solution 2

Phase 2 saw the problem divided into two steps, record a match score for each competitor and store this with the competitor. Match competitors based on their match score. The things I have to match on are First and Last Name, Address, Date of Birth, Postcode, Suburb, Phone Number and Email Address. For each of these I normalised them before storing a hash, normalisation was to remove punctuation spaces and covert them to lower case. A hash of these was recorded. The recording format was to use a piece of structured text associated with the competitor. The structured text could be matched in queries.

Because many of our competitors are families, it was common for several competitors to share data such as address, phone numbers emails and so on. This made finding false positives particularly important. In fact it was common for a family to share all of the same data but first name and date of birth.

Once the mapping exercise was completed, the system then go about matching. This process was simple. Rules were devised , eg First and Last name plus DOB and matched on this rule. There were several rules which gave a good fit.
This solution worked but it was rather prone to not matching people and it was slow. Query optimisation and careful caching of parts of the solution speed it up so that it operated in an acceptable time frame. This wasn’t terribly critical after all as the solution only had to operate once a year. There was however an edge case that had to be quick, matching a single new competitor against the database. This had to happen in user wait time, and that bit was starting to get very slow. Very slow in this case meant 1-2 seconds. That could add up to a wait time for a competitor that was agonisingly slow.

Enter the third attempt

Enter solution number 3, in this solution I reduced all of the hashes calculated in the first phase into a single hash, a hash of hashes. This immediately solved my speed problem, now even with a large database, speed was excellent. The database had grown over time to have 35 thousand competitors with some unknown number of duplicates.
It quickly became apparent that this solution was quick, and it was simple but it was disturbingly precise. Enter once, but next year put a hat on and the system would fail to recognise you. It lacked generality.
It was time for solution number 4

The last solution

In this solution I added a fact table. A fact was something like a first name or an address hash. For each fact I recorded Hash, a Weight, and a FactType. Now I could ask the system for competitor X find all competitors with matching facts and tell me the sum of the weights. Once they reached a threshold of sufficient matches they were the same person. For weights for each fact I used the selectivity of the fact in the database scaled to a number between 1 and 10. For example there are 11 thousand last names in 35,000 giving a selectivity of 31% which equated to a weight of 4. First and Last name combined was the most unique and this got a score of 10.

This solution worked well, testing it I could see really good matching being shown. But there were some disturbing false positives. Competitors that clearly were not related who were being grouped together. What was going on.

The first tranche of these false positives were caused by a lack of data. We had gradually been entering old data into the system. This was race results from years when the online system did not exist. For this data we had First and Last Name and Suburb. When this data was imported it used its own match rule. If Bob Smith from Carlton was in the system exactly once we assumed a match otherwise we did not match Bob to anyone. It was not a perfect rule but given the limited data that was the best that could be derived.

Trouble was that for this type of entry they were essentially unmatchable using a fact table. The simple solution for these entries was to exclude them from the matching process.

This hugely improved the false positives, but it did not eliminate them altogether. More investigation revealed that there were records that had been entered into the system where not a lot of details had been recorded. People tended to use NA (for not applicable) or a space or a dot to enter field values and bypass the mandatory checks. The chief offenders here were not the public but harried administrators.

Adding a stop list of words and when recording a fact that was on the stop list weighting it to 0 eliminated these false positives.

Now the list was looking excellent, false positives were eliminated, matching was acceptable in speed though not spectacular, a run was taking in the order of 3 hours 57 minutes. We might be nearing a good solution.
Then a problem emerged, I noticed that there was a an edge case. Sue smith and Susan Smith born 3/May/1967 were being matched, this was good, we can guess that Sue and Susan are the same person. Brian Smith and Timothy Smith born 14/Aug/1989 were also being matched. This is a problem Brian and Timothy are most probably twins. I dubbed this the the twin false positive.

Some twin logic was added, this used several rules to detect twins and to match people whose names differed but were the same person. The first of these was to look for contractions Chris and Christopher are the same Chris is just a contraction of Christopher. Bob and Robert are a diminutive pair. By recording a list of common diminutives a second source of twin disambiguation was created.

This still left the case of spelling mistakes eg one year you enter Molly and the next year Moly. These false negatives I decided to leave. Better I thought to have a few unmatched competitors and allow these to be manually matched, than to try and add a spelling feature to the system.

Performance

The remaining problem was speed. Some analysis showed that the the most expensive query was the summation of the fact table. Fixing this by trimming the query, and adding some appropriate indexes reduced the run time to 14 minutes, quite an improvement on 3:56 hours. Changing a query to fetch a list of matched Competitors to use a cache of in-memory competitors shaved another few minutes off and the total run time became 10.5 minutes. Finally adding in a matched list reduced the time further still. If you have matched A with B then this is symmetric, B will also match A. Recording a list of already matched eliminates the needless B with A comparison. Run time was now an acceptable 9.4 minutes.

Conclusion

I know that this solution was better than both solutions 2 and 3 because I was able to run each against a full set of data. Solution 4 generated 4 thousand matches, higher than 3 which had matched 1000 or so, and still better than solution 2 which matched 2,500. Solution 2 was certainly generating some false twin positives so 2,500 should be read as 2,150
Solution four seems to do a good job. It is quite amenable to change. The weighting mechanism or the calculation of hashes can be changed independently of the matching mechanism. Bulk matching is fast, individual matching is very fast.

Red cordial hour

Parliament has been like watching screaming queens bitch slapping each other. An here I am not referring to our ancient monarch Elizabeth Regina. But more coquettish rouged ‘ladies’ of the evening.

You resign, no you resign, I called it first, you are not a real women you should .... etc. Slap, oh you bitch. Slap. Oh Slap slap slap slap.

The Leader of the Opposition LO has his hands on an email, an email that suggests that the Prime Minster or at least the Prime Ministers Office wanted a deal for a friend of the PM. A friend that had loaned him the use of a ute. The LO then called on the PM to resign. Not for having a friend though that was news to most. For having mislead parliament. THe LO also called for The Treasurer to resign for the same crime. The PM called on LO to resign as he said that the LO facts were false. And it turns out that the facts are false. The damming email is in fact a fake. Parliament erupts in a day of name calling and hyperbole.

This sadly is what passes for parliamentary debate. Instead of any of the things that matter. GFC, Global Warming. An effective Carbon Trading scheme. What Australia gets is the deracinated ravings of our ‘leaders’ telling each other that they are not fit for the job.

Its like the hair pulling competition for 3 year olds after red cordial hour at the local kinder. Some adult needs to come in and give everyone a bottle and some afternoon quiet time.

Brave brave new Myki world

Same old stuff: Myki its a new system; You get less rights

Chasing through the maze that is the governments legal and regulatory framework for MyKi is fun. Fun in the sense that picking at a scab is fun, you want to, you know you shouldn’t, and the result is painful.

There is a long tradition with the introduction of new systems that the system provider ensures that most of the rights belong to them and few of the responsibilities. We saw this with the introduction of a variety of banking products, Credit Cards, EFT POS cards etc.

MyKi is a banking product. It is an interesting banking product. Myki is a stored value card that notionally stores a sum of money. This money can be used to buy travel on trams or trains and goods or services. Probably the goods and services will be coming in the future.

The MyKi system is then both a banking product, a ‘stored value card’ and a ticketing product. It is the bastard child of linking these two unlike things that present some interesting issues.

Essentially Myki cant decide are they a bank with a bugger the customers attitude or are they a transport company with a screw the customers attitude. Either way as a customer guess what you are fucked, but the dilemma is card as ticket or card as notional stored value. Sometimes reading the Myki literature the Ticket side wins other times the Banking side wins. At all times the customer, that’s you bub, looses.

For example

Under the Transport Act an Authorised Officer can take your ticket from you as evidence. The act suggest that AOs must have reasonable grounds for doing so,but in fact they always take the ticket. Under the MyKi system the AO will be taking whatever stored value is on your card, plus of course you will be required to pony up for a new card. The transport act and the ticket nature of Myki conspire to deprive you of the stored value on the card. Now the fact that this is the current practice doesn’t mean that it will necessarily be the new practice but it would give one pause. Should I really place any significant value onto a card that can be confiscated by officialdom. At their whim.

The MyKi terms of service are even more interesting. They say in part TTA is entitled to reject an application to redeem value loaded onto a Card if there has been a material breach of these Terms which I would take to read that if you have breached the use of the card, by say incorrectly swiping on and swiping off that the TTA may firstly take your card under the Transport Act, and then may not have to offer you the value that is stored on the card. Beautiful, screw you over then steal from you. All nice and legal. But they do help Grannies across the road. Oh no wait they don’t.

The ToU then go on to say that you the cardholder have no rights to the money stored on the card, and that TTA offers no Fiduciary duty to you. This suggests that the TTA want to operate a clever sort of Stored Value card. One in which they store value at their grace and favour. If things go wrong, then they are completely off the hook. Will things go wrong though is a very fair question. After all this is a system that is years late and millions over budget so maybe all of that time has been spent making sure there is a super system. Possibly, but MetCard when it was introduced was years late millions over budget and buggy as hell. So from past experience it seems possible that there will be problems with the new system. Luckily for the operators that have ensured that all of the loss will be borne by the public. That’s you bub.

The ToU do address the issue of system error. They say TTA’s records are, in the absence of manifest error, conclusive of the amount of stored value on the Card or I take that to read, our system is right and if you wish to claim it as being wrong then you will have to prove manifest error. And since we know that governments never make errors they sure as hell will not make manifest error. Again there is a loser and that’s you bub

It seems that the TAA terms of use tilt the balance heavily in the TTA’s favour

Fees and Charges

The ToU suggest that I could ring the MyKi hotline to determine what the fees and charges were. I did this and having got through the usual maze of button pushing I talked to an operator. They didn’t know what the fees and charges were, they thought I was talking of fares, again the confusion are they a ticketing agency or a bank with only one product. After some prompting they were able to tell me that a new card costs $5:00 which is refundable at the moment. There is a fee for a replacement card, and there is fee of $9:80 to transfer a balance from one card to the other, presumably if a card is lost. So I assume that if you loose a card, and need it replaced this will cost 14:80

According to the ToU any other fees are to be announced by publication in a newspaper. They of course grant themselves several waivers to do this urgently should they need to, and a waiver to charge whatever fees against a card ‘from time to time’.

So the skinny on MyKi

Its a ticket that you have to pay for, storing value on it. It can readily be confiscated leaving you with no recourse. Its not a fiduciary product leaving you with no protection under the banking act. The operators have no idea what the fees are. The language to describe everything reserves all the rights to the operator.

My advice.

Get an anonymous ticket. It just might protect your privacy.

Put a small amount of cash into it. That way if the system screws up. Or an authorised officer menaces you you only loose a small amount. Don’t follow my advice, expect to loose and loose large. And if you do the TAA Connex, Yarra Trams, the government and the people who help grannies across the street don’t loose. Someone does, that’s you bub.

What I have learned from bank TV adds

Ok so its fish in a barrel time. I am bagging the banks and their adds. It is like shooting those poor fish. Who doesn’t hate their bank. Yes man in a red hat in the back row put down your hand. You are just the exception in the crowd that proves the rule.

Maybe one of the reasons that we hate the banks is their craven adds. The current crop in Australia are just truly appalling.

Which bank thinks humour sells their product, they think racism is funny. They think Australians find racism funny.

Westpac thinks we think they are a bunch of deranged cowboy gamblers that participated in the Global Financial Crisis; so they are telling us that they are really a little bit safer that the lollipop lady. It might work if you didn’t know that their provision for bad debts this year is 4.4 Billion and last year they reduced their dividend by 20%. They are not the lollipop lady they are those crazy gamblers their adds suggest they are not.

The ANZ is the stalkers bank. They have scary automatons to stalk you. Or could it be a bloke wearing an ATM suit. The add is trying to tell us that they have more ATMs. More than what, where, what sort. The sort that get skimmed or the other sort. The sort that charge me a huge fee to use or the other sort. If you are a stalker this add will excite you for the rest of us being followed by a computer that walks, a la the terminator but not quiet as fast is just creepy.

The last of the big four NAB is just too lazy or stupid or profitable to bother with TV spots. Or their adds are so asinine that I have never noticed.

Which bank adds feature a bunch of Americans that are an add agency, the bank has apparently hired the worst agency in the world. The agency would put out really bad adds if it were not for the rock solid bankers at the CBA who set the Americans straight. This has been the theme for a long running series of adds from the CBA. I think its supposed to be funny. But try this experiment. Replace the Americans with another group, say Aborigines. Suddenly you realise that what the bank is telling us is funny is racism. Yup that’s a thigh slapper.

But really these adds are more annoying that that. We are expected to be post modern enough to know that the add agency is not real and that we are being told ‘a story’ Very post modern, we know that you know, and you know that we know that you know. Yeah I get that. Yet if I am a little more looking inside the add that the witless creatives that came up with this puke I think. Hey here is a bank that is so sure that their customers are witless that they make adds about a pretend agency that I am meant to think is real. The CBA is pissing its money away on deliberately bad adds and somehow this is good.

If you want to do a fish out of water adds for a bank check out the NZ bank that has done this. Very funny. Its about one guy reporting back to his faceless overseas mentor. It is funny. In a banker kind of way.

All up doleful annoying stupid adds. I don’t know what to be more depressed about. The bank marketing departments that approved this crap. Or the agencies that came up with it in the first place.

Well enough bashing the banks. It has been fun though.

Foggy Melbourne

It was foggy in Melbourne Yesterday so I got up bright and early to see. Except of course it wasn’t bright sort of dull and swirly and gray.

The Duck Pond in Carlton Gardens

Autum Mists

Tree Line

A simple proposal for the reform of Financial Planning

They say that a fool and his money are soon parted. Financial planners are supposed to prevent fools, or the financially illiterate from being parted from their money. All too often planners and the products that they recommend do just that.

To remedy this planners offer disclosure documents that tell you about the nature of the product, the planners relationship with the product vendor and so on. These are wonderful documents. You go to a financial planner to get advice, to simplify the process of investing and get given a many paged tome of dense inarticulate writing to go through. In other words you get given the very thing you went to the planner to avoid.

I have a simple remedy for this. First some simple structural changes to the way planning services are provided.

Firstly all planners should only be able to operate on a fee for service basis. This removes the chance that the planner is motivated more by the commission that they receive than offering good advice. This is something that is already happening and will come into the rules of the financial planners by 2012. There should be no commissions, no trailing fee, no fees built into products etc.

Each product should have its real risk explained. Suppose you use a margin load to invest in the share market. This has for good stocks a relatively straight forward risk explanation. But suppose it is a more complicated scenario, investment in a product using leverage that is itself leveraged and possible investing in further leverage. These kind of products work wonderfully in a rising market and as we have seen in the Global Financial Crash woefully in a falling market.

Having a way that determines the true risk proposition is important so that the naive and the savvy can compare products.

Planners should not have any relationship with the organisation they are investing in, except that they too can invest in the same product but are limited to a 20% maximum holding.

Planners should have a legal duty of care. Where a planner is offering advice like Storm did to bet your house. That immediately should fail the duty of care. The individual concerned and the organisation they work for should become liable and this liability should extend up the chain. It is manifestly unreasonable that the banks who finance such shenanigans can walk away untouched whilst people have been ruined.

Disclosure is good, vital even, but it needs to be simple and to the point. To this end I would introduce the 3 10s rule Disclosure would be limited to 3 sets of 10 points, it could be less. The first set would be desirable outcomes eg the 10 things that will happen if the product works as advertised. Now for most product there will not be 10 possible desirable outcomes there will be less, still the list is limited to 10 items.

The next list would be the set of things that could happen should the product fail in some way. Eg a margin call will be made in this circumstance. It will be this much and so on. This list is the 10 undesirable outcomes

The last 10 would be the 10 disaster scenarios. Planner goes broke, product goes broke, market goes belly up and so on.

Each point would be required to be written in plain English and would be limited to a around 100 words. The total set of disclosures would therefore be at the most 3 to 4 pages and in most cases significantly less. Does this make it hard to explain really complicated products. Yes it would. But is that a bad thing as it would push complicated and hard to explain products from the market. These are the sort of products that are next to impossible to explain and next to impossible to estimate the risk.

How would this be enforced? Planners would be liable for loss if what happened was not described in their document. In the event something bad happens and a court decides that a reasonable person could have reasonably foreseen the event, and that this event was not described in the disclosure document the planner would be liable for the loss. All disclosure must be in plain English.

Similarly a lack of plainness and straight speaking in the disclosure would put planners on the hook.

Naturally planners will want to guard against being exposed to liability for investment losses so they will ensure that they write good disclosure documents. They will probably insure against such losses so their insurance companies will have an interest in validation the disclosures. Planners are busy people and they will probably push the issuers of products to come up with some of the disclosure material. This in turn will mean that those product creators may themselves bear some liability.

Furthermore as disclosure documents become simpler, and more understandable the ACCC will have a simpler job in looking at those playing at the edges of the disclosure regime. If the ACCC were able to make a binding determination that put planners on the hook. There would then exist a force that would make those who are shonky and offering poor advice instantly liable for loses. This stick would be corrective in the industry. Potentially it allows gulled investors to unwind their positions before too much damage is done.

This proposal may increase the costs of getting planning advice, it will decrease the likelihood of getting bad advice. It will leave disclosure as a useful matter.

These proposals will undoubtedly raise costs, they will undoubtedly make financial planning a less attractive proposition. Hopefully they make it less attractive for the venal, and those lacking veracity.

These ideas would make receiving advice clear and consistent. Leave it in plain English and ensure that both the advised and a stake in the successful outcome.

Harbinger of Doom

Oh look at all the loverly fines

Oh look at all the lovely fines. Authorised officers AKA Customer Diss-service officers must be having a wet dream. A new complicated system combined with their cruelty rudeness and intolerance.

No wonder the photo is blurry I was shaking in fear, when I saw this new device on my local tram.

Read all about the Myki system and how Yarra Trams plans to use it to drive away customers. And here is what the customers say

You may think that the forgoing statements are full of hyperbole, overblown, alarmist even. You may be right.

Trouble is having had dealings with Authorised Officers I can attest that they are overly aggressive, rude and overbearing. They are either by their training or because of their group culture very likely to turn an ordinary situation into confrontation, arrest, assault and a high level of violence.

I have never seen police violenty arrest people I am sure they do I have just never seen it. I have seen Authorised Officers do this on three occasions. I simply cannot ever believe that its is necessary for 6 men to pile onto one person and hold them to the ground over a 3 dollar fare. Over feet on as seat. Over the Authorised Officer having a bad day.

The actions I have seen seem grossly disproportionate. This must be a culture that the management of Yarra Trams and Connex subscribe to and encourage. The alternative of course is that they have unknowingly allowed a culture of victimisation and harassment to flourish. But given their repeated statements backing up their AOs it seems unlikely.

For this reason I am very apprehensive when a new ticketing system is introduced. We have a group of enforcement personnel that go the biff, with gleeful regularity. A group who are uniformly rude, aggressive and confrontational. This is not a group of men, and the occasional women who are going to transform themselves into helpful agents of change. The new Myki system is complicated. Like all new systems there will be a period of time where people have to learn the new system. The current enforcement regime if it continues will make this learning process a nightmare.

Here I might be wrong. Maybe the management of Yarra Trams and Connex can change their thuggish charges into angels. Maybe there can be a miracle on the 86. But I think that the balance of probability is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

It seems the Myki system has been designed to make criminals of us all. We must clock on and clock of each vehicle that we are on. We must have previously loaned the transport company money by putting it on our stored value Myki cards which we can then redeem on a trip. There is no facility on trains or trams to buy a ticket. Simply getting on a tram without a card, or without sufficient value on the card, you ae breaking the rules and risk being fined.

The transport company will let us link a ticket to our bank account and automatically debt should we lack funds, or we can have an anonymous account that we top up. Given public transports monumental inability to manage complex projects I personally won’t let these companies to my bank account. I would suddenly find that my rent had not been paid as Yarra Trams had billed me for 100s of tram trips between somewhere I had never been and another place I wasn’t going to.

Even lets suppose that Myki or Yarra or whoever runs this dogs breakfast are really good. And here I look at all of the utilities who periodically manage to over-bill. The power, the phone, any billing system that bills in little increments. So we either use an anonymous account or we set a special account that when Myki or Yarra or whomever screw up we are not financially ruined.

But lets not get distracted by the possibility that the Myki might have, may have, most probably will have, is almost certain to have, a cocked up stupid form filled bureaucratic nightmare of a billing system. See We don't want to give your money back and My card broke now what

Lets concentrate on the introduction of and the uptake of a new ticketing system. A system that will be managed by a hyper-agressive set of bully boys. Oh and bully girls.

How does Myki imagine that this will work. So far in the trials the error rate has been 10 percent. I have tried to verify that figure and I can’t Now it is unclear if that is 10 percent of trips or 10 percent of interactions. Each trip has two interactions. So at best for an ordinary commuter who goes to work and returns each day than once a week the system will have made an error. This will allow the authorised officers to fine you, insult you. Assault you and then lie about what they found. The current law in the transport act gives you no legs to stand on. So one day in 5 if the system works at its current level you stand to get a 167 dollar fine. Brilliant. If you complain you can or will be arrested. And if you are arrest you will be put in a pressure hold, forced to the ground and assaulted by Yarra trams or Connex goons. These ‘men’ if that is the right word to use for such thugs will lie to make everything legal. Think that I am being over the top. Read many customers accounts and a steady pattern of violence and lies emerges.

Of course the error rate of 10% may fall. Lets hope that it does. AO interactions of course do not lead to assault. According to AO spokesmen the AOs are simple doing their duty. The spokesman is correct, as few if any AOs end up in court for assault. I simple maintain that it is assault as the training that the AOs receive makes it likely that they will escalate an event. That the will take what should be a simple though unpleasant situation and turn it into something much worse. That this seems to be a consistent pattern of behaviour is why I term it assault. The courts so far take a different view.

I am thinking that this is going to be one of those epic fails. A public relations disaster. A complete catastrophe. I salute the executives at the head of Yarra trams. I salute the violence that they encourage, perpetrate through their AOs and condone, I bow down prostrate before them, a position that heir Authorised Officers have forced me to assume. 1.3 Billion dollars in public money and some thick thugs in greatcoats will cause it to fail.

Lets hope I am wrong.

The government has bet 1.3 Billion dollars that I am mistaken. Yarra trams has hired a few hundred men and trained them to be thugs, says I am right.

Addendum

Today pursuing my interest in Myki I went to the Myki demonstration site at Southern Cross Station. There a very helpful attendant told me all about it. Apparently she is to be called a *Myki Mate*, divine I say.

It would have been a great demo but most of the machines and all of the interesting ones were in her words “been broken for a couple of days”. For 1.3 billion running a demo site should be easy. They could pay someone to be the mechanical Turk.

One thing I learned is that you must swipe on and swipe off. If you forget to swipe off then you will be charged a full days fare. Seems to me a simple swipe in the moring and you are done for the day. I am sure that the AOs will have a different view.

More on the privacy aspects of Myki later. Yes big brother will watch you.

A camera project.

i love my big camera the Canon 5D. But big is the operative word. It is a huge camera, it is something that you deliberately take with you. Not something that lives in your pocket. So I go and take pictures but not always the pictures that are around me every day.

On the other hand I have an iPhone. It has a camera that has been roundly condemned. I read an inspirational post on using a Helga Camera, which sadly seems to be no more. This and a couple of others got me thinking. Rather than see the awfulness of the iPhone camera as a limitation treat it as the feature that makes photos interesting.

Borne of this is my Camera that you have blog.

Building a Stomp Box

An account of building a Stomp Box, a kind of musical instrument. Pete wanted a new way to extend his range, combining his love of music and mine of woodworking to make an instrument. Read More

Pictures

At last we have pictures.

Well not exactly true, there have always been pictures its just that they were hard. Gradually I stopped putting them up as it was too much work.

Not anymore. And to celebrate here is a picture of a flower.

Tulips taken at the flower show.

Stringing me along

This is a story of how a man got his string, how a designer failed, and how 40 minutes of my life was wasted by poor design.

I wanted cooking string, the kind of thing you use to tie up chickens, or a bundle of herbs. A bouquuet garni if you are being a smart arse.

The handy mac dictionary says

"The bouquet garni (French for “garnished bouquet”) is a bundle of herbs usually tied together with string and mainly used to prepare soup, stock, and various stews. The bouquet is boiled with the other ingredients, but is removed prior to consumption."

I went to the supermarket and I looked for string. I looked, and I looked and I looked, I gave up, the supermarket is big, string is small. Really small and everywhere if you believe physicists. But that was not the sort of string I was after. I asked a staff member who found out an aisle for me.

Great I had narrowed my search form the whole store to an aisle but an aisle in the supermarket is a big thing. I had already wasted 15 minutes looking for string. Now I was getting annoyed, and the more annoyed I got, the more determined I became. Strange that isn’t it. Sometimes an annoyance like that causes you to give up and almost the same annoyance can make you dig your heels in. Clearly this was a heel dug in day.

I looked around the spices, could it be filed with tying up herbs? No string.

I looked in the baking nostrums section, lots of patty papers, sparkly balls for baking, chocolate hail. Almost made me want to bake something, but no string.

I looked amongst the oils, the flours the specialty baking stuff. No string

I found another staff member who looked in the section where they sell knives and kitchen scales and weird appliances made on the cheap in China and sold for a trifle. The things that break in the bag on the way home form the store. Or maybe that just happens to me. He couldn’t see string, I couldn’t see string. He thought they must be out of string.

I looked again now that my search had shrunk form a whole aisle to just an area of aisle. Woolworths has a kind of crap kitchen stuff home brand. Everything is packaged in the same sort of packaging. Clearly they got there printing done by someone who had an excess of weird colours, or maybe they have a colour blind designer. I would try to describe the colours. Maybe the photo does it justice. Its sort of a green and sort of a fawn brown. I hope these colours aren’t the new seasons designer black, how silly would I be.

And there amongst the generic stuff was string. I had been fooled cause I was actually looking for string. I should have looked for a box labeled string, a box sitting as you can see amongst all the other boxes.

What sort of crazy designer takes a nice distinctive thing, a ball of string and hides it in a box. Admittedly labeled string, no wait, its not, its labeled Cooking Twine. Hell its in a whole range of things that are all the same colour wise. Does anybody ever try and buy these home brand things in their horrid almost green almost fawn packaging.

What are these design guys thinking. If I hide the string no one will buy it and I will be able to corner the market. String is evil no one should buy it.

What is the string, sorry coking twine doing here anyway. Its a consumable, poor stuff, it is languishing in among the durables like graters and pepper mills and stuff.

Notice the string, see how stringy it is. See its essential stringiness. Package that into a box and its nature is gone. Design failure. Put it not where it is logical for it to be. Store layout failure. Put it in a truly horrible box, more design failure.

Causes of failure

What caused me to have to take so long to find string.

• Search space is very large
• Search space reduction was ineffecient
  • Hanging tag list is too generic for string
  • Staff didn’t know location of product.
  • Staff interrelationships are poor
• String stored in an illogical place
• Packaging is woeful
• String is called Cooking Twine

Search space

The search space, the number of racks, rows, and aisles to look in a super market is very large A small specialty item like string is going to be hard to find. After a first pass look I started to use the tools that the store provides to narrow my search. This store has a hanging list at the end of each aisle telling you were things are. This list is optimized to fit on a single A4 page so a small specific item wasn’t there. There is no more detailed list

Next I tried asking a staff member. Unfortunately for me he was a low status guy. When he found someone that knew the answer. A job that he did promptly, and cheerfully. The person who gave him the answer simple pointed him and therefore me to an aisle. Still a large area to look. I suspect that his status meant that the other staff member could blow him off with vague directions. This suggests that whilst the first chap had my customer interests at heart. This didn’t extend to other staff members. This might seem like an over-reach in analysis. But when I approached a second staff member the pattern was repeated. He too cheerfully went off to find the information, came back with more precise but still vague information relayed to him from a more knowledgeable co-worker. Once could be chance, twice ia pattern emerges. Junior staff don’t know things and the more senior staff that do know are not helping out the juniors, and therefore not helping out the customer.

Illogical Storage

String as I have mentioned is a consumable. I looked for it with spices, after its association with bouquuet garni. I looked for it in the baking nostrums section, sparkles, patty tins etc. I looked in the edge of flour territory, yeast bread improver and so on. None of these places were right but my approach was to pick up that the store groups like things together. The store had grouped it with like things. Like things that are packed in the same way.

The store is breaking its own meta-rule. It places like things together, flour, sugars, Asian grocery and so on. It doesn’t for example place all of the home brand products together, or all of green things together. With string it broke that rule and placed it with its ‘essentials brand’.

I am reminded of Gorge Luis Borges Chinese Encyclopedia, In this (possibly fictional) volume described by the writer, animals are categorised as:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others, those that have just broken a flower vase,
13. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Its wonderful, and nonsensical, and if you look hard there is almost a pattern, look harder and then there is not. String’s classification in Woolworths is the same.

Packaging

I have already mentioned the colours. Vile! The strange name. Not string but twine. How the packaging hides the nature of the product forcing the consumer to read the packaging rather than give a hint as to content. A ball of string, or twine is visually arresting, it forms a lief motif for things that are string. Its embedded culturally. Imagine cute kittens playing with a ball of wool. Search for string and countless images of spools of string and balls of string are shown.

The packaging ignores that and just presents a box. The typogray on this box the most important item is HOME essentials. Cooking twine is sandwiched between the ‘essentials brand’ and the new that this is a dispensing pack. In order to determine the nature of the contents I have to from this cluttter of information find the word Twine, the only word that gives me a clue to the contents. Out of two brands and 7 words 1 gives me a clue. And it wasn’t the clue I had set myself I was looking for string.

In closing

This seems like a long spiel on a simple ball of string. Its not really about the string. Its about how a series of decisions, poor packaging, poor placement, untrained and poorly supported staff, insufficient reference material, make it extremely hard to locate a simple product.

Imagine that this is repeated in countless stores and for untold products and this adds up to a lot of 40 minutes lost.

What moral purpose

Its Easter and its Easter Sunday. The holiest day of the Christian year, the day when we consider life and death and our response to it. Or we do if we are of a mind. Cardinal Pell tells us that condoms are not the answer.“that condoms encouraged promiscuity”. If that was what he said, we would know that he is what many of us suspect. An elderly demented power broker of the Church. But that unfortunately is not all of what he said, What he said was to back up Pious and Benedict and those other fathers of the church. He said that Condoms where not the answer to AIDS The only answer was to respect the marriage vows and not to have sex outside marriage. Condoms were never to be used. In fact this deluded pointy hat wearer went further and suggests that condoms were part of the problem not the solution.

Well excuse me holy fuckwit. If that were true and condoms caused promiscuity then there would have been less promiscuity before condoms were around. But it just ain’t so. In the world where I live. If a hot chick offers sex I am having a bit, and here hot is a very very relative term. And if the figures of many many studies are anything to go by; many women feel the same. Lots of kids 10%, 20, 30% take your study and make your stance,are born outside of the marriage. Abstinence and only sex inside marriage. Only a religion whose rule makers are all celibate and all men, would think abstinence is going to work.

That’s not to mention the problem of hemophiliacs with AIDS or the victims of rape. No Pell and the power mongers of the church want to hew to Benedict’s line. A moral purpose is better than staying alive. Pell’s morality is better dead, than protected. Yes its a great idea that we all stay chaste and love the one true wife or husband, we only do the naughty with them, not fort pleasure god forbid, just for procreation. It is a great idea but one undone by what we are. Humans.

I have one word for you Darwin. We are not machines of the divine, vessels of holy spirit or any other mumbo jumbo. We are flesh machines for passing on genes. And a clever organism AIDS has co-opted that drive and is hitching a lift. Get over your manslaughter morality and understand a few of the things that have been known the last 200 years. Its time to interdict, its time to move on. Its time for growth here in the world during Easter.

To think that a pontiff can be so removed from our true human nature is to wonder at an organization that can be so out of touch. To think that you would rail against a measure, condoms that is effective in preventing not just AIDS but other STDs as well because you have a moral argument against contraception. Where do these men’s real values lie. Is human life so beneath their pervue, that it is less important than a moral principal. That is twisted.

The kind amongst us would suggest delusion, the unkind would find these men are monsters.

Its war she cried

It is wonderful how our media and politicians co-opt the rich imagery of war to support their causes.

We have the war on drugs, the war on terror from our politicians. Now forget the risible concept of a war on war ie the war on terror. Turning what are in essence police actions into wars is lazy and degrades the language.

Then we have the media, who tend to conflate simple criminal vengeance between networks with war. We allegedly have a bikie war, we have just had a gangland war. These terms make for great headlines, but in the process debase the language. Can a bunch of criminals killing each other in a tit for tat manner really be a war. Vengeance yes, murder yes, but war, hardly. These are people that deserve none of the things we associate with war, the good, like patriotism, honour, service and so on. Criminals killing each other shares death with war, nothing else.

War however disgusting and horrific has an import component that agencies give to themselves the legitimisation of violence and ultimately death. Pathetic patched up crims on bikes have no such legitimisation except in their own perverted world view. People using drugs have hardly taken up arms and started to kill those who would choose to prevent them. The criminal networks that are enabled by and maintained by the opposition very well might. War, hardly.

Start to use our wonderful language better. Leave war in its proper place.

It's alive

Ohmslaw was for a while dead, or deadish. But then my friend heysus, say it with a Spanish accent, brought ohmslaw back to a state of grace.

Thanks Dave; AKA heysus. He performed a transformation. A resurrection if you will and here we are looking more chipper than we were. more buff, more cut, more ripped. Weird how many ways there are of describing a body that has gained muscle and lost fat.

Hopefully the new ohmslaw is like that, the fat stripped away, the writing ripped and rippling.

pGal Lives

Its been a while but I have begun to resuscitate a friend. pGal is the CMS behind this site and a couple of others notable the Lorne Surf Club Site www.lornesurfclub.com.au. I have been the webmaster and site handmaiden there for a number of years. This is rewarding but also frustrating, frustrating as I have to make all of the content. As time has past there have been more and more people saying let me edit pages and manage things. I realised that pGal was not up to this task.

The bones of the system are great, but you need to know how the software is intended to work in order to use it. I decided that three things had to happen for the Surf Clubs site. First it needed a site revamp, the old look was sad, dowdy, like a mouldy old stuffed parrot that has seen better days. So item one was a site revamp. Item two was a change to a key pgal design decision. When I designed pgal I allowed works (a document, picture, ...) to be either a reference in the db and a file or contained in the db. This was probably a good decision at the time, but now with hindsight not such a good idea. It made managing those files hard. It means that a suite of things have to be backed up, the db, files, templates and so on. It made the user interfaces more complicated and error prone. It meant that authors had to know too much. So I made the decision, everything into the db. No more files. The third thing I added to my todo list was a reworking of the pgal interfaces to make it much easier to use.

So I have completed items 1 and 2, a reworking of the surf clubs website. It now produces compliant HTML and CSS. I think it looks much better than the old site, luckily now only available in the Google Cache

I have added the ability to provide pages via a markup language. I chose textile as the markup format. Not for any particular love of textile, It just happened that this was the first reasonably complete implementation of a markup that I found. Now documents are much more straight forward to author. 90% Just write them in textile in the db. Job done. the remaining 10% that are tricky, HTML. In fact for many documents an author need do nothing more than type.

Next problem that I needed to solve was to display the Surf Clubs newsletter on the website. The surf clubs newsletter is called the Lorne Mower. Yes I hear the thigh slapping from here. To make it I edit an HTML document and use the marvellous Campaign Monitor http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ to send emails. I build an HTML document and provide a zip of all of the images. Campaign Monitor picks this up and turns it into an addressed email. it a loverly system and I thoroughly recommend it. So I wanted something like this for the site. A facility where I could chuck an HTML page, a zip of images and hey presto it all gets imported. Well this now works, and works a treat.

That has meant that I could import Mowers for the last couple of years, as well as some of the other bulletins etc that have been sent to members. You can see an example here http://www.lornesurfclub.com.au/Photo?Gallery=235

In additon to these big features I have added a number of smaller things, Better editors for documents and the combined Gallery and Document, fixed a number of bugs, in particular a rendering bug that had driven me nuts but when finally solved proved to be simplicity itself.

So now I have plans to make pgal much easier to use.

Step one is to redo the edit navigation. Currently this is a bit hard to use, sort of like saying celestial navigation in a storm at night is a bit hard when compared to asking a GPS where the hell are we. Viciously primitive might be a better description.

A revamped navigation page will allow me to hang off of it all of the creational activity. This in turn will provide for a more work flow like approach. Currently pgal has no work flow, you just assemble all the parts, and provided that you know the order of assembly, what is produced works. Of course if you don’t know the secret sauce, then great weeping and whaling and gnashing of teeth are in store for you.

This is one of the reasons that I have been reluctant to open up pgal to others to edit on it. The reason that I am chained to being the web-master for eternity.

Revamped navigation and the moving of some key tasks to that navigation area is going to make lots fo things much simpler. No more renumbering pages by hand to get their order right.

Step 2 is the idea that you can attach templates to an area. Currently templates are global. Fine for a simple site where you may have only a few templates, but in a larger site there may be many different areas of the site, each of these may have several templates. Currently the surf clubs site runs to 35 templates, which means that choosing the wrong one becomes very easy.

Oh I hear you ask, what is a template, a template in pGal provides the layout of a page, it takes various resources that are passed to it and renders them, A simple example might be a page that renders a document. The template provides the look, the gallery and the document the data. and meta-data to render the page.

By attaching a template to an area I can then provide an area manager, more on these later, a limited set of templates to choose from, oh and a a default template. Templates know how to render a part of the site, currently you have to know what a particular template requires. that is say for example a template needs a document and 3 pictures, you need to make these resources and tie those four objects to the gallery (AKA directory) and apply the template and vola it works. Clearly in the current model getting the right resources for a template is just another thing to screw up. So as well as attaching templates to areas each template will have a set of resources it needs, it will use these resources to drive the editor and suddenly we are looking at workflow. So Area has Templates Template has Resouces, template has an editor for making a page. I have a warm glow.

All of this leads to step 3 which is t provide access control lists to areas. An access control list will allow the system to specify an owner and editors that own a directory, and its children. This feature will allow the boat rowers to edit their part of the site, and the p2p people their part and so on. Getting here allows me to hand over content creation to others.

There are a few other things I want to do. Currently all graphics are held in one giant directory, this system is hard to manage and files get renamed in perverse ways to ensure that there are no name clashes. That in turn makes editing harder. I want to move all graphics so that the source is stored in the DB. Its going to make the DB much larger but it will mean that there is now only two things to back up. The db, and the template area. It will also mean that all graphics can be squirted out as required, resized and all that good stuff.

To make managing graphics easier I intend to have each site directory create a parallel website directory in which any resources, graphics files and so on are stored. This makes file names easier to manage and makes moving things, and deleting them easier too. No more shared graphics and all of the complications that that creates.

Finally when I am at this point I can add the other feature I have wanted for a while. Current each URL in pgal looks something like /Photo?Gallery=3 hardly the most memorable of URLS what I would like is for that to be /MySite/Trips/Kimberly a much more descriptive URL.

All in all this is quite a bit of work, but the first few steps have been taken, and they were fun. Even if it was a bit of a pain to have to visit 5,6,7 year old code and realise that it was not as good as it could be. Thank goodness for IntelliJ re-factoring tools.

Stay tuned for the next instalments of the pGal story, and what the programmer did next.

Paul Newport Video

Toward a better power supply

Toward a more stable power network
When it gets hot the power goes out. This can be for several reasons, equipment failure usually due to heat and demand, or the need of central authorities to shed load. Load shedding is a bit of a euphemism, it means cutting power to an area fro a period of time so that the entire network remains safe.

When its hot the load is mostly power used for air-conditioning. But more is coming, the first electric cars are just on the horizon, Everything consumes more power, big screen TVs air-con, now cars, businesses etc.

The proposal for managing this that was muted when power was sold off was to institute an economic model. In this model power would be sold in 15 minute blocks, blocks would be priced according to the cost of supply using maths so complicated that the company that runs this system had to be given an unpronounceable name (NEMECO)

The big downfall of converting the domestic tranche to 15 minute power blocks was the need to retrofit every house with a smart meter. These are expensive, around the 1500 dollar mark. That’s the best figure I can find. Most of that cost is not the meter, its the installation.

For this reason the new meter model failed.

I think I have a better idea. In this idea all houses would be equipped with smart meters, these meters would be selling power in 15 minute trances, but they would also be able to turn on and off remotely various classes of devices.

The classes of device I think that could be usefully turned off remotely are
1) Air conditioners
2) Water heaters
3) Electric vehicle recharging

The way that this would work is that on days where ‘load shedding’ was required then different areas would have some of these devices switched off. This might be for 1/2 an hour or so. The pain could be shared around. This type of load shedding allows lack of supply to be shared around. It also allows load in areas with equipment that is critical to be shed. For example suppose that a particular substation component is close to tripping because of temperature, load could be shed keeping the network alive, keeping food in fridges, leaving computing and telephony services intact.

But this load shedding, and smart meeting could be extend. Provide differential pricing for general classes of supply. Allow people to choose when their meter turns off particular classes of device. Say I decide I don’t mind sweating a bit. I set the price I am prepared to pay for aircon, and if that price is exceed then my aircon goes off.

This is a nice set of features, I can provide economic input to how i consume power, the supplier can ultimately protect the network in a better way than just shedding load. With some cleverness this protective feature can be extended to network components.

Now the rub, we have only a few really hot days a year, on average around 1.3 days a year over 40. This is a lot of expense to plan for these hot days. We have 10 days a year on average over 35. This is around the sort of temperature where load shedding becomes a possibility. I don’t here have the capability to estimate how much of the system would have to be metered like this before it became useful. I can’t really conduct a useful cost benefit analysis. But I think it would be worthwhile to try and do that analysis.

In closing how could such a system be rolled out.

I suggest a set of triggers that would require the installation of a smart meter, and a set of carrots that would induce people to install one.

The triggers could be
Meter installation of any sort.
Installing aircon
Installing hot water
Rapid charge system for electric vehicle recharge

The carrots could be
Cheaper power for those who install meters

The power system is going to have to adapt going forward Electric vehicles are almost here, global warming is here and will continue to impact, people are installing more aircon, using more power, increasing their consumption in all sorts of ways.

We need to do something to manage the network better, we need a way to ensure that there is security of supply. This proposal might be a way

Power nap of death

Why do all my devices gobble so much power. Even on standby? Most devices could benefit form a really simple model, a scheme that I am calling the 'Sleep of death", catchy huh.

All devices have a power down mode when after a period of inactivity they start to go to sleep.

When the device goes into power down mode it switches off the mains supply. It monitors whatever turns it on, keyboard for a PC or remote for a telly using energy stored in a capacitor. The capacitor would be sized so that there is enough storage to keep monitoring going for 5 days.

After 5 days if the device has not been used then the capacitor looses energy and the device is truly powered off, the sleep of death. To wake it from such a death like state you have to go and hit the start button on the device.

The aim should be that devices that are sleeping should consume 0 watts of power, and if they are not used for a few days they stop using power altogether. So some of the things that flow from this is that the traditional wall wart will die. This kind of device can't be powered off they still sip power event if there is noting on the other end. Don't believe me, just put your hand on one. It will be warm even if the wall wart is doing nothing.

I have just walked around my hose and found that I have 17 devices that suck power to provide some sort of instant on feature. Most of these devices are not in use most of the time. Given that we are worried about power use and CO2 emissions or should be, its about time this vampire power was fixed.

For most of the devices I have this is going to be a superb system.

Lets enumerate things in the house that could use this model, and a few exceptions where this might be a truly BAD idea.

TV Obvious gimmie, if you haven't used the box in 5 days a walk to the unit to power it up is not going to kill you.

Settop Box/PVR/DVD Player. Yes yes and yes, most of these sit idle for me most of the time. Would be really nice if the TV knew that these peripherals existed and could tell you you needed to power them up if they had gone to the sweet sleep of death. My TV Stereo DVD PVR system sucks enough power on full power on mode to be a good mini heater. On standby all of this gear is still noticeably warm. Warm is a lot of power, a lot of power when I am down the pub, sleeping, working. Activities that consume 20 hours of my day. Currently much of this gear seems reluctant to power itself down or off.

Computer and its brethren.

In my set-up I have

• Desktop
• Laptop (several, don't ask why I have more than one)
• External speakers
• External Disk
• Printer Colour and B&W
• Router Modem hub, bane of my existence, dlink piece of crap

Desktop, this model would work well. For me I use my desktop as one of the locations to backup several remote machines so it would never power off completely.

Laptop, model works well

External speakers, provided that this was engineered so that I didn't have to go into the wiring hell under my desk should be OK

External Disk: Not such a good idea as machines tend to get a bit grumpy when a disk they used to see is not there. It would be great to have this type of device notify itself to the computer that its connected to. Then during the sleep of death the computer could then say, hey user, the following external devices have gone to 'sleep with the fishes', or whatever this should be called. You need to wake them this device by 'clicking its power switch'. Actually that would be great for printers too.

Printer see external disk. In fact I now turn my printer off fairly regularly as I really don't use it that much. Its a bit annoying how often a network connected printer will accept jobs queued to it but will do nothing to let you know that it is in fact not on the network.

Router. This could be problematic. I suspect that most of the time I could figure out why there was no wireless when I used my laptop, but could my mum? I am not so sure that this could be made simple enough. But maybe routers could be configured like this.

Sleep of death model.

Repeated sipping, in this model it still uses a capacitor to store power but just as power is about to die the device powers up enough to fill up the capacitor and the cycle repeats.

Actually even this might not be enough for routers as they may need a massive capacitor to keep wireless or whatever working.

Things that should not have a standby mode at all.

There are lots of devices that have a standby mode, a stupid stupid standby mode so that they are ready whenever we push a button. Things like dish washers, washing machines dryers and so on. All these devices should do their task and ten switch themselves off. You need to switch them back on to get them working.

• Dryer
• Washing Machine
• Dishwasher
• Microwave
• Stoves

Things that have batteries that we would like to be charged.

There are lots of things that have a battery, dust busters, cordless tools, toothbrushes, etc etc.

All of these should be required to power themselves off and only power back up when the battery is at 50% and then repeat the cycle. It should be simple to have these devices last a huge amount of time consuming no power at all. For example my battery drill takes 2 months to discharge half its battery, well as near as can be judged from the winking lights on the recharger. For myself I leave my drill unplugged but quite a few people are not prepared to have everything not available all the time.

One cordless tool will not save the world but the millions out there all sipping away at power just might.

Some things that you might not want this model for.

Conclusion

So just using myself as the testbed it seems as though there are a lot of devices that could benefit from the Sleep of Death. Of course for the model to really work, some devices like TV's and computers would need modification to help users out.

Its time that the Energy star criteria was revised. Revised so that when items go to sleep eventually they sleep and die as suggested here. We should insist that all new devices follow this model. Every single item that uses a mains power but is mostly off.

Oh and in the meantime, swithc off all the things that are not really in use.