Author Archives: Nathan Dimmock

The Lake District

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Windermere station is a beautiful 15 minute train journey from Kendal and with a tourist information and kitchenware superstore next to the station, the journey felt much more civilised than trying to navigate unfamiliar country roads in a rented car.

Since we had arrived directly after breakfast, we decided to delay walking the mile down hill to the lake itself and first take in the views from Orrest Head. Unfortunately the weather was not on our side and while the many different shades of grey-coloured clouds over the lake provided atmospheric views, the wind blew showers of rain at us frequently enough that we were not encouraged to linger at the top. The helpful lady in the tourist information had recommended an extended walk from Orrest Head so with the indomitable spirit of people who got up early and will enjoy their holiday in spite of the weather, we struck out over grazing land divided by picture postcard dry stone walls to reach the Lakeland Horticultural Society’s Holehird Gardens. The rain did not last and even I thought the garden was pretty impressive for its range of flora and colour.

Retracing our steps it did not seem long before we were back in the town of Windermere and warming ourselves up on some proper comfort food at Lazy Daisy’s café. Windermere was much less touristy than I was expecting, even for a working Thursday, although later I realised that this was probably due to it still being another mile from the lakeside! The lakeside itself was overrun by SAGA coach parties as expected, but there were some very quiet walking paths which quickly took us away from the hubbub to some pretty spots such as the Sheriff’s Walk, Cockshott point and Queen Adelaide’s hill.

Lake Windermere

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As the boat dropped us off for our 4-mile walk the weather did not look promising. Happily there is only so much rain that can fall out of the sky in one day and the harder it comes down, the sooner it stops!

Traditional Windermere launch at Wray Castle Landing

iPhone Buying Advice

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A number of people have recently asked my advice on buying an iPhone so I thought it worth writing up my current thoughts.

iPhone or Android (Samsung/HTC)

At the moment any phone marketed as an “iPhone competitor” is running Google’s Android software. I have not personally used an Android phone beyond a quick demo of friends’ devices but a survey of articles suggest that latest software has a comparable set of features to the iPhone, and every Apple-hater will quickly tell you that Android is better because it can do X, Y and/or Z, which Apple are too arrogant or controlling to allow. If you are someone who understands what feature X, Y or Z is and feel you need it, then you should get an Android phone. Everyone else should read this quote from a review of the newly released iPad-clone from people that make Blackberries:

“Browsing on the PlayBook ends up feeling very much like an Android device – perfectly usable, but not up to iOS [i.e. iPhone] standards.”

Whether this is something you find annoying enough to justify a more expensive iPhone over an Android device can to some extend be determined by spending some time with a friend’s phone or an in-store demo, so I highly recommend doing this. Another frequent complaint about Android phones is that the battery life is worse than that of an iPhone1, especially those models with the larger screens.

One of the major features of Android is the ability to install apps which have not been vetted by Apple. However it is highly unlikely that an average user would want to install an application that was banned by Apple so that advantage is moot. There is also an argument that since the iPhone+iPod+iPad2 platform is currently making developers a lot of money, and Android upgrades must be blessed by the phone manufacturer3 after being released by Google, iPhone owners are likely to get the latest and greatest apps before Android owners, and certainly no later.

It is natural that older Android phones which do not have all the latest iPhone features are practically being given away by the phone companies (so too the two-year old iPhone 3GS) but recently released Android phones are also considerably cheaper than iPhone 4s. For example today on orange.co.uk a £35 per month contract for 24 months will get you the recently released HTC Desire S for £0, while an iPhone4 costs £119 on the same monthly tariff. I don’t think I can tell you whether it is worth you paying that extra £119, only hands-on demonstration and experimentation with a phone will tell you whether you think the phone will be good enough, the right apps available for what you want, and the battery life long enough.

Should I buy an iPhone 4 now or wait for iPhone 5?

While Apple are highly secretive about their product plans, it is widely believed that Apple have unofficially set media expectations that unlike previous years they will not be announcing a new device at their annual developer conference in June. There is no reliable information as to when a new iPhone might be released but the smart money is on a September announcement alongside this year’s iPod line-up.

Historically, supplies of new models has been extremely limited for the first few months so waiting until September realistically means waiting another month or two after the release date, and expect to pay at least the current cost of an iPhone 4. At the moment (May 2011), there is the possibility you may find a carrier able to offer some sort of discount on an iPhone 4 which will easily give you 18 months of good service before an Autumn 2012 release of the next generation.

Do I need a screen protector for my iPhone?

No. The iPhone 4 screen is designed to be touched directly and manufactured to a high quality. Placing an additional layer of low quality plastic between you and the screen will impair its function. I can really recommend the InCase Snap case (~£10 on ebay.co.uk, or half that for a clear plastic knock off) which protects the back and has a raised ridge around the front preventing contact should the phone be placed face down on a surface. If you need to protect the screen while the phone is not in use (e.g. inside a hand bag or similar) then buy a case that has a cover you put over the screen when not in use, or store the phone in a sock when inside the handbag.

  1. 7 hours of talk time and 300 hours standby is claimed by Apple[back]
  2. a.k.a. “iOS”[back]
  3. This is significant since if an app requires the latest version of Android and your manufacturer has not blessed it yet then that app will not be available to you, even if it it is available on other Android phones.[back]

In defence of necessary complexity in language

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A letter to The Independent recently quoted the following sentence from an article about the Big Society as an example of obscure writing.

Public sector mutualisation and budgetary takeover by citizens of the state is a crucial initial phase in endowing ordinary citizens with the power to ensure that the services they run are operated in a way which combines public interest with economic efficiency and localised employee ownership building in all the gains that this model delivers.

I would not disagree that the final clause (“building in all the gains that this model delivers.”) is unnecessary and should have been pruned by a good editor, but a complex concept cannot be explain in simple terms.

Mutualisation refers to idea of collectives/co-operatives, for example, building societies. “Public sector mutualisation” is therefore makes people co-owners of the public sector changing the model from one where they are customers or consumers.

budgetary takeover by citizens is a (too) concise term for having spending allocations and priorities determined by citizens and not civil servants.

services they run refers to public sector services now co-owned by the ordinary citizen where said citizen has high level input into budgets and policy but implementation remains with the public sector.

combines public interest with economic efficiency—money is spent in line with public expectations with minimal administration costs. I think it interesting that “public interest” was chosen here instead of “public good”, but this is a post about language not politics so I will not examine that further.

Contemporary mediums with low character limits such as text messages and twitter encourage dense, terse and economic phrasing so I find it surprising that someone would complain about a sentence which is all of these things. However perhaps at 348 characters (requiring three tweets) it was the length that offended the letter-writer?

[Mostly typed one-handed due to a broken collar bone; enforced R&R at home has given me too much time to read and consider such things!]

Alaskan Retrospective: Whales and Glaciers

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The Alaskan coast is a fantastic place to observe whales due to the abundant food supply, it apparently has more bald eagles than the lower 48 states and has some awe-inspiring scenery, including Glacier Bay National Park. The Pacific North-West is known for its unpredictable and rapidly changing climates so to have such superb weather in September was very lucky.

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A teen flick that’s actually good and something completely different

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When the inflight entertainment guide quoted Empire magazine as saying Easy A was the best teen comedy since Clueless, I decided that it was a low risk proposition to spend some of my 10 hour flight putting that claim to the test.

At first I was sceptical but after I caught myself laughing-out-loud during an early scene, I was hooked. An updated telling of The Scarlet Letter, it is a tongue-in-cheek and self-referential demonstration of how issues of image, the human need to belong, and hypocrisy within small communities (whether they be the old English village or the modern high school) remain timeless. It is not as ground-breaking as Clueless simply because Californian high school culture has been “done”, but it is nice to see an intelligent and (a bit too) clever central protagonist bringing a higher tone of humour to the genre.

In contrast Scott Pilgrim v The World feels like a teen flick but technically is not one (we are told the eponymous lead is 22 years of age). This was similarly highly billed as “witty, dazzling and highly original”, and it is certainly different but only going to make sense if you understand video game culture. The plot line is familiar: boy meets girl and must win her heart by overcoming his rivals and/or succeed at some task or competition. The twist is that the usual real-life scenarios are instead portrayed allegorically as a series of video game levels. It is agreeable watching, although sadly it is never explained what the central characters actually have in common to make their relationship plausible. But then many video game purists claim that storyline should be secondary to gameplay—entertainment—anyway, and it certainly has that.

A Short Survey of Music Retail

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On Wednesday I went to a fantastic gig by KT Tunstall. I had already listened to (and mostly liked) her new album via Spotify but the concert confirmed that this was music worth owning (such an outmoded concept!). Here is a short survey of a consumer’s music purchasing options as of this week:

  • The cheapest price for a physical CD was £8.49 at Amazon. Spotify means I have no requirement for the instant gratification afforded by downloads and a CD also provides the highest fidelity with no worry about digital loss, but there is a lifetime storage cost of such low density physical media.
  • Amazon will also sell me the same album in 256kbps MP3 format for £7.49.
  • 7digital are a competing digital download service and the price was £7.99. I was impressed with their “digital locker” feature which allows repeat downloads of your purchases, automatically providing an offsite backup. The files were also encoded at the higher rate of 320kbps and can be downloaded as a zipfile in your web browser, unlike Amazon which requires you to use a separate application.
  • For an iTunes user the iTunes store is arguably the most convenient method of buying music, and the price matches 7digital, £7.99. Like Amazon there is no option to re-download and the bitrate is the lower-but-probably-not-noticeable, 256kbps. The store is so popular I am assuming that in the long term there should be no significance attached to the files being in the AAC format instead of MP3.

Having enjoyed KT providing some context for the songs on the new album I also looked to see if any store would provide me with electronic sleeve notes. iTunes offers a digital version of the DVD (for the same price as Amazon charges for physical media) but no store offered any non-music extras.

Conclusion? I decided 7digital offered the best combination of convenience, durability, quality and price because physical storage space is at a premium in a flat, and good off-site backup is a significant cost.

The Aeroplane Film Review: The A-Team

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The problem with remakes, especially of nostalgically remembered classics, is that they often over-play the ingredients of the classic to the point where they dominate the modern version and the cake as a whole does not taste good. I recently caught an episode of the original TV series and it was preposterous—helicopter gun fights over an LA suburb resolved with the bad guys crashing into a cliff but somehow crawling intact from the burning wreckage—surely Hollywood would take this as a licence to produce the worst kind of implausible nonsense that is present in every big explosion action film?

Surprisingly they did not. The modern version retains but updates the humour and of course the action is thoroughly modern. It’s still ridiculous but entertainingly so, and actually more plausible than many straight-action capers and Liam Neeson is on wicked form as Hannibal. My only disappointment was the rousing theme tune made only a single appearance, but perhaps that was a fair price for them not overplaying the nostalgia.

BCS Magazines: All Gloss, No Substance

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I have been a member of British Computer Society (BCS) since undergraduate when the regular magazines from BCS gave me a glimpse into how working in IT might involve more than than the algorithms and computational theory being taught in lectures.

In recent times I find it is rare that the BCS’s increasingly glossy publication, IT Now, contains anything of interest. Too often an article appears to be a modified version of a corporate marketing piece with the specifics of the company’s product removed so as to maintain the illusion of being editorial rather than advertorial. The result is even worse than an actual sales pitch since all substance is lost!

A recent special issue on open source software was especially disappointing. The articles were not the usual marketing speak, but they were still vague and anecdotal rather than informative and analytical. For example, an article entitled “Cracking the Desktop” fails to mention Firefox, one of the most successful open source desktop applications.1 A case study of the challenges faced when deploying this faster and more secure alternative to older versions of IE to corporate desktops would have been informative, yet the article looks at the cost benefits of switching to OpenOffice, an obsolete technology compared to online office tools such as Google Docs.

“Can Open Source Be Secure?” also exemplified the lack of editorial rigour in IT Now. The phrase “Experts do not agree” should not be allowed without referencing at least two sources (i.e. the “experts” on either side of the argument) yet the article contains no citations at all. The label ‘Journalist hiding their own opinions…’ from http://www.tomscott.com/warnings/ should perhaps be applied here.

I have renewed my BCS membership for another year on the basis that my local branch and Specialist Groups provide some value. The new Academy of Computing project should be given a chance to demonstrate that it can be the UK’s Learned Society of Computer Science, but the chance of another copy of IT Now not going directly to my recycling bin is slim.

BCS members can participate in a discussion about the future of IT Now.

  1. As of today, Mozilla reports 127 million downloads since 21st January 2010 versus 48 million OpenOffice.org download since 11th February 2010.[back]

Enjoying the outdoors in San Francisco

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San Francisco’s climate is ideal for outdoor-activities, warm and pleasant, not baking and burning. While the city itself is too busy and hilly to explore lazily by bike, the 17 mile ride from The Presidio to Tiburon is mostly flat, away from motor traffic and provides plenty of opportunities to enjoy the beautiful bay and bridge.

FreeviewHD PVR Review

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FreeviewHD has been broadcasting in our area for several months but since we almost never watch live television it seemed pointless to to buy a FreeviewHD (or DVB-T2 to use the technical name) receiver without some sort of recording capability. These have taken a surprisingly long time to reach the market but I noticed last weekend that the venerable John Lewis were selling a 500GB Digital Stream DHR8205U FreeviewHD hard-disk recorder and since the reviews on the web forums were broadly positive, made something of an impulse buy.

I quickly discovered that if the TV is not plugged in during boot then the box will flash “loading” at you forever but after that initial false start installation was smooth and the HD reception is an appreciable upgrade. The feature set appears comprehensive and although there is no option to repeat a recording daily or weekly, it can be instructed to record an entire series of programmes which is usually sufficient.

My biggest complaint is that the user interface is definitely quirky, which reminds you that this is definitely early-adopter territory. Most annoying is the remote control which has some of the most commonly used features (such as ‘pause’ and ‘library’) on tiny buttons which are laid out with no semblance of logical grouping. The listings guide is quite useable, although the ordering of the channel list is not customisable which means the three HD channels are 6 screens away from their non-HD equivalents. Pressing the large “OK” button during viewing brings up the list of channels with no programme information which seems redundant: on my previous PVR this button showed the current and next programmes. The screen showing the recorded programmes appears to have had so little attention that it might actually be an afterthought: recordings are laughably labelled simply as ProgrammeName_DDMMHHMM.trp. Fortunately there is at least a chance that the software issues might be fixed with the next software update scheduled for the end of June.

The user guide suffers from similar problems of poor readability including at least one circular reference (the effect of enabling “standby power-saving mode” is never explained). The packaging describes the product as “Manufactured in the UK” but DigitalStream itself seems to be a Korean company and the terminology used by the software is from a bizarre parallel universe: channels are called “services”, future recording “reservations” and the stored programmes library is “media”. Despite these foibles, so far I am a happy customer.

A Personal History of UNIX Tool Management on OS X

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When I first switched to Mac from Linux I used fink to provide the simple software installation (and removal!) to which I had become addicted while using Debian. In addition to being command line compatible, fink also shipped the software as binaries which on the relatively slow CPUs of the day meant the software was able to be used much more immediately than if it had to be compiled.

About three years ago, I noticed that the fink binary distribution no longer had all the packages I wanted to use. The website would indicate the package was available but actually it would be only available in source code form and my aging laptop did not have the CPU or disk space available to compile not just the package but all its dependencies. When I upgraded that old laptop, and compiling everything from source seemed feasible, I decided that the MacPorts project had more community activity and jumped ship.

MacPorts worked very well. The initial install took time, and worked the fan of my MacBook quite hard, but once the base packages were compiled, subsequent software installs and updates were mostly painless. MacPorts also made it vary easy to tweak installs using its variants mechanism. However MacPorts’ downfall, in my opinion, is that it is not content to be just a way of augmenting the existing UNIX tools on my Mac but that it wants to be a self-contained operating system itself. For example, in order to install the git-svn tool MacPorts was going to download, compile and install not only an older version of Perl than is shipped with 10.6 but also a second version of the subversion tool that Apple have already provided. I am sure this is a good way to deliver a powerful and stable system, but it felt like MacPorts was taking over.

I am not the first to think this since someone has developed homebrew. It has the explicit goals of playing nicely with the OS defaults and programming language specific distribution systems such as RubyGems, CPAN and PyPi. I am pleased to be report that homebrew was very quick to setup and install the few remaining UNIX packages to which I remain addicted. The installer makes the assertion that every user on your system should be in the staff group,1 but the script was very simple to modify and I have submitted my version back to the maintainer.

The one package where I do not find homebrew satisfactory is LaTeX. homebrew uses the TeX Live distribution rather than the tetex package I have used in the past. However TeX Live is a humungous 1GB download and some quick research showed that it was very much a kitchen sink package with many sub-packages that were completely unnecessary for me. Instead I highly recommend the 85MB download (234MB installed) BasicTeX package which has proved to be entirely adequate for my needs, even if it does have softie GUI installer!

  1. I noticed that on a fresh install of 10.6 no one is a member of the staff group. It appears that all Administrator users are members of the admin group though, and since it seems to only allow admins to change the machine’s homebrew install, I forked this gist and replaced all the instances of staff with admin.[back]

Yosemite

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My abiding memory of Yosemite will be the weather. It rained as we drove into the park so we expected the views to be hidden from us and were pleasantly surprised when the low cloud made our first view of the valley more dramatic and different to the clear blue vistas found on postcards.

When we woke the next morning the rain was still pattering down on the roof of our heated canvas tent-cabin. We were recommended the Mirror Lake trail as likely to be the nicer of the standard sights given the conditions and the rain stopped long enough for us to enjoy the walk, and see the granite rock formations appear and disappear from behind the foggy clouds. By lunchtime, the temperature had dropped and the drizzle had turned to proper rain but undeterred we set off for the large torrent of water known as Yosemite Falls, not realising that that the clouds hid a second higher stage which was even more impressive. The weather had worsened to the point that we did not feel like risking our cameras and as we headed away from the falls, rain turned to sleet and we decided a few hours in the visitor centre museum and Ansel Adams gallery were not going to cause us to miss very much.

Sleet turned to snow while we were in the museum and we were very grateful when the friendly people at Camp Curry upgraded our tent-cabin from just heated to heated <strong>and</strong> insulated since the forecast was for it freeze overnight. Fortunately we survived the night and the sun arrived the next morning when we were greeted by a glistening fairytale landscape of snow-covered trees and granite pinnacles. The strong sunshine meant the snow began to melt quite soon on the trees on the valley floor, but watching it drip from the branches was picturesque in itself.

After a morning walk taking in the glorious landscapes (albeit dodging the melting ice as it fell from the higher trees!), we had an early lunch and then paid another visit to Yosemite Falls. However as we approached the cloud closed in again and around the falls there was definitely some soft wet precipitation that seemed to be more than just spray from the snow-melt fuelled torrent of water cascading down from on high, so the photographs were still taken rather hastily! Fortunately the clouds only delivered a mild hail storm and we were able to exit the Park without any weather-related problems. It may not have been pleasant at times, but the weather definitely enhanced this visit.

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Sequoia National Park

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After two and a half days admiring California’s coastal scenery, it was time to turn inland and the National Parks of the Sierra Nevada. After being sent on a small detour by some wilful mis-signposting in the town of Atascadero, we drove into Sequoia National Park at dusk, as the last rays of the sun coloured the rocks a wonderful ochre shade of orange. After about 10 miles (and several thousand feet of altitude), the roadside became deep snow banks and the dashboard told me the air temperature was 43°F (~6°C)—a complete contrast from the 26°C we had been experiencing a few hours earlier. Sadly there was no time for sunset pictures though as we had to reach our lodgings before the restaurant closed and I had to suffer a dinner-starved Rosie!

The next morning was bright and sunny which caused the snow to glisten and sparkle. We set off from Wuksachi Lodge in search of a good walk to rid us of the memory of yesterday’s many hours in the car, and started with the Giant Forest of Sequoia trees and the largest (by volume) living tree on Earth, General Sherman. At 275 feet (83m), this tree isn’t even the tallest, or oldest, but its trunk continues to expand outwards each year and it (he?) is a fine example of these majestic trees. Since the snow on the trail from the car park to General Sherman was entirely compacted, we set off on a trail which was described as paved and very easy. It was only a few tens of metres before we realised that the trail was not marked apart from the paving, and that was hidden below increasingly less compacted snow. After guessing the direction wrongly once and having to hike back through ankle-deep snow, we returned to the car and went in search of a visitor centre to find out what was recommended in these conditions!

Apparently snow shoes are recommended for the trails at the moment, but since we also wanted to visit the big granite “Morro Rock”, we set off to see that before committing ourselves to snow shoe rental. While the walking trail was under snow, the (closed to traffic) road was mostly passable in hiking shoes, although the signage was so poor we took two wrong turns just 100m from the rock! The signs warned against climbing the rock if there was any snow or ice on the stairway, but the strong afternoon sun ensured we had a thrilling 400 step ascent to the 2049m elevation summit for some stunning views of a mountain range on one side and the deeper than the Grand Canyon valley on the other. The best part was that we had the rock entirely to ourselves, something there would be no hope of when the access road was open to cars in the summer!

The Big Sur

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The Big Sur is an area of outstanding natural beauty south of Monterey, California. US Highway 1 whiles and wends a course between a rugged coastline pounded by huge Pacific surf to the West, and steeply sloping hills to the East. Along the way there are a number of well maintained state parks offering short hikes to get a closer glimpse of the waves thrashing into the rocky beaches and cliffs, or on the other side of the highway, forested canyons and pretty waterfalls.

Our first stop was Point Lomos State park which featured some easy and uncrowded hiking trails to give us our first glimpse of the raw power of the Pacific. A second stop in Pfeiffer State Park took us inland through shady pine groves and spring wildflower to a gentle waterfall.

Further south, marked only by a sign saying “Narrow Road” (thanks to the Lonely Planet for clueing us up to this one!) we were able to get down to sea level and the gorgeous but wind swept Pfeiffer Beach. Big waves splashed impressively against building sized rocks near the shore, and the sand had pretty purple patterns due to the manganese garnet deposits washed down from the surrounding hills. The sun was baking but the incredible wind made it feel about as warm as a Cornish beach!

Most of the inland sections of Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park were closed following extensive recent fire damage. However it does contain the rare sight of the pretty McWay Falls which cascades 80 feet directly onto a pristine unoccupied sandy beach (no public access to the beach was a condition of the legacy which gifted the park to the State). Many people turned around after seeing the falls, but the same trail led to a lookout point with a beautiful 270 degree vista of the coast.

We also stopped at Salmon Creek Falls, a more conventional three level drop within a forest canyon, but with a supreme location at the apex of a hairpin bend in one of the twistier sections of the road. This set of hairpins takes the road down to the coast again and follows the shoreline rather sedately, albeit with some fantastic views. The highlight of this section is undoubtedly the colony of Elephant Seals basking on the beach near Piedras Blancas: the beach is less than 50m from the highway, so viewing them is as easy as pulling into one of the spacious car parks and finding a good vantage point away from the other tourists!