Oxgate Gardens, London NW2

I love FriendsReunited. I don’t make many contacts there, but every few months something comes up in a serendipitous way. Sometimes it’s a happy serendipity, sometimes not. For example, I came across the name of someone that I was at school with back in 1962-3 at St. Benedict’s School in Ealing. I sent off an email, received no reply, and thought nothing of it. And then a few months later I had a message from his account, written by his wife – or rather his widow. He had died suddenly, and she’d been cleaning up his electronic personæ and come across my query. That felt strange.

The most recent connection was just today. FriendsReunited have expanded from their original school and college contacts to include workplaces and now street addresses. Back in 1954-1963 we lived in a suburban semidetached house in north-west London: 75, Oxgate Gardens, London NW2. (Google Maps only shows the street; number 75 was on the north side, about three houses from the corner of Coles Green Road.) Just across the street and a few houses down there was a slightly larger three-storey house that had been converted into a small private school: Blenheim House. Both my brother and I went there between 1958 and 1962. (It’s mentioned towards the end of this history of schools in the Willesden area; apparently it closed a year or two after I left.) I noticed that another FriendsReunited subscriber had lived at an address that must have been next door to the school, so I sent her an email. We exchanged messages, and it unlocked a torrent of memories from about 50 years ago. Delightful. Thanks, Sally.

First, find a dictionary

I was just chatting to my brother about library information systems – he works at the Bodleian Library in Oxford – and he mentioned that “the Bod” is implementing some new systems from VTLS in Virginia. Naturally, I checked out their web site. I assumed that the VT in the name stood for Virginia Tech – after all, both institutions are based in Blacksburg, VA. Nope – VTLS stands for “Visionary Technologies in Library Solutions”. (That has to be one of the most blatant acronym redefinitions I’ve come across.) Digging further, I came across this gem:

“Built according to the standards and best practices set forth by the Digital Library Federation’s Electronic Resource Management Initiative, VERIFY brings a plethora of benefits to staff and users alike.”

Plethora?!?! Perhaps they should try using their own software to locate a decent dictionary or thesaurus….

So passes a courageous, red-headed maverick who spoke truth to power

The Guardian, BBC and others are reporting that: “former Cabinet minister Robin Cook, 59, has died after collapsing while hill walking in north-west Scotland.” Apparently he was fell-walking with his wife Gaynor near the summit of Ben Stack, and he had a heart attack which led to a severe fall; it took some time for rescue services to reach him.

Robin Cook was the most senior politician in Britain or the US to take a principled stand against the invasion of Iraq. I blogged about his book, Point of Departure, last year. It’s still essential reading. What a great loss to British politics.

(I note that Jack Straw, John Prescott, Gordon Brown, David Blunkett and others have issued statements expressing sympathy and appreciation for Cook’s contributions. But there’s nothing from Tony Blair yet.)

"My WiFi is safer than your WiFi…."

File this under “Lawyers saying stupid things on behalf of their clients”*. Massport, the agency that operates Boston’s Logan airport, has been deploying WiFi throughout the terminals, and charging $7.95 a day for its use. (Cheapskates like me have not been tempted.) Now Continental wants to provide free WiFi in its frequent flier lounges, just as it has elsewhere. Since Massport can’t come right out and say, “No, we don’t want you undercutting our monopoly,”, they need to find another argument. And they have: Continental’s WiFi is not safe.

Last month, a Massport attorney warned the airline that its antenna “presents an unacceptable potential risk” to Logan’s safety and security systems, including its keycard access system and state police communications.

Massport told the airline it could route its wireless signals over Logan’s Wi-Fi signal, at a “very reasonable rate structure.” In response, however, Continental said using Logan’s Wi-Fi vendor could force the airline to start charging its customers for the service.

Hey, guys: WiFi is WiFi. If Continental’s isn’t safe, then neither is Massport’s. Of course the truth is that both are perfectly safe. I wonder if the Massport lawyer knew that he was spouting bull-guano, or whether some BOFH in Massport fed him a line. Either way, Massport looks pretty stupid.

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* There’s a lot of it about. You may have noticed this story in the L. A. Times [free registration required] about the woman whose child was fathered by a seminarian, now a Catholic priest in Whittier, OR. When she applied for an increase in child support, the archdiocese’s lawyer responded that ‘ the child’s mother had engaged “in unprotected intercourse … when [she] should have known that could result in pregnancy”‘. Oops.

Small ideas are safe

A serendipitous blog thread took me to Thoughts Arguments and Rants, where I stumbled over a lengthy critique of Paul Berman’s NY Times piece about the so-called “philosopher of Al Qaeda”, Sayyid Qutb. Now I’m not particularly concerned about the Berman piece, nor about Sayyid Qutb; moreover all of this was published in the winter of 2003. No, what seized my attention was this insight (my emphases):

“Some, and I suspect Berman is among them, suggest that life is not meaningful without some deep idea to guide it. And this is meant to be a bad thing. But lives are, in the most important sense, not meaningful, and this is a good thing. Things that are meaningful, street signs, sentences in blogs, etc are not intrinsically valuable – their value consists in their utility. If lives are to be justified in terms of their meaning, that is to say that they have instrumental value only. And that is the first step on the road to ruin, or at least calamitous war.

I thought the primary lesson of the 20th century was that deep ideas are dangerous. Small ideas are the lifeblood of the world, and they are safe to boot. Someone who has a new idea for representing the relationship between thought and world, or for curing a particular kind of cancer, or for describing the history of the Jews through the Dublin traipsings of an ad salesman, is not likely to start a war over their idea. Someone who has a new idea for the overall arrangement of society is somewhat more war-prone. Deep thoughts are literally dangerous. Paraphrasing Keynes somewhat, the armies of the world are moved by little else.”

The rest of the piece is packed full of lovely small ideas: from the risks of “Captain Ahab” philosophy, to the importance of small ideas in science*, and why Bloom is a better role model than Stephen in Ulysses. Highly recommended.

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* which suggested a twist on John Lennon: “science is what happens when you’re waiting for other paradigms”

A heavy hand, or bad engineering?

Tom Yager of Infoworld recently reviewed Microsoft’s first attempt at a 64-bit operating system. While most of the review was unexceptionable, a couple of comments really irked me:

“Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition debuted with an anemic shelf of 64-bit apps. Skeptics will rejoice to learn that 64-bit Windows isn’t load-and-run compatible with many, if not most, 32-bit Windows applications…. Windows x64 runs 32-bit applications stably or not at all; it won’t allow an incompatible app to install or load. This is neither Microsoft’s heavy hand nor bad engineering. It is genuinely impossible to run a great many 32-bit applications directly on AMD64 and its Intel derivative in pure 64-bit mode.” [My emphasis.]

Now this last point is simply false. As I replied to Tom:

“I’m typing this email into Mozilla Thunderbird on an Acer Ferrari (AMD Athlon 64) laptop, running Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. The Thunderbird executable that I’m running is 32-bit:
/usr/local/lib/thunderbird-1.0.2/thunderbird-bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped
(It’s the same binary that runs quite happily if I boot into 32 bit mode.) However the “ls” command is 64-bit:
/bin/amd64/ls: ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped
So far, I personally haven’t encountered a single 32-bit Solaris application that won’t run under 64-bit Solaris.”

So how come Solaris 10 can mix and match 32-bit and 64-bit processes* while Microsoft can’t? As my colleague James Carlson said, it’s:

“… mostly because of a great deal of effort that happened almost a decade ago when we originally switched to 64-bit kernels, and continuing work since then to make sure everything just works right…. I’m sure that Windows users hope that one day MS approaches that level of maturity.”

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* OK, it’s true (as James pointed out) that Wine doesn’t work (yet) on Solaris 10. However I don’t really think of Wine as an “application”. I really can’t think of any 32-bit Solaris x86 application that won’t run in 64-bit mode – but if there is, I’m sure the blogosphere will know.

For family and friends only

We were babysitting Tommy this afternoon, and just after we’d fed him he seemed to want to roll over to take a look at something. He’s only seven weeks, so rolling is not yet supposed to be in his repertoire…. After he’d being trying to roll for about five minutes, I decided to capture a video clip using my Treo. It’s over two minutes long*, and Tommy kept going for several minutes after I’d finished. It should play in QuickTime; sorry about the quality. Check out the leg action around a minute into the clip – a natural soccer player, I’d say…!

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* And 2.6MB in size – don’t try this over a dial-up connection!

Howl's Moving Castle

howlposter.jpg

Yesterday I met up with Kate, Hannah, and a friend to see Howl’s Moving Castle at the Landmark in Kendall Square in Cambridge. It was delightful: another wonderful creation by Miyazaki. Normally I prefer to watch foreign animated films in the original language with subtitles*, but this was the English language version, and it worked very well. The element of the film that really grabbed me was the way in which Miyazaki plays with the age of the heroine Sophie, after she’s been turned into a 90 year old woman; he shows us the girl in the woman and the woman in the girl, and how the way she sees herself affects the way others see her.

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* I don’t like animated films in which the actors providing the voices are so distinctive that you see them rather than the animated character. The exception here was Billy Crystal, who provided the voice of Calcifer, an irrepressible fire demon. Instantly recognizable, but not intrusively so.

It was 20 years ago today…

Today’s the 20th anniversary of my arrival* at Sun – July 29, 1985. What title to choose for this blog entry – the obvious Beatles quote, or the Grateful Dead’s “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been”? Obviously both apply. Anyway, it’s been a wonderful roller-coaster ride – and just as important, I’m still having a hell of a lot of fun.

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* I’ve already blogged about the circumstances, so I don’t need to repeat myself.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

I’m flying back to Boston tomorrow afternoon. When I made the reservation, United decided not to allow me to select my seats, so before going to bed this evening I decided to log in to their web site and see what the computer had chosen for me. 27E, a middle seat towards the rear. Ugh!

“I wonder if there’s any way to get to a seat selection screen,” I mused. “Perhaps via EasyCheckin?” I navigated through United’s awful maze of menus, and chose checkin. “Would you like to purchase an Economy Plus upgrade for $34?” Probably (holding my breath) – what seats are available? 14A?! A window! The last unclaimed window seat in the plane. Be still my beating heart! (Yes I know it’s an emergency exit row: that doesn’t bother me.) Selected, paid, confirmed. Oh joy!