The Economist on the dollar's decline

The Economist on what happens if the dollar’s fall means that it loses its status as the reserve currency for the world: “The dollar’s loss of reserve-currency status would lead America’s creditors to start cashing those cheques — and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price.”

(Via Talking Points.)

Rowan Atkinson on the right to offend

In today’s Daily Telegraph, there’s coverage of a press conference including Rowan “Mister Bean” Atkinson. He and others criticized proposed changes to UK “hate speech” laws that have been interpreted as covering criticism of religious ideas. “The freedom to criticise ideas – any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs – is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.” Exactly.

(Via Sully.)

At the Jini Community Meeting

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Live at the 8th Jini Community Meeting at The Brewery in London; listening to Jan Newmarch of Monash University talking about a variety of Jini based projects at Monash.

(Sign of the times: 90% of the laptops here are Macs….)

Bizarre stuff: hearing references to Geoff Arnold that resolve not to me but to the other Geoff Arnold (who’s not here).

Bob Scheifler is now presenting the changes and new features for the next Porter release of Jini. Cool stuff.

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Update: After the coffee break, Dennis Reedy is talking about Rio, the policy-based service provisioning framework based on Jini.

Tarnished silver bird

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As I noted, I flew on Friday night from BOS to LHR. The trip was probably the most uncomfortable I’ve done across the pond. First we got away 90 minutes late, because of a faulty spoiler indicator that had to be replaced. Then the seats proved to be too short in the leg, and the placement of the IFE [in-flight entertainment] equipment meant that even though the nominal pitch was reasonable it was imposible to get comfortable. And then the meal service was slow, and things were pretty bumpy from about 20W to the Irish coast. Bottom line: I got less than an hour’s sleep. Not surprisingly I slept like I log on Saturday night – from about 6pm to 8am!

I’m posting this from the Sun office at 55 King William Street in the City of London, a few yards from The Monument (see right).

Silver bird

I’m off to England this evening for a week: AA108, BOS-LHR, 777-200. Here’s a nice image from Airliners.net.

(I think this is the first time I’ve included third-party Javascript in a blog entry – I wonder how the RSS aggregators will handle it. UPDATE: It doesn’t validate properly according to the W3C tools.)

First racism, now censorship

Not content with preserving the racist language in their state constitution, those wacky Alabamians are at it again. State Representative Gerald Allen is proposing to burn (OK, ban from libraries) all books that include homosexual characters. Neil Gaiman has blogged about it, as has Sully. So much for Tennessee Williams’ southern classic “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof”, Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”. (And Dave Thompson’s book on “Last Tango in Paris” would also be excluded: the proposed ban would also cover books containing heterosexual “actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama”.)

Among the sage

ValleyFlowers.jpgAnother photo from Monday. Yes, I know that the closest blossoms are out of focus: I turned on macro and thrust the camera deep into the bush….

Searching for the perfect Linux laptop

Quite a few of my friends and colleagues are running Linux on their laptops, but it seems that each of them reports that something doesn’t work quite right – WiFi, or sleep mode, or power management. (And the Web seems to be filled with horror stories, hacks, and half-baked solutions.) I’m curious if this is a universal truth, or whether someone has managed to achieve The Perfect Linux Laptop configuration. I’m thinking of things like:

  • sleep to RAM works
  • everything works correctly after waking from sleep (even if you’ve unplugged a USB or FireWire device while sleeping)
  • WiFi automatically connects to known and public networks, and reconnects after sleep
  • power settings (screen brightness, CPU speed) automatically adjust when you unplug from the mains
  • able to play, read and write CDs and DVDs
  • automatically switch to mirrored or multiple screens if an external monitor or projector is plugged in
  • etc.

I can’t believe it’s really that hard – is it? (And does the Tecra M2 on CAMS fit the bill?)