3 Days Of Peace And Bloody Fast Internet

    It's a rite of passage that has returned to prominence in recent years, the Youth Of Today like their hippy grandparents attend outdoor music festivals. They go and camp for three days in a quagmire, acquire assorted ailments and parasites, have half their stuff nicked, suffer appalling toilets, and get horribly sunburned while listening to poorly mixed and distorted music.

    At least, this is what we are led to believe when listening to the survivor tales.

    As a member of the generation for whom festivals were not a mainstream activity I have to admit I didn't know what to expect when I attended my first similar event last week. It's important to note though that this was not a music festival but a hacker camp. Several thousand assorted makers, hackers, and other technically inclined people camping in a field in Surrey for four nights, surrounded by a dizzying array of talks and presentations, and all bringing along their own creations to show off to the rest of the community. Every structure on site from the largest marquee to the smallest one-person tent had mains power and super-fast internet, and every hackspace, user group, or other organisation had its own section of the campsite. The toilets are best forgotten but the showers were rather good, the catering was passable, and there was plenty of beer and cider on tap. I made a good call by bringing along decent bogroll and a Dettol spray.
    To find yourself among many thousands of your own community is liberating. You can drop seamlessly into conversations about things that elicit blank stares from the average Joe: how to optimise the efficiency of a coupled-inductor flyback converter for example, or whether an electric monowheel could be practical transport.
    I was pleased to bump into more than one person from this community on the site as well. As I write technical articles in the maker sphere my name is not unknown, but though I'm in no closet I suspect most readers have no idea I'm trans. Attending this event had something of an outing about it, as there was no place to hide. So a group of us ended whiling away some time around a smoking BBQ, talking about anything but being trans. Which was in itself quite refreshing.
    It's something I now understand, why old hippies still go on about the Isle of Wight festival or Woodstock. I've got a major case of festival withdrawal, and so have all my hackspace friends. It's another two years until the next one, that's going to be a long time.

Dah-di-dah-dit, dah-dah-di-dah

    This morning, a big brown envelope from the postman. Inside, from the UK radio regulator OFCOM, a reissue of my amateur radio licence that I let lapse in the '90s. And there I was protesting about not regressing into my childhood!

    It's interesting, coming back to something I last looked at twenty years ago. I'm doing it for very different reasons to my teenaged radio hobby, this time it's because my local hackspace has some radio amateurs and I want to join in.

    A lot has changed in the world of amateur radio since the 1990s. Gone are morse tests to use shortwave bands, and we have a whole load of new frequencies to use. My licence is now a "full" licence and my callsign is now nearly 30 years old, enough to be considered venerable.

    And I've changed too, in more ways than the obvious. I tired of old gits yakking away at each other back then, and I'm not sure I want to venture back into that particular fray. Amateur radio can have rather an old-fashioned culture at times.

    So what am I going to do with it besides talk radio with the hackspace crowd? Probably what I always wanted to do back in the day but only achieved partial success at: build my own kit. There are still corners of amateur radio where you can push at the boundaries of what is possible, it's not all a slightly rarified version of CB for older men.

    All this has got me reaching for the soldering iron, see the picture. There's another thing that has changed since the 1990s, computerised circuit design tools that are easy to use!

    Building stuff though, it's an escape. The receiver prototype in the picture may one day emerge as a more polished design, but I don't really need it as I still have my trusty 1980s-vintage communication receiver. So why bother?

    You need something to keep yourself in touch with your worth.

Retro desktop

    For someone who earns a living by sometimes pushing computers to the limits of their abilities, I have been rather deficient in some of the things most people use them for. Take office tasks, for instance. My laptop sports a copy of LibreOffice as part of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, but it rarely gets used. I've not had a functional printer set up for about a decade, as very little of what I normally do is paper based.
    So I found myself rather unprepared recently when I realised I was going to be needing a bit of good old-fashioned office word processing. All the things most people have to hand around their computer, I didn't. The thought of shelling out for a pile of new kit didn't really appeal, so to furnish myself with what I needed I turned to my stash of random stuff-that-will-come-in-useful-someday.
    My desktop PC hasn't had a refresh since the early 2000s. I remember when it was a cutting-edge gaming machine, now it just about runs a cut-down Linux distribution and is far too slow for the software in hand. Plus it has a very noisy fan. Useful to have for pulling data from old hard drives, but come to think of it that's all I've used it for these last few years.
    Fortunately I had a handy replacement already on my desk. A pocket-money-cheap Raspberry Pi with a GertVGA adaptor drives the venerable CRT monitor, and I had to dust off my 25-year-old IBM model M keyboard. It's difficult to explain the attraction of these rather noisy devices, but their unique bent-spring mechanism gives a typing action like no other.
    The oldest item I pulled out though was the printer. A 24 pin Epson dot matrix printer from the 1980s, complete with period sound effects. With properly configured software these printers can produce output that would fool you into thinking it came from a laser printer, but because most people didn't know how to set them up they gained a reputation for poor quality. The reason I hung onto mine though is cost. Instead of ink or toner cartridges these printers have a ribbon like that in a typewriter which only costs about a fiver, and produce an astounding number of pages from a single ribbon.
    All I had to buy to complete my junkyard desktop were a couple of USB adaptors which together cost me under a tenner: a PS/2 keyboard and mouse adaptor and a parallel printer adaptor.
    I was pleasantly surprised with how usable LibreOffice is on a Raspberry Pi. It's not the fastest of machines by today's standards so I hadn't set my hopes too high, but I guess using Microsoft Office 2010 over a network at work had conditioned me to poor performance. After a bit of playing with the Linux printing system to get everything talking I soon had my documents coming off the printer in very high quality.
    So there I have it. The sounds of a 1980s office, clack-clack-clack keyboard and dot-matrix whine. I guess you have to be here to appreciate it.  
   

On the fashionability of houndstooth tweed

    About ten years ago I remember a conversation with my friend C in which I predicted  fashion trend. Not usual for our conversations which tend to be somewhat geeky.
    My prediction was a simple one: that within the next decade we'd see a return to fashionability of houndstooth tweed. Think about it, ten, twenty or thirty years ago did you see anyone wearing that fabric?
    C works in the television business. He writes software that runs digital TV studio equipment, you've probably watched TV that passed through his code somewhere. Our conversation was about one of the projects he was working on, as an electronic engineer who started with scrap TV sets it's a subject of interest to me.
    At the time the UK and other countries were on the cusp of moving from analogue to digital TV. For most consumers this probably meant more channels, a better picture or high definition, but for us it also meant the end of the analogue colour encoding systems, PAL, SECAM and NTSC.
   Analogue telly was sometimes referred to as compatible television, meaning that a colour signal was compatible with a black-and-white receiver. The colour information coming from the studio was split out from the luminance information and cleverly encoded such that it wouldn't show up as noise when viewed on a black-and-white set. The PAL, SECAM and NTSC colour encoding processes each took different approaches to the same problem, but shared the same aim.
    PAL was developed in Germany in the early 1960s. We Brits got it in the late '60s, on our third TV channel, BBC2. PAL tackled some of the problems found in the earlier American NTSC system, but in doing so it introduced a few quirks of its own. The one you'd have seen from time to time is the so-called Hanover bars, colour noise appearing whenever any close-together stripes appeared on the picture. It's one of the reasons PAL test cards have striped regions.
    As you've probably guessed, houndstooth tweed produced intense Hanover bars on a PAL TV, resulting in a riot of colour noise on the picture. As a result, the pattern disappeared completely from the fashion scene sometime in the 1960s.
    So why my prediction? Digital TV has its own picture quirks that you can spot if you look carefully at some of the lower qualty channels, but it doesn't use PAL. Instead, you get the full unadulterated colour signal, so Hanover bars are a thing of the past on a digital set now PAL has been turned off.
    And as if by magic, houndstooth tweed has made a reappearance. You won't see me wearing it as it's never been a favourite of mine, but there it is on the High Street. Technology influences fashion.

That was the future, that was.

    They say today's children are digital natives. That is to say, they have never known a world without ubiquitous computing and to them operating a computer is as natural as a dial telephone or a record player was to someone born in the 1970s.

    I feel sorry for today's children. They are surrounded by so much computing power, yet they know so little about how to use it.

    I was part of the first generation of digital natives, for whom affordable home computing arrived just as we were old enough to get to grips with it. I saved my primary-school-age pennies and bought a Sinclair ZX81. Back then if you wanted to use your computer you had to learn to program it, there was very little commercial software and the machines were designed to be easily programmable. My generation learned BASIC, and if like me we were extra-geeky, machine code. I eventually learned enough about the internal circuitry of the Sinclair to understand its operation completely, the only computer I've had that I've understood to that level in a long career in technology.
    My generation's schools had rooms full of similar home computers. In an unusually far-sighted move the UK government funded the development of a school computer - the BBC Micro - and we kids lapped them up. It is fair to say that many people like me were given careers by that investment.

    By comparison, today's children learn basic Microsoft Office skills. They use computers as appliances, dumbed down in case they might inadvertently learn something from them.

    I spent a while a few weeks ago sorting out some of my old PCs. Dismantling and scrapping some broken or archaic ones, resurrecting a couple of slightly more capable ones to take a lightweight Linux platform for web browsing and other general purpose duties. These were hot gaming and software development platforms in 1998 and 2001 respectively, but now they don't really cut it in the modern PC market. By rights I should get rid of them, but when you work in tech it's always useful to have a spare PC or two around.
    It is sobering to realise though that I'll soon be able to buy a more capable PC the size of a credit card for the equivalent of $25. The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer designed to use a modern HDTV as a monitor and a commodity USB keyboard and mouse. It uses a processor similar to the one in your mobile phone and for storage it uses a memory card like the one in your digital camera. Best of all it runs a full-featured modern Linux operating system which gives it the ability to do most of what until very recently you needed a full-sized PC to achieve. As you might imagine, I'll be placing an order for one as soon as they are released.
    The aim of the Raspberry Pi is not to give geeks like me a new toy though. It is aimed at schools, and it is designed from the start to be easy to program. Its creators - among them some of the people whose imaginations were sparked by the 1980s computer boom - hope to recreate some of the interest in computing as more than a study of appliances that we had with the BBC Micro thirty years ago.
    Maybe today's kids aren't going to be so unlucky in their tech after all.

Wave goodbye to my wavemeter

    I'll be saying goodbye to a little piece of my past on Saturday. My friend Paula who I know through the Swindon TG Group and who performed her mother-hen dutes on my first ever public outing is a radio amateur with a special interest in microwaves. I'll be taking my microwave wavemeter down to Swindon to give to her, as she has far more use for it than I do.
    For an electronic engineer, pieces of test equipment like the wavemeter form part of the tools of the trade. They are to us what hammers and tongs are to a blacksmith or brushes are to an artist. You build up your collection of instruments over your career and they are what gives you a window into whatever device you are working on. Without them you are relegated to simply being an end user, the electronic device is simply a black box with wires that either works or doesn't work.
    So it feels a bit of a wrench to find myself giving away what was at one time a highly prized and rather useful piece of kit. It's almost as though a piece of my identity has been removed. But I last held a radio licence over a decade ago, haven't touched a transmitter in years and certainly have no use for a wavemeter calibrated to 10 GHz. Paula by comparison has regular need for such a device and I hope will find this one - a former US Navy unit and a very high quality piece of kit - to be very useful indeed.
    It will no doubt be a rather amusing sight. Me turned out in full-on seven foot girl mode, manhandling a huge grey flight case from one car to the other. Where's a bloke when you need one eh!

Plus other

    A very short post as befits a writer befuddled by medication.
    I was interested to spot today that the new Google Plus social networking service has an "other" option in the gender field on sign-up. I doubt it can be taken as evidence of widespread adoption of non-binary identities because I think most geeks will simply use it as an "I'd prefer not to say because I don't want to make it easy for you to spam me with targeted advertising" option. Still, interesting to see that they feel they need to have it.

Fake award scam

    Those SEO spammers have obviously added this blog to their database, for this morning I received another variant on their scam. Seems I've been given an award, with a link to a CGI script that delivers a convincing looking blog award. As a token of my gratitude I am expected to link to them from my blog.

Sigh.

    (Looks at calendar) No, I wasn't born yesterday.
    It concerns me not only that these losers are still pushing these scams, but that businesses are being duped into paying for them. Let me make this abundantly clear, the search engines know all about these stunts, they can sport them a mile away. They have spent a lot of money hiring the brightest people on the planet to write very clever software to spot unexpected linking trends and send the linked sites spinning into oblivion.
    If you are ever offered search engine promotion services by someone who claims to be able to offer speedy or guaranteed results, ask them their name. If it isn't Sergei Brin or Larry Page, founders of Google, it's simple. They are LYING. The best they can produce with these techniques is a short term gain on a few carefully chosen search terms. The only thing that works in that arena is hard work building an online profile, there are no quick fixes.
    Yet again, no sale.

Not for sale

    My afternoon was enlivened today by an email popping up in my inbox offering to buy this blog.
    Wow, I thought, I've joined Ariana Huffington, hold on a minute while I get the wheelbarrow for all that cash!
    Sadly for me though, the sender was not AOL. Instead it was a spam search engine optimisation company wishing to buy my little piece of the Internet for its well-written keyword-heavy content and for its meagre standing in the search engines. For this I would receive about three hundred dollars, and then I would sit back and watch my creation covered with spammy meaningless links to the spammers customers. My work destroyed, my readers abandoned, and the search engines temporarily polluted.
    Not a chance.
    What my spammer correspondent doesn't know is that in a past life I spent a lot of time helping one of his targets detect and beat the tactics he is attempting to employ. I regard search engine spammers as the low-lives of my industry and would rather do anything than enter into any form of business arrangement with one of them.
    So it looks as if our little corner of the internet is being looked at by these people. If you get an "I want to buy your blog" email, just ignore it. Even if you did try to sell it it'd doubtful whether you'd see any cash, these people operate on the edges of what is legal so I'd not expect them to be trustworthy when it came to payment.

Gender as a text field

    A delightfully geeky link for you this morning, Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora. If you are not a web developer, it's an explanation from a programmer of her decision to replace the binary "bit" field that stores gender in her application with a "text" field, thus allowing more options than "Male" and "female".
   The usual array of idiots in the comments: "People either have a penis or they don’t. Their sexual preference/life philosophy doesn’t alter their gender" Sigh. But well done Sarah Mei!

The evolving language used to describe us

    Google launched a new toy in their labs yesterday. Google Books Ngram viewer is a tool for examining the occurrence of different words and phrases over time in language corpora gleaned from their Google Books project. In short, you can see whether a word is in, out, on the up or heading for oblivion.
    It's a compelling toy, one on which I could quite happily waste an entire morning. To find that Ronald Reagan made no impact on written English as a film star and neither did Margaret Thatcher as a backbench MP, for example. Or the history of British fast food tastes.OK, maybe I'm too much of a geek for my own good.
     Of more interest is the use of language with respect to our community. "Transsexual" peaked over a decade ago, replaced by "transgender" which only took off about 1990. No real surprise there, except perhaps the lateness of the latter's rise.

    And it seems I'm a little dated in my use of "transgendered", too.

    For me that last graph captures the joy of mining large real-world data sets. No matter what your opinion may be, the data never lies, and sometimes it tells you something unexpected, or maybe something you didn't want to see. And strangely enough I find that rather beautiful.

A little bit of housekeeping

   The keen-eyed among you may have noticed a new template on this blog. I've updated it to the latest Blogger template, mainly to pick up a few of the new features that are worth having. I've tried to stay as close to the uncluttered style of the previous template as I can, and I've made a few CSS tweaks here and there. You'll tell me if anything breaks on your browser/OS combination, won't you.

Gender differences in Twitter messaging

Numbers, by gender. Women type <3 more often.

    Something came my way this morning that I'd like to share with you all. Some researchers have categorised Twitter posts by the poster's gender and put together a couple of online analysis tools to extract and view the results.
   Put in a list of words and see which are used more by male posters or female posters. Or type in a single word to the detailed query box and see what words often accompany it for each gender.
    It's a fascinating tool, I have had to be careful not to waste too much time playing with it at work.

Servoscribe

    Trying to describe a sparkline for my employer in a single concise sentence earlier today I was reminded of the machines that were my charges in my first ever job. Servoscribe potentiometric chart recorders, I've not thought of one of those in at least fifteen years!
    So, dear reader, if you'll permit me to indulge in a little reminiscence as a tonic for girl fog and for wearying of the faded warblings of the trannier-than-thou, I'll continue on the subject of outmoded laboratory equipment.
    A Servoscribe can best be described not as a machine or a device, but as a contraption. An unlikely Heath Robinson-esque assemblage of  machinery, electronics and electromechanical devices, they were a uniquely 1950s understanding of the problem of accurately recording a voltage that might vary over time.
    An electric clock drives a roll of graph paper at a user selectable rate past a pen. The pen has a mechanical linkage to an electric motor and a potential divider - just like the volume control on your TV - and the motor's job is to match the position of the pen and the potential divider such that the voltage from the latter matches the voltage on the input terminals. Clear as mud? The simple version is that a pen moves across a sheet of paper as the input voltage changes, leaving a line on the paper to form a graph. Connect a sensor, for example a thermocouple, and you can plot the change in temperature over an hour, a day, a week or whatever you fancy.
    All those mechanics driving the pen made a Servoscribe a pretty complex device, but they were the easy part. They were built to last, machined not from the chocolate they made cars from in those days but from good quality metal. The Servoscribe's party piece was its chief weakness, the chopper-stabilised DC motor amplifier featuring a mechanical switch in the form of a vibrating reed inside a glass tube.
    Modern electronics is easy. All the problems have been solved. If you need an accurate DC amplifier, you just order one. It's called an op-amp, and it's about the size of an earring and it'll cost you about twenty pence. But back in the 1950s they didn't have the advantage of such luxuries so they had to think laterally. They couldn't make good DC amplifiers but they could make good AC amplifiers. So what if they turned DC into AC, amplified it with an AC amplifier, then turned it back to DC? Simple, no?
     So they gave us the chopper-stabilised amplifier. A reed switch vibrating fifty times a second chops up the DC into AC for the amplifier. That's right, fifty times a second. By the time I got my hands on Servoscribes they'd been out of production for nearly twenty years, and the reed switches in most of mine had been vibrating for a lot longer than that. Those reed switches, and their care and nurturing, became the bane of my life.
    A Servoscribe was a cool piece of kit in its day. It was an interesting piece of kit as a curiosity in my day. Hell, I wouldn't mind one today for old time's sake, there must be something I can plot meaningless graphs of! But science has moved on, events can be measured in so much more detail these days with a computerised data recorder and the kind of things they used Servoscribes for in the 1950s are now so passé as to be taught to schoolchildren. Some of them have even been thoroughly debunked, replaced with far more interesting and clever science that does a better job of explaining the greater breadth of understanding that the intervening decades have given us.
    It's been an interesting trip down memory lane, thinking about the Servoscribe. But like all scientific dinosaurs that have had their day, there's no point in hanging on to one just because it once did a very good job. However much you may like the warm feeling that having one in the lab gives you.
 

Part of the bloke departs

    Our oven died this evening. My wife nearly cried. What happened? An electronic component fried itself in the power supply and filled our flat with the unmistakable aroma of burned circuitry. It turned out we'd neglected one of the air intakes on the back of the machine and it had become clogged with dust over the couple of years since we last moved it, this might have contributed to the unit's demise.
     I am an electronic engineer by training. Not too long ago I'd have had the back off the unit in no time and there is a good chance that I might have been able to fix it. I have the skills, even if I don't use them for a living any more. Tonight I recognised that there was a good chance that if I tried to repair it we'd be left with yet another project, so we pointed this web browser at Argos and reserved a replacement oven for pickup tomorrow afternoon.
     I can't help thinking that yet another piece of the me that used to be has just departed. Tinkering with machines used to be almost what defined me, yet here I am throwing in the towel at the first tendril of smoke. There is still a chance I'll take a look to see what failed, but by then a new oven will be in place. Part of me feels as though it is missing.
    The new oven is a direct replacement from the same manufacturer for the one that failed. If you are looking for a combination microwave and fan oven then I can heartily recommend a Panasonic inverter oven. Just because ours died after six years doesn't mean they aren't damn good pieces of kit if you clean their air intake!

Slowing down at work

    With three days left at my current employer I should be pretty free of stress, but sadly it isn't working that way. The two customers I spend most time dealing with have both succumbed to the lethargy of high summer and don't seem to have got it that after Friday I'll be gone and though my colleague will be able to service my software they won't any more have direct access to the person who wrote it. So several things that really need to be done before I leave seem to be slipping by the wayside. I know on Friday they'll panic and I'll be expected to do a week's work in an afternoon. On top of that my wife's work has become liable to floods in heavy rain due to a blocked drain, so she's very stressed, spending her time glued to the BBC Weather service looking out for showers.
     As a result the level to which my GD has been annoying me has ramped up over the last few days, to the extent that last night I found myself unable to sleep despite having taken my sleep medication. A very weird sensation, the feeling of drugged sleepiness while simultaneously staying unable to succumb to it.
    So I'm not fit for much, back to being barely awake and girl fogged. It'll pass, but meanwhile it's extremely annoying.
    Fortunately I've been finding some time to play amid the fog. The image above is a QR code. If you're not familiar with them, it's a two-dimensional barcode. I'm interested in them at the moment because they are a quick and convenient way for someone like me to convey a piece of information to a mobile phone, the phone owner simply points their camera at the QR code and their scanning software automatically picks up the information.
    So I've been playing with Google Image Chart Editor and the Zxing QR code generator to explore the format. My application needs to pass a location to the phone user, something which should be easy but has slight annoyances (iPhones and Android phones behave slightly differently, for the curious).
    When I found myself scanning the barcodes on my groceries to see what information they contained I knew it was time to stop. Tesco tinned tomatoes, for the truly curious, are 000436408451. Fascinating!

Usability

    If you are a dedicated follower of blogs you may have noticed a lot of template changes in those hosted by Blogger over the past week. Those crafty Blogger developers have released a new template editor and not surprisingly many of their writers have enthusiastically taken to it.
    This blog has remained as it is though. It uses a variation on the most basic of the original Blogger themes, called Minima Stretch. White background, full screen width black text, no images, no fancy fonts. The web as it used to be, welcome to 1998!
   So why, given that for a living I stay a step ahead of the cutting edge on these matters, have I retained such an archaic look and feel? The answer is threefold: clutter, accessibility and bandwidth.
   Clutter, because this for me is primarily about writing. The occasional picture finds its way in here, but the word is where it's at. Too many widgets, banners and animations take away from that focus. I want you to read the text and I don't want you to be distracted from it. Of course, the text has to stand up on its own, but that's a function of my writing and your taste, I can't blame the design if you don't like it.
   Accessibility, because I want this blog to be easy to read. I used to work in an industry in which it is de rigeur for web sites to have a black background. Against that the slightest funny font or indistinct colouring made them almost impossible to read. Some of the Blogger themes seem anxious to replicate this to the extent that there are blogs I follow that even I with my near-perfect vision I find almost impossible to read through their web interface. So black text on a white background with an easy-to-read font means this blog is as readable as it can be, nobody should come away frustrated because they couldn't see the text.
   And finally bandwidth. Most people won't notice this one being on super fast broadband connections, but the more stuff there is on a web page, the longer it takes to load. As a recent adopter of an Android phone I've had this brought home to me recently, loading a large page over a rural 2G GPRS link can be painful at times. A minimalist template like this one is about as quick to load as a Blogger template can be, meaning that browsers on slow connections get their word fix quickly.
    This has been a geeky post but I'm not sorry. It touches on my professional life as well as my life as a blogger so it's a subject I have some views on and I've unloaded them on you. Thanks for reading and next time you change your blog template bear some of the above in mind. Your readers will thank you for it.

A reply from Nationwide

    There it was when I returned home yesterday, a reply to my Little Britain letter to the Nationwide Building Society.
    As I expected, it has the feel of a boilerplate form letter. Here is the main paragraph:

I am very sorry to read that you find the television advertisements offensive. The characters in "Little Britain" are some of the most popular on British television, and using them for our new advertising campaign was not intended in any way to be discriminatory. We chose to work with David Walliams and Matt Lucas and the "Little Britain" concept because we believe that they can bring their highly successful brand to our advertising. However, we do appreciate that the advertisments are open to interpretation and personal taste, and we would like to apologise if any offence has been caused.

     I'm sure I would write something similar, were I a divisional director of corporate affairs at a building society whose profits have nosedived.
     Looking a little wider, I am disappointed to see that Dru Marland's open letter to David Walliams seems to have suddenly become significantly less visible in the search engines than other comparable posts of hers. A quick comparison: search on the open letter vs. search on another post. The former search returns only pages that link to the post, the latter returns the post itself. Such manipulation of content visibility either by practitioners of a very specialist niche within the search engine optimisation world or by direct approach via legal channels to the search engine itself is something I am not unfamiliar with by virtue of the work I do for a living. That I see it here indicates that the point being made has reached its target and steps are being taken to limit any damage to the Little Britain brand. It strikes me that any such damage is self-inflicted.

EDIT: Sometime later on Saturday 5th of June, as if by magic Dru's open letter post reappeared at the top of the search on its title (See comment below). Google searches do not rearrange themselves in this way over these timescales without editorial intervention. It would thus be tempting to claim success as a 1337 search engine h4xx0r but that might be a bit presumptuous. Google doesn't change things for simple bloggers. However it would be extremely interesting from a tech perspective to know what the story was behind the post's disappearance and subsequent revival. I guess I'll never know.

Trade In Your Tranny

    Language is a wonderful thing. Every community has its trigger words which though innocuous to the wider world, set in motion a particular reaction within that community. Politicians refer to exploiting them as "dog-whistling".
    This morning the UK-based geek's favourite news organ, The Register, published a piece about a trade-in scheme for analogue radios.
    I'd better not let my wife see the sub-heading. She might get ideas.

Connectivity

    A day or two ago I was looking at a new mobile phone. I made my choice, the Motorola DEXT, ordered it, and received it yesterday afternoon. This isn't a phone review site so beyond saying it's the closest I've yet been to having a useful computer in the palm of my hand and so far I'm very pleased with it I'm not going to list its features in tedious detail.
    Being at home today, I took the opportunity to go for Chinese food with a friend this lunchtime. On my way back I used my new toy to check my email. One of those "Because I could" things. Now my constant connectivity extends its reach to almost anywhere within the radius of a cell tower. I realised I'd walked over half the way home with only the barest glance at my surroundings which was a crying shame because it''s been a beautiful day. By way of atonement I stopped by the river for a few minutes and took a picture of a pair of hopeful ducks in the shade. No food for them, they soon lost interest in me.
    A few things recently have made me realise how much what we do has been changed by requiring a constant connection to the rest of the world. First, my office being disconnected from the world. Bang! four days of work made very difficult. At least we can do something at home, another company in the building has a phone-based business model and has had to shut up shop for the duration. It's not impossible that our inept JCB operator could have cost a few people their jobs by the time all this is over.
     Then there's the TV. My wife is away for a few days so I have to tell our PVR what to record in her absence. When I turned it on, nothing save a "No signal" message. A quick status check on the BBC Engineering web site finds our transmitter is undergoing maintenance today. A service one takes for granted having disappeared, several hundred pounds worth of TV and video kit suddenly stands completely useless.
      Working in a tech based industry I guess I'm slightly ahead of the curve on some technologies. I've been an enthusiastic adopter of the cloud, I have a very quick PC yet nearly all of the services I use it for are online, hosted somewhere in California rather than on my hard disk. These aren't just entertainment or social networking services, I think it's safe to say that my ability to earn a living depends on cloud-hosted services, not least our company email server. Being abruptly disconnected from them is a reminder of the fragility of the personal infrastructure with which we've surrounded ourselves and I have to admit it's left me sitting a little less easily as I continue working.
    Somehow I can't imagine the three inch screen of the DEXT will be quite enough for me to do my job.