The Quiet Road

So Windows Vista, eh? What’s that all about?

My computer died a few weeks ago and between being skint and being busy so as to be a bit less skint, I’ve only recently gotten round to buying and setting up a new one. For the past ten years or thereabouts, I’ve tended to buy my computer in kit form. And my PC evolved steadily rather than ever getting replaced wholesale. So I’d buy a new motherboard and processor when the old ones died or could no longer handle the increasing demands of modern software (Adobe, I’m looking at you here). Over the years I’ve seen hard-drives go from being measured in MB to being measured in the hundreds of GBs. CPUs have struggled from 286 to 386 to 486 and then — the big leap — to pentium and beyond. My new one is a Core 2 Quad. It’s approximately 68.4 gazillion times faster than the fastest chip available just fifteen seconds ago. In about 3 and a half minutes it’ll be superseded. It will be largely obsolete by the end of the week.

I’m enjoying being cutting edge while it lasts.

Anyways, I decided this time to go with a pre-built system. I can no longer be arsed with the faffing about when the bloody thing breaks down. I’ve got a three year warranty, so if something goes wrong, I just have to phone them and they’ll have it collected and repaired at no cost or hassle to me.

It arrived with Windows Vista preinstalled and I figured I’d give it a whirl, secure in the knowledge that I can always reinstall my old copy of XP. And the verdict after a couple of weeks use…? It’s a bit shit actually.

Don’t get me wrong. It has many many redeeming features and some bits and pieces that make it worth sticking with. In fact I shan’t be returning to XP. I’ve gotten used to the enhanced file system with its breadcrumb navigation and ubiquitous search, both of which I’d seriously miss if I went back to XP. The new Taskbar and Start Menu really work well, and the User Access Control isn’t nearly as annoying as I’d been led to believe. I’ve not even bothered turning it off (which is perfectly possible) as it isn’t all that intrusive once you’ve done your initial set-up and software install. The Last.fm plugin for Media Player requires authentication each and every time I start up the program. But I can live with that.

The ‘aero’ display is pretty, and the live thumbnails of minimised windows in the taskbar is a useful feature. The sidebar is lovely but has a serious lack of plugins and widgets. You’d think Microsoft would have concentrated on having a wide selection of excellent little applications to plug into the sidebar. Instead there’s absolutely sod-all. Even the ability to “minimise” Media Player onto the Sidebar doesn’t exist. I’m using it as a repository for RSS feeds, but in truth I’m turning it off more and more often because I already have netvibes.com for that. An opportunity wasted.

The Windows Update process (with which I’ve had difficulties in the past) is streamlined and far less intrusive. In fact Vista does a pretty good job of tucking most of the actual workings of the Operating System further out of sight than ever before. As a bit of a tinkerer, and someone who knows their way around Windows better than most, I can find this a bit patronising or frustrating at times. But there’s no question that it’s a good thing in general. And all the options and controls are still there, you just have to dig a bit farther than before.

All of which makes a nice selection of interface enhancements and a worthy overhaul of the file system (it’s not the all new WinFS of legend, but as far as the actual user experience goes, it may as well be). But at what cost?

Well, aside from the financial one (it’ll always be a lot cheaper with a new PC; hence my decision to avail of that discount and get it now) the big cost is stability. Vista has been out for quite a while now, but there are still issues with some of the drivers. Despite having the latest Creative Soundcard, the latest version of Windows and the latest Creative drivers, it still seems to be a flip of a coin as to whether I’ll have sound on any given start-up. Or else I’ll have sound, but the Windows Sound Console will tell me that I have 5.1 Speakers (true) while the Creative Sound Console will insist I have 2.1 stereo speakers. And any changes to the settings can result in the system crashing, or more often, two of my five speakers stop working altogether.

Vista also seems to crash occasionally when it goes into power-save mode (if I wander away for my PC for more than 10 minutes), which is a right pain in the arse. XP never did that.

Worst of all though, are the plain old “random crashes”. They’d almost become a thing of the past with XP SP2. In fact, I remember very few random crashes once I’d upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. But here they are again with Vista. I might have Photoshop or Dreamweaver open and I’ll fire up a browser. 49 times out of 50… no problem. But every now and then the PC will throw a complete fit and lock up on me. In just two weeks of Vista use I’ve probably lost an hour’s work due to the OS dying while I had files open. That’s a waaaay higher rate than with XP.

Overall though, Vista has sucked me in. The file system alone is worth the cost of entry. And XP would seem very limiting in that sense were I to return to it. Aside from that though…? It’s all a bit underwhelming. A bit, “is that it?” So if you’re thinking about upgrading, can I suggest you hold off until Microsoft release a Service Pack? You’ll like the enhancements, but it’s probably worth waiting until the OS is more stable before you get them.

Just a quickie as I have to catch a bus in half an hour…

That’s how I started this blog post earlier today. And I then proceeded to demonstrate exactly why you shouldn’t write and publish anything that requires fact-checking or basic arithmetic in less than half an hour. First up, it turns out that the “news” item I was critiquing was almost three years old. Way to be cutting-edge, jim.

Not content with staleness, though, I then added a healthy dollop of inaccuracy (dividing by a thousand — instead of a million — to convert square metres to square kilometres). It’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t have got published if I’d used my usual two-drafts process instead of dashing it off in twenty minutes.

Given that the maths error pretty much invalidates the second half of the blog post, it’s not something I can just amend. That said, the first half is still relevant. So I’ll leave that here as a reminder that we shouldn’t take the news at face value when they make technical-sounding statements like: “For an energy source to be commercially viable, it must reach an efficiency of 10%, which is an industry standard.” I’m going to take out the second half of the post though as it’s a bunch of arse based on a flawed calculation.

But I hope this all serves as a reminder that we shouldn’t take blogs at face value either. Thanks to Doormat for pointing out the error.

The BBC currently has an article heralding the news that Sun and hydrogen ‘to fuel future’. It suggests that a new nanotech breakthrough has made converting solar energy into hydrogen a practical method of fuelling our cars. On the surface it sounds quite interesting, but unfortunately there are serious problems with the article. It opens by telling us that:

Hydrogen Solar says it has managed to convert more than 8% of sunlight directly into hydrogen with fuel cell technology it has specially developed.

For an energy source to be commercially viable, it must reach an efficiency of 10%, which is an industry standard.

BBC News: Sun and hydrogen ‘to fuel future’

That all sounds very interesting, but it doesn’t actually make any sense. For an energy source to be commercially viable, it must reach an efficiency of 10%, which is an industry standard. Er, 10% of what exactly? I just don’t get it. The reality is that for an energy source to be viable (in practical terms, forget commercialism for a moment), it must produce more energy than is used to extract, refine and distribute it. This is measured as a ratio (sometimes known as Net Energy Ratio, NER, or more precisely as Energy Returned on Energy Invested, ERoEI) not as a percentage. So crude oil, for instance, has an NER of between 30:1 and 90:1 (depending on the well). If you were to convert this to a percentage, it would equate to a return of between 3000% and 9000%. Is that what the 10% in this article refers to? An NER of 0.1:1?

Probably not, but lest you get blinded by the intro figures claiming some sort of magical commercial threshold of 10%, please be aware that those claims make no sense as they are currently written.

[The rest has been DELETED. See above.]

A few weeks ago my trusty old mp3 player (in an era of inbuilt obsolescence, four years is considered “old” for electronic gadgetry) began making worrying clicking noises. The sort of noises that presage catastrophic hard-drive failure. Of course if I’m honest, the descent into decrepitude began some months ago when the screen started to fade. But despite the washed out screen and the inability to use the “next track” button without the machine locking up completely and requiring a hard-reset (involving poking a pin into a little hole on the back), I really liked my old player. It was one of the first of the hard-drive mp3 players… a shade bigger and a lot heavier than my old cd walkman, it was an unstylish brick. But it had 40GB of space and played non-DRM WMA files (my preferred portable audio format). Also, it wasn’t manufactured by Apple. A bonus.

I briefly toyed with the idea of buying a new hard-drive and replacing the knackered one (not really sure how easy a job that would be, but I’m sure there’s a tutorial online). But in truth, I’d be spending money to squeeze an extra few months of life out of the thing. If that. The screen would have given up the ghost before too long anyway, leaving me with a new hard-drive in a useless player.

So I bit the bullet as the saying goes, and spent 299 euro on an all-singing / all-dancing new piece of technology. And if you don’t mind, I’ll leave struggling with consumer guilt for another post.

I spent a long time reading reviews and comparing specifications before I made my decision. The criteria were as follows:

• Must play non-DRM WMA audio files (no way in hell I’m redigitising my entire CD collection)
• Must have a minimum of 30GB of space (I’ll be putting 22 or 23GB of music onto it right away, and obviously want to leave some room to grow)
• Must not cost more than €300 (the maximum budget I decided upon)
• Must have a battery life of at least 10 hours of music (to last the whole London-Holyhead coach journey)

Those were the minimum technical specs. Anything that met those would be considered. And surprisingly few did. In the end, the reviews all seemed to agree on one winner, and the fact that it’s made by the same people who made the last one I owned (and liked) is a bonus. So I’m now the proud owner of a spanking new Creative Zen Vision:M.

I went for the white model as the reviews said the black one, while initially the best looking, seems to scratch rather easily, while the other colours look a bit plasticky.

As several added bonuses, however, the new machine has a full colour screen, plays movies and displays photos, can synchronise with Outlook calendar and contacts, has a built in recorder and FM radio and can output audiovisual content through a stereo or onto a TV screen.

And it’s the same size as the video iPod. So no more wearing a jacket in warm weather just so I have a pocket big enough to put my walkman in!

There was a slightly cheaper and more svelte alternative that didn’t have the big colour screen. But in truth, while I can’t see myself watching much video on the thing (quite aside from anything else, the amount of music I have means there’s not much space left for video – even with 30GB), the idea of having a portable photo-album containing all my digital photos does appeal to me.

I’ll let you know how I get along with the thing after I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks.

For those of you awaiting the publication of George Bush’s response to the Iranian letter, I can exclusively reveal that I’ll have it for you by the weekend. My sources in the Whitehouse and Reuters news agency failed to get hold of a copy, but my source in Ahmadinejad’s administration came up trumps. He’s forwarding it through secure channels even as I type.

In the meantime let me point you towards a couple of groovy thangs.

First up is Netvibes. This is an AJAX / Web 2.0 (think Gmail stylee interface) application. It’s essentially a feed aggregator, but it’s the first one I’ve encountered that does everything I want it to. It works inside the browser (important) and can integrate webmail and POP accounts (groovy). It has multiple tabs in the page to allow easy segregation by topic (blogs page, news page, tech page, etc.) and if you keep the page open on one tab of a tabbed browser (Firefox, say) then notification of a new item on any of the netvibes tabs gets flagged on the browser tab. If all that sounds a bit confused, don’t worry, it works very well indeed.

Staying with the tech-toy-theme, check out this entry over at The Sharpener from John Band all about the newfangled Google Trends. A potentially useful tool (Google Trends that is, not John) for those of us tracking public awareness. See this chart for peak oil as an example.

Speaking of google, I was pleased to note that I come top of the search results for ‘torture John Reid‘. Well, top result for google.com and google.ie, but The Independent beat me into second place on co.uk. Hell, if they want first crack at him, that’s fine. I’m a patient man.

While I’m here let me point you towards a couple of gems from the most recent issue of The Onion. You’ve got to love any story that begins with the line… “Pro-life advocates celebrated approval of the new anti-abortion drug UR-86 by the Food and Drug Administration Tuesday, calling it a “safe and effective method” for terminating pregnant women while leaving their unborn children unharmed.” [Read more]

And then check out Mr. Special Foreign Man Won’t Read Anything Not Written In His Own Language. Wonderful.

Nice to see the London Borough of Hackney are taking the issue of sustainability seriously (thanks to Jarndyce for pointing that page out – via the newfangled google chat system).

Oh and read David Byrne’s latest journal entry. There is Chemistry Between Them. Interesting stuff.

Now, I’m off to the secret location for the Bush letter “drop off”. If you don’t hear from me by the weekend you can assume the CIA have silenced me.

A pernicious white fungus has spread “like snow” in the caves of Lascaux in France, where the fabulous rock art has been described as the Sistine Chapel of prehistory. The fungus is believed to have been introduced after contractors began to install a new air-conditioning system that was meant to preserve the precious 17,000-year-old cave paintings from heat and humidity.
– Irish Independent

It’s possible that the above link may require (free) registration to the Indo, so I’ll give you the jist of the story…

An artist, or group of artists, produced a series of paintings on the walls of a cave system in Lascaux, France. Seventeen thousand years later, authorities decided that the paintings needed to be protected from heat and humidity and installed an air conditioning system.

The air-conditioning system altered the environment of the caves – which had remained fairly stable for 17 millennia – and within weeks the ground was infested with a white fungus. The authorities who installed the air conditioning claimed that the fungus wouldn’t spread to the paintings. They claimed that it would remain on the ground.

It didn’t.

Now the fungus has begun to encroach upon the paintings and the authorities who installed the new technology are employing people to very carefully remove strands of the fungus from the paintings by hand in order to protect them from their first serious threat in 17,000 years.

A news story and a parable.