Thereafter the story becomes a tale of rich and unscrupulous dealers and collectors trying to get control of the treasure, with a few reasonably honest characters caught in the middle. It’s neither a very long story nor a very complicated one, but it’s quite fun.

I liked the new unpleasant characters, and welcomed the return of the same “good guys” from Wahoo Rhapsody. I just hope Morey has done his legal homework creating a wealthy collector with an ill-fitting toupee called Ronald Stump!

My only complaint about the first book was that it felt a bit too obviously a copy of a Carl Hiaasen, and there’s still some truth in that criticism. In particular Atticus Fish does feel like an echo of Hiassen’s character Skink. However, that’s a minor complaint, and I look forward to the next book in the series.

For many years now if there’s been the prospect of either snorkelling or diving on holiday I’ve taken a Canon PowerShot S-series or G-series camera with its waterproof housing. I’ve had at least three generations of that solution, which have been utterly reliable and produced some good results. However they are a bulky solution in these days of reducing baggage allowances, and somewhat slow and clumsy in operation.

This year, therefore, I decided to try a different solution, and opted after some deliberation for one of the new “ultra tough compacts”. While Canon and Panasonic both have a comparable solution, after some deliberation I went for the Olympus TG2, based on a combination of its looks and spec.

This is supposedly a very tough piece of kit – waterproof to 15m, drop-proof to 2m, crush-proof to 100kg and with a large operating temperature range. The downside is that this is a market where the competition is intense but based on point for point feature matching, with a focus on improving things like nominal depth protection rather than the photographic features.

That meant that even before use in anger there were some compromises: none of the cameras in this class do RAW, even though Canon, for example, support this fully on their smaller high-end compacts like the S95. to make things worse the TG2 also lacks many of the some other fundamental tools to control exposure such as automatic bracketing (despite a very high frame rate which would support it well), or shutter priority.

The lack of these features is a complete mystery to me, when these cameras are allegedly designed to be used in conditions where the lighting as well as the environment will be challenging…

Early trials did suggested that the camera does have accurate, fast autofocus (which was something I particularly wanted), and makes a decent job of auto exposure in most cases. Picture quality is OK, but the noise levels rise rapidly at ISO 800 and above, the JPEGs have a somewhat “overprocessed” look, and there’s some noticeable pincushion distortion on underwater shots, even at medium zoom. These are presumably all  the result of the tiny sensor, which is significantly smaller than in compacts like the Canon S95.

So, off to Barbados and into the water with the turtles. One immediate observation was that the display is very difficult to use at snorkelling depths (where there may be quite a lot of ambient light from above/behind you), and the tiny font becomes illegible for a user like me with ageing eyes. A “high contrast” option on the display, and a large-font “quick menu” option (like on all my Canon and Panasonic cameras) would be useful.

However, a few minutes into the snorkelling session I noticed a much more serious problem: the camera kept on switching itself off, and the battery level was dropping almost as I watched. I managed to snatch a couple of shots, but the camera was really misbehaving, and I had to give up.

Back on the boat the problem was immediately apparent – the camera had sprung a leak presumably through the cover for the USB port, as that had evidence of water inside it. However, instead of being limited just to the port section, the water had spread rapidly through the camera with the result that the lens was misting up and the electrical problems were getting rapidly worse. Although I tried drying the camera out and recharging it, it’s now completely dead. Fortunately I had invested in a waterproof SD card, so I managed to rescue a few decent shots, but otherwise it’s a write-off.

This is an extremely poor design. As you have to charge the battery in camera (using the proprietary USB cable – another peeve), there’s no option of just sealing the camera for a complete trip. You would also think that the camera would have some measure of “double sealing” so that in the event of a leak into the port or battery/card openings the water wouldn’t permeate quickly into the rest of the electronics, but this is clearly not the case.

This camera is completely inadequate for its intended use. Fortunately my suppliers (the excellent Wex Photographic) have promised me a full refund. I will not be spending it on Olympus equipment.

Following in the best tradition of Winston Churchill and T E Lawrence, Stewart is evidently not just a administrator, but also both a leader and do-er, an entertaining writer, and an insightful analyst. His memoir is, by turns:

• Inspiring, describing those who strove to improve and reform Iraq, in many cases risking and even losing their lives in the process,
• Shocking, describing acts of repression and violence, and also when describing the atrocious incompetence and cowardice of the Italian military,
• Intriguing, as Stewart describes scheming Iraqi politicians who could have given lessons to Nicolo Machiavelli,
• Thought-provoking, particularly in the final reflections about which interventions succeeded, and how many failed,
• Exciting, for example when describing the protracted siege of their office in Nasiriyah,
• Highly amusing. My favourite was the Islamist militant who publicly compared Stewart to Hitler, and then immediately asked him for help with an injury to the militant’s penis. Stewart’s descriptions of his interactions with the Bhagdad bureaucracy, with their management consultancy and PowerPoint “solutions”, also made me laugh out loud.

This is a strong analysis of an important piece of the world’s recent history, the latter acts of which are still playing out. It’s also an insightful study into the reality of politics in an environment as complex as post-invasion Iraq, which may genuinely have no peers. The book is eminently readable, and I strongly recommend it.

As before, Orzel sets out a clear account of the field, working in many cases from first principles, but continuously framed by very funny exchanges between him and his dog, who, like any of her kind, is constantly looking for ways to increase her food intake, and her success in hunting bunnies and squirrels.

The quantum physics volume introduced me to a lot of relatively new thinking and experimental evidence, and I was hoping for the same this time, but relativity is obviously a more mature field, and there was less that was new to me in this book. That said, the teaching of this field has obviously moved on since my student days, and I was surprised to find, for example, the concept of relativistic mass increase referred to as an “old” model, with the book focusing much more on momentum calculations. Similarly the basics of special relativity are presented using a range of geometrical models, with a heavy emphasis on the spacetime diagram, which is a different approach to some previous books I’ve read.

I had some complaints about the Kindle edition of the quantum physics volume separating diagrams and footnotes too far from the relevant text. On this occasion I received a physical copy of the book and was looking forward to that being less of an issue. The physical book layout is definitely better, but could still be improved, as  diagrams are often a page or more away from the descriptive text.

However, that’s a minor niggle, and really my only one. If you want to learn more about relativity and also have a good laugh, this is a strong recommendation.

Like Morris, Llewellyn’s vision is deliberately utopian: mankind has not had to experience near destruction at the hands of asteroids, mechanical warriors, zombies, plagues, intelligent apes and/or aliens (delete as applicable), and has averted the worst effects of more gradually acting causes, such as overpopulation, pollution, global warming, corporate greed and rabid bankers.

Llewellyn has cleverly constructed a composite Utopia, with different regions of the world finding different solutions and being at different points in the cycle of economic, political and population development. Overall the message is positive, as the author openly intends, although there is the suggestion that communities such as the Gardenians (British) who have reverted to a largely rural “non-economy” may be sowing the seeds of their own decay, with limited ability to maintain older technology and innovate new solutions. It is not impossible to see them becoming the Eloi of The Time Machine – pretty, charming, but useless.

Unfortunately as a modern novel the book does have several weaknesses. Few short-term problems mean there’s almost no drama in the story. There are tantalising glimpses of some things, such as a new communal game, but no real description, and some of the text is in danger of dating rapidly, such as references to Apple and their current products. The ending comes suddenly and the story just stops. The author’s intention may be to use this as a springboard for another tale in the series, but that’s not clear.

There are also numerous “schoolboy errors”, such as a space elevator system which is not equatorial and somehow manages to complete a rotation in less than 24 hours, or a solar power system with output many thousands of time greater than it could possibly have. Given Llewellyn’s credentials as a technical presenter, I found these disappointing. 

This is a relatively short book, and worth a quick read for some of the ideas, but ultimately a more complete development might have worked better.

In the first chapter, he explains how little we can now assume about how people will consume content, and the challenges of making sure that your web site will work across the range of different devices and connectivity environments. He also dismisses the concept of a “mobile ghetto” – one or more separate sites dedicated to a particular class of device – and establishes the concept of a fully responsive site. The following chapters explain how to achieve it.

Chapters 2-4 are the book’s core. In chapter 2 the author steps through the process of creating a web page as a flexible or “fluid” grid, avoiding any fixed sizing or relationship between the separate elements. This delivers a framework which is resilient to browser size changes, and should also be fairly browser independent. Chapter 3 focuses on ensuring that images and similar elements within that layout are also flexible, so they will resize with the others.

Chapter 4 takes this design and adds CSS media queries, enabling the browser to resize and move the page’s elements to better suit the needs of different shapes and sizes of device, the result being a fully “responsive” design, using just standard HTML and CSS. This is a longer chapter than the others, and goes on to explore some of the specific challenges of the approach, and some elegant examples of how to apply the principles presented.

The final chapter takes a slightly different stance, first exploring how the sample design will degrade in less complete browsers, and also considering the specific needs of mobile users. This leads into a discussion of the “mobile first” concept, in which website designs should focus on the essential content and progressively add features rather than subtracting them from the desktop design. Whether this approach will work for you depends a lot on context, but there are important concepts relating to focusing on the core content which apply to all designers.

And that’s it. I read the book in a couple of sessions, and then got stuck into updating my web site with all the key concepts well established. Ethan’s book is clear, well written and commendably short, and I’m happy to recommend it.

The book is not available from Amazon (except in French!!), but can be purchased and downloaded in multiple formats (including .mobi for the Kindle) from A Book Apart.

To reveal much more would risk spoiling the story, but rest assured this will keep you turning the pages and frequently laughing out loud.

If you mourn the passing of Sharpe’s best work, and are frustrated by the way so many purported “comedies” import of this genre fail to amuse, then you will enjoy this.

You should now be able to get the full experience of “Thoughts on the World” on all devices

Please bear with me if there’s the odd foible as I complete the changes. Also please let me know if you spot any problem – but don’t forget to let me know what device you’re using.

My blog now supports multiple views, with the default being an “abstract”, giving an experience a bit like Google Currents. Use the icons at the top of the page, just below my title bar, to switch between them. Please let me know what you think.

About a year ago I wrote a piece entitled “Ten Ways to Make Your iPad Work Effectively With Windows”. That was to some extent a tale of frustrations, apologies and work-arounds, and it’s time to contrast how the Android option delivers for business users in a heterogeneous environment.

USB Connectivity and the Shared Filesystem

Imagine you want to read a document from your PC on the iPad. First you connect the iPad via USB. Then you fire up either iTunes or DiskAid. You next either go through an “import” dialogue, or drag files from Explorer, but you have to target the space of the right application. Then on the iPad you have to open the application which received the file(s). Remember how to drive the apps file management features (they’re all different…) ​ This may not be the final step. You may have to select your files and “open in” the editor /viewer app, or you may have to do an “import from iTunes” step in the editor. Finally, if you make changes, then you reverse the above, if you’re lucky. If you’re using an application like Polaris Office with no effective export features you’re stuffed! If you open in multiple applications you end up with several copies to tidy up.

Got that?

Now let’s try the Android tablet. Connect it via USB. It appears as a drive on the PC. From the program where you are viewing the document you may be able to do a “save as” to the tablet. If not, you just copy/paste the file in Explorer to a convenient directory on the tablet. In the tablet’s file manager click the file to open it. When you have finished editing save the file and it’s visible to the PC as soon as you connect it.

You can open in one application or many, but you only have one copy of the file on the tablet unless you deliberately choose to do a “save as”. Result: predictable document management.

Media Formats and iTunes

Android devices are media format agnostic, which makes transferring media to and from other devices much easier. In fairness this is also much easier on the iPad than it was originally, although only if you use a program other than iTunes to manage your content.

Freeing yourself up from iTunes is a major benefit in its own right. If any company other than Apple supplied it the software would be labelled “spyware”. Being able to access and manage your tablet using native Windows functions is much cleaner.

SoftMaker Office

If there’s a single “killer” application or suite which makes a compelling case for an Android (or Windows Mobile) device this is it. Open Word documents and add tracked changes. Open Excel spreadsheets and the formatting and formulas work. Show a presentation full screen and just click to advance. Sounds easy, but no iPad solution can deliver. SoftMaker do. With menus which follow Office 2003. Accept no substitutes.

The S-Pen

There’s a reason why moving from daubing with the fingers to drawing fine lines with a pen represented a significant forward step for mankind. Unfortunately Steve Jobs didn’t get it. Those who have used Pocket PCs, Tablet PCs or Samsung “Note” tablets do. While much of what I describe here applies to all Android devices, Samsung have a significant USP with their stylus support, which speeds normal text input but also opens up the mobile device to a much wider range of uses.

The iPad could in theory be a great platform for design collaboration, but I never had any real success, mainly due to the lack of precision drawing tools. Someone with much smaller fingers and much greater artistic talent might do better, but my ability to finger paint detailed models on an A5 page is limited.

Samsung’s S-Note is a good start, for free-hand sketching, which it can optionally “tidy” as you go, or structured diagrams. However an even better solution is DroiDia, a surprisingly capable Visio clone for Android. The user interface is a bit arcane and will take a bit of acclimatisation, but the Visio-compatible results are very good. Here’s a simple three tier architecture:

If your work involves maths or science then S-Note provides you with another benefit – handwriting recognition of equations. This works amazingly well – here’s an example:

(Anyone who asks what this means will be subject to a very rude response )

Finally, the S-Pen makes the tablet a genuinely usable Remote Desktop client. Yes, the iPad has several apps which provide RDP or similar connectivity to a larger computer, but anyone who has tried to do productive work with Windows on a small screen driven by fingertip has typically given up in frustration. With the S-Pen the problem disappears, as selection resolution matches that of a mouse or Tablet PC stylus. (The same thing also helps enormously with web pages designed with a fixed format for larger screens.)

SwiftKey

This alternative input system for Android devices dramatically accelerates “tapped” text input, and on Android devices it works for all applications, not just a stand-alone “notepad” which would be the iOS approach. Its predictive abilities verge on the psychic, and I often find myself writing whole sentences with only 2 or 3 taps per word (like this one!) It’s probably borderline whether I can input text faster with SwiftKey or a full-sized keyboard.

Widgets

Android’s “widgets” provide genuine information right on the home screen of a phone or tablet – not just a badge saying “99 new things have happened in this app” . It saves me a lot of time not having to go into an “app” just to get regular information like current appointments, weather and news headlines. As the technology becomes more widely understood I expect business-related data to be presented in the same way.

Multitasking

In another iPad blog (Not from My Cold, Dead Hand… ) I wrote about whether the iPad could replace a PC, and concluded it would severely limit content creation capabilities. Beyond the limited input tools and editors supported by iOS, the lack of multitasking is a major issue.

A genuine multitasking operating system makes a lot of difference when you’re trying to compile content from different sources. For this post, I had to flip between WordPress, a browser, S-Note and PhotoShop Touch, but the ability to do so meant I could create the post entirely on the Note. iOS makes a reasonable job of faking multitasking a lot of the time, but the need to reload documents all the time becomes slow, tiring and a source of errors.

Set aside the limitations for content creation and consumption, and iOS bars itself from certain classes of business application, particularly those requiring continuous background processing. Simple “logging” apps, for example, run in the background under Android (or Windows Mobile) but can only run in the foreground on an iPad or iPhone.

Conclusion

I realise that this is a plea for BetaMax in a VHS (Apple) world, but even with limited exposure I am identifying some significant differences in the ability of my Galaxy Note to deliver business value compared with the iPad. I encourage readers to think about what’s important to them, and whether an iOS or an Android solution will meet the needs better.

There were some touches of genius. The plot, based on A Very English Coup cleverly wove in all our current bogeymen in a bang up to date tale featuring drone warfare, Islamic terrorists, toxic bankers, careless and callous petrochemical companies, electronic surveillance and the rest. Technology was exploited to help tell the tale, not as an end in itself. I also admired some of the direction, especially those scenes which placed Charles Dance’s Machiavellian character deliberately lurking in the background.

But ultimately it was all a bit unsatisfying. I’ve identified several reasons why, but the main reason was simply that it was too rushed. There’s clearly an optimum length for a conspiracy thriller on TV, and it’s about 6 hours run time. Edge of Darkness was 6 hour-long episodes, and so was State of Play. The first series of Homeland, was 10 episodes of about 40 minutes each (about 6.5 hours). There’s an upper limit as well: at around 8 hours Hunted was just too bloody complicated, and while a series of 24 runs much longer, at about 17 hours, they religiously change villains and threats twice a day, so we’re back to roughly the 6 hours duration for each “segment”.

By contrast, Secret State ran for less than 3 hours (ignoring adverts and the now mandatory review and preview segments), and it just wasn’t enough to properly develop the story. Instead of slowly developing understanding, you had key plot elements revealed as almost throw-away sound bites. Watching an off-air recording with Channel 4′s longer-than-American commercial breaks just increased the frustration.

In Edge of Darkness there’s a fascinating scene in which three senior policemen are waiting in a hospital for news of a suspect who chose to throw himself out of a window rather than face arrest. It runs for about 2 minutes, but the suspect’s condition, the police officers’ frustration, and the growing despair of the central character are all communicated with almost no dialogue. They act. Secret State had no time for such luxuries.

Secret State also had precious little time for character development. The central characters were all wonderfully cast, but most went nowhere – we learned nothing about them as people and little about their drivers, beliefs and agendas. Most also behaved true to the initial impression, rather than surprising us with unexpected heroism or villainy. Apart from the brilliant opening episode Charles Dance was particularly under-used.

I’m not convinced you need “Previously” segments in a four episode show. If you can’t follow something for four weeks, that’s a rather poor lookout. However it’s the “Next time” segments which really wound me up. These were full of spoilers, and totally un-necessary when the drama was already sufficiently suspenseful to make sure viewers returned. Surely the time would have been better devoted to addressing at least some of the hurried treatment?

A conspiracy thriller doesn’t need a happy ending, but it does need a satisfactory one, in which the dispositions of the main parties and issues is clearly portrayed. Secret State failed in this, with a hurried ending which left a lot of questions unanswered.

By contrast, the BBC’s best effort this year, Line of Duty followed the rules, and while it had a few annoying plot and character flaws, it ended up more satisfactory than the better plotted Secret State.

And finally, Of . It may be just coincidence, it may be the sincerest form of flattery, or an attempt to gain praise by association, but I’ve noticed that the best conspiracy thrillers all seem to have three word titles with a common middle word. I await State of Secrets or Secrets of State with anticipation – remember, you read it here first.

OK, I know that not all films and plays involve trains, but enough do that this is a surprisingly powerful classification system.

A couple of years ago we went to see a performance of Chekov’s Three Sisters. While I may be oversimplifying things slightly, most of the second act is the sisters talking about getting on a train. I forget the details, I think one wants to move away from the family to Moscow. I can’t even remember whether she actually gets on the train or not. Despite the fact that it was a good performance by several famous British actors, many of whose other work I love, I was bored out of my skull. Frances and I were both so affected by this, that we now have an in-joke reaction to any mention of Chekov where one of us immediately says “just get on the —— train”.

But then I realised just how many of our favourite films do involve someone getting on a train. The key difference is that there is never any debate whatsoever about the need to do so. The challenge is how. You may have to drive your Audi off a bridge (Transporter 3), jump from a helicopter (Under Siege 2, Broken Arrow, Unstoppable), shoot lots of bad guys first (3.10 to Yuma), jump from a camel (Sahara), talk the bad guys down (Pelham 123), jump from a car (Unstoppable), quietly murder some of the good guys (From Russia with Love), jump from another train (Unstoppable again), hide in a mailbag (Live and Let Die), run several Manhattan blocks and jump through the subway roof (Die Hard with a Vengeance), beam in (repeatedly) using a time machine (Source Code), claw into the back of the carriage with a Caterpillar digger (Skyfall). You get the picture, and I haven’t mentioned Speed, Batman Begins, Goldeneye…

So do you like stories about talking about getting on a train? Or those about doing it?

(Published June 2011, updated November 2012 as the list grows…)

The 10″ Note addresses all of those weaknesses, and may well become not only a primary content consumption device but also a primary platform for content creation. The available software is just better: I am writing this with the free WordPress apply for Android which just works, where the iPad version was very frustrating. Text input is quick with SwiftKey, I can multi-task with Chrome to look up previous posts, and I can easily find and add content from other sources, always a challenge in iOS land. This post has taken about 20 minutes, entirely on the Note.

I’d also like to bring your attention to a great app from Google called Currents. This takes RSS or similar feeds and turns them dynamically into an attractive “on-line magazine”. It works brilliantly with photo-rich feeds such as the photography blogs I read. Here’s what it does with “Thoughts on the World”:

I didn’t have to do anything with my existing feed to get this result. Currents doesn’t work in every case – if a blog starts every post with the same boring advert then it doesn’t have much to work with – but the hit rate is quite high. It is could also do with a way to mark items as read, which is a major omission. However overall Google seem to have another hit, and currently it’s free.

Blogs away!

This wasn’t a trivial act as the 10″ Note is so new that the spec I wanted isn’t yet directly available in the UK. However I went to Buyspry.com of Maryland via eBay, who shipped a 32GB device to me via DHL, and between the two of them I had it in my hands in 4 days. Very impressive.

Setup was also remarkably pain-free. I switched it on, provided a few credentials, and it sat for about half an hour downloading and installing all the apps already on my 5″ Note. About 90% needed no further attention.

So I’m back to an intermediate computing device with a proper multi-tasking operating system with a shared, visible filing system. Hurrah! It has a proper fine-tipped, pressure-sensitive stylus, not a banana. Hurrah! Connect it to a PC and the filing system is just there as part of the PC’s storage. Hurrah! I can choose an intelligent, input mechanism and it works for all applications, in my case the almost psychic SwiftKey. Hurrah Hurrah!

I do prefer Android as an operating system. It’s great having an “active desktop” (to steal the Microsoft term) ​on which I can intelligently organise my applications with the mix of active information feeds. Multi-tasking is so much more 2012. And many of the applications are much more powerful. Yesterday I copied a Word document to the tablet, opened it in TextMaker, SoftMaker’s Word clone, viewed it exactly as on the PC, and marked it up using 100% Word compatible markup operations. Try that on your iPad!

Dislikes? Not many so far. The storage is slightly disappointing, only matching the iPad despite buying the maximum spec and a large micro SD card. However, I expect to waste a lot less on multiple unmanageable copies of files, and the Moore’s Law benefits have reflected instead into a much lower price. The proprietary USB connector is an Apple copy too far – why not just a standard mini-Based or micro-B? And that’s about it.

There are a few software challenges: I’m not sure I’ve found the ideal Twitter client, video player or image viewer yet, but I have functional solutions and the machine has only been in my hands a week. Solving those problems on the iPad took me about 8 months. In a couple of “edge” cases the iPad had a good “kitchen sink” multi-purpose app which will require a slightly more complex solution on the Note, but I can live with that.

So far so good. I’ll keep you posted.

Highly recommended. Now about those 5 virtual machines I want to run at once…

While I hate to be contrary (no I don’t! ), I’m not convinced that the assertion about photographs and bricks is correct, even today. Regular readers will know I can’t resist an estimating challenge, so here goes…

Most estimates of the number of photos taken each year comes out somewhere near (but typically a bit below) one trillion, 10^12. As this number is growing exponentially, to get a total number of all photographs ever taken we can focus on recent years, and something in the range 5-10 trillion would probably cover it. However, we don’t retain all our shots. I dump about 50%. I don’t know how typical this is, but let’s use it as an estimating basis. So this gives use a number of “existing photographs” of a few (2-5) trillion.

Now bricks. This is more tricky. I estimate the number of bricks in a typical British family home at around 15-20,000. That provides shelter for an average 4-5 people, but we also spend time in other brick buildings (work, hotels, communal buildings), so let’s say 10,000 bricks per person in a “brick rich” environment like the UK.

But not everyone lives in a “brick rich” environment: for all sorts of economic, environmental and cultural reasons many buildings use other materials. So let’s assume that 10% of the world’s buildings are brick.

10,000 (bricks per person) x 10% & 7 x 10^9 (people) = 7 x 10^12 bricks. That’s still a couple of times greater than my estimate of the number of photos…

Now obviously as the numbers are (surprisingly) so similar and the number of photos is growing exponentially, the roles will soon be reversed. But I don’t think it was true in 1976.

Ultimately this is a conspiracy plot which involves almost everyone in the White House except the central character, and feels like a tired reworking as a result. Furthermore that conspiracy is not really credible, with Aryan supremacists who have presumably just quietly ignored Barack Obama, Colin Powell and the many Jewish members of recent US administrations. Many characters know much more than would be realistic in a successful conspiracy, which fundamentally requires secrecy.

Although the book inhabits the real world of current Middle Eastern politics and players, other realities are ignored. For example early on there are several misogynistic “a woman can’t do this job” challenges to the new president, but no one thinks to mention Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel or any of the US’s successful female Secretaries of State.

The writing fails to be either intriguing or suspenseful. With only one main exception the main characters remain true to the new president’s initial assessment of their personalities and loyalties. The chief of staff and housekeeper behave suspiciously, but the reason is immediately disclosed, rather than the disclosure being deferred for a page or two.

Many of the details are simply laughable. Apparently the head of the Secret Service is a dwarf of 4ft 10. The villain is a Nazi who refers to “Capitalist Pigs”. The president is a long-standing career politician, but apparently has no advisors except those inherited from her predecessor, and although she has a country to run, the president is worrying about her biological clock, despite being about 50.

On a practical level my pre-release review copy of the book had a number of oddities of grammar, typography and layout. While these may be rectified before publication and were not critical, they were suggestive that the work has not received a great deal of review before printing.

It’s a shame, because the premise of this book is a good one, but the execution does not deliver a worthy read.

Most image processing software supports geometric correction via three parameters labelled a, b and c. These are the parameters in the following formula:

Ru = scale*(Rd + a*Rd^3 + b*Rd^5 + c*Rd^7)

In this Rd is the distance of a point in the image from the centre in the distorted image, and Ru is the distance it was in the undistorted image. The model is that distortion is radially symmetric, and has the effect that concentric circles of image points move either closer to or further from the centre than they should be. This translates into the more recognisable types of distortion when straight lines in the image cut across these imaginary concentric circles.

There’s a couple of useful pictures here.

There are several variants on this formula. Wikipedia has a much more complex looking version which appears completely different, as it allows for the effects of off-centre lens elements and different profiles in different directions, but if you ignore these effects then with a little bit of factoring it boils down to exactly the same equation. Bibble, for example, switches the labels a and c, and other versions factor “scale” into the individual parameters, but the basic formula is the same.

The problem is that if this is the formula used in MFT in-camera corrections, then the data isn’t the right shape. We should just see three or maybe four fractional values, and the rest should be zeros, or maybe constants for a given lens/camera combination. While in some cases you can select values from the MFT data which work, it’s inconsistent and there’s no explanation for all the other data.

We know that MFT cameras also correct in-camera for chromatic aberrations. Maybe this could explain the other data points? The trouble is that this doesn’t work either. CA correction formulae work in one of two ways. They either provide a pair of shifts for the different colour channels (requiring two further parameters in addition to the three or four for geometric correction), or you get three sets of geometric correction parameters, one for each colour channel, as per the following taken from a DNG file using one of Raphael Rigo’s tools:

r : 1.000168 -0.128185 0.052356 -0.005116 0.000000 0.000000
g : 0.999694 -0.127995 0.052335 -0.004995 0.000000 0.000000
b : 0.999967 -0.127973 0.052642 -0.005050 0.000000 0.000000

While this might explain the number of values, you’d expect to see three sets of very similar values in the MFT data, and that doesn’t happen.

There are other ways of doing geometric correction. There are other formulae, but they don’t seem to be in common use. There’s also a non-linear approach (see http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/lenscorrection/ again), but this would need either a series of small values with the same sign (for a cumulative curve), or a progressive sequence (for an explicit curve). Of course, there could be some sort of complex differential version, but that’s cheating!

I have to assume that the model is capable of interpretation, especially since for some lenses a simple mapping works pretty well. However, it’s clearly not as simple as we’d hoped.

Although there’s no obvious reason why not,  Panasonic and Olympus have not published the specification for this data.  That leaves those of us who want to use a RAW processor other than LightRoom or SilkyPix struggling to get decent results with our MFT images.

Building on some excellent work done by “Matze”  (thinkfat.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/dissecting-panasonic-rw2-files.html)and Raphael Rigo (syscall.eu/#pana) I decided to have a go at implementing a parser in my CAQuest plug-in for Bibble/AfterShotPro. However although getting the raw data is fairly straightforward I have discovered that the algorithm is more complex than we thought,  and seems to vary from lens to lens.

I have therefore decided to open up the exercise to a “crowd-sourcing” model to try and get several eyes on the problem. As we uncover algorithms which work well for one lens or another I’ll publish them here,  and also build them into CAQuest.  Over time we may come to completely understand the complete MFT algorithm,  and our work will then be done.  Of course,  if one of the MFT partners wants to help by publishing the algorithm,  that would also be perfectly acceptable .

The project pages are here: www.andrewj.com/mft/mftproject.asp, with a discussion hosted at the Corel AfterShotPro forum.

Finally today in desperation I tried googling, which hadn’t worked previously, and I lucked on the solution. The following site wasn’t the first reference I found, but it probably offers the best explanation:
http://olafd.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/heavy-disk-io-after-shutdown-in-vmware-workstation/

The solution seems to be to simply add the following to each vmx file:
mainMem.useNamedFile = "false"

The difference is little short of miraculous. Not only has the disk IO problem vanished, but I can now attempt operations such as starting or shutting down two VMs simultaneously, which would previously have rendered the system completely unusable, or even crashed it.

It’s early days, but so far the only downside seems to be that the visible time to suspend or resume a VM has gone up from a couple of seconds to about 15, but that’s a tiny price to pay.

What annoys me is that if this fix is known, and its effect so dramatic (even if not for every user), then why don’t VMWare make it more visible on their own sites, and provide it as an option in the WorkStation UI?

Addendum

Interesting little “gotcha” on this, recently uncovered. If you have a VM with a lot of RAM, and/or your working files are on a slow disk it can take some time for saved state to write completely to disk after VMWare says that saving is complete. If you power the host down while this is happening you will corrupt the saved state and have to completely reboot the VM. I assume that if you wait for the disk to quiesce before powering down the host then things will be OK. Just be careful out there!

Google Calendar can’t reliably handle annual reminders,  you know,  those unusual events like birthdays and anniversaries. It frequently gets in a twist and reports that they have a repetition pattern it can’t handle. The nasty knock on effect is that this essentially crashes Google Calendar sync on the phone,  but only after hanging the device in a high CPU state for a minute or so,  which drains the battery rapidly as it repeats over time.

The fix is to go through the calendar on the browser and fix the repetition pattern for each annual event back to “Yearly”. Sync should then run smoothly,  and battery life settle down, although you may need a “battery out restart” to get back to normal.

What is depressing is that these bugs have apparently been known about since last year and Google have done nothing to fix them.  Oh well…

On a positive note I continue to be blown away by Swiftkey.  Its ability to predict what I want to type is uncanny. I’ve typed this on the Note much faster than I could ever do on the iPad,  and probably not much slower than I’d manage on a laptop.  Highly recommended.

There’s an excellent blog on this at the following URL: http://allaboutgalaxynote.com/how-to-solve-battery-issues-after-ics-update-in-your-galaxy-note/

It turns out my phone was upgraded on Thursday to Android 4.0 (resplendent in the code name “Ice Cream Sandwich”) which has a serious bug causing calendar sync to fail if you have appointments which repeat indefinitely, like birthdays, not exactly an uncommon situation. How Google have released an OS with such a major and far-reaching bug is a real puzzle.

However,  the good news is that armed with a copy of the log file viewer aLogcat, and a PC browser where you can quickly update the properties of your appointments,  it’s fairly quickly resolved. If the equivalent problem arose on the iPad you’d be stuck.

I guess I just have to avoid tempting fate like that…

In many ways this is a more direct successor to my much-loved HP iPaqs than a current Windows phone. First, you can drive it with a stylus, which I find dramatically more efficient and accurate on a small device. You can choose and customise input methods,  and they then work everywhere. I’ve found an excellent keyboard with predictive text called Swiftkey, but the standard keyboard, Swype and voice dictation work as well. It has a proper file system, so file management is independent of the application, and both USB and cloud solutions work with minimal effort.

Getting my applications in order has also not been too painful. Many of my favourites from my Windows devices have Android equivalents, so I quickly implemented OneNote, TreNotes and several others. There’s an Android version of SoftMaker Office, so no repeat of the iPad problems with Office files,  although I’m not convinced the Android version as mature as the Windows Mobile one. The “missing” sync function for Outlook was a bit puzzling,  but I discovered that I already owned some software (Sync2) which syncs Outlook to Google, solving that problem.

The main “serious” app challenge was password management. CodeWallet Pro no longer exists, and while SafeWallet is a reasonable replacement transferring the data was not trivial. However an hour with a bunch of different text editors and manually converting a flat text export file into an XML import seems to have worked.

Sadly, my favourite games are a different matter. Very few seem to have made the transition to Android. Common choices like Sodoku will be fine, but I may have to bid farewell to others.

Downsides? Not many. Yes, it’s very big for a phone, but not big enough to displace the iPad,  although it may relegate the Kindle to sunny day duty. Battery life may be poorer than either the iPad or HTC Touch HD2,  but should still do a day of heavy use, or two days of lighter duties.

It’s going to take a little while to get completely to grips with a whole new OS, but so far I’m amazed how quickly and smoothly things have gone.  Wish me luck!

• Go wandering helmetless on your first visit to an alien location, especially after you’ve seen the evidence that the aliens were killed by some sort of pathogen?
• Have an emergency medical system in the captain’s quarters which doesn’t understand female anatomy, and the captain’s a woman?
• Leave the charred body of a colleague, which has been infected by the aliens, on the doorstep of your spaceship without any attempt to “lock it down”?
• Not check that the ship’s geologist and colleague, who said “we’re just going back to the ship”, had actually done so?
• Pin a note to the wall warning said geologist & colleague not to sleep in the room with all the alien creepy crawlies?
• Bunk off for nooky with the captain when you’re the officer on watch, without at least deputising someone else?
• Etc, etc.

It’s said that Red Dwarf took their inspiration from the Alien films, rather than Star Trek. Based on this showing I’d say some of the DNA has gone the other way, too, only the Red Dwarf mob would be better prepared and disciplined.

I wanted to enjoy this film, but ended up plain annoyed. Not impressed.

That said, the equations are used more as milestones than intensively studied subjects. This is not a “book full of maths”, and each chapter is largely a textual exploration around the subject starring the featured equation, explaining what it means, and what it led to.

The scope is vast, from Pythagoras through to the underpinnings of quantum theory, chaos and derivatives trading, taking in key scientific developments and their mathematical explanations along the way. Stewart does a remarkable job of compacting this scope into just 17 chapters and about 300 pages.

If you’re a skilled mathematician you will gloss over the maths and still take value from the following discussions. If, however, your maths is more limited or, like mine, rather rusty, you’ll find you don’t need to follow all the mathematical details. You don’t need to really understand about grads, divs and curls, for example, to appreciate the similarity in “shape” between the key equations in several different areas of science. The author does a very fine job of both explaining this structure, and also where the reader must understand, and where detailed understanding is less important.

Some of the explanations are quite complex, especially where Stewart is exploring the most recent applications of older ideas. I did get lost a couple of times and had to re-read short sections, but overall I came away thinking that I had built a decent grasp.

The book has an admirable focus on the practical applications of science, but some of this is presented with such limited detail that in a couple of places it devolves into lists of applications rather than real explanations. As well as positive stories, Stewart is not afraid to show where mis-interpretation of the mathematics or its limitations has failed us, most notably in the last chapter on financial derivatives and how their abuse has caused the current crises.

Although eminently readable and often amusing, this book is best read in chunks of a couple of chapters at a time, allowing the ideas to sink in. Do so, and invest a little effort, and you’ll be well rewarded.

Sometime around 2007-8, maybe by coincidence just when Bill Gates retired, this all went to hell in a handcart, and since then I’ve been cursing new Microsoft software versions as much as praising them. Each release has brought frustrations, and in many cases they have been sufficiently severe to drive me to adopt a competitor’s product, or at least a third party add-on.

XP SP 2 broke WMA format so it is incompatible with most third party players. My car was new in 2008, but I have to rip CDs using an XP SP1 virtual machine. Vista broke the reliable and flexible ntbackup. It took a bit of effort to get it working again, and it’s still part of my (more complex) backup strategy, but the “heavy lifting” is now done by Acronis rather than Windows.

The disruptive user interface and file format changes of Office 2007 have been widely discussed elsewhere. Suffice to say that I never used Office 2007, and run Office 2010 only with a third party add-on which restores the old menus. The compatibility-breaking changes to follow up flags in Outlook 2010 are extremely annoying, but as yet insufficient to drive me to an alternative product.

The same is not true of the changes to Virtual Machine support in Windows 7. Before that move, I used Mirosoft’s own Virtual PC extensively. However, the loss of compatibility, features and reliability were so severe that I now only use and recommend VMWare WorkStation/Player for this purpose. You can read about my experiences here.

The latest problem, and what has prompted this blog, is the appalling state of Internet Explorer 9. I have been a faithful user of IE since V1, and have lived, fairly happily, with its limitations through to IE8. However, since “upgrading” to IE9 I have become completely disillusioned, because it just isn’t reliable enough. Here are a sample of the things which just don’t work properly:

• Downloading dynamically-generated PDF files, such as bills from BT,
• MasterCard SecureCard authentication. This one’s a real pain if you’re at the end of a long online purchase, and you find your main credit card won’t work,
• The combined address / Google search bar. If I type in a valid www…. address, I expect the browser to at least attempt to use it , not do a search!
• Printing. Some long text pages, especially from typepad blogs, get mashed with the main font/character set replaced by something unreadable,
• Rendering some web sites readably at all. Some of the worst offenders, ironically, are Microsoft’s own “support” forums.

By direct contrast, Google Chrome seems to do a decent job of all the above. I am hereby announcing my intention to make it my primary browser whenever I have a choice.

I’m now really scared about Windows 8, with it’s so far half-hearted changes to the desktop. What will that wreck?

Now in fairness, Microsoft are not the only, or maybe even the worst offenders in this space. For example Bibble/Corel have just pushed through a change to their AfterShot Pro software which no-one wanted and which breaks a plugin I’ve written, and I suspect in that community I have some influence to say “the new version is broken, don’t use it.”

I really don’t understand Microsoft’s behaviour here. Are all these compatibility wrecks conscious decisions? If so, do the conquest sales related to cool new features really outweigh the loss of loyalty from existing users? If not, have they just got lazy and complacent? Who knows?

The idea of making a real historical figure the detective in a historical mystery is not unique (arguably Philip Kerr makes an even better choice with Isaac Newton in Dark Matter) but it is very effective. We know these characters had considerable intellect, the right political connections to advance investigations, and were in interesting places at interesting times.

However unlike Kerr’s Newton, Leoni’s Dante is initially very ill-prepared for his task, and is annoyingly gullible until right at the end of the tale. Given that this is his fourth outing in such a role, you’d think he’d be getting a bit better at it! The novel also struck me as very similar to S J Parris’ tales featuring Giordano Bruno, but with the difference that at least Dante does at least realise the truth for himself, albeit right at the end.

The story is well written, with action which advances very steadily and got me involved quite quickly. There’s a distinctly Italian focus on the political relationships between the players, but Leoni avoids the mistake of creating a cast of thousands, and focuses on a relatively small group of core characters. The very distinctive writing style is usually easy to read – whether this is the author’s skill or the translator’s is not clear, and arguably unimportant. There are occasional wordy patches, especially when trying to describe Dante’s state of mind or his ideas about his poetry, but these give way fairly quickly to the main action.

The book creates a brilliant depiction of mediaeval Rome, complete with crumbling Roman buildings not yet supplemented by Renaissance replacements, complex power politics and downtrodden lower orders of society. However, I did find the repetitive details of the routes around Rome, described without benefit of a map or some sort of overview, a bit hard to follow. Fortunately it’s not critical to do so for the plot. On a lighter note, I now understand the inspiration for Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork…

The fact that this book is fourth in a series doesn’t seem to be a barrier to reading it first, as the small amount of necessary background is simply explained at the right time. However, as noted, you do wonder how much practice Dante needs to get any good at detection.

This book is not a “light”read, but rewards the reader with a rich, captivating tale well worth the effort.

On the upside, however, Morey has done a fine job of creating a compelling and highly amusing story which rips along at a great pace, from the first evil practical joke to the final complicated dénouement. The plot, although relatively simple, winds and unwinds steadily and you won’t want to put the book down once engaged. Although the overall outcome is never really in doubt, there are enough surprises in respect of which characters receive satisfaction, which rehabituation and which a well-deserved sticky end.

The best writing of this style has me laughing out loud, whether in company or not. This didn’t quite achieve those heights, being read with more of a constant wry grin. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read and I’m happy to recommend it, but here’s hoping the author’s next novel will be even better.

The concept is simple: Chad Orzel’s dog, Emmy, may be a typical mutt obsessed with walks, squirrels and discarded food, but she’s also intelligent enough to have a basic grasp of quantum concepts, and a view to how they might be exploited in her favour, for example by passing simultaneously around both sides of a tree to catch a squirrel. Each chapter starts with Chad explaining why “it’s not quite like that”, and going on to explain the real physics to her in some detail. This works well, breaking up some quite complex discussions with amusing dialogue between master and hound, and makes the book eminently readable.

The books scores because it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex areas like decoherence, entanglement and quantum teleportation, supplementing explanations of the basic concepts and “thought experiments” with the details and outcomes of relatively recent experimental verification. Similarly “quantum” is the current buzzword beloved of pseudo-scientific charlatans, and the last chapter is a timely effort to debunk those who abuse it for get-rich-quick schemes and medical quackery.

I also particularly liked the way that the author is not afraid to embrace the concepts of measurement errors and accuracy. These are vital tools to understand how well, or badly, something has been established, and I was very pleased to see such an accessible book using them well.

The explanations themselves are a mixed bunch, some being very complicated and taking me a couple of goes to read and absorb. Given that I probably have rather more background that the target demographic (I do have a good Physics degree, albeit a few years old) this may mean that some readers could struggle with the most complex parts. I suspect a few more diagrams in these areas might have helped. However overall the book succeeds, and will probably prompt keen readers to re-read or seek out secondary explanations where they don’t understand first time.

In the Kindle edition some of the graphics are a page or two adrift of the relevant text, and the footnotes (which often contain important or amusing asides) are presented in a bunch at the end of each chapter, which is not very reader friendly. I suspect the paper version of the book is better in this respect.

This books is well worth reading, and has certainly helped to refresh and update my understanding of a complex field, while giving me a welcome laugh at the dog’s antics. I look forward to reading the relativity volume later this year.

At the core is the old idea that the achievements of the ancient Egyptian 4th Dynasty were created by and for visiting aliens, and that much of Egyptian mythology stems from that encounter. However, unlike the disappointing, distorted and disingenuous pseudo-science of Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock this book just sets out to spin a great yarn, and succeeds admirably.

The author paints on a grand canvas, covering three worlds and five millennia, but keeps the story at a human level, by focusing on a number of well-developed central characters: be they good, evil or simply misguided. While throughout the book historical and current stories proceed in parallel, a believable contextual and technical explanation is developed for their linkage.

The science is clever, focusing mainly on the achievements of one of the races who have developed technology several hundred years beyond ours, but based almost entirely on organic solutions. Interstellar travel is handled realistically, with sub-light journeys based on long periods of hibernation, and the quest to recover a lost faster-than-light solution a key part of the plot. However, at no time does the science dominate or become superfluous to the plot.

I had a few minor niggles: The cover notes don’t do the story justice, and won’t help sales. The character, race and place names are arguably too Americanised and insufficiently “alien”. Also my pre-release copy of the book contained a number of odd spelling errors, which suggested that it had been typed without the benefit of a spell checker. However, these are very minor complaints about a very good book.

I enjoyed this thoroughly, and it’s restored my faith that it is still possible to write new science fiction work which bears inspection against the old masters. Highly recommended.

On the face of it, this is a  classic Pitt story: maritime mysteries, strong male and female characters, the gradual disrobing of byzantine plots, heinous villainy committed mainly by an evil family firm, and the side of right held up by Pitt, his NUMA colleagues, and a handful of other worthies. At the climax Pitt and Giodano ride to the rescue against a heavily armed force of Korean villains, who have just destroyed a SEAL taskforce, transported on a confederate paddle-steamer! The book’s a real page-turner, and you won’t want to put it down.

But maybe the most interesting facet of this book, and why I’ve decided it deserves a review, is as a historical snapshot of the world and America’s assessment of it. Some authors deal with contemporary issues and seem to have a remarkable ability to predict real events. Others, Cussler usually among them, avoid the current in order to avoid becoming “dated”. Unusually in this book he’s tried to paint a picture of the near future, and it’s interesting to see what he got right, and what wrong.

The main villains (who have their offices on the 100th floor of the World Trade Centre – some things no-one could have predicted) are motivated mainly by money. The other evil force is a very cold war Soviet Union leadership, even though the cracks were starting to appear by 1984, and in reality by 1989 it was all over bar the shouting.  Mere “terrorists” are despatched as possible players early on by the rather dismissive statement “[it’s] Too elaborate. This operation took an immense amount of planning and money. The ingenuity is incredible. It goes far beyond the capabilities of any terrorist organisation.”

Remarkably Cussler does predict a middle eastern war triggered by an invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but he has it happening in 1985, by Iran. However as a counterpoint, at one point the idea of American forces ever fighting in Afghanistan is treated as an example of the impossible. How times change.

The book is a revealing period piece, and interesting for the references which have been overtaken by history. Ultimately, however, it’s a good story and deserves to be read in the spirit in which it was written. Do so and you won’t be disappointed.

Like most myths this may have started from an original truth, but is now a lie. I am it’s latest, but I suspect far from only, victim.

Let me explain. For over a year now I have been developing a plugin for the RAW developer Bibble and it’s recent successor, Corel AfterShot. These plugins are developed using c++ and the Nokia QT framework, which theoretically allows the same code and user interface design to compile and run on Windows, Linux and Mac.

As a died in the wool Windows developer, that’s where I started. There’s a QT add-in to Visual Studio, so with a bit of juggling I managed to get one of the examples to load into VS, build, and run using Bibble as the target executable, and I was off. I was on a fairly steep learning curve in respect of the programming model, but I had very few problems compiling and running things.

When it got to the stage that I had something to share with the Bibble community I published the Windows version, and another member of the community kindly cross- compiled for the other platforms. There was another learning curve to make sure my code compiled cleanly on the other platforms, but nothing too drastic. For over a year I sent code updates to Jonathan, and got compiled Linux and Mac libraries back.

Although Jonathan still provides a very helpful service, it became apparent that if I wanted to have full control over the application versions I support, and be able to verify my plugin’s portability, I needed the ability to compile and run each version myself. I wasn’t prepared to buy and carry extra hardware around, but maybe VM technology would work.

I started with Linux. I had a couple of false starts but quickly found a site which has pre-built VMs for most Linux distributions (http://www.trendsigma.net/vmware/), and homed in on Lubuntu – based on Ubuntu but with a quite Windows-like shell. I downloaded and installed AfterShot and QT Creator, loaded up a copy of my code, and clicked “build”. And it worked first time! Getting a completely slick solution took a bit more effort, but it works so well I don’t now even copy the Windows code, I just open the same directory from my Linux VM and run the Linux builds in place.

So far so good. Now for the Mac. What could go wrong?

Apple’s antipathy to virtualisation is well known (see http://www.andrewj.com/blog/2012/mac-osxa-third-class-os/), and strictly speaking you’re not allowed to run OSX on non-Apple hardware. However, I got a legal copy of Snow Leopard, and found advice on the web on how to run up an OSX VM. You have to be patient, especially as it can take a couple of goes to boot the VM cleanly or install software, but generally it works pretty well.

First challenge: installing software. Unlike Windows or Linux, where non-trivial software has to be installed by a program which does useful things like error checking, on the Mac you often just simply drag a package of files to “Applications”. When it works, this is nice and easy. But if it fails, and I’ve now experienced this several times, it does so silently leaving you with a broken installation, which may not be obvious until things don’t work.

Eventually I manage to install Bibble, ASP, QT and, adding 30% to the size of the OS, XCode, the Mac development environment. I open QT Creator, and try to open my project. The first problem is that QT puts platform-specific settings in a small file alongside the main project files, and this has a fixed name, so you can store either the Linux or the Mac settings, but not both. Sigh, and copy the files from Windows to a local directory on the Mac.

After a bit of juggling, I got the plugin to compile. I then had to set up the deployment steps, renaming and copying files. Cue the next annoyance. Deployment configuration requires copying and adjusting complex filenames and paths. On Windows, you right-click any file or folder and there’s an option to copy the path to the clipboard. I was delighted to find that exactly the same trick works on Linux. OSX has no such simple solution. In the end I found a page of instructions on the web, which involved setting up macros as the like, but it wasn’t “easy”.

So I’ve compiled and deployed my plugin. Start AfterShot. Half the plugins and tools are missing, including mine. Re-install AfterShot, reboot the vMac, and now the standard tools are there, but still no sign of my plugin. The files are there, but the log has a very cryptic message about how my plugin “does not contain any recognisable symbols”.

Cue about 5 days of testing, trying different things, emails and posts on the Bibble forums. To cut a long story to a tolerable length…

1. No one seems to know how to compile successfully using QT Creator on the Mac, you have to convert to XCode,
2. XCode can’t cope with spaces in your folder or filenames. Another reason why the code can’t be shared directly with Windows and Linux,
3. When you’ve finished compiling, you have to do an extra step called “fixing the paths”. The QT/XCode combo manages to embed hard-coded pathnames in the executable files, which fail immediately you rename or move it. This doesn’t happen on the other platforms. Fortunately there are scripts available to perform the fix, but it’s certainly not obvious,
4. It’s all very sensitive to precise choices of SDK versions and the like,
5. Plugins for Bibble have to be compiled using a different QT version to those for ASP, and you can’t have more than one version installed on a Mac (ironically this restriction doesn’t apply on Windows or Linux, where there’s no problem just using the latest libraries for both). I had to use the “clone” feature of VMWare to create a “branched” VM with a different installation – on a physical machine I’d be sunk.

That’s not quite the end of it. One of the SDK features I use in AfterShot relies on an asynchronous processing model. On the other platforms and on a physical Mac my code runs fine, but on the “vMac” it returns invalid data. This is clearly a Bibble/Corel problem, but one for which no-one has yet offered an explanation or fix.

Now I accept that some of this may be down to my use of a VM, and some is definitely weaknesses in the Mac versions of the QT and Corel software. But setting those aside, the fact remains that the Linux exercise was genuinely quite easy, the Mac version far from it.

So there are lies, damn’ lies and statements about how “Macs are easy, they just work”. The next person to repeat that lie to me may suffer a painful injury to a soft part of their anatomy…

A sequence of short chapters each explores a topic, usually identifying a stream of words stemming from a common source, whether that be a Greek, Latin or proto-Indo-European root, a language which has been partially adopted into the English tapestry, or a fount of linguistic innovation such as the writings of Milton. In many cases he threads a route through time, geography and lexical space to words which have dramatically different or even opposite meanings to their antecedents.

While each chapter can be read alone, Forsyth cunningly links them together, with each feeding the next, and the last linking back to the first like Ouroboros swallowing its tail.

The writing is always amusing, and occasionally funny enough to stimulate a laugh out loud. Forsyth reserves particular cruelty for poets, and other specialists in the use and abuse of words. My favourite quote: “[we] should devote a chapter to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. So we won’t.” Myles Coverdale, editor of an early English Bible, is characterised by “[he] didn’t let the tiny detail that he knew no Latin, Greek or Hebrew get in his way. This is the kind of can-do attitude that is sadly lacking in modern biblical scholarship.”

This isn’t a learned book, and its structure and style preclude any deep exploration of a particular topic. But it will convey a broad appreciation of the mixing of the rich Jambalaya which is the English language, and will certainly pique your interest at understanding where words come from, as well as their immediate meaning.

I’m a Windows user, spending much of the working week away from home. I get a vast amount of value from virtualisation. It allows me to carry just one PC with multiple “client specific” images, and enables me to keep running legacy software almost indefinitely. My main client uses the same technology to provide legacy support for essential software, which in long-cycle engineering businesses can easily be 20-30 years old, as physical assets in such businesses age many times more slowly than the computing equipment around them.

I also develop plugins for the Bibble RAW processor. The same code should work on Windows, Mac and Linux, but you have to compile and test on each platform to confirm this. I’ve recently added a Linux Virtual Machine to my kit. This was remarkably painless, just a few hours work, and I can now rapidly cross-compile and test my Windows-based developments under Linux. If there’s an issue which means having to support more than one flavour or version of Linux adding it would be trivial.

I just can’t do this for the Mac. I don’t want to buy and carry another laptop (which would be useless for any other purpose), and you can’t get virtualised OSX, either as a VM or as a service, through any legal and “safe” route. The result: as far as I am concerned OSX is a “third-class” OS, almost a “technical ghetto”, and I have to rely on the good offices of other developers to deliver my plugins for it.

People will put up with a lot in the name of love. Maybe Mac users “love” their computers enough to tolerate this behaviour. But looking in from outside I find Apple’s attitude perplexing and very annoying.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

It is perfectly possible to make the iPad play nicely as part of a professional Windows-based environment, but you do have to be prepared to grab the bull by the horns, dump most of the built-in apps (which are almost all pretty useless), and take control of both file management and communications via partner applications on the PC. This article presents some of my hard-won tips and recommendations on how to do this and get productive work out of the iPad’s great hardware.

I’ve been very happy with my 15″ Toshiba Satellite Pro, new in early 2009, but recently it’s been showing some signs of reaching the end of its economic life, plus the way I now develop my photographs is very compute-intensive, and a faster device would speed that activity up considerably. I also find that the relatively slow single 2.5″ disk leads to very slow startup times and virtual machine operations, both of which slow down my professional use.

Thus my first decision was that my new device should support an Intel Core-i7 processor and 64-bit Windows, at least 8GB RAM and ideally have solid state disks, at least for the boot drive.

The next driver was forced on me by the vagaries of the market. Prior to 2007, most laptops had a 4:3 (=16:12) aspect ratio, but suddenly the market decided that all laptops should be “widescreen”, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. This was great for viewing movies, but meant that for a given diagonal size the new devices were more than 10% smaller than before. Not much good if you’re working on text documents (usually of vertical orientation), or digital images with <3:2 aspect ratio, which is most of them… That’s one reason why my next laptop went from 12″ to 15″, just to maintain the vertical size of the display.

Now they’ve done it again! Almost all new laptops have a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means a further reduction of about 8% screen height for a given diagonal size. This is a right royal pain in the neck, particularly as it is typically accompanied by an increase in pixel resolution, which combine to make text and icons much smaller, just as I’m getting to that age where my eyes are starting to change, and slightly larger text would work better. There are other disadvantages too: a given laptop model is around 8% longer than it’s predecessor, so it may not even fit in the same bag.

This all appears to be driven by fashion, and targeted solely at those who watch movies on their laptops. The goal appears to be “true HD”, and hang the consequences. After some brainstorming, I can only think of three things short wide screens are good for:

1. Watching films
2. Browsing spreadsheets or other tables with lots of columns
3. Working on photographic panoramas

On the other hand, they are much worse for:

1. Reading and writing documents (most pages are portrait orientation, and the human eye has problems tracking across very long lines of text)
2. Developing – you want to see plenty of lines of code and diagnostics, and most lines of well-written code are quite short
3. Working on any normal image, especially if it’s portrait orientation
4. Working with any application which has multiple top and bottom toolbars, or a Microsoft “ribbon”
5. Everything else…

So where does this put my laptop choice? After rather more agonising than usual, I’ve gone for a desktop, or should that just be “desk”, replacement system , an Alienware M17x. This is very fast, has the usual stunning Alienware looks, and importantly supports dual disks, with a highly-rated quality screen. The screen is just slightly taller than the Toshiba, but the laptop is a full 5cm wider, and over 1kg heavier. It’s a good computer, but portability is definitely down a notch. The thing which makes it feasible, of course, is the iPad, which now fills the role of the portable, meeting-friendly launch to the Alienware cruiser. Admittedly carrying two devices increases the weight of my computer bag, but usually only until I have decanted the laptop into its base location for the day, and maybe it justifies the weight training…

Thus far, I’m impressed with the beast. CPU performance is certainly as expected, and I’m pleasantly surprised by battery life, at almost 5 hours in light usage. This makes up for the fact that the main power supply is about the size of a house brick, and although the laptop will run off a smaller Dell supply, it won’t charge the battery. On the disk side I’ve installed a Seagate Momentus hybrid drive as the secondary data drive, and that seems to be working well, but my first attempt to install the SSD for the boot drive didn’t work, so that’s still pending. What is annoying is that like all my previous laptops, the LCD panel is nowhere near correct colour calibration with the default profile, so I have to sort that out before serious photographic use. Further updates will follow…

To wrap up, here’s the potted history of my laptops since I started buying my own, and why:

• 1999-2001: Compaq Presario with 12″ screen. Worked for VB development and general office use, but slow
• 2001-4: Dell Latitude LS400 with  10″ screen. I got the “light, portable” bug, and this little laptop fitted the bill, even if I did have to haul a separate CD drive and floppy drive around. It was good on the move, but never quick and I worked off an external screen when I could.
• 2004-6: Toshiba Portege M200 with 12″ screen. The first decent convertible tablet, great in meetings (in tablet mode), and decent for development although you had to be patient…
• 2006-9: Toshiba Portege M400: The only time I’ve done a straight upgrade, this was basically the M200 with built in CD and a dual core processor. CPU performance was fine, I/O was very limited. However, the thing which really started to frustrate me was the difficulty of getting accurate colours on the screen.
• 2009-11: Toshiba Satellite Pro A300, 15″ screen. With the change of aspect ratios, I had to go to 15″ to get a screen as “tall” as the 12″ of the Porteges. This workhorse has served very well, it’s fairly light, and only the most extreme image processing or virtual machine work exceeded its abilities.
• 2011-: Alienware M17x. Fast, elegant, and just about preserves the important vertical dimenion of the screen! Also heavy and expensive… The jury’s out.

Has anyone else noticed or suffered from this odd trend?

The first third of the book deals mainly with the evolution and nature of scientific “laws”, and the meaning of reality relative to our various mental models. This is very interesting, but perhaps a little ironic given the authors’ statement on the first page that “philosophy is dead”. What other label should be attributed to this discussion?

The next section explains key aspects of quantum theory, in particular wave/particle duality, probabilistic rather than deterministic behaviour, and the effects of observation on the system. That we can now demonstrate this behaviour for relatively large objects, and affect the observed outcome from behaviour originating some considerable time before the observation, is fascinating.

Since Newton science has developed a series of theories describing the workings of our universe, and has then attempted to combine or extend them to provide an ever more comprehensive description. The next section of the book describes this progression. The descriptions of classical physics, relativity and quantum theory are fine, and don’t suffer too much from relative brevity as the older theories will be broadly familiar to most readers. However the pages on M-theory are really too brief, and don’t adequately explain it. Finishing that section with the fact that M-theory admits 10^500 solutions makes it sound very far from the elegant theories espoused earlier in the book.

The final section of the book attempts to describe and explain some of the most problematical aspects of current cosmology, but in my view doesn’t make a very convincing job of it. Cosmological problems include both the fact that universal expansion is still accelerating, and that our current model requires the young universe to have spontaneously “inflated” from coin-sized to many times galaxy sized in less than a second. Neither of these are well explained by current theories as I understand them, and this book doesn’t bridge the gap. Earlier in the book the authors pooh-pooh theories relying on “then a miracle occurs”, but don’t seem to be proposing something much better.

Instead of proposing a theory which explains the observations, the authors seem to be saying that under M-theory all things are possible, and we choose the set of outcomes which matches our measurements. To my mind this is perilously close to saying “God created the Universe as it is”, even though the authors are at pains to refute precisely that interpretation.

It feels to me that Physics is on a threshold similar to its position in the late 19th Century, where we are creating progressively more arcane versions of existing theories in an attempt to prop them up, but what is really required is fresh new ideas – the 21st Century equivalents of Relativity and Quantum Theory. This book confirms that need, but its suggested resolution does not convince me.

Refreshingly Khoury avoids making his heroes into supermen, but the same is not quite true of his villains, all of whom seem to be well-resourced single-minded psychopaths one step ahead of the good guys. A bit more variety there would also help.

Khoury writes well, much better than Dan Brown or some of his other competitors, and the book never lost my focus or interest. The action is well paced, with occasional explosive sequences of high drama. These feel slightly like the the author has an eye on the future film script, but are plausible and reasonably easy to follow. However as much as the action I enjoyed his observations on the formalisation of Christianity by the Romans under Constantine, and the extension of these ideas into yet more possible roles for the mysterious Knights Templar.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, with a bit more depth than some others of its genre. I just hope that the author now has the courage to develop a bit more subject matter variety for his excellent writing.

I knew before going in that the film portrays espionage without action, an “inaction thriller” if you like. What I didn’t expect was that it also lacks humour, intrigue and to a surprisingly large extent, dialogue. So much time is allocated to the menacing glances and thoughtful fiddling that some sections might as well be silent. It’s as if the screenwriters and director got to points where Le Carre was describing characters’ internal thoughts, and decided that we could just be left to guess them.

What this also means is that the film lacks the complex plot twists which one might expect. If the characters don’t engage in conversation, then there’s little opportunity to dissemble. Problems like a damaged log book are resolved by simply finding the man who was on duty and asking him to recount his memories, not by any complex act of detection. When a key character who is supposedly dead resurfaces later in the film, there’s no explanation of the timeline, or how he has just been allowed to go back to his cover job with no explanation of his absence.

While the film has a stellar cast, most are sadly underused. The senior spies other than Smiley and the mole have maybe a few lines each and almost no interactions between each other – completely wasting the talents of some of our most senior actors.

The film is shot in a dull brown monotone, carefully stripped of any variation in colour, or tone, or subject, with the single exception of scenes at a key office party. The colour scheme goes well with an accurate portrayal of the dullness of ordinary lives in the 1970s. There’s one very good sequence where Benedict Cumberbatch has to exploit the weaknesses of the low tech environment to extract a key piece of evidence, but most of the period detail is treated as simple background rather than context, a crucial difference.

A spy film without explosions or chases is one thing, but when there’s no attempt to substitute intricate detection, verbal jousting or witty banter then it rapidly becomes a very dull thing indeed.

A few weeks ago the excellent Page Eight with Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon showed exactly how this sort of thing should be done. This much vaunted “film of the year” fails badly.

Location:Southern Ln,Stratford-Upon-Avon,United Kingdom