We had one at 4:30AM. I awoke to find a ghostly figure standing by the bedroom door saying

What are you doing here? This is our flat.

She was evidently addressing an intruder. It took me a few seconds to wake up and process this, during which time I heard the question repeated more urgently and I got the impression from shadows, of someone advancing towards the room.

I leapt up and rushed out to confront the invader. He reversed back toward the front door, pausing to collect shoes he had removed on his way in. In a few seconds he was gone.

I thought I had locked the door, but evidently I hadn’t turned the lock all the way.

Was he someone who had, as we have done once or twice, accidentally gotten off the elevator at the wrong floor and tried the wrong door, or was he a burglar? Could he have a key? (I once woke up in bed in a flat in London to find a former resident letting himself in with a key he’d retained; luckily he was the more terrified and fled on finding the place occupied).

We called the front desk. Eventually the phone was answered, suggesting that we still pay handsomely for someone to discourage any prospective burglars by snoring loudly. I gathered that there was

a snort of derision

when the possibility that the door was not properly locked was mentioned.

However, nobody had been seen fleeing the building — though how someone asleep would have noticed I am not sure. If true, this suggested that it was indeed someone who pressed the wrong elevator button after a heavy night’s drinking. What cues there are as to what floor one is on are easy to miss, even in the daytime.

Several of the flats in our building are let out on short term rents. As result we have quite a lot of strangers coming and going.

It took me a long time to go back to sleep.

I locked the door. Not properly. He had a key. Change the lock? Should I have grabbed him? Called the police? Why hadn’t I heard him? etc.

In retrospect, I was even more impressed with an old lady in her 90s who, when living with my wife’s parents, confronted a burglar in her bedroom one night and demanded of him

Who are you and what do you want?

He fled.

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Windows 7 Professional

After my completely unsuccessful Windows 7 upgrade of a Vista Media Center PC (last post) I tried again with my Lenovo X200 laptop.

This was an altogether more satisfactory experience, eventually — I’m posting this using Windows 7.

I couldn’ t use one of my discounted Windows 7 upgrades on the X200 because it was running Windows Vista Business, and this couldn’t be downgraded to allow Windows 7 Home Premium to be installed. There was nothing for it but to dust off my student email account (I haven’t graduated yet; that’s next month) and register for a £30 upgrade to Windows 7 Professional.

Just getting hold of the software was a hassle.

First, I had to register an ac.uk email address to which an offer would be sent.

The registration site didn’t work from home. I went to the university and it worked from there (so, IP address based restrictions were in place). Digital River, collecting money for Microsoft, then declined my credit card and said I wasn’t eligible to upgrade. I looked again at the conditions and wondered if it had divined that the Windows XP-based university computer I was using wasn’t capable of running Windows 7 — which was one of the conditions. So, I went home again, knowing I had the link to the online store in my inbox. With any luck I could continue.

When I got home I found that the transaction had completed after all, despite Digital River’s announcement to the contrary. I could now download a download tool, and get the files needed to create a Windows 7 install disc. Creating such a disc wasn’t strictly necessary but it seemed like a good idea given some of the problems reported by those trying to use downloads directly.

This should have been simple. I had already found this blog post setting out what to do.

To create an ISO file (i.e., an image that can be burned to a disc) I had to find some proprietary but free software that seemed to have been removed from the web at Microsoft’s behest. When I finally tracked down a copy I then found that the instructions at the post above were incorrect and I didn’t immediately discover a correction posted in the comments. By the time I had a bootable DVD I was down two hours, not counting time spent purchasing and downloading. (Paying for a physical disk seemed so … old fashioned — hah!)

I updated Vista and backed it up, then I ran the Windows 7 upgrade. It took another couple of hours.

This time I had the immense advantage of being able to run a new version of Lenovo’s ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU) tool afterwards and get Windows 7 compatible updates of numerous hardware drivers.

Lenovo’s TVSU tool is something I only learned about and appreciated after I’d acquired my ThinkPad. It is to hardware drivers and vendor-specific tools what what Windows Update is to Windows. It’s one of those things that once experienced changes your expectations of how things ought to be.

As far as I know, Lenovo is unique in making it possible to keep device drivers and related software, including the BIOS, updated so easily. Besides Apple that is.

When the dust settled, here’s what I found; again, these are first impressions:

• The Windows 7 update had blown away the Vista / Ubuntu dual boot arrangements for my laptop.
• My desktop wireless gadget which indicated the signal strength and ID of available network access points was also gone. I replaced it with the functional but less attractive Wireless Network Meter from addgadget.com.
• The speed of accessing network storage was dramatically better than Vista.
• I like the Windows 7 user interface changes.
• For now I’ve lost the ability to recover the machine from a local partition using the blue ThinkVantage button, since this partition still contains the Vista boot media and installation kit.
• So far, the only application that has failed to work is ReadyNAS Remote, a utility that allowed me to open a secure connection to my network storage from anywhere on the Internet and to work as if I was locally connected.

Most of what needs to be done now is Lenovo-related housekeeping. I deleted all of the ThinkPad and ThinkVantage applications that were recommended for removal from Vista and I haven’t seen replacements for all of them yet. For example, the ThinkVantage Active Protection System park the disk drive heads whenever a fall is detected.

The elapsed time was half a day least.  Even allowing for multi-tasking, e.g., during the backup before the update, this kind of upgrade is still both a bit of a chore and a somewhat risky activity.

However, it feels good to be shot of Vista (one down, several to go). Vista was a necessary evolutionary stage for Microsoft, if not its customers.

Ubuntu 9.10

As a background activity I upgraded my wiki-box from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. Coincidentally, it had just become available.

This time I decided on a clean install as I wished to change the default file system from ext3 to ext4. The applications and data I had were easily backed up. One of Linux’s greatest strengths is the extent to which it permits keeping these things separate from the operating system by means of a /home folder which can be backed up, moved to another disk, and left alone by an operating system update.

The entire operation from downloading Ubuntu 9.10, burning it to a bootable DVD and installing it took not much more than an hour. I expected the download to be slow. It wasn’t. The installation went smoothly, with only one minor issue:

• Once again I had problem with my ATEN KVM switch about (which I have blogged before) causing my Samsung 181T monitor not to be detected correctly. This time there was no Xorg.conf file to edit. And so I discovered that that rigamarole is now optional (Google Ubuntu 9.10 missing xorg.conf for enlightenment). Restoring the old file solved the problem.

All in all, the installation could hardly have been quicker or easier. The improvements in Ubuntu 9.10 have been extensively covered elsewhere (here’s a nice write-up hat includes a short video of  a from scratch installation; and here are instructions for an in-place upgrade).

The moment I liked best was seeing my little cloud icon in the top panel come to life, connecting me to my files on Ubuntu One and then resyncing them. Now I can keep all my contact data in my personal cloud if I wish to, free of charge (Apple charges $60/yr for MobileMe).

Reflection

Windows 7 was the first Microsoft operating system I have installed which I purchased online, downloaded and could have installed as clean install. But it was hardly a frictionless process.

The nominally high cost of Windows 7 and Microsoft’s elaborate schemes to protect it and to segment the market every which way begin to seem like a Maginot line. I think Microsoft should practically give Windows 7 away and charge for cloud services and collect revenue from an online application store. Perhaps they’re headed in that direction and just collecting rents en route while they can, but it doesn’t look like it… yet.

Consider the greatest difference between Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate: the latter can provide an additional level of security through volume encryption. This functionality is included in Ubuntu, at no cost.

Likewise, the difference between Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional: the latter can join a Microsoft network. Ubuntu will do it for free. The same is true of the other differences (network backup and, with additional free software, running virtual Windows XP machines).

Microsoft could hardly be more traditional in its thinking.

Microsoft still has many things going for it, of course, but Ubuntu’s rise has, more and more, a feeling of inexorability. I will be very surprised if Microsoft converts a large number Windows XP users to Windows 7 in the next year.

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• My desktop PC (Vista Ultimate)
• My laptop PC (Vista Business)
• Wife’s laptop (Vista Home Premium)
• Daughter’s laptop (Vista Home Premium)
• Media Center PC (Vista Ultimate)

(In addition, I run some Ubuntu on some machines — a netbook, a server and a desktop.)

The upgrade pricing, especially for anyone using Vista Ultimate, is unconscionable.

I resolved a while ago not to give Microsoft any more money, and apart from buying Office 2007 at a student price, I haven’t. The upgrade prices for Windows 7 are not tempting, with two exceptions:

• The student price for Home Premium or Professional (£30)
• The family pack: 3 Home Premium upgrade licenses (typically £129.95)  — supposedly available while stocks last

The first of these is not available at the moment because Microsoft’s preferred delivery method, a digital download of an .exe file instead of an ISO file (DVD image) has turned out to have problems and it has been pulled from the Internet for now (Microsoft blames the customers; more here).

I succumbed to temptation and picked up a family pack.

Be default one is stuck with upgrading Vista versions to corresponding or higher versions of Windows 7. Downgrading from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Home Premium is not an option — without a clean install (Paul Thurrot describes how to do a clean install with upgrade media).

I decided to try a clean install on the Windows Media PC because it had very little software installed on it — it’s mainly used for Vista Media Center — and because I wanted to see Windows 7 Media Center (reviewed here). I don’t mind paying £40 for an upgrade if this significantly better, but the £160 upgrade price Microsoft asks for Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate would go a long way toward a personal video recorder (PVR) box.

First, I backed up. Twice. Once with Acronis TrueImage, then with Windows Backup (to an external USB drive).

You aren’t tempted to wait for the first Service Pack?

said a friend of mine when I announced my intention.

How bad could it be? The reviews seemed to be almost unanimous in suggesting that Microsoft had finally got a decent operating system out the door.

The media center PC is simplicity itself:

• Abit Fatal1ty F190-HD motherboard with HDMI ouptut to a Sony Bravia HD TV (1080p)
• Microsoft wireless keyboard, Microsoft wireless mouse, Logitech wireless air mouse
• Zalman HD160 media center case with IR remote control
• Netgear WN111 wireless network adapter
• Nova-T PCI tuner

Very little additional software besides Vista was installed.*

When Windows 7 Home Premium was installed as a clean installation, fetching updates from the web before running, the result was

• No Internet connectivity: the wireless adapter wasn’t found and driver software wasn’t installed
• No sound
• A large black border on the screen, even at what was supposedly full HD resolution
• No driver software installed for the tuner
• No driver installed for the IR remote
• The existing media library was “forgotten”

In short, the upgrade converted the computer to a brick.

Doubtless all of the problems are solvable if one has time to spend scouring the Internet for drivers and installing them. Of course they could possibly be sidestepped entirely buy paying Microsoft the ransom required for an in situ upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Windows Ultimate.

I reverted to Vista Ultimate.

I may try again when the first service pack ships.

Or Maybe Not

Last Saturday I was having trouble with intermittent wireless in my laptop after a Vista update. I rebooted to Ubuntu (9.04) and the problem disappeared. A year ago it was the other way around, with Ubuntu wireless being troublesome. Ubuntu 9.10 is due on Thursday and I’m looking forward to what promises to be the best release yet as Ubuntu steadily erodes the value proposition for Windows.

Using Windows it takes a significant effort to keep software and drivers up to date, including 3rd party software. With Ubuntu it’s effortless.

Ubuntu lacks the slick design of Windows 7 or Apple OSX and this will be the focus of the next iteration, Ubuntu 10.04, due in April next year. What it lacks in visual polish, however, it makes up for in lack of hassle now, and the promise of a new online application store.

Microsoft’s latest quarterly revenue figures show a 14% decline in revenue and a 17% fall in net income. Very likely the peak has now been surpassed and its downhill slowly from here on. Apple’s ads making fun of Microsoft are as sharp as ever and are worth a look.

At best I expect two PCs at home to be running Windows 7 by then, those running Home Premium, and possibly my laptop (already dual booting with Ubuntu).

Microsoft will have a passable Christmas I suspect but will be discounting to retain OS market share within 6 months, and they still have to raise their game.

First Service!

as they say in tennis.

____

*Acronis TrueImage, BBC iPlayer, DVDidle Pro, Microsoft Security Essentials, UltraVNC server, VersionTrackerPro, WebGuide,, Superflexible File Synchronizer and Scootersoftware’s Beyond Compare 3.

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It’s just another story of the meeja being hoaxed.

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I was mildly amused to see the Chamber punked today with a press conference at which they purportedly recanted. It was a hoax. Story and video at The Huffington Post, which did check the story and didn’t go with it. The perpetrators were a group known as the Yes Men, out to embarrass the chamber. They did. Here in London and elsewhere around the world the US Chamber of Commerce is a laughing stock.

Reuters reported the recantation and it was subsequently carried on TV.

Yet another story with no fact checking that shows why the journalism profession deserves its current dismal reputation. So, not just a blow to the climate deniers.

A few days ago UK papers reported on the ease with which pranksters placed completely fake stories about celebrities in the UK tabloid papers (Guardian story e.g.). The purpose was also to embarrass. The pranksters in this case have made a film about their adventures: Starsuckers.

It’s been an interesting week in the UK mediawise. Two events have signalled that the world has changed. First, there was the use of Twitter to break open an injunction on the Guardian in the notorious Trafigura case. Second, Twitter, Facebook and email were all used to raise a stink about a nasty homophobic article by Jan Moir in The Daily Mail.

I happened to read the Mail article shortly after it was published, having followed a link to some other story that was in the top 10 on DailyRotation. I posted a critical reaction, which was not published–I checked later. Later, I read that the Press Complaints Commission had been overwhelmed with 22,000 complaints about the article (Guardian story here). I added a complaint at about the 21,000 complaints mark, from what I could gather. The Daily Mail response today seems dismissive of a “highly orchestrated campaign.” Well, not in my case. Clearly the Mail doesn’t get social media yet. How does it imagine the orchestration working?

It was a smack in the face to one of the nastiest and worst newspapers in the UK, the purveyor of outrage by the yard and panderer to the righteous and the smug. Although the whole culture of celebrity makes my skin crawl, I think that perhaps in this case it was useful. Had the Mail published what Moir wrote about a randomly selected man there would have been little reaction.

Now there’s been a visible manifestation of a more tolerant society that will make some think twice before attacking on the basis of their prejudices. The drunk and the bigoted will get an occasional surprise, as these yobs did when they attacked two men in drag.

But, there’s a long way to go here.

BBC’s Panorama TV programme went undercover near Bristol for a few weeks and reported tonight in Hate on the Doorstep about the racist abuse of two Asian reporters. I missed it but my reporter said it was shocking.

The BBC will be making news again on Thursday evening when it admits for the first time the leader of the openly racist British National Party to a political discussion programme.

How I would like to see them punked! Not attacked, punked!

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New York and photography entered my consciousness at the same time, along with iconic images such as Hopper’s Nighthawks. Many of my first books I owned and read on photography were by New Yorkers, and I read Popular Photography so regularly that when I passed one of its columnists on the street I knew him instantly.

That’s Bob Schwalberg of Popular Photography

I said, to a New Yorker flatmate. He looked skeptically at me, then turned and called “Bob”. Schwalberg turned and looked over his shoulder and carried on, having failed to see anyone he recognised.

Told you.

An obituary I just discovered said

No one growing up and entering photography in the 1950s-1970s had a complete education without reading Bob s brilliant and often very funny articles on just about everything related to our profession.

I had my nose against the glass long before I got there.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (1942)

I knew about Eisenstadt, a neighbour in Queens (I didn’t know), Capa, Steichen and Stieglitz and other greats but until now I confess I’d never registered Helen Levitt who died earlier this year (Economist obituary here; National Public Radio’s All Things Considered stories 1 and 2).

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The kind of women’s magazines that have had models in them, which one sometimes reads in the hairdressers for want of anything else (right?), make my skin crawl a little. Now, I gather that the German magazine Brigitte is abandoning the use of models entirely in favour of normal women. Halleluiah!

Today’s news is that Ralph Lauren is trying to suppress a ludicrously photoshopped image of a model, very much the kind of thing I find creepy. It’s here. I’m linking to it to add to the negative publicity they’re now getting as result of their misuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in attacking a fair use.

I’ve criticized Cory Doctorow here before (and he took issue) but I’ll take my hat off to him here. The response to Lauren’s lawyers is excellent.

They are not referred to the reply given in the case of Arkell v Pressdram, which is a bit of a lost opportunity. Maybe that’s culture specific humour.

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I’m behind on The Daily Dish and catching up. This quote from Sullivan resonated

It’s impossible to watch the vast ignorance, hate and extremism in this country right now and not almost despair. At a time of extraordinary challenges, the center is not holding.

I sent these links (Sullivan on torture) and this (Friedman on assassination) to a friend who seemed surprised at my concern about the way extremism is being amped up in the US, but then he’d not been following the news that closely.

American teabaggers are bad enough for any sane person to hope their peculiar distemper stays on the other side of the Atlantic.

Over Here

Now, however, the comments sections of most online British newspapers are overflowing with nasty and often patronising invective following the Irish voting YES to the Lisbon treaty by a wide margin.

Typical reactions suggested that the Irish were smacked on the bottom by their masters in Brussels and told to go and vote again and come back with the right answer.

Their changing their minds was proof that they had been “bribed and bullied” and the result was therefore a “travesty of democracy.” Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence party and an unpleasant little man, sneered that the vote corresponded with what might be expected in corrupt countries like Zimbabwe.

The treaty is a dull and complex document which consists largely of a series of amendments to existing documents. It’s a minor set of reforms that will improve the democracy and efficiency of the EU. It cannot be read easily and was not designed to be. That it was presented in its raw form to any electorate was an act of reckless folly.

The referendum provided a perfect opportunity for the Europhobes of the entire EU, but the British in particular, to descend on Ireland and spin their particular equivalents of euthanizing grandma, to borrow a metaphor from the US healthcare debate:

• Irishmen would be conscripted into a European army
• Abortion, currently illegal in most cases, would become an overriding European human right
• Ireland would lose its ability to set its own tax rates

All of these were cynical and deliberate lies, calculated to target Irish sensitivities: the country’s traditional neutrality, its abhorrence of abortion (shared with the North), and its ability to compete for inward investment.

They were pushed vigorously by an alliance of right wing British newspapers (Irish editions), europhobes, lunatic eschatalogists intent on thwarting the One World Government, and a wealthy businessman.

The YES campaign, led by the government, was poorly prepared and performed badly. It deserved to be defeated. I watched the last big debate via the web and it was dreadful. Not people unable to respond to

You lie!

but uncomfortably close. The NO campaign did have some legitimate concerns, including the prospective loss of a permanent Irish EU Commissioner.

The people declined to approve the treaty. Quelle surprise.

The commonest complaint came people refusing to vote for something they didn’t understand. Some were willing to follow the advice of the government and main opposition political leaders, but not enough.

Encore

15 months later the government had obtained guarantees and concessions (most importantly: no reduction in the number of commissioners). No changes were made to the treaty document; that would have entailed starting again on the previous 8 years of negtiations. The agreed changes will be made to the accession document for Croatia in due course, if and when the Lisbon treaty is ratified by all EU countries.

Critics, in the UK especially, denounced a second referendum in Ireland as undemocratic.

The Irish have a habit of voting more than once on issues that are controversial until they are settled. They did so on an earlier EU treaty (Nice), have done so on social issues (liberalising divorce and contraception) and on changes to the constitution.

Meanwhile, the recession reminded them where their bread was buttered as one columnist put it. Recent multibillion euro loans from the European Central Bank concentrated minds about the viability of an Irish economy and banking system outside the umbrella.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? –J.M.Keynes

This time the YES campaign won largely on fears of economic hardship more than over any great change of mind over the content of the treaty. A significant number of people did take the trouble to inform themselves in detail about the content –and were not exercised about it one way or another– and some of the rest were likely motivated by business leaders issuing stark warnings about the consequences of a no vote for future confidence in the Irish economy.

This Guardian article by Rafael Behr was the best reaction I saw to the hysterics.

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There were no secret handshakes, only terrorist fist bumps and some ironic laughs. I bumped fists repeatedly with one reader, but it was only to effect my first ever exchange of business cards with the iPhone application Bump, at least that’s my cover story.

I enjoy Tomaksy’s blog because he’s smart, humane, deeply informed and he has an urbane sense of humour–and a knowing twinkle  in his eye on his video blogs, especially when making predictions, that’s persuasive. I stumbled on it, not being a natural Guardianista, or indeed a loyal reader of any paper, when I was following the US presidential election.

He’s attracted an eclectic group of regulars who comment on his blog , not all of whom are “liberals,” and whose collective intelligence, knowledge and experience add a great deal to it.

We missed some of the regular commenters, by name (or alias), and I realized from some of the suggested venues in blog comments — Strasbourg, Paris, Washington etc., and the reported whereabouts of various names that this network is extensive, even vast! It could be global.

Mike was here to attend the Labour Party conference. Cases could be made that both Labour the Guardian don’t have long left.

Barring a miracle, Labour will lose the next election. Traditional newspapers are still heading for extinction, slowly.

Today, in what looks like a last throw of the dice, the loss-making London Evening Standard announced that it would become a free newspaper. That will likely mean more tawdry headlines about dysfunctional celebrities<sigh>. And if it succeeds, it won’t do the Guardian any good.

The solution

surely, is to turn newspapers into intelligence organizations worth joining — social networks that filter and prioritise the presentation of news and comment in ways that people would pay for.

The paywall should not be for the regular news, but the filtered view, in which readers can choose which other readers comments they wish to “follow” preferentially (i.e., which should be given prominence). It’s truly surprising that no newspaper has yet done anything better than Slashdot’s moderation in this regard.

I noticed last night that people were swapping notes on their favourite sources and book recommendations.

Should we really have to set up a Readers of Mike Tomasky group on Facebook to facilitate that dialogue? (I will not insult them by calling them Fans. Of course there are problems with that — aliases etc.).

Message to the Guardian: You wouldn’t own that and if Mike moved his readers would move too, so it’s in your interest to make your site more sticky by enabling the community standing of readers to be apparent, and by preferentially presenting stories on topics that interest the reader.

Since the reader’s accumulated past reading add would value to the presentation of future topics loyalty would prove its own reward.

When scanning stories on the referendum in Ireland today I stumbled on this Guardian article from last March: Could Ireland Join Schengen? I hadn’t seen it before and I enjoyed the comments as much or more than the article, especially those of JorgeG. This is someone whose comments I’d be interested in in future.

Why oh why, is still beyond the wit of a newspaper to bring to my attention information that I and people with similar interests would like to read?!

I’ll pay, really.

Well, it was a fun evening. Definitely repeatable. Thanks Mike.

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Droste is a brand I was familiar with, having lived in the Netherlands. But the Droste effect? I had no idea.

Droste TV

It turns out to be a picture within a picture within a picture, receding recursively to invisibility. Why, I have played with the idea myself without having a name for it. Here, for example — by popping a camera chip into the media player media player under the TV.

Perhaps because I never purchased powered chocolate I never registered the Droste nurse.

I have long been a fan of the Dutch artist Escher’s; my favourite ties feature some of his designs with birds and fish. Is it possible he was influenced by the Droste box? I can’t imagine it. Recursive images go back a long way in art history and are obvious, surely, even if his impossible twists were novel.

But what a coup for this chocolate brand to be associated with the effect and not Giotto who used it first, in the Stefanesci triptych.

There should be a word for memejacking of this sort. Maybe that’s it.

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