John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Apricot kernels: 30 August 2004: Rattigan obviously got to me because I a) bought some apricots, and b) cracked open the stone and ate the kernel inside. I expected to find something the size of an apple pip, but actually it's quite a large nut very like an almond, and it tastes like an almond too.
Paula: 28 August 2004: I'm completely outside my area of expertise here, but I saw the Olympic Team GB coach doing a very motivational speech, and I also saw Paula Radcliffe drop out of the marathon and, I just wonder whether what happened was her body didn't match what her head thought she was capable of. Whether she was helped to believe she could do better than she could. Maybe, given the conditions, she ran too fast because she believed she could do it.; For me, it's a small lesson that motivation management works, but you have to be able to do what you believe you can do or things can get dangerous.
Software Freedom Day: 28 August 2004: Good morning. It's Software Freedom Day today.; Hmm. I'm not sure that site delivers what it means to me, so here goes.; The most exciting day of my time at university was when I discovered sourceforge. It's a technical site, but I link to it for completeness. I'd been reading a book called The Hacker Ethic which outlined how it all started and it was all very interesting, but then Sourceforge said "it's not just interesting, John, it's right here, right now, it's huge, it works, it's happening, it's growing, everyone's using it, it's all around you. Open your eyes." Maybe finding sourceforge was my "God spoke to me" revelation.; Anyway, here's the point. Some people think that a piece of software is just an idea, and you shouldn't be able to patent ideas. If you'd been talking in the pub to your friend about how you'd worked out the best way to cook Kohl Rabi, your friend could go home and apply that idea. They wouldn't have to pay you for the idea, it's free. Except, I think you would, if you were a professional cook. I'm not saying I agree with this idea, I'm just saying how it is. I should link to The Free Software Foundation here but haven't worked it into the text.; Linked with this was the idea of open source development. Open source software is supplied with the source code, so you can change it as you wish. It's often licenced to say it's free, you can make changes to it, but you can never charge for it (apart from the duplication costs). Its supporters claim it's great to be able to change the source code. I'm not so sure. Often these packages are huge. Understanding their innards isn't going to be easy. Knowing the full implications of your change is going to be near impossible. And you're probably not going to be able to test it fully.; But testing is the key strength of open source software. The idea is that people give their time free of charge to be involved in the development of an open source software package. New versions are issued frequently, sometimes even daily. A large group of interested supporters and users download the versions and run them, feeding back any problems they encounter. Testing is therefore done en masse, in real conditions, in real time, and free of cost. This results in more robust software. Open source software is often more robust than usual commercial software.; Another strength is that open source software is often free of charge. Can't afford Microsoft Office? Use Open Office. can't afford Microsoft Windows? Use Linux. Can't afford Photoshop? Use The Gimp. Think Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are vulnerable to viruses? Use Mozilla. Using open source software it's no longer a challenge to put together a fully functioning PC without spending a penny on software.; Why would anyone put their time, free of charge, into developing an open source project? For two reasons. Firstly, those people are credited, so it's great for your CV if you've something to prove.; Second, the computer industry has great links with the American east coast hippy culture. It grew up in the sixties. Apple had that culture, certainly early on before John Scully messed things up. When I was adolescent I cycled to a commune in Wales for a look at how they operated. They had a "everything is communally owned" philosophy, even the children were of the commune and communally cared for. Two guys in that commune made their money writing software for a California company. Many people have made a lot of money from the IT industry over the years, and they're from an era where community matters. So they want to put something back.; If you don't like the idea of open source software, if you'd rather use commercial software with its support contracts and SLAs, well tough. If you use the Internet, you use open source software. The servers run Linux and Apache. Website addresses are resolved using open source software (BIND). Your email is delivered using sendmail. The Internet is built on open source software, and it works. You're already using it. Feeling free yet? Go on. Take off all your clothes, hang out the window and shout "Software's free, we can do anything!". You know it makes sense.
Mark Thatcher: 27 August 2004: Isn't the Mark Thatcher stuff fun? Journalists must love it. Maybe they could never penetrate Margaret Thatcher's armour, but they can hit the Mark every time. Channel 4 News said, as I remember it, "Mark Thatcher, whose nickname at school was Thicky Mark". I mean, LOL, that's just unnecessary.
Patrick Rattigan: 27 August 2004: The other day I went to a talk by Patrick Rattigan about alternative cancer treatment. I wasn't persuaded.; I've let my thoughts settle, and the impression I'm left with is that what we saw was an ego on display.; Not that he particularly seems egotistical, but that seemed to drive everything I saw.; As a kid I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted all my O levels to be science ones, and I thanked my lucky stars that I wasn't living in the catchment area of the other school that did a single combined science O level. I never could figure out what they filled the other seven holes with. The universally acknowledged as useless General Studies would have been one. Anyway, I'd forgotten my scientific roots along the way, but my degree brought it back to me. Yay for experimentation! Yay! for falsification and verification and all that. So I may be looking at this with the zeal of a new convert, but Rattigan had no science backing him up. He was like a travelling quack.; He started by saying he used to be an engineer, and then trained as a Naturopath. Great, I thought. At uni, we were taught that what engineers did was apply scientific knowledge. We were engineers. I'm proud to call myself an Internet software engineer. Rattigan didn't seem to do that. He mentioned a trial at one point, so I asked "how many?" and he said "oh, thousands", with a wide gesture of his hand. It's not enough. It's not persuasive.; There was an old woman in the audience who said a few things, every one of which he didn't follow up, but simply moved on from. I found that disrespectful. Mind you, she did talk about bathing her grandmother's breasts. The woman herself must have been 95 years old. So how long ago was this?; To back up my ego accusation, it comes from the sum of many small clues. He said he'd not been to a doctor in thirty years (he rejects conventional medicine). He treats his own family (that would raise his importance). His children haven't been vaccinated (I wonder how they feel about that). He says he's a general conspiracy theorist (he also does talks on 9/11, and whether we really landed on the moon). It's almost like he rejects any group of people, he prefers his own opinion to that of others. He's just damned awkward. He spoke without notes, it seemed to me that he'd not done any special preparation for our talk. Were we not worth it?; The conspiracy of the day, though, was the cancer conspiracy. And the Aids conspiracy, but that's a side-issue (although he did talk about someone injecting themselves with HIV infected blood, live on tv, to prove his theory that it isn't HIV that gives you Aids, and he's still alive today).; Still, back to cancer. What would happen if we cured cancer? The pharmaceutical companies would hurt, the cancer charities would disappear. Is it not in their interest to provide long and expensive cures, but not to actually cure us? I'm naturally cynical and tend towards this kind of argument and then I bounce back against what feels like an air filled "don't be silly" cushion.; I also had a problem with him repeatedly mentioning conventional medicine's use of poisonous elements, where he kept pointing out their position in some poisons index (x is only just below arsenic). Well, doesn't homeopathy use poisons deliberately as an alternative therapy? So how poisonous something is isn't the point.; However. Some things did stick with me.; Firstly, he thinks the improved rates of cancer survival are down to early diagnosis tests coming out positive for things that wouldn't necessarily turn into cancer. False positives, in other words. The more false positives there are, the more survivals there will be (they never had cancer in the first place). The earlier the diagnosis, the less reliable it is. Those who have a false positive result and go through the treatment end up with a higher chance of getting cancer because of the chemical and surgical brutality of the treatment.; I'm sure he'd also balance mainstream medicine's improved rates against the increased occurrence and say we're actually losing the battle.; Anyway, his magic bullet to cure cancer? vitamin B17. When asked what we can get B17 in, it's in obscure things like apricot kernels, which he's found a source of and can sell to us. And in apple pips. So, eat your apple cores.; Faced with a cancer diagnosis, what would I do? You have to jump one way or the other, you can't do both. I'd love to think B17 would work but according to Wikipedia it won't .. or it might. I tend towards nutrition as my favoured therapy anyway. I think I'd want to use modern medicine's tools for measuring the extent and progress of the disease, while undergoing alternative medicine. I'd then set a point beyond which, if alternative medicine didn't work, I'd jump to conventional.; I can't get away from the fact that I've tried a number of alternative therapies and, frankly, they've never worked. Yet I go to my doctor, and the cure always works.; One other thing he did say was about vivisection. He said, they take genetically equal dogs, put them in controlled laboratory conditions, and treat them exactly the same .. same food, same times, and so on. Then they feed them whatever poison they're experimenting on, and the dogs die at different times, of different things. So if it's unpredictable within that controlled experiment, how can it be useful to extrapolate the results across species to us, and then out into incontrolled, real-life situations? Where was his data from? I guess we'll never know.; So, overall, what will I do? Will I eat an apple, and its pips, a day? You bet. I'd hate to think he was actually right, and I was wrong. That wouldn't do my ego any good at all.
Ponce: 26 August 2004: I just went into the toy/stationery shop on South Marine Road and bought a card. I said "I'm looking for a big tin of chocolates", he said "A tin? Not at this time of year." I said "Oh gosh, I hadn't factored in seasonality." He looked at me and the card and said "You hadn't factored in seasonality. Well all I want is £1.20".; The guy obviously has a problem with poncey blokes using long words. I'm not unfamiliar with that reaction. Pity though. Quite a few poncey students live along that road, and the local poncey university has a poncey English degree and masters course.; The chocolates were for Andy Whitelaw Joinery, who had to make do with two boxes of Heroes .. from a different shop.
Cause for celebration: 26 August 2004: It's a celebration morning. It's the first morning in a week where we haven't had to be ready to let windows people in at 8am. There are oases of sortedness in the house .. well, one oasis .. half the lounge is habitable. There are curtains up at the upstairs windows, so my g/f, who has a day off today, can stay in bed a while and watch morning telly even if the roofer turns up.; So just to review, Andy Whitelaw Joinery have really been great. Two guys Mark and Martin, and the bricky Paul have been very obliging and hard working, but particularly Mark has a very good sense of customer care - there was one moment when he asked his mate to lift the window he was working on so he could re-arrange the dustsheets under it so as not to scratch our floor. The windows themselves, built I think by Steve, are fantastic. They're single-glazed sash, and they're quieter than what was before. Quieter with regard to road noise, and quieter when it's windy too. Fantastic.; The good feeling is muted by the fact that, really, every room in the house is a complete mess. There's dust and dirt everywhere. Every room needs some decorating, including the hallway which is covered in dirty marks where they've had to transport windows through the house. But hey, nothing's broken. I removed pretty much everything, including the lampshades. Good job, I saw that when they lifted the dining room window into place, the top of the window would have broken the lampshade had it been there. But, had it been there, I think they'd have noticed and worked around it.; I was really surprised at how I got stressed by the mess. I guess I just like my routines. I couldn't do my morning yoga because the spare room was full of tools (but they asked if they could leave them there and I said yes). I couldn't run in the morning because they arrived at 8am and I couldn't get myself out before then. I didn't shave for three days, even though I knew where my shaver was and I could get to it, because there was nothing covering the bathroom window (which is plain glass rather than, what do you call it, misted .. ?) and it felt like shaving in the street. There was no-where to eat lunch so I ate it standing in the kitchen. Those kinds of things. Hardly Darfur stress levels, but I can only report how I felt.; So, yes, I'd definitely recommend Andy Whitelaw Joinery. The bad things, the mess and so on, would happen however you and whoever replaced your windows. I do have a friend who had a bad experience with Andy Whitelaw Joinery, however (she sucked her teeth pretty badly when I mentioned their name), something to do with them sawing into their beautiful new floor. But I think she said they'd outsourced the work. My experience was very good, and it's all over now. I'll post up a before and after pic in a week or so when it's really all done.; Anyway, I'm going to write a letter of thanks and take it in with a box of chocs later today.; Oh, and overall, it took two guys a day to fit two windows, so four days for eight, and then another day and a half to tidy up, add architrave, plaster, fill, put curtain rails back up and so on. Actually, I think that was part of why I felt stressed about it. I imagined they'd work, well actually I phoned to ask and the switchboard woman said they start at the top and work down "in case of breakages", ha ha, don't say that word two days before we start! So I imagined after say, day three we'd be able to clear up the top floor, move the cats up there, and live up there, in a tidy part of the house. But that's not how it works. On the first day they pick the nearest two windows from the workshop and install them (so they might start with any room), then do two windows per day, but leave all the tidying until last. Tidying includes sawing architrave and wandering around with plaster, both pretty messy jobs. So you have to wait until the very end before you can start putting stuff back. You need a lot of dustsheets.
I tawt I taw a puddy cat: 25 August 2004: I just had a "I tawt I taw a puddy cat" moment. Somewhere in my browsing in the last few days, I'm sure I've seen someone saying that There's Something About Mary is their best film ever.; Can there be people like that?; I should talk, I haven't even seen the film. I did watch a trailer tho.
Being fit: 25 August 2004: I guess most of the guys I know work, like me, in cerebral jobs so it's been interesting to meet and get on with the scaffolders, the roofers, the joiners who have been working on the house, and one thing has struck me. I thought it unusual when the first person said it, but now it seems to be usual.; They all seem to have physical hobbies. One surfs, cycles and on his days off is doing-up another house, another is seriously into cycling. I, on the other hand, try to find hobbies that are opposite to what I do all day .. the gym, drumming, running.; Talking about it with them, though, it makes sense. The point is, for all of us, to be fit enough to take on a day's work, and still be able to enjoy our evenings. There's little point in just flaking out in an evening because our job's taken everything we've got.; If you do a physical job, you have to be able to take it in your stride. Whereas after a few hours of window fitting I'd be dead on my feet, these guys need to be fit enough to do a full day of window fitting as if it were a walk in the park, because that leaves them the energy to enjoy their spare time.; Also, I suppose, if you are fit, then physical things come easily to you, so you enjoy them more, so you're more likely to take them on.; I imagined their hobbies would be different from their work. Reading Niesche maybe, new age spiritualism, but seriously, perhaps things to do with computing, music, languages and travel. I was wrong.; Physically, we all need to be a little bit fit, so cerebral workers should balance their lives with something physical. I'm not sure the reverse applies to the same degree.
Fahrenheit 9/11: 25 August 2004: I went with three others to see Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday, and we were all disappointed.; Regular readers will know I'm no fan of George W, but to my mind this film just isn't good enough.; I retain the Tom Peters rule that says you can extrapolate from seeing a coffee stain on the tray in your seat on an airplane that the airline isn't managing the quality of its cleaning routines, and if it isn't doing that, it's not managing the quality of any of its routines .. training, engine maintenance. I seem to remember Tom didn't fly twice on an airline that gave him a coffee stain; My coffee stain moment in Fahrenheit 9/11 was when Moore talked about the coalition of the willing. There were two things wrong. Firstly, he listed countries no-one has ever heard of, countries without armies. He never mentioned Japan, Spain, or the United Kingdom in the coalition list. So, he was playing for laughs. He certainly wasn't being factual. And if he wasn't being factual in this part that I know about, who is to say he was being in any way factual in the rest of the film. In other words, this film is entertainment, not truth. It's fiction. I can't trust a word it says.; The other thing wrong with that part of the film was that he did exactly what they did in that terrible film Godzilla. When he mentioned Romania he showed a clip from an old black and white horror film of a monster rising from the dead, when he mentioned Holland (not The Netherlands, I think), he showed a hairy youth smoking pot. Is encouraging ridiculous stereotypes the way to foster international goodwill?; I was reminded of something a friend said (hi Martin) in my early days of anti GM protesting when editing texts to go into our newsletter. He said, in essence, that we have to have the moral high ground. We must act within the law and use science and fact as our argument. If we don't, we're just as bad as 'they' are.; I went to a talk the other night about alternative approaches to cancer (I'll blog that another time) and a friend (hi Steve) got approached there by an audience member who tried to persuade him that the earth was only 3,000 years old. Steve said "but what's your evidence", and the guy just looked at him as if the answer was "well, you just have to have faith". The right (and I'm not talking about the political right, I'm talking about truth) must be demonstrably right, indisputably right, or we'll look like that guy, completely off our trolleys. That usually means using good science, even though scientific 'fact' is increasingly polluted by financial and political interests.; The other thing I didn't like was the use of music in the film. I know from working with John Pattison (sorry about the website, it was one of my first and he doesn't seem interested in updating it, and to be honest nor am I at the moment because it would be a freebie so I really ought to deal with my work queue first) how much music affects our emotional response to a film. Watch a film silently, and it's emotionless. Add music, and our emotions soar with the sound. Moore uses that to play our hearts. That's fine, if it's entertainment. But this is political. Of course, political advertisements do that in spades, but we know what that is. Fahrenheit 9/11 is styled like a documentary, and it isn't one.; Fahrenheit 9/11 bends the truth just as much as the Bush administration. Maybe Moore thought the American media bends the truth so much he'd fight fire with fire. For me though, I lost all trust.; Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's entertainment and uplift for Democrats. Would waverers go and see it? At the end of the showing I saw, some of the audience clapped. They weren't waverers who had had their minds turned in the last two hours. So, as entertainment, yes it's certainly a jolly night out for Bush haters.; But hey. I'd rather this than the usual garbage that comes out of Hollywood. And where are the other artists commenting on the situation? Where is art in all this? Maybe this is what it takes to break ground. Maybe after this, more, better stuff will follow. I hope so.; Oh, and Britney's gone down in my estimation.; For the real thing, btw, if you can handle it (these are life changing people), start here: Monbiot, Pilger, and Chomsky.
Disgusting and fantastic in equal measure: 24 August 2004: AntiProduct .. wait a minute. If you're easily upset or have just had your tea, give this one a miss.; Still here? OK. The members of AntiProduct, a band, sell their own body fluids to their fans.; Perfect marketing to disaffected youth. Incredibly disgusting. That's why it's so good. Bad. Bleurgh, must go shower.; Oh, and the point is, they're the headline act at Scarborough's Soundwave festival tomorrow. I presume the staff of the Spa, more used to hosting "those were the days" shows for the over 165s, haven't read the press releases and will enjoy cleaning the dressing rooms after.
Web services: 24 August 2004: I'm delighted to be able to bring you the words of George W Bush, courtesy of the web service 'Random Bushisms'. Refresh the page to get a new one. Ready?; Warning: require_once(nusoap.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/johnalls/public_html/blog200408.php4 on line 174

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