Tag Archives: Rant

Rage Against the Council: Why Recycling in Flat Blocks Sucks

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A few minutes ago, I attempted the simple task of taking out a bag full of recycling.  Having circumnavigated the car that some thoughless Mazda-driver saw fit to park in front of the area where our recycling bins are kept, I discovered this:

Overflowing Recycling BinsNot only is there no way I could fit my recycling into these bins, but each and every one — ten in total — is marked with a “Contaminated” sticker, meaning that the collection people saw something they didn’t like in every bin, and refuse to collect any of them until the management company of our flat block pays the council to take them to a landfill site.

This left me with two options — dump my recycling (in its non-recyclable bin-bag) on the ground and hope that someone helpfully puts it in a recycling bin once they are emptied, or the only realistic option: put them straight in the rubbish bins myself, immediately wasting all the effort my family put into separating them from non-recyclable waste.

Contaminated Container StickerNow I spent a year of my life working on technology for Material Reclamation Facilities — the big sorting depots where your recycling ends up.  For better or worse (it’s a weird thing to be geeky about) I know exactly what can and cannot be recycled locally, what happens to it when it is, and what happens to any “contamination” that makes it through. For my sins, I even know what all the numbered codes on plastic bottles mean.  The net result is that my family and I are meticulous about what gets put out for recycling.  I would happily bet that none of the contamination is our fault.

But this isn’t a “boo-hoo, I have to pay and it’s not my fault” rant.  The fact of the matter is, I live in a block of 93 flats.  Someone in one of those flats is going to be too lazy to sort their recycling or take it out of plastic bags.  Someone is going to be unable to read the signs, or just to not care.  Probably not just “someone” but quite a lot of people.  It’s unavoidable.

The council system is simply broken for large flat blocks.

If a single family house gets their bin marked as “contaminated” and has to pay to have it taken away, maybe they’ll learn.  But given human nature, a block of 93 flats is always going to have contaminated bins, every single week.

Either the process needs to change, collectors need to be more tolerant of contamination, or else there’s no point giving us recycling bins at all.  Just let us put it all out for rubbish and damn the environment, because that’s what happens now, only right now it takes much longer and costs us all a lot more money.

IE6, WordPress, and Dick Moves

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For years, anti-IE6 sentiment on the internet has been rising — and justly so. It’s ten years old, and cares so little for standards that web developers often have to code for it specifically. Quite reasonably, they — we — are a bit fed up with that. Successive versions of Internet Explorer have become much better at standards support, and it would be great if every IE user would just upgrade to IE9 tomorrow.

But life isn’t like that, especially not in the world of corporate IT.

Particularly infuriating for those with no choice over their browser are the pop-ups that tell us to “upgrade our browser for the best experience”, or worse still, landing pages that flat-out deny access to anyone not using a modern browser. The IE6 users of the world agree with you! We don’t like the browser much either. But to rub our faces in it is kind of a dick move.

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With version 3.2, WordPress is incorporating one of these “upgrade your browser” popups alongside an acknowledgement that their admin dashboard may no longer work. I’m sure the many corporate bloggers who have no choice but to use WordPress from IE6 won’t be too happy about that move, but even for the rest of us just trying to get to our site dashboard from work, it’s annoying. Much as we hate those popups, our own sites (at least, their admin areas) will now be displaying them.

WordPress’ announcement contains a handy sample e-mail to send to your boss or sysadmin:

Hi there. The computer I use at [where you use the computer] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. Internet Explorer 6 was created 10 years ago, before modern web standards, and does not support modern web applications. More and more sites and applications are dropping support for IE6, including the new version of WordPress. Even Microsoft, the makers of IE6, are counting down until IE6 goes the way of the dinosaur (see http://www.ie6countdown.com/ for more information). Can you please install an updated version of IE or any modern browser (see http://browsehappy.com for more information) on the available computers? Thank you very much.

I get the feeling that the WordPress team haven’t spent a lot of time behind the corporate firewall.

Luckily, my company has within the last year upgraded to IE8. But many others are not so lucky. From me a year ago, that sample e-mail would have had to look more like this:

Hi there. The computer I use at [where you use the computer] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. [...] Could the Ministry of Defence please spend tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money checking and vetting a new browser, so that I can access a couple of web apps that are by no stretch of the imagination business-critical? Could this browser then be added to the list of those allowed on our networks? To my own company, please could you spend a similar sum of money testing this software, deploying it to our PCs, checking our corporate software for compatibility, modifying it where necessary, purchasing newer versions of our core business tools, and dealing with users’ technical support calls over the following months? I’m sure this can all be happily afforded within our bounteous overheads. Thank you very much.

The corporate upgrade process is long and slow, and little can be done about that. We already hate IE6 — popup banners telling us that have to upgrade it to use your site don’t make us hate IE6 more, they make us hate your site more. Please, please, stop it.

Geo-IP Security: Option Three

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Facebook, and many other online services, have an almost-clever security measure that tries to protect users against account theft. It uses your IP address to do a “Geo-IP” lookup — that is, to figure out roughly where in the world you normally access the site from. If an access attempt happens from elsewhere, the user will have to supply extra information to log in — often an “identify this person from their tagged photos” quiz.

Even if you pass this test of your identity, however, strange things sometimes happen — after a recent trip to France I found myself having to re-authenticate all my apps, and after a few days in Germany, my friend Pete could only restore normal service by changing his password.

I can see how this feature could be useful for some people — perhaps even the majority — but for some it has the potential to be a major irritation. Not only is there no way to disable it in Facebook’s case, there’s also no way of venting your frustration when it goes horribly wrong.

For this reason, I suggest that Facebook’s settings page needs the following options:

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The UI of Least Resistance

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I was working up to a blog post on Ubuntu‘s new “Unity” interface a couple of days ago, but repeatedly stalled when it came to making a point. The only point I could come up with was essentially just “I don’t like this”, which isn’t the greatest of subjects for a blog post — to say nothing of the hundreds who have trodden that territory before me.

Ubuntu's Unity interface

Ubuntu's Unity interface (image credit: webupd8.org)

It’s a fairly bold new direction for Ubuntu’s UI, and the first time their default interface has really diverged from what the upstream GNOME project provides. Now I don’t like it for a number of reasons: it’s slow, it doesn’t provide some basic functionality, other functionality is really well hidden (Go on, re-order your icons. Try it.) and it’s got an “our way or nothing” approach to handling workspaces.

On one hand, as a software guy whose main specialisation is user interface design, I understand the urge to try new UI paradigms as often as possible, on the grounds that sooner or later you’ll discover something that really is better than what you currently have. On the other hand, I quietly despair at how far off that “something better” seems.

Take, for example, me. I’m a UX person, and a perfectionist when it comes to interfaces. I’m irritated by slightly-wrong fonts and icons a couple of pixels out of alignment. I love new things, new ways of organising and displaying data. I’m big on augmented reality. And my desktop looks like this:

Bare XFCE Desktop

Now I think that’s aesthetically pleasing, but in terms of functionality, it resembles nothing quite so much as:

Windows 95 Desktop

Yeah, that.

The only notable exception is GNOME-Do (think Launchy on Windows or Quicksilver on OS X), which I use exclusively for launching apps. The main menu, lower left, only gets used if I forget the name of something. Aside from that, I’m using my computer in exactly the same way I was 16 years ago.

The reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that it is the UI of least resistance. In sixteen years, probably 99% of my computer-using time has involved an interface that’s very similar to that one. Sure, there are certainly better UIs out there. Maybe from an objective point of view, Unity is one of them. But for more than half of my life, my brain has been slowly optimising itself for the Windows 95 style interface.

To become the “next big thing” in desktop UI, a new paradigm must not only be better than what came before, it must be so much better that our brains don’t mind losing half a lifetime’s worth of learning.

That’s a milestone I haven’t seen reached lately on the desktop, and a fear we may not see it reached before “the desktop” stops being a thing.

In Praise of Disjointed Communities

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Prime Minister David Cameron is set to make a speech on immigration today which, to the very vocal displeasure of Vince Cable and doubtless many Lib Dems, is designed to appeal to the core and right of the Conservative party. According to the BBC article:

Communities have been affected by incomers who are unable to speak English and unwilling to integrate, [Cameron] will argue.

“That has created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness in some neighbourhoods. This has been the experience for many people in our country – and I believe it is untruthful and unfair not to speak about it and address it.”

Granted, I’m probably far from the average member of the public in my opinions, and certainly I’m far from core Tory material. But I see that disjointedness as more of a good thing than a bad one.

Many years ago, I lived for a while in the village of Easton, on Portland. It was blessed with both a Chinese restaurant and a Chinese take-away, as far as I am aware the only two on the island. When I was there, the restaurant was staffed with Chinese people (or at least those of Chinese descent) — whether they lived on the island or not, I have no idea. But the take-away? Well, I guess they ran out of Chinese people. It was staffed entirely by Brits. 96.8% of the population are of white ethnicity.

I come from, and have since returned to, Bournemouth. Just 30 miles away, it has a population more than 10 times that of the whole of Portland. During most of the year it is home to thousands of university students; in the summer it opens its doors to thousands more foreign language students and a never-ending influx of tourists. I live in an area with a high Brazilian population. Oriental and Middle-Eastern shops are everywhere.

It’s part of the world in a way that Easton is not.

By and large, immigrants naturally pick up enough English to get by — instead of imposing requirements on their proficiency with the language, how about we try to learn each others’ languages?

Instead of imposing some requirement to “integrate” with society (presumably that means reading the Daily Mail, drinking tea and moaning about the weather), why not celebrate each others’ cultures?

More to the point, why not stop pretending that there’s a single homogenous British society for people to integrate with in the first place? My comment about the Daily Mail was only partly in humour. How do you define such a nebulous concept?

I don’t read the Daily Mail, and I rarely drink tea. My instinctive reaction to the phrase “Oh dear, it’s come over all cloudy again, hasn’t it? Typical.” is an impotent rage as I realise that no matter how much of a travesty of conversation it is, in the eyes of the law, it’s still not cause enough to legitimately punch someone in the face.

Like most Brits though, I do love French food, German beer, Italian coffee, chow mein, pizza and chicken tikka masala.

If I’m trying to make a point here, it’s this:

  • Everyone else’s culture is just as good as ours

  • Everyone else’s language is just as good as ours

  • And by the way, everyone else’s food is better than ours.

Let’s stop clinging to an idea of British culture that we can’t even define, and pretending our way of life is under attack from Poles or Pakistanis.  Let’s not be Easton.

There’s a whole world out there.  Let’s live in it.

UX is in the Radio

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This morning, on the daily hour-long moan-fest we call “commuting”, we engaged in our normal pattern of radio use — working our way across the entire spectrum several times, not finding anything particularly appealing, before at last settling on the least annoying option. Then, a minute and a half later once that one not-too-bad song had finished, repeating the whole cycle again.

I am given to understand that most people pick a preferred radio station and stick with it, tolerating the annoying bits while they wait for whatever they like listening to to come on. I, and the carpool, just don’t quite “get” that behaviour. For me, ten minutes of inane Scott Mills drivel, yet another yokel radio “guess the sound and win two tickets to the cinema!” competition, the hundredth fucking advert for Apple Fucking Conservatories — they’re intolerable obstacles in the way of possibly-decent music.

I approach this problem in the manner of what old people might term a “digital native” (a term which suggests to me that I should have a necklace of USB sticks and perhaps a battle cry that’s something to do with SuperPokes). The choice for me is not Radio 1 against Wessex FM, Radio Solent against Wave. It’s FM radio versus net radio.

And against that competition, the user experience of traditional radio stations is appalling.

Say, like I usually am, you are in the mood to listen to a particular kind of music that you don’t happen to have on you in any form. Here’s how some popular services compare:

  • Spotify will, for free, play you exactly the songs you request, with the occasional advert — so let’s call that about 95% “what you want”. By paying, you can remove the adverts and essentially, so long as your taste isn’t too obscure, get that to hit 100%.

  • Pandora will try to guess your exact taste over time, delving deeper than just high-level genres. With a few adverts and the occasional bad choice, you’re probably getting 90% enjoyment.

  • Last.fm will play you your “Recommended Radio” songs that are “similar to” an artist of your choosing, or songs with a certain user-contributed tag. No adverts, but a higher rate of playing songs you don’t like — call that 85% enjoyment, though of course as with Pandora you can always skip the ones you’re not in the mood for.

  • Local radio, by contrast, often dedicates around 10% of its time to adverts, 5% to news, and (conservatively) 20% to inane DJ drivel. This leaves 65% for music, and if you’re lucky, you might enjoy half of what they play. A miserable total of 32.5% enjoyment. And of course, if you’re particularly in the mood for say, metal or EBM, well… out of luck.

I’m sure it would be premature of me to declare the death of broadcast radio, just the same as I’m sure lots of people enjoy Scott Mills being a twat and the possibility to win virtually nothing by doing virtually nothing in some local radio competition.

But as a means to consume music? It’s a long way from being a service that gives its users what they want.

“Meh” to AV

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There are four months left before Britain goes to the polls to decide whether to adopt the Alternative Vote system, and already the #yes2av and #no2av campaigns are hotting up on Twitter.

Barely a year ago, I would have shouted “yes” with all my might — the Labour incumbents were more into spin and surveillance than the redistribution of wealth, and the opposition Conservatives appealed even less. But AV would have helped the Lib Dems immensely, maybe giving them a shot at power. As the party of the young, in my eyes maybe more a party of the Left than Labour was, I was all for the Lib Dems having as much of a chance as possible to win seats in the House of Commons.

What a difference a year can make.

The Tories are decimating the public sector and somehow still believe that charity and the free market will make it all better. The Lib Dems are complicit and must be on course for breaking the majority of their election pledges. Labour have a new leader who doesn’t seem to do anything apart from offer the occasional doomful prediction about the coalition’s cuts.

The Greens would have me out of a job, UKIP are crazy, the BNP are evil, and I can’t bring myself to run as a Pirate Party candidate because I believe in far more than an end to abuse of copyright.

Who would I vote for if a general election were called tomorrow? Nobody.

In fact, the current political climate has almost brought me full circle on the subject of the Alternative Vote. Under a system like AV, smaller parties are likely to do better. But with a three-(major-)party system, it’s unlikely to be the case that we’ll see a Labour-Pirate or a Conservative-UKIP coalition or anything interesting — it’s still going to be Convervative-Lib Dem or Labour-Lib Dem, even with AV. And all that does is continue the last 13 years’ rush for the centre ground.

The Tories are rushing for it so fast that they’re alienating half their party. The Lib Dems, in theory, define the centre, and despite electing the younger Miliband, the Labour party has yet to decide if and how it’s going to stop its New Labour love affair with ‘Middle England’.

What we absolutely don’t need, for the sake of the next generation’s interest in politics, is an unending succession of coalitions, each one indistinguishable from the last.

So if it could happen, bring on the Labour-Pirate coalition and the Conservative-UKIP coalition. Anything to keep things interesting. But if it can’t — and unless the Lib Dems utterly toast their popularity, it can’t — then let’s have the next generation of Maggie Thatcher and Michael Foot, let’s have some people with real ideological differences fighting it out in the Commons.

Bring me someone I can believe in.

Until then, “meh” to AV.

Dear America, Your Missile Defence is not Broken

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@CampaignReboot, making a good point as always, earlier linked to this CNN article which bemoans the state of the United States’ missile defence programme after the failure of a Ground-Based Interceptor test.

Just to reinforce his point, let’s look at how insanely difficult a task a Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) missile has.

An ICBM launch is first detected by detectors, usually radar, at sea, on land, and in space. All this data must be fed back to the missile base and analysed by a computer within a few minutes.

A GBI attempts to intercept it while it’s in its “midcourse” phase, which generally lasts for around 20 minutes — but it’s not as if the GBI turns around and tries again if it misses. You have one chance to intercept during that time window. During the midcourse phase, the ICBM is in space, over 1000 kilometers above the Earth. It’s moving at several kilometers a second. In this test, it was over 4000 kilometers from the GBI’s launch point.

It’s around 10-20 metres long.

And you have to hit it.

This is, shall we say, not a trivial challenge?

Anyone assuming that their country’s missile defence systems entirely remove the possibility of nuclear attack is kidding themselves. Missile defence is just a part of the great game of deterrence played by the world’s few nuclear powers. If anyone launches, the world is still screwed.

Luckily for any remaining Cold War doomsayers, the GBI’s 50% intercept success rate is pretty nicely matched by the Russian Bulava ICBM’s 53% test success rate. And if your Red (/Green?) terror of the month is North Korea or Iran, can you imagine their missile programmes having anything like the success rate of the Russians’ or the Americans’?

So if all the ranty CNN commenters could get over it, it would be appreciated. The US needs missile defence, even though it isn’t perfect and never will be. Aegis has a better record than the GBIs anyway, did you forget that you had that too? North Korea is not going to nuke you tomorrow anyway.

Stuxnet is in the hands of Bad Guys?!

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Hey! Do you like fear? Do you like bullshit headlines? Well, has Sky got an news for you! “Super virus a target for cyber terrorists”, which bears the even more fascinating <title> tag of “Stuxnet Worm: Virus Targeted At Iran’s Nuclear Plant Is In Hands Of ‘Bad Guys’, Sky News Sources Say”, is their latest fantastical fearmongering piece. Let’s butcher it together.

(Thanks to Chris of Campaign Reboot for tweeting this story. He beat me to it with his post “Sky News, working hard to prove they’re morons”.)

So, shall we start from the top?

A super virus that was used to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme…

Potentially — though there has been no admission from the nation that it was successful.

…has been traded on the black market…

Got any evidence, Sky? No? Okay then. Granted it’s not infeasible, but it would be nice to know if you just made that up.

…and could be used by terrorists, according to Sky News sources.

CORN FLAKES COULD BE USED BY TERRORISTS! EVERYBODY PANIC!

Senior cyber-security figures have said the Stuxnet worm – the first to have been used to damage targets in the real world…

Almost certainly not, although the internet is not being helpful with sources of previous real-world virus damage (except to companies’ finances). There’s also no evidence that Stuxnet has caused any meatspace damage.

…could be used to attack any physical target which relies on computers.

Any physical target running Windows with attached SCADA controllers from one manufacturer controlling a certain number of frequency converter drives made by one of two companies running at certain frequencies. Unless they’re just referring to the Windows exploits Stuxnet uses rather than its payload, in which case… nope, every other OS is immune.(Source: Symantec)

The list of vulnerable installations is almost endless — they include power stations, food distribution networks, hospitals, traffic lights and even dams.

Again, Stuxnet in its known form will cause problems for none of those.

A senior IT security source said: “We have hard evidence that the virus is in the hands of bad guys — we can’t say any more than that but these people are highly motivated and highly skilled with a lot of money behind them.

You can’t say more because you’ve received threats from the FBI if you release this super-secret information that would be useful for protecting the world’s networks? Or because you’re making it up? Present evidence or GTFO.

“And they have realised that this kind of virus could be a devastating tool.”

Really?! Oh, gosh.

Will Gilpin, an IT security consultant to the UK Government said: “You could shut down the police 999 system.

“You could shut down hospital systems and equipment.

“You could shut down power stations, you could shut down the transport network across the United Kingdom.”

Again, I guess we’ve moved on to talking about a heavily modified payload rather than Stuxnet as it currently exists. And then, it’s only systems running Windows, and only until Microsoft patch the two (of five) remaining vulnerabilities that Stuxnet is known to exploit.(Source: F-Secure)

The Stuxnet attack on the Bushehr nuclear installation in Iran is believed to have been orchestrated by a country.

Believed on the basis of speculation, with no hard evidence.

Now experts warn that the West is extremely vulnerable to similar attacks by criminal gangs seeking blackmail payouts or more likely by terrorist groups.

Criminal gangs and terrorists that have extremely detailed inside knowledge of manufacturing systems, which are probably not a common target for either group, and who are dumb enough to rely on a virus that we now have an extensive dossier on, which most virus scanners now detect and neutralise, and for which there are known cleaning methods.

Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary with the US Department of Homeland Security, said: “They could shut down power systems, dams, almost any sophisticated industrial process that requires a control software. Which is practically everything.”

I think we’ve seen this point somewhere before.

There has been a rise in cyber attacks in recent years.

On April 8, 15% of all internet traffic was routed through China for 18 minutes in a mysterious incident the Chinese authorities have denied any part in.

Because it was probably an accident rather than an attack, and it’s not as if routing through China is unusual — the event was merely an unexpected spike. There has been no suggestion that any unencrypted sensitive data was intercepted by China during that time.(Source: BGPmon, plus the more knowledgeable comments on Slashdot and Reddit.)

The Royal Navy’s website was shut down on November 5, allegedly by a Romanian hacker.

In October, the UK Government declared cyber warfare to be a “tier 1″ threat to national security.

Are those… could they possibly be… facts?! My god.

But experts say a more co-ordinated effort is needed to tackle attacks, along the lines of the Cyber Command agency set up in the US this year.

It’s the most reasonable opinion in the article, and it’s the one you don’t provide a named source for?

So, er, thanks, Sky News. I feel so enlightened now.

If you’re looking for some more amusement, the YouTube-calibre comments section is pure Retarded Internet Commenter gold, too.

The Atheist’s Sense of Wonder

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I’ve no idea why this thought should crop up now, but I recall being asked several times by religious folk why I would choose not to believe in a god. Often their question is something like “Why believe that everything you see around you was created by random chance, when it would be so much more wonderful to think that someone created it all just for us?”

I disagree completely.

Isn’t it more wonderful to think that at some point, billions of years ago, everything we know was just an unimaginably tiny, unimaginably hot and dense energy field? That within seconds, it coalesced into quarks and leptons and other stranger things, that those quarks became protons and neutrons, then on into hydrogen and helium atoms?

Isn’t it more wonderful that a simple force like gravity drew those atoms together into huge balls of gas, so hot and dense that they ignited and became shining beacons visible from the far end of the universe? And that they eventually exploded, scattering heavy atoms far and wide? And that those atoms — oxygen, carbon, iron, even as heavy as uranium — gathered around another newly-forming star, clumping together into big balls of rock, one of which happened to be in just the right place around just the right kind of star to sustain liquid water on its surface?

Isn’t it more wonderful that after a billion years of volcanism, asteroid impacts and boiling, toxic atmospheres, somewhere in that water, a bunch of molecules lined up in a pattern on the surface of some clay and became the first proteins? That these chemicals strung themselves together in molecules so complex they could contain the code for their own reproduction? That they became so much more complex still that they could encode the information to generate a cell, a microscopic blob with a membrane that means it can keep conditions inside itself different from those outside?

Isn’t it more wonderful that over millions or billions of years, they developed gills so that they could extract oxygen from the water, and gain their energy from that rather than directly from the sun? That after yet another unimaginably long time, some of them went on to develop legs that would allow them to colonise the land?

Isn’t it more wonderful that millions of years ago the Earth was ruled by giant lizards, and that that isn’t just the plot of a science fiction movie but the real history of our planet?

Isn’t it more wonderful that 14 billion years after the first quarks formed, we stand here today? For all that we are vulnerable, disease-ridden, selfish and fond of killing each other, we alone have the medical knowledge to understand ourselves, and we alone have brains advanced enough to contemplate themselves. We alone understand biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics. We alone have telescopes to study distant stars, and we alone have built spaceships that we have thrown out beyond our solar system into the cosmos beyond.

And is it not more wonderful still that we may not be alone in the universe, that amongst the billions of stars and maybe trillions of planets, there could be other creatures like us — or even that the universe could be swarming with life; great civilisations spanning the distant galaxies.

But an omnipotent MacGuffin that made the Earth just for us? That’s not all that great.