People can do nice things, and just because you ask them!

Imperial measurements - what Americans call English measurements - really wind me up. I was born in the UK in the late 1960s and spent my childhood learning metric only to find that decades later most Brits (even ones much younger than me) still use imperial measurements for most normal things and still reuse the same arguments for their continued use.

And it's hard for me to switch over too. I've become used to thinking about liquids in litres (rather than pints or gallons), because petrol is bought in litres and UHT milk cartons / wine / water / fruit juice is too. Temperature is normally metric in the UK (so that's easy). And for a long time I've thought about short distances in metric and it's only in the past decade I've started to metricize the rest of my life.

And I mean, just normal things: I'm 1.7m tall and weigh 68Kg. My church (and my old place of work) is about 2Km away. Nottingham, where my parents live is just over 100km.

The real difficulty has been reading stuff in imperial on the web. Most of the world is metric, but most of the web is US-centric which means a lot of measurements are imperial even when they're technical. I kept finding this on Space.com: it's really wierd reading articles aimed at an international audience; about the latest space developments and seeing it all measured in pounds and feet, miles, farenheit and gallons. It's like - Nasa has been taken over by Torchwood!

So a few months ago I emailed one of the guys there and he wrote back to say:

“This is something you need to take up with the style of the major U.S.
syndicator of news: The Associated Press. We follow their style to be
consistent, and they dictate using only Fahrenheit.”

Yet just this week I noticed they'd changed to including metric measurements! Dave Mosher says they've updated their style guidelines, but it just goes to show that people can change their minds and be really considerate :-) !

Big Stick Sociology

Yesterday I got threatened by someone with a big stick about the size and shape of a baseball bat. It's OK, I wasn't attacked, I'm just surprised it's possible to get away with that kind of behaviour in public.

I was cycling home from Stockport*
View Larger Map and as I got to the crossroads at Parrswood road / Fog lane a guy in a parked car opened his door right in front of me. So I shouted "Watch it!" and he swore at me to shut up. So I yelled "You don't have the right to tell me to shut up!" and he grabbed something like a baseball bat from his boot* and started to threaten me with stuff like "Come over here and I'll smash your F***ing face in!"

I declined. I was several metres ahead of him; toying with the idea of jumping the lights (which were still red), but I still held my ground and eventually him and his verbal obscenities went into the nearest house (presumably to show off his fine lump of wood).

So that's it really. I reported the incident to a Community Support* police officer. The thing I'm thinking is that hey, there were lots of witnesses, but would they have got out of their cars to help? I think ultimately most of us are too scared to risk ourselves in the face of intimidation and that's why it works. But really it should work the other way round, there's more of us than there is of them!

[* Stockport is in the UK. The Boot of a car is the 'Trunk'. Community support officers are volunteer police]

OLPC Deal: Give Two Get None

I really love the OLPC.


Well, I love everything about it apart from two things, they use an AMD x86-based CPU when they could have used a lower-powered ARM-based machine (e.g. an Arm11 or Cortex A8). And the OLPC "Give One Get One" deal only applies to the US and Canada.

For the rest of the world, the deal is: "Give Two Get None" since outside the US you can donate to give away XO laptops, but you'll never receive one.

But that's OK, I'll buy into that, sign me up Nick for donating 2 XO laptops - in fact I'll sign up for 4. At $800 it's still a great deal!

I'd like to donate in order to seed the XO in particular places: Zambia (where Dignity online operates) and in Senegal (where a cameroonian friend of mine has an interest).

But it's not the only way of doing things, stay tuned for a future post!

Mac mini madness!

Well, there you go. Today Apple UK are offering a special deal on a refurbished Mac mini: A 1.83GHz Core Duo Superdrive for only £499.

Except that... A brand-new Mac mini 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo with a 50% bigger Hard Drive in a nice box costs the same. Something tells me the 'special deal' isn't going to sell!

Pity, 'cos I'm very much a Mac mini fan. In the UK it's still the best Mac deal you can get: with it you can buy a complete Mac for around £500 (e.g. £399 Mac mini + 17" LCD monitor from Microdirect (£85) + Apple Keyboard (£29) + Trust Optical Mouse (£4.50)) => £517). The next best thing is a Superdrive Mac mini at £617 followed by a Combo Macbook at £699.

Even so, I think Apple should sell a... what I would call a Mac nano - a 11" wide-screen LCD (1024x600) backed onto a slow CPU with 512Mb RAM Mac with only Airport/BT networking and two USB ports. With this machine there's no Combo / Superdrive, no external video and just one RAM slot (occupied by the 512Mb). Then I'd sell it for around £350 (£399 with wireless Kbd/Mouse deal). The point would be some kind of satellite Mac good for internet stuff etc. Or is that what the rumoured Apple PDA is going to be? Or would such a machine be usurped by the (other) rumoured Macbook mini/nano?

OK, so my Mac nano might be madness, but at least it's not as mad as a special deal that's anything but!

Gunning for ARM

I'm a fan of ARM Processors - it's the most successful CPU on the planet today, by a factor of 3 or more. ARM processors go inside pretty much every mobile phone these days (it's possible, though unlikely, that some low-end phones don't have one); hundreds of millions of gadgets have them (from handheld games consoles to Network servers); they're so ubiquitous that it's worth using them for ultra-low-end microcontrollers[1][2] and it's popping an ARM processor in pretty much any device: the Marvell WLAN used inside the OLPC uses one for example.

ARM CPUs are successful, because they are actually a good design: Lean and Clean; they do more with transistors than x86 ever can; spanning a range of CPUs from <100k transistors and up to several hundred MHz with the Arm11.

So, I was really surprised to find OLPC failing to use and surprised further that Intel sold off it's ARM-based XScale CPU range last year. But now it's becoming clear, Intel are now anti-ARM and want to push their inherently inefficient x86 CPUs to ultramobiles and even PDAs.

With Moorestown Intel want to use x86 where ARM would make more sense. But probably the most annoying thing is their justification for it: "Second, if you want to get a great experience surfing the Internet, you need an IA-32 Intel architecture, because the Internet is written around it" This is just complete absolutely untrue FUD - the internet is written around being CPU independent - and that's how it should be.

People are gunning for ARM, we need to be more active when advocating it.

Performa 400 Paradise!

After I started re-using my 14 year-old Macintosh Performa 400, I just can't help raving about it! If you've never heard of one, then it's worth taking a step back in time to 1993 for a recap.


I started using Macs in 1986, 512K monochrome machines, but I couldn't afford to buy one until a year into my first proper job, in 1993. The best Mac I could sensibly get hold of was a Performa 400 - a 16MHz 68LC030 Mac with 4Mb Ram and a 40Mb HD, running System 7.1. It cost me about £1280 with a printer. Although slow even by those days it was fantastically versatile, I produce decently edited brochures; bought Think C and wrote some Mac Programs; I upgraded the memory to 8Mb; the Hard disk to 270Mb and I added a SCSI Zip drive and CD Rom. This was the machine that got me onto the internet in late 1995, early 1996 with Netscape 1.18 and Eudora 2.x for email.

Since then I've gone through a number of Macs: A PowerMac 4400, a PowerBook 5300, a tangerine iBook, a 600MHz iceBook and now my two main Macs are the 12" PowerBook G4 I'm typing this on and an iMac G5.

But I still love the P400, which I reacquired from my sister when they upgraded. It's great! For a start... it still WORKS! And with it's ethernet PDS card I can use an old web browser and also ftp. The neatest thing though is still Think C - it's about 17 years old, but as a programming environment, still much more productive than XCode. It's 1Mb of pure genius; efficient and highly usable for (really) basic stuff! And to think it's all being done on a 16MHz 68030, a cpu roughly 1000times slower than today's computers (over 200x slower than my G4), a cpu so primitive they wouldn't even put it in today's crummiest mobile phone!

It's like a trip to computing paradise - they don't make computers like that anymore :-)