What does this say about me then?

Hmmm.  I sold my Mustang and I bought a Cadillac.  Also in unrelated news I found a grey hair.  OK, I found a bunch of grey hairs.  Being as I have been dyeing my hair black for 20+ years its tricky to say how long the swines have been hiding, waiting to pop out and depress me.  On the other hand my Mustang was "only" a Mustang II with the V6 and the Cadillac is a V8 Fleetwood.

This is not a "grandfather car".  Oh, OK, it is...

I was feeling like I was rolling with the big dogs, blowing it up G style and all that when my dear wife commented "why is it you always go for cars like someone's grandfather would drive".  We have different stereotypes of what a Cadillac Fleetwood driver is all about I guess.

Tim Westwood must get this all the time.

The scourge of the evil clampers

Apologies for the quiet spot in the blog, life's been, you know...  I spotted this interested nugget of info on the web and its a bunch of useful info all in one place so thought I'd pass it around in the manual link aggregation stylie...

Yahoo's guide to what to do if your car gets clamped

The Hardware Hustle

Is it just me or is there some kind of conspiracy in the air right now?  In the last few weeks pretty much every IT news and online resource I use has carried an article on the dangers of aging hardware.  I attended a shin-dig just this Thursday where one speaker managed to get a reference in to the topic as well despite it not being on the agenda.  However as he was from one of the hardware companies I suspect it’s always on his agenda.

Is this just a chance confluence of events?  Or is the hardware industry trying to drum up trade using scare tactics?  You gotta know which one I favour.

You see I am employed to get a job done, and to get it done at the lowest overall cost to the company who employ me as I can.  We are not a charitable foundation established to keep Hewlett Packard or Dell sales bonuses high for Christmas so little Timmy can have an iPad.  We are here to align the business need to the available technology.  And if, in hardware terms, that means 5 year old technology then that is just what I will use.

Let’s talk about the environment.  I like “sustainable ICT”.  I follow the mantra of all the Rs.  (or is that a mantra that’s all a load of arse?  I do struggle to remember these days)

Reuse

Repair

Repurpose

Refurbish

Recycle

Replace

But it makes economic sense as well.  I am particularly fond of HP’s DC7600.  It’s a desktop PC from maybe 4 years ago.  I own a couple of hundred of them.  And I bought maybe 50 more of them off eBay for £70 a pop.  They are the backbone of my workforce PCs.  They slog on and they do the job.  They require no hardware maintenance because (and I hate to sound like I am the HP fanboi here) HP built them well, very well.  We bought cheap RAM, and didn’t scrimp on CPU when we bought them and guess what?  They run Vista and W7 just fine.  We don’t permit local storage of data and our principal business applications are web delivered (hey I can maybe pass this off as private cloud and look tech-sexy?) so the tiny hard drives common to desktops 4, 5, 6 years ago work fine for me.  They aren’t great if you have users who need a power user type machine or workstation so for those users we give them a new (or at least newer) PC.  Job done.  Seriously, we have had one pop a fan, and one fail a HDD, and that’s about the lot.

I hear people bleating about difficulty of managing old PCs.  Well, you are doing it wrong then.  We got off XP and W2K because W2K is old and sucks and XP does not enable a lot of the ace features in Windows Server 2008.  We had a business case, we went for it. Also a nice thing is that “longhorn” era OS are hardware agnostic.  One image to rule them all my precious.  And get your patching, updates, inventory management up to scratch and you can manage an estate of disparate hardware of various vintage and it’s no real bother.  There are some great tools from Microsoft to help you do this, as well as a bunch from freeware and cheap third parties. 

I hear further bleating (or scaremongering) about the fact that these old PCs are terribly insecure.  This is on the assumption that you are running a mish-mash of badly patched semi-obsolete OS platforms and so forth.  There is no reason you can’t run a decent OS on an old PC.  The FOSS camp will encourage you to run some Red Hat or Ubuntu estate, carefully crafted to maximise performance but I don’t think you get the easy management that way.  Prove me wrong and I’ll become a convert.  Pick the OS which works for your shop.  Avoid bloaty security products and stick to the ones which do what needs to be done and you’ll have the resources to run a secure network on old kit.  Also the older PCs won’t have come with DVD writers and so forth as default, non-delete options so you are at a lower risk of data theft.  Use W7/WS2008R2 group policy to manage data via USB and you are golden.  Older kit with a CD ROM only is actually more secure!

Energy use is often cited as a reason to replace your old kit.  While I am committed to every possible avenue to reduce energy consumption in my business (especially in our data centre where power = heat = more air conditioning = more expense = more power used = power circuit upgrades = more expense etc.) I am unconvinced by the argument that I need to rip and replace to save a fortune on PC desktop power consumption.  I have looked at people presenting figures on this in the past and on each occasion I found the numbers to be flawed or just plain wrong.  The last one I looked at actually worked back to say that our PCs used 40% more power than the whole power consumption of our company in total.  Beware the “assumptions” people build into these proposals.  If you have a nice modern OS and a nice modern server OS then you can manage Windows Power Management by group policy, and do it moderately well.  The newer the combo of client and server the better the results seem to be but this is still an area where the real world application falls short of the advertising.  Good power management is important for good patching.  Wake on LAN has to work.

This whole thing is starting to be less relevant because of the cloud.  Some CIO of note who’s name and company I immediately forgot says that Windows 7 will be the last mass OS deployment. In the same way that many (including Bill Gates interestingly enough) predict that Blue Ray will be the last disc based distribution format.  Certainly the variety of devices upon which corporate data is being accessed is broadening daily.  And I have to ask if you can pick up email and review a word document on a 600Mhz processer mobile phone why do you suddenly need 4 GB RAM and a 4 GHz processor to do the same job on a PC?

The workforce we manage tomorrow will be working in very different ways, or they will be Chinese. I doubt very much that the PC platform and the traditional server hardware will be what we are talking about with any great relevance, not in the mainstream of IT services anyway.  This push for hardware sales is possibly a death throw of an old industry.  Look how the big PC manufacturers are repositioning themselves as “business services” and cloud providers and the like.  Look how IBM, HP, Dell and the like have been reshaping their businesses.  I think that probably tells you as much about the importance of the old fashioned hardware refresh as does my ramblings...

This is how ecommerce is supposed to work.

I use a company called Rock Auto LLC who is based in some far off part of the USA.  I use them because it’s quicker and easier and often cheaper to deal with them than it is to deal with a local supplier here in the UK.  A couple of years ago I’d never heard of them, but now they are on my MVP list.  Why?  Because I appreciate the fact they have ecommerce down right.  Let’s take a look at the Rock Auto customer experience and you’ll see why I am impressed.

It'll never go back together again...

The website is not flashy, it’s not gimmicky. It gets straight down to business.  It’s easy to look at and easy to work out where you go to get what you want.  It’s equally easy to browse or search depending on your preference on how you want to shop.

Once you have drilled down to the parts you need for the car you have you are presented with a range of choices based on the manufacturer of that part, shipping location (vital information for an overseas customer, you want all your bits to ship from the same location to keep the costs down) and you can even see photos of the part, diagrams, spec info, etc.  Everything you need is there to make it easy for you to select the part you need.

You can select prices to be in US Dollars or converted to your local currency (in my case GBP) although they still bill in US Dollars so the price in your currency is indicative rather than precise.

When you get your basket together you select your shipping options. There is a well placed link to explain shipping options in terms of shipping time and cost.  Most shipping options then allow prepayment of the import duty and VAT (taxes for any non-Brits reading this).  This may seem like a small point, and to some an annoyance if they are hoping to sneak parts through the postal system without getting caught for import taxes but it really is a good thing because most carriers charge between £6.95 and £15.00 to process import duty and VAT at this end.  Pre-paying saves this charge.

The basket also allows you to include items “saved” (by entering a quantity of zero) so you can pick them up next time without searching, just go into your basket and change the quantity back to 1, 8, 16, whatever.

There is a live chat option which I have never used but seems a good idea too.  I have no idea what hours it is manned though, so those of us shopping in different time zones may not be able to use this feature as easily.

Once your card is processed and your order is on the system you get useful update emails automatically generated.  They are well thought out too.  For example your confirmation email gives a link back to each item you purchased, order status and separate link takes you directly to the tracking section of the carrier’s website which is shipping your order, right into your actual shipment.  It’s all just so seamless, its “joined up” and it works.

When there is a query on your order, for example I ordered a rotor arm as part of an order and this part was actually out of stock at their warehouse despite having been listed as available on the website, a real person sent me an email and the email contains hyperlinks back to my order and the item in question.  My options are explained and I just have to ping an email back to confirm my choice.  Easy.

None of this is rocket science.  This is just good ecommerce design/practice.  So why do so many other companies utterly PHAIL to offer a good web experience?  I’m afraid I have to name and shame JC Whitney as an utterly frustrating company to try do business with as an international customer due to the convoluted and slow methods of getting international shipping prices and options and placing an order to ship to UK.   Jegs and Summit also need to get demerit points because they charge a surcharge (around $20) to international buyers for no other reason than I guess they just can.  Summit were at least offering online international shipping options although that appeared to have gone last time I used their website. 

I have no idea how big Rock Auto is and how many people it employs.  It does however prove you don’t need to be the size of Amazon to offer a proper online shopping environment which supports your customers and has them coming back time and again as well as telling their friends how good it is and even writing blog posts on the subject...

Britain's angriest drivers, apparently.

It's good news for the persecuted white van man as a recent poll by insurance website Gocompare.com has revealed BMW drivers to be the UK's angriest. Although the white van man still features highly on the list, he has been overtaken at some speed by BMW drivers. Over half of the 3000 drivers who took part in the poll said that they had suffered at the hands of a BMW driver with the most frightening of behaviour being tailgating (58%), drivers pulling out in front of people (40%) and speeding (39%). And BMW drivers find that they are not the sole German manufacturer in the top 10, Audi, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz drivers are considered to be fiery tempered when they get behind the wheel.

See where you fall among the top 10 angriest drivers -

1.      BMW

2.      White van

3.      Audi

4.      Ford

5.      Land Rover

6.      Lorry

7.      Vauxhall

8.      Range Rover

9.      Volkswagen

10.    Mercedes-Benz

What rattles me about these kind of press releases (you want to guess who released the info quoted above? Huh?) is that it’s just rubbish research.  It’s nothing about the driving ability or “anger” of BMW drivers but it’s all about the social attitudes towards BMW drivers.  You take a straw poll of a bunch of people “which drivers are worst/angriest/most aggressive” and even worse give them a list to pick from and I bet that people would pick BMW and white van even if some bizarre act of parliament had banned all BMWs and white vans from the roads a year previously.  It’s just ingrained to believe all BMW drivers are...  because we like to stereotype people.  The BMW sticks in the mind more when it happens “Oh, typical BMW driver” but the 10 times you were cut up or tailgated by a Honda, Toyota, Fiat, VW, Skoda etc. does not really register.  You will note when ever these “worst driver” polls are conducted you will find “premium” brand cars make up most of the list.  That should tell you something.

If you want to know who Britain’s worst drivers are by brand of car they drive then ask the Association of British Insurers.  They keep records and stats on how many of what type of car get involved in accidents.  It’s how they work out “risk” which then goes into the grouping system which calculates insurance premiums.  

Steampunk Morris and other fables

OK, now I’m impressed.  I love that whole “Steampunk” thing and this Morris Minor has certainly nailed the steam part of that, STAT.  I just can’t imagine how cool you’d be chuff-chuff-chuffing through the traffic in this one.  It’s just beyond cool.  

I’d be tempted to livery it up in the logo of the Sodor Steam Railway Company or some such.  It starts my mind idly wandering to other oddball engine technology transplants.  I have often thought it would be a chuckle to make one of those huge mid 70s FWD Cadillac Eldorado into a Hybrid. My thought is using the electrics to run the rear wheels using a RWD rear axle should make it a fairly easy conversion.  Control systems would be a challenge though. 

While we are on the subject of steam on the roads, this caught my eye from yesterday’s Metro. Not so much the runaway train as the runaway traction engine but even so probably one of the most unusual accidents of the week...

In car computing - OEM style?

I’ve been musing what I would want out of an online car for a while now, there are plenty of guys out there constructing “carputers” which are basically in-car installations of PCs, usually to provide a high storage MP3 / video facility in the car but also some integrate other functions such as GPS and even interfacing with the OBD module to provide vehicle data and stats on a nice PC based screen.  Mobile phone network 3 now offers a My-Fi device which takes a HSDPA (mobile broadband) data connection and turns it into a local wi-fi hotspot, these are available for walk-about use or in-car now.

There is an easier way to get a PC in a car...

Ford in the US has a system called MyFord which links some vehicle systems and entertainment functions with online add-ons too.  MyFord provides a Bluetooth link, GPS, entertainment system linkage and also web browsing in-car.  You can check out the video HERE

Google are reputedly in cahoots with General Motors to provide an Android based online dashboard for GM’s US prestige cars in a service which would presumably replace OnStar eventually.  No scoping has been published but I bet Google is eyeing all that lovely data it can harvest with a salivating tongue.   RIM (manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone) has also bought out a manufacturer of automotive electronics recently.

Which brings me back to the question of what I would want in on online enabled car; perhaps the GPS could update Facebook Places with the exact location of my car so my friends know where I am parked and so TWOCers could come and lift it while my I am in the cinema (as my RFID chipped card has also updated Twitter that I am going to see “Battleship Potemkin 2:  This time its personal” at the Cineplex so I’ll be out of the way for three hours...)  Maybe not.

However...  I already have a CD/MP3 head unit which can control my iPod.  Bluetooth linkages with mobile phones are common enough.  Sat-nav is sufficiently common even my mate Steve has one (sorry Steve) and there is a proliferation of other devices which people are plopping into their cars (I am holding off on an in-car DVD until my daughter really, really demands one...)   The opportunity to integrate the control of these devices has to be a win.  Also there are loads of new services coming out the whole time, some location based, some not.  Subscribers to LastFM, Spotify and the like could have their music on the move as well as being able to access online content from your favourite WebTV providers, LoveFilm or whoever.  Ubuntu users can now stream music to Android devices and services like LiveDrive now support media streaming.  Maybe I could search for a restaurant close to my GPS position then check their menu and read a review and ask to find a route to it all in one interface.  I for one would like to dock my camera and upload photos taken at events straight to Flickr and update my blog...  Sure, I can do this from a netbook (if I owned one or wanted to carry one around, assuming I tethered it to my mobile phone, if I could be arsed), but this is all about the user experience. Putting the services where people want them and making them easily usable.

Maybe when you hear Apple has an agreement in place with Toyota then we can expect a fully consumerised UI?  

Review: Mankind Razor Pit

Mankind Razor Pit:  It will change your life.

OK, perhaps I’m overstating the case a little here, but even a little change is a change, right?  What we have here is the Mankind Razor Pit available from Mankind.  It’s a wonderful little gadget and its damned simple.  Basically this is a device to clean your razor blades.

Ever noticed how your razor gets “blunt” after it’s been used a couple of times?  You rinse it out and reuse it a couple of times but it begins to snag and not shave smooth or close.  So what now? You throw it away and use another.  And guess what?  Those blades are expensive.  You add up what you spend on blades and its quickly going to add up to the £25ish the Razor Pit plus P&P will set you back.

The thing is you see those “blunt” blades are not actually blunt.  You think your stubble is really hard enough to take the edge off stainless steel?  What has happened is that they are covered with a sticky icky residue made of body grease, hair, shaving foam, etc. which coats the blade and prevents it cutting.  What the Razor Pit does is wipe that gunk off so you can keep reusing the blade.

It’s so simple and it works so well.  Before I could get 2 or maybe 3 shaves out of a blade before it needed to be replaced.  Now I can use the same blade for maybe 2 months.  And I shave every day, sometimes more, I am one bristly mother lover. 

This is a remarkable return on investment, works on disposable razors and most types of blade, you’ll save a hod of cash and be far less likely to run out of blades at an inopportune moment.  Plus it means less waste which is better for the environment.  WIN all round.

Opensource – you can’t give it away...

I like a freebie as much as the next guy but I have never been much of an enthusiast for open source operating systems.  And neither is the rest of the world come to mention it.  Last time I ran a report over at NetApps it seems only about 1% of internet users have an Open Source operating system on the computer they use to browse with.  I’m going to be fairly cocky and state categorically that this means only about 1% of computers in the world run an open source OS.

Now if it really is the case that “everybody hates Microsoft” which we hear so often in the pub and on forums, why is it that we all still use Windows when there is a free alternative?  The open source guys will tell you a whole load of reasons why Linux, and specifically their favourite version of Linux is so much better than Windows as well as being free. 

One reason is that the blowhards and Linux fanboi types you meet on the internet or at techy conventions are a very small proportion of computer users.  If you asked my wife for example, she doesn’t give a monkeys what OS her notebook runs.  It just runs.  She can get on the internet and she can pick up emails and she can sync her iPod and copy photos off her camera etc.  Like most PC users she is interested in what it does not what does it.

Windows is the default because every new PC ships with an OS and that OS is almost always MS Windows. While the user is of course paying for the licence they don’t see it as a separate line item and as such regard it as free, or just a part of the package in the same way as you don’t get a separate bill for airline food when you fly long haul, the meal just comes.  You paid for it as part of the ticket, but it’s not charged for so it doesn’t feel like it cost you anything...

What is even more interesting is that (historically at least) people will pay extra for MS Windows.  I am reminded of the Netbook boom of a couple of years ago.  Many Netbooks were offered in Windows or Linux versions.  The Linux version was always cheaper because there was no OEM OS licence cost in there.  In fact, many Linux Fanbois point to the netbook boom as proof of the case for Linux.  What they don’t point out it’s that consumers rejected Linux. Figures from Best Buy show that the return rate on Linux netbooks was about 70-80% (you know I’d look way smarter if I could ever remember the exact numbers) and that most of the returns were exchanged for MS Windows versions...

OK, that was then, this is now.  Linux (and Windows) has moved on since then. But it proves that simply being free isn’t enough to make it happen. It also proves that all those advantages touted by Linux proponents are also not going to win any regular users over.

So what will?

User experience.

Ordinary non-techie consumers are going open source like you would not believe in one market sector:  mobile phone handsets.   Android has open source Linux at its core.   In the smart phone marketplace there are many established players such as Microsoft, Apple, Blackberry and Nokia.  Android is eating all of them for lunch, with the exception of Apple who it is saving for dinner.  How has Android got into this position?  Not by being free or even because of the ease of third party application development.  The answer is that some guys with a vested interest took it and made it work, and made it work well enough that it became an aspirational technology.  No longer do I want a smartphone, I want a GooglePhone.  Or more exactly in my case a HTC Desire-HD.  iPhone sells because it is aspirational as much as because it works or because of its app-store or whatever.  Android is just doing the same thing.

This is what the open source guys need to be doing.  And they are finally catching on.  Ubuntu 10.4 launched a while back and the interface was made over, the whole user experience was upgraded.  But still it did not quite seem to be consumer-ready, not in that same “ooh, must have that” way that the better flavours of Android are.  Now we have release 10.10 of Ubuntu and there is some really rather groovy thinking going on at Canonical.  Stream your own MP3s as a cloud based service to your iPhone or Android handset or to any other compatible device (PCs included!) which you may be using.  Inherent support for this sort of application and technology is what is going to make the Linux based OS the WIN for the consumer.  And while we are on the subject of MP3s and supported formats we need to get past the puritan nature of the FOSS crowd over what is and isn’t a “kosher” open format or standard. Sure, in an ideal world we’d all subscribe to the FOSS standards of freedom and openness but in the real world the consumer has DRM, MP3, AAC, MP4, AVI and Flash and wants access to that without having to hear a pile of whining about how it’s a closed standard and we should reject all but the true FOSS ideal blah, blah, blah.  But I just want to sync my iPod...

Security is an interesting issue with FOSS offerings.  Many Linux types seem to believe that they, or maybe their OS, walk on water. I have heard this from the Mac quarter as well. “You don’t need any security software on a Mac or Linux box because viruses all work only on Windows”.  This is not true.  The majority of viruses are written for Windows but there are viruses for Mac and Linux too.  Also remember specific malwares out there which run in a virtual machine like Java don’t care whether you are on Mac or Linux they run like the scripts on web pages run.  If you can access Web2.0 functionality of say Facebook then you can run the malware too.  “I don’t need security” is sloppy thinking and I just don’t like sloppy thinking.  Understand the threats and take appropriate action.  But recently, you know what?  There are some neat security suites coming out for the various FOSS operating systems.  I’m still dubious about open source in any environment which is really high security (I mean, you publish the source code, so only the good guys will read it?  Yeah?) but for the average user who isn’t running a nuclear facility or whatever, meh.  Secure enough... 

One of the big current barriers to Linux adoption though is the FOSS community at large.  At the moment FOSS fanbois are a fairly exclusive club. They like to explain how their stuff is better than Microsoft and so forth and they like to tell anyone prepared to listen how they should also switch to open source.  But really, I think they like their little club of l33t users...  I say this because most people I know, and I include myself in this, who have tried on open source OS or other significant product have come across the same issues.  The Linux guys will tell you “all the support you need is available free from forums etc.” and the problem is that, well, that.  Telling new users with queries that they are lame, n00b, need to read the FAQ or whatever when asking questions is not going to endear that new user. One line answers which are 99% code and 0% actual explanation are either stereotypical poor communication skills or a desire to look cool and clever rather than a desire to help and spread FOSS into the wider community.  Also the FOSS world needs to get over itself when talking about commercial products.  Telling someone to “ditch that MS crap in place of a proper FOSS product” is not going to fly.  Business users will very likely need to make FOSS products live in a mixed environment with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, whatever.   Much as many of us would probably love to walk away from complex legacy systems with expensive bespoke support and development costs the reality is that business sponsors won’t pay and more often won’t take the risk.  Again, the consumer will have toys which run proprietary formats and drivers which aren’t part of the open source remit and won’t want to junk these (not while they are still fashionable anyway).

Many Linux proponents talk about the ease of making your PC dual boot so you can retain all the stuff which is unsupported in Linux.  This is the one big thing I think they are doing most wrong.  The minute you admit Linux can’t do what Windows does - you prove to 99% of the PC using world that they are better off sticking with MS Windows.  Most of us don’t want a dual boot PC.  It’s more complicated and it’s a faff.  You are in the middle of doing something and you need to do something else? Switch between applications is OK but between OS?  C’mon!  Again, some of the Linux distros seem to be looking towards more compatibility with the non-FOSS Windows stuff and this is a good thing, even if the die-hards will call it selling out the principal. 

To my mind I can see Linux moving forward in the work place first.  Most users will use at home what they use at work because they can’t be bothered to learn two systems so this will probably drive the home user too.  The joy of Linux for the business environment is that users will not be installing all their own junk on it, there just isn’t the same ability to grab unauthorised (and potentially malware ridden) software off dodgy websites and so forth.  There is less opportunity for them to be installing their own communications packages and operating outside of the corporate safety boundaries.  So long as you can configure your chosen distro and OpenOffice and any other items you may need for business use then you are in business and life is looking peachy. 

With the rush to the cloud and SaaS the OS itself becomes less important strategically.  So maybe for some businesses a free OS and maybe locally installed office suite would be attractive with them accessing their CRM, finance system and any other apps of that nature from the cloud.  The big killer for this idea though is the incredibly slick ways you can now manage Windows desktops either remotely or even via automation.  It goes without saying to get the best of this you need to be up to date with your desktop, server and management suite (let’s just say System Center Suite because it’s easier to say it than afford it) but there are amazing efficiencies which come through this tried and tested stuff which many CIOs are going to be reluctant to walk away from even for the price of a free OS.  I can see the enterprise level IT being Microsoft core for a long time.

We’ve had a decade or so of people centralising around a Microsoft core.  94% of Office “productivity suites” out there are MS Office.  Pretty much every data centre has MS server OS running in there, and for many it’s the exclusive OS of business.  Now my crystal ball suggests fragmentation of this homogeneous state of affairs with businesses looking to a range of solutions or blends of those and some new players will be seen as the heavy hitters (e.g. expect Amazon to be real big in the business services space before long).  If FOSS wants to be more than a niche player it needs to come up with a differentiator which is more than its purchase price.  It’s done that on the phone platform, but by allowing proprietary technology and monetisation thereof.  If it is going to have a real stab at the desktop and server market this is a lesson the FOSS community has to learn, and be able to stomach.  

Googlebot autocar

It seems that nobody wants us to actually drive cars any more.  From Mercedes’ productionised “adaptive cruise control” and the Lexus that parks itself through to VW’s recent vision of the car as a shared community resource which I poked a bit of fun at recently there seems to be a fair amount of cybernews and views on the subject of getting robots (or inbuilt technology) to do the business of driving our cars.

None of this is new and the motivation for it is that very sage bit of safety advice from years ago that “the most dangerous part of a car is the nut behind the wheel”.  This was originally some form of validation for manufacturers not to fit seatbelts or collapsible steering columns or other basic safety features in the then new cars of the 1950s.  Now it seems since we have all the airbags, crumple zones, active braking systems and so forth that this last rogue element needs to be addressed!

Semi-surprisingly Google are on the case. Much like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer becomes a trucker and discovers the hidden “Auto Drive” function in his big rig the world has discovered that Google has logged 140,000 miles on public roads with a car which drives itself.  A real person sits in the car to keep an eye on things.  Apparently switching from Google Driving to normal human control is as easy as switching off the cruise control.  I am reminded of an episode of Chips where the guys have to chase down a Lincoln Continental or similar which has its cruise control jammed on but I digress.  The big inhibitor to reverting to manual control has to be the fact that as soon as Joe Public gets his hands on this he’ll be literally asleep at the wheel.

Don't mess with Ponch.

The proponents of this technology tell us that globally we kill 1.2 billion people in road accidents every year and that driver error is the number one cause of accidents. If follows that taking the driver out of the equation makes for safer roads and also studies suggest that “road trains” of automated cars cruising would lower emissions than the stop-start fast-slow snarl of our congested highways.  Certainly I can’t imagine anyone could argue that driving on the M1 on a Friday afternoon is any form of “fun” motoring and the ability to press a button, slip into auto and catch up on some Zzzs or maybe read a book or watch TV is appealing.

Its the Prius if you hadn't guessed

But I’m still way far from comfortable with this...  I’ve seen I, Robot...

NY Times also carries the news

The mystery of the missing cat

Have another little view of Hong Kong from my travelling camera.  I spotted this homemade poster and it made me smile.  I like the “Missing Cat (not baby)” element to it. I wonder if “Missing Baby” posters are common in the region and hope that they are not.  On this occasion its a little bit more about position than content.  You see, or rather you don’t because I got the close shot not the wide shot, this poster notifying the good people of Mui Wo about the missing cat is right where the sign is to “Mui Wo meat market”.  Juxtaposition which I found amusing but my travelling companions (cat lovers, what can I say) did not.

The Autonomous Car

VW have spent quite a lot of time and effort coming up with a series of concepts to support their vision of the “autonomous car”.  In the future, say VW, you won’t need to bother with driving because the car will do that for you.  Better yet, you won’t need to worry about parking your car because the car will drop you off where you need to be and then go off and park itself.  When you are done shopping, working, eating, whatever it was you were up to, you can use an iPhone app to let the car know you are ready to be picked up and it will come and get you.  VW even envision a future where people won’t need to own a car themselves, they will have a kind of time share arrangement in a car (or perhaps a pool of cars) which they then use as and when they need them.  They have quite a natty little video telling you all about their vision.

YouTube link

I am surprised that nobody has mentioned to VW that there is this thing called a taxi.

Jaguar's jet engine electric sports car

Electric cars are boring.  Electric cars are for lentil munchers and hair-shirt wearers.  Hmmm...  Maybe not.  Jaguar are celebrating 75 years in the automobile game (although William Lyons was making cars before then, but lets not be too picky) with this rather impressive C-X75 supercar.

Don't get too excited just yet as its only a concept, and likely to stay that way due to obvious engineering issues around the jet engine at the heart of it (yes, JET engine) but the productionisable (yes, that it a real word) part of the car is its electric motors.  Its these which give it the 205 MPH top speed and 0-60 in 3.2 seconds and 600 mile range on one tank of fuel.  Replace the attention-grabbing jet with a petrol or diesel motor and you have what is essentially a hybrid...

Who thought they'd be fun?

Hong Kong Garden

If you have been wondering what’s been going on in Akku’s World for the last couple of weeks I can tell you the geographic centre of operation was temporarily relocated some miles to the east, into Hong Kong in the People’s Republic of China.   I can seriously recommend Hong Kong as being an awesome place.  Its feckin’ hot and humid and despite British rule for 150 years they just can’t form an orderly queue but other than that they show all the usual required signs of RAWKING.  In just two weeks I have gained half a stone in body mass.  Normally you have to be pregnant to achieve that level of girth growth but I can confirm that with a little effort you too can have a body like mine.  It requires dedication, the right mind set and an awful lot of fried noodles.

Now I know it’s politically very incorrect to take the Michael out of people who are, well, foreign for their funny use of English, and yeah, yeah, I speak exactly zero Cantonese so lets see me do any better, but when a nation comes up with names for its towns and districts like Mong Kok, Hung Hom and my own personal favourite - Tong Fuk - then you have to wonder if they are taking the Michael themselves.  

The “Fat Ho elderly centre” is particularly unfortunate.  Whoever came up with the electoral district of Wan King was obviously on the last day of their notice period for sure. 

 

I'm not quite sure how well this established Hong Kong brand would do in the west...

One of many.  Too many to list here.

So on to the issues of signage.  Quite apart from the bizarre phobia of taking photographs resulting in “no photography” signs in loads of places there is some real interesting signage up.  You can tell a lot about a society by its signs.  Hong Kong is for the most part a well ordered society.  Hence there are many signs in the residential areas reminding you to keep your voice down.

This is also a country which takes no truck with skateboarding, mopeds, or even balloons in inappropiate places.  They take their non-smoking seriously too...

This sign left me perplexed.  Beware of your hands.  It was spotted on the bus up to Nyong Ping.  Perhaps it is more a metaphysical warning, along the lines that the devil may find work for them if they are idle.  I’m not sure I want to know.

I am also going to make an assumption that the MTR signs which say “Take care of children and old people” don't mean you should take up philanthropy, but who knows?

They also seem to have an issue with defecation as there are many variations on the dog doo signs:

I'd like to nominate the above for the finest use of the word "excrete" in a public sign 2010.

Sticking with the poo related discussion I find that toilets are often a place to read much which is amusing or revealing (even if it only Jenny blows dog cocks, 07802 8928991) but in Hong Kong the official signs are more interesting than the graffiti.  Mostly because they don’t have any graffiti in Hong Kong toilets, they get sanitised on a 4 hour rota so I guess there’s no time for that. 

I noted that one urinal in a public loo was “Reserved for the use of the Chief Inspector Of Schools” which suggests that either the Chief Inspector Of Schools has a hygiene requirement over and above the 4 hour sanitisation cycle or is perhaps has some other more medical requirement which means he can’t queue for the loo.  Let’s face it if it was provided as a perk in lieu of a bonus then the school inspections for that year must have come up a bit short.

I’m more than a little intrigued as to what burning issue lead to this stark warning adjacent to every hair dryer in every changing room:

What else would you use a hair dryer for and how could you get in any bother in whatever the other use may be?  Answers on a post card please.

The one which really left me in a state of bemused joy was this urinal advertising mat.  The fact that it is in a toilet and is from a company called Johnson is chuckleworthy enough if you have a puerile and childish imagination but the encouragement to “Enjoy your drink!” is curious and in the context a little bothering.

Down the drain...

There’s not much to say about this one, except that I snapped this happy ensemble right across the road from where I saw a traffic warden assault an unarmed parking meter...  

What is occurring, if it’s not entirely plain to see from the photo is that the driver of the silver MPV has dropped the keys down the drain.  A selection of passers-by have stopped to offer assistance, advice or just to gawk.  Someone has provided a long pole which has been used to jemmy the drain cover up.  Its worth pointing out that this car is parked on the pavement, on a busy road, on double yellow lines.  And then the traffic warden appears.  Said master of the meters laughed his head off and didn’t write a ticket.  This is a true story.  This really happened.

The days of the “dirty diesel” are over...

VW Golf diesel.  Ecowarior, yeah?

The days of the “dirty diesel” are over, it’s official.  Once regarded as the stinkiest, smoggiest way to get about the diesel car is starting to get some props for its eco-credentials.  For those who have not been keeping up with the history of the diesel car (in the UK at least) I can offer a potted history.

The first generation of diesels were generally conversions using tractor or boat related engines.  Stuff like the Morris Oxford or Standard Vanguard would be offered with a slow, clattering, smelly diesel drive train so that farmers and rural taxi fleets could run them on “red” diesel and pay no fuel duty.  This is illegal, don’t try it at home kids. 

Morris Oxford: available as a slow petrol version or extra slow diesel.

In the 1970’s a variety of energy crises, strikes and other problems along with greater acceptance of the diesel in Europe prompted a limited number of diesel versions of several popular European cars to be ever-so-slightly more commonly seen.  These were principally French brands and Mercedes.  Again, these were slow, noisy and smelly and not really mass-market cars.

In the 1980s someone came up with some research which suggested that diesel cars were more environmentally friendly than petrol powered ones and about the same time someone, probably a Frenchie, (hey, you think I actually bother to research this stuff?) had a brain wave and attached a turbocharger to a passenger car diesel motor and suddenly acceptable performance was possible on heavy oil.  Diesel pumps start to appear on filling station forecourts so you don’t have to fill your diesel car up in a truck stop and the scene is set for popular adoption of the diesel passenger car.

So for a while French and VW based cars with diesel engines, and a selection of other brands who bought in the diesels from VAG or PSA, revelled in good mileage and a good “clean” impression on the mass market who finally took the diesel car to its heart and sales of TDi cars went postal in the 1990s.  It was like Girl Power, but with soot.

And then someone says “research shows that a diesel engine car makes significantly more pollution than a petrol engine car even when the disparities of fuel consumption are taken into account”.

Ooops.   Seems all that sooty black smoke IS bad for you, and the environment, after all!

So diesel takes a back seat as an eco-fuel as more fuel efficient direct injection gasoline engines, three pass catalytic converters, and of course hybrids make news.  Diesel fuel duty is raised (in the UK) above that of unleaded petrol to signify its greater environmental impact.  The bright, clean, safe future is looking electric...

And then some folks start to question this “new truth”.  You see diesel development has not stood still in the last 10 or 15 years and new generations of diesel motors are cleaner, quieter, and more efficient than their predecessors.  This week Swiss government research lab EMPA has published research which suggests the diesel car is a better bet for the environment than the electric car...

Now for some time there has been some grumbling from the corner where people who don’t like hybrids and electric cars sit, saying “ah well, the batteries, when you take into account the batteries...” and there is a common opinion which has no apparent basis in published research that batteries from hybrids and electric cars are some uber-evil.  The truth, according to the Swiss, is more fundamental than that. 

Research says that the batteries in Li ION electric cars (and by extension hybrids too) are not a significant environmental impact either in terms of their manufacture and their end of life disposal.  The big issue with electric cars is this: How do you generate the electricity to charge the battery?  For most of us the answer is “coal fired power stations”.  There is a lot of controversy you can kick off over the cleanliness or otherwise of coal and oil fired electricity generation, and there are some claiming gas fired isn’t as clean as it could be.  The point being that if we want electric cars to be the clean sustainable future we need to be putting some significant effort into making electric power generation into a clean and sustainable business.  Now some people will be muttering that this is a lot of effort to go to when you can just get a diesel car and be done with it but it ignores two important facts (and one convenient but unrelated related truth):

1.      We need to address issues of pollution and sustainability in electricity generation anyway

2.      If we do so we can make electric cars which are more eco-friendly than diesel cars

Plus:  Ongoing parallel research will also result in cleaner more efficient diesel cars...

This isn’t about finding one absolute and perfect solution which will work in all cases.   Sadly most people take a polar view on environmental issues with all-or-nothing rhetoric and firm statements of denial.  As with much of life there is a lot of compromise involved and a lot of what the IT industry terms “blended solutions” when looking at tricky, real life situations.  For example it may be that in the future a typical family may have a Bio Diesel (or Bio Diesel-hybrid) powered mid size like a Ford Mondeo as the main family car, used for all the things you need a larger car with a long range, high speed operation and decent luggage and passenger capacity etc.  but that the second car in the family may be a small, mains-charged electric car like a Smart or some kind of Fiat  which is used for short local commuting, shopping and so forth (I’m avoiding using “husband” and “wife” tags on these but you see the distinction I’m making here).

There is also another point which everyone involved in car related arguments on the environment kinda miss out on.  The best way to reduce the tail pipe emissions from my daily hack (a V6 Omega) is for me to drive it less.  Really, this is simples, no?  If I do 200 miles a week in it, but then cut that back to 100 miles a week then we just had a 50% cut in emissions and nobody had to invent any crazy new technology to make it happen.

But how?

Again with the “there is no one solution to suit all needs”.  But really, do I need to drive into the city to sit at a desk to do my job?  Answer, no, I can work from home.  I just need an internet connection and a mobile phone to do a lot of it.  There are web based teleconference and meeting solutions, I can send emails, collaborate on documents and make telephone calls etc. and have secure access to all my company systems and files.  The only reason I don’t work from home most days is corporate culture.  There are loads of office based jobs where electronic processes could fairly easily be introduced to allow people to work from home.  OK, so you work in a shop or a bank, well, in which case then the obvious answer is a clean, reliable, cheap, efficient, well planned public transport system.  Same issues apply to busses as they do to cars regarding pollution but if you have to move people in bulk it makes sense to shift them that way.  OK, I enjoy driving as much as any other enthusiast but who enjoys sitting in a traffic jam choking slowly on the fumes of dozens of stationary cars?  People are more than happy to take public transport when it’s an airliner, you don’t see people demanding to use a private light aircraft to take their summer holiday in Majorca so why are our attitudes to commuting any different?  And yes, for some people the private car will be the only viable option since we’ve allowed so many of our cities to become poop-holes that nobody wants to live, work or shop in them any more...

A nice environmentally friendly bus

What is unfortunate is that there seems to be so much polarisation in this debate which is, after all, kinda important.  For the most part scientists agree that there is something to the whole climate change thing.  How much there is to it they may differ upon but few serious scientists actually take the view that it is a myth.  Part of the problem comes down to the fact that most people in the general public (and many in the media) seem ignorant of how scientific research is carried out.  Everybody wants a nice straight forward simple certainty which everybody can sign up to and then be done with.  The problem is that life (and science) isn’t like that. 

What happens is a continuing development of a body of evidence which is comprised of the validated results of repeated testing.  Some dude comes up with an idea, does an experiment to prove it then some other dudes repeat his experiment to see if they get the same result.  If they do then “peer review” has proved the theory, as far as it stands so far.  Even if they get a different result it may tell us useful things about the theory, how it applies, how it is bounded, etc. Occasionally a report comes out which is validated but contradicts previous research.  This doesn’t mean that all previous research is invalid.  This doesn’t mean the new report is crackpot.  What it does mean is that there is more to the original hypothesis than we previously knew.  More experimentation and investigation is necessary to find out what....

So when the Daily Mail prints “New report proves Global Warming is a myth!” you can be quite, quite sure that it does not.  What it may tell us is that there are flaws in our understanding of how global warming is effecting our environment, or flaws in our understanding of so called “man made global warming” is effecting climate change, but let’s be honest, we knew that already; this is new science and the pace of learning is fast and the amount we don’t know is pretty huge.  A good example of this being the revisions to the positive feedback theory which have made the news of late.  Its all about refining the science and improving what we do know with some certainty.

The so-called Climate Change Sceptics would have you believe that it’s all a conspiracy, and that its somehow in the interests of the scientists to “cook up” a global warming myth.  Hmmm.  Compare how many scientists who promote climate change work for solar panel companies or whatever compared to the number of people in the Climate Change Sceptic movement who work for, or are sponsored by oil companies...  I also dislike the term Climate Change Sceptic.  I would call myself that as I have a genuine scepticism about all “new” revelations in science as all estimates need to be revised in light of future, better understanding and so I take an open mind and accept the balance of the evidence.  Many of those in the Climate Change Sceptic movement are not open minded at all, and many are the same people who believe in a secret global government, the Illuminati, the 9/11 terror attack being an inside job by the CIA and so forth.  Science 101: check credibility of your experts and sources.  You can prove anything you like if you cherry pick flawed research and misrepresent and misquote the rest.

What also causes me massive irking is the “well what can you do? Let’s do nothing” attitude which is prevalent amongst a lot of folks.  An interesting report was published in the US of A highlighting different activities which result in different levels of ecological impact and the general level of misunderstanding which people have over their relative impacts.  For example, the report informs us that turning the heat down on your washing machine (say, washing at 40 instead of 50 degrees) saves more electricity / has more ecological benefit than drying your clothes on the line rather than in a tumble dryer does.  Now while this is a fascinating comparative fact it is actually valueless.  I have read a couple of articles where the fact is presented in such a way as to suggest that it’s a waste of time to line-dry clothes because, after all, you can save more power by using a cooler wash cycle.  FACE-PALM.  Why not wash at a lower temperature AND line-dry?  The two are not mutually exclusive.  Other “shock” results were that turning off your TV rather than leaving it on standby doesn’t save as much power as many people think as “most modern TVs use as little as 1W in standby”.  This assumes everybody has a modern TV for a start (mine is about 10 years old!) and also begs the question: what do you gain by leaving the TV on standby anyway?  Why do people care if it doesn’t save MUCH electricity, it must save some, and the power it uses sitting in standby gives no appreciable gain to anyone at all...  But it seems it is some unbreachable human right to leave your TV on in standby...

So what do we take away from this? Other than that I have too much time on my hands (meh, I was waiting for the bath to run, nothing good on TV).  Well, we can’t say with any certainty that

Diesel > electric

because there are so many variables in there.  We can say the case for diesel, especially bio diesel, especially bio diesel from waste products is far from dead. But don’t just think your 17 year old Volvo 2.5TD estate is suddenly an ecological wonder.  If anything I think the message here is that there is space in our future for multiple approaches as so many individual circumstances will call for different solutions.  Sadly too many people are pushing one-size-fits-all look agendas these days so my closing line has to be:  open your mind to possibilities.  Don’t believe the grown-ups, they don’t always know best...