» 2008 » March

in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Benjamin Franklin’s quote is ironic, especially given this is the time of the year when everyone in the United States is busy preparing their taxes. I’m not sure he realized that one would be no bar to the other in the 21st century though.

Unfortunately, it seems that for some, death is no bar to their quest to get every penny they think they can from people.

In the course of the past week, two stories of miserly attitudes have come to light, showing just how far down the moral well society is sinking.

In recent months, there has been growing discussion online regarding the proposed deal between major ISPs in the UK, such as BT, Virgin Media, and Carphone Warehouse, and a company called Phorm.

The basic premise goes something like this¹:

1. A customer of an ISP signed up for the system types in a URL.
2. The page request is routed through the ISP to Phorm’s servers.
3. Phorm’s servers modify a cookie on the user’s computer.
4. Phorm’s servers forward the request for a URL to the website being requested.
5. The website being requested sends back all the relevant page data to Phorm’s servers.

… But not as we know it.

British Airports Authority (BAA) spent £4.3 billion on creating their brand spanking new Terminal 5 (T5) at Heathrow Airport in London, England. After months of preparation, including “live” testing of operations, it went operational today to much fanfare.

And promptly fell into total chaos.

The most embarrassing failure? The vaunted baggage handling system, supposedly designed to process over 12,000 pieces of luggage every hour - apparently, the workers were unable to log in to the system, resulting in flights being cancelled, and several that weren’t left with passengers but without their bags.

Regular visitors may have noticed a few minor changes to the site today …

The original “red” theme was put together in somewhat of a hurry, but it was missing a lot of the features I like to include in my site designs. I decided to create a new theme “from scratch” and “do it properly”, and this is the current result.

The theme is a port of one originally written for Joomla from SiteGround (though I can’t remember the name).

Losing both of your legs and one arm while serving in a war zone: £214,000
Spraining your thumb typing as a civilian Ministry of Defence (MoD) employee: £484,000

Value of veterans in the eyes of some: Worthless.

That’s the only conclusion I can draw in light of the recent atrocious decision by the MoD to grant such a small amount of compensation - less than the maximum possible amount of £285,000 to boot - to Royal Marine Mark Ormrod, for injuries he suffered in Afghanistan in 2007.

Science fiction lost another giant today, with the passing of Arthur C Clarke.

Most everyone remembers his involvement with “2001, A Space Odyssey“, but he wrote a huge amount of other “hard” science fiction work, stuff that is very set in “reality” as opposed to work such as my own “soft” science fiction, that has “plausible” technology.

I grew up surrounded by the novels of Arthur C Clarke, and his peers such as Robert A Heinlein and Isaac Asimov … In many ways, they “taught” me how to write science fiction.  I guess it’s a sign I’m getting older when another one of the influences on my writing dies.

I love space. No, really, I do. That’s one of the reasons I write science fiction. Between “Inner Space”, the world’s oceans, and outer space, what lies outside our atmospheric cocoon, it’s hard to tell which one is the most “alien”, and the most fascinating for me.

But space … To paraphrase Douglas Adams, it’s big - mind-bogglingly big. The potentials for me, as an author, are obvious.

Tom Simonite over at New Scientist magazine reported recently about a new development in thought-to-* devices.

Named “Audeo”, the device intercepts and interprets the nerve impulses your brain sends to your vocal cords, reproducing the words you thought to speak electronically. Outwardly, it’s just a neckband, but it’s hard to determine from the information what other equipment is needed, assuming the neckband is just the “receiver” that catches the impulses.

The device was “unveiled” at a Texas Instruments conference, with Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation, demonstrating the device in a cross-stage phone call.

The fourth (and final) season of Battlestar Galactica returns to the Sci-Fi Channel on March 4th, after a horribly long delay (not helped, I think, by worries over the writer’s strike). Normally, such a long time means you might be forgiven for being somewhat confused about “the story so far”, but it looks like some clever person has come up with a solution to the problem.

In online shooter games, I’m “The girl in the corner” … Unfortunately, most of my opponents are a little too young to get the reference. Thankfully, with the help of Google and YouTube, I found a video of the original song the title comes from, so here it is