Online book shopping

For some professional development, and to see what Uncle Bob is on about, I decided to buy Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP).

I was impressed that QBD Online had a price (including delivery) of $53.95. This was comparable to Amazon ($53.18), and Book Depository ($57.54). (It's available for free online, but I think I'd rather pay for a hard copy.) I ordered through QBD. Eleven days later (admittedly some were public holidays), they informed me that they were "temporarily out of stock", and the publisher couldn't advise when more stock would be available. I wasn't happy, and asked them to cancel the order. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they responded very quickly (cancel requested 9pm, response at 6am). It means that I'm more likely to go back to them in future.

It was simple to order the book at Amazon. They said that the book was in stock. Twelve hours later I have an email saying that the book has been shipped. Nice contrast.

Energy

Every now and then, someone puts forward a sensible argument about energy - renewables, nuclear, fossil fuels, and saving it. A friend from choir (thanks David!) has just put me onto a book by David MacKay called Without the Hot Air. It goes one better by providing a comprehensive analysis for the UK. It's easy to read online (I couldn't put it down), and he's done all the maths to let you design your own energy policy.

It's remarkably spin-free: most people with sufficient interest in the topic seem to latch on to a favourite solution, and spend their time advocating that. But not here: this is just the data.

Maybe one day there will be a sequel that tries to assess the economics, social, and environmental impacts of all the different options. That couldn't possibly be done as objectively as this first one, but it seems to be a necessary second step...

I recommend you have a quick skim: http://www.withouthotair.com/

Links

Bill Mitchell's Page of per-capita & per-GDP Olympic medal tallies
I think I'm a bit like Bill - I don't like watching the Olympics, and I get a bit turned off by all the hysteria. But there is interesting data to explore.

Features Archive: MyEclipse Delivers Advanced Ajax Tools for Ganymede
I'm not sure how long it should take for the latest Eclipse to emerge from Genuitec, but I'm sure a month or two won't be noticed in the long run.

Meme Agora: 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
Useful patterns.

Commit regularly - advice from a couple of blogs I've read this week:
Coding Horror: Check In Early, Check In Often and clipboarded: for frequent commits

Links for this week

Seven reasons why people hate reason - opinion - 23 July 2008 - New Scientist

Cuil A new search engine. Performance not quite up to Google, but nice categorisation.

Who Are You Calling a Hypocrite? A Guest Post - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
And How Big is your Halo, a followup.

Muphry's Law - The bane of grammatical pedants.

These links will give some clues about some slightly more work-related things I've been looking at. Note that the title of this entry doesn't claim that they're all interesting!
Jena Semantic Web Framework
Pellet OWL Reasoner
OWL Web Ontology Language Overview
OWLED 2008 OWL Experiences and Directions Conference
SAFECOMP 2008 Intl Conf on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security

Weekly interesting links

Moral distance in dictator games
Interesting economic experiments trying to look at morals.

BBC - Radio 4 - All in the Mind
Time stands still or slows down when you think you're about to die.

what i still don't know: Tools: Enablement or Control
Some tools let you do things well, others try (unwittingly?) to force you into a certain mindset. Need to think carefully about software I write.

Courageous E-mail To Boss In Drafts Folder Since December | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
I don't know anyone who does this...

Google Knol (a competitor or complement to the almighty wikipedia).
I'm not sure I like what I see so far. That word "authoritative" bugs me, somehow - what a rampant post-modernist relativist I must be. But I'm glad there is a well-resourced alternative model out there, so that they can compete. I wonder if there will be any cross-fertilisation/evolution.

Interesting links for the week

Interesting/amusing things I've seen recently:

• The Underhanded C Contest - a fun competition to make apparently good "security software" that is actually insecure.
• Michael Nielsen » The Future of Science - How can scientists cooperate easily & flexibly.
• audiveris: Audiveris Home Page - Open source software for optical music recognition. (And proprietary software.)
• Cheap Wine - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog - fancy people can tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, but regular people can't.
• Severed USB cable is really a 2GB flash drive - Engadget - for real engineers.
• EclEmma - Java Code Coverage for Eclipse - generally nicer/simpler than CodeCover - an open-source glass box testing tool, but it misreports on Java 5 enums.
  

And old favourites:

• Version Control with Subversion

Scitilop - backwards politics.

And now for a word from the department of amateur political scientists. In a gross over-simplification, two-party politics can be modelled as a game where each party has to position itself on the well known left-right spectrum. Each person has a preference for a position on that spectrum, and will vote for the party that chooses the spot closest to that preference. The rational strategy sees both parties rush towards the centre.

What happens if we postulate some new behaviour: some people, especially those with preferences towards the extremities of the spectrum, may become "rusted-on" voters. A rusted-on voter won't ever vote for the other party. If each party suspects that its rusted-on voters are loyal, but that those opposite could be tempted to change, then we might find that the parties actually cross over. A left party might start to introduce more right-leaning policies, and vice-versa.
I think I've seen this in a number of situations. In the UK, the (left) labour party has decided to remove the lowest tax bracket, meaning that people on lower incomes have to pay more tax. One might suggest that progressive taxation is a left policy, whereas flat tax rates is a right policy. The left government is moving to the right.

In Queensland, the (left) labor government looked at daylight saving - moving the clocks an hour forward in the summer. Its prime constituency is in the highly populated southeast corner of the state, the most populous area, and the part with the most to benefit from daylight saving. But the government has refused, not wanting to alienate the more conservative (right) country areas.

The relatively new leader of the UK conservative party is much more left-wing than others in recent history.

The Australian federal Liberal (conservative, right) party has elected Brendan Nelson as its leader. He was once a member of the Labor (left) party. He has dissociated the party from many (but not all) of the previously right policies, including some in industrial relations, gay rights, and an apology to the Aborigines.

Ok, so it's not clear that on any single one of these positions, the right party is to the left of the left party. And of course the whole left-right spectrum is very artificial, and becoming less useful. But maybe that's the point.

There must be other articles/blogs about this. Maybe someone will send me some interesting links.

Snowed under

It's been so long since I last wrote. Things that I need to report:

• Trips we did with the Grandparents
• Dinner with Helen and Keith
• Trips we did with Glennn and Megan
• French Battlefields tour
• Paris, Champagne, Reims
  
• Trip to Germany to visit my 3rd cousins and the girls' 4th cousins - not to mention Castle Jesberg! (can't resist putting in a picture here)
  
• Grandparents return to Australia
  
• Choir competition coming up (and I have a cold)
• Joanna's upcoming trips to London and the Orkneys.
  

I've been playing around with a Sudoku solver as a hobby programming task. I could rave on about the structure for pages, extolling the virtues of my loosely-coupled event-driven design. I will confess that it wasn't entirely test-driven, but I'm getting better!

The extended daylight at the moment is interesting - I mowed the lawn between 7:30 and 8:00pm. I've had to put up an extra layer of curtain to help the girls sleep - they giggle to see the daylight after 9pm. And there's still about 6 weeks to the solstice...

Did I tell you the one about the airline fares? I rang Qantas to ask about a 1-way economy class trip London-Hawaii-Brisbane. They said that it would be £3300! I know it's not a very obvious route, but that seems crazy. Then they admitted that I could do it as part of a round-the-world ticket for only £1300. It must be fascinating to see all the factors that these people consider when they set their ticket prices & conditions.

Surprise

I thought it was interesting to find a Formal Theory of Surprise. I must read it some time. I found it when I was looking at surprise in complex systems - the topic of this book, which I'm also going to try to read. I might find myself in a university library soon.

Blog editors

Well you can see that I've been playing around with a rather large entry recently. It got me onto the idea of using some blog editing software - might make the pictures and wysiwyg stuff a bit easier too. How hard can it be? I consulted a list of Top 6 Free Desktop Blog Editors and a Blog Clients Review.

Tried Windows Live Writer. It kept trying to install other parts of Windows Live, and wanted to install itself as a Windows Update. I don't want something like that burying itself so deeply in my system, so I gave up.

Tried W.Bloggar - but it only has an HTML editor. That's not what I want. And it wouldn't keep a list of recent posts.

Tried Bleezer. When I unzipped it, it came out as a file that wanted to be encrypted, and my machine started warning me to backup my encryption keys. Scared me off! I think I had a quick go at using it too, but didn't get past the logging into the blog.

Tried Qumana. Seemed to rate well. It detected my blog nicely, but then froze. I couldn't get it past the splash screen. Seems many others have this problem. I reported it to the Qumana people, but we'll see what happens.

Tried BlogDesk. Doesn't work with Blogger.

Tried ZoundryRaven. Detected the blog, but had a few runtime errors. Wouldn't download any existing blog postings.

Tried Post2Blog. Clicked on the download button, but this software wasn't available any more.

Tried Semagic. Took me a good half hour of googling to be able to connect it to Blogger - not very helpful community (probably a bad sign). I saw a list of lots of previous posts, and could edit them, but only in HTML. Perhaps I can create new posts wysiwyg-ly, but that's not enough.

Tried ScribeFire. It's a firefox plugin, which isn't really what I wanted, but maybe. Discovered my blog nicely, and downloaded the 10 most recent posts. While ScribeFire was open, I posted a version of this entry, and then I couldn't get ScribeFire to notice the change. Minor point, though. I found it difficult to cope with the image upload process though. Difficult enough that I decided to try Windows Live Writer (WLW) again.

WLW was possibly the nicest interface I've seen so far. Once I accepted the fact that I'd need a Picasa web album set up, the image upload was smooth, too. Unfortunately, although it stores both thumbnails and bigger images on the Picasa, it doesn't work as nicely as when I upload the pictures directly in Blogger. I like to be able to click on a thumbnail and see the bigger image. With WLW, if I click on a photo, it just offers a chance to download the picture. Not what I want at all. So I've uninstalled Windows Live Writer. And the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant. And the Windows Live installer. (And you have to accept that it's an "unknown publisher" when you want to uninstall - much riskier than installing, apparently.)

Current plan is to use the Blogger web interface to upload photos, and then try editing text/layout in ScribeFire.

2008-03-14 Update: ScribeFire 1.4.7 now claims to support native Bloggger image upload. This could be good.

2008-03-31 Tried the image upload (in 1.4.8). Unfortunately, same problem as WLW - no thumbnail function.

Weather

We've been having rather changeable weather here for the last week. It's been rather cool, with sunny spells, cloudy periods, rain showers, drizzle, and today saw the week's second hailstorm. It was very tiny hail - almost rice-grain sized, I suppose. I started to wonder about the differences between hail and sleet, and with Google in front of my, quickly found myself metaphorically flooded with precipitous vocabulary.

Tomorrow sees Steph on an outwards sleepover, with Helen hosting an inwards sleepover. I'd best get up some sleep credit now, I suppose.

Am I prolific yet?

I'd just like to point out that this otherwise meaningless paragraph is entry number 100 on the blog. I'm sure none of my professional colleagues can believe I'd be this conscientious at writing reports. And let it be known that today I submitted a paper to a conference - I feel like a regular researcher again! Maybe if it isn't accepted, I'll have to come back and blot out that bit of the record.

Czech it out

Prague was fun. I can still remember most of it, I think, a few days later. I need to clear some time to write about it. But before I do, I wanted to look into the pronunciation of Czech words. I found what looks like an interesting language web site, which revealed a difficult looking tongue twister:

Strč prst skrz krk. (Stick your finger through your throat.)

Not a particularly representative sample of Czech from what I've seen, but good novelty value. There are other pages which might be simpler.

And a couple of other things that I've found recently that I thought I'd jot down, in case I get time to read them one day:

• The provocatively titled "Why most published research findings are false".
• A PhD dissertation Software Quality and Reliability Prediction using Dempster Shafer Theory by Lan Guo.
  

Herefordshire

Ok, that last post wasn't very interesting. But I had to get it off my chest. On more appropriate blog matters: we're now on half-term break. Yes, it doesn't seem that long since we were on Christmas holidays. That's what happens when Easter comes this early.

Things to report:
Stephanie had fun at the Birmingham ThinkTank science museum on Monday, and enjoyed the planetarium part. They also expanded their friction study in an entertaining way, with teams making different types of cars to race.

Helen was a Rat (in constume) in the Chinese New Year activity at school on Friday.

Yesterday we went for a drive to Berrington Hall, a National Property place in North Herefordshire. The building wasn't open, but the grounds were, to show off all the flowers given the early spring we seem to be having. I seem to have a personality flaw that doesn't allow me to get properly excited about large numbers of snowdrop flowers and the odd daffodil.

We delivered Stephanie to a school-friend's place at Yarkhill for a slumber party (although reports indicate that there was very little slumber to be had, especially for the Dad who had to go and sit in the bedroom at 1am to encourage silence).

Having one child away was a perfect excuse to get a takeaway Thai dinner - our first since being in the UK. The Indians must outnumber Thai restaurants by 10:1 or so - nothing like Australia. The food didn't seem as tasty as in Brisbane, but I feel we may need to have another try.

Herefordshire beckoned again this morning. After collecting Stephanie, we wanted to go to another National Trust place, keen to exploit our annual membership purchased the previous day. But the Weir Garden wouldn't open until 11am, so we popped into Hereford city for morning tea. We walked around in the 0° fog looking at the close-up sights, and then found our way to a Marks and Spencer cafeteria for morning tea - more scones, jam, and cream! The fog was slightly thinner (if you're optimistic) by the time we got to the garden. I thought it was a very nice place: a relatively steep bank with paths meandering through flowers, trees, and shrubs, past a fast flowing river Severn. I think the fog added to the atmosphere, although I think the majority opinion was contrary. I was a bit of a party-pooper and sat in the car to review some work papers while the others explored more at leisure.


We made it home just in time for me to disappear Gloucesterwards for a Howells feature evensong. The Gloucester Service, with Like as the Hart and Take Him Earth for Cherishing, a psalm chant, and even a Rhapsody in C Sharp Minor postlude. Far too rapturous for lent, but as Rupert pointed out, Sundays aren't really part of lent. Maybe I should go and have some chocolate before it gets too late! The sermon (not a regular feature at evensong) concerned Archbishop Rowan Williams and the furore over his Shariah remarks. The Dean suggested that most of the commentators who were complaining about the remarks could not have read or understood them - and he compared this to people who derided Jesus for dining with tax collectors and sinners.

I find the whole debate very interesting, and it reminds me of Barry Jones presenting a complex science policy about 15 years ago. It was labelled the "spaghetti and meatballs policy" after the complex diagram that he showed off. It seems to be very dangerous for an academic to try to present a complex idea to the masses. I suppose that even if the reporters understand the issue, they will have to make headlines that sell, and the competition is probably a "race to the bottom". I wonder if there's a way for society to avoid this...

The BBC seems to have a huge number of interviewees with "moderate" points of view, talking about how Jewish and Islamic arbitration already happens in the UK. But it doesn't hose down the problems. Some of the church people making the most inflammatory remarks (can you tell which side I'm on yet?) seem to have prior record of disagreeing with Williams.

Evidence, support, plausibility, belief, probability.

I've been reading about mathematical theories of "evidence" - how one should draw conclusions based on different types of (perhaps conflicting) evidence. Dempster-Schafer seems to be the big name, although there are a few offshoots from this that deal with different areas where DS doesn't seem to produce intuitively correct outputs. I find it interesting that "science" is so fundamentally based on the concept of experimental support for theories, but that there isn't a good single theory for describing how evidence supports conclusions.

If you type Dempster Schafer into Google, the first result is a DSTO report, which outlines the concepts nicely, and has a good comparison with Bayes' probabilities.

Although I'm a Wikipedia fan, its article in this area isn't so good, I don't think. The best thing was that it pointed me (in the last reference) to a very clearly written Masters thesis which sums it all up nicely.

Oh, and by the way, it is actually work-related! I feel lucky to be able to read about such interesting things in my work, but a bit embarrassed that I wasn't already aware of such things.

Dropping marbles, skipping lectures.

A nice Freakonomics post led me to see what happens when you drop a marble in a sandpit. Check out the videos showing how these physicists attract their future students. They should have no problems.

A related Freakonomics post attracted a comment describing auctioning the rights to skip lectures.

Australian Election

Well, some pluses, some minuses. The Senate vote is the saddest part for me - especially the Queensland figures. I assume the ABC's figures are based on people voting above the line, and perhaps the Democrat supporters are the least likely to do that, but it's sad to see there will be no Democrats in the Senate. It's a shame that their conscientious and important contribution was not more widely appreciated. The Greens have a responsibility to try to fill these big shoes now, otherwise indications are we'll see the impact of sloppy legislation in the years to come.

It doesn't look to me like John Howard will be able to hold onto his seat. I think that Kevin Rudd has had to be rather conservative (whatever that means, these days), and also adopted a great deal of spin-doctoring (like the Liberals too) to achieve what he has. That's mostly unfortunate, but it's the rational approach, given the behaviour of the other parties and the voting public.

The most pleasing thing is to see that no single party will have control of the senate - at least after June next year. It seems that we'll have 37 Liberals and 1 Family First on the approximately conservative side, and 32 Labor, 5 Green, and Nick Xenophon on the other, although that categorisation is imperfect.

It will be interesting to observe the Coalition leadership process, now that Peter Costello had stepped down. I wonder if the coalition will want to demonstrate a move towards the centre.

Senate preferences

It's interesting to see the senate "above the line" preference distributions for the Australian elections, and how misleading they might be. You could look at the Queensland preferences here. Perhaps you'd have to be gullible to think that the "DLP Democratic Labor Party"preferences would go to Labor. They go to Fred Nile, then the Liberals. The Australian Shooters Party does too. The Fishing Party votes go straight to the Liberals, but the Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party votes go to Family First, then the Nationals (but not the Liberals). "One Nation WA" preferences go to Family First, and they put "Pauline" way down the list, but Pauline's go straight to One Nation WA, and then to Family First. The wacky Citizens Electoral Council (who allegedly want the repeal of GST) throw preferences straight to Liberals. Arguably the most misleading arrangement is that the "Non custodial parents party" give preferences to Family First.

I suppose we have to be glad that we get the governments we deserve.

More from GetUp.

Interesting links

Just for a change, here's some geeky stuff that I want to remember/share.

I try to skim Freakonomics occasionally. Risk perception and smoking. Thoughts about selling votes.
Worse than failure: curious perversions in information technology is cute too.

Spring Security (previously known as Acegi) is updated. In fact the whole Spring Framework is updated, now at version 2.5. I haven't caught up with it all, but I want to understand why the Spring people are keen on annotations - last I heard they weren't.

I've been reading some Martin Fowler. The Time Modelling business is interesting, especially in relation to the Time Bands concepts reported earlier.

Some public sources that I'm reacting to in thoughts about security architectures:

• Jason: Horizontal Integration
  
• Commission on protecting and reducing secrecy in government
• FuzzyMLS
• How confident are you that a system behaves? What if there are multiple arguments?
  

Pound sign

I can now type a "£" symbol. It was surprisingly difficult to achieve.

I had to add the US English (International) keyboard, in addition to the Australian English (US) keyboard. I can switch between keyboard layouts with shift-leftAlt. One would thing that having an international keyboard would be the best option, but because there are so many accents and weird characters, it's a bit odd. For example, when I'm in international mode, and I press the ", nothing shows up until I type the next character. It waits to see if I type a special sequence that might mean, for example, ö or ü. So I'll spend most of my time in good-old Australian mode, until I find myself needing to use these special characters.

Thanks to Penn State University for providing the advice.

And why do people call # a "pound sign"? And why is the £ that shape? Is it anything to do with the abbreviation for pound (weight) being "lb"? More on these questions some other time.