Status-Q

I know that several people have been buying iPhones recently, but I wonder how many bought two in one day?

I have. Well, to be fair, I did have to take one back. I initially purchased the iPhone 4S from Three. But unfortunately, the Three network has almost no coverage in my home, as I discovered when I got it back there. (The moral of this story is to make sure that you haven’t transferred your previous phone number to your new network until you’ve tested aspects of it that are important to you. Fortunately, I hadn’t.) Here’s the Three coverage map of Cambridge:

You see that little light-coloured hole in the bottom left corner with no coverage? That’s where I live. Which is a bummer, because Three’s bandwidth, customer support, and prices are all really quite good.

However, I’m working at home now, and so being able to receive calls on my mobile while at home is really quite important.

And so I took my phone back into town, sorted out all the refunds and cancellation of contracts, and got another one. I was actually quite amazed that two shops in the centre of Cambridge both had availability of the iPhone I wanted. But sure enough, there was another 64GB 4S in black at Vodafone. And Vodafone, I did know, had good coverage at my home. Their data plans suck. At least, in comparison to Three or some of the other carriers. But, when I got it home, the coverage was fine.

And with Vodafone, there is an interesting twist, which is that if the coverage hadn’t been good, I could have bought a femtocell to improve it. I gather that these are not really very good, but since, if you have a contract, you can get the box from Vodafone for only £20, it seems as if ‘not very good’ might be much better than ‘nothing at all’ which is what some of the other carriers were able to give me.

Anyway, I’m loving this new phone. The camera is excellent, though I’ve only just started playing with it. Here’s a quick low-light shot from my kitchen:

But the Siri voice recognition system also seems to be splendid. In fact, this entire post was dictated into my iPhone, with only very minor corrections, and the insertion of links and images, afterwards. Writing something of this length, using a small phone keyboard, would have been a real pain. I am exceedingly impressed, especially considering the problems I’ve had with speech recognition systems in the past. The only downside is that it will only work when you have a good network signal because it relies on cloud-based services. But otherwise the implementation is great: there is a little microphone key next to the on the keyboard, and so almost anywhere the keyboard pops up, you can decide to dictate rather than type.

And so this has just been dictated into my WordPress blog page and I’m now going to hit save.

Here's a way to make yourself feel really stupid: take the SD card out of your camera and slam it happily into the slot in the side of your iMac, only to have it disappear completely. After a short, stunned moment, the realisation slowly sinks in that you have pushed it into the CD/DVD slot instead. How, you wonder, could anyone do something so foolish?

Well, here's what the side of my 27" iMac looks like, in a good light, after I have moved my head about 2 ft to the right from my normal sitting position:

I hope you'll agree that it's not quite such a daft thing to do. I certainly hope that, and so do the correspondents on this thread on the Apple support forum, where you can read several pages of confessions from people as foolish as me, and some helpful suggestions as to how to get it out again.

Based on one of those hints (Thanks, Cathy1956!) I fished it out with this elegantly-crafted tool:

It's good for people like me to have support groups in times of great need.

One of the side effects of getting older is that I have to take some regular daily medication (for some trifling ailments). Another is that I get more forgetful. So I appreciate the tablet packets that come marked with the days of the week.

I do sometimes suspect, though, that the manufacturers think you will take a particular pill because you remember which day of the week it is, and not, as often seems to be the case for me, the other way around...

One of the most useful sites I've discovered recently is called What The Font?

If you're wondering which typeface was used in a logo, a business card, a letterhead, you can upload an image of a few words and it will attempt to identify it for you. It works beautifully.

I was creating a DVD of a friend's wedding and thought it would be fun to have the font in the DVD menus match that used on the order of service. So I scanned a line, uploaded it, and it turned out to be Mayflower. A quick search found a free version here. Wonderful! - it could have been a time-consuming job tracking that down.

If you don't have an image, but you have a reasonable sample of the text, then Identifont might be able to help. Not as quick, or, in my experience, as accurate, but a good alternative none the less.

The whole faster-than-light-neutrino thing is an absolutely wonderful example of the scientific method at work.

How many other fields of endeavour would handle this the same way?

Can you imagine a salesman saying, "We've come up with this product, but we're a bit surprised to discover that it seems to do something we didn't expect really, really well! Could you check this for us? Is it as good as we think, or have we just screwed up somewhere?" Mmm.

Substitute a politician, or, better, a religious leader: "Gosh! Errm... We think this might be a miracle... Could all of you skeptics out there check the facts for us and see if we've missed some rational explanation?"

You get my point...

This is exactly how science is meant to work. I think it's wonderful, and it makes me proud to be a scientist.

In my studies of transatlantic cultural differences, I have pondered the fact that many successful American companies have been started in garages. HP, Apple, Google… It’s almost a tradition now.

The English, on the other hand, as a naturally modest race, often have more humble beginnings, and the first faltering steps of many companies here are taken in a garden shed. (Though I do have some good friends here who ran their company from a garage for quite some time, and then did very well at getting US investment… Could that have helped? Something to ponder…)

Three of my recent companies – Ndiyo, DisplayLink and Camvine – began life in the shed at the bottom of the garden of a rented house here in Cambridge. The house was used for meetings, for management, for coffee-preparation, but it was the shed where the important stuff happened. Though, to be fair, it was a very fine shed, with four desks, Velux windows and views of the college playing fields next door; it would be fairer, perhaps, to call it a studio.

About 18 months ago, Rose and I built a new shed at the bottom of our own garden. (No Velux windows in this one, though it does have three runs of Cat-5 cable going to it from the house.) We built it mostly just because we needed the space, but some friends saw this as heralding something more significant. You now how, in a movie, when a female character is suddenly sick for no apparent reason, you can tell it won’t be long before you discover she’s going to have a baby? That kind of thing.

Well, as it happens, I do have a project which I’ve been wanting to work on for some years, but haven’t had the chance. I’m not sure whether the technology is really viable, and I can’t talk about it publicly yet because if I can make it work, I may need to write some patents. But I think it’s worth trying.

And so this past week was my last full-time week at Camvine, though I’ll be doing some part-time work for them for a while to help smooth the transition, and maintaining close contact with the company whenever I can. It’s a great team, and they have my strong support and best wishes going forward.

First, I’m then going to take a couple of weeks just to potter about a bit. Other than visits to the in-laws, I think I’ve only had one holiday since I started Camvine four and half years ago, so a short break will be welcome.

But last week also marked the incorporation of my new company, Telemarq Ltd. Sounds good, eh? You know and I know, dear reader, that it means ‘Quentin trying to make new stuff work, while propping up his rapidly dwindling savings with some consulting’. But please don’t tell too many people!

You can tell them, however, that the Telemarq headquarters are in a shed.

Mmm. You can now download C/C++ apps to run within Google Chrome.

So the browser really is becoming an operating system. Or, at least, a sandbox. Soon, I expect, you'll be able to download full VMs and run them in the browser, at which point the whole idea of displaying web pages will be just one service your browser provides, in much the same way that driving a graphics card is just one function of your current operating system.

The main difference between your browser and your operating system will then simply be whether they think of the network, or the disk, as being the primary filesystem...

I had a call from a nice lady named Celine at Comantra. She told me that they were a Microsoft support partner and the information they had about my PC suggested that there was a problem with the Windows operating system and that my machine had been compromised by malware and viruses. If I was sitting in front of my computer, their support team would be able to help me sort it out...

Now, this was not the first time I had been contacted by similar organisations, and I wanted to find out more, so I asked about the name of the company, got their phone number (08000488005), got her name...

And then I yelled at her.

Ask any of the chaps, and they'll tell you that old Q, for all that he may be rather excitable sort of fellow sometimes, is not really given to yelling, but these scams really annoy me. They pick on the nervous and vulnerable and get them to fork out cash for a service which in all probability they do not need. Certainly, they know nothing about your computer - not one of my computers has run Windows in the last decade or so, for example - and how would they tie it to your phone number anyway? Unless they happened to be involved in the malware business themselves, perhaps... Anyway, in the past, when I've started asking difficult questions, they just hang up, so I wanted to play along to make sure I knew who was culpable. They know they're guilty of misrepresentation.

If I'd had the presence of mind, I would have used the rather nice response that I heard someone on a podcast recently recommend for telemarketers of all types. He would listen patiently and then ask, "I have a question. Why don't you get a job that makes peoples' lives better instead of worse?"

Nice quote from Kevin Kelly on the (excellent) Triangulation podcast:

The solution to bad or stupid ideas is not to stop thinking. It's to have better ideas.

Similarly, the solution to bad or stupid technology is not to get rid of technology. It's to create better technology.

An interesting start to the day today.

At an hour at which all civilised people should still be tucked up in bed, I presented myself at the dear old BBC Television Centre to be interviewed on the Breakfast TV programme. I was then whisked upstairs to do the same on Radio 5 Live before coming back downstairs again to do a slight variation on the theme on TV again.

And the reason for all this early-morning scurrying through the rather charming maze that is the BBC?

Well, it's about 20 years since the start of the World Wide Web. (Do you remember when we used to call it by its full name to distinguish it from the more common arachnean use?) So they've been running various anniversary features and interviews, and the old webcam story is always a good light-hearted one when most of the rest of the day's news is about economic collapse!

It's hard to pin an exact date on the start of the web, but it's usually taken to be Aug 6, 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee posted a message on a usenet newsgroup describing the project and telling people where to get the code if they wanted to try it out. Hence the 20th-birthday celebrations today. It seems amazing to me that undergraduates leaving college next year will have been born after the web, and will never have known a world without it.

One of the first things I remember doing with the web, probably some time in 1992, was writing a web server which was effectively a blogging tool, though it would be a long time before anyone would have called it that. It showed a page and let you type something at the bottom; that 'something' would then be appended to the page with a timestamp. I used it for a little while as a lab notebook, but not very seriously or for very long. I was really just experimenting with the idea of web pages that could alter themselves... And of pages that could be edited through the browser itself.

Status-Q came much later: my first post here was not until early 2001, so it's a relative youngster. But it has at least, I realise, been going now for more than half of the life of the web.

Anyway, here are links to recordings of the radio and TV interviews in case anyone's interested.