A report on El Reg about MI5 reportedly wanting access to travel records associated with Oyster cards (report originally in The Observer 16/3/07) raises considerable issues regarding electronic data and privacy.
This makes me wonder what MI5 might want, once the Phorm system is installed in the ISPs representing the great majority of broadband users.
Our paper in Aging Cell describing the identification and characterisation of a Drosophila orthologue of the exonuclease function of WRN is now available online, and open access.
British Telecom have a Privacy Policy. I reached this page from the BT Webwise page, so presumably it applies to their proposed arrangement with Phorm.
We may share your personal information with other companies so that they can contact you with details of other products or services you may be interested in. We will only do this if you have agreed to this and where the companies agree to use your personal information for that purpose only. If you have agreed to receive information about products and services from another company and later decide not to you will need to contact that company yourself to let them know. You can of course ask us not to continue to provide your personal information to any more companies in future.
For background to this article, see the related story about BT's relationship with the targeted advertising company Phorm. Note in relation to the patent application that Phorm (under a different company name had form as a spyware distributor) . For more information check out the links in that story.
Thanks to a commenter at an El Reg article, the following snippets from the Phorm patent (which you can read at the Political Penguin blog) should be noted:
This morning saw the first of the North Bucks Road Club events in the 2008 time trial series. Ian Stokes arranged several 10 mile time trials on the Astwood sporting course and we had the use of Astwood village hall.
On a pretty windy day, thirteen riders turned out. I very nearly failed to make it in time, puncturing in Cranfield en route to Astwood. I refrained from getting too grumpy, as a passer-by helped with my annoying tyre levers! Having (sort of) pumped up the tyre with my very small pump, I dashed off to Astwood, arriving after the first four or five riders had started, in a state of some perspiration. To add insult to injury, I ended up with number 13! I quickly removed unnecessary clothes (bib tights etc), much to the horror of my fellow competitors.
BT have hit the news bigtime recently over their shady deals with Phorm, a company which appears to have a shady past that many allege involves spyware. There's a good overview on The Register. Essentially what seems to be proposed is that BT Broadband subscribers internet browsing habits will be forwarded to Phorm, who run an advert server called OIX. Web pages which use OIX to serve up adverts will then aim adverts at you based on this information. Sounds creepy? Well it is.There are several issues here:
1. BT trialled this last summer, an act they are loath to admit to.
One of the enduring myths of cycle racing concerns the relative merits of tubular tyres relative to clinchers. Convention has it that nothing can compare to the performance of a quality tubular. However, lot of anecdotal evidence is bandied around supporting high quality clinchers as superior to tubulars. I was recently sent a link to test data regarding the characteristics of tyres versus tubulars - this gives clear data to support this contention.', '
A couple of images to show the differences between a tubular and a clincher (links to external website images)
Seems to be a week for obituaries. Gary Gygax, who with Dave Arneson wrote the groud breaking tabletop role playing game Dungeons & Dragons, has died. The Register has an obituary, as does the New York Times. I spent a lot of time as a youngster playing a variety of role playing games, beginning with D&D. While I eventually moved on to other games (notably Call of Cthulhu) and eventually gave up gaming, I retain a soft spot for D&D, and particularly the original edition of a boxed set of three slim booklets (pictured left, and see the Wikipedia article).
D&D was derived from earlier miniatures war game rules, and was published by Tactical Studies Rules, later known as TSR. The company grew astonishingly rapidly (probably too fast), before being absorbed by Wizards of the Coast, a company that rose on the back of a craze for trading card games.
Riding the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up 25 mile event in south Wales has become something of a Team Grumpy tradition in recent years. In the past, the event has been held on the fast R23/3 (or variant) course, which features the improbably fast descent of the Neath bank, a hill that you don' have to go up again! Due to roadworks, last year the event was run on the R25/24, an altogether more realistic course - this course was used again this year. In 2007, the weather was astoundingly vile, torrential rain coupled with strong winds.
Team Grumpy entered the event this year with particular enthusiasm, as we plan to ride the Duo Normand again this year, after missing last year's event. Both Gerry and I always look to this event for a glimpse of our form; this year we were particularly keen as Gerry's had a bad neck, and after a winter of diligent training (well, as diligent as my work life allows), I came down with something that resembled winter vomiting virus exactly two weeks before this event.
This year, I received a series of increasingly gloomy emails with dire weather forecasts from Gerry - on the day, however, we drove over to the HQ in quite pleasant though rather windy conditions. We'd requested an early start as we had a lunch reservation at Y Polyn, a rather excellent restaurant we usually go to after the event, so we were the second team to start. The R25/24 course begins by heading down the Neath valley on a dual carriageway (A465). On the day, this made pretty hard riding, as it was into the teeth of the wind. Fortunately, Team Grumpy were working well, taking spells of about 30sec each. While I felt at the time we were riding rather cautiously, in retrospect I'm glad we kept something back for the hilly second half. After the southern turn, we roared back up the dual carriageway to the halfway point, mostly clocking 30mph or more, before heading south again on the B road that runs alongside the main road. This road's considerably more challenging, with many short steep climbs that throw you off your rhythm. Added to which, there were considerable numbers of road-kill toads! Fortunately the overnight rain had mostly drained away, and other than the aforementioned flattened amphibia, there were no pools of standing water (as there were last year).
I was saddened to read on www.timetriallingforum.co.uk that Sheldon Brown had died (see this obituary). Sheldon Brown's website is a fabulous source of bike information, particularly related to fixed wheel and tandems. He'll be missed worldwide.
I've just received a FrogPad portable keyboard, to use with the OQO UMPC I bought recently. It's Bluetooth enabled. The manufacturers claim one can reach 40wpm quite quickly, even for those who aren't already touch typers. I'm most definitely a "hunt and peck typist", so it'll be interesting to see how this gets on. Besides using the keyboard with the UMPC, I plan to use it with my (hopefully soon to be resurrected) iPaq hx4700 Pocket PC.
This is what a Righty FrogPad looks like (if you click on the image, you should see a life-size version). I bought the Lefty version, in white, with the intention that this would leave my right hand free for mouse or stylus use.
Physically, the unit seems pretty robust, with a slide on cover. It comes with a CD with a typing tutor (for Windows and Mac, but the Windows version seems to work OK on Linux under Wine), a retractable USB power cord and mains adaptor, and several leaflets and manuals.
Groklaw has a story linking the current MSOOXML deliberations to a Microsoft strategy document that's in the public domain thanks to at least one anti-trust case. (Note that it's a big pdf file, and that the groklaw story has it as text). The Groklaw story has many comments, and is worth reading. Is this normal behaviour for a company, or am I just naive?
Having looked at that document, this news story (Gates to tap young minds) sent shivers down my spine.
Well, actually, a bunch of American Baptists burnt an effigy of Richard Dawkins. It is pretty impressive that standing up for your views on life and religion can provoke such a response. On the other hand, they also burnt an effigy of Hillary Clinton (reportedly described by the fruitcakes as "a Hitler named Hillary Clinton – the anti-God baby killer who plans to turn the United States into Sodom and Gomorrah").
Wild stuff in the realms of a "god" who's believers claim is kind and benificent. Me, I rather like Dawkins' portrayal of the Old Testament god in The God Delusion. I notice the amazon.co.uk listing has garnered 700 reader reviews, which seem on first glance to be very polarised...
My friend and colleague Lynne Cox is chairing the organising committee of a meeting to be held at Oriel College, Oxford, in July 2008. This meeting promises to be an excellent opportunity for networking and establishing collaborations in this field. Lynne asked me to join the committee and design a website.
Click on the meeting logo to visit the conference website.
I have occasionally linked to news items relating to Microsoft's dubious tactics aimed at getting ISO ratification of its 6000 page OOXML file format as an international standard. Now the European Union has waded in with an investigation into Microsoft's actions. Reports from CNN and The Wall Street Journal. See also Groklaw's chronology page on office file formats, which provides a huge set of links to provide background to the situation
After buying a Squeezebox music player, I have recently been considering various formats I have music in, their relative merits (both sonically and aesthetically), and their convenience. Over the years, I've acquired a fair sized collection of vinyl records. To be honest, I rather like them - there's a sense of having to look after them, and the artwork of the sleeves has the capacity to be far superior in most cases to that of CD covers. Currently I use a Rega Planar 3 turntable for playback through a Naim Nait 3 integrated amplifier. They sound pretty damned good, too.
Of course convenience leads us all to CD. I have a good number of these now, and a Naim CD3 CD player.
What's prompted this discourse has been my purchase of a Squeezebox. This is a smart device, that runs an embedded Linux and hooks up through the wireless network to a fileserver holding audio files. The Squeezebox is in turn connected to the amplifier. It can play a wide variety of file formats, including mp3, ogg and flac. So. I've been ripping CDs to disk, and using the Squeezebox for playback. Is the quality good? Well, I guess not as good as CD, but that's countered by the sheer convenience!
XO Laptop: It's the Software, Stupid! - A nice post about how the OLPC empowers kids creatively. A riposte to a number of rather scurrilously negative posts circulating on the web.
Timetriallists spend rather an undue amount of time worrying about the aerodynamics of their bikes and of their body position on said bikes. I guess at least it's easier than training! Wheel aerodynamics are a frequent topic on discussion fora, but often the data are either non-existent or are derived from wheel manufacturers and are therefore unlikely to be impartial. As part of an ongoing review of bicycle wheels, www.rouesartisanales.com have put a detailed study of the aerodynamics of a variety of bicycle wheels online. The study has previously been published by the magazines Tour and L'Acheteur Cycliste.
The test setup
As with most such tests, the basis here is that the wheels are placed in a wind tunnel (the web page has some detailed images of various elements of the setup). The wheel under test appears to be fixed to an inverted fork, on which there are electrical strain gauges - effectively, these are what assesses the aerodynamic drag. The wheels are said to spin in air air flowing along the wind tunnel: it's not clear whether the wheels are driven, whether they spin due to the air flow, or whether this refers to a pivot that allows the wheel to experience air flow at different angles of attack. Drag was measured at wind angles 0 to 35 degrees. Because the more extreme win angles are infrequently experienced on the road, it seems that an average drag value is computed by giving less weight to the more extreme angles, and greater weight to smaller angles. This is indicated by the Gaussian curve in the graph.
My Pocket PC (an HP iPaq) broke recently, and while I was scanning various online emporia for a replacement, came across the OQO O+ UMPC, which was a clearance item at Expansys. Since one of the main reasons for using the Pocket PC was as a means of tracking my cycle training, I thought a miniature PC running WinXP might be useful. The other significant use would be for delivering presentations. So, how does the device stack up? And given this is the old model, now replaced by a slightly more powerful device running Vista, are these comments valuable?
Hardware specs:
