So, after a little investigation, and with a bit of help from google webmaster tools, I’ve realised that the antique version of WordPress languishing here had a security flaw which had allowed some evil miscreant to embed malicious javascript into most posts.

A couple of hours later, and I think I’ve finally cleaned up the database and upgraded wordpress to a /safe/ version.

And with that this blog and can go back into hibernation, see you in another four years…

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joyous

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leave the guy alone, at least he has opinions – Boris for PM

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No, no, no. No matter how intelligent or sophisticated this particular Chimpanzee maybe, he does not ‘deserve to be treated as a human’; he deserves to be treated as a Chimpanzee. The real issue is what is appropriate treatment for a Chimpanzee, and by association what is appropriate treat for animals in general.

A Chimpanzee is self-evidently not human, and arguing that they should be treated as such on the grounds of 96% shared DNA is absurd. If one were to use that as a yardstick, then how much shared DNA is enough? If we drop the bar to 88% mice can be Human too! 50% and bananas are in as well!

Even if the bar is set at 95%, presumably limiting the new ‘human’ race to just the higher-order primates, what does this actually mean? Do Chimpanzee’s get the right to vote? Can they enter into contracts? Do they have a right to an education? What happens to Zoo’s, can they look forward to being prosecuted and sued for false imprisonment?

Unsurprisingly, it is this last question that provides what I believe is the real motive behind this ludicrous perversion of the judicial process. Money.

It seems that the person wishing to become the guardian of the Chimp in question fully intends to sue the vivisection laboratory that ‘kidnapped’ him from Sierra Leone in the first place. And of course, as legal guardian, she would have full control of any damages that might be awarded. To provide for the Chimps old age, naturally.

Either that, or it’s just a bunch of extreme Animal Rights nutters, and a lawyer who’s spotted a way to potentially make a huge pile of cash. I’m not sure which is worse.

The case does raise an interesting question about what it means to be Human, and what it is that distinguishes us from all other species of animal. But this is surely a philosophical question that no amount of legal silliness is ever going to answer. I can only hope that the Austrian courts show some common sense, and throw this out at the earliest opportunity and leaves the claimants with all the costs.

It began innocently enough: a colleague’s huge 17″ Dell laptop starting a conversation about what makes a good laptop. The majority view in the office being that it should be as powerful as possible, with as big a screen as possible. Even a 17″ screen being seen as too cramped by one who lusted over Acer’s 20″ 9810.

My view is somewhat different. My desktop machine is the powerhouse , and you’d have to prise it’s three 24″ monitors from my cold dead hands for me to give them up, but a laptop is something different.

If it’s so big and heavy that carrying it about is a hassle, so powerful that the battery only lasts an hour, and runs so hot that I can’t even keep it on my lap that long, I’m just not interested. I don’t see the point: It still won’t be as powerful as a comparatively priced desktop, and is only slightly more mobile. No, for me a laptop should be small, light, have long battery life, and run cool enough to sit on my lap for a few hours with setting fire to my trousers.

Much to my colleagues disgust, my mythical perfect laptop would be roughly the size of an a piece of A5 paper; have tablet functionality for ease of note taking in meetings (but still have a usable keyboard); have at least four hours of battery life; be powerful enough to run the basic apps I would use when away from my desk; and have built-in wifi and Bluetooth for flexible internet connectivity. Basically, a cross between a fully fledged modern laptop and a UMPC. Fortunately for my bank balance no such machine exists…

Or so I thought until one of my colleagues pointed me in the direction of the Fujitsu Siemens website, and curious little machine that seemed to meet all of my requirements, the Fujitsu P1610. And so, before I could stop myself, out came the credit card and a few days later my new toy arrived.

Basic specs first:

• Intel Core Solo U1400 1.2Ghz Processor
• 8.9″ Touch-screen
• 512Mb RAM
• Intel 945GM graphics chipset
• 60Gb Hard disc (1.8″, 4300rpm)

So, by desktop standards at least, weak, very weak. But, I’ve had it for about week now, and it’s an amazingly little machine, its size (just 23cmx19cm) makes it small enough to take anywhere without being obtrusive. In tablet mode the 8.9″ WXGA touchscreen is great for taking hand written notes on, mostly because it doesn’t get confused about where the cursor is if you rest you hand on the screen while writing. I’ve no idea how it does this, but it’s immeasurably nicer than any over touch screen I’ve ever used. Its also makes a very good e-book reader, being roughly the size of a small hard back book (though a little heavier at 1.5Kgs). I read a lot of technical books in pdf format, and being to do this on the sofa or in the garden is much nicer than being stuck at my desk, especially as I’m easily getting 4.5 hours out of the battery, even with wifi and Bluetooth turned on.

So the tablet functionality is good, but being able to flip the screen round and have a ‘proper’ laptop with a keyboard is really the killer feature. Especially as it’s handled so well, with screen resolution automatically switching between landscape and portrait modes as the screen is rotated. Despite being small, the keyboard is surprisingly nice to type on. The keys are small but well defined, with a decent amount of travel and a nice positive action. It’s no Model M, but it’s a lot better than a lot of the keyboards in laptops literally twice its size, and is fine for banging out emails or short pieces such as this.

In both portrait and landscape the 8.9″ screen doesn’t feel as cramped as you might expect, probably because the 1280×768 resolution means that there is a fair amount of space. Although it may make things a bit too small for some people – one of the first things I did was map a couple of the hard buttons next to the screen to <CTRL>++ and <CTRL>+- to make it easy to increase the font size whilst viewing websites in tablet mode.

It’s only real weak point is performance. It’s quite happy running the main applications I wanted to use it for: Firefox, OneNote, Outlook, Word and Acrobat Reader. But running them all simultaneously brings it to its knees as it struggles to page out to that 4,300rpm hard drive. The upgrade 1Gb of Ram should make a massive difference, but it would have been nice if that was the base spec, with the option for 1.5Gb.

Then there’s Intel graphics chipset, which while adequate for windows applications, isn’t going win any performance awards so high-end gaming is definitely out of the question. That said, it managed to run the latest Sam & Max adventure well enough to be playable if not perfectly smooth. It does have a Vista Capable sticker, but I have to wonder just how much slower that would make it, and I’ll definitely be sticking with XP for the time being.

The only other point against it is price, at about £1400 all in for the base 512mb model, it’s not cheap. But the quality of the overall user experience does justify that price tag.

So, if you want a truly portable machine, and don’t actually need blazing speed, I really can’t recommend the Fujitsu P1610 highly enough. It’s even managed to win over one of the most ardent proponents of the ‘Bigger is always better’ mantra in my office, what higher praise could there be?

First, and possibley least interestingly to anyone else, Life & Love. The desire, no… The need to communicate raw emotion, but not actually wanting to talk about it. Over the past eighteen months a succession of stream of conciousness pieces have been comitted to paper. Only vaguely coherent, with little focus and much emotion, the process of writing them has usually been cathartic and enlightening. I never been one to keep a diary or journal, but that is what these peices most closely resemble – a diary of emotional states. Herein lies the problem -publication of such pieces, even under a pseudonym, is something I ultimately have not been able to bring myself to do. This blog may have repeatedly prompted me to commit my feelings to paper, and doing so as definitely been beneficial, but it has never seen any of the results.

So with the page set up, but unable to publish anything that I’d written, I’d try to write about the other thing that most interested, annoyed and concerned me: Politics and the state of the country and Western Civilization in general. Despite the almost constant stream of political machinations worthy of comment and the seemingly endless examples of modern Western Civilization gradually collapsing under it’s own weight, I’ve rarely been able to get anything written at all. Properly forming an opinion and trying to analyse where an event may lead required far more time than I’d expected, never mind actually writing it so that it was interesting, coherent and readable – resulting in numerous half finished drafts going unpublished, and many more article ideas unstarted.

So, from now on, I’m just going write whatever comes to mind, whenever it comes to mind. The results may be inconsistent, half formed and sometimes downright bizarre, but anything is better than nothing. And perhaps the process of writing will gradually lead to an improvement in quality.

On the other hand, and I may be giving the ACPO far too much credit here, there is something to be said for a very limited amount of summary justice. The cliched ‘clip round the ear’ from the local policemen of my youth (when I were a lad, I remember when all this were fields, etc etc), did have some postive effect in instilling respect for authority, other people and the consequences of breaking the law, regardless of it’s illegality. In some respects this seems to be what the ACPO is trying to acheive with this proposal. Yet the act of officially granting the police power to dispense summary judgement seems, in itself, to be a dangerous precedent, especially when they are already virtually unaccountable for their actions.

The fact that giving some yob a clip round the ear is now seen as more harmful to the country than giving the police wide ranging summary powers is both baffling and worrying.

This is actually a story about which I, surprisingly, have mixed feelings. On the one hand it does seem silly not to be able to portray Churchill with a cigar and the attitude of the council is infuriatingly condescending. But on the other hand, if you’re going to have a ban on smoking in the workplace, and have it enforced by petty minded fools, then this is exactly the sort of rubbish you have to expect. A theatre is obviously a ‘workplace’ after all. No, the thing that really annoys me is the spurious logic that is bandied about as to what the ban is actually for, in contrast to what it seems it will really lead to.

Think about it, this isn’t meant to be an outright ban on smoking, or even a ban on smoking in public. No, it is a ban only on ‘smoking in the workplace’, designed to protect non-smokers from the alleged dangers of passive smoking while at work. After all who could really take issue with that? People have to work, why should they have to work in an environment full of cigarette smoke? It probably sounds perfectly reasonable to the sort of person that sees nothing wrong with banning things in general.

Except that’s not what it’s about at all. It can’t be, as the vast majority of workplaces in England already do not allow smoking and haven’t done for years, without the need for a government diktat. How many offices do you know of where people are allowed to smoke? How many shops? Factories? I can’t recall a single one, and given that it is in these environments that the majority of people in this country work, there doesn’t seem to be much need for a ban ‘to protect workers’.

The majority of ‘workplaces’ where smoking is currently permitted are places that are only incidentally workplaces. They are primarily public meeting places, in which people also work. They are restaurants, bars, clubs and pubs. These are the real targets of the smoking ban, they have to be, as without them the ban is utterly pointless. “So what?” you may say, “Shouldn’t people that work in these places be protect also?”. No, I would argue that they shouldn’t.

In contrast to ‘normal’ workplaces the vast majority of restaurants, bars, clubs and pubs do allow smoking, and in my experience those that don’t are usually much quieter than those that do. People expect that smoking will be permitted, in at least a section of the premises, the freedom to choose to have a cigarette after a meal or with a drink is part of the service that is being paid for. Therefore, people that go to work there do so knowing the sort of environment in which they will be working. To argue that a barman shouldn’t have to expect be exposed to a smokey atmosphere is akin to arguing that a fireman shouldn’t have to expect to be exposed to fire – it is a nonsense. If a smokey atmosphere bothers you so much, don’t become a barman. It really should be that simple.

The real aim of this ban is simply to further demonise smokers, it is nothing more than a crude attempt to force them to give up that which some find distasteful, or be ostracised from society. Looked at from this perspective, where the wording of this ban eventually leads us becomes clear. Where precisely isn’t a ‘workplace’? Plenty of people work in the street, so logically at some point smoking in any public place will be banned. If I employ a cleaner or a nanny, my home becomes their workplace, so I can’t smoke there either. I already can’t smoke in my car, as that seems to leave me open to a charge of Driving Without Due Care & Attention. A ban on smoking in the ‘workplace’ does effectively allow smoking to banned everywhere.

In which case, Mel Smith not being able to smoke when playing Churchill seems a slightly insignificant side effect.