but she's a girl combo feed

Bike rage

Thu, 15 May 2008 11:02 GMT

Perhaps it's because it is Bike to Work day today in San Francisco, but there seems to have been a lot of controversy stirred up on the web this week by the gentle art of cycling.

First, there was the ridiculous assertion that cycling is less efficient in terms of energy consumption than driving, as if we -- in developed countries -- need to consume any extra food to fuel our cycle rides or as if drivers fast to compensate for the energy not used when driving their cars. I could go on...

And then a post by jwz, offering his own advice for people wanting to start cycling in San Francisco, attracted an enormous pile of enraged comments, many from other cyclists upset by his recommendation to "Never take bike advice from anyone who owns bike shorts, clip shoes, a messenger bag, or a fixie." I don't necessarily agree with all his advice either (though he did make it clear that it was specific to the cycling situation in San Francisco), but I wouldn't get upset about it. People cycle for all kinds of different reasons, and have their own preferences, requirements and constraints. There really is more than one way to do it.

I suppose that I don't understand why cycling inspires such ire in people. If you're not being harassed by drivers (or anyone else who seems to take it as a personal rebuke that you are using a eco-friendly mode of transportation), or or pedestrians, or being taunted by gangs of school children, or having your tyres shredded by the glassy remains of outdoor binge-drinking sessions that seem a permanent fixture next to every park bench in Birmingham, other cyclists also seem to want to join in.

Of course, some cyclists act like idiots, just like some drivers and some pedestrians, but does that have to mean that the rest of us who just want to potter quietly to work have to take the rap? In that context, watching this video of a school run in the Netherlands (via Velorution) made me want to cry -- it's like glimpsing Utopia. All those comfortable, sensible, load-bearing bikes! The broad, glass-free, well-maintained cycle paths! The people cycling calmly along in their ordinary clothes, and not wearing helmets! The hordes of children cycling with their parents! Sigh.

bag is hot [ma.gnolia]

Mon, 12 May 2008 02:37 GMT

Tumblelog by musician Joseph Arthur, complete with tracks.

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Tags: music

bag is hot

Mon, 12 May 2008 02:37 GMT

Tumblelog by musician Joseph Arthur, complete with tracks.

Saved By: bsag | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: music

tms [fernLightning] [ma.gnolia]

Mon, 12 May 2008 02:36 GMT

Interesting-looking tool which allows you to see your Time Machine backups as something similar to a VCS.

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Tags: command-line, timemachine

tms [fernLightning]

Mon, 12 May 2008 02:36 GMT

Interesting-looking tool which allows you to see your Time Machine backups as something similar to a VCS.

Saved By: bsag | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: command-line, timemachine

Wasp's nest

Sat, 10 May 2008 09:22 GMT

Wasp's nest

A close up of a fragment of wasp nest which was in our loft.

Taken in Birmingham with Casio Exilim EX-Z40

Wasp's nest fragment

Sat, 10 May 2008 09:22 GMT

Wasp's nest fragment

Chunk of wasp's nest from our loft. The whole thing was the size of a large watermelon. I love the regularity of the cells - amazing that it's all made of paper.

Taken in Birmingham with Casio Exilim EX-Z40

Thinking with Tinderbox

Sat, 10 May 2008 09:22 GMT

I've been trying to write another grant proposal recently (a seemingly Sisyphean task for academics), but I ended up a bit stuck. It was a collaborative idea that a colleague and I sketched out last year, but which -- for one reason or another -- ended up on the back-burner for a while. I was really struggling to pull it together. We had plenty of ideas, but I was having trouble rearranging and grouping them into a sensible structure and seeing gaps that needed to be filled. Finally, I decided to blow the dust of my copy of Tinderbox and try that.

I wish I'd done it earlier. I used to use Tinderbox a lot for writing notes and organising ideas¹, but newer, shinier applications have come along, and I've gradually turned to them. But Tinderbox is still a great tool, and it really excels at visual brainstorming. If you open a map view, you can just hammer out short notes containing all your ideas, then group them into similar themes later. With a linear outliner (a view which Tinderbox also has), you end up worrying more about where stuff should fit than what the important ideas are.

Once I'd got all the ideas down, I made some adornments ('sticky notes' on the page to visually group notes), and started moving notes around, first into similar ideas, then dividing them into aims, questions, hypotheses, techniques and random things to remember. Once that was done, I moved back to the linear outline view, and tidied things up, fleshing out the outline a bit as I went. It was really effective, and almost fun²! While Tinderbox can export notes quite easily as text (or HTML or XML), I probably won't bother to do so in this case, because I was just using it as a tool for thinking rather than writing. I've started to write the final document with the Tinderbox outline view open to guide my writing, and it's working really well.

¹ I even constructed, managed and wrote this weblog with it when I first started blogging. ↑

² Something which can make grant writing even almost fun is a miraculous tool, in my opinion. ↑

Crab apple blossom

Sat, 10 May 2008 09:22 GMT

Crab apple blossom

A crab apple overhanging the canal towpath.

Taken in Kings Norton, Birmingham with Casio Exilim EX-Z40

Ontario bakery succeeds with honor payment system - Boing Boing

Wed, 07 May 2008 02:34 GMT

Interesting that they lose very little: some people forget to pay or cheat, but a roughly corresponding number overpay.

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Tags: psychology, economics

Ontario bakery succeeds with honor payment system - Boing Boing [ma.gnolia]

Wed, 07 May 2008 02:34 GMT

Interesting that they lose very little: some people forget to pay or cheat, but a roughly corresponding number overpay.

Saved By: bsag | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: psychology, economics

Fraud

Tue, 06 May 2008 12:44 GMT

A couple of days ago, I came home to find that I had received a call from the security department of my credit card provider. I panicked a bit, of course, but called them straight away. They told me that they had flagged up a couple of transactions as suspicious, and gave me the details of the dodgy items. To my great relief, the transactions had actually been made by me, so there was no problem.

I have no idea why those particular transactions were seen as suspicious, but I'd certainly rather have a few false positives than for them to miss genuinely fraudulent transactions. I was also quite impressed that they phoned me to check. However, the whole experience did feel a little bit like my Mum reading my credit card statement and pointing out items in a slightly disapproving way: "Now, this one here -- did you really need to buy that, it was rather pricey. And this one, what was that for?"

New TV

Sun, 04 May 2008 11:41 GMT

It must the technology breakdown season or something: after the amp blew a capacitor, both our ancient TV and the less ancient Freeview box started to go on the blink. The Freeview box was crashing and needed to be rebooted and retuned several times a week, always -- as luck would have it -- just as some programme we wanted to catch from the beginning was starting. When I was a kid, we used to have to turn our old black and white set on a few minutes early to let it 'warm up', so this didn't feel like great progress. The TV was also having picture and sound problems, which pretty much covers all the critical elements necessary for a satisfying TV-watching experience.

So we bit the bullet and joined the 21st Century by buying a widescreen LCD TV which was in a sale. After living with a 20 inch 4:3 format CRT screen for so many years, the 32 inch 16:9 TV seems gigantic. No more do we have to squint at the narrow strip of slightly fuzzy picture when sitting more than a couple of metres away. It has made the whole TV, DVD or EyeTV recording-watching process much more enjoyable now that we can actually see the visual details properly and hear the dialogue and sound effects clearly.

The radical change in the quality of our viewing experience (and the earlier improvement in our listening setup with the new amp) prompted me to rearrange the living room. The room isn't large, so rearranging the furniture is a bit like a slightly frustrating game of Tetris, but I think the new arrangement works better. We used to have the sofa at one side of the living room and quite close to the TV because of the size of the screen. This meant that we were at an awkward angle to it, and had the speakers on the other side of the room, at right angles to the TV. Now that we can sit a healthy distance from the screen and still see it, we could put the sofa across the end of the room, facing the TV. That also meant that I had space to move the speakers either side of the TV, so that we can supplement the TV's speakers with the floorstanders -- it's poor-man's surround sound, but it definitely adds to the experience. Also, since the speakers are firing down the long axis of the room instead of the short axis, it works better with the acoustics of the room.

The expression of Cleo (our cat) the first time she walked into the rearranged room was priceless. She looked at where the sofa used to be and did the closest thing I've ever seen to a double-take in a cat. Then she looked at me with a "What the hell's going on? Where's all my stuff?" look for a bit, before settling a bit grumpily on the sofa in its new position.

Accents

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:04 GMT

While watching House the other day, I was thinking again about the different accents in English-speaking countries. There seems to be a weird non-symmetrical effect in how easy people in one English-speaking country seem to find it to recognise the native accent of another English-speaking country.

For example, Hugh Laurie seems to me to be able to produce quite a convincing American accent (note that my point here is about how easy it is to recognise an accent, not reproduce it, which is much harder). However, as a British-English speaker, it's perhaps not surprising if I can't pick up the subtleties of an American-English accent. But many American viewers find his accent very authentic, and are often amazed to find out he's British. There's a running gag in Flight of the Conchords about Americans thinking Bret and Jemaine are British rather than New Zealanders. When I went to the States, many people I met thought I was Australian.

It doesn't seem to by a symmetrical effect. Dick Van Dyke's wincingly bad Cockney accent in Mary Poppins set a new benchmark for bad accents, but even American actors with reasonably good mimicry skills can be detected¹. Adam Monroe did a pretty good British accent as Takezo Kensei in Heroes, but I could tell immediately that he was not a native British-English speaker before I knew what his nationality was. Other American-English speaking actors who have attempted British-English accents (like Gwyneth Paltrow), have often been quite convincing, but their accent is still detectable to British-English speakers as non-native. Meanwhile, many Australian actors use British-English or American-English accents, and I can't tell that they are not native speakers.

Note that I'm honestly not getting at Americans here. British people have similar troubles telling a Canadian accent from an American one, or an Australian accent from a New Zealand one. I have particular trouble telling South Africans from New Zealanders, unless the accents are fairly extreme, or the person says particular words ("six" being a handy diagnostic feature). I'm just wondering why -- even between pairs of accents -- there's a non-symmetrical effect in how easy either party finds it to recognise the accent of the other. Is it a matter of exposure to the accent? We certainly get a lot of American TV, films and music in Britain. Or is it because we have a wider range of native accents in Britain (I'm not even sure if this is true), so our ears are more highly tuned to detecting differences? It could even be something to do with the time of divergence of the accents from the ancestral stock.

I don't know what the answer is, but I'm intrigued by the problem.

¹ I'd be interested to know if his accent sounds reasonably authentic to an American-English speaker, though. ↑

Another classic BSAG moment

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:30 GMT

As regular readers will know, my nom de keyboard of 'bsag' and the title of this blog both refer to the look which comes over someone's face (usually male) when I exhibit signs of knowing something about technical matters (see my About page for more details).

I had a classic example of BSAG earlier this week when I had to contact some heating engineers about our boiler. We've dealt with these particular people before, and they are great: they are nice guys, do good work and charge a reasonable price. However, they really don't seem able to handle the fact that -- while neither Mr. Bsag and I are experts on heating systems -- I know a bit more about it than my husband. I started to explain what I thought the problem was, but they asked if they could speak to Mr. Bsag. I could have put my foot down, but since I'd dealt with them before (an experience very similar to those experienced by Arabella Weir's 'Invisible Woman' character on the Fast Show), I knew that it was a losing battle.

So I handed the phone over, and we had a farcical exchange where the heating engineers would ask Mr. Bsag some technical question on the phone, he would ask me, I would answer, and he would tell the engineers what I'd just said. It worked out OK in the end, because they came and fixed the problem (which was indeed a faulty control board, as I'd thought), but it would have been a bit easier if they'd actually believed that I knew what I was talking about. Sigh.

Wired for sound (again)

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:31 GMT

I finally managed to get a [new amplifier][1]: an Audiolab 8000a from ebay. I wired it up last night with my new speaker cables (The Chord Company Carnival Silver Screen) and I've been enjoying discovering our music collection again.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I'm pretty familiar with this Audiolab model, because my Dad had one for years. In fact, I'd even heard it with my current speakers, because they also used to belong to my Dad. What I wasn't quite prepared for was how much my old amp must have been deteriorating over the last 6 months or so, because I was blown away by the quality of this amp. It gives an enormous amount of what we audiophiles call 'wellie' (a technical term, you understand). So much so that I had to dive for the volume control because I wasn't prepared for what would come out of the speakers. The volume knob starts at about the 7 o'clock position, and 9 o'clock is more than enough to fill the room. The sound is gloriously transparent, so I can hear the wonderful warm quality of my Rega Planet CD player, as well as the totally different quality of the AR turntable. In short, all the sources sound different, which is just as it should be. The speaker cables probably need a little while to bed down, but I'm very happy with it.

I like a nicely balanced sound, but it is nice to hear properly weighty base again. When I was testing the system out yesterday, I played a few tracks from 'Knives to the Treble' by Burning Babylon via the SliMP3. A huge grin spread over my face, and I ran to get Mr. Bsag, dragging him into the living room. "Sit down here and feel the sofa vibrate!" It wasn't overdone, just very, very deep.

[1]: http://www.rousette.org.uk/blog/archives/smoky-music/

Automation

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:14 GMT

I was quite excited about the prospect of Automator when it was introduced, because it offered the prospect of being able to write quick scripts to solve little workflow problems, without having to know much about AppleScript. I can code in a number of languages (not brilliantly, but enough to get by), but for some reason, I find AppleScript quite difficult. It looks enough like English that you're lulled into thinking you know what you're doing until you get tripped up by some odd syntax. Anyway, Automator allows you to cobble together pre-built building blocks, recorded actions, and little shell scripts (in Python, Perl or Ruby as well as bash and other common shells) so that you don't need to write Applescripts if you don't want to.

Despite this convenience, I haven't used Automator quite as much as I'd thought I would, partly because applications like Butler lets you do a lot of things you might use Automator for, but in a more accessible way. However, there are occasions when a nicely crafted Automator workflow is very handy.

Mr. Bsag often has to send photographs or scans of his prints to galleries, and they often insist on a 300dpi TIFF. He stores these images in iPhoto, and while you can certainly export as TIFF, I haven't found an easy way to change the DPI (though you can do it in Preview in Leopard). However, you can change the DPI property of an image using the commandline tool, sips, as well as lots of other handy things. But Mr. Bsag wouldn't be comfortable with a commandline command, which would bring it back to me doing it for him, and I'm lazy. Enter Automator!

I made a quick workflow (see an image of the steps here) which gets the selected items in Finder, puts a dialog box to say what it is going to do an allow an escape, runs a Ruby script which calls a sips command on the arguments to change the DPI and convert to TIFF, then speaks a confirmation of how many files were converted. I made it into a Finder plug-in¹, so that Mr. Bsag could just export his chosen images from iPhoto to the desktop, select them, then use the contextual menu to run the script. It seems to work fine. For common tasks like this where you want to batch convert some files to a standard format, Automator is ideal.

¹ The documentation for Automator says that if you make a workflow a Finder plugin, you should remove the first 'Get selected Finder items' step. When I did this it acted as if nothing was selected. With the selected Finder items step in place, it counts each selected file twice. Weird. In the final plug-in, I hacked around this by simply dividing num by 2. ↑