niq’s soapbox

‘Absolutely horrendous’? Or absolutely predictable?

The first is an economist quoted by the BBC, on the subject of today’s producer price figures - one element in our rising inflation. The second is, well, me (e.g. here, here) and anyone else with basic numeracy.

In basic commodities (though not yet in manufactured goods, thanks to China), we have regression to the mean: the return of something closer to normality after a period in which prices were artificially low. In the case of food and energy, that’s no mere economic cycle but a generational period. As of now, rising food and energy prices are getting the lions share of the blame. International factors make a good scapegoat when the more important factors are what the late Douglas Adams called Somebody Else’s Problem.

But we’re missing the monetarists’ basic lesson. Printing more money doesn’t create more value, and increasing the money supply will fuel inflation, unless there’s something real and new to spend that extra money on. Pouring billions into subsidised housing, Northern Rock, and now the banking system at large, doesn’t create extra value, so it can only fuel inflation.

And then there’s the housing crash, which has finally begun in spite of yet more government money to prop up prices. Real-world interest rates are rising in spite of the Bank of England, and have a long way to go before they re-align with debt levels (after all, it was Gordon Brown paying off the national debt in the Prudence years that enabled rates to come down from double-digits to their boom-years values).

No government dares not bail out their articulate, well-represented middle classes. So there will be more tax, more downward pressure on the pound, and much more inflation, to help shift the great bulk of the burden from the established powerful but over-borrowed to the hapless hard-working.

Here’s an easy solution, if they’d dare be honest about it. Include house prices in inflation figures. That gives a measure of inflation as it affects those of us who are not so rich as to own property. And the good news is that after years of hyperinflation, it’s finally falling!

We know that the powers-that-be can’t do joined-up thinking and come up with coherent policies.

The coincidence of two news items today illustrates this rather clearly:

• Congestion charging for Manchester.
• Social and Economic benefits of a much-improved broadband infrastructure.

Manchester’s proposed congestion charge will, at best, work like London’s. That’ll only happen if there’s consistent political will to make it work. It needn’t take more than one person in a key management position to scupper it, and turn it into an expensive fiasco. Think “Sir Humphrey”, though if he opposed a proposal he’d (one hopes) at least stop it before spending billions on it. But at best, congestion charging is a poor substitute for John Major’s fuel price escalator.

Coupled with the congestion charge will be a huge investment in public transport. That is, public investment: the state poking its nose in. We’ll pour billions of taxpayers money into providing more inefficient and polluting transport so we can move ever more heavy, reluctant bodies on their daily journey to the cubicle. Public transport should be less polluting than private, but that’s not automatic. Even if they get it right it’s a marginal improvement, and massive public investment is a great way to get it wrong.

Meanwhile, also today, the Broadband Stakeholder Group’s report points to benefits such as flexible working, lifelong learning, and a big impact on social exclusion. Now that’s an altogether better way to invest large sums of public money. Instead of one city catching up with where it should’ve been maybe two generations ago (by European standards), the whole country can catch up with where it should be NOW!

Actually I don’t think public money should go into broadband either, except at the fringes to ensure universal basic availability. Let the market do that, and let it compete honestly with old-fashioned transport. With energy much more realistically priced than it has been for a couple of generations, efficiency will soon win. Sustainably.

Stop subsidising last century’s solutions!

Talk about ripoff!

Yesterday I booked a weekend in Truro. At £85/night (b&b) for an “executive room”, I expected some modest measure of luxury.

So, I arrive at the hotel. They give me room 37: top floor, in the roof. I reach the room, and find it’s pretty tiny: have to take care not to bump my head on the beams if I go around the other side of the bed. The window is small and high - no view. And no minibar. Well, I don’t really want a minibar, but a fridge I can put a bottle of water in would be nice. Well, at least there’s a kettle and tea/coffee.

The bathroom, by contrast, is really beautiful. There’s a separate bath and shower cubicle, and the biggest shower head I’ve ever seen. And a big window, that opens onto the edge of the roof, from where a seagull screams at me.

Except … the shower doesn’t work. I turn it on, and all I get is a pathetic dribble. Feeling well pissed off, I phone reception. Third or fourth try I get through: she’ll send the porter up. OK, get dressed again, and fill in time by getting out the laptop and checking that the hotel’s wifi works. It does, and I have time for a very quick grumble on IRC.

Porter arrives, confirms that the shower doesn’t work. Can’t fix it, but can move me to another room. So now I’m in room 35, which is also pretty tiny, and lacks the luxury bathroom. So instead of beautiful but useless, I now have a working shower in a bog-standard hotel bathroom. No bath any more, which is a shame, as it would be nice to have the option for tomorrow night.

And the bed is .. well, it would be fine, except for the knobbly mattress, which is the poorest I’ve slept on for quite a while.

On the other hand, the restaurant has just served me a jolly decent meal. Not cheap, but at least it was in line with what it cost. Unlike this room.

Bah.

On Saturday Evening, I’m taking part in The Dream of Gerontius, at Truro Cathedral. The Plymouth Philharmonic choir - in which I regularly sing - has been invited to augment the local Truro musicians in this large-scale work. Should be fun!

The downside of this is a busy and exhausting Saturday, as we get our one and only opportunity to rehearse all together in the venue. The Plymouth Phil has coaches departing at 9 a.m, to meet up at 11 in Truro. So I’d need to leave home just after 7a.m. to get on the coach, and wouldn’t arrive back home until after midnight. That’s not so much fun when we’ve been told to bring a packed lunch, because there won’t be time for a proper meal.

I could save an hour of that by taking a taxi to Plymouth for £25. Or I could take a taxi to Truro for maybe three times that. Or I could hire a car for the day and face a long drive I’m not fit for and a parking nightmare. Of those, the taxi to Plymouth is the only one that has any appeal whatsoever.

So how about the luxury option: book a hotel in Truro for Friday and Saturday nights, and make a weekend of it? The downside is that our concert is the end of a festival week in Truro, so the hotels are at their busiest. My default plan - find a B&B / guest house with glowing reviews - isn’t an option. Anything decent is going to cost something not far off £100 per night.

So what to do? The clincher is that Friday night in Tavistock is going to be miserable too, due to the local yobs club. So I’ve booked two nights in the Royal Hotel in Truro, and will travel down there on the train tomorrow evening. Back home on Sunday, which gives me a a free day of touristing. An added bonus is that the hotel is just couple of minutes walk from the cathedral, so I can do things like change clothes and enjoy a quick cuppa in comfort during Saturday’s efforts.

Add the hotel bill to meals and incidental expenses, and I’m paying at least £200 extra for this weekend. Which I probably wouldn’t even have thought about if I owned a car. Like the £800 I recently spent on a new bike, that seems expensive until you count how much I save by not having a car. But set against that, I’m gaining a nice weekend break, and a lot more comfort than my fellow choir members who are travelling down for the day.

When you consider that on a day-to-day basis, I’m the one who doesn’t spend half my life looking for parking spaces, an occasional £200 is worth it for the reduced daily hassle alone!

I’ve just had a pint of good English beer with my meal. As one does from time to time.

It’s a premium beer with a great flavour. But not, alas, at its very best. In this season, my kitchen - in common with the rest of the flat - is rather too warm. English beer is famous for being “warm”, but that really just means warmer than refrigerated, not summer temperatures. My kitchen in winter keeps beer at an excellent temperature. Alas not in summer, and keeping it in the fridge is no solution, because that’s far too cold for English beer to retain any decent flavour. That’s one reason I drink more Weizenbier in summer: it’s great to drink well chilled on a hot day.

Traditionally, the right place to keep English beer is a cellar, but ever fewer of us have any such thing these days.

All of which reminds me of the time in Italy, when I had to replace the fridge/freezer provided by my then-landlord, after it had packed up once too often. I went to a big superstore selling lots of white goods, to take a look at what was available. What I picked up had not just fridge and freezer sections, but a third compartment which was kept at about 12°, notionally for fruit and veg in the Italian summer. Great - in that climate, a larder was really useful!

With our English summer, it’s less necessary than in Italy for our fruit&veg - though it would nevertheless be nice. But a store at 12° would be ideal for English beer, too.

Why don’t we see those 3-compartment fridge/freezer/larders here in the UK?

The last couple of days have been rather windy. Today it got stronger, and was accompanied by intermittent rain. That’s more like October/November than May, though of course it’s warmer and lighter than in the traditional wet&windy autumn season.

Heading out, I found today’s wind has done some minor damage. In Paddons Row, one shop sign was down, and another was hanging loose, with a single hook intact. The latter looked like a potential hazard, being big&heavy enough to do serious damage if it falls on someone.

Being a bank holiday, the shop was closed. Neither the sign nor the shop window had a ‘phone number, so I couldn’t try reporting it to the proprietress. The police station was also closed, so I couldn’t report it there. As for doing anything about it myself, I’d likely be arrested if I tried to climb up there. And besides, doing anything with that sign in the wind, without a stepladder and someone to hold it steady on the wet, sloping ground, would be verging on suicidal.

Arriving back home, I found a phone number for the shop, but got no answer. I also tried the police, but hung up after too long on hold. For the time being, it’s not a problem: the wind has subsided and it’s stopped raining. But if it gets up again later, who knows what might happen?

What bugs me about this is the contrast between this situation, and the kind of grief the powers-that-be inflict on us in the name of mostly-bogus Health and Safety concerns in everyday life.

Was it not Martin Luther King who said we should judge a man “not by the colour of his skin, but by the content of his character“? When faced with a report saying “Obese blamed for the world’s ills“, I say it’s time we invoked the great man’s rhetoric. Judge me not by the amplitude of my girth, but by the content of my character!

When I heard of the report, my first reaction was to try and seek out the original. Failing that, I thought I’d leave it: the news reports probably misrepresent it anyway. But then today out cycling up Dartmoor, I met a chap even more rotund than myself on a bike, and looking plenty fit enough for Dartmoor’s hills, and thought maybe this is at least blogworthy. This kind of report - judging people for what they are - is perilously close to the kind of prejudice Dr King’s people suffered.

I’m a fatty, so I eat 18% more calories than average?

Probably guilty as charged, though I eat a small fraction of what I did in my youth, before the middle-age spread set in. But against that, the fact I don’t eat meat must surely in itself put my dietary carbon footprint well below the developed-world average.

But more than that: I’m sure my good layer of natural organic insulation is one reason I don’t need to heat my environment in the English winter. Not the only reason: the fact that I’m fit and healthy helps, as does my youth when the cost of heating was out of the question, meaning I got used to nature’s temperatures. But anyway, I have no doubt that my layer of fat more than pays for itself in carbon emissions saved.

And I drive an excessive amount?

Definitely not guilty: the last time I drove was a little over three years ago, when I hired a van for a day to move house. I use a combination of bicycle and public transport for all my travel. More importantly, I make efforts to avoid unnecessary travel, particularly that western-country ritual of commuting, which I have eliminated altogether from my life. To cap it all, my life’s work is dedicated to developing the infrastructure for many more people - in principle everyone in the knowledge economy - to be able to avoid much of their travel.

So I guess I’m guilty of being portly, just as Dr King was guilty of being black. I don’t see that either of us has anything to be ashamed of!

Much has been said about the Debian/OpenSSL bug by people closer to it than I am. An expert view comes from Ben Laurie, who lays in to the Debian packagers for fixing an apparent bug locally, and not sharing it with upstream. In a second post, Ben clarifies some confusing issues, like whether OpenSSL is relying on uninitialised memory for entropy (not quite, but what it’s doing is not good either).

Ben’s wrath is well-deserved, but it seems to me there’s a fundamental reason why the OpenSSL folks must bear a share of the blame. Given the use of uninitialised memory, why wasn’t there a great big comment right there in the code, explaining it? Anything like that is sure to raise alarm bells in anyone reviewing the code, and send a programmer straight into fix-the-bug mode. And that’s an apparent-bug with a fix so simple that a compiler or runtime library could do it automatically. Don’t blame the Debian maintainer for fixing a blunder so trivial it must be a typo!

Why the “fix” went beyond just initialising that memory and broke it is beyond the scope of my (non-) research on the subject, and therefore this post.

UPDATE: Kudos to Michal Čihař for pointing out the upside to this sorry tale.

So that’s how MSIE is an essential core component of Windows, and can’t possibly be removed!

As with any other geek, people expect me to know all about computers, and help them out when something doesn’t work. Never mind that I know nothing about windows, and proceed by trial and error. So, I’ve just been to help a friend get her newly-installed broadband working.

It turned out she was already connected to the ‘net just fine. I popped up a command window, typed in “ping www.google.com”, and it worked without hesitation. OK, so where’s the problem? She showed me: she brings up MSIE, and it insists that she’s offline and invites her to connect! Evidently it’s too … ummm … smart to notice that the rest of the operating system all around it is connected. She’d already done the “obvious” thing, and tried setting up a new “broadband” connection in MSIE’s menu.

OK, the menu doesn’t have an option for a regular network connection. So I tried just removing the old dialup connections, whereupon it all worked. Evidently they were standing in the way of MSIE using the network!

Well, I take my hat off to the engineers who designed that. It must take a lot of ingenuity to make things quite so gratuitously difficult. Heath Robinson would be proud of you! And that’s the kind of feature that’ll keep you firmly ahead of Linux, Solaris, MacOS, etc, which “just work” when you attach them to a network, and deprive the user of all that mystery and entertainment.

Lydford Gorge is small, but it’s about as close as you get in England (south of the Lake District) to real scenery. That is to say, the word “gorge” really means it.

Looking down from the road bridge (don’t try that if you get vertigo!), the river in the bottom looks exciting. But I can’t tell from that distance whether it should be navigable by a white-water enthusiast - possibly excluding the famous 30-metre waterfall. Upstream from the bridge the view is very much obscured by trees; downstream there’s some clear view (that’s the really vertiginous one), and it’s very clearly not a wimp’s river. But in a country where anything above about grade 2 (OK maybe 3) would be impossible to insure, the absence of commercial adventure on it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s impossible.

Hmmm. Anyone tried it?

p.s. yes, I must be mad. All the best people are mad