The Ed Techie

Things to do in the middle of the night

I woke up with a cough last night and couldn't get back to sleep so came downstairs. While doing some surfing (as an aside to this aside, I never turn the TV on at such times anymore), I accidentally hit the return key after just typing in K in the browser. It took me straight to the wikipedia definition of K. Odd, I thought, so I tried L, and that got the wikipedia definition as well. I wondered if wikipedia had the whole alphabet sewn up, so went through each letter. It seems my initial two hits were just beginner's luck. Most single letters (without the addition of any domain entry e.g. .com) returned Google searches, but a few of them went directly to sites. In case you're interested (and I know you are), the following are the lucky letters:

e http://www.eonline.com/

g google mail

k http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K

l http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L

N http://www.the-n.com/

r http://www.r-project.org/

t http://www.att.com/gen/landing-pages?pid=3308

y http://mail.yahoo.com/

I then wondered why more single letters don't take you to sites, so looked up single letter domain names. It turns out this was something of a hot issue, with six single letter domain names reserved, but apart from that these the internet governing body has reserved the rest under the .com, .net and .org names.  Steve Krause explains http://www.stevekrause.org/steve_krause_blog/2007/02/why_no_singlele.html

This is slightly different, as the ones mentioned above are not the ones reserved, but is based on there being no alternatives for google to find I guess?

Anyway, amazing what you discover at 3am and better than watching the shopping channel surely.

The anti-social life of information

I was on campus at the OU yesterday. We have something of a parking crisis, which for a campus in the middle(ish) of nowhere, this is bad news. The response to this has been to outsource parking control to a firm who hand out £80 fines. Well, you can guess where this is going - I spent twenty minutes trying to park and eventually opted for a less than legitimate place as I had a meeting to make. When I returned less than an hour later I had a parking ticket. I was incandescent with rage (anyone who witnessed me discovering it might be tempted to add 'literally' in to that sentence).

What particularly aggravated me was that I had been in a meeting which was trying to find ways of saving the University lots of money by more efficient course production techniques (I favour use of RSS feeds). At the same time the University was busy raising some extra revenue (and the fee does seem vindictively high) by slapping a ticket on me.

It struck me that this is one of those relatively small things that have a disproportionate impact on staff relations. I certainly felt less devotion to the cause afterwards. As a keen e-worker it made me reflect that for all their evocation of the benefits of real social contact, Brown and Duguid should produce a sequel (they can have the title of this post if they want) which looks at some of the downsides, such as the tyranny of open plan offices, gossip, distractions. I want to set chapter 5 aside for parking...

Get beyond the title James

Rather an off topic post, so look away now if you wish:

Listening to Oliver James (a TV psychologist in the UK) promoting his new book on 5Live in the car yesterday I had one of those 'I'm shouting at the radio' moments. James asserted that although Dawkins' Selfish Gene was published in 1976, it was probably not until the greedy eighties that it became popular as it was used to justify self-interest. Huh? Dawkins book is (partly) an attempt to explain how altruism occurs within the process of natural selection. Indeed in his analysis of game theory he sets out how selfish behaviour works to the detriment of society as a whole.

Two possibilities occur to me here - the first is that James is a critic of evolutionary psychology. That's fair enough, it's a scientific theory and you can argue with it. But what I think is wrong is to deliberately frame it in a social and moral context that is simply not true.

The second possibility is that James hasn't read the book and has simply taken the 'selfish' in the title and the summary part about natural selection and made the erroneous assumption that the book should have been called 'In praise of selfishness' or something. Just in case he's in any doubt, The Blind Watchmaker is not in fact a textbook for manufacturers of poor quality timepieces.

Given this misreading of Dawkins, you don't hold out much hope for the rest of the research underpinning his book, do you?

As an aside, my five year old daughter loves evolution. It started with the deceptively simple question 'where do sharks come from?'. I commenced with a mummy and daddy shark -based explanation, but she cut me short 'no, before there was a mummy and daddy shark.' 'Ahhh, evolution.' I now operate a martini approach to this, giving the explanation anywhere and anytime. So, for example we will be in a queue at Tesco, clutching a packet of Jammie Dodgers when she will ask, 'dad, tell me about evolution....'

When internet shopping goes bad

As I am normally an enthusiast for doing everything online, I ought to report when it doesn't work out quite as planned. For Christmas I bought my wife a Nano (yes, despite the fact that the last one corrupted, and that I have all those DRM and performance issues with iTunes, it is still cool looking and good for running). I ordered online a week before Christmas, and paid for next day delivery via City-Link. Sadly these turned out to be something of a keystone cops delivery firm. It was despatched on Monday, for delivery on Tuesday. I checked the tracking website and it was loaded on to a van at 6.30am. The day passed and it didn't arrive.

I checked the website again the next day, and it had been loaded on at 5.30 this time. At 3pm I became nervous and spent half an hour queuing on the phone to be told 'it's on the van, it'll definitely be with you by 5.30'. Naturally 5.30 came and went with no sign of my parcel. I began to get anxious about the approaching big day now. I rang again and was assured that it would be made a priority for the next day.

Thursday was spent waiting, telephoning, waiting, but alas, no amount of pacing up and down or swearing could summon the God of parcel delivery to have mercy on me. I now had the most travelled parcel in Cardiff, as everyday I merrily tracked its progress around the city (I had an image of it sitting on an open top bus, being driven past the stadium). I began to worry about its carbon footprint. I was wondering if a picture of a nano would suffice for Christmas morning.

The next day I resorted to repeated phone calls and was eventually rewarded with one of the operators promising to speak to her friend whose boyfriend was driving the van. Strangely, this unorthodox method of systems control worked and the package eventually arrived.

What the whole fiasco reminded me of was the early days of e-commerce, when the logistics still needed to be worked through. This was particularly true in grocery shopping. I remember a number of online grocery start-ups who tried to fill the vacuum created by the sluggishness of the major supermarkets. Unfortunately these firms lacked the infrastructure of the big firms which was particularly problematic when it came to delivery times - you might be able to have a book delivered at any time, but you can't have ice-cream sitting on your porch all day. This led to some convoluted solutions, for instance one firm provided customers with an external food locker where they could store the shopping. This was never going to catch on, let's face it, and only when the Tescos and Sainsbury's of the world moved in did the simplicity of choosing a delivery slot make sense.

The moral is that it's the boring, logistical stuff that makes a good idea succeed, I guess.

The seedy underbelly of ponyworld

My four year old daughter is very keen on horseriding (what is it with girls and horses?), so I have been dutifully taking her along every weekend to our local riding school. Now previously I had thought this was all rather sweet, but a bit dull. The story of doping at a children's show-jumping event though has given me a renewed interest. Who would have thought that such rich thriller material could be found at a gymkhana? I await the release of the new My Little Pony, Sedata, who falls over repeatedly and listens to Hendrix...

Surely too stupid to be true?

This from the Register - Stingrays attacked in revenge for Steve Irwin's death.

Surely no-one is that stupid are they? It's rather like melting ice in revenge for the Titanic. That'll teach 'em.