Steve Hemingway

sex and intelligency. A favourite topic of mine.

I bet MIT wished that they had never agreed to allow their students to participate in this study.

This article about Bruce Hyman is pretty extraordinary.

It exposes the deep flaws in the system of Family Courts we have in the UK. Justice is a precious thing, and it seems clear to me that it is an elusive commodity in these courts. This article is typical of the many I have seen criticizing the system.

This blog entry reckons that Meraki is poised to offer an alternative to ISPs and mobile operators.

This article indicates that traditional 'muni-wi-fi' has many problems, but even the FT's dopey IT correspondent was able to set up his Meraki mesh network, so there is strong evidence not only that it works, but that you don't need a maven to set it up (and presumably to keep it going).

I'm not going to throw away my 802.11g routers yet, but I am definitely interested. Even in my modest brick and wood house coverage is pretty patchy, so a mesh system sounds an ideal alternative to having to run cables everywhere just to connect the routers that serve the area that would otherwise be dead spots of coverage.

If you live near me (SG3 6PG approx) in Knebworth and you are interested in sharing my cable modem connection, drop me a line to an obvious address, or give me a call 0845 299 0113.

Erm, some of you may have received a kind of chain letter invitation to a Facebook app called 'Are you interested'. I received one of these myself, but to install the app, to find out what it does, I had to send an invite to at least ten of my friends. Since I can barely scrape together 10 friends all told, a high proportion of you must have received this invite.

From what I can tell it is complete pants. It appears to be a kind of 'Am I Hot or Not' restricted to people who have installed this app, all of whom (including me?) appear to be total losers (sorry Eric).

Anyway, I will probably de-install the app., but for those who received the invite, and were prompted to visit my Facebook page, now you know the background to your invitation.

If I don't get around to sending you a hard-copy Xmas card, let me take this opportunity to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy 2008.

For those 1% of the population who are not yet on Facebook, and who are wonder what on earth I am wibbling about, you will just have to sign up and have a look at my profile, which you can view here. A restricted profile of me is available to those who are not on Facebook.

I spend too much time worrying about what Google thinks of my websites. It seems to have a mind of its own. I am usually disappointed in looking at my page rank, and general search engine performance, since I seem to further and further down the rankings.

Just recently this blog has mysteriously shot up. It seems to have coincided with my commenting on postings by Becker and Posner, a blog that I very much admire. They are always thought provoking, even if they can be rather ideological on occasions. You may think that This post is too Panglossian, for example.

What I didn't realise is that Movable Type is smart enough to parse the blog entry and fill in the trackbacks automatically. Previously I'd been carefully cutting and pasting the trackbacks into the relevant field on the posting screen.

I remain convinced that a modest level of link exchanging is beneficial to one's page rank. If you have a blog and you'd like to swap links, then please drop me a line. This means you, Neil!

This post is rather worrying. It suggests that submitting links 'unnaturally quickly' or having an inbound link that looks 'suspiciously' like a paid-for link can result in a site being unindexed from Google altogether.

This would be a catastrophe for many ordinary businesses. Google accounts for the huge bulk of visits to my commercial sites. I suffered a severe loss of traffic moving from one host to another (and also switching domain names, temporarily) about a year ago. I have still not recovered.

I am a great fan of Google, but I am not unaware of the fact that it could crush me and not even notice.

The category of this entry is really 'not seen on the web'.

I am writing it because when I was young, in my family, in South Wales, we referred to spring onions as 'gibbons'. I have searched, but failed to find any reference to this definition on the web.

I have no idea of the origins of this word. My family had both English and Welsh roots (my father's forebears came from Yorkshire, my mother's from Aberystwyth). I don't recall coming across the term 'spring onion' until I was a student safely away from any Welsh influence.

Please feel free to comment to confirm or deny the accuracy of this usage.

If you execute this search you can check whether any other pages defining the word 'gibbons' with reference to salad vegetables.

https://www.imified.com/settings/widgets.cfm

Twitter and Imified are two web based services that I heard about somewhere, signed up to (they are free, as in beer, after all), and then wondered what all the fuss was about.

Just to explain: twitter allows you to make blog-style posts from e.g. your phone, but only up to 80 chars. A kind of haiku blogging, I guess. I find it very slow to text and so although I do occasionally post from my phone (usually on a train when I am bored with reading), but it didn't, as they say, change my life. Imified is a most peculiar service. It is basically what we used to call a CLI to the web. For those youngsters reading this, a CLI is a command-line interface. That is the sort of way that Real Men (TM) interact with computers.[ref1], like DOS of a shell in Unix.

Anyway, the way imified works is that you add imified as a chat buddy on the instant messaging system of your choice. Mine is (inter alia) Google Talk, so I'm a mate of imified@imfied.com. He's (almost) always online, but his line in banter is extremely limited. What I eventually discovered is that to make the system remotely useful it is necessary to do two things: (i) install a useful widget - twitter in this case, (ii) create a short cut through the menu system. The need to create shortcuts didn't dawn on me until today. The problem is that the menu system is clunky, and the imified servers are *really* slow. So there is a huge different between being able to type "/tweet finally worked out how to use the imified shortcut system" and navigating through even one level of menu structure.

There is a lot of stuff about how to use imified on the imified blog [ref2] but the problem is that if you're like me, you just install the app and then start using it, regarding a need to actually read instructions as humiliating admission of defeat.

The weird thing about both Twitter and Imified is the absence of any sane business model. These are useful little web gizmos, but I cannot imagine paying much to use them. I might be persuaded to part with, say, 0.1p to post something, but it would have to be the kind of micro payment that has successfully resisted development of the whole history of the commercial web. Same goes for imified - a tiny payment would be tolerable, but it would have to be use based. Frankly I'd be very reluctant to sign up for 10p a month, because I know that something else would come along to displace imified in my affections, but I'd completely forget to cancel the paypal standing order. I can't imagine either have scope to monetize users via advertising (especially imified where you don't even see a web page). Somebody somewhere is funding these things with no obvious commercial potential. I suppose the same could be said for Netscape once.

References

[ref1] Real Men Don't Program in Pascal

Imified Blog entry introducing Imified

This is something that I would really have just posted on del.icio.us but it's a widget which I need something to embed in. Here it is:

I have decided to try again to use encrypted emails using Public Key Encryption. Every couple of years I have a go at this and find (i) that this is very clunky and inconvenient to use and (ii) nobody who ever exchanges emails with me is remotely interested in installing the addin etc.

Well, this time I'm going for this greasemonkey script approach. This means that if you don't use gmail on Firefox then you might have some problems. Even if you do use this combination, but you are on Firefox 3 there may still be problems as the script seems to be unreliable on this version. Oh well....

This is not utterly secure, but it should be good for exchanging passwords, commercially confidential material etc. Please do email me (plaintext or encrytped) to explore the effectiveness of this approach. As Jackie Smith used to say "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", which, translated means "we are determined to read every communication you send and receive".

Update: 25 Jun. I have now discovered that Evolution has built in support for PGP encrypted and signed email. Sea Horse (a bundled application in Ubuntu) will generate and store private and public keys. Here is my public key:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
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=pmXZ
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

You should be able to cut and paste and import this into your key manager. If you manage to import this you will be able to send me a signed and encrypted message.

Update 19 Oct 09

Actually, it's a lot easier just to encrypt within the file system. It's all built into Ubuntu - you can just right click and encrypt with a 'shell extension' a file that you can find within nautilus. This can be attached to an email, which of course may be as brief as you like. The details appear to be explained here, but to be honest I didn't bother reading the details. I just feel a lot more comfortable that Ubuntu will offer decent encryption than Microsoft.

I am usually far too lazy to write a proper blog entry. Cutting and pasting sentence fragments to Facebook and Twitter are much more my style. However I still haven't worked out how to share a video on FB, so I'm posting it here.

It exemplifies the attitude of a lot of people to using their credit card on the internet. Tragic.

I have received an invite to Google Wave. I don't know much about this except that it is some kind of real-time collaboration tool. I accepted the invitation and now can provide another seven of you with an invite in turn (You get eight, a lot less than the hundred you used to get with gmail. I have offered one to my son, but he seems less than enthusiastic so I may get it back).

The selling point of Wave is that it is real time, and multi media. Maybe the big downside is that it is real time. Proper work requires undivided concentration. Real time interaction destroys that. Like trying to write a novel while serving at a (possibly not very busy) shop.

I have accounts with ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger (under its many names), Skype, Google Talk, and probably a few instant messaging services I have forgotten about. I use Pidgin messaging under Linux to sign in to many of these services but hardly ever talk to anyone over them. If people want to get hold of me synchronously they telephone me, or even visit me.

I've been reading Hal Varian's book 'Information Rules'. Its discussion network effects is very good. It seems to me that no IM system, including Google Wave, if that is actually what it is, will reach that critical mass that email and the telephone have reached. Varian is a clever guy, and a lot of people have lost a lot of money by betting against Google, but not everything they back turns to gold. Any members of Orkut out reading this?

The problem with Wave is that it requires people to say something. People seem reluctant to do that. I am not sure why not, but I suspect that it's something to do with the experience most people have of education, of failing exams and having all their mistakes counted against them. I guess that this makes them afraid even to write an email. I'm not quite sure how this squares with the average comment on a Daily Mail article, but I guess that these are made by the 1%.

I was reading that now more than 30% of the population of China is now online. Twice that proportion (surely) are online in the UK. But none of them seem to be from my school or university cohort. If you are in your 50's and are reading this, please comment on this entry to confirm that you are both online and able to write a sentence or two.

This podcast is extremely thought-provoking. It is an interview with Clifford Winston who did some research into the question of what really happens when governments act to correct what they perceive as market failure.

Our own prime minister sees market failure everywhere and is hyperactive in creating new laws and taxes to correct this market failure. Interestingly there is not much evidenced-based analysis of the outcomes of this intervention. Perhaps you will not be surprised to hear that Winston, whose book can be downloaded free from the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Regulated Markets website, concludes that intervention usually is not justified in economic terms.

What you might be surprised to hear is his conclusion that he can find no example of cases where regulation had a positive payoff. Before you dismiss this conclusion out of hand, at least listen to his interview with Russ Roberts to hear his evidence.

Various types of market-failure correcting interventions are examined, but the one that sticks in my mind is the anti-trust legislation. As Dr Winston points out, recent high-profile cases brought under this were aimed at Microsoft and Intel. If they have true monopoly power, it sure doesn't seem to be reflected in above average performance of share price!

If you follow the Econtalk link you will find a link to the downloadable version of the book. I had some trouble following this link in Google Chrome and I have not read the book. It does sound as though it is worth a look.

I have had the good fortune to be related to some people, particularly Guy Yeomans Hemingway, who produced the Hemingway Family History in the 60's, helped by my dear friend Geoff Dart. This gives an idea of what it is about.

Kathie put some effort in researching our immediate family at St Katharine's House in the 80's, when all the records were still in dusty files. I combined this information in a GEDCOM file, which has gathered its own virtual dust on my hard disk ever since. I posted it to RootsWeb, here.

I am extremely bad and lazy about data. Once I get a piece of code working, I always think that it is simply for users to sort out the data. As far as I was concerned, the best way of doing this was in something like a wiki, where everyone who was remotely interested could create and monitor their own leaf of the tree. I looked around at the options for this and eventually decided that the cheapest option was phpGedView. I was slightly hesitant about getting it installed on my web server as my days as a serious programmer/administrator are well behind me. However I discovered that a combination of beautiful coding on the part of the developers, and excellent web-based administration screens provided by my hosting company, pair.com meant that I could get the interactive Hemingway family tree up and running in an absurdly short time.

Really it's only interesting if (i) you are related to the individuals on it and (ii) created as an individual user by me. I can't do anything about (i) but I can certainly sort out (ii). Just email me at steve.hemingway@gmail.com and I'll set you up. I think that you can just send a message to the administrator via the hosted tree as an alternative to sending me an email, but I can't see why you would want to do that.

While I am writing this I should own up to damaging the tree. I somehow tried to merge in a couple of incompatible trees of the Pullen/Palmer/Verrall/Houde families, which resulted in some awful confusion. Because I am only extremely distantly related to these families I have never bothered to invest the time to sort things out. Please help!

Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths University Enterprise Network. So now you know. You can find out more at stem-uen.org.

The idea of a UEN is to strengthen links between universities and industry and to promote entrepreneurship. Yes, it is a quango and as such has a lot of equality, diversity and inclusiveness rhetoric.

Currently the website is fairly sparse, but it's likely to collect a lot more content in the coming months.

I used to work for a big bank, and my manager had the idea of taking his team on various physical activities, walking around islands near Singapore carrying heavy backpacks. It didn't really work because some of us were reasonably fit and others were terribly unfit. Therefore the experience varied from being a stroll in the park for some, to an exhausting endurance trial for others. This simply did not cause us to bond. To be fair to the guy who organised this event, he was an excellent manager, something extremely rare in the banking or in IT, and the experience probably did produce some subset bonding.

This article shows bad it could have been. A group were practically cooked alive by a management guru. Almost nobody believes that management gurus are any better than corporate witchdoctors. Lucy Kellaway has practically made a career of mocking their pompous idiocy in her weekly column in the Financial Times. But still there are managers out there who think it's a good idea to steal their staff's leave in order to subject them to what is, for some, ritual humiliation.

Thanks to Flip Chart Fairy Tales for the lead.

This post should be X-rated as this is truly the scariest man to have lived in Britain in the last 100 years. I stole the image from this post, which is from a blog written by someone who is probably certifiable, but just might have spotted something that the rest of us have missed. Thanks for Jackart for the lead.

On this day in 1968 this article appeared about how the Reorganisation Commission Marketing Board had decided that the Egg Marketing Board must go. It had been set up in 1957 and in fact clung on until 1971. The idea was to protect egg producers, and consumers, from instability in egg prices by regulating and controlling production of eggs.

I don't think that many people now regret its demise. Certainly egg production in the UK has not been a model of good practice, but it seems to me that the eggs we buy are of good quality and reasonable price. There are concerns about how healthy they are, which didn't exist in 1968, so much so that it would be illegal to use the 'Go to Work on an Egg' slogan which, apart from the little lion stamped on the eggs, is the only thing that people remember about the Board.

It's quite rare to see a story like this. Once a quango gets established it is very hard to get rid of it. The big losses experienced by the few (the employees) trump the tiny individual gains which would be experienced by the many (the consumers of eggs). However, in this case, somehow, the many prevailed. In a similar way the Milk Marketing Board went the same way. Interestingly this all happened when a Labour government was in power. Three cheers for Harold Wilson!

Google News Archive Search is a truly wonderful thing. I can't quite believe that so much archive newpaper material is available, free of charge, delivered magically to a computer near you.

I did a few searches and came across this article about the origins of Stevenage New Town. I knew that the local lord of the manor, Lord Lytton, was adamantly opposed to the development, because he had a large area of his estate forcibly taken from him by the process euphemistically known as a "compulsory purchase", and more accurately known as theft. It seems that he was not alone.

What I found slightly surprising was that it was necessary to come in a fleet of twenty four official cars. It was even more surprising that Lewis Silkin's car had had the air let out of its tyres to let him know what the ungrateful locals thought of his plans.

I always slightly struggled to understand why the 1945 government was not re-elected. It obviously had a huge support initially, supposedly stood up for the common man against the forces of reaction and was free of corruption and run by one of the outstanding prime ministers of the 20th Century - Clem Attlee. However, its collectivist mania caused at least one industry - sugar - to fight back hard against nationalization (e.g. here) which may have persuaded voters that with another five years of Labour, Britain would end up abolishing private property entirely.

NHS doctors, like doctors everywhere, are not infallible. They make mistakes. In the USA they are damn careful to avoid making mistakes because they could be sued for millions and then find that they are uninsurable, and hence unemployable, for ever afterwards.

The NHS is not like that because, generally speaking, the doctors are part of the state apparatus that should ensure good practice. It's in nobody's interest to rock the boat, especially politicians who want us to believe that the NHS is the envy of the world (and of course fantastic value: a snip at a mere 110 billion pounds per year).

It's "the closest thing that the British have to a national religion" (N Lawson), so newspapers are loath to criticise it. However, the fact is that people die every day through bad decisions and diagnoses made by NHS employees. We should at least be told, because I believe that we are grown-up to be told the truth. It is quite possible that these errors are an acceptable price. I would be that last to suggest that it is worth spending enough to ensure that not a single life is lost or ruined through NHS failure, but we do need the debate.

Before you make up your mind, you might like to look at the National Death Service, a blog devoted to pointing out the cases when the NHS screws up.

I should declare an interest. My mother had bad abdominal pains, loss of appetite and a feeling of nausea. She went to a local GP and was diagnosed as having indigestion and prescribed an anti-emetic and Gaviscon. A few days later she collapsed, was admitted to hospital where she was found to have a tumour the size of a grapefruit blocking her colon. Fortunately, because she was operated on immediately, she survived and is now symptom-free. But only because she had a lucky break.