Driveway (Sept 11th update)

On Tuesday, September 11th I discussed the poor state of the driveway, and Mark's proposal that we should collectively invest in 10 tons of chippings to resurface. The lorry arrived on Saturday and here is the result.

The previous state of the driveway is shown below.

We were all hard at work after the lorry departed, shovelling and wheelbarrowing and raking. I had to take a break halfway through - without the rowing machine I would probably have died!

Grammar

Previous post: The new Roman Empire?

"Fox points out that a number of 'first citizen's (as Emperors called themselves for the fig-leaf of legality) were assassinated in the name of freedom - Julius Caesar, Caligula and many subsequent."
____________

"It should be subsequently"
"You mean I put an adjective where it should be an adverb? "
"It's a mistake."
"Actually there are two parses of that sentence. There's the one you mention. But in my parse there's a subsequent elided word, namely Emperors. That's why it's OK to use an adjective."
"You're arrogant too."

The new Roman Empire?

It's commonplace to identify America today with the Roman Empire.

I've just finished Robin Lane Fox's wonderful "The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian". Fox points out that a number of 'first citizen's (as Emperors called themselves for the fig-leaf of legality) were assassinated in the name of freedom - Julius Caesar, Caligula and many subsequent. In each case it proved politically impossible to restore the Republic. Augustus proved the point by dallying away from Rome until the senators called him back in desperation to sort out disputes.

Fox is less analytic as to why this might have been the case, but it was surely a function of the lack of senatorial legitimacy amongst the plebs, and perhaps more importantly, the legions, each of which needed a champion to secure their wages, and colonisation land once they had finished military service.

In a patronal society (one we would today call deeply corrupt) a hierarchy centred around one individual seemed to be optimal in managing power and resource relationships.

Which major power does this sound most like today? Russia.

∞i

A man says to his Freudian psychotherapist:

"The phrase 'the square root of minus infinity' keeps popping into my head."
"And what is that?"
"Infinity i."
"And graphically?"
"A tall, vertical, erect axis."
"hmm."

TrueCrypt (+ rowing machine)

I had a backup problem: six Gigabytes of technical, client and financial data which needed secure storage. I have a very big flash drive, which I can store off-site, but the data needs to be encrypted.

I thought Vista might come with an encryption program. Microsoft Office 2007 has effective (AES) file-level encryption these days, but Vista has nothing which works on folders, Gigabyte or otherwise.

A quick web search led me to TrueCrypt. This is a great freeware product which allows you to set up encrypted 'volumes' - stored as files - on your hard drive (it does other stuff too). The 'volume' looks like another disk or flash drive when you use it and is very securely encrypted. Once past the password, data can be accessed and copied as from any other data store. The advantage is that the data is encrypted on the hard disk itself - great if the laptop were to go missing - and the volumes can be copied straight across to USB drives. This I have now done.

I made a donation and after finishing this, I'll go read the manual.

+++

The engineer called lunchtime to fix the Oxford II rowing machine. The trip-computer/console had been behaving erratically and basically not functioning for a while. Replacing the unit had not fixed the problem. The engineer determined that a cable had been crimped when the horizontal aluminium rail (on which the seat slides) had been moved to its vertical 'park' position. I reckon it's a design flaw. Anyway, it works now so no excuses.

Stardust

Seen at Salisbury last night, Stardust is a knowing fantasy fairy story for “children of all ages”. As a fan of The Princess Bride I thought it was great. Clare was underwhelmed – I think any film with a unicorn in it rather raises her ire.

Minkowski diagrams

In special relativity we hear a lot about length contraction - objects such as spacecraft and the ubiquitous 'rigid rod' 'get shorter' as they approach light speed. People don't get this. Does the rod 'really' get shorter or not? It seems to depend on the observer, defying Aristotelian logic and common sense.

An excellent Wikipedia article on Minkowski diagrams clears the whole thing up. The problem is with our use of language. When we say 'spacecraft' or 'rod' we are making a spacial statement - the object considered at a 'now'. But that immediately invalidates special relativity.

Instead, we have to consider the space-time object extended in space and swept out over a defined time. This extended space-time object at a particular 'now' is viewed differently by differently-moving observers because their 'now's are differently-oriented. Specifically when you view an object travelling fast past you, the spatial slice you measure as being the length 'now' is rotated as compared with the 'now' length measured by an observer travelling with the rod. And the rotated view is shorter. It's made clear in the diagram below, with explanatory text pasted in from the article.

Notice, by the way, that this has nothing to do with the time taken for light to get to you from different parts of the object at your 'now'. Your length measurement has to correct for those effects, and after the correction you compute that the 'length' is shorter.

"Relativistic length contraction means that the length of an object moving relative to an observer is decreased and finally also the space itself is contracted in this system. The observer is assumed again to move along the ct-axis. The world lines of the endpoints of an object moving relative to him are assumed to move along the ct'-axis and the parallel line passing A and B respectively. For this observer the endpoints of the object at t=0 are O and A. For a second observer moving together with the object, so that for him the object is at rest, it has the length OB at t'=0. Due to OA being less than OB the object is contracted for the first observer."

* Excerpted from the Wikipedia article.

The point is made more clearly by the following thought experiment in the diagram above. Suppose, according to the 'blue' observer speeding by, that the rod flicked into existence 'all at once' for a millisecond along OB, then vanished again. The 'black' stationary observer would not see a rod at all, but would calculate a thin slice of material which sprang into existence close by and seemed to move away much faster than light (although it would visually appear to be slower than light due to light propagation delay from more distant parts of the rod). The 'spatial' rod would, in fact, have been rotated a little into time from the stationary observer's viewpoint.

New Laptop -- update

I knew it was too good to be true ... here's the note I've just emailed off to technical support.

Hi,

I today bought an Advent notebook computer at PC World Basingstoke running Vista Home Premium Edition.After installing a few programs (Office 2007, Frontpage, etc), I am now getting a window saying:

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library
_______________________________
Runtime Error!
Program: C:\Windows\explorer.exe
abnormal program termination
[OK]

Shutting down and restarting hasn't removed the problem. If this error window is closed, or the OK box clicked, the window vanishes, the desktop icons vanish and Vista seems to go back to the final part of its power-up sequence. Then the wretched error window comes back again.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Nigel.

PS: It turns out that this is a frequent symptom of an incompatability of Vista with an old program. In my case, my old encryption program. I've uninstalled it, and the problem has gone away.
The tech guy on the phone was confident he could solve this problem, and took great pains to steer me to the one minute automated quality assurance feedback after he'd finished. I, of course, gave him 5 out of 5 for helpfulness, accuracy, courtesy etc.
So that's how they manipulate their scores!

New Laptop - Oct. 16th 2007

With several possible work leads in sight, I decided I had to have a new laptop. My BT laptop, which I've been using for work the last 16 months, went back to BT a couple of weeks ago. My 'other' laptop, a Toshiba which I bought back in 2003, is showing worrying signs of ageing. The sound card occasionally gives up entirely, and the erratic functioning of the PSU has led to heartrending bleeping noises from the almost-drained battery on too many recent occasions.

So off to Basingstoke PC World this morning with Adrian, where we were helped by a charming young Polish tech guy with an unnerving grasp of the equipment choices on sale and their respective pros and cons.

So -- I'm typing this on an Advent laptop with 1.8 GHz dual core processors, 2 GB memory, 120 GB HD, 802.11g WiFi and of course Vista. To be honest, Vista was a calculated risk, but so far it's proven remarkably intuitive and has also successfully loaded several of my XP programs without complaint. I have a few more to install, it being an all-day job to get a new computer into usable shape ...

Interweave Consulting Autumn Newsletter

My autumn newsletter sent out today, featuring a Q&A about the experience of working in BT's Wireless Cities programme.

It's a PDF (120 kB) and you can take a look here.