The most effectual TopSat

This morning I got up early and was in work before 07:00 (what's the 'oh' stand for?...) to attend the TopSat launch event. This is a satellite that people here helped build -- more specifically, people in our department build a camera capable of a resolution of 2.8m from aheight of about 680km, which is pretty impressive given that the project cost just $22M, a fraction of the cost of most satellites with a similar function (taking photos of the earth).

Happily the launch went smoothly so the UK now has a brand new flying digital camera in space.

Oh, and we didn't launch it ourselves -- after a few presentations on the project we watched a live feed from the launch site at Plesetsk in Russia, where it was launched, alongside four other satellites, on a Kosmos 3M liquid fueled vehicle.

No Place Like the Home Office

Yesterday to celebrate the movement of the ID card bill through its third reading (a piece of important news, cleverly arranged to be overshadowed by Ken Clark) I emailed the Home Office through the address advertised on their website for general enquiries (public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk), thinking that there was no chance they would offer a straight answer to how much the ID card scheme would cost (current estimates vary from about £3 billion to over £20 billion -- that's American-style billions, by the way), but I might as well ask anyway.

Today I received my response, which wasn't quite what I had expected...

Your message

 To:      public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
 Subject: ID Card Query
 Sent:    Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:54:20 +0100

did not reach the following recipient(s):

Public Enquiries (CD) on Wed, 19 Oct 2005 09:44:20 +0100
   The recipient was unavailable to take delivery of the message
       The MTS-ID of the original message is: c=gb;a=cwmail;p=home
office;l=SDCEMB010510190844SAAKW16R
   MSEXCH:MSExchangeMTA:PHU:L01EM004

Hmm, if their IT infrastructure can't handle a simple email enquiry, what hope is there for the national identity register? Or maybe there is another explanation...

Crimes Against Music

Yesterday evening we went to see Mitch Benn at New Greenham Arts, on the site of the former Greenham Common airbase. Most of our friends have never heard of Mitch (they don't listen to Radio 4 as habitually as we do), so trying to describe him to them can be difficult -- I've settled on him being something of a cross between Bill Bailey, Weird Al Yankowic and Tom Lehrer, but definitely with his own style. Basically, he does cleverly written and (with the help of his talented backing musicians, The Distractions) wonderfully executed musical humour.

The show was great, with my personal highlights being "Ikea" (about the vikings who are "conquering the world with our self-assembly, flat-packed furniture"), "Now He's Gone" (a touching song about a girl who has a novel solution to ensuring that her boyfriend never fools around) and the spectacular "Macbeth (my name is)" (an Eminem style rap about the classic antihero who is told, "by man born of woman your butt is unkickable"). Oh and there was the one about the teaparty. And the stadium rock. And the West End musical. And...

Mitch and the band seemed quite fun in general: bassist, keyboardist and vocalist Kirsty turned up outside during the interval for a swift cigarette and a chat with those assembled, and there was a good opportunity to meet them (and buy albums) afterwards where we learned that it is easy to set Mitch off on one of his rants.

We'll be keeping an eye on his tourdates in future...

Long-Term Hedge

One edge of our garden is shared with neighbours and has a combination of 6' wooden fence and short sections of hedge (leylandii -- erk!). The other two sides, one of which borders a road which sees quite a lot of traffic, are bounded by a waist-high wire fence.

It feels quite exposed, so we want to do something about it. I like the idea of a hardwood hedge, but that would need quite a lot of trees/shrubs and I have so far been unable to find the right sort of plants at a price we can afford.

Until now.

Enter a Somerset firm called Ashridge Trees who can provide industrial (or should that be agricultural) quantities of young trees from an alarming selection of species for what looks to me like great prices. I expect we'll be ordering a few dozen trees this year. The only problem is that it will take a few years for the hedge to turn into a hedge, but it means we can be surrounded by things like blackthorn, crab apple and wild roses. Nice...

Freedom and Wealth

Paul Graham, in his essay 'The Word Hacker' asserts "If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite trend." I thought I'd test this, so had a quick look around the CIA World Factbook to get some data.

This was completely non-scientific, just pulling info on a few countries more or less at random, but is vaguely interesting.

Country	GDP per capita ($)	Gratuitous graphic bit
USA	40100
Switzerland	33800
Ireland	31900
Canada	31500
Australia	30700
UK	29600
Netherlands	29500
Japan	29400
France	28700
Germany	28700
Sweden	28400
Spain	23300
New Zealand	23200
South Korea	19200
Saudi Arabia	12000
South Africa	11100
Russia	9800
Iran	7700
Romania	7700
Turkey	7400
Venezuela	5800
China	5600
Egypt	4200
India	3100
Cuba	3000
Pakistan	2200
North Korea	1700
Uganda	1500
Nigeria	1000
Somalia	600

A couple of countries I tried to access resulted in "access forbidden": Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I didn't spend too much effort looking for others.

While all this proves absolutely nothing, there are a few interesting things to be seen like, for example, that South Korea has more that 10 times the per capita GDP than North Korea, or that Ireland does better than most of Europe. Actually, I am mildly surprised to see the USA so far in front too.

Near Miss

Today I received an email from a family member pointing me at a website purporting to allow visitors to find out about "near misses" registered on their car by speed cameras, explaining that if you reach 20 near misses you receive a speeding ticket.

Well, a whois search on the domain reveals that the owner of the site is one "Snooty Fox Leisure" (which doesn't sound like the sort of organisation that would have access to this sort of information), and viewing the page source reveals that the first line of the page is a comment reading "This is a fake program that is not intended to harm anyone (c) Paul Suggitt 2003".

I guess this isn't genuine.

2005-09-26 Update: I've had another look at the site and played with it -- it gives you pregenerated usernames and passwords, and doesn't actually do anything else (the site pretends that the service is unavailable). I wonder how many people keep going back there to try to check their car.

2005-09-27 Another update: OK, it does work (the service unavailable was genuine), and it seems safe. I still don't approve for numerous reasons. Yeah, I'm a sour-puss and grumpy-face.

Artificially Intelligible

It is finally over! This year has been the toughest I have had yet with the Open University and this lunchtime I posted my end of course project report.

The course has been on artificial intelligence and, on balance, it has been interesting and enjoyable. The problem is that part of the course made use of software that I found... uhhh... unpleasant to use, to say the least. By the sounds of it I was not alone in this. The software is a KBS (knowledge-based system) toolkit called Flex, which tries so hard to be user friendly but falls so far short. And the less said about the documentation, the better.

Anyway, the end-of-course projectlet required some experimentation with this toolkit... and hilarity ensued.

Now it's the 3-month wait for the results to come out, then two more years of study (next year its a whole year of project work, designing and building a networked application in Java) and I will finally have that degree. Almost there now...

But tonight, I will have a beer.

Flight Club

Saturday saw the wedding of VK and KG, the first church wedding I have been to for some four years, although come to think of it a little over two years ago there was another religious wedding which, thanks to an allowance in Scottish laws, was held outside.

Many of our friends have had quirky weddings in one way or another and this was no exception: the reception was effectively a small kite festival with invited guests only. There was a hog roast, an ice cream van, and flying demonstrations from some of the best kite flyers in the UK -- including the reigning UK individuals champion. The bride and groom's "first dance" was a performance of their kite ballet to the tune of "Me and My Shadow", which after a couple of false starts due to far too little wind, they did an admirable job of.

I really must fly kites more often.

Reichenbach

A month and a half ago, <3 and I handed back to the keys to our previous house. We wanted to do this much earlier but the landlord refused to let us out of our contract.

We walked around the house and the landlord pointed out numerous points where he felt we had damaged his house or failed to leave it in a fit and clean state. Apart from a couple of points we disagreed with his assessment, but managed to not get too angry with his nitpicking and hectoring. We also kept quiet about his frankly insulting comments -- for instance the comment about how now <3 has a PhD (in physics and electrical engineering) she can get out of the typing pool.

After some discussion it was agreed that we would pay for certain repairs out of our deposit (of nearly £1000) and an additional £100 for time spent to clean everything up (we hoped this would ease the transition). This would leave us with at least half of our deposit to be repaired.

Two weeks ago, <3 phoned the landlord (who was unavailable) and left a message asking if any progress had been made with returning our deposit.

A little over a week ago we received a letter from the landlord in his usual hectoring tone, listing a large number of defects and reasons for keeping the deposit -- all of it. He provided receipts for less than £70.

Two days later we saw a solicitor for legal advice. He suggested that we probably have a good case and that if the landlord cannot produce receipts for money he deducts from the deposit, a court would be likely to side with us if in any doubt. The solicitor also explained the procedure in some detail for seeking a county court judgement in order to reclaim our money.

Yesterday we posted a letter to the landlord, 'without prejudice', disputing some of his comments, inviting him to reconsider his decision to keep the deposit, and threatening legal action.

Interestingly, the house is currently for sale and, according to the estate agent, there has been plenty of interest. I'm wondering if the landlord will have the "necessary" repairs done (I doubt he ever intended this) before it sells. If not, he won't ever have those receipts.

Gorging Ourselves

Saturday was KG's stag day and the main event was an afternoon of "gorge scrambling" courtesy of Adventures in Kenfig, near Porthcawl. I have to admit to a measure of trepidation (as did many of the other guys), but went along, paid my money and was duly issued with a wetsuit, buoyancy aid and helmet.

Half an hour or so of driving around South Wales brought us to Pontneddfechan, towards the western end of the Brecons, we got our kit on and set off with two instructors and three people who had arrived as a separate group. Shortly afterwards we were floating down a stretch of river before beginning the scramble up a tributary.

Despite initial misgivings, this was fun. Over the next three hours we traversed rocks and walls, climbed waterfalls, swam pools, crawled through caves, yelled encouragement to each other and finally rounded things off with leaps from a couple of waterfalls, all in beautiful surroundings. All tiring (and 4 days later I'm still acheing) but enjoyable and rewarding. Plus, it's entirely possible we might do it again sometime -- even <3 and some of the other non-attendees sound like they might be up for joining us.