Mixed Signals

Get into the office to find enough spam in my mailbox to feed an army of Australians. Not good. I don't want to look at hot Russian sex kittens, thanks very much, nor invest just $26 a week with a guaranteed return of $5000... $7000... AS MUCH AS $10,000 A MONTH.

However, it's not just the ever-increasing volume that's worrying. Hidden in the cascade of quasi-legal scams are adverts from companies I've heard of, some of whom get their stuff reviewed by us. We've had some readers say that we shouldn't do those reviews -- but is that fair? How about encouraging the development of anti-spammers; e-mail programs that send "User unknown" messages back, or the use of uman-readable-only replyto fields? Something has to be done, but something that's not as disreputable or disruptive as the sin itself. Any ideas out there?

Tuesday

A friend is entertaining two Swedish women, who're over on their holidays to see the sights and observe that strangest of animals, the Londoner at play. The hour is late, the chattering loud, the whisky flowing - quite a treat, as the Swedish Systembolaget booze monopoly keeps prices of spirits stratospherically high over there. One of the Swedes with an admirably joyful curiosity expresses an interest in this Internet she's heard so much about. Particularly any online lesbian sites.

It is curiously satisfying to be given licence to explore the dark side ("it was for journalistic research, y'honour"), especially in such agreeable company, and my friend was delighted to kick the modem into life, pull up his collar and slip into the red light sector of cyberspace. What they found, though, was a skein of links of such duplicity and cupidity that it makes Arful Daley seem like the National

Consumer Council. Everywhere they looked, pages promised much but provided nothing. At one point, the pornographers' habits of starting up new browser windows with menus in (more difficult to navigate out of, y'see) had produced 30 copies of Netscape on screen at once.

Fortunately, my friend is a professional. He and they managed to eventually filter out the cons and nastiness and honour was satisfied, so to speak. But it looks as if the guardians of the nation's morals can sleep easy in their beds (if that's what they want to do there); on the current state of the online pornographic industry, nothing but frustration awaits the frustrated.

Wednesday

Wednesday is Palm Pilot day! First, we find that IBM hasn't so much licensed the Pilot technology from 3Com as bought a big box of the things, sandpapered off the words 'US Robotics Palm Pilot" and written "IBM Workpad" on in blue crayon. Oh, and it's replaced the green power button with one of dysentric brown. You've got to laugh, really. Such badge engineering is a good idea really - it'll get the product, which is one of the few that's honestly good enough to merit it, into a whole new part of the corporate world, and the thing will become the de facto standard for hand-held organisers. Bet Casio, HP, Sharp et al aren't laughing, and could you ever see IBM badging the Psion Sienna?

Then come reports that executives in the US, keen to prove ownership and prowess, have taken to giving whiteboard presentations in Graffiti. That's the written shorthand Pilot understands. This also provokes laughing, but in experiments I and a pal discover that our mutually incomprehensible scrawl is much improved if we do the same when writing on paper. This could spread.

Finally, our American and ultra-professional editor-in-chief, Bob Kane, is unexpectedly convulsed with laughter. He's unable to speak, so we prise his Pilot from his hand and see if we can find out what's going on. Seems the man was downloading new software from the Web, and got an offline document reader -- this grabs text from the Web and shoves it into the Pilot for later consumption. Bob had innocently chosen the top downloaded document from a very respectable Web site, only to discover it was a salacious tale involving spanking and panties. Why this rendered him speechless with mirth for a good five minutes is another one of those cultural differences we may never fully understand.

Thursday

We're moving! Spend most of the day packing stuff into crates. Tempted to just slip into one myself and close the lid, just to escape the chaos, but friendly voices tempt me even more strongly with tales of beer after it's all over. Words cannot express the heroism of the IT department who when faced with moving telephones, 150-odd computers, megabit data links and rooms full of temperamental Notes servers do not just collapse with fear but get on with the job. Can't wait for good wireless networking, though. It'll make such a difference. Get diary done day early, because online stuff may be a little temperamental.

In the evening, descend on Emporium, a club just south of Oxford Circus. It's Firefly's 6th birthday bash, and they always put on a good one. Hear with sympathy story from pal who's being parcelled off to the Continent for three days in the exclusive company of the scene's Most Obnoxious Journalist. MOJ himself does not appear to be in attendance, so we content ourselves with tales of past sins including incidents known as The Client's Wife, The Wastepaper Basket and The Snog.

Party goes on and on. But that's OK, the office is closed tomorrow. Working at home.

Friday

Woken from deep and troubled sleep by online bod Arif. "Errr... " he says. The sort of "Err..." that's never good news. "Err... don't suppose you could rewrite the diary" he says. "Some sort of corruption... we've lost it."

But of course. Delighted Just don't expect an entry for Friday...

Fresh from my orgy of nerdiness last week, when I found and downloaded emulators for Edsac, the Ferranti Pegasus, the Oric Atmos, the Altair, and other bits of antediluvian technology, I go sniffing around after ancient chips. One in particular turns up time and time again, the 4004. Intel's first microprocessor - indeed, the world's first microprocessor. As such, it figures large in the company's official mythology. But did you know that its development was funded on the quiet by Sharp? Or that Intel's enthusiasm for the whole idea was so muted that it very nearly didn't bother picking up the marketing rights, or that it only started to invest its own development money two generations of processor later, for the 8080?

Have a look at http://computer.org/annals/an1997/a3toc.htm. It makes fascinating reading.

Tuesday

Forget Tellytubbies. The PC Magazine offices are gripped with the next big cute thing, Fin Fin. This is Fujitsu's artifical life creation, half dolphin, half penguin, and its cuddly avatar is given pride of place on top of online whizz Wayne Hazell's monitor.

But then the atmosphere turns nasty. A lynching is afoot! Within minutes, the poor ickle thing is dangling from the ceiling by a length of Category 5 twisted pair network cabling! The mob is a vicious animal. But a saviour is at hand! Louise Lindop, managing editor of PC Magazine's network edition, swoops into action. In best Clint Eastwood stylee she rides into town, snatches the hapless toy from its fate and carries it to a safe haven on top of a stack of 100Mbps Ethernet switches.

It's a full moon tonight. I suspect this may have something to do with it.

Wednesday

What shall we do with the drunken Psion? I've been carting the Series 5 around all week, and it's growing on me like a veruca. Alas, last night it took it upon itself to stop responding to touch - everything works 'cept the stylus-sensitive screen. Normally I'd reset it and see if that helped, but the damn thing's got half a short story in by now. Which means I have to - gulp - get PsiWin running in order to ferry the data to a central core or refuge, and CIX, CompuServe and Usenet have had many a teary punter's tales of PsiWin woe.

I'm a professional. I must grasp the nettle. Odd how after fifteen years of fiddling with RS232 I no longer leap delightedly at the challenge of making it all work.

Watch out next week for an announcement from IBM. It's licenced the Palm Pilot technology from 3Com, and has a product just raring to go...

Thursday

Hang loose with the good old boys from Lycos, the original search engine. These Bostonians have set up shop in Europe, the better to sell us spidering - their verb - services. They've got city guides. They've got local data. They've got... a rather unfortunate site name.

Now, I don't know whether it's just me but I find it very easy to spot alternative meanings to product names. The Palm Pilot, for example - a perfect Viz euphemism for an exponent of the old knuckle shuffle. Where would you think Lycos' UK operation would live? www.lycos.co.uk. of course - but no, someone registered that ages ago and wants paying for it. Lycos wasn't having any of that, so has registered www.lycosuk.co.uk. Lycosuk. Sounds like some peculiar perversion involving skin-tight clothing to me...

Not that we can laugh. When PC Magazine was setting up its online forum on CompuServe all those years ago, we had to choose a keyword for it. "I know", said one American. "Ziff UK". It nearly went through, until it was pointed out that spaces weren't allowed...

Friday

PR company Noiseworks has just delivered a large plastic dog bowl emblazoned with the logo of a client of theirs and the name of a new product.

I do not own a dog. I do not wish to own a dog. Dogs disturb me - I consider that Homo Sapiens has spent a good couple of million years evolving in order to dispense with the dangers inherent in sharing a planet with packs of wild carnivores. The idea of willingly sharing house space with an implacable, intelligent killing machine is not one that appeals. And the thought that Noiseworks is trying to get me to place my life on the line is worse -- what are these people up to? What dark anti-journalist conspiracy is afoot? We'll all be murdered in our beds, our throats torn out, our pillows soaked with arterial blood!

I am about to go around to Noiseworks' gaffe with an army of peasants clutching flaming torches in order to raze the nest of evil-doers to the ground when Guy Kewney looks over my shoulder and says "Oooh! A dog bowl! My dog Sam would love that!" and removes the satanic feeding device. This man knows no fear...

Tuesday

See Monday. Still, had a rather useful burst of hallucinatory fiction writing. Scribbled ideas down, still seem OK in the cold light of viral sobriety.

Back in the real world, CompuServe has finally been sold. Mildly interesting that AOL is taking possession of the wetware, computers and online services, but much more interesting that WorldCom is using the deal to get control of both the CompuServe network and the AOL network. WorldCom, in case you haven't noticed, also owns UUNet. That's Pipex. And MSN's access. According to the Web page -- which may not have been updated to take account of the CSI/AOL deal -- the company has some half-million dial-up access points worldwide: it's also the US's fourth largest telephone company, with fingers in pies across the globe.

Watch these people. They own your bits.

Wednesday

Back at work... still grotty, but probably non-infectious. A pleasantly large selection of tasks await. My AGP/300 MHz Pentium II machine has arrived, so settle down with screwdriver and copy of 3D benchmarks to test the old hype. Amazingly, AGP -- the Accelerated Graphics Port -- doesn't seem to do a darned thing more than PCI. Mumble. Fumble. Phone -- everyone's still on holiday. It's impossible to get anything done in this industry between July 15th and September 15th.

Eventually find the computer is missing a small but vital file -- the USB support. Yes, without the Universal Serial Bus files, AGP won't work. Why? Hey, it's all IO, right?

Mumble some more, replace the file, and as if by magic AGP springs into life! A 4Mb graphics card can run as many textures as an 8Mb graphics card! Coo. Err, that's it. No other detectable differences.

Hey ho. Some days, the excitement is just too much...

Thursday

Wandering the web looking for cool stories -- find a genuine Kubrickian character out there designing brains. This man, oh so suitably named Dr Hugo de Garis, runs the Brain Building Group -- no word of a lie, distant reader -- in Kyoto, Japan. And he has the complete kit of parts to complete the task -- what looks like grand funding, the appearance of a Hollywood mad professor, and some majorly off-whack ideas. You really must look at his Web site to appreciate the chap.

Some samples: he is designing a Robokitten (Robokoneko in Japanese) to show off one of his more recent brains. A long document includes various spine-chilling comments: right at the end "It would be a good idea to look at some real kittens to see what they do. That way we could get ideas for behaviours to be put into the kitten brain".

If I read the site correctly, these people have built the first fast evolving-network hardware already, with a capability of 100 billion cells/second reconfiguration in three dimensions.

You couldn't make this stuff up. Go see.

Friday

More stuff you couldn't make up -- in Japan, telephone companies are putting Tamagotchi code into mobiles. When you call somebody else with a Tamagotchi phone, the two virtual pets converse... and if you then don't call again for a while, the pets start to pine and hint that they're missing each other. Nasty, eh?

But not as unsettling as Microsoft's Actimates. Yes, Our friends in Seattle have got into the cuddly toy business, peddling an interactive purple dinosaur which can link to your PC or TV. It has a range of actions, sensors in paws, feet and eyes, and a vocabulary of 2,000 words (which increases to 4,000 when it's watching television or 14,000 when it's wirelessly linked to the computer. Now, wouldn't you like to hack that?).

Long-memoried types might remember Petsters, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell's abortive attempts at much the same thing just after he got out of videogames. He also did the Chuck E Cheese pizza chain... can we expect to see Bill doing Big Macs? Oh -- too late. He's already bought the company.

A grand night out in town has a bucket of cold water thrown over it by the news from Paris. Watch the announcer on BBC try and fail to come to terms with what he's saying. The Internet goes into spasm; can't log onto AOL without getting unknown Americans offering condolences, alt.conspiracy.princess-diana is there in microseconds, and forget about www.royal.gov.uk. But it's fascinating reading the newspaper sites around the world as they update their front pages.

Just as well. Radio appears to have given up for the duration, with Radios 2 through 5 carrying the same rolling news. Subsequently hear that Broadcasting House had a major power failure on Sunday, and was having considerable trouble running all five radio networks anyway.

The whole story was summed up, starkly, by the file name of CNN's lead Web story. It started out at 1am as diana.wreck and switched at 5am to diana.dead. This is not going to be a normal week.

Monday

The 56k modem scene gets weirder. Now an inventor -- Craig Townshend -- has appeared, claiming to have patents on the basic ideas. Indeed, 3Com/USR has bought a licence from him, but how this affects the ITU V.pcm standard is not clear. Everyone says something different - last time PC Magazine found this happening was when we did ISDN terminal adaptors. It finally became apparent then that nobody actually knew what was going on. Have increasing suspicion that this is the case now.

Meanwhile, finally flash-upgrade my US Robotics Courier to X2. Connection speed to favourite services promptly falls...

Tuesday

Hear from a pal at the Burning Man festival in the US. You'll hear more and more about this... but what the reports rarely say is that the place runs to a great extent on hallucinogenic drugs. Which is worrying, given the fondness of the attendees for guns, high-powered cars and high-powered lasers. Worst you get at Glastonbury is a burned mouth from a thermonuclear falafel.

Get particularly worried about the chemist who brings a UV laser to 'make people glow' from miles away. Yeah, right. I've always found tanned retinas so sexy...

Wednesday

I sit opposite one. I've known loads. I've even wondered about becoming one. But I've never really known exactly what it is that editors do all day (which is OK - they normally feel the same way about me). The bits of the job that I do understand seem thankless. Take recruitment, for example: magazine people tend to have an unorthodox range of skills and it's quite hard to find just the one you want for a particular niche.

One computer magazine editor pal of mine confirms a story I'd heard previously. The publication in question needed a deputy art editor - page design, pictures, that sort of thing - and found a likely bod from the East End. He did a creditable job at interview, got hired and set to work on the mag. So far, so good. The team then went out with a PR company for an evening's jolly: our hero's first such event. The free booze was too much; he got more and more garrulous and eventually had to be gently led from the premises, with his boss apologising profusely to the PRs for misbehaviour.

This would be bad enough, if not exactly unknown. Our chum then decides to go back to the office at midnight: the security guards are leery of letting him in, but eventually capitulate. Shortly afterwards, the alarms go off - he's down in the basement, rootling around. Out you go, matey.

Four o'clock in the morning, and he's back. Security guard in no mood for repeat performance, and refuses entry. Our pal gets physical: cops are called, and it's in the slammer to cool off. He's still too bladdered in the morning to be charged (a drunk and disorderly rap awaits), but eventually the office calls and say "Cool off. Come in on Monday at 10, we'll sort it out then."

He wanders in at 11 on the Monday, as if nothing has happened. Final straw, really: farewell, dep art ed. Later hear, through my East End pals, that he's come in for a fair amount of ribbing from his chums for such total stupidity, and that he hasn't even got enough money to buy a copy of the one issue of the magazine that he contributed to.

And you thought that computer magazines were havens of silicon-studded anorakhood. Lord, no.

Thursday

Rumours grow that Psion's results are not going to be fab. "Strong pound hurt us", says Psion. "Can't get the Series5, and nobody's buying the Series 3c," says a retail source. "Everyone looked at the Win CE machines and wanted to get a Psion, but they can't make them", says Guy Kewney when I ask him.

Later, I go on Radio 5 Live and pontificate about this.

An angry user phones up. This guy is fuming! "Why did you give them such an easy ride?" He lets fly with a long stream of instances of bugs in the software. The spreadsheet freezes. You can't print individual pages from the word processor. PsiWin, the PC replication software, goes wrong in various interesting ways. It's not the bugs that particularly rile him, though, it's Psion's responses to the complaints. In the first week, says my correspondent, technical support didn't even have a database - they had to write reports on Post-It notes. And they won't say whether the bugs have been fixed, or when they might be - all they'll say is that there'll be an upgrade (in six to eight months time) which will have the fixes. And will cost £50. And which can't be installed by the users without invalidating the guarantee.

Interesting. I should be getting one on review next week: it'll be fun to talk to them on these matters.

Friday

Fix modem problem. CNN now called diana.burial.

Get flu. Retire hurt for duration.