Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 29 August 1998, 7:03 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
A worried phone call from a good friend. She's consulting somewhere in town, and uses AOL for her personal email. From habit, she installs the AOL client software on a PC: these days, you can use a couple of smaller programs to get mail and stuff, but that's only been a recent innovation and she hasn't got around to getting them running.
Disaster. Something goes wrong and the AOL software crashes, taking the computer's networking with it. After an hour reinstalling everything, it's almost back to normal -- except that IP doesn't work. Much faffing later, and it still doesn't work and nobody can see why. She calls me: after all, I've spent a long time at the sharp end of Windows 95's networking stacks and know my gateway from my subnet mask.
Another hour later, and I admit defeat. We've been through everything, but the packets refuse to get out of the machine -- or perhaps it can't see packets coming back. Or something. How can we tell? Windows has no diagnostic capabilities. With more people on the Net, there's going to be a large cash reward for the first clever soul to develop some no-thought-required IP problem solving package. Get to it!
Tuesday
More nonsense accrues about BT's Home Highway. You've read the story so far on ZD Net, but there's more -- like the glum engineer who was installing ISDN at a correspondent's house, and who suggested that if Home Highway is anything like as successful as BT is planning then they'll run out of trained installers. Not that it matters, the morose wire monkey continued, as they won't give us the right test equipment anyway.
And another pal slips me the wink that even if ISPs wanted to support 128k two-phone-calls-at-once access from Home Highwayers, lots of them couldn't. A popular make of router can't cope: if the two calls come in on different ISDN trunks, and they quite probably will, then they'll go to two different routers. These routers have two modes of operation - ignorance of each other, or working together. If the routers are ignorant of each other, then the two calls will never be combined and the link will fail. If the routers are configured to work together, then the two calls will combine and you'll get a 128k link -- until something goes wrong. At that point, every router in the group - not just those two - will fail.
Needless to say, ISPs are unhappy with either of these scenarios. And BT's Home Highway service is already being nicknamed Home Highwayman -- "after all," said one jaundiced hack, "it's robbing the poor to give to the rich".
Wednesday
I'm summoned by the Beeb to the Business Breakfast. 5am start, in the studios at 6, makeup lady has to use JCB to get enough slap on to hide the bags... ah, fame!
It then goes downhill. I thought I was there to discuss NatWest's new Zenda service - a computerised (but with real people) information service that manages your time and information for you. It'll warn you when birthdays are coming up, feed you newswire services via filters, handle financial info, all that sort of thing. Very interesting, and there are loads of good questions to ask about it - what will the bank do with all the demographic information it gathers? What role does the media have now banks are doing newswire services? Why a bank, anyhow?
The first question from the presenter is "Are there too many gadgets in our lives?" and it goes on from there. Sigh. And they called me Robert Goodwins -- interesting, given they called me Rupert when they first asked me on. Mind you, watching the autocue for other items I'm struck by the large numbers of spelling and punctuation mistakes. This isn't news, it's entertainment. And I got out of bed for it. Fool.
Thursday
My colleague Lem Bingley has returned from his holidays, looking tanned and jetlagged. He sits down at his computer and starts to check his email while regaling us with happy tales of driving from Mexico to Canada. After a while his voice trails off. He's staring at the screen. 'Oh, no...' he says, and blanches beneath his Montana-browned skin.
With good reason. Just before he left, he wrote a piece for IT Week on why Linux isn't ready for corporate use -- at least, not yet. Fair enough. But then some bright spark decided it would make a perfect piece for online publication and, while Lem was thousands of miles from any browser, shoved it up on here.
The result has been not dissimilar to taking all one's clothes off, smearing honey over one's torso from Adam's apple to Eve's exciter, and violently prodding a beehive with a short stick. To say that Linux supporters count among their number the excitable, the defensive and the downright abusive would not be to say that there aren't any cool, sane, reasonable ones. It's just that the sensible types don't tend to write. While the others... well. A typical quote:"How much did Microsoft pay you to write that drivel? The only excuses for such nonsense are technical incompetence, journalistic incompetence or bribery - perhaps all three. What's it to be?"
I think he's up to around a hundred responses so far, but I daren't ask. Fortunately, there are enough gems in the dross to make it worth his while to keep going through them. But, Linuxians, it's not big or clever to respond to something that you don't like with invective, personal abuse or arrogance. I know you all think we're in the pay of Evil Bill (reading some of the anti-ZD Net stuff on slashdot.org is remarkable. How do these people know so much more about the company than we do?) , but you'll make far more impact if you use logic and evidence to back up your fanaticism.
As for Lem -- he's beginning to get worried that some sort of jihad is forming. I'll give him Salman's number, and they can meet up for a drink somewhere. I hear Montana's nice at this time of year.
Friday
We coin a new collective noun for bankers to replace the very 80's 'Wunch'; we decide that 'Plummet' will be more accurate. As the air crackles and pops with the sound of imploding roubles, we take bets as to the effect of all this kerfuffle on the IT industry. It's probably not going to do the business of being a computer salesman in Georgia much good.
However, there is one planning resource that Yeltsin has missed. Have a go yourself: the Silicon Valley Tarot Deck is ideal for planning that IPO or debugging that Internet stack installation. Hey, it works for me.
Saturday 22 August 1998, 8:42 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Two things, each of minor interest, that together send a shiver up the spine. Thing One: My father (the country vicar) is getting very close to getting his private pilot's licence. He makes his first airfield-to-airfield flight, ending up in Bristol in the middle of a cloud of big jets - the first time he's flown to a big field and it's obviously made quite an impression on him.
The second thing is the report that in New England, the air traffic control computers failed for more than half an hour and the controllers had to resort to pushing hand-written notes at each other in an attempt to keep track of the hundreds of aircraft.
If this was Hollywood, it would be at this point that the director picks up the pace and starts to draw the themes together, culminating with the Vicar taking off in Concorde as the missile defence systems of the world crash and burn. Hmm. Now there's an idea...
Tuesday
Suddenly, the world wakes up to Year 2000. It takes the News at Ten to do a piece, and suddenly the phone won't stop ringing with news editors, journo friends and others trying to get a story together.
Someone asks me ‘What are the rest of Europe doing?", which is a damn good question. Another friend has some of the answers. The Scandiwegians are well ahead, apparently, but the French have only just noticed that there's a problem. Until now, it was filed away as just another Anglo-Saxon plot and worth ignoring altogether... "And don't forget," says my francophile informant, "this is the nation which uses Macs because Macs don't crash." "But Macs do crash!" I say. "I know, I know", replies mon pal, "but they're not counted as crashes. They're minor interruptions, to be expected. Only Windows machines crash in France."
Are we really ready for union?
Wednesday
World domination ahoy! Work begins on Project Nixon, my secret software which I'll use to become very rich. Then I'll retire to a little pied-a-terre in a seaside town and write my novels... (actually the novels are World Domination Plan 2, and if they work first I'll retire and write my software. That's if the screenplay (WDP 3 - vicars and aircraft) doesn't kick off).
Anyway. Project Nixon is a brilliant idea, only slightly sullied by my recent discovery that someone's done it before. The idea is that you plug your phone into your soundcard, and whenever a call is made or received the computer automatically records it to disk. If you find you need something from a recent phone call (which only ever happens after you've made the call, of course), then it's just a matter of diving in, grabbing the sound file and playing it back. For reporters and spies, that's very useful - many times a call turns into an interview and one doesn't have time to plug in the tape recorder, check tape, levels, batteries and so on. Fortunately, the people who've done it before have gone out of their way to make their software difficult to use and I soon convince myself that I can do it much, much better.
The small problem is programming it. I finally get Visual Studio 97, find out how ActiveX deals with audio and start sketching out flow charts, state machines and user interfaces. Ah, just like the old days!
Watch this space. Venture capitalists who wish to subscribe to this most thrusting of concepts should email me at my usual address, or just send Jiffy bags stuffed with dosh. Actually, if I was at all serious about this I'd just find a way to do it over the net, call myself At-Dot-Slash VoiceComm Inc, and wait for the money to arrive without even asking for it...
Thursday
If you go down to the woods today, be sure of a big surprise... Actually, that's more true of Regent's Park, where the cuddly teddy-bears of ZDNet UK are having their annual picnic. And Guy Kewney and I are invited!
Of course, it coincides with the first hurricane of Autumn. Guy, freshly back from holiday where he sailed boats in the sun, looks distinctly cryogenic in his shorts and Marigold-yellow T shirt. While the younger members of the team zoom off and play football, fly kites and creatively terrify tourists, the grown-ups huddle around a large pool of ice (brought to make the beer better) and pretend it's a crackling campfire with old-fashioned paper media merrily blazing away.
The saddest moment occurs when Jo Bawa (freelance) whips out her Palm III and laments the fact that she's never, ever used the infra-red transfer mode to beam a business card. "Aha!" exclaims Guy, and whips his out, too. "Aha aha!" shouts Wayne, who is also so equipped, and amidst what can only be described as rude banter (Guy was particularly taken with the possibilities that the word ‘beam' offered - and you must remember that Monica Lewinsky was fresh in all our minds) the requisite magic is spun.
To passers-by, the scene must have appeared on the edge of credulity. Because the Palm III has a flip-up lid, the three pals communing closely looked for all the world like crew members of the Enterprise requesting a lift from Scotty. And besides, Wayne comes from Canada which is probably much closer to Vulcan than we are in London.
Friday
BT finally announces Home Highway, the system whereby ISDN is repackaged and flogged to a wondering populace. Thanks, BT. Twenty years of pretending ISDN doesn't exist, selling it at a premium price to discourage use, and sending out badly undertrained engineers without the right equipment to make the lines work anyway - and you finally wake up just at the time that ADSL is going to make ISDN obsolete.
Ach. Can't wait for the Year 2000 bugs to send us all back to the Neolithic. Perhaps this time we can get it right...
Saturday 15 August 1998, 7:09 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Editor's Note - as it is the height of summer, Mr Goodwins' senses have followed the Parisian model and are currently away for the month. Consequentially, the following diary entries are even more likely to be pure fantasy than usual and should not be used to influence major life decisions. The publishers of ZDNet UK can take no responsibility. For anything.
Monday
It's quiet. Too quiet. Decide to install Linux on an ancient NCR box sitting in the corner. Once the awe of nations, this dual Pentium 60 giant tower is now openly mocked by PDAs and spat upon by passing cellphones. Perhaps I can restore some pride by dressing it in the eccentric finery of this most fashionable of operating systems.
A quick power-up test reveals that it's working, but has NT 3.51 installed. I slide in the Linux boot disk, and restart. Cor! I'm running Linux! Oh, it wants to know what my SCSI adaptor is - and I have a long list of strange names to choose from. I lever off the NCR's case to peer at the chips within... and the computer turns itself off. There's a safety switch that kills the power if you have a look inside - which is about as useful on a PC as doing the same for a Triumph Spitfire. The only time the engine actually runs is after you've spent all day rebuilding it.
I bodge the safety switch, and carry on poking. Nightmare! NCR has built a machine that thinks it's a mainframe - all custom busses and cards, Microchannel Architecture slots (MCA! IBM coughed in its sleep and sent this little fleck of sputum flying across the world!) and acres upon acres of discrete logic.
Discrete logic is... well, you know all those Tomorrow's World stories about computer chips with millions upon millions of transistors in them? Discrete logic is lots of little chips with a few hundred transistors in them. You make prototypes with it. You make one or two pre-production hand-crafted units with it. As soon as you've got the thing working, you whap the whole design in one chip and have done. Not NCR, which liked to do things the very hard, very expensive way for no reason whatsoever. A Rolls-Royce design: at full speed, the only thing you can hear is the tapping of the user's impatient fingers on the desk.
There's more, but if ever you wanted a reason why NCR had about as much chance of survival in the modern world as would a coelacanth in a swimming pool, this computer is it. Needless to say, Linux has no truck with such arcanities and I abandon the project.
Tuesday
A dream: I'm standing in a long corridor, waiting for a table at a restaurant. My best friend's girlfriend disappears off to a side room with another woman in order to... no, hold on, wrong dream. Start again.
A dream (take 2): I'm trying to install Linux on an old but perfectly normal 486/66 computer. Everything works until I have to configure the SCSI adaptor. Nothing works. I download the datasheets from the Web, and set this jumper and that jumper, this address and that interrupt. Sometimes a hard disk answers when called, sometimes it doesn't. And whatever the situation, the computer slides into a coma after about twenty seconds. I start to sweat. I wish I was back at my desk, writing nice things about Microsoft Hell, I wish I was working for Microsoft....
I wake up, shaking. I'm at my desk. There's a SCSI adaptor in my hand, and a swarm of tiny black jumper links is scattered across my keyboard like cubist fleas. At my feet, a disembowelled computer from a long-forgotten company (who nevertheless made better computers than NCR). Time for the Betty Ford clinic, I think... but after this. After just one shot at making Linux run...
Wednesday
... well, just one more...
Thursday
My fevered mind is careering out of control across the six-lane highway of Logic and smashing into the crash barriers of Madness. But if I enable programmed IO at the secondary address then the DMA error message should go away... but how come I'm getting that message if the BIOS is disabled? There is nothing more I can do. I've drunk deep from the cup of Linux and now my drugged, shattered ego must be cast asunder, but if I try to flee the country customs will look for false bottoms in the bags under my eyes.
I resign my commission and enter a Zen monastery on the banks of the holy river Mer-Zee.
Friday (the 23rd March, 2031)
After many years of contemplation, self-denial and esoteric practices, I achieve enlightenment. There is no operating system. There is no computer. Address errors are purely a product of desire. Linux is not right, neither is it wrong. But it has beauty, even in its incompleteness.
My newly-found clarity grants me one last revelation: no matter how long you chant, Windows won't look a microscopic speck better.
Another ed's note: After reading this myriad of cerebral ramblings, I would like to reiterate: The publishers of ZDNet UK can take no responsibility...
Saturday 8 August 1998, 8:05 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Rather nervously, I open it. It turns out to be from Tony Blair. Or rather, the 10 Downing Street site, which I was poking around in last week and where I asked for email updates. They don't want a reply, obviously...
And guess what: the Government, having made an election manifesto pledge of a Freedom of Information Act, has put it back again, this time to late 1999. The sponsoring minister has been sacked, and more control over it has been handed to Straw and Mandelson, who both despise the idea.
GAH! Come on, Shayler, come on...
Tuesday
Another worrying trend: in the US, programmers hired to fix Year 2000 problems are taking a long look at the scale of the problem, turning around and running for the hills. Literally -- they're buying hundred-acre plots in Oregon, picking up a years' worth of dried food and ammo, and preparing to sit out the End Of The World As We Know It. A friend suggests that this is surefire proof of the severity of the situation.
Nonsense. It doesn't take much to send American programmers round the bend -- that's assuming you can get them anywhere near the bend in the first place. A good millennial scare is just what we need to flush out the closet religious, survivalist and alien-worshipping nutters: the only problem in the UK is where do we put them? What little wide open space we have is rather nice or already full of peculiar folk (hey, I come from Plymouth, which borders with Cornwall. I know what I'm talking about here).
The Reverend Ian Paisley appears on the television, and suddenly all becomes clear. Forget the Millennium Dome -- let's make the seven counties the Millennium Zone. Clear out the technology and leave it to those who suspect it's all going to crumble anyway. Come to think of it, hasn't the clock already stopped for the Orange Order, some time in the 17th century?
Wednesday
I don't suppose I can complain: having whinged for the past two months about the wet weather, it seems churlish to point out that now the sun's appeared London Underground has become hot and steamy enough to parboil potatoes. I take myself and my potatoes through the three mile District/Central Line sauna from Tower Hill to Bond Street. It seems as if half the tourist population of the world is doing the same -- not for the first time, I consider building Rucksack Incendiary Bombs. An RIB would look like a pregnant crocodile clip: one tags it onto a floating strap that Yuri from Sebastopol has just shoved in your face, and one legs it. Thirty seconds later, the bleeder ignites and voila - - one less rucksack, and one more cubic metre of air on the Underground.
I have the plans, and I am a desperate man.
Why Bond Street? That's where the Churchill Intercontinental Hotel is, and that's where Virata ("Yes, we've had the Viagra jokes") is showing off its latest technology. About which I can say nothing, just at the moment, but watch this space. The meeting is enlivened considerably because the CEO of the company, Charles Cotton, is an ex-Sinclair Research chap and we spend more time swapping tales of mutual friends than we do discussing the mmmph-mppph shhhhh. Clive Sinclair is back in the media: both because a BBC 2 Learning Zone programme on him was repeated last week and, more salaciously, he appeared on the front page of the Sunday Sport. Why? Because he was at a strip show in Stringfellows. I didn't examine the publication closely enough to see whether it made any boffin' the boffin jokes: suffice it to say that Sir Clive's interest in carbon-based life is just as strong as any affinity he has for silicon. Without an E on the end, of course.
Thursday
Wireless LANs are here again, tra-la-la-la-lah! A hundred dollars a pop, and Diamond Multimedia will hook up your PC to your laptop, or your laptop to your modem... and in future your VCR, home alarm and what have you. No cabling, and a megabit to play with.
The fun will come when the bloke next door (or the hacker in the van out the front) gets one. How secure are they? "Absolutely secure" say the people who sell them. In tests, ten out of ten such claims have been shown to be... optimistic is the safest word, I guess. There's no reason they can't be made secure, but have the companies concerned done an audit on the product? Oh well. If they haven't, be sure someone else will.
Friday
Those clever Massachusetts Institute of Technology bods are at it again. This time, it's a computer which knows you're getting bored by watching your body language: the idea is that it then does something to maintain your interest: collects your email for you, fast-forwards your VCR, changes the screen colour, or whatever.
A brilliant idea, but I'd be particularly impressed if they could teach the same trick to computer programmers.
And while we're at MIT -- Nicolas Negroponte, Professor of Applied Cleverness at that institution, writes in the latest Wired that he's finally given up on his Macintosh and moved to Windows. Which, surprise, he's finding "needs to be much more friendly". Gosh, they breed ‘em bright in Boston. The true significance, of course, is that now Old Nick's given up on the Mac it's safe for the rest of us to quietly sneak back in. What a relief -- we can stop pretending that Linux is important...
Album Of The Week: Music Has The Right To Children, by Boards of Canada. It's a Warp CD, so of course it's worth listening to, but this dark, noodling hour of Scottish ambient techno seeps into the cerebellum like olive oil in the underpants seeps between the cheeks.
Sicko Of The Week: McAfee's ‘suicide' advert: if you don't use our software, you'll end up killing yourself. With a cute graphic by way of illustration. Way to go, McAfee.
Saturday 1 August 1998, 8:06 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Chummy! BT and AT&T club together! How nice for them. Everyone's getting a friend overseas these days -- it's almost as if they'd woken up to the gradual dissolution of the nation state. And, for the first time, a survey shows that slightly more than half of the UK population is sanguine about the pound going away in favour of the Euro.
In other news: Bill Gates is now worth about the same as the poorest 40% of the US population. That's, what, around a hundred million people? Talk about top-heavy distribution: if you can have that level of inequality within a country, the arguments about borders being necessary to keep the poor people out don't really seem that cogent.
Tuesday
Naughty! Someone from a network operating systems company (which shall remain nameless) proves himself no latter-day saint when he flys a kite over Peter Judge, our Networks section editor. Blokey claims that the next generation of IP, IPv6, couldn't run on Windows NT 5.0. "Go on..." said Peter. "Well," said the man, "you can't resize buffers within the kernel of NT 5.0, and the IPv6 specification demands that you do."
Alas for our would-be mole, some of us have spent large portions of their lives writing network stacks and know one end of a transport layer packetisation algorithm from another. What's more, not only can IPv6 run perfectly well on NT 4.0 and NT 5.0 beta 2 but MS has published the source code on its research Web site. And a design white paper. We looked at the source code. We read the white paper. We have one word for our naughty pal -- but this is a family Web site, so we won't use it.
Try harder next time!
Wednesday
Amazing! Delightful news from Intel. As part of the convoluted, byzantine dealings whereby it agreed to build stuff for Digital (before Digital became part of Compaq and Compaq decided it hated the name Digital so much it spent $5.5 million dollars on buying the www.altavista.com domain name from the Altavista software consultancy... but I digress), Intel gets its paws on the StrongARM. That's Digital's development of the Acorn Risc Machine, the Cambridge-designed RISC processor built by people who thought the 6502 was really cool but a little underpowered.
And Intel love it. Intel is going to sell it for use in handhelds and portables and things that go `whoosh' in the night. Triumph for the BBC Micro ubernerds!
Thursday
Bitter! "It's really unfair..." This uttered by a good friend who works for the National Consumer Council (no, that's nothing to do with Which?).
"What's that, then?" I reply. The NCC spends most of its time saying `It's really unfair...', and then making sure something gets done about it.
"The Security Service. It's not that they've got a budget a hundred times ours, or nearly a hundred times as many people... oh, the shame of it..."
"But what? But what?" I have a horrible vision of some internal putsch rendering their Fair Banking policy directly under the control of 007...
"Who'dve thought it? Their Web site's up before ours!"
And it's true. I never thought I'd see the day, but here it is -- www.mi5.gov.uk -- in case you fancy a change in career.
As for the NCC: watch this space.
Friday
Early! Staggering around the flat in an early morning fug, my concentration on getting the coffee machine working before my eyelids glue themselves shut is shattered by the shrill trilling of the mobile.
"It's the BBC haar," says an authoritative voice, "Want to pop over and talk about this semiconductor stuff?"
Of course I do, being a meeja tart and shameless with it. Some time later, a car appears and I womble off to Bvsh Hovse (it claims to be Bush House, but they ran out of Us when naming it). This is the home of the World Service (all stand, respectfully) and a small cupboard containing a camera, a bright light on a big red button, and a line to Television Centre. This is my destination: World Service TV.
What they didn't tell me on the phone was that `this semiconductor stuff' was the closure of Siemen's Newcastle factory, and thus the lead story. The whole thing ended up with what felt like two hours of live interview on the macroeconomics of the global semiconductor market, with special attention to the Far Eastern economic collywobbles. In front of `around ten million people', according to the laconic person who took me to the cupboard and locked me in. "You can see yourself out afterwards, OK?".
I'm just a technical editor. I know TCP/IP, RAM bandwidth and how many bits make eight. Intrinsic chaotic instabilities in the capitalist demand/supply/investment feed-forward model weren't mentioned in my teenage copies of Practical Wireless. Fortunately, the Web had disgorged a few choice stats when I'd checked before leaving, so I think I got away with it.
