Mixed Signals

Congratulations to The Reverend Christopher WH Goodwins, MA, Retd, who phoned me to reveal he's passed his final exam, flown his final solo and is now a fully qualified pilot for single engined aircraft under VFR! The local newspaper and TV station pick up on this, and readers in the South-West region may well have spotted Flying Vicar stories dotted around the place.

Readers in the Cambridgeshire area will get their chance shortly, because the Rev and Mrs G are moving next week to Isleham, a place closer to Ely than to heaven, with four pubs and one enormous carrot farm. Yours truly has been roped in to help with the moving process, and will be spending this weekend busily wiring up computers, video recorders and ‘the sort of thing Rupert does'. This will include the new Pentium II 266 which is one of my parents' retirement presents to themselves: I'm planning to take up a USB videoconferencing system and introduce them to that - if you're online at the weekend, watch out...

Tuesday

Dixons has launched a free ISP service. Well, well, well. First reports are that it works pretty well - and that contrary to what Dixons says, you can access it perfectly well without having to go and install the CD-ROM that the stores are giving out. You need to know some names and numbers, but if you're the sort of person who likes doing that sort of thing, you'll know where to find them.

Which is just as well - for as soon as the CD-ROMs start to go out, the reports of problems start to come in. All utterly predictable, as they use Internet Explorer and install it whatever happens to be on the disk already - and if you've already got IE4 and a load of stuff hanging off it, the chances of an amusing misunderstanding are high. Technical support from Dixons costs a pound a minute (a-ha!), and proves to be none too technical nor supportive. One report online, where a combination of NT4 and ISDN proved too much for the Dixons installation script, says that it took the support team about ten minutes to find out that that they didn't know how to fix it. A tenner, eh? You can buy a month online with free technical support from Demon for that...

Wednesday

Up to Manchester to record a TV show with Lionel Blair and Faith Brown. And my mother. And Martyn Lewis. Of that, little need be said - except that Mr Blair has got a new video out. It's about line dancing, and it's called - wait for it - Lionel Dancing. My, the world of entertainment is a festival of delights.

My best delight came on the train back down from Manchester (which was surprisingly lovely in the autumn sun). In the seat behind me, a bloke sat and talked non-stop on his cellphone: normally a painful burden to cope with for two and a half hours, but in this case it proved worthwhile. It transpired he worked for a company in the education field, and furthermore he was rather proud of his reputation as a laddish boor. I sat entranced as he worked through three cans of Stella and his phonebook, making deals, arranging dinners with heads of London council education departments ("I'll be late, but I'll do the little-boy-lost doe-eyes routine. She'll fall for it. Always does. Haha.") and firing off memos. "Copy that one to Sandra, even though she thinks I'm a slug. Haha."

Great Bores Of Today had nothing on this chap. I took notes, of course...

Thursday

We've all known for ages that computers are like frosty fields, keeping traces of our movements long after we've gone. It takes the Internet to make this very obvious, though. In the last couple of weeks I've had two long-lost chums make contact because they've stumbled across my name by accident - Ian Peel, with whom I was at school, and Christine Coard, who helped continue my education afterwards and subsequently became godmother to my son. It's delightful when that happens (the email from old friends, not the continuing education. Oh, I dunno though...) but one just knows that where one's friends can go, one's enemies can follow. Not that I have any, of course, excepting my various vices and failings.

Although I'm not sure what to make of one Mike Genovese, who came to my attention through a similar route. Once upon a time in a job far, far away, I was trying to teach myself C programming. Being an assembler man, dedicated to communing with the computer in its native tongue, I soon evolved a profound dislike for the new language. So much so that I composed a nerdish poem deprecating what I thought were some of its unlovely features, which some time later found its way into a magazine and, later yet, out onto Fidonet. And there it would've languished and died...

But no - it lives again. It's on the Web, and a pal reported its discovery to me. He also remarked that it appeared to have been written by this Genovese chappy. I checked http://happy.net.ut.ee/texts/c_poem.txt, and yes, there was my C Man's Lament together with an unfamiliar authorship. I mailed the site's owner who added my name to the bottom, and now we wait and see whether MG picks up on this.

If you're out there, Mike, drop me a line. You can find my name on the Internet, y'know...

Friday

HALO, HALO, HALO... what's all this then? It's the High Altitude Long Operation aeroplane, which rolled out this week. Designed to stay aloft for eight hours at more than 50,000 feet, it circles a major city and pretends to be a communications satellite. At the end of eight hours, another one pops up and the first one slinks home. Advantages over communications satellites include: a whole lot cheaper, a whole lot more powerful, can have the latest gear fitted, looks cool. Disadvantages: reliability is unknown and some poor soul's gotta sit there piloting it round and round. Wonder if my father knows?

The BT story rattles around like prune stones in an empty beer can. You can get too close to a story, and have to keep taking a check on what's really happening, what it really means. There are so many things to think about - what BT's licence allows and forbids it to do, what the data protection side of things is, what compromises fair trading and what's just hard business -- and it's not helped by BT itself getting rather sullen over the whole affair.

Two things becomes increasingly clear: if you're an ISP with no commercial telco connections, you're toast. And if you thought the Internet was a big story this year -- wait until 1999. Things are just getting going...

Tuesday

Rumours circulate that Intel is about to buy 3Com -- am I really going to be using an Intel Pilot in the future? The one with a Motorola processor in it? -- and that the company's also going to be buying into Tut's home networking technology. That'd be good. You'd buy a PC with a telephone cable that'd just plug into the wall, and it would do ADSL access to the Net and be a router onto your own home LAN. No setting up, no wiring - it'd use the telephone extensions you've already got -- and suddenly everything can talk to everything else at megabit speeds with a gateway though to the Web. And it would cost maybe a hundred pounds extra.

As always with technology, you hang around for ages knowing that there's a load of potential but not quite seeing how anyone's going to do it -- and then it all happens quicker than anyone could reasonably expect. Hurry up and wait, as they say in the Army...

Wednesday

Ay Carimba! The sudden realisation hits me: I'm supposed to be taking Goodwins Junior down to Plymouth this weekend to stay with The Vicar. And I still haven't replaced the wheels on my Skoda.

A frantic check on the Railtrack website reveals my permanent way options, plus a telephone number for Great Weastern telesales. This is quite possibly the only way to buy an Intercity ticket these days; I tried last week to get one at Liverpool Street, but of the ten or so windows only five were open and none would sell me a ticket for anything other than that day.

There then followed a charming danse a cyber, where the chap on the blower and myself delicately click our way through our respective computer systems -- I checking times, he checking fares. His system was slower than mine (tee hee). Of course, none of this can quench the underlying silliness of the railway system de nos jours and if there was a single integrated fares and timetabling system available via the Web I could have completed the task in a quarter of the time.

Nevertheless, telesales is immensely enriched if both ends of the conversation have Net access.

Thursday

Off to see Motorola, ostensibly in a meeting room at the Hampshire Hotel, Leicester Square. I'm the last journo of the day, though, so I find the Moto posse gravitating thirstily towards the bar. Would I join them? Delighted -- although the hotel fails to stock anything but fizzy American beer and I end up with a coke. Mens sane in corporate hospitality, I guess.

Motorola has been having a mixed time of it lately. One of America's oldest new technology companies, it started off making radios for cars in the 30s. Since then, a combination of consumer, military and industrial products has seen it do well, and it was perfectly positioned to profit from cellphones when they first came along. It dabbled in datacomms and still makes some fine semiconductors... but of late, it's been struggling. Late into digital phones and never comfortable with computers, it turned into a sprawling empire of mutually incomprehending divisions and other companies have been making hay at its expense.

All over, says Motorola. A big reorganisation and strategic acquisitions leave it ready to go to war: its cellphone people are talking to its datacomm people, cooperating instead of coldshouldering each other, and with key technologies such as Java, Starfish's data synchronisation stuff and good handwriting recognition it's going to be a new golden age.

Fine words, and necessary. But there's something missing: perhaps I was talking to the wrong people, but they really should know that Java and Javascript aren't the same things... and how about Symbian? The question seems to wrong-foot them: while an internal reorganisation and reassessment of the markets are great, even essential things for Moto to do, it's not clear to me it's taken the time to really look around it and see what the world's really up to, these days.

The proof of the pudding is in the products -- and on that, we must only wait and see. Good luck!

Friday

Dental dismay and exploding monitors render the day bleak and throbbing. You don't want to know, and I don't intend to tell you. Oh, and there's development on the BT front -- it's up to more than we ever imagined. See you next week...

A load of Americans come over to Europe and tell us we've not been very good at keeping up with technology, but we're getting better now. Thanks, Frank Gens of IDC. Of course, the real reason is that the US technical and financial communities has belatedly realised that with Asia and Russia down the pan, there might actually be a market in the EU worth cosseting after all.

Thing is, e-commerce is fine and dandy but it makes more sense as communications prices go down. If you ever want to see grown men and women weep, try asking any company with offices in the UK and elsewhere in Europe just how much they're paying for their comms infrastructure. If anyone out there wants to make a serious killing, get the funding together (half a billion should do) and get out there to build a new trans-European fibre network. You'll need a third of the dosh for the holes in the ground, a third for the buildings, bits and bods, and the final third to keep the entrenched telcos at bay. EuroQwest, your time has come.

Tuesday

Lovely figures from ECTS -- and no, that's not an unreconstructed comment about the barely-dressed models which the games companies use to titillate the nerds. Did you know that Tomb Raider made as much money as The Full Monty, and that UK companies account for 12% of the US games market? UK films only scrape together 3% of the US cinema market. And there are plenty of UK people in the US games industry too -- it's a huge success story, and one that's never reported.

Where does all this come from? Most of the seriously good games writers I know got there by figuratively pulling apart their cheap little 8-bit microcomputers and spending their teenage years shaving clock cycles from three kilobyte assembler subroutines. You can't do that these days: Windows 95 is technologically opaque, even to people who understand computers, and the last time I could sketch out the memory map for the display of a computer was in the days of EGA. If we're to carry on grabbing the imagination of the next generation of high-earning geeks, we really should find a way to expose the throbbing heart of the computer to their curious gaze.

Wednesday

Twelve down, thirty six to go. Poor old Globalstar is trying to be a competitor to Iridium in the satellite telephone business, but while Iridium sent its 60-odd constellation fleet of orbiting telephone exchanges up in batches of six or seven, Globalstar will compress everything into just four launches. The first batch of twelve went up today from the Ukraine but only briefly.

Something went wrong with the second stage of the booster, and twelve satellites rapidly turned into a rather fine firework display. Collapse of share price, in come the vultures. Iridium is doing much better, but is still a way away. It's got all its satellites up and has had hundreds of staff making thousands of phone calls. And discovering thousands of bugs: instead of the big service start on the 23rd, it's going to let 2000 early adopters on. They'll pay $3 a minute -- but if you want to call them from a BT phone, it'll cost you nearly six quid a minute. Wow.

And meanwhile, the portable phones that Iridium uses have been unveiled. Since the last time I saw a prototype, they ve sprouted a huge aerial all thick, lumpy on top and silvery. Bizarre. You couldn't fit it in a pocket.

Thursday

Unheard of events pile up on each other today as BT breaks all records. First, the press office actually call me back: second, they find the person within the company that I want to talk to; third, he calls me back and finally -- I hope you're sitting down -- BT says sorry.

As well it should. It's been caught bang to rights, flogging its new Click service by spotting customers who dial ISPs through checking their phone bills. Naughty, naughty. But, says BT, it was just a maverick saleswoman acting on her own initiative.

Nobody I talk to believes this for a second. BT is asking us to believe that a lone saleswoman recognises an ISP number on someone's phone bill -- not any of the big guns neither, but Cix with its elite 15,000 users -- and then concocts a perfectly normal telesales script, and then has a pile of Click CD-ROMs she's able to cause to be sent out. All on her own, like telesales people do. No marketing has been done on Click, said the spokesman, who couldn't have seen www.btclick.net.

Presumably our telesales woman has a little CD-ROM burning operation to back things up.

Anyway. If you don't fancy paying an extra 1p/min for Click you will soon be able to get free Internet access and not pay a penny for it www.connectfree.co.uk has the promises -- and I'll report back when everything's running. If it ever does, of course: the service was supposed to have launched a month ago, and their Web site is full of broken stuff.

Friday

A hush falls over the Internet, as a billion people quietly take a note of the URLs for the Monica Lewinsky Memorial Download. I'm writing this three hours before the Starr report goes live: you'll read it many hours afterwards -- that's if the Net isn't a smoking ruin. President Clinton, eh? What a man. He can even make the Net go down but he should've paid more attention to that terribly useful DOS command -- DELETE Starr.Starr.

I was scuba-diving over the weekend -- well, learning so to do in a swimming pool -- and my ears are still not back to normal. Thus, when I take Number One Son to the Notting Hill Carnival, I tend to feel the sound systems in my chest rather than hear every sparkling nuance of the upper registers. This is Richard's first exposure to seriously loud music, and I'm gratified that his reaction is much the same as mine was -- shock, followed by delight and a clear desire for more. Grotty pub gigs for him when he's older!

As we walk the sunny West London streets, we pass various members of the 7,000 strong Metropolitan Police presence, sauntering around with the best will in the world. We even pass the Chief Constable himself, looking relaxed and cheerful as he mutters into his walkie-talkie. I wonder whether to tell him that the brand-new, multi-million pound secure Met radio system he's using can be tracked by any reasonably wily hacker with a Web connection and a couple of standard scanners. But he's looking so happy, I can't bring myself to prick his bubble -- in fact, he's almost as happy as the mixed ethnic group of people sitting on the steps opposite, industriously contributing to London's air pollution. Even such environmental misdemeanours don't seem to bother him.

I wish I understood policing. Coppers, eh?

Tuesday

Copper, eh? IBM has shipped the first of its new copper-containing superchips. These go faster, cost less, are smaller and better in every way to the aluminium-wired ones that have gone before. A warm feeling of technological wonderfulness suffuses my whole being, as once again clever people do good things.

It's soon replaced by awe, when I read in New Scientist that researchers are mass-producing custom-built elements in tiny semiconductor factories. Squeeze an ion in a titchy cavity made out of silicon and push a few electrons around, and you can make atoms that have never existed before. This is restructuring reality: genetic engineering for the elements of nature.

Meanwhile, Wired reports that Steve Wozniak is still a schoolteacher (cover story), Tiger Electronics is building a furry pet for Christmas (huge spread), and it's good to be in embedded systems. All about as exciting as dentistry. Lost the plot, guys.

Wednesday

International Child Net Porn Ring Smashed! scream the headlines. Who Will Shut Down This Evil Internet? is the subtext of some of the editorials I read from the more sensational tomes.

Scuse me? While it's true that paedophilia is one of the most distasteful subjects imaginable, and one that wrecks lives in peculiarly horrible ways, it's hard to see that the Internet is in some way responsible. I don't know who has been arrested in this latest operation, nor what their history is, but anyone willing to get past the various security and authentication checks that the creators of the ring put in place will certainly have paedophilic tendencies already. You don't go looking for this stuff out of pure curiosity -- or if you do, you will be repulsed by what you find. You won't go back for more. One of the entrance requirements for the ring is reported to have been ownership of a library of 10,000 or more pictures: people don't suddenly get the urge to collate such a gallery because they've bought a modem.

So, given that the people involved with this ring will already have been paedophiles, it seems as if the Internet provided the means for their detection and capture. Isn't this a good thing? If it wasn't for the Net, and the willingness of the ISPs to collaborate with the police, these people with their hoards would still be at large. I really can't see the Net as the villain in this piece.

Thursday

The Apple iMac launch is tonight! Unfortunately, I couldn't make it -- had to attend a book launch at Filthy McNasties, by one Martin Millar. He's great and his books are wonderful chunks of wry urban adventures. Like Irvine Welsh, only they leave you smiling and without a bad taste in your mouth: I promised I'd mention his Web page, and tell everyone that his new book, Love and Peace with Melody Paradise, is an essential purchase. Which it is. And you can't help but warm to a man who puts all his rejection letters online...

News from the iMac launch is less invigorating. Robbie Williams? Blue cocktails? IMacs everywhere? What could go wrong? "It was so uncomfortable", says a source. "Less a party, more an exercise in digital futility". I hope the iMac doesn't end up like that. Still want one.

Friday

My, how we laughed. For reasons unconnected with work, I'd been messing around with some old Sinclair Spectrum web sites -- I'd been talking to another journalist about Symbian, and had pointed out that Psion started by writing games software for the ZX81 (a flight simulator, of all things). That led to a quick scan of the Web to see if that software was available anywhere -- as so much is, on emulator sites -- and a discovery that some terribly keen yet misguided individuals had been compiling lists of everyone involved in the old days.

Today, a press release arrives from IBM. IBM, it says, is about to launch the smallest hard disk drive ever, designed for PDAs, digital cameras, mobile phones and the like. Good. It's fast, tiny and very abstemious with the juice. Good, good. And it's called the Microdrive. Collapse of stout party.

If you weren't there, or have blotted the memories of those days from your mind, let me remind you what the Microdrive was. Upset by the cost of floppy disk drives, Clive Sinclair decreed that he would invent a better way to store data. He ended up with a long, endless loop of videotape about 3mm in width, held in a small black cartridge that looked like an After Eight. This slotted into a fist-sized drive with a rubber wheel and an ordinary tape head, and usually failed to store any data whatsoever. Named the Microdrive, it was universally abhorred for its unreliability: in the end, ICL made it work properly but by then it was all too late as 3.5" disk drives were cheaper anyway.

I do hope nobody tells IBM. With luck, they'll call their next PC the IBM QL, and they'll have to stretcher me away from my desk.