Entries by Colin Turner

This is a whimsical storyline I knocked out this morning. If you don't know much about HE (Higher Education) or the QAA it may not mean anything to you. Indeed, you might need to know a little bit about the Metatron. and some other Judeo/Christian theology to follow this. Absolutely no offence is intended to anyone!

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There was a polite knock on the door. The Metatron looked up from his desk and bade the guest to enter. And so Michael, Field Marshal of the Heavenly Host entered the room, a troubled look on his normally serene face.

“Peter says we have an unusual guest at the gates. He claims to be from something called the … QAA”, he said.
“The QAA?”
“Yes, some sort of Quality Assurance Agency.”
“And why are they here?”
“Apparently”, and here Michael paused for a moment, “they want to audit just how heavenly Heaven is...”
“What?”
“They say that there are some metrics which cast some doubt on the issue apparently.”
“But Heaven is the definition of perfection. How could anything be found wanting?”

Michael looked wretched for a moment.

“He's asking if this is so, how was it that we had... the Incident...?”
“What?”
“Well,... he's saying that if everything here is so great and perfect how come we have a … what were the words he used again? Oh yes.... a retention problem.”
“Retention?”
“Apparently yes, this is one of the metrics they use. They are apparently concerned that our “First Output” showed an “attrition rate” of a third”.
“Did you tell him about Free Will? That it's up to sentient creatures to choose their own path?”
“Yes”
“And?”
“He says everyone uses that excuse.”

The Metatron paused while he considered this.
“OK, so what next?”
“Apparently they want to see the figures to see if this is a one time “blip”, they are asking for our “Academic Plan” for the next output.”
“Oh dear...”
“Is that a problem?”

The Metatron thumbed through some documents on his desk.

“Apparently we only intend to “retain” 144,000 of our second output”.
“Out of how many?”
“Well, sort of, um, 100 billion and counting so far”.
“Isn't that an attrition rate of over 99.999%.”
“Yes,... do you think that will present a problem?”

The two angels considered for a moment, after a while, the Metatron cleared his throat again.

“Do you think we could classify purgatory as an exit award?”

Posted by Colin Turner

I have both these phones. The HTC Desire is my personal phone, and runs Android (in this case Froyo, Android 2.2). I've been using Android for some time now, and regular readers will know I haven't been shy about commenting on its problems in the early releases. I also have, and have had for about the last month, an Apple iPhone 4, running iOS 4, for work. I've been promising some people a comparison.

Disclosure: I'm not really an Apple fan. From the moment I started to play with some in QUB, I disliked the single button, the cotton wool interface that kept you from "harming yourself", or doing anything deep. But I know that has changed somewhat, the latest Apple computers, while still having that fluffy exterior now have a decent operating system underneath. So I'm going to try to be as fair as I can be.

First a comment about the build quality. Both phones feel very similar both in the hand and in the pocket, the iPhone feels like it has a better build quality, but then you do expect solid hardware from Apple. Both phones have a button on the top to "wake" the device. Both have volume controls on the side. The iPhone has a nice feature of a slider button that mutes the device at one go; the Desire requires you to put the volume slider to zero (there are other ways, I know). The iPhone has one big button at the bottom, reminiscent of the one button mouse, and this is an area where the Desire wins hands down, with more physical buttons including the search, back button, the menu button, the home button and the optical trackball.

A note on the intuitiveness of the interface. Apple claims that their interface is so intuitive you don't need any instructions. I must say I find the Android (Desire) interface more intuitive, and when you start that phone for the first time, it walks you through the basics. Very helpful for beginners.

Anyway, time is short and some people are waiting on this review, so here's a potted comparison.

Feature	iPhone	Desire
Basic Interface	Uncluttered, but uninformative, no widgets, no live wall paper, no active folders. Dull, one size fits all. Switching between tasks and back again is inelegant. Notification of outstanding items is cleaner than standard Android.	Very rich, combinations of apps on the desktop, widgets and all the things mentioned by their absence for the iPhone. Much more personalised. Task switching, particularly the back button, is much more elegant. HTC Sense is nicer.
Phone	Disastrous. Frequently won't connect calls when my Desire will. There seems to be something else at play here and I've reported it. Both phones are on the same network BTW. It's more awkward to change numbers on the fly and many other things. But it's very pretty.	Much improved in Android over the last few versions, the ease of dialling, changing numbers is much better. Finding contacts to dial is much easier and faster. Oh, did I mention it works?
Voicemail	Fancy. Asks me to set it up every single time I turn on the phone. Recently while travelling, I couldn't pick up a voicemail because of this for about an hour, by which time I was sitting with the caller.	Not Fancy. Works all the time.
Workplace	The stock mail client is very pretty, and for example, links to appointments easily (but makes it hard to see if you are free). It has limited threading support which is really nice.	The Android exchange support is, in my opinion, superior. It lacks threading, but does have follow up support, which I take to be vastly more important.
Apps	Legendary, but there are relatively few free quality apps. For example, I struggled (still haven't) found a decent calculator (not the built in one) that is free. I find the market app rather clunky. Can't find any decent external exchange apps that work.	Many problems with the Market were fixed in Froyo, the apps available seem to be broader in nature, and many more are free (my perception). Choice of several exchange apps, more fully featured than iOS.
Software Keyboard	Simple, elegant, but frustratingly difficult to type complex content, having to change layouts all the time.	More cluttered, but actually as easy to use, better word prediction, less switching between layouts.
Battery Life	Initially winning hands down, but now hogging battery like no tomorrow, can't make it through an average day. I don't know what's causing the problem and so I'm just deleting apps all over the show.	Vastly improved over other phones, still an issue, but actually appreciating it more after the iPhone
Music	Very pretty. iTunes integration. This is also the problem. A cheap player I bought for my Daughter allows me to just dump music on it and it works. What I had to go through to get Music onto the iPhone because of my unusual setup, well, it wasn't easy. Oh, and by the way. iTunes sucks. I mean really... disastrous, but with no alternative.	Bulk device, you can just copy the music on and it works. Plays music just as well as the iPhone, in fact better because the former occaisionally and inexplicably stops. Wide variety of music players.
Video		Flash.
Web	Browser is probably prettier than Android's and allows more Tabs, seems to be slower though.	Native Flash is an advantage here too.
Notifications	Really dreadful, and a well known problem in the Apple community. Poorly handled, and when they pop up, and you go to use the phone the notification is just gone.	Elegant system that allows multiple notifications each of which take you straight to the issue. Persist, unobtrusively, until dismissed.
Calendaring / Time	Automatically setting the time to the wrong time since the clocks changed. Manually fixing this makes calender entries wrong. Setting it back to automatic makes the time wrong again.	Google Calendar back end more open than Exchange. Exchange functionality built in too. Minor quibble, cannot change the colour of the Exchange calendar. Date / Time works. Minor quibble, on a non rooted device you can't use ntp for ultra correct times. Can't on the iPhone either as far as I know.
Oddities	My laptop supplies power out of USB while it's off. I use this to charge my Desire if need be. The iPhone requires the whole machine to be on for it to charge the phone.	The power connector on my Desire seems to be a bit stretched, so if I'm not careful, it's not being charged. The Desire asks, when plugged in, whether it should charge, act as a disk, do internet tethering etc..

I'm honestly struggling to find an area where the iPhone wins hands down against its competitor. I can't think of one. I imagine if the iPhone is the only smart phone you are used to, it seems miraculous. It probably seemed that way against Android 1.1. But Android has grown up now, and it makes the iPhone look just stupid by comparison. I couldn't recommend an iPhone to anyone. Sorry.

By the way, I fully accept that perhaps when I get used to the iPhone I might come to love it more, but I'll be surprised.

Posted by Colin Turner

I wrote this essay almost eight years ago. I'm just republishing it in a web format.

In many eastern religions, and indeed their occidental counterparts, great emphasis is placed in reaching states of personal enlightenment or self-improvement. In Zen, this is often approached from several angles (See D.T. Suzuki [2]), but perhaps the most well known is that of zazen meditation. In this practice the mind is encouraged to have no attachments, it may move freely, neither forced to consider thoughts, not forced to leave them.

This state of mind could be described by the word mushin meaning literally “no mind”. In this state the mind is truly focused on the present moment, not anticipating the future and not pondering on the past. The martial arts of Japan have long been looked upon as an alternative, or perhaps at least parallel, means of progressing to this goal. In Budo this can be thought of as a form of meditation in motion, always acting in the present.

This prevents fearful anticipation of the future and also misinterpreting such future events. Although the idea of a budo is that of a way without destination, this goal of mushin should be constantly striven for. Perhaps an intermediary goal is that of fudoshin. This means "immovable mind" although this translation fails to carry the positive implications in this word. For me this means that the mind is immovable by outside influence, or to put it another way the mind can only be “moved” when one desires it.

As the beginner knows nothing about either his body posture or the positioning of his sword, neither does his mind stop any- where within him. If a man striked at him with the sword, he simply meets the attack without anything in mind. As he studies various things and is taught the diverse ways of how to take a stance, the manner of grasping his sword and how where to put his mind, his mind stops in many places. Now if he wants to strike at an opponent, he is extraordinarily discomforted. Later, as days pass and time piles up, in accordance with his practice, neither the postures of his body nor the ways of grasping the sword are weighed in his mind. His mind simply becomes as it was in the beginning when he knew nothing and had yet to be taught anything at all.

extract from the Unfettered Mind, Takuan Soho

So here in "The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom", a letter written by the famous monk Takuan Soho to the equally famous swordsman Yagyu Munenori, Soho advises that a person with no martial experience may be better off than those who embark upon such a path. The person with no such training at least behaves naturally, even if possibly foolishly. Their mind may be affected by many outside influences, but at least they themselves do not cause it to "freeze".

When one begins training in a martial way, one often begins by learning basic skills and body movements and then, of course, waza. When attempting to refine performance of a kata or waza, one’s mind may focus on the future - in the hope of attaining the perfect form - or it may focus on the past, in the recollections of past successes or failures.

Unfortunately these moments of locked focus, the states of "fushin" or frozen mind, however brief cause the body which is forever locked in the present to be deprived of command. In severe cases then, fushin is manifested by the locking in position of the whole body.

How then can we move towards this state of fudoshin, and thus ultimately to mushin? At this stage in my journey it seems that the following are true, whether during the execution of a kata, waza or a more free action.

• One most resist the urge to anticipate the future except by observing the present. It follows that ultimately waza should not be "selected" but eventually will arise without conscious thought (mushin).
• One must avoid lingering in the past. Recollections of past encounters and their success or failure are false as the past moment will never truly match the present.
• One should not let your eyes and mind become locked on the opponents eyes, their weapon, fist or any other point. Gaze should take it the whole person as well and the mind should observe all things.

  Some teachers say that you should always stare at the enemy’s weapons, or at his eyes, or at his feet. This is not a good idea because it fixes your spirit in place and is easily read by an experienced fighter.

  - extract from the Book of Five Rings - Minamoto Musashi
  
  
• Forced aggression may cause the mind to focus too greatly on the future desire for victory and thus ironically deprive the body of the mind in the present to help obtain it. One should not delay the cut, or throw, but neither should one rush it in too great a desire to bring the future more quickly. Indeed it seems from the books "Zen and the art of archery" (see [1]) and the "Unfettered mind" (see [4]) that we wish to obtain a state in which the cut happens because it is natural or the throw happens because nothing else can happen.
• Such considerations occur outside the dojo when considering our progress along the Way or in other matters. Of course we must always strive to improve and progress, but if we are too desperate we risk placing our mind in the future and not the here and now. Similarly we must have the patience and some tolerance about our state of current imperfection. Focusing too much on the failures of the past denies us the chance to observe ourselves in the present to make us better in the future.

These comments are of course, immensely subjective. However these thoughts map my current way of thinking a short way into a long journey and at this time it seems the best way for me to continue to refine myself.

References

[1] Herrigel, Eugen: Zen in the Art of Archery, Arkana 1988.
[2] Suzuki, D.T.: Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, Double- day 1996.
[3] Musashi, Minamoto: The Martial Artist’s Book of Five Rings, (trans. Stephen F. Kaufman), Tuttle 1994.
[4] Soho, Takuan: The Unfettered Mind, (trans. William Scott Wilson) Kodansha 1995.

Posted by Colin Turner

For many years now, I've been aware of the Cthulhu Mythos, since it infuses lots of popular culture. Indeed, Dread Cthulhu was recently blamed for the horizon oil spill, a theory that I rather enjoyed.

Despite this, I hadn't actually read any of H.P. Lovecraft's books directly. Last week and this, I decided to try out an ebook reader on my phone, specifically the rather excellent Aldiko for android. It's a nice application. I downloaded two of Lovecraft's books; "The Call of Cthulhu" and the "At the Mountains of Madness".

Lovecraft has been, mostly after his death, immensely influential, with references to his work appearing in many modern authors' work (e.g. Stephen King, Neil Gaiman). He is famous for the idea of "Cosmic Horror". The idea that the world is not truly rational, and understandable, but nightmarish, chaotic and hostile or at best indifferent to human nature.

I found "The Call of Cthulhu" rather unpleasant to read in parts, not because of the supposed horror, but because of the unpleasant racism implicit and explicit within the book. It does need to be remembered that everyone is a product of their times however, and I find the implicit racism difficult to accept in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien too. But the book was interesting.

The second book, "At the Mountains of Madness" was more mature and less objectionable.

But I couldn't entirely share the horror of the protagonists. Some of their discoveries were genuinely horrifying (usually acts committed by human beings) but much of the rest would be wondrous. They are horrified by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in architecture. Non Euclidean geometry does not frighten me, and indeed Lovecraft understood it wasn't the true nature of the universe. But seeing clearly non Euclidean architecture in a "normal" setting is wondrous, terrifying perhaps briefly, but not horrific. Much of the horror just comes from the primitive frame of reference, either scientific, or religious or both, of the protagonists.

And this is the bit I really can't understand, since Lovecraft was a failed astronomer, so he would have known that the universe is, to the best of our knowledge, indifferent to our existence, and that the laws of physics themselves could see our annihilation in so many ways. Indeed, apart from a (probably literal) Deus Ex Machina solution, every scientist knows that the ultimate future of humanity is doomed... Is that "Cosmic Horror"?

By the way, since the world is Sherlock Holmes mad at the moment, I recommend A Study In Emerald (PDF), a Hugo Award winning short story that is an interesting cross over of the Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu mythos written by Neil Gaiman.

Posted by Colin Turner

I was having an enjoyable early Summer BBQ chat with Mark Kerr and Jonathan (Noodles) McDowell a few weeks ago. We know each other from the days of Fidonet's greatest glory. Fidonet still exists, but back then the internet did not have a presence in normal people's lives, academics I worked with at Queen's only selectively had email access, and that through the dark arts of Kermit. Back then a few of us ran Bulletin Board Systems, over plain vanilla modems with all sorts of speeds, 1200 bps transfer rates were common.

The systems were held together as nodes in Fidonet, and the hundreds or thousands of users on each system could send a form of email to other users in the same system, or even users across the world. Every message was piggy backed on the daily or nightly phone calls from one system to a neighbouring system. Mark and I would call some odd systems, like that of Joaquim Homrighausen and Mats Wallin in Sweden, and we would happily carry any mail going for Sweden or coming back.

Everyone was sharing a bit of the cost. As such, it was considered the height of poor etiquette to reply to a message tens of lines long, quoting the whole message with a "me too" at the top or the bottom. You were expecting someone else to pay for transmitting the whole original message again, just for your extra words. You were expecting in echomail (the Fidonet equivalent of newsgroups, or mailing lists) that hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of systems would store all that information on all those hard disks.

No, it was correct to trim a few salient lines from the original, and put your reply below it. That's enough for everyone to see what is going on. Every mail editor in existence showed the quoted text either with a ">" character to the left, or sometimes a "CT>" to indicate the initials of who wrote it.

These trimmed, quoted conversations allowed the full flow of the conversation to be followed by anyone without referring back to every word uttered by the original poster, and showed the coherence of the thread in a way that is hard to do in any other way. Google Wave is perhaps a modern attempt at the same idea.

But than people grew indifferent to bandwidth because there was so much, so they never bothered to trim their replies. You can expect in a modern mailing list to find each reply containing complete copies of all the previous correspondence to that point, which is already stored in the list, shown in a nice threaded view in your editor. Some new email programs (I'm looking at you, Outlook), made it almost impossible for people to do anything other than "top post", because they don't easily show quoted text.

And here I am, an old dinosaur who still tries to stick to the old ways, because I believe it's easier to read properly quoted replies... but increasingly, you can't have conversations with people with braindead mail software because they just can't do it. And they haven't even seen it before, they can't understand it. They complain when you don't top post your replies. Like the stereotypical cantankerous codger sitting in his porch watching the kids mess on his lawn I want to tell them that no, they are the ones doing it in the stupid new fangled way. We were here first.

So maybe we should just give up... those few of us left, but then I was reminded (by Noodles) that now email is being shipped around mobile devices all the old arguments of bandwidth and storage are increasingly relevant again. So I ask the open question, is there any point in trying to stick to the "old ways"? Thoughts on a postcard please.

Posted by Colin Turner

Today I have found myself reading about three authors. These three men had various levels of fame and in each case, the interest today was more about them than it was about their work.

Samuel Clements aka Mark Twain, the great American writer was coming to my attention because his century long delay in publishing his memoirs is coming to an end. I must confess that I've never been the biggest fan of Twain's works, though many I have enjoyed. His life is very interesting however, filled as it was at times with great pathos and controversy as well as success. There are many theories as to why his memoirs have been so delayed, but one of the front runners is that some of his comments about (at least orthodox, in the broad sense) religion attracted attention. I'm sure it will be broader than that. Nevertheless, one of his quotes is already in the random section in my blog.

Also it has another name - The Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God. It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies… But you notice that when the Lord God of Heaven and Earth, adored Father of Man, goes to war, there is no limit. He is totally without mercy - he, who is called the Fountain of Mercy. He slays, slays, slays! All the men, all the beasts, all the boys, all the babies; also all the women and all the girls, except those that have not been deflowered. He makes no distinction between innocent and guilty… What the insane Father required was blood and misery; he was indifferent as to who furnished it.

I have great sympathy for this quote, and it puzzles me when I meet people who cannot remotely consider the possibility that, even if there is a perfect God, perfect in His grace, that it might be the case that the humans who wrote the bible might not have listened so well. Because the only other possibility is that such acts are, in fact, OK to be committed by people when protected by divine wrath.

You may recognise this quote, it is possible that it is illegal to publish it in the Republic or Ireland which is another story altogether. Anyway, it will be interesting to see what else Mark Twain will offer the world in his memoirs.

Martin Gardner is my second author under discussion. I read of his death today, albeit at a ripe old age. His collection of mathematical puzzle books adorned my shelves (they currently languish in a box for now) for many years and with collections of his own puzzles and those of many others, they gave me insight into the nature of mathematics. I still use some of the puzzles I read about in my classes.

I was quite surprised to read that he had written extensively about Lewis Carroll and his work, although as a mathematician I was long aware of the mathematical implications of Carroll's works. So I'll perhaps have to acquire that book for summer reading. However I have long suspected that the more controversial aspects of Carroll have prevented him being enthusiastically claimed by mathematics in the public imagination.

Gardner's book introduced me the Fibonacci Sequence, and so it is fitting that I saw this the day before. I think he would have loved it.

Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

Douglas Adams was the third author. I couldn't write about authors on Towel Day and not mention him. I have been marking much of the day, but when I've been out and about running a few errands, I have always known where my towel was. I reflected how Douglas would have marvelled at the fact that already, many of us already have the closest thing to Hitch Hiker's Guide in our back pocket, a smart phone connected to Wikipedia, and the rest of the total of human knowledge on the Internet (and the sum total of gibberish too).

Hmm. And having just added more to that pile with more rambling even than usual, I'll say so long and thanks for all the fish.

Posted by Colin Turner

I've had a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 for some time now, and it works well, but I did have one bizarre problem with it when I used it with my main desktop machine (running Debian (Sid)). Namely, that if I had the camera plugged in (usb) at boot time the sound on the computer did not work, if you plugged it in after boot, everything was fine.

This was pretty irritating because if I forgot I would often have dozens of windows open and ready for work before I realised.

Normally this happens because the cards are loaded in the wrong sequence by udev. But, if you listed the sound cards with the main card wasn't just in the wrong order, it simply wasn't there. I tried comparing modules loaded with and without the camera (at boot) and manually loading the differences, but this did not help. I tried forcing the index to be zero on the correct card, but this also did not help.

In the end, I made the following edit to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and this did the trick. So if like me you were searching for the answer to this, I hope it helps.

Posted by Colin Turner

Michael stands in the rain, as drops fall from his brow to the ground,
He waits patiently, his steel grey eyes surveying his battlefield,
It is a strange one, strewn with grass and flowers and many a mound,
And rank and file of stones each entreating that He should yield.

Scattered here and there, his kinfolk stand, but none as Michael.
He is the soldier, with breastplate and shield, and sword by his side,
Not drawn since he came to be here; he stands as a stoic sentinel,
Patient, benevolent, the fire in his spirit not worn with boastful pride.

Michael stands in the rain, as he has stood in the blistering Sun,
And when stars wheel above him; when snow coated, but not numb,
Rather with exultant wings renewed, he stands vigilant for the One.
Waiting for his ancient foe, the firstborn seraph, who does not come.

Posted by Colin Turner