Re-gruntled

A couple of weeks ago, in an embarrassing example of blog as self indulgent whinge, I complained about problems with Google Calendar. For the record, they have been ironed out and were temporary propagation artefacts; I am now completely happy with the resulting system, hosted by Google and managed primarily from Mozilla Lightning. In fact, I shall be shifting fully onto it from August 1st, a month earlier than planned

I also said, at that time, that:

“Adding an item from the E63 is slightly less convenient than on the Palm, but to a degree with which I can live. Modifying an item from a phone is impossible, but I've found ways to deal with that too. (There is supposed to be a way of synchronising the E63's onboard calendar application with the Google calendar, but I've not sussed that yet.)”

That para, too, is now out of date. I have found several third party apps which integrate Google Calendar with the onboard calendar of Symbian phones (the Nokia E63 runs Symbian), of which I narrowed down to a personal choice of two with confusingly similar names: Goosync and Googasync.

The two offer slightly different approaches, marginally different facilities, and considerably different pricing structures, but both do an excellent job and I won't say which I plumped for in the end. (Just don't do as I did, and try them both at the same time ... at one point I was weeding out six copies of every appointment at both handheld and web ends! Try one at a time, them make up your mind and install your choice.) The result, whichever you choose, is a near perfect unified system running simultaneously in web browser, hand held and (if you go for the Lightning option) email client.

Any which way but ... up

Well, well, well ... (three holes in the ground, as the old joke goes)...

The light hearted title of my last post ("And, best of all, the right way up") has been coincidentally taken up by Dr C (here and, in much greater detail, here), in response to an Unreal Nature post ... and Ray Girvan has (in the comments) tied it back to habitat theory, for which I have great affection and about which I have always intended to write (but never actually done so) here.

Let them eat cake

Growlery correspondent Pauline Laybourn seeks to return me in a particularly fiendish way to the great free will debate. Echoing my Meaning of Loaf , she persuades Galen Strawson to play Satan on the mountain top by offering me (on her behalf) a cake.

All I have to do for this cake is (a) spend $10 and (b) ignore an Oxfam collection box. Or, viewed another way: not only am I called upon to think though (yet again!) the free will question, but as I do so I must choose between two ways of spending money which, a few seconds before, I didn't have ... outside a cake shop I didn't know existed, and I certainly didn't know that I intended to visit.

I have no intention (assuming I have the free will to have any intentions at all) of getting caught up in the free will question again ... but the cake and the Oxfam box cause so many other questions to float up in my mind.

It is clear to me, immediately, that I must put my $10 windfall into the Oxfam box, and forego the cake. But...

...I probably wouldn't want the cake anyway – certainly not ten dollars worth of cake. And it probably wouldn't be vegan, so I wouldn't be able to eat it. And since I have acquired this $10 out of thin air, donating it costs me nothing. So that makes the Oxfam box a no brainer. But...

...why was I going into an unsuspected cake shop, to buy a cake I didn't want and couldn't eat, in the first place? Was it, perhaps, for somebody else? Am I, by putting the money in the Oxfam box, depriving a child of its eagerly anticipated birthday cake? Am I, in other words, on a road to hell paved with good intentions, doing unknown harm by my casual reflex assumption of the right way to do good? And, if this is the case, the $10 is probably not mine to decide about anyway. On this scenario, I clearly should stop arrogating to myself the right to reallocate funds entrusted to me ... thus, equally clearly, I should buy the cake.

Somewhere around here, I begin to feel that life would be so much simpler if I just accepted the absence of free will....

And, best of all, the right way up

A short extract from The unbearable lightness of being in Aberystwyth. Partly because it has relevance to (and pokes fun at) photography, the arts, history, and a town which I love ... but because I enjoyed reading it, and hope that you will too.

“The wooden car groaned to a halt and I clambered out on to the steeply inclined platform and followed the straggle of tourists who were about to have the Cliff Railway revealed to them as a metaphor for life. You sit expectantly, creaking up the hill, heart filled with anticipation of what's at the top. You can't help noticing the ride itself is pretty unimpressive, and then you get out at the top and wander around for a while looking for something the purpose of which might justify the building of such an elaborate contraption. You meet other souls wandering around with that look of puzzled expectancy, the expression that conveyed the question everyone wanted answered: 'Have you found it yet?' Since no one has, whatever it is, you stop off for a cup of tea in a musty wooden shed that smells like the place the head groundsman at the golf club keeps his tools. After that, spirits slightly raised by the mahogany-coloured tea, you go to check out the camera obscura. On the way in you read with mounting excitement about the piercing clarity of the image you are about to see in which every detail for miles around will be laid before your eyes in supernatural splendour. And then you find yourself in another dark shed, on a raised wooden pathway walking round a grey glass dish in which can be faintly discerned, as if at the bottom of a very deep fish pond where the water has not been changed in years, an image that is Aberystwyth upside down. You stare for a while, as people whisper, 'It's clear, isn't it?' and then the realisation gradually dawns that the image outside, from the cliff top, is bigger, brighter, sharper and, best of all, the right way up.”

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• Malcolm Pryce, The unbearable lightness of being in Aberystwyth. 2006 (ch.3). London: Bloomsbury. 9780747578949 or 074757894X (pbk)

Leonardo lays it on thin

This is originally an ESRF story, but brought to my attention by Quality Digest.

Leonardo da Vinci's use of translucent glazes in numerous subtle layers to achieve depth and gradation is legendary, a well known delight most obvious in his rendition of facial skin tones. Not all art lovers are interested in the science of this but, for those (like me) who are, the approximate thickness of these layers has always been cause for wonder: easily calculated and emotionally hard to credit. This study, though, goes beyond approximations to measure (noninvasively, using X-ray fluorescence) those thicknesses to close limits.

The answer: Leonardo was consistently working with paint films between 1μm and 2μm – that's one or two thousandths of a millimetre.

[More detail here.]

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• European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), http://www.esrf.eu/
• "X-Ray Spectroscopy Gives New Light on Leonardo da Vinci’s Faces", in Quality Digest, 2010-07-20.
• L Viguerie. et al, Revealing the sfumato technique of Leonardo da Vinci by X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2010, 49, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201001116.

Two smiles

Two new poems from Martin Brown caught my fancy this morning – one on each of his blogs:

• "The spy" on Jungle Igloo
• "The sprout and the cabbage" (for Lear lovers) at Cabbage Factory

New world ... real soon now

My friend Dirk Dusharme writes in delight at rediscovery of “Roger Whittaker, a folk singer I loved as a kid”.

I didn't know Roger Whittaker as a kid ... but in my student days, "New world in the morning"^[1] was something of an anthem.

Everybody talks about a new world in the morning.
New world in the morning takes so long

As we listened to the song we looked around us at the mess of a world which we had entered. "Yes," we all thought impatiently (though I don't remember anyone saying it aloud), "we need a new world, and yes, the morning is too long to wait for it".

Four decades on, I look around me at the world which my own generation (we who were listening to Whittaker in the early 1970s) have bequeathed to those who follow. We have no cause to feel proud. Some of us who were so impatient for a new world now have long ago deserted the cause and settled for profiting from the old one. Some have given up, resigned.

Some of us continue to dream of, hope for, and work towards a new world. But we tend to think in terms of achieving small steps towards it. Possibly we dare to hope that within our lifetimes we might see some sort of early prototype virtual concept model of it. All of which is sad evidence that we are grown old and wear our trousers rolled^[2].

I met a man who had a dream he had since he was twenty.
I met that man when he was eighty-one.
He said too many people just stand and wait up til the mornin',
Don't they know tomorrow never comes?

I scan the faces of young people I work with, looking for the same impatience as we had. It's there; not in every face ( when was it ever?) but in enough. There will never be a new world today, nor for that matter in the morning; but we desperately need those who can still demand that there should be.

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1. Roger Whittaker, New world in the morning. 1970, EMI Columbia. DB8718. (More recently on Roger Whittaker, New world in the morning, 2007, Philadelphia: Collectables, B0000TAOFM.)
2. T S Eliot, "The love song of J Alfred Prufrock", in Prufrock, and other observations. 1917, London: The Egoist. (More recently 2001, London: Faber, 0571207200, or in TS Eliot, Collected poems, 1909-1962, 2002, London: Faber, 0571105483.)
   

Iran report

Extracted from Paul Rogers' "Iran Report" for the Oxford Research Group:

“...military action against Iran should be ruled out as a means of responding to its possible nuclear weapons ambitions. The consequences of such an attack would lead to a sustained conflict and regional instability that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it.

... ... ...

... an Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it. This would be in addition to the extensive instability and unpredictable security consequences for the region and the wider world.

... the consequences of a military attack on Iran are so serious that they should not be encouraged in any shape or form. That may be an uncomfortable conclusion, given that some of the more robust diplomatic approaches may carry with them an implicit threat of military action, but it is realistic. Put bluntly, war is not an option in responding to the difficult issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

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• Paul Rogers, P., "Iran report" in International Security Monthly Briefing 2010. 8(2010-07).

A shortage of gruntles

Two and a half weeks, or so, since my last post, and what do I return with? A disgruntlement. (Is disgruntlement a word? It ought to be ... and it fits well in the Growlery, so let it stand on both counts!)

I am not what the marketing people call an "early adopter". I never change my technology until what I already have can't do something I need to do. I value reliability, familiarity, dependability, transparent usability, over cutting edge capability. So, I have continued to use a PalmOS hand held computer of one sort or another long after they ceased to be current. My palm machine holds numerous vital databases managed by JFile (a program whose author saw the way the wind was blowing and moved on some years ago) and handled at the desktop by JFTrans (whose author has also shifted to a new platform). For PIM functions I have relied totally upon Agendus, which integrates and expands upon the basic PalmOS elements miraculously without messing in any way with their structure. I make frequent use of several calculator or other math programs including PowerOne graphic scientific calculator from Infinity Softworks (who appear to no longer be with us). There are numerous other utilities on there as well, without which life would be either very much harder or much less intuitive.

On the other hand, I am not blind to need for progression so things have to change. “Life must change, if life's to grow”, as my favourite quote provider has it^*. I always make these changes in the early summer, when I have a period of relative slack in which to internalise them before they are tested in the fire of a new academic year. Thus it is that a year ago I added a Nokia E63 to my bag, for web and text based communications. I looked at the Blackberry clan, and [shudder] Pocket Windows, and there are several Apple iPhones knocking around here somewhere, and various others ... but none worked as well for me as the E63.

And now I am in the process of shifting my diary/calendar out of Agendus, thus decoupling it from address book and all the other functions which Agendus handles so well. Why? Because my current PalmOS device will not last forever. And because if I am giving up Agendus, I might as well try to future proof myself to some extent by moving onto the web where it can be accessed regardless of future shifts in proprietary handheld formats. And because it will more easily allow me to synchronise calendars for different external purposes with my own view of things. I don't, to be honest, like keeping PIM information off my own platforms ... so I've spent six month planning how to secure content behind a tokenised wall. Contacts information will never be shifted onto the web; though now that the calendar has gone, they will probably migrate to the E63.

So my comings and goings are now contained in Google Calendar. Or, to be more precise, are increasingly contained there and will be wholly so from August 31st ... for the time being, both handheld and web versions are running in parallel. Detailed maintenance is done (either from the desktop or via a web book when on the move) through Mozilla Thunderbird's calendar management extension, Lightning and a Google Provider addon which works well. Multiple calendars can be integrated within a single Lightning view. Alterations made at either the Thunderbird or Google end are reflected at the other within a second or two. The result can be viewed in any internet connected browser, so is available ion the E63 or any subsequent replacement. Adding an item from the E63 is slightly less convenient than on the Palm, but to a degree with which I can live. Modifying an item from a phone is impossible, but I've found ways to deal with that too. (There is supposed to be a way of synchronising the E63's onboard calendar application with the Google calendar, but I've not sussed that yet.) All in all, I'm happy with the new set up and prepared to drop the handheld version in six week's time.

So, with all that, and for free too, what is my disgruntlement? It has to do with daylight saving time adjustments. I've moaned about these before (and for people who know me in person it's worse, as they get their ears bent on the subject at least twice a year) but now I have a new reason to be exasperated.

A week ago, the online calendar segments which interpenetrate with those of my students went live. Immediately, I started to get woeful messages asking why I was forcing them to attend lectures at eight in the morning throughout the winter. Surprised, I went and looked ... sure enough, all times from roughly November to March were an hour earlier than they should be. Shuffle back to September 2010 or forward to April 2011 and they are correct again. As long as we are in Summer time, Google presents appointment slots in Summer time terms. Presumably, when we shift to Winter time, summer time slots will appear to be an hour later than they ought to be.

Mutter mutter.

I assumed, at first, that this was something to do with harmonising the setting of time zones on both my own platforms and the Google calendars. In particular, I suspected that the problem had its root in my insistence on keeping all my ICT equipment permanently on Zulu time all year round. I started by setting all the calendars to Zulu time, but that created new problems. So I reset them, gritted my teeth, and set my PC to daylight adjustment; but that didn't work either. I tried various combinations, but nothing seemed to work ... Google Calendar simply cannot see across a time adjustment without this parallax error, so to speak. I just have to live with it.

A particularly bizarre oddity is that Thunderbird/Lightning manages to get around this and show times correctly all year around ... but only in some views.

BUT ... just to annoy me further ... having spent time writing this whinge, I have just gone into both Google and Thunderbird calendars ... to find that ... blow me down ... the problem has disappeared. September and December 2010, January and May 2011, regardless of view, all display 9am lectures as 9am. At least, they do on my desktop ... and on the E63 ... but not on the web book at the time I typed those last three dots, though the display is not OK there as well.

What's going on? Is this a sporadic problem (disgruntling both in itself and in its unpredictability) or a permanent one (disgruntling but allowable for) or a web propagation issue (downgrade to irritating and livable with) or has it solved itself (disgruntling to have been disgruntled for no reason ... and a source of paranoia incase it unsolves itself again)? Only time will tell ... by August 31, I should know which it seems to be, and whether I should stick with the PalmOS calendar for another year.

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• Melanie Safka, "Ears to the ground" on Please love me. 1973, New York: Buddah. BDS5132