Anthony Campbell's blog

Nice mixed metaphor from the Defence Secretary

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:51:36 +0100

Defending the Government's latest position reversal (this time on the choice of aircraft for the new carriers) the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, said that being prepared to change your mind when conditions changed was better than "burying your head in the sand and ploughing on regardless". Because you wouldn't be able to see where you were ploughing, I suppose.

Google algorithm update - more news

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:11:23 +0100

Numbers of hits on my pages are still down, but I think the length of visits relative to the number of visits is increasing. This presumably means that the relevance of the hits I'm getting is greater. If so, there is an improvement in quality at the expense of quantity, which is probably a good bargain.

Google algorithm update affects my site

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:11:49 +0100

I've noticed a dramatic fall in the number of hits on my pages in the last couple of weeks, by more than 50 per cent. I didn't change anything - in fact, I couldn't do so until now owing to a recent eye oeration which made reading difficult - so it isn't anything I've done.

A quick search in Google itself show that they have recently modified their algorithms significantly. This is apparently meant to improve the ratings for less prominent sites that don't use underhand methods to enhance their rating. I don't do this so I don't know why I am suffering. If my experience is anything to go by this is not an improvement.

Eye operation

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 09:54:45 +0100

I haven't posted here recently because I had an eye operation (trabeculectomy) 4 weeks ago and I still can't see the screen clearly. I hope to be back in the not too distant future.

Cycle helmets should not be compulsory - Journal of Medical Ethics

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:22:05 +0000

Abstract

Many jurisdictions require cyclists to wear bicycle helmets. The UK is currently not one of these. However, an increasing number of interest groups, including the British Medical Association, want to change the status quo. They argue that mandatory cycle helmet laws will reduce the incidence of head injuries and that this will be both good for cyclists (because they will suffer fewer head injuries) and good for society (because the burden of having to treat cyclists suffering from head injuries will be reduced). In this paper we argue against this position. We suggest that cycle helmets may not be especially effective in reducing head injuries and we suggest that the imposition of such a restrictive law would violate people's freedom and reduce their autonomy. We also argue that those who accept such a restrictive law would be committed to supporting further legislation which would force many other groups – including pedestrians – to take fewer risks

This article is by two authors from St George's Hospital, London. It is to be found at

http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/02/21/medethics-2011-100085.long

or at

r J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100085.

Paypal acting as a literary censor

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:33:14 +0000

14 March 2012

Good news! Paypal have now reversed their previous decision and there will be no restriction on payment for legal fiction. Congratulations to Mark Goker and all who supported him - and to Paypal.

---------------------------------------------------------

Mark Coker, the managing director and founder of Smashwords, has been told by Paypal that they will not process payments for books dealing with incest, rape, bestiaility, child abuse or other sexual topics they disapprove of. This ruling would exclude Nabokov's Lolita, not to mention the Bible.

Moving payments to a different payments processor is not an option, Mark says. He is therefore trying to negotiate a more sensible arrangement with Paypal but he is not certain that he will succeed.

This is an appalling affair, The books in question are legal so Paypal is setting itself up as a moral censor which it has no right to do. And what will come next? A ban on books that are critical of Christianity or religion in general? I'm not affected by the present ban but I would be by the exclusion of religious criticism. The fact that Paypal has a virtual monopoly of processing online payments is potentially disastrous. Time for protests.

Rabbi Lionel Blue's suspect zoology

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:24:59 +0000

In today's Thought for the Day Rabbi Lionel Blue said that a lot of small spiders had come into his bath by crawling up the drainpipe.

This would require them to swim through six inches of water.

He then went on to say that before releasing them he gave them cake crumbs to eat, which frightened them. As all spiders are carnivorous their lack of appreciation is understandable. I don't know how reliable the Rabbi's theology is but his zoology needs a good deal of brushing up.

Academics boycott Elsevier

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 12:21:04 +0000

The current issue of the BMJ informs us that over 7000 academics have signed an online petition to say they will no longer edit or referee papers for Elsevier journals or have their own papers published in them. This bocott is in response to Elsevier's support for new legislation to end guarantees of free access to publicly funded medical research. As a result, Elevier has withdrawn its support for this legislation.

I'm delighted by this news. Elsevier has long had a restrictive attitude to its publications and has limited free access as much as it could. Its subscription charges are much too high. I accept that publishers have to make a living but their cupidity is often excessive. There is a widespread feeling, which I share, that publishers 'take advantage of the academic community's pursuit of knowledge and commitment to sharing what they discover broadly and free of charge.'

You can sign the petition at http://thecostofknowledge.com/.

Book review: The Bat Tattoo, by Russell Hoban

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:42:43 +0000

This is one of Hoban's gentler fictions, with a happy ending. It has three narrators who speak in turn: Sarah Varley, Roswell Clark, and Adelbert Delarue. Roswell and Sarah are both wounded people: Roswell drove while drunk and the resulting accident killed his wife, while Sarah was married to an unsatisfactory man who is also dead. Both Roswell and Sarah decide to have bats tattooed on their arms as emblems of good luck. Much of the novel is concerned with their lives come to intertwine, each finding something in the other that had been missing for them up to now. Quite a lot of the story is told in flashback. [More]

Book review: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:15:27 +0000

Lewis is a financial journalist. Here he reports his experiences of interviewing people in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and the USA who have been involved in the current financial catastrophe. [More]

Reinstalling Brother HL5240 and Epson Perfection v330 after crash

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:07:25 +0000

A few days ago I had a hard disk crash and had to reinstall Debian Sid. Fortunately I had a backup for my home partition. Mostly things went off smoothly but there were two problems.

1. My scanner

This is an Epson Perfection v330. The drivers for this used to be on Avensys but are now on Epson. I had compiling problems with them - dependency failure. I eventually found libltdl3_1.5.26-4+lenny1_i386.deb by googling and was then able to compile things. Someone on a newsgroup says I downloaded the wrong file - it should have been iscan_2.28.1-3.ltdl7_i386.deb, which would probably have avoided the need to find the missing library.

As my correspondent rightly remarks, the Epson site is confusing. This is a pity because the v330 does work on Linux and is one of the few reasonably priced scanners that do. I've seen posts from two people who bought it and gave up trying to get it to work.

2. Printing from my Brother HL5240

I don't like CUPS so use lprng plus magicfilter by preference. Before the crash this was working well and I could also print to the printer from other computers on the local network. After the reinstall, nothing worked. Eventually, with some useful advice from the Debian maintainer for lprng, I got everything working. There are several things to do.

a. My /dev/lp0 had disappeared. I fixed this by adding the following to /etc/modules:

parport_pc
lp

b. For some reason the Brother filter wouldn't work , though it did before. I therefore used ljet4-filter in magicfilter and this seems to give everything I need.

c. To get remote printing from another computer on the LAN I needed to do two things.

First, I added a line to /etc/lprng/lpd.conf :-

lpd_listen_port=515

Next, I commented out this line in /etc/lprng/lpd.perms:

# REJECT NOT SERVER

These are important; otherwise you will get messages about "connection refused" or "no connection permissions".

Down with sugar!

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:30:50 +0000

The current issue of Nature has an opinion piece on the dangers of sugar. Robert H, Lustig and colleagues say that sugar should be taxed and restricted in the same way as alcohol. Lustig runs a children's obesity clinic in San Francisco. See Sugar: The Bitter Truth by Lustig onYouTube,

This view endorses the central claim of Gary Taubes's book The Diet Delusion. In his lecture Lustig doesn't mention Taubes, but his message is the same as that of Taubes. In outline, this is that reducing calories and exercising more to lose weight doesn't work. The widely promulgated advice to cut down on dietary fat is wrong, because it isn't fat that makes us fat, it's carbohydrate (and especially fructose, which Lustig regards as a major culprit and as dangerous as alcohpl). Lustig even repeats the slogan that Taubes uses: " a calorie isn't a calorie; not all calories are equal."

Like Taubes, Lustig blames much of the mistake on the late Ancel Keys, whose research, he finds, was flawed. Lustig is important because, unlike Taubes, he is a clinician and an academic - Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Three tiling window managers compared - xmonad, dwm, and i3

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:23:41 +0000

As you may know if you have followed some of the previous posts here, I used icewm as my window manager for a good many years, because I liked its simplicity and unobtrusiveness. As its documentation says, it does its work and gets out of your way. Just what I like.

As time went by I found I was working more with windows in fullscreen mode rather than stacked, swapping between them as needed. Icewm has a menu that allows you to do this, so you know what you have open. But it then occurred to me that I was using icewm as if it were a tiling WM. So why not look into the world of real tiling WMs to see if there was something that would suit me even better than icewm?

I first tried xmonad, which I liked a lot. But, being written in Haskell, it was pretty difficult to configure. So I next looked at dwm, which is visually and functionally similar to xmonad, with quite similar default key bindings. It was simpler to configure than xmonad, being written in C. I don't know C but I found it considerably easier to guess how the configuration file worked than was the case with xmonad, with its Haskell code.

One minor disadvantage of dwm was that to test a new configuration involved restarting the thing, but since I didn't keep making changes that wasn't too serious. What I found more annoying was the lack of anything like a menu to show what other windows were open. In other words, if I was viewing the browser and wanted to switch to, say, mutt, I ended up cycling blindly through the windows until I arrived where I wanted to be - and it was easy to overshoot. Of course, I could also go to tiled layout and choose the correct window there, followed by a return to fullscreen, but it was not very intuitive..

I then had a look at i3. I hadn't done so previously because the docs said it was primarily for developers, but I found that it was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. It's easy to configure, at least in its latest version (4.1) and it has all the features I was looking for (plus others that I don't need). I'll illustrate how I use it with some screenshots.

Here is the default tiled layout, with several windows open. The browser is the selected window in this case. I can easily add another window with Mod+Enter, or I can start a new application using dmenu (Mod+d).

Now I press Mod+w to get the tabbed layout, which shows the selected window (my home page in my browser). Although this occupies the whole screen apart from the upper and lower bars, it is not actually fullscreen. I can change to any of the other windows by shifting to a different tab, either with the keyboard or with the mouse.

If I want true fullscreen (seldom needed), I press Mod+f. Now the bar disappears. In this mode I can't switch to a different window; I must toggle fullscreen with Mod+f again to return to tabbed layout. To shift to a different window I must first press Mod+f again to get back to the tabbed layout.

There is also an alternative layout to tabbed - the stacked layout (Mod+s). which is what I use most of the time.

I emphasise that this by no means exhausts all the options that i3 offers. For example, you can have the windows tiled in a grid, e.g. 4x4, and you can have different workspaces as you do in other WMs. These are called tags in dwm, but they work in the same way. I can see why they would be useful if you had a lot of applications open, but seldom have more than 3 or 4 windows open and using more workspaces would be confusing. (See the official i3 web page for details of all this.)

The main exception is xsane, used for manipulating my flatbed scanner. This opens several drop-down windows, and these work best if you change to floating mode (shift + mod + space). I find it's best to do this in a separate workspace, otherwise it becomes confusing.

Configuring i3 is very easy*; you just edit the config file (~/.i3/config). This is a plain text file. Here is my config, with comments. Note that i3 has a strange idea of the keys to use for moving around: instead of h,j,k.l it shifts everything to the right and uses j,k,l,semicolon. As I'm used to h.j,k,l in vim I changed the default arrangement in i3. If you do this you must also change Mod+h (which by defajult gives a horizontal arrangement of windows), otherwise you will get an error message because you have Mod+h mapped to two different commands.

*These remarks apply to the current version of i3 -4.1. Previous versions were a bit more complicated to configure.

Note: If you ever find that i3 seems to have locked up, so that you can't change to a different tab, check first that you are not fullscreen. If that is not the problem, do Mod+Shift+R to reload, which should make things work again.

Book review: Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer, by Russell Hoban

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:19:17 +0000

Russell Hoban wrote a number of excellent novels, several of which are already reviewed on this site. Between 1987 and 1996 he produced no new novels, but after this nine-year gap he returned to adult fiction with several more novels, working in spite of increasing ill-health. He died at the end of 2011.

Like many of Hoban's novels, this one is a first-person narration. The story is told by Jonathan Fitch, a young man who has lost the girl he loves because she found out that he had been carrying on with a large number of other women behind her back. He bitterly regrets this and is sitting on the floor, drunk and in despair, at the top of the stairs in the Piccadilly Tube station, where he is accosted by the eponymous Mr Rinyo-Clacton. He is a tall powerful man of enormous wealth (though the source of his wealth is never specified). [More]

More on teaching computing in schools

nospam@example.com (Anthony Campbell) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:46:53 +0000

There was an item on this in today's Material World on Radio 4. in which it was said that schools were going to be encouraged to use free software. So perhaps all is not lost.