Recently in Technology Category

Here's a good description of computer programming, published in today's Guardian:

High-level programming can be like mathematics or music: it brings order and harmony out of chaos. There is a fundamental sense in which everything is clearly right or wrong. A note is either in tune or it is not. A solution is either correct for an equation or it is wrong. A program - well, it fails to work. But eventually, some work right, and when they do there is an extraordinary feeling that the necessary, unarguable structure of the world has been revealed. In this way, programming is more like physics than pure mathematics, because if you apply the right logical or mathematical transformations to your input what comes out is not merely satisfying on its own terms but appears to rule the world as well.

The author Andrew Brown's weblog, Helmintholog, often has interesting posts and is worth adding to your favourite news reader.

How about one of these? It's 12½ feet wide! If you don't have room, what better excuse do you need to move house?

Panasonic unveiled this beauty at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Its screen is the equivalent of nine 50-inch sets. The price was not revealed, but it's a step up from Panasonic's 103-inch (8ft 6in) version, which cost £35,000 when it launched. Start saving those pennies now.

A couple of weeks ago, Apple released a version of its web browser, known as Safari, that works on Windows PCs. I've been using it on and off ever since, and I'm very impressed. It's only a beta release and there are definitely some bugs that still need to be resolved, but it loads pages very quickly and makes the web look simply beautiful. (Apparently, the appearance is due in large part to the font Lucida Grande, which comes with Safari as standard.)

So if you have ever wondered why some Mac fans rave about Apple's superior design and if you're curious to see how they view the web, download Safari 3.0 and start Surfin' Safari today!

It's been a fairly glorious Easter weekend here in the UK, with the temperature reaching 17°C yesterday afternoon. Easter is still an important event in the British calendar. It's the only official, four-day weekend, and very many people plan extended holidays around it. Apparently, Heathrow airport served 212,000 passengers on Thursday alone (see Easter getaway congestion begins), which is equivalent to evacuating the entire population of Kitchener, Ontario, in a single day (and Heathrow is just one of four airports serving London).

This weekend also happens to be the best time to find a bargain on the UK version of the popular online auction web site eBay. The reason is quite simple. Fewer people are at their computers on the longest non-familial holiday of the year, particularly if the weather is nice, which means fewer bids get placed and prices are correspondingly lower. So this weekend I purchased a new digital camera, and I'm pleased to report that it was indeed a bargain.

I purchased a black Canon EOS 400D digital SLR (single lens reflex) with an 18-55mm zoom lens for £396.51 from the Canon Outlet shop on eBay.co.uk, which was 5.6% less than the cheapest version of this model sold by Canon in the preceeding 16 days (there were 15 such cameras sold during the period).

Of course, it's often difficult to know if price comparisons are valid on eBay because you can't be certain that the purchased items are all equivalent. Are they all in the same condition, for example? In this case, however, the cameras are all sold by a single vendor, the manufacturer Canon, and they all come with a one-year manufacturer's warranty. They are described as "refurbished" which Canon defines as follows:

Refurbished products are 100% OK and therefore we can offer them with a 1 year manufacturer's warranty. There is nothing wrong with these products! All refurbished products are sealed with an authentic Canon seal!

We just can't sell a refurbished item as new because:

- it was used as demo product (at trade fairs etc.), or
- the outside carton box was slightly damaged during transportation (and then replaced by a neutral brown packaging), or
- it was sold and the box was opened. Then the item got returned to Canon.

Upon return to our facility, a product of this type is put through a full set of functional test procedures, cleaned, repaired (if needed), and refreshed with a set of in-box materials (manuals, accessories, cables...) and sealed. The packaging of the product may either be the original Canon packaging or a neutral (brown) packaging. The core product itself may (exceptionally) contain minor cosmetic blemishes.

Given the single vendor and the one-year warranty, I think it's fair to assume that we are comparing as close to "like for like" as it's possible to get on eBay.

In recent weeks, Canon has sold two versions of the EOS 400D, one in black and one in silver, at least six days a week (black-bodied cameras currently demand a premium, see Black vs. Silver for some possible explanations). In the precceding 16 days before I purchased my camera, there was an average of 11 bids placed on each black 400D for an average price of £452.34. The range went from a low of £420 to a high of £500. In my case, there were only 5 bids and my winning bid was £396.51.

So how did I achieve my new minimum price for a black EOS 400D? Here are my tips for buying successfully on eBay:

1. Research the market on eBay by searching for historical prices. Identify the maximum and minimum prices achieved and calculate the average.
2. Establish a budget and stick to it.
3. If you really want a bargain, never bid more than the average price that you calculated in step 1.
4. Don't forget to consider the shipping charges. Many vendors offer items with a lower reserve/starting price in order to encourage you to bid, and then charge you a premium for shipping. They are making money on the shipping, so beware.
5. If possible, bid on items where the auction ends at an unpopular time (in my case it was 7:15 PM on a Sunday night in the middle of a glorious bank holiday long-weekend).
6. Know your competing bidders by viewing their bidding history. Some may be professional retailers using eBay to stock their business inventory. Others may be buying strictly for personal use. It's easier to predict how the professionals will behave. They have fixed costs and margins that will force them to drop out of the bidding sooner rather than later. Avoid bidding against the rogue personal users if possible (pick that unpopular time). They are unpredictable.
7. Bid the maximum amount you are prepared to pay in the last 10 to 5 minutes of the auction. Don't be tempted to make incremental bids repeatedly. If you do, you may not reach your maximum before the auction ends. The professional buyers will all be bidding at the last minute too, and you or your computer may not be able to respond quickly enough.
8. Don't be tempted to increase your maximum bid while you are currently the highest bidder. If you do, eBay will execute another bid at the next bidding increment on your behalf, which effectively means you will be bidding against yourself — a very stupid thing to do.

Hmmm... I guess working for a real, bricks-and-mortar auction house for six years had some benefits after all.

Are you feeling historic? Do you want to secure your place in history? Then visit the History Matters web site and participate in the One Day In History project.

The British Library, along with a number of other cultural and heritage organisations in the UK, is inviting people to submit their blog entries for today (October 17, 2006) in an effort to record our collective experiences for future generations. They believe that even the most mundane of days will still be of interest to our descendants in years to come.

The objective is to obtain a written record of contemporary British life, but the web is a global medium and I can't help wondering how many people from other parts of the world, having nothing to do with the British Isles, will submit their entries. I can't imagine that the British Library would object to an international contribution, but the law of unintended consequences is bound to apply just as much on this day as on any other!

peace, originally uploaded by Jaanus1.

Skype, the internet telephony company now owned by Ebay, turned three recently, and invited users to submit entries in a birthday card competition. The results have been posted on Flickr.com, and this image is my favourite. Look closely at the detail on the hands. The concept and the execution are both very well done.

Note, this image was not the winning entry!

Four years ago some observers thought that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (aka the CBC) had the best Flash-enabled World Cup web site. I've been watching the CBC site to see if they would repeat their coverage in a similar way this year, and until today I couldn't find any reference to the upcoming tournament at all.

Now that it's begun, however, the CBC has unveiled its Live Soccer Tracker and it does indeed seem to offer all the information you might want if you can't watch every match on television, let alone in person. It's certainly a good way to catch up on the latest results.

The remarkable thing is that Canada has only ever participated in the World Cup once, in 1986; and it lost all its matches even then.

The medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer apparently has a weblog: Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. It's clearly a lot of work, and like the curate's egg, quite good in parts. It's also good to know that "Thow kanst buye a Chaucer Blog t-shirte if it pleseth thee"!

FlightAware.com is a new online US flight tracker. Here's the blurb:

Founded in March of 2005, FlightAware is the first company to offer free flight tracking for both private and commercial air traffic in the United States. FlightAware's proprietory flight arrival time algorithms combined with our powerful, intuitive, and reliable web-based interface yield the most capable and useful flight tracking application on the Internet.

It does seem to provide a wealth of information about each flight and aircraft. The 24-hour animation of US flights is pretty cool.

OnOneMap.com

Google Maps is a dynamic mapping application brought to you by the clever people at … Google. It's dynamic because you can reposition the map "on the fly" (ie without having to reload your browser), so it's much quicker than most of the other mapping applications available on the web.

Google has encouraged people to develop their own applications for its maps, and one of the best that I've come across in recent weeks is OnOneMap. It describes itself as "the UK's first property search engine map", and I can see how it might become an essential resource for anyone hoping to buy property in the UK.

The idea is simple, but new: people and agents with houses to sell inform OnOneMap of the details and OnOneMap displays their properties on Google's maps. You can filter the properties by many different criteria, not the least of which is price, and then view all the available properties that match your requirements in the neighbourhood of your choice.

Prior to OnOneMap the only way to obtain as comprehensive a list of available properties in a single neighbourhood was to drive around the area looking for "For Sale" signs while compiling your own list with pencil and paper! (Well OK, maybe a pen.) So if good property really is a case of "location, location, location", OnOneMap should do very well.

A couple of weeks ago, I read the following sentence in the Economist (see Telecoms and the internet: The meaning of free speech):

The acquisition by eBay of Skype is a helpful reminder to the world's trillion-dollar telecoms industry that all phone calls will eventually be free.

In recent weeks I've been captivated by Google Earth.

If you don't know it, the BBC television programme Click Online has a good description of this spectacular mapping software at Portal race goes local and global.

Never let it be said that the web isn't practical. Here's a link to an essential site illustrating 15 different ways to tie your shoes: Ian's Shoelace Site

From the Financial Times:

Carly Fiorina will be paid a $21.4m severance package after being fired as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard last week. She will also be able to keep her computer and receive free tech support for three months.

Only three months? It's a good thing she got the cash.

Customers are rarely found in this mobile phone shop.

Apparently, the UK has more mobile phones than people these days.

On one hand, that's not surprising when you consider that Vodafone, O2, Orange, and T-mobile all have shops within 200 meters of one another on my local high street. Strangely however, the biggest of them, Vodafone, hardly ever has any customers in it.

People must be buying their phones some other way.

We had spinach for dinner this evening (among other things), and not for the first time I found myself wondering: Why does cooked spinach leave a film that you can feel on your teeth?

Well it seems it's all down to those annoying oxalate crystals.

Isn't the Internet simply amazing?

I'm experimenting with del.icio.us, a "social bookmarks manager".

So here are links to some of the web pages that I found interesting recently (the annotations are mine):

• Adam Polselli's 2005 Color Forecast What colours will we see on the web in 2005?
• Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | Art failure Max Hastings on how droit de suite will hurt "dealers and auctioneers, who make up one of the shadiest and least lovable groups in our society".
• Another record year Norman Lebrecht thinks the classical recording industry is dead, but will the demise of the profit motive really be so bad for music?

I've been experimenting with a new digital camera while on holiday, and I must admit I'm very impressed with its potential. Who'd have thought images such as the one below could be produced so well digitally?

Le Moulin, Correns, France

In fact, digital photography comes into its own at night time. The camera captures light in a way that film just doesn't seem to record and that even the human eye has a hard time perceiving. Consequently, it becomes important to take a series of photographs at different exposures (aka bracketing) to ensure that you capture the scene as you envision it; but the beauty of digital photography is that you can take as many shots as you like without incurring any extra cost.

Of course, the ability to view the results of your work immediately is probably the single biggest benefit of digital photography. It takes a long time to learn from your mistakes with conventional film because of the time-consuming need to process and print each roll. Digital cameras provide feedback straight away, and that shortens the learning curve considerably.

In addition, the personal computer is an infinitely flexible digital darkroom. It allows you to manipulate your images in a myriad of new ways, some of which are in questionable taste I must admit.

Nevertheless, I've been coming to this part of France for many years now, and yet I've produced my best photographs of the place during this visit. It's not a coincidence. Digital photography has allowed me to see with a fresh pair of eyes. Long may it continue.

National Public Radio has a story on Dodgeball.com — a new service that helps people meet up with their friends on the fly, via mobile phone.

I wonder if this service would be more popular than one warning you when your enemies get too close?

I'm learning so much now that I'm a responsible parent. Who'd have thought anyone needed these?

They're heat sensing, soft-tipped weaning spoons.

Apparently, the red bowl of the spoon turns bright yellow if the food is too hot for young mouths (wouldn't yellow turning red be a more intuitive signal?), and being "soft-tipped" you can accidentally stab your bundle of joy with one and it won't hurt.

I wonder who thinks these things up?

Anyway, thanks to the wonder of the Internet you can read at least three reviews of these spoons on the Ciao! Shopping Intelligence web site. If after that you're still interested, Boots has them on sale for £1.24. That's 50% off! Better get them while they're hot.

The UK Passport Service now accepts passport applications online, and I began the process of applying for my new daughter's first passport on Monday around midday. At 10 AM the next day the postman dropped the typewritten application through our letter box!

All that remains is for me to sign the form, organise the necessary photographs and countersignature, pay the fee and post it back to the Passport Service — most of the work in other words.

Of course you have to start somewhere, and saving me that initial trip to the Post Office in order to pick up the application form is a very welcome improvement. The speed with which it all happened was simply a pleasant and impressive surprise.

Did you know that in the ISO paper size system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of two (1.4142 : 1)? I had no idea, but it explains a lot; particularly why folding a sheet of A4 in half produces two sheets of A5, etc. Believe it or not, such a convenient format was not established arbitrarily, but has in fact a mathematical basis.

Markus Kuhn has an interesting site that tells you everything you were wondering about international standard paper sizes.

My better half flew to New York last week on business, and I took the opportunity to update my knowledge of online air traffic tracking applications (as you do). To my surprise I found that things have moved on significantly in the last couple of years.

It's still possible to listen to live air traffic control communications for several airports in the USA. For example, JFK's ATC is available in Windows Media Player format at http://audio2.km3t.org:8010/jfk_gnd_twr. Of course, it's more interesting if you understand ATC jargon, but several ATC glossaries are easily accessible online.

CheapTickets Flight Tracker

The oldest flight tracker for North America of which I'm aware is still available care of the CheapTickets web site. It displays a map of the region over which the flight is flying and uses Java to move an aircraft icon across the map as the flight progresses. Three instrument dials indicate speed, heading and altitude.

FlyteComm's route map

Now a few more flight trackers have taken off. FlyteComm offers real time flight information, including current position and altitude for any flight in the USA or Canada. It provides a stationary map of the world with an icon indicating the aircraft's position and details about the weather at the relevant destination.

Lycos Flight Tracker route map

The Lycos Travel Flight Tracker, provided courtesy of FlightView, offers similar information for all flights in the US and Canada, and illustrates the flight path on a map.

Airport Monitor 2.0 uses a stationary map to display the position of all the air traffic in a given airspace, not just a single flight. In the case of JFK, for example, the aircraft icons are colour coded: blue for those landing at JFK, green for those departing JFK, and red for whichever JFK flight you select with your mouse. Details for your selected flight, such as altitude and aircraft type are provided as well.

Airport Monitor 2 for JFK

It's a veritable plane-spotter's heaven, but why would anyone go to the trouble of providing all this information for free? Well, it seems it's all about airport PR. Here's the explanation from the company's web site:

Give Neighbors A Better View Of Your Flight Operations

Until you let airport communities see the airspace with their own eyes, you will never create the trust and partnership you need. After all, seeing is believing. Our web-based visual tools help transform community relations by putting clear arrival and departure information at the fingertips of your neighbors.

When local residents have a clearer picture about what's happening in the air above them, it's better for the community. And the airport. Planes make noise. But neighbors don't have to — if you've given them the right tools to understand the airport's operations.

That strikes me as a fairly enlightened approach to community relations, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it helps. Perhaps such a system would have prevented that ridiculous case of plane-spotter spying that occurred in Greece not long ago. On the other hand, I suspect diehard plane-spotters would argue that there's no substitute for the real thing.

Last week Halley Suitt wrote about the decreasing need to backup her computer, now that many of her most frequent tasks are carried out online. By using Yahoo for her email and Blogger for her weblog, she no longer has many important documents on her own computer. As she explained, even producing paper copies is convenient and easy:

I'm in the habit too of looking for my most recent CV or copy of a story as an attachment to email that I may have sent someone and even the act of attaching and sending, is in a way, a form of back-up. Again, if I'm out and need to get a CV to someone, I can go into Kinko's, use their computer, go to my Yahoo email, check my sent documents, get the attachment that was my most recent CV and print it.

On Thursday came news that Halley's approach is causing serious problems for larger businesses: BBC News | Technology | Document deluge threatens firms.

Documents can be copied so easily that most workers spend lots of time finding the latest version of contract or proposal they are collaborating on…

"E-mail has become a kind of document repository by proxy," said Mr Pearson [who commissioned the research], "a lot of people are spending a lot of time looking for the latest version of a document."

Next week iSociety is publishing the results of its research on the use of technology by British companies (see iSociety seminar: getting by, not getting on), and it doesn't sound good:

…the reports [sic] major conclusion [is] that many UK organisations suffer from a ‘low-tech equilibrium’, and could do more to make the most out of the technology they have. Unskilled staff, uninterested management and disconnected IT people characterise too many UK workplaces.

That last statement certainly corroborates my experience. The staff uses IT, but can't change it; management doesn't use IT and doesn't understand how it can help; and the IT department eats, sleeps and breathes IT, but isn't in the real world.

How's this for a foolish celebration of conspicuous consumption?

Mr. Sarkis said [Williams College's] campus bookstore made the high costs [of textbooks] all too visible. "They really rubbed it in," he said. "If you were the highest spender of the day, they'd ring this little bell and say they had a new winner, and give you a lollipop. I got the lollipop twice."

The unwanted recognition backfired on the campus bookstore because Sarkis and another student were motivated to set up in competition against it. They now import textbooks from overseas and sell them to American students for much less than the US market price.

What a role reversal that is! I have lived most of my life in countries that envy America's standard of living. Canadians are always complaining that their taxes are unreasonably higher than those in the United States, and in both Britain and Canada many consumer goods are known to be more expensive than in the US. Now, thanks to the Internet, American students are discovering what it feels like to pay more than others (see Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas in The New York Times).

Interestingly, the Association of American Publishers is arguing that foreign sales have to be priced according to the local market and are simply an added bonus for America's GDP. In other words, the costs incurred in producing the book must be recouped from the domestic market (i.e. American students), after which sales of foreign editions (at very little additional cost) simply contribute to the publisher's profit.

It's a real shame the record companies don't apply the same reasoning to the pricing of music CDs. Recorded music would be much cheaper in Canada and Britain if they did! In fact, why stop there? All Hollywood's costs could be recouped in the US, and then all movies and CDs could be virtually free everywhere else. I think it's a great idea.

More seriously, marketing specialists would have you believe that pricing is a complicated process in itself; but I've come to the conclusion that most businesses simply set prices as high as they can until sales start to suffer. CDs are expensive in the UK because people are simply willing to pay more for music. Similarly, textbooks are more expensive in the US because American students are relatively wealthy and are prepared to pay more than students elsewhere.

Pricing is a part of business strategy, of which the most honest description is to be found in What Management Is by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone:

Business executives are society's leading champions of free markets and competition, words that, for them, evoke a world view and value system that rewards good ideas and hard work, and that foster innovation and meritocracy.… All the talk about the virtues of competition notwithstanding, the aim of business strategy is to move an enterprise away from perfect competition and in the direction of monopoly.

…The game may be moving faster, and the advantages may be shorter lived, but the objective is the same: figuring out how to hide from competition, or dampen it, or constrain it, so that you can earn superior returns.

No wonder American students are feeling abused. Luckily for them, however, the power is shifting. The Internet is making it harder for publishers to hide.

Recently Robert Fulford wrote an entertaining article in Canada's National Post in which he gently poked fun at modern society's use of colloquial slang (see Words for a young century). Here's his opening paragraph with added emphasis for anyone who may not be quite up to date with the latest lingo:

When I'm in the zone I sometimes think the English language began a process of change on or about Jan. 1, 2000. I have the sense that all of us are now busy inventing new, specifically 21st-century ways to talk and write. Is that weird or what? It's impossible to prove, of course, and my more cautious friends will warn me against so rash a theory. Don't go there, is how they'll put it. But I'm stepping right up to it, because in this business, the word business, you stay focused or somebody comes along and eats your lunch. And that's something with which, frankly, I have issues.

I have never understood the need to invent such confusing metaphors, and I frequently wonder how they ever get started. Don't go there will always seem like a traffic instruction to me. It's what a one-way sign would say if it could speak, and I have greater linguistic expectations for human beings than I do for traffic signs.

However, our world seems increasingly riddled with inarticulate successful humans. Here's Bill Gates no less, responding in the Financial Times to the question Will Office 2003 become popular quickly?

Many times, the reason we have lags for the new version of Office is that it only works on fairly new hardware, partly because of the way we did these features, and partly because of how powerful hardware's got. This thing works super good even on a three-year-old machine. So it doesn't have to be coupled with any type of hardware refresh.

Coupled with a hardware refresh? What he means of course is that you won't need to buy a new computer to run Microsoft Office 2003, which should help to make it become popular quickly. It's highly ironic that the world's richest man, who made his fortune developing and selling products designed to facilitate communication, should be so inarticulate himself.

It's strange how these coincidences happen. In my last post on The psychology of geeks I included a footnote that was attributed to Bruce Tognazzini, and this morning he pops up in a story published by BBC News: Web wizards weave their magic.

Not surprisingly, he has his own web site, Ask Tog; and it seems he was recently in London, hence the interview with the BBC.

Magic.

In Geeks and Promotion Anil Dash suggests:

There are many kinds of geeks in the world, and I think I tend to know at least one of each variety. But a common personality trait among a lot of the smartest, most creative people I know is that they're not inclined to do a lot of self-promotion...

I find that most of my friends and acquaintances who create truly visionary works aren't really against promotion, it's just not a skill that they cultivate for themselves...

I think part of the reason is cultural, as programmers have always had a mistrust and even a contempt for the suits, for the marketers who just want to pimp a product, developmental realities be damned.

Well the reason may be partly cultural, but it's also definitely psychological. Here's an excerpt from The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability and Productivity by Thomas K. Landauer (1995):

Software engineers (another name for programmers and system designers) tend to have different personalities, different approaches to the world, from the rest of us.

Programming attracts twice the proportion of introverts in the general population and three times the number of "intuitive" thinkers (Tognazzini 1992)¹. Introverts prefer their own thoughts to social interaction. Intuitive thinkers prefer the products of their imaginations to humdrum reality; they solve problems by visual imagery and insight rather than by plodding logic or investigation. These traits apparently suit people for the largely independent, sometimes lonely work of programming and to creating the intricately complex and abstract structures of software systems. It is unlikely that they help a person understand the majority, who would rather interact with co-workers than computers and who prefer to think about simple, concrete problems."

1. Tognazzini, B. (1992). Tog on Interface. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Give me the world inside my head any day.

Given the dot.com boom and bust, the long-term impact of the Internet on business largely remains to be seen, but there's at least one industry where its effect is a huge improvement: the sale of antiquarian books.

Believe it or not, but the impact of the Internet on the sales of used books was far from certain. Would the improved ability to find specific books increase demand and sales sufficiently to offset any decline in prices that might occur if customers could easily shop around? That's the question Björn Frank and Guntram Hepperle asked at the University of Hohenheim in Germany at the end of 2000. In the abstract to their paper entitled The Internet's Impact on the Market for Antiquarian Books: Some Unexpected Empirical Results (click here for the whole paper in PDF format) they concluded:

Though there is a considerable variance in most books' prices, we do not observe the expected negative correlation between price and share of internet sales (in relation to a seller's total sales). We find other factors which have a systematic impact on prices, but with respect to the Internet, our main result is that e-business currently contributes little or nothing to driving prices downwards.

I have to say that I'm not surprised. Yesterday a biography of one of my distant cousins arrived in the post from Hoffman's Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio. The third edition of Memoirs of Mrs. Rebecca Wakefield: Missionary in East Africa was published in 1888 and written by the subject's brother, Robert Brewin. I only discovered this book two weeks ago in the course of doing some family history research, and yet thanks to the information superhighway I already have my own copy and Hoffman's Bookshop has another satisfied customer.

Although I purchased the book from Hoffman's, the transaction was brokered by abebooks.com, which "connects those who buy books with those who sell them, providing abundant selection at affordable prices". The Memoirs of Mrs. Rebecca Wakefield was only the second book I have purchased in this way, but I'm in the market for a third, and thanks to abebooks.com's "want list" feature there's every chance that I'll find it eventually.

Last week when I was searching for the Memoirs of Mrs. Rebecca Wakefield there was only one copy to be found, so comparing prices was impossible; but in my limited experience prices on the Internet for books in a similar condition are also similar. So the real benefit the Internet brings is the ability to track the books down in the first place. There's no way I would have found copies of my books without the Internet.

Of course, there's another benefit. I have yet to set foot within 250 miles of Columbus. In fact, I've never been to Ohio at all; and now, fortunately, I don't have to -- at least not to spend time in its bookshops.

Update: For more on the Canadian success story abebooks.com see Giants and behemoths in The Globe and Mail.

The headline above caught my eye, but it turns out that to date only a small fraction of the UK mobile phone-carrying public has bought a new "camera phone". I didn't think they'd catch on because I couldn't imagine what people would want to photograph on a regular, if not daily, basis. Now I know:

... the most popular subject is drunken people taking pictures of themselves larking about in pubs.

Yet another example of modern technology being put to the best possible use. For the full story see BBC NEWS | Technology | Mobile phone snaps taking off.

Well, I wouldn't have believed it possible! I have already received my tax refund for last year. I only filed my return on January 28 and my bank confirmed that the money was deposited directly into my account by the Inland Revenue on February 3. That's only seven days after filing, and it includes a weekend. Since it takes the banks three business days to transfer funds, it means that the Inland Revenue had processed my tax return within two days of receiving it. I'm sure this amazing accomplishment is largely due to filing electronically and having relatively simple tax affairs, but it bodes well for e-government initiatives in the future. Who'd have thought that eliminating the need for civil servants to do data entry would result in such a huge improvement in performance? I am truly impressed.

While the debate about human editors versus machines still rages, observers should note that Moreover.com filed the recent ZDNet story Opera: Microsoft is hurting our style under "Classical music news". I can well believe that these guys may know nothing about classical music, but you'd think their technological expertise would tell them that Opera is more than just an art form.

According to their web site:

Moreover's XML technology and proprietary rules-based categorization process ensure unrivaled quality of coverage and speed of delivery.

Unlike automatic statistical approaches to classification that are limited to 85% percent accuracy, Moreover's hybrid technology that combines automatic techniques and human editors guarantees near-perfect accuracy, continuously.

Near-perfect accuracy? Although you can't see it in the image above (click on the image for a larger view), the same mistake was repeated twice more with the same story from other sources. Someone needs to change the rule that references to "opera" should always be classified as classical music.

I wasn't alone in my praise for the Inland Revenue's on-line filing system yesterday. The folks at the work foundation liked it (iWire - Stragglers, eGov & 31st Jan), and so did author and RSS guru Ben Hammersley (Signs we live in the future). Unfortunately, Junius (Tax return phobia) will have to wait until next year.

My Sudsy Dame and I both have mobile phones, and on a couple of occasions we've been forced to call one another in order to track each other down. Once, when we'd agreed to meet at London's Elephant and Castle (that's a large intersection, not the pub) we had to phone one another after both waiting 20 minutes without finding each other. On another occasion Sudsy Dame called for help to get out of London's notorious Barbican complex.

It wasn't long before I could see the benefit of combining a mobile phone with a global positioning system (GPS), and after a little research I discovered that they already exist.

Today's Guardian reports on a new application of this idea - Finns can now home in on their hounds thanks to location-based services (see Guardian Unlimited | Online | Dog and bones):

Dogs wear a small mobile device and the hunters carry a Benefon mobile phone with built-in GPS and software from Pointer Solutions. If the dog goes missing, its exact position, bounced off a satellite, will be displayed on a map on the mobile's screen. The hunter can also listen to the dog, which could be up to 100 kilometres away.

If keeping track of your spouse in this way sounds a little too manipulative and invasive, think again:

Tracking services such as this are among the more successful location-based services, according to Jeremy Green, head of wireless research at London-based consultancy Ovum. KTF of South Korea offers child-tracking and OAP-tracking [Old Age Person]. Of its 5,000 customers, 20% have senile dementia.

So that's what's wrong with Finnish dogs - they're all senile! I wondered what was wrong with a little old-fashioned obedience training.

Sudsy Dame has yet to develop senile dementia (I think), but the GPS phones could come in handy for the growing sport of Geocaching, of which we are both becoming fans and which I may write more about later.

I'd like to introduce the latest entry in the battle of the dishmatiques, the Minky Dishjet Powerpad!

Credit must once again go to my wife for spotting this new rival to the classic Easy-Do Dishmatique in our local Sainsbury's (you may remember that she was the first to find the Easy-Do Bathmatique), and there can be no doubt that it also qualifies as a true dishmatique since it meets Jonathon's specification:

• a handle that is filled with liquid detergent; plus
• snap-on replaceable sponge heads.

In fact, the packaging boasts that "Refill heads include brush, non-stick and tough scourer". It has an on/off switch built-in to the handle so that although it "Dispenses Liquid As It Cleans", it also "Saves Washing Up Liquid". It has a screw cap at the end of the handle, so unlike the Dishappointing Dishmatique Flex, washing-up liquid can't leak out. We've been using it for a week (in great secrecy) and can attest that it holds up well when compared with the original Dishmatique. It's a little shorter, but stouter, and feels more durable. However, only time will tell.

It's produced by Minky Homecare Vale Mill (Rochdale Ltd), who's website address is given as http://www.minky.co.uk, and I must admit that I'd never heard of the company before this discovery, which is perhaps a telling admission because…

… Minky holds H. M. The Queen's Royal Warrant for cleaning and laundry products. This is the Dishmatique that Prince Phillip uses at Buckingham Palace! Now, wouldn't he be a great addition to the Sudsy Studs Calendar? Just think what it could do for sales.

On the day when Tesco refuted claims that it was supplying spiders along with its grapes, comes news of a new on-line grocery business serving New York City (well, the Upper East Side at any rate).

According to the BBC (BBC News | UK | Tesco denies using deadly spiders):

Tesco has admitted that a drive to use less pesticides in its food could mean more spiders turning up in bags of fruit. But the supermarket denied that food producers are using black widow spiders, after three customers found them in bags of grapes. In separate incidents, the three women discovered the deadly spider among American-grown grapes bought from Tesco stores. Two of the spiders were alive. The company says producers do use natural predators to protect fruit, as an alternative to chemicals. But it strongly denies that the distinctive spider, whose venom is 15 times more potent than a rattlesnake, is deliberately used on suppliers' crops in the US.

If that sounds like a scary disincentive, consider FreshDirect, a new on-line grocery delivery business based in Queens and currently serving the East Side of Manhattan.

According to Fortune magazine (The Online Grocer Version 2.0):

Their cargo--meat, fish, cheese, fresh-baked breads, produce, and other foods--sells at prices about 25% below what most New York grocers charge.

FreshDirect does deliver specialty-store-quality fresh food and prepared food at strikingly low prices.

It's a measure of the times that Fedele and Ackerman [the company's founders] refuse to call FreshDirect a dot-com. And while they admit that the company could not exist without the web (orders are placed on freshdirect.com for delivery the following day), they insist that efficiency, not technology, is the point. "Our idea was to build the ultimate food company that could scale," says Ackerman. "The only reason we chose the Internet was that it helped us reach people at a lower transaction cost. It allows us to do for food what Michael Dell did for computers." One of the great unfulfilled promises of the Internet has been that it would enable manufacturers to sell directly to consumers. But few companies other than Dell have actually done it.

And of course Webvan failed spectacularly. That first great Internet grocery scheme spent more than $1 billion on huge distribution facilities in seven cities before closing shop in July 2001.

Why should these guys do any better? It's a question they are asked constantly. Fedele and Ackerman insist Webvan was merely a distribution company that missed the point. Says Fedele: "This is a company based on food people, not dot-com people." FreshDirect's motto: "It's all about the food."

Hmmm...this is interesting. Up to now I had rather assumed that the attraction of on-line home delivery services was the convenience of the service rather than the quality of the food, which I have always assumed would be identical to that purchased in person at any given store. Certainly, here in the UK the food delivered by Tesco, Sainsbury's, et al., is identical to that found in their stores. In most cases, the food actually comes from your local shop, so it is literally the same food that you would buy if you went shopping in person.

The interesting aspect of FreshDirect's strategy is that it is offering better food at lower prices, as well as the convenience of on-line ordering and home delivery, which quite frankly sounds too good to be true. I find myself wondering what exactly "specialty-store-quality" really means and how it compares to the quality offered by the average grocery store in the UK. I also wonder if this approach would work outside of Manhattan, or more specifically in places where food is less expensive. Presumably shoppers in Queens already pay less for their food than residents of Manhattan. Will FreshDirect be as appealing to them?

Of course, Ocado (about which I have written previously, and on which the Economist reported just last week, see Off Their Trolleys) claims to be offering similar benefits here by supplying only food from Waitrose, which is generally considered to be the UK's highest quality grocer; but Ocado is definitely not cheaper than food sold in Waitrose's stores, in fact the delivery charge makes them more expensive still.

So perhaps FreshDirect's approach will be limited to places with unusually high food costs. Of course it's early days, and it remains to be seen if they can even make it work in Manhattan.

It occurred to me some time ago that webloggers are the modern equivalent of pamphleteers, and last weekend I did a little research on this idea. As you might expect, it's been suggested before, most notably by Dan Bricklin, creator of the very first spreadsheet program, Visicalc (see Pamphleteers and Web Sites).

Now from the BBC comes news (BBC NEWS | Technology | Life lessons for web users) of a recent conference on the Internet's potential to change society (Beyond the Backlash: Where next for the digital economy?). According to Mark Ward, who reported on the conference for the BBC:

John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University, said there was a pressing need to nurture public discussion spaces online and to keep them free of the usual vested interests that can hobble debate.

His comments were echoed by John Perry Barlow, founder of US cyber-liberties watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who feared that badly drafted laws would severely curtail the freewheeling spirit of online discussion.

"I thought we would be spared the governments impositions by its incompetence," he said, "but we cannot trust to that anymore."

Instead, he said, the US Government and corporations were pushing a unified agenda that stressed control, censorship and the removal of basic rights over freedom of discussion and action.

Challenges to the corporate and federal axis were limited because, so far, net activists and protesters were not fighting on a united front.

"What we have now is 10 million lonely pamphleteers crying out on lonely street corners and not getting together as a block or getting together as opposition to traditional institutions," said Mr Barlow.

He said there were profound dangers in letting the government and business-backed view of what can be done online prevail because the net was at a pivotal moment in its development.

"If we design it to serve existing models of business and government and to follow short-term goals we will be bad ancestors," he said. "Do not, I beg you, be bad ancestors."

I don't know enough about the history of journalism to compare the effectiveness of the pamphleteers with that of webloggers, but it seems to me that it might be premature to draw any conclusions. Perhaps the "10 million lonely pamphleteers" will get together soon.

A number of interesting organizations appear to have produced this conference, including Demos, The Work Foundation, and vitamin-e.

Yet more interesting stuff from this week's Economist (Economist.com | European telecoms). It seems ...

One of the fastest-growing uses of text messaging, moreover, is interacting with television. Gartner's figures show that 20% of teenagers in France, 11% in Britain and 9% in Germany have sent messages in response to TV shows.

I hate "reality television" shows, such as the Big Brother series, which have been the prime source of this interactive television trend. I have yet to see or hear any participant or fan with anything significant to say on any of these programmes. As far as I'm concerned the primary benefit of getting them all to communicate by text message is that each one is limited to only 164 characters. You can't have too many run-on sentences with that reality!

Here's an excerpt from an interesting editorial in this week's Economist: Economist.com | Computers and government (subscription required). Although it's really commenting on IT projects in government, I think the same points are relevant to all organizations. In fact, it shouldn't be titled "Computers and government" but "Computers and people".

Most private-sector bosses - especially since the bursting of the dot-com bubble - hope for nothing more than a return on their investment through lower costs and some improvement in competitiveness. But politicians (vide Mr Blair), desperate to find quick fixes and unencumbered with any understanding of what technology can and can't do, often expect miracles. And one of the things that technology can't do is to alter people's attitudes towards change. "Change management" is never easy, but in the public sector it is especially hard because there is too little competitive pressure pushing it, and there are too many powerful unions holding it back. The commonest reason for IT failures is that custom-made systems are built to fit existing ways of working. Such systems, which consultants are only too happy to create, are expensive, deliver only marginal benefits and are inherently likely to go wrong.

So how can civil servants avoid disaster? First, they should regard installing new software as an opportunity to re-engineer the way they work in the light of both the Internet and how they want to operate for the next 20 years. Consultants cannot make those decisions for them. The new business processes must also fit unmodified software, not the other way round: the more modifications to the software, the greater the risk. Second, they should beware of incomplete automation: if one area of operations still depends on hand-written forms, little will be gained. To this end, they must buy business applications that have been engineered from the outset to work together. These may not individually be the "best of breed" that consultants often recommend, but they are more likely to be properly integrated - think of Microsoft Office. Finally, IT systems should provide managers with vital information; most fail to because data are fragmented and hard to find. With an Internet-based system, important information can be kept in one place, and managers can get at it when they need it.

...genetically modified onions that won't make you cry (see Blame it on the enzyme: Researchers pinpoint culprit of onion tear factor). Whatever will they think of next?