John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

29 April 2005: We had the big debate last night on Question Time where the three party leaders each in turn faced the audience for thirty minutes.

Most of the time I watched Supersize Me on Channel 4, a triumph of campaigning, fantastic, entertaining, really great.

But I did see the hassle Blair got over Iraq, he had a bad day yesterday. I've two thoughts. Firstly, the focus at the moment is on the Attorney General's advice, and Blair's answer is the decision was his to take, he had soldiers on the ground and he took the decision as leaders must.

Two things, for me, weren't raised. Firstly, there were soldiers on the ground (that perhaps forced his decision) because all the preparatory steps had been taken. It looks very much like the decision to go to war was taken much earlier than all this, and the people and the cabinet had to be persuaded to come around to that view. That's not very democratic.

The other thing, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've a feeling there was never a poll showing a majority of public opinion for the war. When Blair took his judgment, he judged against the 'people'. How does he justify that?

Having said that, the Labour party manifesto is a glorious thing. Whoever says it's dry has no soul or no imagination or neither. Every page affects us. Every page is a to-do list. We may not agree with everything (there's a feeling he'll increase our nuclear power programme for instance, and I don't agree with road charging (because I think it's a ridiculous over-use of technology, just massively increase fuel prices (but I know that's political suicide))), but we can never have the government we want, it's always a compromise.

Oh yes, my main point. The thing people are talking about this morning is the question about GP appointments. On Question Time someone pointed out to Mr Blair that if, on Monday, they want to make an appointment with their GP for Friday, for instance, they're in the surgery and need to come back for a follow up, they can't. Because of the government's target that everyone who wants a GP appointment should be seen within 48hours, the surgery simply won't accept appointments with more than 48 hour notice. That person would have to call on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday to make their appointment, which for her meant queueing on the phone for three hours.

The shock is, Blair had no clue this was happening. He "will look into it". A show of hands showed this was commonplace. I thought it was an obvious part of seeing the GP .. although I did manage to book an appointment with the nurse a week in advance the other day. I thought everyone knew this was what was happening. Suddenly Blair seemed out of touch. If he didn't know that, obvious, part of our daily lives, what else didn't he understand.

Not only that, it's also obvious management theory that you must be really careful what you measure. In this case, measuring the GP queue simply made surgeries push the queue back to the people. The queue is still there, there are still people out there wanting to see their GP, it's just not written down yet.

What's really scary is, if he didn't know that was happening, well, targets are so much a part of Labour, that leads to the possibility that he doesn't actually understand the side effect of setting targets. Either that or he isn't watching for the obvious problems. That would be serious.

In fairness, it's not a queue. If I book to see my GP next week, I'm not in a queue, my queue length is zero if I got a satisfactory appointment. So, what, is this a fault in the analysis software the surgeries use? Are they not able to flag a planned appointment as opposed to a queued one?

We chose our current surgery (on Prospect Road) because our local one (on Castle Road) said "we're very busy, you can't get an appointment with us for four days". In four days I could be dead, that's a queue.

In truth, it's not Blair's fault, he wants the right things and is doing the right stuff, it's the fault of implementation. The government sets out what it wants, and as the requirement trickles down it gets diluted and bent and people find creative ways around it.

The more I read the manifestos the more I think I might actually vote Labour this time, because I like their management style. Things do get done. There's a sense that, maybe now we've got through about the GP waiting times, perhaps something will happen to fix it.

There's a comment on the Question Time website from someone saying this has been the most boring campaign ever. Boring? Iraq? Tuition fees? Road pricing? Taxation? Fuel prices? Our relationship with the US? Europe? OK maybe the main parties are middle of the road, but there are more and more parties on the edge, from UKIP to the Greens to Respect. Boring? Man, you're not bored with the campaign, you're bored with life.

IoP

27 April 2005: I had a spam email from someone called Insuperable O'Perjurer the other day. Sounds like a nice guy. Bet his nickname was Souper at school.

Wet Queen

27 April 2005: As if we needed reminding of how self centred Michael Winner is, he lost all the PR benefit he presumably was trying to gain from his efforts to generate more recognition for police officers killed in the line of duty when he accompanied the Queen as she unveiled a memorial to them. It was raining, and on these occasions I presume a see-through umbrella is used so as not to prevent people seeing her majesty. That subtlety was lost on Winner, who used it to shelter himself instead, leaving her maj out in the rain. Or maybe he was aware, and just thought "at least she's got a hat, I've got nothing".

PR works best when it goes with the flow. There's no point trying to persuade us Michael Winner has a heart, a conscience, or is nice because the facts speak so clearly for themselves. Any well intentioned PR effort such as this, which has obviously taken a long time and a lot of effort to reach yesterday's public awareness peak will always unravel in the face of reality. Far better to go with the flow. Get him to campaign for the Tories, for instance.

Sims

27 April 2005: It's been a while since I checked the log file for my own site, and things are moving on quite well. My first full month's server logs in May 2003 showed 194 page requests. In March 2005 I got 3,796. It won't set the world alight, but that's five requests an hour which is more than I imagined.

My blog pages are by far the most popular pages, so that idea worked then. Google alone's delivered over three thousand people to my site.

It's amazing how people link to you. Xeni-2 at simtropolis used my photograph of a zebra crossing in Tossa De Mar (about a quarter of the way down the page) to show a colleague how a zebra crossing should look when he was programming one for the Sims game. OK, it's my copyright, and my bandwidth, but it's fun too, and it's in keeping with why I took the photograph, Tossa De Mar as Trumpton, or as Sim City.

Still the most popular search, beyond 'John Allsopp' is Vance Miller, the dodgy kitchen guy I talked about. Norwegian log cabins, oxo tins, and Romilly Weeks feature highly too, although hopefully they're not in someone's head all at the same time. Oh and eleven people found me searching for peekaboo dog. Maybe I'm keeping the wrong company.

Doctor Who

25 April 2005: The BBC must be really upset about the whole Iraq war/Andrew Gilligan thing. In the last Doctor Who, aliens who had landed in London, killed our government and were impersonating them made up the threat of alien craft hovering above the planet, poised to destroy us. They required the codes for our nuclear defence system and in a presentation to the UN they said they had incontrovertible proof (I may have remembered that wrong, but they used the same phrase that was used in the real presentation) that the aliens could destroy us within 45 seconds (Saddam was said to be able to deploy his weapons in 45 minutes). Cheeky monkeys

Illiteracy rant

21 April 2005: I'm going to rant, OK? Don't ask me why, but I opened a copy of Hardcopy today from July 2003. It's "a publication for software professionals" from Grey Matter. I don't mean to imply that I favour them, I don't at all. They just keep sending me this magazine because I once, let's see now, in 1999 ordered something from them.

The technical director, on page three, says "There is a great deal of development effort and sophisticated coding behind making some of the most commonplace applications user-friendly - take for instance the code in my word-processor that is now checking what I'm writing and correcting it as I type!". There may be, but it's clearly not enough.

The magazine is the mouthpiece of the big name software companies, but even so I thought I'd browse the article about some "cool things you can do with with PDFs". I did have to (and don't try this at home kiddies) pour Domestos into my ear and swill it around my head to try to cleanse myself of the image that the phrase "cool things you can do" conjures up. Sorry. Hang on. I have to get this one out. Does the author think so little of me that he thinks I'd be persuaded by something "cool"? Do I not have important things to do? Do I not have goals in my life? Things I want to change? A life to have? Do I not have urgency? Am I not busy? Do I not have clients to satisfy, and their users to take care of? That's besides the fact that I work from home and quite possibly don't see anyone for the whole of my working day. I can (I don't, but I could) sit here in my dressing gown with unbrushed sticky up hair and pick my nose all day. I am also British. Americans do cool(/vapid* delete as necessary), the British do not, and if you do think I'd be interested in something 'cool' I've a strong feeling that's because I'm being looked down upon .. you are important, you have a very important job in a very important company, whereas I would clearly be motivated by the bright and shiny thing, the cool thing. Shall I dance for you? I am so far from being motivated by the idea that something's cool you wouldn't be able to see me with a network of radio telescopes. Now. What was it you wanted to sell to me?

I am becoming ("becoming!" I can imagine you exclaiming), a curmudgeon. I opened the door to an electricity supplier salesman the other day and he smiled and said "how are you?" and I said "what do you care?"

The article starts with the problem of directing people to parts of a web page. Might you cut and paste the text from the web page and send it in an email? It loses its context. Fair enough. Might you send them a link to the page. Sounds fine to me, but no, the best way, apparently, was to "PDF the web page" (Has PDF suddenly become a verb? I pdf, you pdf, we all (he hopes) pdf?) ".. and send it to the customer" because he could "use the Acrobat mark-up tools (like the highlighter and comment tools) to point out the key information on the page". That is a living hell.

So let's see now. The whole point of the Internet is that information is findable using a URL (web address). The Internet is a linking machine. Links are free, anyone can create one. Any half decent website will have created information in digestible chunks, so it wouldn't be hard to find what you want on the page, and you should be able to land on the relevant page and find understandable navigation so you can explore further.

Furthermore the Internet is flexible. It's designed to be viewed your way. You can apply your own stylesheet to the Internet so if green and pink float your boat, you can have the Internet that way. More realistically, whatever machine you choose to use, and whether you're fully fit or partially able, the Internet will bend to your requirements.

Highlighter pens work because it's obvious what they do, they're to hand, and they're immediate. You don't need training, you don't need to play hunt the menu option, and you don't need to wait for your computer to load the function and a new graphic layer before it'll work.

N n n noooooo, Adobe want us to buy translation and mark up tools in order to translate a web page into a fixed format that's larger and therefore slower to send (when there's no need to 'send' anything bar the website address), and then we can add, electronically, our own highlighter markings and annotation. Only a Gadget Shop shopper would enjoy that, and they're obviously rare because that company went bust recently.

Then, and this is an absolute classic, "A PDF is harder to lose than an email, so there was a better chance of the customer keeping the file for reference". What complete bullshit. Email arrives organised. Email clients have search facilities. People organise their emails because they have to. Wanton irrelevant file litter is going to get lost every single time, and people are less likely to know how to search their hard disc to find it, and if they did, it takes longer than an email search.

Finally, in another equally facile article about PDFs, this time combined with XML, we get this grammatical gem. "In many ways, PDF is a digital replacement for paper. Like paper, PDF files can represent both content and layout with full fidelity. It also supports XML data exchange, interactive forms, digital signatures, electronic comments, and more". Then again, maybe he's partially right. Paper does represent content and layout with full fidelity. Oh, unless you tear it maybe. When we complete a paper form we do interact with it. Rumsfeld found paper quite open to a digital signature, and as for electronic comments, I can imagine "Miss Pettigrew, would you shred this beeping pile of beeping forms" might qualify.

I was going to rant through the vagaries of the leaflets for the local council elections but can't quite be bothered to write it, so I'll leave you with my finale.

My favourite, is the leaflet from the North Yorkshire Police Authority about how they've spent our council tax. Apparently we have, in big letters, 8,326 less crimes, 2,940 less burglaries, and 48 less robberies. No improvement in literacy then. How do they make themselves understood when questioning suspects?

On a similar subject, I was pleased to hear several years ago that Marks and Spencer were changing all their "five items or less" fast checkout aisles to read "five items or fewer". They did a whole PR job on it, it was covered in all the main television news bulletins. Now I notice they have reverted to the former with the feeble excuse that it's colloquially understood. What could possibly be misunderstood about "five items or fewer"? It's just slack. They'll lose the vital pedant market.

The right plastic bags

19 April 2005: I've strained my back, and I'm meeting a client tomorrow, so I don't want to take my heavy briefcase. Instead, I thought, I'd take my stuff in carrier bags. He knows me, and I can explain I want to balance the load.

The problem is, which bags? Do I really want to advertise Tesco? I had all the bags out. I thought I was going to have to settle for Boyes bags, but found, first an Aeropuerto de Gran Canaria bag, that's OK, and then what a godsend, an Organic Farm Shop bag. Sorted.

Reminiscence

19 April 2005: I've been asked perhaps to play some sleazy swing-style drums inbetween scenes as part of a student play at the local college. The only swing I remember owning is a copy of the Twin Peaks soundtrack (God I used to love that programme, and, while I'm regressing, the skilled works of Sherilyn Fenn).

Also, bass/vocalist Paul wants to play Ever Fallen in Love .. by the Buzzcocks. So tonight, it was time to extract my turntable from storage and get out some vinyl. What awesome pleasure! Wire, Outdoor Miner, Two People in a Room, Map Reference, Mannequin. The Gang of Four I Found the Essence Rare, and, because I want to do a ska version of one of their tunes, The Sex Pistols, maybe Pretty Vacant, Holidays in the Sun, or No Feelings. Undecided which.

But wow. The latter is a tremendous, thrilling, outrageous, shitkicking, DO SOMETHING NOW, call to action. A thrill up the spine, an undeniable siren call. Still.

So what is that? Is it that, having lived through the time, I'm hard wired to appreciate it? Or is it, objectively, absolutely fantastic?

Evidence for the former includes my strong feeling that it just wouldn't be the same if I bought the albums on CD.

It takes me back, that's for sure. The Gang of Four takes me back to queuing to get into Nottingham's punk venue, The Sandpiper. Athletico Spizz 80 tunes (co-oold, windy, citeeeeeeee) do that too, as does almost anything by The Skids. I saw Adam and the Ants there (before all that Antmusic nonsense, before Pirroni, was a little surprised to see them a year or so later with all the pirate gear and a fat bloke on guitar), The Damned (Captain Sensible came on stage wearing false naked breasts and said "Margaret Thatcher just gave me a blowjob"), and one time turned up on the wrong night to some jazz funk outfit :-) I fell asleep inside the PA bass bin during either Echo and the Bunnymen or Julian Cope. Oh, and a friend got so drunk he forgot he'd come with me and took his own taxi home. I hadn't enough money, so walked all the way home, overnight, from Nottingham to Long Eaton (>10 miles), passing milkmen (remember them?) and various morning shift.

I always did want furry trousers like Captain Sensible's

Then there was the summer, round at a friend's house (hi Urko), and he put on Wire's Outdoor Miner and we went absolutely mental because he'd got the single version which had a solo in the middle. We had no idea it existed, we only had the album. We must have played it a gazillion times.

Never Mind the Bollocks takes me back to sitting in the living room at home with huge headphones on, listening to it on my dads pride Goodmans hi fi, and my mum being really annoyed that I'd bought it and saying "What will your grandma think?" and me thinking "I think you're slightly missing the point here". We compromised that, when she visited, I turned the album cover around so she couldn't see the title.

Your adolescence has a disproportional influence on the rest of your life. Punk formed my character. It gave me energy, enthusiasm, a willingness to be different and to take a stand, and a desire to change things. Those are all good things.

The Sonics

19 April 2005: I'm having huge fun with The Sonics atm. Following their track on the Vivienne Westwood CD (of things on the Sex shop jukebox) I bought "Here are The Sonics". Here's how the sleeve notes start: "You hold in your hands the greatest punk rock album ever made. Recorded on the run by a bunch of beat infested no-counts and released on a hunch by a fledgling local label that just let it all roll, this set flat out is the perpetual flame that feeds the foreverly teenage ears of America and beyond. HERE ARE THE SONICS is a prime testament to the affirmative action of rhythm and blues on impressionable young minds and a key sample of trailblazing initiative soused in rabid enthusiasm. It is also the loudest, scariest, most appallingly defiant collection of ditties commited to wax .. "

Groovy.

They sound as fresh as hell, and they're from 1963. Feeling jaded? The Sonics are musical Alka Seltzer.

If ever my band disintegrates, I'm going to start The Chronics and just do Sonics covers. Also, I want to know how to dance the Mashed Potato.

Who should you vote for?

18 April 2005: This is interesting. www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com was featured this lunchtime on The Daily Politics. You answer about twenty questions and it tells you which party matches your views most closely.

Most interestingly, it asks beforehand which you think will be the answer. I answered Green, and got Green, so maybe that means I'm aware.

Anyway, they provide the ability to cut and paste my results, so despite the fact it'll probably mess up any chance of me getting through an XHTML verification, let's see how this works:

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Green

Your actual outcome:

	Labour 13
Conservative -5
	Liberal Democrat 25
	UK Independence Party 1
	Green 32

You should vote: Green

The Green Party, which is of course strong on environmental issues, takes a strong position on welfare issues, but was firmly against the war in Iraq. Other key concerns are cannabis, where the party takes a liberal line, and foxhunting, which unsurprisingly the Greens are firmly against.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Apparently, although I can't find it on the site, most of their results say you should vote Liberal Democrat.

Radcliffe

17 April 2005: It's rare for me to watch a sporting event, but I just watched the wonderful Paula Radcliffe do her thing in the 25th London Marathon, finishing an amazing five minutes ahead of her nearest rival.

Strangely, I was wondering aloud with my partner what happens if you're halfway round a marathon and you want a wee. Radcliffe answered that today in style.

Dr Who

16 April 2005: Must go, the fantastic Christopher Eccleston's doing Dr Who again in about five minutes. Fantastic.

HP Deskjet 5150, the real ink costs

16 April 2005: I've just replaced the colour and black and white ink cartridges for my HP Deskjet 5150 for the first time. The blinky light had been irritating me for months, and finally, while printing out the Green Party manifesto (irony noted), the cartridges pretty much gave up.

It's fairly obvious that the cost of an inkjet printer nowadays is subsidised by the cost of the cartridges. The HP Deskjet 5150 costs an amazing £56, yet I've just spent £49.98 on two colour cartridges and one mono one from W H Smith (their 3 for 2 offer makes the Guernsey operations more expensive). Well, until I got home and realised that the W H Smith branded ones are remanufactured, and I wanted originals (I've a lifetime's experience buying copies).

Anyway, according to this I should have had 400 colour pages (at 5% coverage, ie. not photographs) from my colour cartridge, and according to this I am supposed to have spent £708.08 over a year and a half (the average life of such a printer) on the printer and cartridges, assuming I printed 30 average pages a week. Finally, according to this the standard mono cartridges are supposed to last 450 pages at 5% coverage, the colour 390 pages at 15% coverage.

Well, I'd kept the figures because I was sure I was going to be short changed and wanted to be able to prove it, but it appears I've done rather well, although that's probably because I put up with ever poorer quality prints for months.

I've had the printer since the 6 November 2003 when I bought it from eBuyer for £88.90 (total, including delivery, etc.) The only other thing I've spent on it is £7.99 for a pack of photo paper, and that was for a cheeky friend who wanted me to print their photographs for them.

I don't think I used it much until April 2004 when my laser printer stopped working. Since then I've recorded every sheet I've put into the printer. I printed 9 photographs in the end, and 1,369 ordinary pages, mostly printouts from web pages, PDFs, that sort of thing.

First of all then, according to the average this printer should be getting ready for the knacker's yard. 18 months average life? Good grief, I still think of it as my new printer, yet I am printing the average number of pages .. actually 26 per week (30 is average), so it's not as if I've given my printer an easy life. Not that printing thirty pages in a week is exactly taxing.

The cost? For the ink, because of the offer, the W H Smith cartridges cost me £18.34 for the colour, and £13.25 for the mono, totalling £31.59, so the ink cost per sheet has been £31.59/1378 = 2.3p per print.

If you add the cost of, I'm guessing now because I use scrap paper most of the time, but is a ream of copier paper perhaps £2.50 nowadays? If so, then adding that cost onto the total would give us £38.44/1378 = 2.8p per print.

How long might I expect the printer to last? To be honest, unless it konks out beforehand, or I find the need for a higher spec, I wouldn't be surprised to find it still knocking around in ten years time. But let's perhaps be more realistic. Let's give it a three year life. The purchase cost divided by three needs to be added in, so it's now £68.07/1378 = 4.9p per printed sheet.

As for which figure to use, we're getting into the difference between, hmm, I thought it was opportunity cost but it isn't. There are two economic phrases I can't recall. Basically, if you're looking at ways of outputting to paper, you'd use the higher figure when comparing inkjet to laser to outsourcing or whatever because you want the total cost of taking the decision. However, once you've bought the inkjet printer, you've spent the capital on acquiring it. The cost of printing an extra sheet is the lower figure, 2.8p, assuming zero maintenance costs and that the printer lasts as long as you've planned.

It's very much the same with cars. Before you buy a car, you can compare the cost of travelling entirely by public transport, or entirely by car, but most of the time once you have a car, it often makes little sense to take public transport because the bulk of the cost of a car is in the ownership .. the cost of the finance, the depreciation, and the road tax. You're paying those anyway, so you may as well make use of what you're paying for (and not pay twice, once to own a car but not drive it, and again to travel by bus).

It's still easier to read from a printed page though.

See follow up.

As for the Green Party's manifesto, at 32 pages it cost 90p to print if we take the lower figure, which is rather less than the £2.20 I paid for the Conservative Party one. Obviously, stapled together, printed in the ink-cartridge spirit of "two wheels on my wagon, and I'm still rolling along", and on the back of old letterheads, the Green Party manifesto looks like roadkill. Still, their heart's in the right place, I can see it look, over there. And there. Oh, and a bit there too.

We are what we do

16 April 2005: A friend bought me the book "change the world for a fiver" (thanks Rory). It's a list of easy things to do to make things better, which sounds like a trite "little book of niceness" but actually it seems rooted in community action, and I like it.

Interestingly, however, action number 45 (out of 50) is to leave a note to five of your neighbours, giving them your phone number, and saying "Hi, I'm your neighbour, here's my phone number, please call if I can help". According to their stats, that's the least popular activity. Why is that? Is liking your neighbour just too close for comfort? Do we mistrust each other that much?

A talk on software patents

15 April 2005: I've just transcribed the talk at the local Linux User Group about software patents, it's a good read.

There's a really curious thing going on with the swpat.ffii.org website if you check the links about 2/5 of the way down (or search for FFII). What do we think's going on there then? Dark forces?

Google maps

13 April 2005: Google maps, checkout the amazing satellite images. Pity it's just for the US at present.

London calling

12 April 2005: A group of holidaymakers formed over breakfasts during our holiday in Lanzarote and took over the sun extension. Therein they moaned in detail about the commute into London "and the other day, I was three quarters of an hour waiting in Kings Cross" (so don't do it, and tap tap, you're on holiday now, forget it).

This was followed by property problems. One couple had moved house four times in two years.

Poor spoiled London poppets. So do something about it.

Software patents

11 April 2005: Rather than fill my blog with rants about software patents, I've created a separate page and rss feed (http://www.johnallsopp.co.uk/softwarePatents.rss) in which I'll collect stories which speak to my level of understanding.

Plus, as my brain slowly melts, I'm bound to refer to it as "against software testing", or as the European software pagents legislation, so there's some idle fun to be had watching out for my typos.

Feeling sorry

8 April 2005: It's the catholic Diana fans of the West Midlands I feel sorry for.

More seriously, I remember British Leyland, and thank God the government didn't throw money at Rover.

Pope

5 April 2005: I've been struggling with the coverage of the Pope's life. I've felt like the media is struggling to find something good to say about him, and I wondered whether my default-setting bad feelings about him (and Catholicism being the worst of all religions) had any basis in fact. After all, the Pope's death has hardly been a surprise, the poor guy's been half dead for the last ten years. If there'd been anything good to say, it would surely have been writ large.

What difference did this Pope make? I've read every word printed in the newspaper and listened hard for the positive in tv and radio news, and still struggle with it. For instance, for all his reputed lingual strength and media savvy, I don't remember ever hearing him say anything in English. If he was that good, how come he never touched me?

I read that a high-up Catholic wanted the next Pope to listen much more strongly to the views of those within the faith than those of people outside. That's a negative feedback loop if ever I saw one. Train people in the faith, then only listen to them when you make decisions. At every turn Catholicism feels like an unbending hierarchy.

They're writing he did good in Poland by supporting Solidarnosc and helping the first peoples uprising against communism. Well, maybe, but even if so, he did it from a safe distance. He was never going to encounter Soviet metal. I can't begin to understand the courage those men and women must have had to actually live that time and make the impossible happen. And anyway, what, exactly, has that to do with catholicism? It feels more like an out-of-work hobby for him.

So then there's him being against abortion and birth control, tools aiding the hard-won right of feminists to own their own bodies. Is he not an oppressor of women? I don't know the story, but there seems to be dissatisfaction that he didn't deal more severely with the American paedophile priests (although that story seems reasonable enough). Is there a thread of sustaining male power? After all, where are the women priests?

As for helping the poor and the disposessed, I don't think so.

So, I was going to write that he was a stick in the mud at best, an oppressor at worst. I was still uncomfortable with that though. This article seems to write more intelligently than I can on this subject, and helped me understand why I felt uncomfortable .. he didn't seem to hold consistent views. Surely the point about a faith is that it lays out a consistent morality so everyone knows right from wrong. If someone who leads a faith isn't seen as holding consistent views, surely they have failed to deliver. I, for one, won't be shedding any tears. Well, only for the fact that we'll have to endure two days of church nonsense in the news instead of just the one.

Volcanoes put you in your place

4 April 2005: For some reason, Lanzarote has a real sense of place. I knew where I was on earth in a way that I don't sense at home. Perhaps it was just that I was somewhere new, but I've a feeling it was the volcanoes that really did that. Volcano views in the Timanfaya National Park, you can see another tour bus

Volcano views in the Timanfaya National Park, you can see another tour bus

Volcano views in the Timanfaya National Park, for scale notice the road across the middle of the shot

Perhaps that and the sense that we were a mere speck off the coast of the enormous continent of Africa, breathing the exhaust of the Sahara.

In the top picture, you can also see patterns of colonisation where one single seed that grew has created a whole colony heading off windwards. The eruptions were in the 1730s so you also get a sense of how long it will take before these slopes are colonised again.

Software Patents and the Yorkshire MEPs 3

4 April 2005: On April Fools Day, I received the following response from the Liberal Democrats:

Thank you for your email concerning the proposed EU Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. The Liberal Democrats are in favour of increased legal certainty in the area of EU intellectual property law and have therefore supported the Commission bringing forward its initiative in 2002. The explicit aim of the Directive is to clarify the limits of patentability in respect of inventions that may involve computer software. This covers a wide range of products which we would agree might legitimately be patented such as computer-controlled braking systems for vehicles or specialist communications devices.

The position of the UK Government is one of supporting the Directive. Science Minister Lord Sainsbury has set out his policy as wanting to ensure that US style patenting of computer software is not allowed in the EU and he believes that the Directive will achieve this objective by ensuring that computer software as such cannot be patented in any EU member state. The European Parliament voted its first reading on the proposal in September 2003 where amendments were adopted to strictly limit patents to new inventions only.

The Council of Ministers adopted its Common Position on 7 March 2005, agreed on in principle on 18 May 2004. Although the Common Position clarifies the boundaries of what can and what cannot be patented when software is involved, it does not extend current practice; nothing will become patentable that is not currently patentable. Importantly, non-technical software, mathematical algorithms, and business methods are all specifically excluded.

The Common Position will return in April to the European Parliament for its Second Reading. Michel Rocard, the Rapporteur will draw up his report in the Legal Affairs Committee. The likely timetable is for discussion in Committee in April and May, vote in Committee in June and a final vote in the plenary in July.

It is worth remembering that at Second Reading, the Parliament has to adopt its amendments at plenary by an absolute majority (ie. by more than 367 votes). This constraint means that only those amendments representing a compromise and receiving cross-party support will have a chance of succeeding.

The identified weakness in the Council's Common Position concerns Article 2 and the definition of terms. The critical test is the definition of a "technical contribution" and associated notions of "technical effect" and "further technical effect". If it represents a genuinely narrow definition of patentability then the Directive could make a positive contribution in firmly enshrining this in EU law so that all member states would have to reject patents that fall outside this definition. If, however, it would allow a broader range of patent applications to be granted following something closer to the US model then the Directive could be very damaging indeed.

Your views have been a helpful contribution to the advice we are receiving on the potential impact of the Directive and I will take them fully into account. I hope that you are assured that Liberal Democrat policy is clearly against allowing the patenting of software and that this principle is guiding our consideration of these matters.

The Liberal Democrats welcome contributions to this debate. The relevant documents will be published on the Legal Affairs' Committee website in due course at http://www.europarl.ep.ec/committees/juri_home.htm. Please send any proposed amendments to me at dwallis@europarl.eu.int

We have received some very pertinent lobbying from SMEs arguing both in favour and against the Commission's proposal. The Liberal Democrats are also committed to ensuring that there is a full and independent impact assessment of the proposed Directive in relation to small and medium-sized businesses.

Rest assured that Liberal Democrats will continue to fight for a fair outcome on this very important issue.

Yours sincerely, Diana Wallis MEP

I hope that clarifies things for you.

Two pounds

2 April 2005: I've just worked out why I've gained 2lbs in weight. When my partner goes away, as she just did, I tend to want to comfort myself by cooking something nice, and that tends to be a Nigella cake (she looks quite scary in that pic, don't you think).

This time, however, it was the turn of BBC Good Food Vegetarian magazine. I made a chocolate and banana cheesecake for ten people. My partner took a quarter of it with her, and I ate the rest.

It was also Easter, so my partner bought me a 400g box of chocs from Thorntons. I ate those too.

All in all, over the last week, there were 4,410 calories in the cheesecake, and 2,040 in the chocolates. If we ignore the second half of the packet of chocolate biscuits I also consumed (the first half was the base for the cheesecake), that's an additional 6,450 calories in one week.

Apparently 3,500 calories equals a pound of weight, so there you go, that'll be why I put on 2lbs then.

Still, I just re-measured my resting heart rate (it's higher than it was a month ago, so I'm probably fighting the cold my partner's just recovering from), and my stride which was 2.1 feet, set when I was doing the ridiculously slow bouncy walk thing, should now be 3.2 feet, so that's more like it. I just ran about three miles and weighed myself at the end and maybe, just maybe, over the last couple of days I've left those 2lbs on the road.

She's away again soon though. I can hear Nigella calling.

Pope

1 April 2005: Do you think the pope will pop up tomorrow, as if on springs, and cheer "April Fool"?

He's always been one for a laugh.