John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Mumbai: 30 July 2005: That couldn't have been right, what I heard on Channel 4 News last night, that the Indian monsoon provided 37 inches of rain in a single day. We decided it must have been an error, I mean, if we get an inch of rain here there are problems.; No. Nearly a metre of rain, in one day. That's biblical rain.; Oh, and that sorted out our Bombay/Mumbai confusion. Same thing. Mumbai used to be Bombay.; Sounds like a groovy place actually, with a geography and probably an energy not dissimilar to New York.; I've a friend (hi Chris) who is there right now with his Indian wife, he says "absolutely incredible place. Just survived total monsoon!" I'm jealous. I'm not sure about going to India as a tourist because I think we'd feel such outsiders, but he's married into the culture, he'll be doing all the family stuff and seeing Mumbai as they do. Yep, totally jealous of that.
Mostly also enjoying: 30 July 2005: I'm mostly also enjoying Garbage too, in fact we have tickets to see them soonish.
I'm off to hell: 29 July 2005: It appears not everyone enjoyed the Tunick installation. I was going to cite 'love thy neighbour' which I thought was one of the ten commandments but apparently not.; Incidentally, one of my fondest memories of my dad from childhood is when he tried to read me a bible story, the one about Sodom and Gomorrah. "Sod 'em" was a common expletive at the time and at my age seen as very naughty. I don't think my dad quite expected lines like "two angels came to Sodom in the evening" so the family soon descended into giggles.; I went looking for the story and found this amazing Lego (maybe) bible. :-0; Actually, wandering through that story it gets rather weird "bring out the two men and let us have sex with them", "no don't, take my virgin daughters instead" so I began to think it might be a weird kind of porn lego bible (how random can you get?), but maybe here's the real thing and the two tally pretty well. Wild.; Did any of you see Ian Paisley Junior on Channel 4 News last night commenting on the IRA's statement? Jeez, I was rather looking forward to the day the Rev. Ian Paisley finally shuffles off and we'd be rid of the deadweight of his miserable face but it appears it lives on in his son. Bugger! Religious bigotry, don't you just love it? Anyway, I'm off to hell, see ya :-) (Tunick next - previous)
Mostly enjoying: 28 July 2005: Currently I am mostly enjoying the incredibly well written Absolute Power, neatly preceded by warmup acts Extras and Catherine Tate, the equally well written Smoking Room, and Boothby Graffoe on Radio 4 and home baked bread with cheese and with jam (well, breadmaker baked).
Naming the band: 28 July 2005: I'm sat in the fug of a drinker's false dawn and I've a story to tell. It's about a year and two weeks since I first played with the band, on a set of pads kindly loaned by JP (guitar player and proper day-job composer). Now we've our first gig coming up and we still have no name.; Some months ago, I came up with Dynamo Kev as a name. I loved it (it's dynamic (my most important criteria), and it's kinda humorous) and started a not-so-secret campaign to get it adopted. Safe to say, I think, my fellow band members weren't triffically impressed "people will say, 'why have you named your band after a football team?'".; As my brain whirred, as it does, while driving, doing the washing up, or inbetween lines of code another name would come up .. Johnny Nonegan, The Vendettas, The Hillman Blimps .. but I soon tired of the "ummmm, naaaaahhhh" faces of my co-conspirators as I'm sure they tired of mine whenever they suggested a name. The band is just for fun after all, why lay yourself on the line like that?; So I invented a game. I got a grocery bag from the organic shop and put into it slips of paper .. some containing band names I was really suggesting .. The Dandruff Dandies, Thirty Foot Bear, The Cayley Fliers .. along with an equal number of comedy ones from the random band names website, such as Swinger Dog, Bonny Hotness, and Clout Jelly. The game was to guess from which source the name came. The beauty of that game is I could throw in any name I came up with .. Diet of Worms, Captain Moonlight, Kazan .. without any quality checking. If the band liked any, that was fine by me.; One day, in a concentrated effort with these slips of paper, Paul (bass and vocals) spotted the strapline "food you can trust" on the side of the bag. For me it was "yeah, maybe, but there has to be something better". I decided to find that better name.; Over the weeks that followed, I fell in love with a number of names, and had them rejected. Thirty Foot Bear was one ("what drugs are you on, and can I have some?"). Cascadia (from the name of the geological area off the West coast of America which is likely to produce the next big tsunami, "makes me think of Duran Duran"), and in an effort to reach a middle ground The Collectors, The Ushers, The Compressors.; I learned something from an ex-employee one day in a discussion. His demeanour, well in fact his job when he wasn't working for me, was as a nightclub bouncer. In other words, a completely immovable object impervious to reason. The argument went something like this: me "I think A", him "I think X", me "what about B?", him "no, X is good", me "have you considered C?", him "yes, but X", me "well what about D, E, F", him "X" .. etc. In other words, while I ran around in circles trying to outwit him, to find holes in his argument, and do all the normal things people do in such discussions, he simply sat there like granite impervious to it all. In the end, like a snappy dog, I'd tire, and he'd have won. He could play that all day. Interesting.; Paul had fallen in love with Food you can Trust and for him everything had to measure up against that. From my point of view the name became entrenched in its own raison d'etre, powered by the fact that it had come out of a chance encounter with a grocery bag. I do like following chance, I do it every day, some major life decisions have been powered by chance so I'm more than with Paul on that, but in the end I had a crisis.; The thing is, being a soft spoken kinda chap, I don't ever even attempt to win by throwing my weight around. I don't shout. I don't threaten. Consequently, I resent those who dominate conversation by talking loudly .. talking loudly doesn't mean you have the best ideas, just that you win by bludgeoning your colleagues. For me it's all about being considerate, being honest, and working through issues together. Paul, I think, is very like that too (so I'm not suggesting Paul does any of those strongarm things), but in the case of Food you can Trust, I was in danger of being the snappy dog. That's fine, I'd done the same things with Dynamo Kev, but in the end I gave that up. I sat and had a good think, and concluded that I couldn't live with Food you can Trust, it just didn't work for me.; With that, I threw my toys out of the cot. No more names from me. The bag of names was no longer funny, so that went, and I disappeared on holiday.; How to bridge the impasse? I remembered a graphic designer, now deceased, called Jim Eckersley who used to say when presenting his ideas that it didn't matter if we (the paying customer) liked them or not, they were designed to work for our client. Perhaps we were aiming too high. We are all three very different people, that gives the band variety, but perhaps what motivates each of us is different. Maybe there was no band name that would unite us in excitement. Maybe we needed a name we could each live with, but that worked for our audience. Anyway, many band names sound crap out of context .. U2, Take That!, it's even difficult to see how the members of something like the Kaiser Chiefs would actually get excited about that name. The thing is, names sound good afterwards, after all the work's gone into turning them into a brand.; Then I remembered Stefan Sagmeister's Made You Look - Another self indulgent monograph (incidentally, I got a statement through from Amazon the other day, I've made £1.33 so far (in five years) from such links. Hmm, I'll try not to spend it all at once. Obviously, that's not why I put the links in, but anyway, just thought I'd say.; Sagmeister's big deal is getting to the heart and soul of a product. What's at the emotional centre of Coca Cola? Volvo? Nasa? Our band? He has a tool to help. I thought, and suggested, that if we approached the problem scientifically, with a process, we might end up with a name that worked regardless of whether we individually got excited about it or not, and so long as none of us vetoed it, we'd have a name and it would stand on solid foundations. The problem is, no-one really wants to go through a process like that. Shouldn't art come from inspiration?; Then, a breakthrough. When we met up to look at the venue for our forthcoming gig, JP said he'd concluded that he'd accept any name me and Paul could agree on. Well, if that was the case, and with our gig coming up on the 6 August (no longer, it's been delayed), and Paul's daughter started working on the invitation design, I thought me and Paul should take the opportunity and make a real effort to solve the problem.; So last night we went to the pub, me armed with a dictionary, my list of names, paper and a pen, and Paul with his tinopener (it wasn't that but I can't remember what he called it) and, alcohol fuelled, we worked through it.; Starting with words to describe our band .. quirky, eclectic, lyrical, self-effacing, brantub/discovery, new/different, something for everyone, uncategorisable .. it became clear that what we agreed upon was the fact that we play all sorts of music and we each bring our own desires along .. Paul looks partly for technical things .. the ability to play bass and sing too, and he's got quite a low voice so it has to be within range, whereas the thing that's always appealed to me about music is its rhythm. JP, we think, wants space enough to bring himself to the party on the guitar. Mostly though, it's the choice of songs .. from fifties r&b (maybe) such as Clarence 'Frogman' Henry to the Libertines, from T Rex to Baby Bird, and we (almost) always choose a less known album track.; So there's that idea of randomness, of dolly mixtures, of a jukebox maybe, and with a darker side maybe gambling or russian roulette, the unexpected.; I got excited by the idea of there being some magic there, almost like we were witch doctors. That somewhere in among the tunes we choose to play, something will touch you, whoever you are. So we hold the key to your heart for that moment, and you'll leave changed, even if it's only that you'd never heard of The Sonics before. We wandered through the soothsayers, magic, fairy dust, sibyl (got excited for a moment around the idea of sibilance), reached Handful of Dust which kinda worked, but we wanted to avoid the occult, the spooky, the magic, the alternative therapy undertones.; Out of monochrome and monotone and maybe 2-Tone came the opposite:- Gigatone, which I really liked, but Paul felt anything giga or mega was too computery. There are other prefixes which don't sound so geeky, such as tera, so The Teratones or Teratone works for me, but I couldn't really get that across in the loudness of the pub.; Another aspect of the 'choosing unusual tunes' thing is that we also deliver them to you, so there's a whole publishing thing (this came from Paul's idea of The Publishers which was just a little too static and perhaps even mundane for me) .. radio, broadcast, receiver, soho. I like 'radio', it has a bygone era feeling about it, so 'chaos radio' or 'radio goodness' has lots of potential.; We got locked into the idea of a gift, but with a dark side, almost like your first free heroin hit but couldn't make it work.; Another aspect was the gathering of material, collecting, using a dragnet, exploring and discovery and all that, and possibly the sponsorship, investment, re-energising of old forgotten tunes. With investment, speculation and gambling comes that dark side again. We wanted perhaps that feeling of the chap who, at 65, put everything he owned onto red in a single spin of the roulette wheel .. the adrenaline taste, the whirling and spinning, the piss yourself loss of control and lack of anchors. We couldn't get it into a band name.; I mentioned a friend (hi Suzie) who, with her boyfriend at the time, had a word that worked for all occasions. Rah! It worked for happiness, it worked for annoyance, it worked for everything. Rah! seemed to say it all and be appropriate for all occasions.; Towards the end of the evening we tried to gather the strands together, we had this collecting thing, I still had names that hadn't been rejected yet that worked for me such as The Whirls, and The Curves, but Paul felt that 'the' was becoming overused in band names. Interestingly when we were naming Splat!, the band I used to play in in 1978, we felt exactly the same thing. Craster Kiss works for me too, with all sorts of stuff about first kisses and gothic vampires too, but they were all random, not rooted in the work we'd done this evening.; Then, at well after eleven, Paul wrote Rah! Collectors. I crossed out the s. We smiled. We agreed. It works. The Rah! covers all the styles we bring, whether it's a romantic, lyrical song or a trouser shaking rock stomper, Rah! works. The idea of collecting Rah! moments works. It's got dynamism for me. It doesn't include 'the'. It's different.; This morning, I still like it. 'Rah! Collector'. It's very different, but I think it's a grower. I'm just hoping Paul's still up for it, and JP doesn't veto it. Otherwise we'll end up being 'the brewery pissups'.
Menezes: 25 July 2005: I just don't know any other place that would give this sort of detail and this level of balance: Wikipedia on Jean Charles de Menezes.
Walkington analysis: 25 July 2005: Pah, it gets worse. Beverley Athletics Club (for it is they) just sent me the 'age corrected' results. I had no idea. According to that a 50-ish year old lady came fourth. I'm trying to guess the maths behind it but it's making no sense. Suffice to say, however, it makes me look even worse at 622nd out of 627. Bugger! Once they add the weighting for overbearing self confidence I'm going to end up last!; It turns out an organisation called World Association of Veteran Athletics used to produce figures to place older athletes in their proper place relative to the world records at their age. I say used to because there's no sign of them now, their website was incorporated into World Masters Athletics towards the end of 2003 and I can't see anything about it all there. However this explains it completely.; Oh, there are pictures too. Predictably I'm on the last page, and looking rather too bendy-in-the-middle for my liking. Previous.
Walkington analysis: 25 July 2005: Some analysis for you. There were 624 runners, 432 of whom were men, and 86 declared their age to be 40 to 44 (my age group, and I mean that quite a few didn't declare their age at all). Fastest man 32 minutes, fastest man of my age group 33:11, fastest woman 39:46. Slowest person, 1:21:57. In the graph I've grouped runners into men, men aged 40 or above but less than 45 who declared their age, and women and I've grouped the finishers into five minute blocks. Clearly I can't use age as an excuse since the profile of the Ms is the same as for the M40s. That little red line in the <70 block is me. Funny, I thought I was taller than that. If I were serious about this race I'd want to be finishing in under 50 minutes. Previous.
Walkington result: 25 July 2005: The results are through, I'm listed at 1:06:08. It has to be said I'm last in my class. It appears I managed to overtake 21 people once I got my strategy sorted out. Obviously they spelled my name wrong (now corrected) .. I'd give them a piece of my mind if I could only catch them :-) Previous.
Another Tunick comment: 25 July 2005: A rather beautiful piece on the Tunick installation from The Telegraph in Calcutta. Previous.
Walkington 10k: 23 July 2005: Yesterday evening was the Walkington 10k I've been training for since the start of March and the first group running activity I've done since regularly messing about at the back in school cross country.; According to my training, I was hitting a mile every ten minutes. A 10k is 6.2 miles, so I should come in at just over an hour. That was the theory. We'd driven the course a few months back and knew it was hilly, so in the last few weeks I've been incorporating hills into my routine a little. I usually run along the seafront, so it's flat, but interestingly at the start of my training the slightest incline would make a huge difference to my heart rate, but lately it had made less of a difference so I thought I was getting fitter and more able to handle the hills.; The pre-race gathering had a really good feeling to it, but I did feel a bit like a labrador in a field of greyhounds. Where are these people normally, with their bouncy legs and insatiable desire to run about? I don't think I've ever met any. Anyway, I felt good among it all. The organisers had set up a chap, guitar and mic and, given what that could have been like, he was doing a fantastic job. 'Suspicious Minds' is what I've got on the brain as a legacy from him.; So my race plan was to run at my normal heart rate range .. 135-148 bpm. I thought probably some would die off halfway through and I'd pass the finish line without really breaking much of a sweat. I wanted a base line which I would improve upon next time, and I knew that following that plan I'd finish in just over an hour, and that last year the stragglers were coming in at 1:20 or so so that would be fine.; Coming up to the mile marker, I was almost last. Behind me was a chap who kept having to stop because of cramp, and (God forbid), a woman. By mile 2 nothing much had changed. I was up against the top of my heart rate range and my monitor was beeping irritatingly at me to let me know I was outside my range. I noticed no-one else with one, and started to think my incessant beeping was probably breaking some kind of runners byelaw, so I had to work out how to stop the beeps while running, which meant I lost my own accurate timing.; Something had to give. Coming in last, after doing all the preparation, wasn't what I'd expected. The thing is, I reasoned, I've been training for a marathon, for endurance, not for speed (I've been following Marathon running for mortals). With a marathon, it's all about lasting the course, keeping your pace, making sure you had something in reserve so that you didn't die at the dreaded 20 mile marker. Maybe, my mind ticked, a 10k isn't like that. Maybe a 10k is more like, you know, a race, where you try hard and don't hold anything in reserve. It's only 6.2 miles after all.; So I upped my heart rate range and raised my upper limit to (you know, I can't actually remember now, but I'll guess at) 165. At that level, and as people started to flag, I started to overtake. It was still comfortable, so that was working.; One thing about running to a heart rate is that you run uphill slowly, but downhill really fast. I think, but I don't know, that's a good thing because maybe the downhill running uses your muscles in a different way. That's good because maybe it's using parts of muscles that would otherwise rest the whole thing out.; On an uphill part I was awoken from my slumber by a woman behind me going "bloody hell I didn't expect this". I thought only motivational phrases were allowed, but anyway we chatted for a while. She ran 6 miles three times a week on the flat but this was her first race and she was really struggling with the hills.; At many times I was running on my own and, while it was a little embarrassing to be clapped and egged on by the marshals, it felt really good too.; Anyway, I wasn't nearly last anymore, and I decided to raise my limit again at the five mile marker to between, I think, 170 and 175. I'd never run at that level before, and for the record never run 6.2 miles before either, but it still felt fine. I don't think there was much extra to give, but I was breathing comfortably and all was well.; I overtook a chap at about the 5 mile marker when I started to hear noises from over the hedge, I thought there might be someone having a picnic and listening to the radio (like you do). Then I realised, it was the tannoy from the finish line. I asked the chap I was overtaking "is that the finish line I can hear?" "yes" he said "but it's a bloody big speaker".; I also passed a chap and he asked me the time. 52 minutes I told him. "Oh", he said, "we've missed the winners ceremony then".; Coming to the finish line felt like landing a plane. I'd been out on the open road for so long that the final field with its taped-off route around the edge felt like a landing pattern. The finish line looked so small, like an airstrip, I thought "how am I going to hit that spot, what if I miss?" And after, crossing the line, the complexity and the detail .. looking at your time, stopping your own watch, acknowledging your wonderful girlfriend and trying not to look stupid on the photograph, then being corralled into a long passage of more tape, getting off the runway, given a bag of goodies (well, baddies actually), collecting a T shirt, parking your plane at the right terminus. It's quite a blur.; Collecting myself, that was good. We chatted for a while to cool down. The evening air was fresh, we couldn't have asked for better weather. Then my hill woman came through and we congratulated each other. She said "I went through 24 hours of labour and this was worse".; In the car on the way home I felt really good. Those endorphins are a friendly bunch. And this morning I irritated my partner by losing another pound in weight. Overall, in about five months I've lost, if you take the two extremes, about 8 pounds. I didn't feel the need to lose weight, and I've not done anything special to lose it, running just did that for me and it's nice to do.; In the end, the time on the photograph shows 1:06:10 (we think ten because there's a pic just before it showing 1:05:58). I'm happy with that, I learned a lot, and thanks to everyone involved in making a happy, well organised event. I'm sure I'll do a 10k again in my lifetime, but actually it's a very different thing to a long distance run. Next year, a half marathon for sure.
Just a few more Tunick pieces: 21 July 2005: Newcastle Evening Chronicle, The Guardian, Art Daily, CBC Montreal.; I haven't seen myself in any pictures yet. Previous.
Conservative's comment on Software Patents vote: 18 July 2005: The Conservative's Edward McMillan-Scott sent this on the 7th July:; Dear Mr. Allsopp; Please find attached the latest press release from the Conservatives in the European Parliament. As you can see, the draft directive was rejected. Whilst I realise that this is not the end of the matter as each country still has its own laws on software patentability, I trust that you will agree that the rejection was a better move than adoption of flawed legislation.; Yours sincerely, Edward McMillan-Scott MEP (Yorkshire & Humber, UK, Conservative), Vice-President of the European Parliament; followed by the press release:; Software patents directive rejected by MEPs; STRASBOURG, 6 July 2005 -- MEPs rejected the controversial draft directive on software patents today in Strasbourg after the three largest political groups in the Parliament all came out against the proposal.; The vote means that software companies and developers will still be able to register patents but will have no assurance that patents will be granted on the same basis across the European Union.; Conservative MEP Malcolm Harbour, who has followed the vigorous debate on the issue as a member of the legal affairs committee, said:; "It is clear that the Parliament and the Council will not be able to reach a balanced solution on such a controversial issue.; "Certainty and clarity is essential in the area of patent law. The directive as presented to Parliament offered neither.; "The fact that the Commission will not come back to Parliament with a new proposal suggests that the rejected directive is not considered to be indispensable. Throwing it out now is much better than ending up with flawed and damaging legislation."
Tunick on TV: 18 July 2005: When I wrote the blog below I'd only had an hour's sleep in the Mecca Bingo car park in Gateshead, and I'd just woken from an hour's dozing at home and couldn't go back to sleep. I also realised that there was a tv programme about the event to be broadcast that night and I admit I was a little nervous about what I'd see. Being very tall, I tend to stand out.; My thoughts have settled a little now. The programme helped (we bought a Logic LDR1 set-top box for £44.99 from Currys just for the occasion and shockingly, it worked). It actually did well to put Tunick's work into perspective, and all the issues the work is 'intended' to convey were the issues I got from his work. It also served as a reminder of exactly what had happened, Tunick's loudhailer instructions took me right back there, as did, interestingly, taking my clothes off to have a shower.; I had rehearsed in my head the reasons for me doing it. Firstly, I love Tunick's art. For me the cityscapes show the vulnerability of us humans within a hostile environment, despite the environment being built and developed for our use. Secondly my working definition of art is something done with the intention of understanding what it is to be human. Tunick's work goes beyond delivering a message through a painting or song, you can actually get inside the work and experience what he's trying to put across. His work is about vulnerability, you can get that from the photographs, but you can get it espresso by going and taking part. I worried about things like leaving my car keys, clothes and wallet in a bag in a car park in Gateshead on a Saturday night, but concluded that was all part of the vulnerability experience, just give in to it. The chap next to me planned to keep his car keys in his hand. Good idea, I thought, then, no, that would detract from the sense of freedom being nude was going to provide. Thirdly, it seemed to be a way to support art that was different from just buying it. Finally, it looked like immense fun.; On the 'fun' side, they were a great bunch of people. In a 'normal' group you'd get the naysayers, the moaners. Almost by definition, this group were people who wanted to experience something outside the norm, willing to take a risk, and they were art-aware (I'd only seen the flyers in galleries). The jokes came often .. "has anyone got a pen I could borrow?" Applause were done with buttock slapping. Tunick people are great people, people I could spend time with.; Now I feel it's even more than that. The tv programme went through the history of the nude in art. It's a core image going back to the oldest art from long-gone civilisations. I got to thinking that Tunick's work updates the nude. Perhaps getting 1,500 people together to make art is something that's much easier today. We are gathered in impressive cities and those who aren't can transport themselves easily. Organisation is easy through modern communication. Photography (only about 100 years old) saves the models posing all day. So having lots, thousands, of nudes in an image is something that's very modern.; Putting thousands of nudes in a picture makes them very small, almost turns them into individual brushstrokes, but each imbued with their own meaning, their own reasons for doing what they did, and some clearly did have issues. One guy before the initial disrobing curled up on the floor shaking and holding himself. But that people-as-brushstrokes thing makes for a very complex work indeed, and complexity itself is a modern phenomenon. This is big, important, long lasting art and I'm loving the fact I was part of it.; As I left a woman in a group behind me said "I'm only concerned what the kids might think", and I turned and said "well, I'm only concerned what my mum will think". I think she should be proud.; More news: Independent Online, South Africa, News24, The Guardian, The Scotsman, Channel 4 News, Art Daily.
Ass for arts sake: 17 July 2005: It's hot enough to take off all your clothes, so along with perhaps 2,999 others I walked naked across Newcastle / Gateshead's Millennium Bridge at about 4:30 this morning as part of one of Spencer Tunick's art installations.; It was fun. Happy. I thought I'd have much more to say. I expected to feel vulnerable, and to be more entertaining over a beer afterwards. Perhaps the stories will come when they're ready. But the strange thing is by the time I'd walked 100 yards naked it felt like the most natural thing in the world.; Oh, I might say that if you're the kind of guy who spends his time looking for a woman with a perfect body, it doesn't exist (apart from my partner's obviously). Wierdly, men seem more able to get closer to the media determined ideal.; Trivially, lots and lots of people have tattoos, and quite a few shave their bits (men and women). I can also confirm there's nothing sexy at all about being naked with lots of other people. It is interesting though. More Tunick pics here.; I've been on holiday btw, that's why I've been quiet.
We won the software patents argument: 6 July 2005: Fantastically, awesomely, tearfully, happily, wonderfully, we appear to have won the software patents argument. I got this at 12:07 today from Richard Corbett:; Dear Mr Allsopp and members of the Scarborough Linux User Group,; You wrote to me recently on the subject of software patents and the proposed Directive on patentability of computer-implemented inventions.; I thought you would like to know that the European Parliament voted today, shortly after 11am UK time, to reject the proposed Directive outright. Labour MEPs voted with their Socialist colleagues from across Europe in support of this motion, resulting in a huge majority of MEPs (648 to 14) voting to reject.; Parliament's decision to throw out the proposed Directive is final and the proposal cannot be resurrected. A change to the law is now no longer on the horizon.; If you would like more information, please do contact my office. I will be issuing a press release and updating my website shortly to take into account these developments. In the meantime, I would like to thank the hundreds of constituents who contacted my colleagues and me on this issue. Relying on your informed and clearly expressed opinions, Labour MEPs were able to vote accordingly and help to reject this ill-judged legislative proposal.; With best wishes, Richard Corbett MEP; How absolutely fantastic is that! The people won over the corporation.
Responses to MEP software patents letter: 5 July 2005: In response to the letter below I got the following from Godfrey Bloom:; Dear Mr Allsopp; Thank you for your email regarding the above, one of a considerable number we have received on this subject.; It appears that this legislation is being proposed for the benefit of large, often multi-national, companies and not for the benefit of smaller businesses or individuals.; I and my UKIP MEP colleagues will be opposing the legislation.; Yours sincerely, Godfrey Bloom; .. and the following from Richard Corbett, Labour MEP. A personal letter, impressive:; Dear Mr Allsopp,; Thank you for your e-mail on the important issue of software patents and for the links you provided.; I have had a number of meetings on this subject with companies and practitioners on both sides of the argument on this issue. Thanks to these contacts and to emails such as yours I have become increasingly aware of the devil in the detail on the Council's common position.; I agree with you about the potential dangers of software patenting as currently proposed. As a result of my contacts with practitioners and emails such as yours, I will be recommending to my Labour colleagues in the European Parliament that we amend Council position along the lines of the Parliament's first reading position and the proposals suggested by Michel Rocard MEP. I will be voting accordingly in tomorrow's session of the European Parliament following our debate today.; Parliament has the opportunity to amend the position adopted by the Council of Ministers. Ultimately, the text can only become law if both Parliament and Council agree on the same text - and we have up to three readings to do so. If we are ultimately unable to come to agreement, the proposed legislation will fall.; Thank you again for contacting me, and if you have any further queries, please let me know.; Best wishes, Richard Corbett MEP
Final software patents letter to MEPs before vote tomorrow: 5 July 2005: I got worried that I hadn't done enough. With the software patents vote tomorrow, I sent off this to our MEPs:; Hello; This is just a quick note about the software patents vote tomorrow with two links that you might like to take into account.; The overriding impression I've got from watching this issue is that it's quite possible MEPs don't have any experience of the software community and so have difficulty imagining the effect of the patenting of software. This from the revered Richard Stallman, explains the effect in everyday terms.; The other thing that appears to be happening is that the pro lobby is using confusion as a weapon. Their strategy seems to be to develop the belief within MEPs that they are voting against the patenting of pure software, while actually the legislation is sufficiently unclear to allow it. I trust you will be clear, as your party is, that pure software should not be patentable as a result of this legislation.; Finally, I received a request for evidence to back my claim that software patent legislation hampers innovation. This provides that evidence.; The proposed legislation does not yet achieve the goal of providing clarity throughout Europe. Please do not vote it into law tomorrow.; John Allsopp, Scarborough
J2EE: 4 July 2005: Back so many months ago I'm genuinely ashamed to disclose I made the decision with one of my clients to programme their site in J2EE rather than the usual PHP. J2EE, I told him, was a programming environment for big systems. It was robust, secure, and handled a lot of the hard work automatically so not only would programming be fast, it would be done right.; I can't remember the hosting company I originally went with, but after a few months I moved to The Bean Factory (formerly The Bean Container) which charged about £5 per month for J2EE hosting. Others were charging perhaps £30 per month, but I thought the former was sufficient to cover the period between creating the static website .. the text, graphic design, menu system and so on, and implementing the serious functionality. If there were problems, I reasoned, we could change to a more expensive host then.; The idea was to publish the static website first so the search engines had time to find us and index us. The functionality came second.; Things didn't exactly go according to plan.; I wanted to do the best design I could and I set about working through a book on the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for J2EE. Comically, looking back, I used ArgoUML which is fine as far as it goes but it's like a half-built bridge, there's a point where there's simply no more road and you find yourself falling into the river.; I don't care to remember the details now, but RUP requires that you iterate through some systems design diagrams. You start with a broad brush and gradually add detail. Except with ArgoUML, every time I went on to the next stage I couldn't find a way to copy the original diagrams so I could add to them, so I ended up re-creating them. That was tedious and annoying to say the least. But the unfinished bridge part was when I discovered that there was more Rational Unified Process than there was ArgoUML. Simply, ArgoUML didn't implement the rest of the RUP. I looked around for other solutions, but by then it was rather too late to learn a new system. Lesson 1: do check your tools will do what you want them to do.; Anyway, the design is a good one and I stand by it. It may be my best yet, so something worked. Having completed the design, it was time to implement the system in J2EE.; One thing irritated me from the start about J2EE when we were learning about it at university. How to explain this .. try this: let's say you wanted to create a database of runners in a race. Normally in software once you'd got the name, age, time and so on for the runner, you'd issue a command to save that to a database. In J2EE, so the blurb goes, you don't have to do that. A 'container' will do that for you. Great.; But two things. Firstly, when I do that in PHP and mySQL (the normal database system web developers use) I can run PHPmyAdmin, an administration tool, to take a look at the database and check that the data I thought I saved actually reached its destination safely. No-one could point me in the direction of a similar tool for J2EE and its database CloudScape and I couldn't find one. Despite some online help, I never did get J2EE to talk to mySQL either. So I had no way to check that my data was being saved correctly, except for the correct behaviour of my programs. Secondly, what they don't tell you is that if you then want to query that database, for instance, to find all the runners who finished the race in under 40 minutes, you have to learn a new language: EJB-QL, rather than use what we all know, SQL. So, let's get this straight .. J2EE is easier because the container handles everything, oh, except this part for which you're going to have to learn a whole new language.; EJB-QL was the straw that broke my back. Last week, knowing that I was making only glacial progress, I went to bed on Wednesday night and felt my adrenal glands squeeze fight or flight into my bloodstream. I wasn't happy.; It wasn't just the fact that Sun's DeployTool has lost my metadata (data about the system necessary to convert human readable programming language into machine readable code so it can run) when it crashed a few weeks ago, forcing me to recreate it. It was also that it was inexplicably crashing more often.; It was that the help I can usually turn to in the world of PHP, didn't seem to be available in J2EE. I presume there are simply fewer J2EE programmers. It was that I'd bought every J2EE book under the sun and nothing seemed to clarify the points I wanted clarifying.; It could also be that The Bean Container presided over a 90.55% uptime in June for this client's website according to siteuptime.com. Just think about that. 9.45% down. That's nearly 16 hours a week out of action, over two hours a day unavailable, and they've so far taken four days to answer my query about it. Nonsense. No wonder I'm having problems getting my client a decent search engine position.; Then there's the fact that you can't just FTP my files over and that's installation done. With J2EE, at least with The Bean Container, the application had to be uploaded and then Bean Container staff deployed your application. Well, for £5 a month they're not going to want to do that very often. I felt restricted to perhaps a monthly upload, although they never put a limit on it, and we never actually did deploy anything.; I even tried to find myself a J2EE mentor through the British Computer Society. The very nice lady tried hard, but ultimately failed to find me one.; Back in university days, our J2EE exercises felt like simply lists of button pushes with no clue what we were doing. Click this, enter this here, select that, push this, scratch here, sing this, cross your fingers and oh, it works. Not a clue why, or how, but ain't it grand. After several hundred hours of further learning (and my learning techniques got me a first so they do work) it still felt like that.; J2EE requires things done exactly how it wants it, and your code is exploded into all corners of your computer. Normally you write code and it runs and you can see what's happened. In J2EE there are three files for everything plus the mysterious deploytool which holds more data describing the three files. Your database query isn't in the code at all, it's somewhere in the deploytool. You have to get all of these things exactly right or you get a War and Peace sized report on the fact that something went wrong (but no-one knows exactly what). And no-one can help, because no-one uses Sun's DeployTool in real life, it's just a proof of concept.; No-one uses Sun's J2EE server either, they tend to use JBoss. The 'simple' documentation for that system, printed out, is as thick as a breezeblock and they proudly state that it's written by the programmers who built the system. Yep. You can tell. Thanks for that.; The system is, I've concluded, too difficult for one person to learn on their own. I was programming a line at a time, then testing it. Whereas a test run in PHP might take ten seconds, the deploytool on my machine took about two minutes to run, by which time I've brushed my teeth, made a cup of tea, fed the cats, been shopping and forgotten what I was compiling and have no idea what I'm checking for.; There is a famous article about J2EE being too big to understand here. When I read that, before all this, I thought "there will always be dissenters in any walk of life".; My new machine is sat at my side, half built, because I've gradually stripped everything away from this project except deployment. I cut out formal learning about J2EE, building the new system, and anything to do with maintaining and improving the static site in an effort to land this system. To no avail.; Last Thursday I made a deal with myself. If I could overcome my EJB-QL problem, despite it being only the latest in a long line of problems I've had to overcome that have taken days of work, I'd carry on. If not, there had to be another way.; If you've ever been on a long cycle ride you'll recognise the feeling when you reach the top of a hill and realise that there's more hill to come. J2EE learning is like that. You've never 'got it'. You can't 'get it'. You solve one problem only to find another. It's too big to understand.; At the end of Thursday, the problem was still unresolved. The help wasn't there online. The books didn't help. There had to be another way.; I worked out I'd spent, so far, 235 hours programming Java for this project. There wasn't much to show for it. At least I had reflected my inexperience in my rate, so perhaps 235 hours of my time at my skill level and with the problems I was having maybe reflected 50 hours of programming by someone with good experience. My hourly rate reflected that. That may be, but the client was still sitting patiently waiting for his system to be delivered. I couldn't let him down. He has been fantastic throughout.; I decided to start again and implement the design in PHP. Today I met the client, I outlined the problem, apologised, outlined the plan for going forward, gave him a humungous credit note for my Java programming, and I start again with a clean slate. He thanked me for "sorting this out". Actually, I couldn't wait and I'd started on Sunday with PHP. I did 4 hours of work and at the end, instead of feeling like Gollum I felt like Thor. Every four lines of J2EE could be devastated with one line of PHP. For every three files there was one. Where there was confusion, there was certainty and clarity. In those four hours I converted several J2EE files which had taken me weeks to write into clean, simple PHP. Yes yes yes yes yes, there is light! Praise the Lord and Halleluyah.; So that is that. I've had it with J2EE and boy do I feel happier. I'm back to what I should be, not beaten down by daily problems. Today I can solve problems not just dig myself deeper into them.; In truth, I think J2EE systems are developed by teams wherein people can specialise. I'm sure you can learn J2EE with some expensive course, a team of people around you who know the answers, with an expensive development tool, and with only a piece of it to learn at any one time. On my own, without any of those things, in retrospect, I didn't stand a chance. I didn't know that at the time. I'm sure too J2EE helps big companies solve big company problems. I don't have big company problems.; So there. I suppose the only thing really damaged is my ego, but hey, I'm excited about this project again. I'm wanting to come to work, not avoiding it. That's a great feeling.
Comics: 2 July 2005: One special day I met a friend I'd not seen in decades (hi Clive) in Leeds and we wandered around in a bunking off school what shall we do kinda mood and I ended up in a comic shop. I don't think I've ever been in one before, maybe once, but anyway I bought one I liked the look of. I tried to avoid the laser gun superhero type of thing and Japanese soft porn and went for Kabuki, Skin Deep by David Mack. The chap at the till said "the next one in that series is just out", to which I replied "I've no idea what I'm buying, so it means nothing to me".; I've just read it.; I'm impressed by the artwork. I'm sure I'll keep it around and whenever I need some visual inspiration or ideas I just need to select a random page for a host of ideas. So, as an artist, fantastic work.; But I'm left with irritation. Remember those times when you sat down in front of the telly and gave yourself for two hours to some drama or other only for it to end with "continued tomorrow night" .. the night you've got something else on. This is like that. I didn't know, but there's a whole series of Kabuki comics. This one makes little sense on its own. So I feel betrayed. Mack, I gave you my £8.99 and I wanted entertaining, I didn't want to get dragged into spending more to find out why I started.; Nor am I entirely sure what the point is. I wouldn't want to take away the artform, nor inane novels for that matter, but inane is what this seemed like to me. A bit like the reasonably crappy novels you'd hire from the library.; So I'm left only with ammunition for my opinion about comic fans. I mean, what are comic fans for? It feels like immersing yourself in the world of the superhero is escapism. To my mind, if you spend so much time trying to escape your life, perhaps you could spend some trying to change your life for the better. Get married, get divorced, get some training, do something constructive.; Of course, comics and adolescents go together, and that's perfectly valid. Adolescents have no resources and by and large live with their parents because there's no other choice. Adolescents are allowed escapism by the bucketload. But there's an age after which comics would surely become a reminiscence and nothing more.; I think I'm in the wrong here. Everyone needs some escapism. Film, novels, music, a walk in the park, it's all escapism. I suppose comics just aren't my kinda thing. I don't get it. At least I tried. Darling, would you pass me my slippers?
Geldof: 2 July 2005: When Geldof was supposed to be a punk, he said he was the singer of a pop band. Now when everyone's supposed to be popular, he's as punk as they come. Calling the leader of Ethiopia a (close your eyes if you're easily offended, the worst of swear words follows, but I'm damned if I'm going to asterisc it out, particularly if The Stage didn't) 'a cunt' to his face is quite a special thing to do, if you can forgive the idea that a name for a part of a woman seems to have become the worst thing you can call someone (if they're equal does that mean women walk around with power crazy genocidal maniacs between their thighs)?; Anyway, I can't decide if I'm heartless by sitting here writing this instead of watching Live8, but the lineup sounds like all those people punk wanted to get rid of. I wonder if there was a big surge of electricity when Sir Elton took the stage as people were finally moved to make a decent cup of tea. Geldof's always wanted to work with the biggest group of people he could muster. For him, it seems, people power means quantity, means being in the centre ground.; The other strategy works too though. Outside in. Linux has been successful with an outside in strategy.; I was thinking about the difference (previously blogged I'm sure) and me and my partner. We went to our favourite local Italian restaurant Tuscany Too and they asked whether we wanted an aperitif. Being clueless, I handed the problem back and said "surprise us, give us a great Italian aperitif". What we got was Campari, blood red orange juice, and ice cubes and it was just fantastic.; My partner's reaction to that was to buy Campari and blood red orange juice and make it every time the sun came out. My reaction was to ask the same question next time to see what other great things we could get from the same source.; The other day I met a friend (hi Dawn) and she showed me the slides for her forthcoming presentation on personality. Now, I don't know a tenth of what she knows about the subject, but there seemed to be a lot of words on those pages .. agreeability, impulsiveness, openness and so on, along with plenty that I'd never seen before and haven't a clue what they meant. Although I have studied psychology and retain an interest, I haven't a clue what box my and my partner's behaviour falls into over the aperitivo. So it struck me that the thinking about personality is boxed in by the words used to describe it, and that it's much more of a mixed up mess than words and labels can describe, and that thinking about personality using words is almost bound to failure. I never did understand what 'perverted by language' meant, but now I have a clue.; So Geldof's a complicated person, mixing a strong desire for change with a strong desire for popularity, or at least for taking a lot of people with him, yet always wanting to be on the fringe too .. not a punk when we were all supposed to be, yet a punk now when all any teenager wants is a job as a tv presenter. But we're all complicated. Perhaps the big deal about Geldof is "be yourself", but even that's a hoped for luxury for the great majority of us.
One for the pink postbag: 2 July 2005: Dear Gay News. The other day my partner and I were following a recipe. We cooked the tagliatele and drained it according to the instructions, added the butter and fresh herbs and then the recipe said "toss together". By the time we'd finished that the herbs were wilted and overcooked. What did we do wrong?