For those of you not following me on Facebook or on twitter (drbrake) I submitted my doctoral thesis back in April and today it was formally examined. I was asked to provide some minor revisions and once I have done so (within the next three months) I will officially become Dr Brake (or Dr D.R. Brake if you like as my forenames are David and Russell). For more on my thesis (which I will also make available online once I have done the revisions) visit my academic publications page.

I replaced my five year old PowerPC-based iBook G4 with a practically identical MacBook last week and I know at least one other reader is contemplating the same thing so here are some impressions and a few problems/requests for help.

Good:

• As you might expect, I got more storage - 500Gb instead of 80 - which means I can now have all my music and all my pictures and all my movies on one machine instead of having them distributed on different ones.
• My battery life has gone back up from c. 1hr to supposedly nearly five (as yet untested).
• Having a built in webcam is pretty entertaining.
• Making the transition was very easy even though it involved a change of processor architecture as well as a change of machine. Only a few applications broke and almost all the application settings remained intact. I was working on the new machine within a half day of connecting it to the old one.
• Thanks to a “back to school” offer the new macbook came with a (nearly) free iPod Touch which was significantly better than the first generation one I had in that it includes a volume control and can accept a microphone.

Bad:

• The down arrow already seems to be coming loose though the machine has not been subjected to any physical stress I can think of.
• Even with nearly double the RAM (2Gb) and I would have thought several times the raw processing power, the new machine feels very little faster. Moore’s law suggests I should see a 4x speed increase - where is it? One can’t blame The Great Moore’s Law Compensator - the tendency for software to get more and more bloated as processors improve - because I am running the same software I was last week. Are there a lot of non-native applications still on my machine running in emulation? Will I see a dramatic boost if I “top up” to 4Gb of RAM?
• It’s not noticeably lighter either though I believe it is supposed to be slightly lighter and it is just different enough in shape that I had to buy a new case for it.

Help, please?

• Adobe AIR seems not to work despite uninstalling and reinstalling it twice so BBC iPlayer and Tweetdeck don’t work either. Any ideas?
• I installed Windows 7 RC via Bootcamp but none of the games I have installed to date via Steam run - in the case of TF2 I get the “splash screen” and the icon briefly appears in the dock but then it disappears without even an error message. Should I try installing parallels, fusion or one of the other multiple-OS enabling apps and try that? Any other ideas?
• Any ideas about how I can get my Macbook to recognise the existence of an external monitor when it is running Windows 7? If I do get it to play games I would prefer to play them on my 19″ monitor.

I still remember finding E.E. “Doc” Smith’s space opera, The Skylark of Space when on holiday with my parents when I was probably no more than 10 - I immediately read it cover to cover and sought out the others in the series. I had forgotten about it for years then noticed it had gone into the public domain so I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg into my iPod Touch and began to read. I was immediately struck by a certain amount of casual racism (not uncommon in 1928) and of course its attitudes toward women were also pretty retrograde. Moreover, with their powerful weapons the heroes seem quite happy to kill off hordes of alien ‘bad guys’ even when they can’t shoot back. The racist and eugenicist undertones became stronger and stronger near the end however. The ‘bad aliens’ are darker skinned than the ‘good’ ones, and I just got to the point where the hero describes the religious system of the good aliens, seemingly without dismay:

they are magnificently developed for their surroundings. They have attained this condition by centuries of weeding out the unfit. They have no hospitals for the feeble-minded or feeble-bodied–abnormal persons are not allowed to live. The same reasoning accounts for their perfect cleanliness, moral and physical. Vice is practically unknown. They believe that clean living and clean thinking are rewarded by the production of a better physical and mental type

Ugh… I didn’t remember that part!

You wouldn’t think it would be too hard to get TV listings that would cover all the freesat channels and provide reviews and ratings, particularly for all the films (I am uneasily aware that lots of films that are not reviewed in the papers and are on obscure satellite channels pass me by unseen). Alas the Radio Times is the leading free contender and a) it doesn’t include a few channels and b) its movies at a glance feature is seriously broken. It used to work really well about two years ago, letting me see a list of only those movies which had 4 or more stars but that feature was lost in a redesign and never renewed. I’ve looked at several other free online options (Onthebox, Yahoo TV guide, TV Guide and TV Easy) but they were even worse. Time Out which I used to buy mainly for the TV listings appears to be cutting down on their listings and in any case doesn’t offer them online.

Digiguide does appear to offer what I am after but it isn’t free (£15 a year) and alas they seem to have put the bulk of their development effort into their Windows offline reader and the Windows PC I have is some distance from my TV. If they offered a similar offline reader tailored for my iPod Touch or Mac I would subscribe like a shot. I might yet end up doing so. But if anyone else is aware of a good free option either available now or on the way I would love to hear about it.

Thanks to BBC iPlayer and the increasing number of podcasts available my ability to download interesting stuff is finally outpacing the time available to consume it. My iPod now contains about 48 hours of audio and video material - a mix of (free classic) audiobooks, current affairs and history programs and a number of academic-related feeds, notably Thinking Allowed, Radio Berkman and of course the LSE’s own podcast of its lectures. Unfortunately, in attempting to update the podcasts blogroll on the right I seem to have broken it instead. You can see all of the individual podcasts I subscribe to as they broadcast in reverse chronological order here.

By way of background, I have been thinking seriously about switching to Freesat (our house can’t receive Freeview). In addition our DVD recorder appears to be dying, and our TV set is at least 22 years old so it surely has to die soon, which would mean going HD. Knowing that HD is the future it seems silly to buy a new device that only played and recorded at standard definition. So logically a box which offers Blu-ray recording and built-in Freesat recording would be a sensible purchase, since both functions would be useful now or in the future. Imagine my delight when I heard that just such a device was about to arrive here - the Panasonic DMR-BS850. So what would I expect to pay for that? Well the Humax Freesat DVR is £300 and a Panasonic Blu-Ray player starts at £180 or so. I’d expect to pay another £100 or so to be able to record onto Blu-Ray as well but I’d also expect a little cost saving for buying everything in a single box. So maybe they’ll charge £550? Nope - it seems Panasonic plans to charge nearly double that sum for their new gadget. Bah!

I guess what I’ll do is buy a Humax box, possibly a cheap replacement DVD recorder (£130) when this one flakes out and wait for my TV to die and for Blu Ray pricing to become rational…

I have started listening to Radio 4’s Whatever Happened To The Working Class and was almost immediately distracted by the fact that the announcer for the programme said it was “Whatever Happened To The Working Class” (rhyming with lass) and the ((ex-)working class) announcer Sarfraz Manzoor pronounced it “clahss”. A few decades ago this would certainly have been reversed…

I’ve been going through my thesis and checking all my chapter and sub-section references so they point to the right section after edits. A friend (thanks Bruce!)  just pointed out that there’s a feature in Word that - if I had known about it - would have saved me the trouble.

“If you did your section and chapter headings with a suitable heading style, and put in the references with insert cross-reference -> numbered item, it should indeed renumber them automatically.”

I can’t believe I have been using Word for over 20 years (!) and never discovered that feature.  I am also a little put out that nobody told me about it. So I hope this helps someone else (though I fear it may be a little late for me).

I’ve been following Lost since it began and at first found it really engaging but regular readers will note increasing disenchantment setting in. Even though I know I only need to ‘hang in there’ for a season and a half to find out what is really going on I have (rather belatedly) decided that I just can’t be bothered. The main weaknesses I despair of being addressed are:

• The characters are thin and their behavior is inconsistent
• Relatedly, they seem irrationally swayed by any ‘authority figure’ who comes by. This results in characters holding diametrically opposite views for no better reason than they blindly believe the last person who seemed to know what was going on (eg Ben, or Charles Widmore).
• Lots of misunderstandings arise which would have been easily cleared up if the characters just shared information with each other or talked over what had happened to them.
• There are just too many loose ends to tie up.

I think I’ll probably watch the last season finale just to see how on earth they try to make it all make sense but that aside, I’m done. It’s a pity, as it started really promisingly…

I know SE England is not great at handling snow but this is a new level of uselessness. All London buses cancelled? No taxis available? And it’s not as if it arrived without warning - forecasters have been warning about it for days…

From London discoveries