Alan's Ramblings

Well, it looks like I'm going to get my Andy Warhol moment - except in my case it's going to be four minutes instead of fifteen. My video diary is going to air on Countryfile on BBC 1 next Sunday. 11:30am, and I'm the top story on glossop.com who call this blog "Fascinating" - I wonder if that is "Fascinating" as in "Interesting and informative" or "Fascinating" as in "The oddest thing we've ever seen" ;-)

I also did a phone interview with the Tameside/Glossop Advertiser today - If anyone has a village fete or supermarket they need opening, my rates are very reasonable ;-)

Posted by alan at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well I've finally finished the filming for my video diary for the BBC Countryfile programme, and the courier came today to take the camera and tapes down to BBC Birmingham. After two failed attempts (due to the weather) I finally got some footage of the Moors For The Future airlift onto Bleaklow. When I turned up yesterday morning at Windy Harbour the cloud was down over Higher Shelf, so it didn't look like we'd get onto Bleaklow. We shifted over to Kinder to see if it was any better, but in fact it was even worse, so about 11:00 we got back to Windy Harbour, and the cloud had lifted just enough - a couple of hundred feet - above Bleaklow Head so we set to and drove up to Glossop Low and were helicoptered up from there to Wain Stones - thankfully I didn't need to leg it onto the moor carrying the BBC kit this time! There were plenty of us there so I got to wander around filming the helicopter, plus a very cooperative hare that sat still for me for long enough to get some good shots. The weather was pretty marginal and quite windy - in fact when I was filming with the camera at right angles to the wind I had to hold it down as the wind would have otherwise have blown it over. However it held off and only started to spit with rain as we were lifted off at 3:45, so at last I managed to get the last part of my video diary completed.

I spoke to Rachel yesterday to arrange for the kit to be picked up, and asked her what would happen next. The slot is only 4 minutes long so she's got to edit the 2 1/2 hours of footage I've taken down to fit - hopefully there will be enough that's useable to fill the time ;-) I don't know when it will be transmitted, but I'll post something as soon as I know. I enjoyed making the diary, and it's given me an insight into how much effort is required to fill even a short amount of airtime. On the other hand I won't miss lugging all the kit around with me, it got a little wearing towards the end, lugging a camera in my hand, festooned with the microphone cable around my neck and the tripod strapped to my rucksack.

Posted by alan at 08:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I posted earlier, I'm doing a video diary for BBC Countryfile, and as I've also posted the Moors For The Future project is also airlifting several thousand bags of heather onto Bleaklow as part of the effort to repair the damage to the peat, so it seemed an obvious thing to do to try to combine the two and get some footage of the helicopter. I was going to film last Thursday, but as I've already said we were fogged in. MFTF were flying again yesterday, so I thought I'd do a normal patrol and walk over to the drop site to do some filming. I popped in to Windy Harbour to find out from the MFTF team where they were going to be before heading off to the briefing centre. They were going to be working around Wain Stones and Hern Stones so Bob and I drove up to Snake summit to walk across.

It was looking a bit murky as we drove up to Snake and just as we got togged up and ready to go Fiona radioed us to say that due to low cloud they'd moved the drop site to Lawrence Edge on the opposite side of the Bleaklow plateau. We got back in the car and drove round to Woodhead dam and parked up. We could see the helicopter as we walked up Bradwell Sitch, and as we got to the bottom of Lawrence Edge I heard over the radio that the heliciopter was going to refuel. The weather was looking a bit dodgy on the north side of Bleaklow as well, so I staggered up Lawrence Edge as fast as I could, weighted down by the camera, tripod, batteries etc.

I got to the top edge and spotted the ground teams just as I heard the helicopter coming back. As it appeared through the murk I saw that it didn't have a load on, which was a bad sign. Sure enough it landed and the team nearest the edge piled in and it took off and dissapeared. Bugger! Having hauled all the kit the 800 feet up from Woodhead dam in double-quick time I was less than thrilled to see them being taking off the hill.

I mooched over to the second team to share my woes. They were hoping for the helicopter to come back to pick them up, but then the weather dropped right in so we all sat there while they waited for radio confirmation of whether they needed to walk off or not. 20 minutes or so later we heard the helicopter off in the distance - the weather hadn't perceptibly changed, so it didn't seem like there was any way he could get in. A message came over the radio asking the team to get as close as possible to Lawrence Edge, and as they were moving the rotor disk of the helicopter appeared up through the murk from under the edge of the crag, smack bang where he'd picked the first team up. The wind was blowing along the valley, so he came up from below the edge and across the moor sideways to the landing site and everyone piled in whilst I tried to get some footage on the camera. Once everyone was aboard he took off and crabbed sideways across to the edge again, about 20 feet above the ground before dropping back down below and very quickly out of sight into the clag. I was chatting to Fiona later on and it appears that the cloud base was a few tens of feet below the edge of the plateau, and he'd flown along the valley edge below the cloud level before popping sideways up the face to pick them up - a very slick piece of flying. It would have been impressive enough if the pilot had done this as part of a rescue, but was really staggering was that he was so matter-of-fact about it - he even offered to come back to pick myself and Bob up! The helicopter firm are based in Scotland so I suppose they are used to these sort of conditions, but still - way to go, PDG Helicopters!

Bob and hung around for a bit and had our lunch in case the weather lifted and they could resume the lift, but when I checked with Fiona they'd scrubbed for the rest of the day. Bob and I did some shots of the peat erosion and the steps being taken to try to stabilise it by the MFTF folks before carrying along to Wildboar Clough and off down White Mare where I managed to get some more shots of hares, although they were being distinctly uncooperative and kept running away before I got close enough to get a really good shot - most thoughtless of them ;-) We dropped down onto the Longdendale trail just above Torside car park before heading back to the car at Woodhead dam, taking a few last shots along the valley before we headed back to the briefing centre and then home.

Posted by alan at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

About 18 months ago I got in touch with the BBC Countryfile programme with the aim of doing a video diary on the mountain hares on Bleaklow. As I hadn't heard back from them I assumed that nothing would come of it, but late last year they got in touch again to ask if I was still interested. We agreed that early Feburary this year would be the best time to do the filming as the hares are still mostly in their white winter coats and are more active during the day as it is the start of the breeding season. Rachel from the beeb at Birmingham came up a week yesterday to give me a camera and a run-down of how to use it and what they were looking for in terms of footage, e.g. "Plenty of GVs" (General Views) and "Always explain what you are doing to camera"

John, Bob and myself went out last Saturday up Yellowslacks to get some footage of the hares. There were plenty around, but the camera only has a 12x zoom, which means you have to get really close to get a decent shot, and the hares aren't known for being cooperative! After a lot of skulking around rocks and cursing of both the microphone lead and the tripod we did get a fair amount of footage.

That evening when I got home I thought I better check through the tapes to make sure they looked OK. I checked the first tape, them moved on to the second when disaster struck - the damn tape got jammed in the camera which then started beeping and flashing various cryptic error messages at me. A glance at the manual revealed that I should eject the tape and try again, but the bloody camera refused to eject the tape - and it was the one with the hares on it! I eventually managed to get the tape out after about an hour of trying, however I was intending to do more filming which was going to be difficult without a camera. Fortunately I was going down to Hampshire for work on Monday, so after a frantic series of text messages between myself and Rachel I arranged to swap the camera on my way past Birmingham on Monday.

Last ThursdayI was supposed to be doing some more airlifting, but do to the fact that we were fogged in it didn't happen, and as a result I couldn't film anything save the helicopter on the ground (a Lama) sharing a field with a real live Llama. John and I went off to Snake Summit for a wander around Bleaklow in the murk - visibility was down around 50m, and the only person we saw was one of the full-time National Park staff cutting channels in the peat to try to get some of the water to drain off the first section of the Pennine Way - the path is slowly sinking into the bog, as it's one of the earliest bits to be done. Now they use stone flags to lay causey paths as you can see here. In the early days they tried out all sorts of stuff including geotextiles, split paling fencing and even polystyrene blocks! The causey paving works best because it floats on the surface of the bog, and doesn't need anything laid underneath it, so all the paths are done that way now.

I'm off out tomorrow as they are supposed to be airlifting again, but the weather forecast isn't good so it remains to be seen if I'll actually manage to get any film of the helicopter before the BBC want their camera back! As soon as I know what the transmission date of my 4 minutes of fame is, I'll be sure to post it here, so keep checking back :-)

Posted by alan at 05:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It looks like someone at lastminute.com found my technobabble generator to use in their "The boss is watching - look busy" page - all the words in those phrases are in my seed file, and like the generator they have 10 entries in the list.

Interesting...

Posted by alan at 11:16 AM | Permalink

I was supposed to be helping with the helicopter lift of heather brash onto Bleaklow again today, but because of high winds it was scrubbed. As I'd already booked the day off from work, I decided I'd go for a walk anyway. I walked up to Glossop Low, up to Wain Stones then off via the top of Dowstone Clough to Ferny Hole then down Shelf Benches. I was coming down Shelf Benches just before 4:00pm as the sun was beginning to set, and snapped this image - I particularly like the clouds. Apart from running a filter over it to remove the JPEG noise introduced by the camera, I've not manipulated it at all. I toyed with making the foreground a little less dark and increasing the saturation, but I quite like it as it is - it perfectly sums up the mood of approaching dusk on a blustery Peak District winters day. I've set it as my desktop background, the limited number of colours and bold contrasts work rather well.

Posted by alan at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, my third eTrex arrived today, a nice new one and so far it seems fine - despite the abysmal weather I took a stroll to try it out. I'm still puzzling over exactly where the Bleaklow fence line goes between Shining Clough and Woodhead, so I parked up above Woodhead tunnel and walked up onto the Trans Pennine Trail (the old turnpike road) then wandered westwards towards Woodhead Bridge. That gave me a chance to reccie the other side of the valley and figure out where the fence goes. It appears to come down to the Longdendale trail along Smithy Clough, but I've still no clear idea of where it goes between Stable Clough and Shining Clough. One of the nice things with the Summit is you can use it for doing resections - because it has a built-in compass you can mark your current position, then take a bearing from where you are and project another waypoint along it. If you do this three times from different vantage points and join up the three resulting lines (dead easy in OziExplorer - just set up three two-waypoint routes and display them),you get the traditional 'cocked hat' that shows you where the point of interest is.

As I said in my original post, I'd also paid £20.00 to Geomantics for some cleaned-up SRTM height data for OziExplorer. Well, it eventually arrived - in a format that's completely incompatible with OziExplorer, despite the website clearly saying " We supply geo-edited SRTM data in a suitable format ... for use with 3rd party programs such as Bryce, Terragen, OziExplorer, 3D Studio, Photoshop etc." Bollocks. It's supplied as 5km squares of 16-bit raw height data, and OziExplorer doesn't understand that format at all. Eventually, after repeated requests for information, Geomantics told me I had to download a 3d terrain modelling application, and a plugin, and re-reference and convert all the data - and I have 74 files worth, although I don't want it all. You'd need to have quite an in-depth knowledge of GIS and earth coordinate systems to be able to do this, which leaves me out. Needless to say, I've emailed them and the electronic payment service they use to ask for my money back, it will be interesting to see if I get it. I've also suggested that they remove the frankly untrue claim that the data can be used with OziExplorer from their website - if you get here via google and are intending to buy their data for use with OziExplorer, take my advice and don't.

Posted by alan at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday the nice chap at GPS4Less phoned me up to let me know that Garmin were going to send me a brand new, tested unit and it would be arriving by courier today. Seemingly the fact that I'd mailed a link to my previous post to both the CEO and Director of Sales and Marketing of Garmin had achieved the desired effect. I had an email from Garmin's European Service/Support Manager apologising for the problems I'd had, and saying:

So it seems that Garmin not only have the things in stock, but the original 1-2 weeks estimate for getting it replaced wasn't right either. Sure enough, at about 2:30 this afternoon the replacement was delivered. They'd included a nice case and a couple of spare sets of batteries, along with a letter. I powered the Summit up, only to discover that the LCD display was dodgy - pixels were 'bleeding' left and right across the screen from the edges of the various dialog boxes and icons. I know that LCDs are prone to this, but it was really quite noticeable, and on the previous unit - despite it's other fault - there wasn't any sign of it at all. Just to confirm I wasn't imagining it I nipped down to the Ranger station to compare it with Fiona's identical model. Despite hers being several years old and having had a hard life, the display was much better than mine.

I'd phoned the Garmin Service Manager up to explain the problem with the replacement before I went to compare my Summit to Fiona's, so when I got back I phoned him back up to arrange for yet another unit to be sent to me tomorrow. As I was digging through the contents of the box they'd sent me, I noticed a slip titled Newly overhauled 1-year limited warrany certificate, so whilst I was on the phone I asked if that meant that I'd been supplied with a repaired unit to replace my original brand-new unit. "Yes, although you were supposed to be supplied with a new one" was the reply. I'm sure that was his original intention when he mailed me yesterday (see above), but obviously something had got lost in the translation - which isn't very impressive - but hardly surprising in light of my experiences with them so far. Expecting me to pay £150.00 for a broken-and-repaired, second-hand Summit doesn't exactly seem reasonable, which he accepted. My third-and-hopeully-final Summit will be arriving tomorrow, just in time for my birthday, which is what the bloody thing was supposed to be for anyway.

Sheesh.

Posted by alan at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, my brand-new eTrex Summit is having to be replaced - it has an unfortunate tendency to turn itself off for no apparent reason, even with a fresh set of batteries. There's no low battery warning, it just switches off. It did this at least ten times on Saturday when I was using it, and despite re-flashing the firmware and doing a factory reset, it still continues to do the same thing at unpredictable intervals. I suspect that it's something to do with the compass / GPS switchover - at a configurable speed it switches over to the inbuilt compass for heading information, and from what I can tell sometimes when it switches to compass it also switches off completely. I got in touch with GPS4Less who I bought it from, and they don't have any more left, and from what they are telling me neither do Garmin - seemingly Garmin have an abysmal inventory control system, and stuff can take 5-8 weeks to come into stock. I spoke to Garmin UK myself and they said it could take up to a couple of weeks to get a replacement to me, and they point blank refused to tell me if they had them in stock for 'security reasons'! The guy I spoke to at GPS4Less is going to see if he can locate me a replacement from somewhere, but I'm pretty annoyed at Garmin - firstly the unit is faulty, secondly they won't tell me if they actually have any of the damn things in the UK and thirdly it seems that even if they do have them it's going to take an unacceptable amount of time to get a replacement to me.

0 out of 10 for customer service, Garmin.

Update

I posted the URL of this entry into Garmin's customer support webpage and also asked them how long it would take to get a replacement, and surprise, surprise, within 15 minutes I had a reply:

This is pretty obviously a boilerplate reply, and it didn't actually tell me anything I couldn't get from their website. It also didn't answer my main question regarding how long it would take to get a replacement. I replied:

And got the following brush-off:

I didn't consider this to be an acceptable answer either - basically 'Go away we don't want to know' seemed to be the gist, so I asked again:

And by now I suspect you can probably guess what the reply looked like:

So it's apparent that Garmin think the answer to the simple question 'Have you a replacement eTrex Summit in the UK that you can ship to me?' is a trade secret that must be protected at all costs - the mind boggles. On that basis I can only assume that anyone who dares to ask for pricing information can expect the Black Helicopters to appear shortly thereafter.

As I've already said, GPS4Less (who have been very helpful) don't have any in stock, and don't know when Garmin will be able to supply them with a replacement, as Garmin are telling them that they themselves don't have any and don't know when they will be getting more - so I'm now back at square one. I've posted the failed unit back to GPS4Less as it's no use to me, so I'm now £149.95 out of pocket, I've had to pay £4.05 to send the unit back (and I bet I don't get that back), and I still don't have a resolution to my question to Garmin, let alone a working GPS. I'm trying to remember when I last received such poor customer service, and I'm struggling - all in all a pretty appalling experience, and it's badly dented my faith in a company that I previously held in high regard.

Garmin, your customer service sucks.

Posted by alan at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My latest toy arrived yesterday - a Garmin eTrex Summit GPS. I already have a Garmin 12XL, and although it's an excellent GPS it is a little bulky, and it eats batteries four at a time. As my birthday is coming up, I decided to treat myself to a newer model - Fiona has a eTrex Summit that I'd played with, and I particularly liked the fact that it had an altimeter and a flux-gate electronic compass - very Stargate SG1. The last time I looked for a GPS with a compass built in, the only one that was available was the Silva model, and that cost £ bazillions.

I originally thought about getting one from eBay - what an utter waste of time that was. The Summit retails for about £150, including VAT + P&P, so I thought I might be able to pick one up for about £100-£120 on eBay. Wrong! I bid on two, and on both the price quickly soared above my £112 bid limit. I have no idea why someone would pay £140 + P&P on eBay for something that they could get from a retail outlet for £150. Gary helpfully explained it to me - "They are all stupid", and I think he's probably right. I'm going to put my old 12XL up for sale on eBay - they retail for about £150, so I'm hoping for something in excess of £200.

Mostly I like the eTrex Summit - the smaller size, lightness, half the batteries, a better display, and of course the altimeter and compass. The unit will also hold more waypoints, routes now have a realistic number of points in them, it can can hold multiple track logs - all these things are a definite plus. There are some downsides compared to the 12XL however. Firstly there's no 'Average position' function to increase the accuracy when saving a new waypoint. Secondly it doesn't store waypoint comments - on most of the Garmin consumer units the waypoint names are restricted to just 6 characters, which leads to some very cryptic abbreviations. The 12XL allowed you to store a longer description with the waypoint so that you could check you'd picked the right one - this is missing on the Summit. The third and probably most serious criticism is that once you've stored a waypoint there appears to be no way to update it to your current position. If you've entered a waypoint off a map it may not be 100% accurate or if you marked it in the field you may not have had a particularly good satellite fix, so it's been my practice with the 12XL to update waypoints as I visited them. With the Summit it appears the only way to do this is to delete and re-save the waypoint, which is a pain to say the least. I can't believe Garmin really haven't provided a way to do this, but I can't find anything in either the manual or on the web. Shame.

Another nit is that Garmin changed the connector used for the upload/download cable, so the old one I made for the 12XL no longer fits. The official Garmin cables retail for about £30, and last time round I made my own because of the price, using a connector supplied by someone I found on the web. This time round I bought a ready-made cable for only £12.95 inc VAT + P&P from the most excellent Lynks Cables. I ordered this mid-afternoon and it arrived on my doormat the following morning. They operate on a trust system as far as payment goes - they dispatch the goods and you can either keep them and pay for them or send them back. They offer a wide range of cables for all sorts of applications, and the one I received was a professionally-made cable complete with moulded connectors and a RF choke.

With the aid of the cable it was the work of moments to copy all of my 230+ existing Dark Peak waypoints from the 12XL onto the Summit, using OziExplorer. However - another nit - Garmin have extended the waypoint symbol set in the Summit, and even though some of the symbols are the same on both the 12XL and Summit they have been renumbered so all the symbols end up muddled. Bah. OziExplorer is an excellent software package which allows you to overlay waypoints, routes and track logs on a map (and much, much more besides), so you can manage all the information in your GPS graphically - I consider it to be an indispendable adjunct to my GPS. I've had a copy for 6 years and I've been very happy with it. When I updated it recently I noticed there was a 3-D add-on available. I didn't expect much, but I downloaded it and the free NASA SRTM height data - and I was blown away, it really does make the map match the terrain - I had endless hours of fun plotting places I knew well in 3-D and comparing it to my memory . You can also overlay your GPS data on the rendered map surface. It's still a beta product so it has a few quirks, but I'm very impressed and for less than £18? Amazing. I've subsequently coughed up £20 for some georeferenced and cleaned up SRTM data from Geomantics as some of the features on the raw SRTM data don't align exactly with the map.

Anway, I will be out on Saturday mapping the next segment of the Bleaklow fence, so I'll get a chance to test out my new toy in earnest.

Posted by alan at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Further to my last but one post, I've just read this on the Guardian news website:

The full article is here. The original story is from the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), although the story has been widely reported elsewhere as well.

I'm genuinely lost for words. What are they thinking of?

Posted by alan at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've just been reading the experiences of a UK journalist detained at LA airport, courtesy of a link from Alec's blog. She was visiting the US and didn't realise that she couldn't do so on under the normal visa waiver scheme. I can easily understand how it happened, I've filled in a fair number of the green forms myself and I can't ever recollect seeing any questions about being a journalist - and I've always wondered what 'moral turpitude' was.

My own experience reflects hers on a thankfully far less extreme level. Pre 9/11 the immigration guys at SFO were always polite - at the top of the internet boom one of them even asked me for stock tips when he learned I worked for Sun. On my last trip I got a slightly unpleasant grilling from the officer, despite the fact that my passport has a whole crop of SFO stamps in it. At one point he even asked me "So why did you have to come to the US? Couldn't you have used the phone instead?". I'm not exactly sure at which point the US immigration service started having a say in Sun travel policy, but it's obvious that they now feel they do.

It seems that paranoia about the rest of the world is fast becoming one of the defining US national characteristics. That's a dangerous state of mind to be in, as it rapidly leads to the assumption that you can justify doing whatever it takes to defend your interests - witness Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Ironically over the weekend the TV here in the UK has been dominated by the D-Day 60th anniversary. Hey guys, we are on your side, remember? Or at least we used to be...

Posted by alan at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In a vain attempt to prevent my already degenerate carcass from degenerating still further, I've once again taken to trotting around Mossy Lea, a pretty little valley just round the corner from the house. It's not that far - about 4k, but with a reasonable amount of climbing - 360ft or so. I'd noticed the unusual amount of wildflowers that seemed to be around this year, so I took my camera on one of my circumnavigations last week - the fact that it also gave me a convenient excuse to keep stopping to take photos had nothing to do with it ;-)

Looking down from Shire Hill over Old Glossop. My house is in amongst those on the left of the picture. This 130ft, 20% climb is right the start . My legs are aching just thinking about it. At dusk this is a good place to see the Pipistrelle bats that I've mentioned earlier.	Rhododendron ponticum in full bloom. Although this looks pretty when it is in flower, it is an introduced species and has a pernicious impact on native fauna and flora - in fact active efforts are being made to eradicate it from Shire Hill.	This on the other hand is a native species, Hyacinthoides non scripta or the Native Bluebell, dappled shade under deciduous trees being a favoured habitat.
The Native Bluebell is also under threat from the introduced Spanish Bluebell Hyacinthoides hispanica with which it freely hybridises. These however are the real McCoy.	The high point of the round, 790ft ASL. The valley in the distance is Yellowslacks, with Mossy Lea Farm in the valley below. The hillside above the wall on the right is Shelf Benches, an abandoned quarry that has been entirely reclaimed by nature.	The valley contains quite a number of Hawthorn trees, Crataegus monogyna. I've never seen them carrying this much blossom before - the smell as you pass them is quite overpowering, especially on a warm day.
Looking down Mossy Lea towards Glossop, with Shire Hill on the left. Edge Plantation, the hillside on the right hand side of the valley with the track curving up it has just been planted with native broadleaved trees - something to benefit future generations.	This Hawthorn tree is one of my kid's favorites due to the odd lean that it has. Hawthorn is very common in the UK - nearly all of the hedges that are such a key feature of the countryside are Hawthorn.	Another common native plant, Cytisus scoparius or Broom, so named because that's what its twigs and branches used to be used for. (Elaine, if your broomstick is looking a little bare I can send you some ;-)

Posted by alan at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was hunting around in Borders looking for something to buy for James, my eldest, and I found a boxed beginners Go set and book. For those of you who don't know what Go is, it is a 3,000 year old game that originated in China. Go is the European name for it, derived from the Japanese name, Igo. Other names for it are Wei Ch'i in China and Baduk in Korea. The game consists of a 19 x 19 grid, with one player playing black stones, and the other playing white. Unlike other board games, the pieces are played on the intersections of the lines rather than inside the squares. The objective of the game is to surround territory with stones of your color. Pieces can take each other, but that's a secondary objective - the winner is the person who has captured the most territory.

So that I wouldn't get hammered by my 10-year old son on Xmas day, I thought I'd better get a head start and find out how to play. It turns out there is an enormous amout of information on the net - not surprising as the game is played by an estimated 50 million people in the Far East. A good introduction can be found on the British Go Association website. There are also quite a few online Go servers, that allow you to play other people online - and having played a few games, I'm hooked!

At first sight the game appears to be straightforward - the rules are fairly simple, and it all seems pretty easy. However, having played a couple of games online and been soundly thrashed, it has really grabbed my interest. It's actually a far more complex game than chess - unlike chess the best Go-playing programs are of a distinctly crummy standard. The reason it is so much more difficult for computers than chess, according to this overview of computer Go is that at any given point in a Go game there are vastly more potential moves to be considered, and that in addition evaluating each potential move is far more difficult and costly, and to cap it off libraries of precomputed game openings and endings, which are used extensively in chess playing programs, really don't work very well for Go - in all it is thought that 10^27 more computer power is needed for a world-class Go program than is needed for chess. At least there is still one thing left where we are better than the goddam machines :-)

The largest online Go server is the Internet Go Server (IGS). Most of the Go servers are based on telnet, but there are a quite a few clients available that give you a graphical board to play on, and you can also watch other games that are in progress. I quite like gGo - it's written in Java so it is cross-platform. I shouldn't say this bearing in mind who I work for, but it is the first Java application I've come across that I actually consider to be worth using!

Posted by alan at 09:49 PM | Permalink

Private Eye has a regular series of cartoons entitled "Scenes You Seldom See". Bearing in mind my recent experiences with spam, I thought this was rather amusing :-)

Posted by alan at 03:04 PM | Permalink

I've been away on holiday for the last two weeks, and when I got back on Saturday I tried to access my email at work - big, big mistake. I have some procmail filters that catch most of my spam and put them in a seperate folder. This filled up with 2Gb (!) of spam - mostly Sobig.F, then procmail wrote another 2.5Gb of spam into some other files for good measure (filling up the filesystem containing my home directory) and then started to dump everything in my inbox - which also filled up to 2Gb. When I tried to open my inbox, the IMAP server blew a fuse and started dropping 2Gb copies of my inbox on the mailserver, which also filled up - then nobody in my office could use email either. Fortunately it was the weekend, so with the help of a friendly IT support person I managed to unclog my home directory and inbox, leaving me with the mind-numbing task of wading through the 35,000 messages that had ended in my inbox.

After the immediate panic was over I started monitoring the incoming stream of spam. Nearly all of it is Sobig.F or the consequential email bounces caused by it - I'm getting about 1/2Gb of spam (about 6000 messages) a day, which is absolutely ridiculous. Nicholas Clark, a friend of mine, has received over 100,000 copies of Sobig.F since the outbreak started, yet we are told the outbreak is not all that bad!

The direct spams are bad enough, but the bounced emails are the last straw. One of the nasty traits of Sobig.F is that it forges the 'From:' line in the virus-laden emails it spews out. Why do all the people who set up email filtering insist on sending back bounce messages, when 99% of the time the 'From:' address is incorrect? This widespread practice is pointless and only increases the amount of crap clogging up everyone's bandwidth and mailboxes.

Anyway, if anyone else out there in spamland uses procmail, the following recipe will catch Sobig.F:

:0 HB
* ^X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
* ^X-MailScanner: Found to be clean
* ^TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA//8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
* ^AAAA4AAAAA4fug4AtAnNIbgBTM0hVGhpcyBwcm9ncmFtIGNhbm5vdCBiZSBydW4gaW4gRE9TIG1v
Spam

Posted by alan at 10:03 PM | Permalink

Well I thought it was funny anyway... ;-)

Posted by alan at 09:47 AM | Permalink

I'm a volunteer Ranger for the Peak District National Park, which mainly involves wandering around the hills in all weathers. The Ranger Service is nearly 50 years old, follow the link above for details of what we do and who we are. A great bunch of folks from all walks (hah!) of life, and I find it a great way of having a complete break from the day job.

Posted by alan at 12:00 AM | Permalink

I am a member of a local community Samba band Ruidogrande. Samba is Brazilian carnival music, and is percussion-based. This gives the inner child in me (ok, the outer child!) the excuse I've always wanted to bash the heck out of a large, noisy drum. I play the Surdo (which means 'deaf man' in portugese), which is the biggest (and therefore loudest ;-) instrument in the band.

About a year ago my wife made the mistake of bringing home a flier advertising practice sessions, and giving it to me as a joke. Hah, that'll teach her!

For more info, see the band website here. Other good places are the Worldwide Samba page, and the UK Samba page

Posted by alan at 12:00 AM | Permalink