Where are they now?

Hope springs eternal : I'm looking for three people whom I last saw in 1966 (yes!) :-

Why? Well it's been forty years this year since the class of 1966 got our first degrees, B.Sc. (Hons) in Physics, from City University, London (UK), and I'm trying to organise an Alumni Reunion for this summer. It'd be great to have everybody there :-)

Believe it or not, I've found everybody else of our class, and that after 40 years! But these three still elude me. I've tried various search engines (e.g. Google). I've scanned for books written by them or scientific papers on related subjects. I've asked the Alumni association. I've scanned 'Friends Reunited'. I've even looked at the list of registered sex offenders ;-) All to no avail :-( My researches turned up several namesakes for these three, but emails showed them to not be the guys I'm looking for. So if you know anyone bearing these names, or indeed have any tips about where else I might search, please mail me.

Here are a couple of old photos which might jog their memories if they see them :-)

I'm really looking forward to the reunion. Find out what all those fellow-alumni (with the same basic qualification) did with their careers. Gonna be a jaw-wagging party :-)

Our university was not far from the LSE (London School of Economics) which has much more famous students. Back in the early '60s there was an LSE student who sometimes sang and played harmonica with a startup band, a certain Mick Jagger. Nowadays you'd get a chance to meet LSE student Monica Lewinsky, who recently began studying for a master’s degree in social psychology there. What a blow, if I can't find those three above.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 24th February 2006 at 06:24 CET permalink Email

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Ten countries in a day...

The BFI (Bastard Flying Instructor) takes you on another flight. Had we thought of it at the time, we might have registered with the Guinness book of records. As it was, we just had a day's good fun and gained a lot of experience and hours.

One of the perks (and/or social obligations) of being a flying instructor is that low-time pilots invite me along as safety pilot; I'm not logging any PIC time, but I get a nice day out :-) In particular, pilots notice their licences are about to run out (as they do every 2 years) and they need the minimum requirements to renew them. These are 25 hours as PIC and 24 flights of which at least 3 must be cross-country with legs of at least 100 kms. Either they didn't have (or make) the time or have the necessary cash to keep their licences current. So they need to catch up; there are several in this situation at the start of each season.

In this particular case there were 3 of them and the weather forecast for the weekend was great. So I decided to do a looooong trip with them, so they could experience terrain different from just orbiting the home airfield on their usual 20 mile "coffee-hops".

We flew to all of Germany's neighbouring countries and back home in one day :-)

Let me call the pilots A,B, and C. Pilot A took the left seat, I took the right and the other 2 were in the back as PAX. We flew NNW from our home field (EDLP=Paderborn-Lippstadt), spent the saturday on the beach at Sylt and then positioned the plane to Tonder, on the southern border of Denmark, that evening. I explained sunday's trip to the three green pilots and had them prepare their flight plans. In the meantime, I called the destination fields to get an OK for a touch-and-go rather than a full-stop landing as needed. That way we wouldn't have to waste time clearing customs 9 times, which would have cost us 4 or 5 additional hours, time we did not have.

Early sunday morning pilot A got to fly us on the first leg from Tonder in Denmark (at the top of this map) SW to Groningen/Eelde in Holland.

Of course, the BFI (me) had made this more difficult than it seemed :-) Danger area ED-D101A means we had to stay low, but high enough to avoid the bird zones above the north Fresian islands. So we were in the early morning haze, and pilot A had never flown over open water (the North Sea) before, so I had him learning fast ;-) If he drifted 5 miles north of track, he'd put us in the danger zone ED-D41 which starts at sea level. If he drifted 5 miles south of track, he'd put us in the restricted zone ED-R13B which starts at sea level too. Just for kicks, the BFI turned off the NAV receiver, so that he couldn't home on the Helgoland VOR :-) After that leg, we knew that pilot A had relearned how to do dead-reckoning using compass and stopwatch only :-)

In Groningen/Eelde in Holland we did a pre-approved touch-and-go and flew SSW to Butgenbach/Elsenborn in Belgium, which is just south of Aachen (Germany). Just to keep pilot A on his toes, I said casually "Be sure not to trespass into German airspace please!". So his neatly planned straight line got turned into a double-dog-leg ;-) At least I turned the NAV receiver back on, to let him thread his way through the difficult airspace around the Maastrich military base :-) In Butgenbach/Elsenborn in Belgium we did a another pre-approved touch-and-go then flew the short hop due south to Luxembourg.

In Luxemburg we did a full-stop landing, cleared customs in and out, had a late breakfast, emptied our bladders etc. and changed pilots. Pilot A now had his required three 100km+ cross country flights (Paderborn-Sylt, Denmark-Holland, Holland - Belgium) and had gained some hours and a whole lot more experience of new (to him) cross-water situations :-)

Pilot B now took over, flying the SE leg from Luxembourg (east of Koblenz [in the yellow state]) to Strasbourg, which is (just) in France near the German border north of Freiburg (in the pink state of Baden which is lower left on the map). She did a touch-and-go there and then she flew us to Altenrhein, which is a Swiss airfield on the southern shore of Lake Constance. This was to be our southernmost point. Of course, the BFI made it slightly more difficult by asking her to fly along the Rhine valley instead of a straight line. Why is this harder? Around noon you're flying into the sun in a hazy valley and have to avoid flying back into french airspace, just a mile to the west ;-) We did a touch-and-go at Altenrhein, much to the annoyance of the guy in the tower, because it had just turned noon and he was on his official lunch-break. Ooops! He billed us double later :-(

From Altenrhein (Switzerland) she flew us east along the Austrian-German border to get in some alpine flying experience (which included some pretty hefty thermals, it being a warm summer day over the mountains). Just south of Sonthofen I took them low level into a dead-end alpine valley near Obersdorf and showed them how to turn around when the valley isn't wide enough to do so. FYI, you pull up to a vertical climb, stall-turn at the top and pull out going back the way you came in :-) I also showed them how to fly along the south-facing slopes, where the thermals give a good rising wind around noon :-) She'd never been in the mountains before, but she learned fast. Then we transited the Salzburg control zone and she flew us on to Gmunden (in Austria). Thats just east of Passau in Bavaria, lower right on this map.

In Gmunden we did a full-stop landing, cleared customs (who had come out to the airfield especially for us!) in and out, had a late lunch, emptied our bladders etc. and changed pilots. Pilot B now had her required three 100km+ cross country flights (Luxembourg-France, France-Switzerland, Switzerland-Austria), had gained some hours and had had her first experience of alpine mountain flying. Mind you, the combination of thermals and stall-turns had left her feeling a little queasy, so she skipped lunch and spent some quality time in the ladies' restroom ;-) She said I'd earned the BFI title ;-)

Pilot C now took over and flew us NNE from Gmunden (in Austria) to Ceske Budejovice which is in the Czeck republic. We flew a bit west of the straight line shown on the map so that we could see the lake in the Lipensk national park and then turned ENE to see Cesky Krumlov. We orbited the old town there and took several photos, it really is a beautiful town. The Czecks wouldn't approve a touch-and-go, so we had to clear customs in and out. But we did pick up some fuel, even cheaper than the tax-free fuel in Luxembourg :-) From Ceske Budejovice we flew north to an airfield in Poland somewhere east of Cottbus (my notes are incomplete here). We did a pre-approved touch-and-go, avoiding customs clearance, then headed west back to our home field. Again, the BFI had ensured that pilot C would be flying into the sun in the evening haze, thus making his task more difficult, especially as I'd faked a NAV failure by pulling the NAV fuse when the pilot wasn't looking, because I'd pointed out the beautiful town of Wittenberg (where Martin Luther lived) off to the left. At the same time I'd caged the gyros and innocently put my headphones up on the combing, next to the magnetic compass, thus deflecting it :-(

However, pilot C was wide awake and noticed the caged warning flag on the gyros and went to reset them. It was then that he noticed my headphones resting next to the magnetic compass :-) He gave me a really dirty look, mumbled something about BFI-with-a-capital-B, but got us back on course. About a quarter-hour later he noticed the NAV failure, and christened me the triple-B-FI :-) Still, those were a couple of equipment-failure lessons he'd never forget, and he DID get us home OK, without me needing to intervene :-)

After landing we went to clear customs. In reply to the rote question "Where have you come from today?" (the sods are too lazy to read the flight plan), the customs guy got a chorus of "Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg" (from pilot A), "No! Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria." from pilot B, and "No! No! Austria, Czeck Republic. Poland" from Pilot C. So the customs guy looks at me, asking "What's true? Who's right?" Grinning, I replied "Don't ask me, I'm just a passenger. They're all right, I think ;-)" So he searched us!

Then we put the plane to bed and debriefed during our evening meal in the clubhouse. As the number of beers increased, so the tales got hairier, and our three ex-greenies became the heroes of the evening. And I got lots more requests to be a safety pilot, so there can't have been TOO much B in the BFI ;-)

P.S : Other BFI blog entries are :-

• Flight Blog.
• Wet Dreams for Pilots and Wannabees
• Unfortunately . . .
• ANR : Airplane Noise Reduction
• A pilots' slide rule : the Aristo-Aviat 617.
• Foxy Lady
• Smoking past, Extra low :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 20th February 2006 at 06:20 CET permalink Email

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Site-seeing with IE 7 β2

Most of my blog-readers will know me as an enthusiastic fan of the the Opera browser. Opera is smaller, faster, safer (more secure), more portable and more standards compliant than IE. Opera is downloadable for free :-)

But now MS are playing catchup. So I got myself the IE 7 β free download and spent last weekend trying it out. Here are my first impressions in a powerpoint bullet style :-

• For MS, a good improvement, but still not as good as Opera nor as extensible as Firefox.
• Tabbed browsing, RSS integration and (slightly) improved security(?).
• Compared to IE6, a new user interface, e.g. with thumbnails of all open tabs tiled within a single browser window.
• Better management of favourites (two favourites controls).
• Non-portable : Internet Explorer remains Windows-only, and IE7β will only run under Windows XP (SP2) :-(
• Wishy-washy rendering of photos, especially PNGs; Firefox and Opera show photos much more clearly, IMHO.
• CSS support is still incomplete :-(
• No DRM as far I could see :-)
• ActiveX controls default to disabled, some phishing defense has been added, both adding security, but it is still liable to spyware attacks (MS knows this and will fix it before release they claim).

All in all, it is an improvement, so it'd be worth Mandarin Meg adding it to her browser collection and checking out her code with it. I expect that the 70% of users too lazy to change over to a decent browser like Opera or Firefox will be forcibly migrated to IE7 from IE6 over the coming two years. Users with e.g. Win95, 98, ME etc. will get no support :-(

BTW, it didn't uninstall completely and 100% cleanly on its own, so make sure you install it under control of an uninstaller tool :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 18th February 2006 at 06:18 CET permalink Email

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Thanks, Reddivari Sarva Jagannadha Reddy

I never cease to be amazed at the generosity of E-friends abroad! Yesterday a registered parcel (from India) arrived from a blogreader, R.S.J. Reddy, who lives in Tirupati, India. The postman said "You have friends all over the world, don't you! Kiev last week, now it's India!". The parcel turned out to contain a signed copy of R.S.J. Reddy's seventh book "The true value of PI" (cover shown below).

Reddivari Sarva Jagannadha Reddy (59) teaches zoology in Tirupati, India. He is interested in geometry and (presumably) found my article about a high accuracy squaring of the circle in the internet. Whilst I may not always agree with his mathematics, I am grateful for his generosity; after all, we barely know one another apart from a couple of mails and my blog-entries. Methinks the blogosphere is indeed a global village of friends :-)

So let me say a big thankyou, sir. Since I have not written any geometry textbooks, I shall revenge myself by sending you a signed novel of mine. The IT textbooks I wrote are in German, but there's a novel in English, so look in your postbox next month, sometime then you will get a small package from Germany. Thankyou again :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 17th February 2006 at 06:17 CET permalink Email

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Been trying to avoid this fourfold-meme drifting around the blogosphere. But now that three of you have tagged me, maybe I'll just fulfill my social obligations before it becomes four.

First blogger to tag me with the fourfold-meme was Gary Turner, but by the time I noticed the tag I'd missed the boat. Thanks to Peter Harris for the heads-up though.

Second was the anonymous Miffed Piggy, who also suggested a change in appearance of my blog and even mailed me three alternate templates. Sorry ma'am, but I'm not going to add your templates, lest the name of the blog have to be changed to "Four Skins" ;-)

On Tuesday of this week, Valentine's Day (sic?), Frank Paynter tagged me on the same fourfold meme, so I'm going to give in and comply, if only for a bit of peace and quiet ;-)

So here we go with my lists of four. So you golfers, FORE!, afore I go get my four-four :-

Four Jobs I've Had

• AI geek & IT consultant; what a waste of a career, even for a 3rd rate scientist.
• Corpse-washer in the morgue; but only until I got my first plastic bags of mashed up bits from the motorway, whereupon I vomited hard and quit on the spot :-(
• Cryptographer; if I told you more I'd have to kill you ;-)
• Flying instructor (that was the most fun). In the vein of the BOFH, maybe I'll blog a short series of anonymised anecdotes, calling it BFI (Bastard Flying Instructor ;-)

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

• Alien ( Yay, Sigourney, give us five!)
• Crossroads (now listen to Steve Vai as the Devil's guitarist :-)
• The Plank (the version with Spike Milligna, the well known typing error)
• The life of Brian (Monty Python vs. religion).

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch

• Upmarket : Mensa Quiz
• Downmarket : Al Bundy
• Futures : Dr. Who
• Past : Alles muss raus (starring Urban Priol)

Four Places I've Been on Vacation (in this millenium)

• Isle of Man (TT racing)
• Hurtigruten (blogged on 24th May last year ).
• Azores

Four Favorite Dishes

• Barbarella (Jane Fonda)
• Barbara Schöneberger
• Liv Tyler
• Liz Hurley

Oh, I see now that Frank meant the edible kind of dishes, what a pity :-( That'd be :-

• Lamb Vindaloo
• Surf'n'Turf
• Haggis, Neeps 'n Tatties
• Durian

Four Websites I Visit Daily

• Mandarin Design
• Jonny B's secret diary
• D-Flat Chime Bar
• Doug Alder

Four Places I'd Rather Be

• Queenstown, New Zealand
• Dufftown, Scotland
• La Digue, Seychelles
• and of TT-course(sic), on the Isle of Man Mountain Circuit, on a Manx Norton :-)

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging

• Haggiswurst
• Toxic Soup
• Nobody Asked
• Silent Lucidity

Ok you four, take it from here. I realise that's a tall order, since you four blog anonymously, but do your best without breaking cover :-) FYI, German net law requires that we have an Impressum, reachable from every page on the site, with the real name and address of the site owner, with all the consequences which that implies. So no anonymous blogging here!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 16th February 2006 at 06:16 CET permalink Email

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Valentine's Day : it's criminal!

The sheer scale and effrontery of the commercialisation of Valentine's Day pisses me off!

Boxes of chocolates with NINE! layers of wrapping. That's more than the number of chocolates inside :-( Posies of flowers at 200% markup, 300% for roses, 400% for last-minute shoppers, compared with the regular prices. Pink railway tickets, fer Gawd's sake!!

The world would be a better place if we all just said I love you! a little more often. I could go on, but I won't; instead I'm putting together an anti-valentine's day collage:-

Yes, I do know that the My Lai massacre in Vietnam (shown lower right) was on 16th march and not on 14th february. But you can't remind Americans of their war crimes often enough, now that King Dubya is trying to break the war-crime all-time record. Impeach W!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 14th February 2006 at 06:14 CET permalink Email

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Motivating schoolchildren with games.

I've been having discussions (also in the blogosphere) with several teachers about optimising usage of scarce teaching resources, a hot topic amongst teachers.

Option A : Should we be stretching the talented children as far as possible? In the UK, government ministers have been advised that compulsory tougher questions for A-level candidates should be introduced, with scores of A⁺ and A⁺⁺ so that university admission boards be better able to differentiate between candidates. Alledgedly A-levels have been dumbed down over the past 4 decades. University admissions tutors think the students they are recruiting are less capable, a report suggests.

Option F: Or should we be dragging the lower quartile, kicking and screaming, unwilling and/or disinterested, up to a government mandated minimum achievement level? What benefits our society more? The opinions of the aforementioned teachers were split 50/50 between these two extremes. Personally, I'm strongly in favour of option A.

Just picking one blogging teacher - Reflective Teacher - as an example, it would seem that lower quartile schoolchildren nowadays are less well behaved, and less well motivated. They could learn more and better if we could motivate them better/at all.

My experience has been that children can be motivated by game situations, where they may not realise they are learning ;-) Let me tell you about virtual darts :-)

The children were noisy in maths class and did not want to do their rote arithmetic exercises. So the teacher asked "Would you rather play a team game?" the children thought this was a great idea and approved noisily. The teacher formed two teams and hung a dartboard on the blackboard, explaining the rules of virtual darts. Virtual, because no sharp pointed darts get thrown around the classroom!

The object is to score down to zero from 301, finishing on a double or bull as usual. One child from each team chalks his team's scores on the blackboard. The rest of each team forms its own line. The child at the head of the line shouts out what he/she is aiming at and the child at the head of the other team's line can name an adjacent field on the board where the virtual dart lands. Example : Team A's aimer calls aiming for triple 7 (which is on the lower left of the dartboard). Team B's deflector calls out the dart went into the 16, 7 oder 19 fields, single or triple, e.g. "single 19". A toss of a coin decides whether the dart gets deflected. The Team A child at the blackboard (scorer) has to do the mental arithmetic to subtract this "single 19" from their current score to get the new score, which the child at the blackboard records. Of course, if he's too slow, his team will be shouting the answer at him ;-) The team A members then move forward one place in the line, the scorer moving to the rear of the line; that way everybody gets a turn as aimer, deflector and scorer. Then it is the turn of team B, the teams alternating throws.

Is it fun? Yes! Are the children motivated? Yes! Is team spirit encouraged? Yes! Do the children learn to understand minimax strategies instinctively ? Yes! Does the children's mental arithmetic improve? Significantly! How do I know? Because almost 50 years ago I was one of those children and would like to thank Jeb Blamey, our great and pedagogically talented maths teacher those 45+ years ago. Albeit somewhat belatedly :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 11th February 2006 at 06:11 CET permalink Email

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Rumours about the Death of Harry Potter ;-)

He's dead you know, really. But she's not going to tell you until the very last book, when she's milked all those quids from innocent and gullible children around the world. Gullible's travels. Be daft for her to kill off the 'Happy Rotter' before the last book. Ooops, freudan slip there, that should say 'Party Horror'. If she did murder Harry Potter in the middle of the series, she'd have to resurrect him for later tales. But resurrection only happens to fictional characters. And there was a real Harry Potter; more later about how that Harry Potter died. Writing is money for old rope, like the one shown here on the left. Highly strung; wizard prang! No noose is good noose.

So we need a plot to finish him off. Ever thought about his arch enemy, Vol-de-Mort? That's french you know, and means 'death-wish'. So Harry Potter is always fighting his death-wish, right, all the way through school. Hogwarts. But finally he and all his friends, as written by our quid-itching author, graduate from school and leave. Hogwarts, i.e, to buy a Harley and join the Harley Owners Group; hence Hogwarts. And like all other Harley riders, in a HOG - warts and all. Taking a handful of the Fat Boy's twistgrip on his test ride, Harry Potter shot ahead and was in danger of losing his mates, so Harry Potter throttled back and waited for them to catch up. Well, he bought the Harley and got a magic number plate, 5251351, that's the Happy Rotter's magic number, and rode to Holland, 'cos he likes watching Ruben's F*kk*nk pictures. He was given quarters to stay in by a Dutch artist, who then painted him, and whose picture of Harry's face was shown in a local head shop.

So Harry Potter was hung, drawn and quartered by a Dutch artist, but not in that order ;-)

And while he was in Haarlem, he spent his time partying with all those seductive girl spies, so he was on the phone a lot to the Mata Hari Party Service. But he also conjured up some bright patents, like this Combination tool, in particular for yellow motor vehicles. Car-amber!

Each friday - speaking his best schoolboy french - he would order fish at the chip shop, where, due to a missing letter 'S', Harry Potter was poisoned, although some would claim that Harry Potter was battered to death in the fish'n'chip shop ;-)

Finally he cleaned up his act and joined the British Army. So we know that Harry Potter was shot in 1939 and buried in a graveyard at Ramle, near Tel Aviv, with a saucy regimental inscription on his tombstone.

And the magic thing about it? Look at his army ID number on the gravestone. Then look at the number of the patent for the combination tool mentioned above. And look at the phone number of the Mata Hari Partyservice club, also mentioned above. And that of Mijnherr F*kk*nk too. Coincidence, thy name is Happy Rotter! If you think I just made all of this up, you can read all about how the real Harry Potter died on the website of the Worcestershire Regiment.

So now Harry Potter is dead, you need some better fantasy books to read, I recommend anything by Terry Pratchett, e.g. The Amazing Maurice, The Wee Free Men, Monstrous Regiment, A Hat Full of Sky, indeed, any and all of his ever so hilarious Discworld series.

In the meantime I'm off to play darts with DV Inferno, our local darts club, playing at the Allotment Club in Paderborn, Riemekestraße 175, Telephone number 05251 35111 :-)
You can't make this stuff up; it's magic!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 8th February 2006 at 06:08 CET permalink Email

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Bloody theocracies!

I am an atheist, not seduced by any of those human-invented gods, be they Flying Spaghetti Monsters or - to get us out of the Dark Ages - the Lightbringer Himself. Most of those religions are violent and bloodthirsty, the monotheistic ones especially so. "What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban...". Nowadays, we seem to be going through a phase of fundamentalist madness again.

I also think that theocracies are one of the worst forms of government! Like fascism.

Taking the oldest religions first, and moving into modern times, you'd think we had become more illuminated. Well maybe 23 of us have, but the rest?

In modern New York a fundamentalist mohel was found to be biting off the foreskins of young boys and then sucking the blood from their penises. That rabbi had hepaptitis-C and as a result the children on whom he practised his fundamentalist vampirism died. Michael Jackson was taken to court on far lesser charges, but that mohel got away with murder in the name of religion. "Thou shalt not kill" is Old Testament and applies to Jews too, surely?

Then we have Christian fundamentalism. The One True Church^® in all its variations. R.I.P all those who died at their hand, from the Inquisition to Dubya's crusade. It is not by chance that the most frequent juxtaposition to the word "Sin" is the word "Cardinal". How many innocent children were molested and choirboys buggered by the Catholic priests of the USA alone? Did they not hear the biblical order "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's ass!"? America (known WMD-user) now has an IQ challenged born-again preznit, with his most macho appendage on the nukulah trigger pointing at Iran, & as said by some, an Opus Dei goy recently appointed to the supreme court. Is the USA becoming a fascist theocracy?

This past week we had Islamic fundamentalism running amok, unable to bear a little satire and no sense of humour, demanding the death penalty for alleged blasphemy. Just recently we had Maal Hijra, the islamic new year. They have 1427 now, and appear to have reached the same state of civilisation as Europe had in 1427. Just FYI, on May 10th 1427 the Jews were all driven out of Berne (Switzerland), so anti-semitism was rampant then too. Even as it is now, with the president of Iran ranting that he wants Israel elided from the map :-(

Islamic fundamentalists also dispute women's rights, insisting that their women wear a burka or even an Afghan chador (چادر), a full length piece of cloth covering everything, except for a slit for the eyes, letting the women see out. The Taliban do however have a use for the piece of cloth cut out to make the slit. It is used by the men themselves :-(

Religion may be a highly infective mental disorder, but it's part of His intelligent design ;-)

Footnote : As you may have gathered, today's diatribe is a plea for freedom of speech, including the use of satire, I'm with the Danes here! Let Iran import Danish bacon again!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 6th February 2006 at 06:06 CET permalink Email

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Powerpoint-Karaoke ;-)

Having missed Gary Turner tagging me, I owe him one. So let me extrapolate from his current post, on sabotaging Powerpoint presentations. This is a new idea that he may not know about, but which all of you desk monkeys may enjoy, especially Haggiswurst :-)

Karaoke : you'll be familiar with the usual Karaoke sessions down at the pub, whereby background music is played and more (or more likely, less) accomplished contestants sing the words (if they can remember them) to the background music. The best(?) presentation wins, but some of the singers(?) are really crappy. Beer helps, for the listeners anyway ;-)

Powerpoint Karaoke : The judging committee brings along some really crappy Powerpoint slide shows, unknown to the public and the contestants alike. Each slide is projected from the laptop for 30 seconds and each contestant gets 3 slides assigned to them. They then have to give a lecture for those 3*30=90 seconds, based on their 3 slides. Then the next contestant is on until the PPT slides are exhausted. Contestants have NEVER SEEN the slides before! Also they are most probably not acquainted with the subject matter, jargon or abbreviations, so you can imagine all the verbal hand-waving going on ;-) At the end, the judging committee comments each 90 second presentation and awards points. How well can you waffle? Audience applause contributes to the points too. As do beer bribes for the judges (it IS a pub game) ;-)

Actually, this is not as dry as my description sounds; it is usually rather 'office-wimp' geekily hilarious. Finally, the audience has to say what the presentation was actually about, and award it points. Worst slideshow of the evening wins the PPT-lemon ;-)

Just to give you the flavour, you now have 30 seconds to say something about this :-

The other 29 [4 would have sufficed] are just as bad. This one sample slide :-

• does not have a clear message,
• is hopelessly overcrowded,
• has neither an author nor a title nor a date nor a version nor a file URL in the footer,
• uses colour coding and horizontal striping for the same purpose,
• does not use the ISO recommended standard Ishikawa diagramm for showing causes,
• contains unneccessary 'advertising' logos,
• etc. etc.

Now read Edward Tufte on the iniquities of PPT. And think about improving your own talks!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 4th February 2006 at 06:04 CET permalink Email

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Apple Mairkitting is gaen tae Scoatland...

Thanks to Bob Fairnie (actually his granddaughter, Laura Thorburn) for this picture :-)

Noo listen tae Donald, Wullie an thae Dog (1 MB MP3) frae thae Scots' choons waibsait.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 3rd February 2006 at 06:03 CET permalink Email

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Don't sell that disc 2nd hand . . .

. . . without scrubbing it clean of all data first!

There's been an amusing tale of incompetence making the rounds here in Germany. A local PC magazine bought a dozen 2nd hand discs via Ebay and then looked at them to see what they could find. Some had been scrubbed properly - tips on how to do this are given below - but some had merely been "reformatted". The MS reformatter does not delete files, it merely overwrites the file allocation table (FAT), leaving the data there. Typical shoddy MS quick and dirty approach to security! This meants that the purchaser (the PC magazine) could still read the data using any of the commercially available FAT-reconstruction tools.
BTW, folks say MS stands for Minimal Security :-(

The guy who had sold the disc via Ebay had merely reformatted it. He left behind a huge collection of illegally downloaded music, hard-core pr0n, and some personal files stored in the directory called "My data". The latter contained named photos of his friends, of youngsters eating pussy ;-) , of himself doing 'guess-what' singlehandedly (sic!), his resume´and his business card with name and address. In his resume´ he claimed to be a computer expert! Well, demonstrably NOT a SW expert, must have been a HW guy, with all that evidence of pulling his wire ;-) Wide open for blackmail, huh?

So to save any of my readers from a similar fate let me tell you how to scrub all of the data from any disc you may want to resell 2nd hand.

I recommend the Active@ Kill Disk - Hard Drive Eraser. It is security software for unrecoverable data elimination for any computer capable of booting in DOS mode from floppy drive. It uses access to the drive’s data on a physical level via BIOS bypassing logical drive structure organization, thus it does not matter what operating systems and file systems located on the machine. It can work with DOS, Windows 95 / 98, Windows NT / 2000 / XP, Linux, Unix for PC. They even have a free version to download on their site. Or you can pay under $30 to get a US Department of Defense 5220.22 M compliant version which supports several erasing methods including the most secure Gutmann's algorithm.

There is also another good freeware called Eraser available via Source Forge.

The British CESG guidelines call for overwriting seven times, to obliterate any off-track magnetism traces. The CIA overwrites ten times. Overwriting three times is sufficient for private discs in my opinion.

Looking at this issue the other way around, if you have buggered your disc for any reason, you can still recover (most of) your data by using a professional data recovery service. Perhaps not cheap, but for eejits who don't back up their data regularly, cheaper than trying to reenter all your data! Discs are so cheap these days, you could seriously think of getting another like you already have together with a RAID-1 controller and running the pair as a mirrored set. Most PCs will have sufficient room in the cabinet for a second disc. Check that your power supply can cope though. Use surge suppressors on the power line too. And go read my story about RAID-1 from August 7th last year first!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 1st February 2006 at 06:01 CET permalink Email

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