Technical issues

OK, I'm having some technical issues—some super new Blogger javascript seems to be stuffing everything.

I'm dealing with the issue and normal service should be resumed shortly.

Blogger appears to be playing up a bit (I can't post any comments, for instance)—until it's fixed, service might be (even more) patchy.

UPDATE: working again now.

Our generation will go to space...

Don't tell me that the concept of a space elevator doesn't fill you with thrills...

Some years ago (checking my archives, I find it was actually way back in 2006), I championed Liftport's Space Elevator programme, believing that—amongst other things—the whole concept was incredibly cool. Although they ran into difficulties at one point, Liftport is still going and still keeping the space elevator dream alive.

There are times when the world conspires to remind you of certain things, are there not? I have just started re-reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars—which features a space elevator—and now I have just stumbled across this fantastically enthusiastic post over at Counting Cats.

In 1995 I started my MSc in astrophysics (yeah, I have a dog in this fight but mine really is worthwhile—do I need to say why? If so I have lost you and you can grab your coat on the way out and basically I hope the door doesn’t bang your arse) at Queen Mary, London. I met a Spaniard there and you know what? She’d only written her undergrad dissertation on the space elevator! I was like wow! I really was. The idea, like so many others, like the Silbervogel or whatever had just been in the aether (which Einstein demonstrated doesn’t so much not exist as just not matter—ouch!).

Whether or not great minds think alike is irrelevant. Competent ones can do and we were far from alone. Both Agnetha and I had dreamed independently of something grand and this was not the meeting in a pub in Stepney of two geniuses. It was better than that for it was written on a beer mat. It was simply the realisation that it could be done and that we were not alone in conceiving this scheme. Yeah, I know it was not original but it honestly had been to me and her. That is my point. If the idea can occur without separate cause to the likes of me or Agnetha then…

… Maybe it’s a good one. Not an Earth-shaker. Not a Quantum Mechanics or whatever but basically, physically, (the engineering is as ever something else—I have have the greatest respect for engineers—they make dreams real—and that is way cool) absolutely obvious.

NickM finishes his post with this extraordinary video: it seems that the designs have not much changed since those that I saw in 2006, but the technology has finally arrived. It's time...


So, so cool...

Redesign and HTML5

A few weeks back, I did an Accessibility report on the Labour Party website (it failed, massively). During that post, I pointed out that this blog was not Accessible and that I would, to paraphrase Captain Picard, make it so.

This is still my intention, but I am going to go a little further—having found that I can support all browsers through various techniques, I am going to restructure the blog in HTML5 (and checking it all in this HTML5 Outliner!).

HTML5 is logical and neat—especially for a blog format website. Replacing endless divs with the new block-level elements—such as header, hgroup, footer, nav, aside, section and article all make reading the site structure so much easier.

Plus, of course, these elements allow for assistive software to recognise the page structure in a meaningful way, thereby increasing Accessibility—a subject that my recent article in Ability magazine expands on.

By the same token, I shall also be making extensive use of CSS3 and, as I intimated in my post about the iPad, deploying some effects—such as CSS animations—that will only work in the latest versions of Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers, e.g. Chrome).

All of this is as much to ensure that I continue to develop my coding skills, and learn the new syntax, as anything else. Naturally, however, The Kitchen will still be useable by every browser—but I do not intend to deliver the same experience to every browser.

For those who are interested, the rough browser breakdown for those visiting The Kitchen is as follows:

• Firefox: 40.97% (Rendering Engine: Gecko (Open Source))


• Internet Explorer: 34.22% (Rendering Engine: Trident (proprietary))


• Safari: 12.63% (Rendering Engine: WebKit (Open Source))


• Chrome: 7.11% (Rendering Engine: WebKit (Open Source))


• Opera: 2.90% (Rendering Engine: Presto (proprietary))

However, whilst all of this technical stuff might be interesting to your humble Devil—and sundry other geeks out there—it is, ultimately, you people who read this blog. As such, if you have any suggestions for the design—e.g. perhaps I should be using light text on a dark background—please feel free to sound off in the comments...

Apple's iPad

Apple's iPad: a thing of beauty—but is it any use?

A number of people—commenting on the blog and in email, IM and physical conversations—have asked your humble Devil for my thoughts on the Apple iPad. Having had a few hours to digest the announcement, and glide around the web to see the opinions of others (most notably this superb rundown from Daring Fireball), I am now ready to unburden myself (with the usual disclaimer^*).

First, I would like to say that it is quite obviously a thing of beauty. When Steve Jobs first held it out, between his two hands, I was unconvinced; once he sat down to use it, however, holding it in one hand, I realised that the proportions were exactly right.

Second, there are some features that are sorely lacking (although I expect them to be in the next release). The first is that there is no camera; no, not in the back, but in the front—surely being able to make video-calls via Skype or iChat is an obvious use for the iPad? I cannot understand why this would have been left out, as it would have been superb to demo too. As such, I shall have to put it down to a desire to keep something back for the next edition.

The next gripe here is the lack of multi-tasking—and I have two specific problems (which may or may not transfer to the final product). The first is with music: on the iPhone, some of Apple's applications do run in the background—I am thinking of the Mail programme and of the iPod element. As such, I can listen to music whilst doing other things, e.g. answering an email, etc. I have heard that one cannot do this on the iPad at present and it seems counterintuitive since one can perform these tasks on its smaller sibling.

Further, I have heard that one cannot have more than one Safari browser window open at a time: this, too, is a problem since one of my main activities—blogging—requires me to shuttle back and forth between windows, copying and pasting sections of text and URLs.

As I have pointed out, however, both of these features are present in the iPhone, so it may simply be that the software was not ready for the demo and that Apple intend to replace these features in the two or three months before the iPads actually go on sale. Or, of course, they may be provided in a software update shortly afterwards.

One of the other main criticisms is, of course, that the iPad ecosystem is, like the iPhone, entirely closed—even to the extent that you cannot see the file system. For many, this is, of course, a deal breaker but I am not sure that it entirely matters.

Why? Well, the iPad is clearly not intended, for most people, to be their main computer but an adjunct to it. As long as one can transfer files between the iPad and one's main machine (a Mac Pro in my case—this has relevance later) then this is not really a problem.

In fact, for many people, it might actually be a virtue—as Frasier Speirs notes in his excellent Future Shock article.

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
...

I'm often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

Fraser makes the point that many techies are up in arms about this because "secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism" but for many normal people, a computer can be a massive hassle.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".

It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

I couldn't agree more, and I think that the iPad is aimed at precisely this market.

It is also worth noting that a consensus is forming, amongst those who have actually used the iPad, that there really is no substitute for getting the machine in your hot little hands—here's Cruftbox on its power.

Well, I am lucky enough to have been at the Apple Event today. Deep within the Reality Distortion Field. I saw the demo live, not snap shots on a web site. I got to use the iPad and see how it worked in person. I talked with other people that had tried it.

And you know what, just like Steve Jobs said, you need to hold it for yourself. It’s a different computing experience. It’s intuitive and simple. The device is blazingly fast and obvious how to use. It is a third kind of computing between a smartphone and a laptop.

For those that have iPhones, you know the experience of showing someone the iPhone for the first time. The look in their face, when they first flick the screen or squeeze the image to zoom. The realization that this is something different, very different, than what they have experienced before.

I am a technology professional. For almost 20 years I’ve tested, used, broke, fixed, and played with all kinds of technology from broadcasting to air conditioning to software. I am not easily swayed in these things. But even with all my skepticism, I think the iPad is something different. A new way of computing that will become commonplace.

Oh Internets, I know you won’t believe till you hold one in your hands. You’ll bang on about features, data plans, DRM, open source, and a multitude of issues. You’ll storm the message boards, wring your hands, and promise you won’t buy one till ‘Gen 2’. The din will grow and grow as time passes.

And then one day, in a few months, you will actually hold one and use it. And you will say, “I want one. Iwant one right now.”

This lack of multi-tasking is massively offset by just how fast the damn thing is—applications launch instantly. John Gruber points out that a very significant development—not simply that the iPad is fast but that one of the reasons for this is that it's driven by an Apple-manufactured chip. This is extremely significant: Apple have never manufactured their own chips before—yes, they had financial input into the AIM chip group (before the switch to Intel) but they didn't actually design or manufacture the chips. Apple really do want to control the whole eco-system—because the company believe that this allows it to make better products (and thus more money).

Now, I know that very many people object to this—after all, they have popped up on this blog to criticise Apple's control of the far less closed Mac platform. And that's just fine—you don't have to buy an iPad (or a Mac).

But, your humble Devil simply isn't worried about such things: I am a designer, a graphic artist, a website coder, a writer, whatever—I don't want to get down and dirty with my computer. As Fraser Speirs points out (above), fucking around with my computer is not my Real Work—my computer is a tool that allows me to do my real work more efficiently. As soon as I spend even an hour fixing, hacking or otherwise configuring my tool then I am able to do an hour's less of my Real Work.

Do I really need to start mucking about in the guts of my machine? After all, as Jeff Lamarche succinctly puts it...

I'm a techie, but I don't need to be able to program on every electronic device I own. I don't hate my dishwasher because I can't get to the command line. I don't hate my DVD player because it runs a proprietary operating system. Sheesh.

And how much more exciting would websites be if the only browser that anyone used was WebKit? As it is, we will have to wait many years before we can use the amazing CSS advancements—such as CSS-driven animation—that the WebKit group have built in.

Unless, of course, you are designing websites purely for the iPhone or iPad—because they run WebKit as the rendering engine for Safari. In the same way that I currently design websites for standards-based browsers and then hack for those that aren't (yes, IE, I'm looking at you) can see myself starting to design websites for WebKit browsers, and then hacking for less-advanced browsers such as Firefox and IE. It's incredibly exciting.

Anyway, that is slightly off-topic and yet also relevant because, ironically, the iPad is also desirable to techies like me (and yes, this is where I answer the question, "will you get one, dear Devil?")—and, yes, I will get an iPad when they are available. Why?

It is because I am a power-user that I will get an iPad. Let me explain...

I have had Apple laptops but I never really used them very much. The screens were too small for me to do graphics work on them and, besides, the trackpad is not much good for that. So, I used to find myself carrying not only the laptop and its heavy power block, but also a mouse so that I could use it half-way effectively.

But still I didn't really use it—I had no real need to. With a bigger, more powerful machine at home and a reasonable one at work, I had no need to use the laptop in any meaningful way—it felt underpowered and, as such, rather frustrating (although this is partly because Adobe's software is increasingly bloatware). As such, I always felt that I was wasting its potential. And, of course, once it was nicked, I felt no need to get a new one.

In short, because I am a power-user a laptop does not have enough power for me—and yet it is too expensive and too powerful for me not to try using it for the power work.

Nevertheless, I do travel more and more these days—both for work events and for speaking engagements on behalf of the Libertarian Party—and, given the volume of it, I want to be able to get work done whilst I am travelling.

What I mainly need to get done is presentations or speech-writing: these are two activities which the iPad—equipped with the new iWork Suite—is admirably suited for. In fact, it gets even better...

One of the problems that I have is that I am constantly translating my Keynote slides into Powerpoint so that we can present them on the work's demo laptop—and, of course, a lot of things just don't translate tremendously well. Sure, there are other options, but at present I still need to spend the time to check and make corrections to my slides. But with the addition of a VGA-out dock, I can simply connect my iPad to the projector, thus avoiding all of the translation problems that I currently have—plus I can use a remote control to move my presentation along without breaking my rapport with the audience.

In addition, the iPad will do all of those other things that I want to do whilst on the move—although an iPad edition of Coda would make my day (hear that, Panic?)—and in a package that is smaller and, crucially, cheaper than one of Apple's (admittedly superb) laptops^**.

In other words, the iPad does enough for me to use it as a mobile device, whilst being cheap enough for me to justify buying one.

Plus, of course, it is a thing of beauty—and, yes, I just want one.

^* DISCLAIMER: I own an insignificant number of Apple shares, which have provided a pretty good return, i.e. 200%+ over the last few years. They have, as usual, fallen after the news of this announcement (they feel pretty heavily after the iPhone announcement too—and I picked up some more on the cheap) to a current price of $192.06. It's a good price since they were up at around $217 a few weeks ago. Not, of course, that I am giving anyone investment advice.

^** This is not to say that I think that Apple's laptops are overpriced—I don't think that they are. It is just that they are too expensive for me to justify buying another one given the very limited use that I would get out of it.

Accessing Labour

In 1995, the Tories introduced the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). The provisions of the DDA were considerably bolstered by NuLabour in the DDA 2005; NuLabour also introduced the Disability Equality Duty (DED).

45,000 public bodies across Great Britain are covered by the Disability Equality Duty (DED), which came into force in December 2006. The DED is meant to ensure that all public bodies—such as central or local government, schools, health trusts or emergency services—pay ’due regard‘ to the promotion of equality for disabled people in every area of their work.

This, of course, applies to websites too and the government has generally adopted the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines (WAIG): public sector websites are required to reach Level AA of the WAIG.

As some of you may know, in my real life I am involved with a company that specialises in building and reviewing Accessible websites—so the technicalities of the WAI are something that I am pretty familiar with.

So, inspired by the wife, I decided to go and have a look at the Labour Party website. It's not good—not good at all.


Click here for a larger PNG version.

The home page is shown above, and the numbers correspond to the points below.

1. Text rendered as images: this should be avoided where possible, especially where that image is also a link.


2. Hover states are swapped in by Javascript swapImage, rather than by CSS. Someone with Javascript switched off, e.g. those with partial sight using a screenreader, will see no feedback. Those navigating with the Tab key, rather than a mouse, will also see no feedback.


3. Dropdown menus are a big no-no, for a number of reasons. If they are Javascript-rendered then they will not appear in the HTML, and therefore will not be read by a screenreader.
   
   For those using the Tab key, many dropdown menus will not activate—meaning that those users cannot navigate the site.
   
   In this case, the menus have been rendered as a collection of nested lists, with no skip-nav link: this means that someone using a screenreader will have to navigate through every, single link in all of the submenus before they can get to the page content. On every, single page!


4. Flash. Ugh. I am using a Flash blocker, but many assistive technologies will prevent the use of Flash entirely—quite apart from locking out those who don't have the Flash plugin installed. This is, apparently, a quiz—for what it's worth.


5. Aaargh! The site is using Flash to render headings, so that a custom typeface can be used. There is an alternative text version for those without Flash...


6. ... but this heading—News—is an h1. Aaaaargh!
   
   For those not familiar with how headings should be arranged, think of them as being like an index to the page information—like a table of contents—where lower numbered headings relate to the higher numbered heading before them.
   
   For instance, a well structured page might look like this:
   

   <h1>Welcome to DK's website</h1>
  <h2>About DK</h2>
    <h3>Personal Life</h3>
      <h4>Who I am</h4>
      <h4>Where I live</h4>
      <h4>How to contact me at home</h4>
    <h3>Work Life</h3>
      <h4>Who I work for</h4>
      <h4>What my job title is</h4>
      <h4>How to contact me at work</h4>
  <h2>What DK is doing</h2>
    <h3>Current Blogging...</h3>

   
   ... and so on and so forth. You should only ever have one h1 on a page—it explains what that page is, broadly, about.
   
   You should never skip headings, i.e. in the flow of the code, you should never jump from an h1 directly to an h3.
   
   To return to the point originally made, the h1 for this page should be something like <h1>Welcome to the Labour Party online</h1> or something similar—not News.


7. See that link that says "Continue Reading"? There are a couple of problems here, which are also wider site problems.
   
   First, using all capitals is a bad idea: those with literacy problems will struggle more than usual.
   
   Second, a screenreader allows the user to take links out of context in order to navigate through the page; as such, all the screenreader user will hear is "continue reading" (and three of them at that). Continue reading what exactly?


8. Ooops. This heading—Videos—is another h1! No, no, no.


9. These videos are hosted on YouTube. Video is a difficult subject as regards Accessibility (although the HTML5 video tag should make life easier once browsers support it properly) but, as a bare minimum, you should provide a transcript for those using screenreaders. Ideally, you should also have close-captioning too (for deaf users).


10. Another Flash heading—How You Can Help. The text alternate is an h5! So, we have jumped from an h1 to an h5. Except that we haven't.
    
    Because in the flow of the code, the first heading is this h5!


11. Another Flash heading—Join The Fight is one heading, followed by For Britain's Future. And the textual alternate is an <h6>


12. Yet more Flash headings—the textual alternates are all h6s, which is roughly correct.


13. There are no label tags on these forms—ensuring that many screenreaders will not know what is supposed to go in here. They will just say "input". Yes? Input what?


14. Another Flash heading—Local Labour News. This heading is an h4!


15. The contrast between the yellow text and the red background is insufficient. Those with poor eyesight—and that includes those with colour blindness—may not be able to read this text at all. There is an excellent colour contrast tool over at Juicy Studio: it uses the algorithms given in the WAIG 2.0, and gives you the compliance Level (A, AA or AAA) for varying text sizes.


16. More Flash headings—Site, Labour's Polices, About Us and Support Labour. These are h3s! Do bear in mind my example of good heading structure above, whilst I review what this page's heading structure is (going in code order).
    

              <h5>How You Can Help</h5>
            <h6>Join The Fight</h6>
            <h6>For Britain's Future</h6>
            <h6>Donate</h6>
            <h6>Join</h6>
            <h6>Volunteer</h6>
            <h6>Events Near Me</h6>
            <h6>Fundraise</h6>
            <h6>Labour In Your Area</h6>
            <h6>Recruit</h6>
            <h6>Tell Your Friends</h6>
            <h6>Why I'm Labour</h6>
      <h4>Local Labour News</h4>
<h1>News</h1>
<h1>Videos</h1>
    <h3>Site</h3>
    <h3>Labour's Policies</h3>
    <h3>About Us</h3>
    <h3>Support Labour</h3>

    
    To summarise, the headings are in a totally nonsensical order, they don't relate to the parent headings, and there is no h2 at all! This is abysmal.


17. This list of links... Well... Instead of using an unordered list—ul—these links are simply loose in the code (not good practice). Further, the bullet points have been generated using an • character, so a screenreader will read, "bullet point... link: home; bullet point... link: Labour in Government; bullet point... link: News; bullet point..." Well, you get the idea.
    
    Believe me, someone who is blind is going to get pretty sick of having to listen to the word "bullet point" before they can hear what the link is. They could, of course, switch to links only mode, but they are going to have to go through all of the links in the top navigation first...!

There are a couple more general points to make.

• Much of the page structure is rendered in tables. Don't use tables for layout—use tables to display tabular data. And when you do so, you should make them Accessible, i.e. include legend, caption, scope, etc.


• There are pieces of CSS and Javascript scattered throughout the HTML. Don't do that. The HTML is for structure, not for styling or scripting. Call the CSS or the Javascript in the head and then hook them to the HTML elements with classes or ids.
  
  Some people like to apply their own custom stylesheets to webpages, e.g. many dyslexic people find that a pale pink or pale yellow background helps them to read the text much more easily. Using CSS within the page will over-write the user's styles, thus making the information more difficult to access.

It is a pretty poor showing Accessibility-wise: in fact, NuLabour is breaking their own law by blatantly discriminating against disabled people on their website.

How much does this matter?

Well, as far as I am aware, no organisation has yet been taken to court in the UK for having a non-Accessible website—although I know of a few cases where legal action was threatened. Of course, often because disabled people simply don't have the money to fight a lawsuit, but this is a role that advocacy groups might take on.

For instance, in the US (where a similar law applies), a private individual was bolstered by the National Federation of the Blind and NFB California in suing Target for its inAccessible target.com website. Target settled out of court for $6 million, and promised to make the website Accessible and incorporate website Accessibility into its staff training.

In this country, it is a legal duty for all organisations—pubic and private—to ensure that their website is Accessible. It's also, I think, a moral issue too: I have taken part in a lot of events, given talks and participated in debates around this issue—with able and disabled alike—and I have seen just to what extent the web can empower those with disabilities. Technology (and especially the web) is a massive force for good in this respect, opening up all sorts of avenues—not least in enabling them to work: a great many disabled people become self-employed entrepreneurs because they cannot find employment.

Anyway, I hope that some of the points that I've raised have been useful to any of you building a site!

What I must also say is that I am well aware that this blog is not particularly Accessible—I shall be addressing that as soon as I can, i.e. within the next few weeks.

An Accessible site does not have to be a boring site, by any means: an awful lot of Accessibility is simply to do with good HTML engineering, and the rest is about providing alternatives for those with varied disabilities.

But simply providing a text-only version of your site does not mean that your website is Accessible—a text-only version of this Labour home page would still have the useless heading structure and confusingly huge numbers of links that the normal, graphics version has.

Oh, a quick disclaimer: the company I work for (and am now a very tiny shareholder in) does do website Accessibility audits and Accessibility training—feel free to drop me a line if you're interested...

UPDATE: Commenter Mark Wilson says that the WAIG are a bit old.

The problem is that the accessibility guidelines (WCAG) are really old and not really designed to cope with the modern internet.

Not so. Yes, WAIG 1.0 were released in 1999, but WAIG 2.0 were released in December 2008 and were specifically designed to take account of new technologies—in fact, they are designed to be technology-neutral.

Insisting the site works with JavaScript turned off for instance stifles an awful lot of functionality. See Gmail with it turned on and off for an example.

Sure. And for those instances, there are the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) and the Web Accessibility-Accessible Rich Internet Applications guidelines (WAI-ARIA). These deal with, for instance, protocols for informing screenreaders that Javascript has changed something on the page.

The danger with a check list approach in designing a site when your check list is hopelessly out of date is that you don't really address the underlying issues with disabled people using web sites and you also become risk averse and don't innovate with truly useful web sites.

And this is why people should gain an understanding of Accessibility and update their knowledge of the subject as they update their knowledge of, for instance, coding or design.

Violating the laws of thermodynamics

A little while ago, I posted about how the "greenhouse effect" was a complete misnomer and the phrase "greenhouse gases", therefore, was also wrong.

Now a commenter points me to this article which highlights the revision and re-release of a paper that underlines this point rather more strongly.

The peer-reviewed Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics (Version 4.0) [PDF], published on January 6, 2009, appeared in the March 2009 edition of the International Journal of Modern Physics.

The central claims of Dr. Gerlich and his colleague, Dr. Ralf Tscheuschner, include, but are not limited to:

1. The mechanism of warming in an actual greenhouse is different than the mechanism of warming in the atmosphere, therefore it is not a “greenhouse” effect and should be called something else.


2. The climate models that predict catastrophic global warming also result in a net heat flow from atmospheric greenhouse gasses to the warmer ground, which is in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

Essentially, any machine which transfers heat from a low temperature reservoir to a high temperature reservoir without external work applied cannot exist. If it did it would be a “perpetual motion machine”—the realm of pure sci-fi.

Gerlich’s and Tscheuschner’s independent theoretical study is detailed in a lengthy (115 pages), mathematically complex (144 equations, 13 data tables, and 32 figures or graphs), and well-sourced (205 references) paper. The German physicists prove that even if CO2 concentrations double (a prospect even global warming advocates admit is decades away), the thermal conductivity of air would not change more than 0.03%. They show that the classic concept of the glass greenhouse wholly fails to replicate the physics of Earth’s climate. They also prove that a greenhouse operates as a “closed” system while the planet works as an “open” system and the term “atmospheric greenhouse effect” does not occur in any fundamental work involving thermodynamics, physical kinetics, or radiation theory. All through their paper the German scientists show how the greenhouse gas theory relies on guesstimates about the scientific properties involved to “calculate” the chaotic interplay of such a myriad and unquantifiable array of factors that is beyond even the abilities of the most powerful of modern supercomputers.

Indeed. And the two scientists make the point quite forcefully in the abstract to the paper.

(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

Now, true believers may argue that this does not actually prove that mankind is not, in some way, causing warming. However, it does comprehensively demolish the method by which they claim it is happening.

This thorough debunking of the theory of man made warming disproves that there exists a mechanism whereby carbon dioxide in the cooler upper atmosphere exerts any thermal “forcing” effect on the warmer surface below. To do so would violate both the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. As there is no glass roof on the earth to trap the excess heat, it escapes upward into space.Thus we may conclude that the common sense axioms are preserved so that the deeper the ocean, the colder the water and heat rises, it does not fall. QED.

This paper deserves wider dissemination as it strikes pretty hard at the roots of AGW theory. In my humble opinion, it does not entirely disprove the greenhouse theory, since the different properties of the differing layers of atmosphere might well provide some sort of mild, and purely temporary, "ceiling" effect—but then, I am no physicist.

It certainly does disprove the apocalyptic temperature rises that are predicted through CO₂ rises alone. But then the IPCC and its hangers-on have long since moved on—they now rely on the theory of "positive feedbacks" to provide their catastrophic scenarios.

This "positive feedback" postulation has long been the dodgiest part of the entire AGW hysteria, however, and for the entire multibillion pound industry environmental concern to be based on such an unproven theory leaves it on very uncertain ground.

UPDATE: via John B on Twitter, here is an long refutation of the above paper. The blogger's article does make a number of unbacked assertions, although the length of the article may preclude amplification in that entry.

Plug in, baby

Why has no one thought of this before, eh?

The venerable three pin plug has been with us for many years: whilst we all know that our plugs are better, safer and generally brilliantly British, nothing can alter the fact that they are a bit cumbersome—especially as gadgets get smaller and smaller.

As such, surely this must be the best re-invention of anything ever?

The multiple plug adaptor.

The Royal College of Art's graduate show has opened, and this year, the show-stopper was a plug. Min-Kyu Choi impressed every passer by with his neat, apparently market-ready plug that folds down to the width of an Apple MacBook Air. "The MacBook Air is the world's thinnest laptop ever. However, here in the UK, we still use the world's biggest three-pin plug," says Choi.

Choi's plug is just 10mm wide when it is folded. To unfold it, the two live pins swivel 90 degrees, and the plastic surround folds back around the pins so the face of the plug looks the same as a standard UK plug. The idea produced a spin off, too. Choi created a multi-plug adaptor, a compact standard plug sized unit with space for three folded plugs to slot in, as well as one that charges USB devices.

This is, quite simply, genius.

Let's hope that we get to see this on the market before wireless power takes over, eh?

The fundamental problem with Open Source...

... is that—all too often—you end up with multiple platforms, multiple versions of the code, etc., as Fake Steve points out.

According to Gadget Lab, app writers have somehow just realized that the reason open source fails in customer-facing use cases (as opposed to back on the server in a locked room) is that it splits like a bead of mercury into a zillion different forms, and nobody can write apps that work across the platform because, strictly speaking, there is no “platform.”

There are just a bunch of different devices that have a lot in common with each other but aren’t quite the same. Trying to turn that into a “platform” is like trying to build a porch using three hundred pieces of wood, none of which are the same size.

This does become something of a problem when you are trying to build and maintain something as complicated—and with as many dependencies—as an Operating System (OS).

Just think of all of those different desktop Linux "distros"; think of all of those little tweaks and codebase differences that they employ and now imagine trying to develop for them.

And, as far as a user is concerned, the user interfaces suffer the same fracturing—especially as you can apply different UIs to varying distros, or even the same distros.

(In my real job, we have had enough problems developing software between different versions of Coldfusion—and that is just one server application from one company.)

Dear friends, this is only going to get worse, not better. Think about it. Every handset maker wants its device to be different. And special. So they intentionally tweak the OS to give themselves what they think of as an “advantage,” when really it’s nothing of the sort, because all it does is prevent ISVs from writing apps for them. Even if the handset makers weren’t totally short-sighted and evil, there’s the competency issue — ie, even within a single company you’ve got a bunch of different teams of engineers, and they’re all using whichever version of Android was the latest and greatest when they started out on their project, or whichever version they happen to like best, and they’re all making their own tweaks and changes trying to outdo the guys across the hall, or in the next building.

Those Open Source projects that have worked—Firefox and the other Mozilla applications spring to mind—have done so because they have had one controlling entity ensuring a properly documented and linear development path.

It's worth bearing in mind when you look around and wonder why Linux is not more popular...

Misnomer of the century: "the Greenhouse Effect"

The Greenhouse Effect is one of those things that no one disputes, right? You know, the reason that the Earth is warmer than it should be is because of the fact that energy from the sun warms the planet but that "greenhouse gases" (such as water vapour, methane and CO₂) trap the heat reflected from the surface—and so the planet is warmed.

No one disputes that, right? It's established science, yes?

Er... No.

One thing we can get out of the way immediately is that it doesn’t work in the same way as a greenhouse. There used to be a theory, dating back to Joseph Fourier in 1824, that visible radiation could enter through the transparent glass, but because glass is opaque to infrared, when it is re-emitted it gets trapped. Fourier proposed that gases in the atmosphere could act the same way. This theory was proved wrong for actual greenhouses in 1909 by Professor Wood of John Hopkins University. An experiment comparing a pane of glass to a pane of crystallised rock salt (Sodium Chloride) which is totally transparent to infrared found no difference in temperature. In fact, greenhouses work by preventing convection, a mechanism that is of course impossible to freely floating CO2.

The above paragraph is taken from PaAnnoyed's superb post at Counting Cats, which helpfully clarifies the physics of the so-called Greenhouse Effect: it's worth reading the whole post, but I'll present a quick summary.

Some of you might remember that, a few weeks ago, I published a piece pointing out that the approximate mass of Earth's atmosphere is...

... about five quadrillion (5x10¹⁵) tonnes, three quarters of which is within about 11 km (6.8 mi; 36,000 ft) of the surface.

This is, you will not be surprised to know, because I was researching the greenhouse gas effect myself: alas, a lack of time meant that I hadn't got around the writing the post—and now I have no need to do so.

So, if the Greenhouse Effect has nothing to do with greenhouses, then why is the Earth warmer than it should be? And why is the mass of the atmosphere relevant? Simples...

What keeps the layer at 10 km so cold? –54 C is far below the –24 C we expect on energy-balance grounds, so it can’t be by radiating to space. And the fact that there is a straight line all the way down to the ground suggests that whatever the mechanism is, it’s the same one that keeps the surface at +14 C. Straight lines don’t happen by accident.

I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. The answer is pressure. Because of the weight of air, the pressure at the surface is greater than it is higher up. This means that if air moves up and down, the pressure changes, and the air expands or is compressed. And when air is compressed its temperature increases.

Air is driven to circulate up and down by convection. As it rises, it expands and its temperature drops. As it descends, it is compressed and its temperature rises. This maintains a constant temperature gradient of about 6 C/km. (It would be bigger, but evaporation of water carries heat upwards too, which somewhat counteracts the effect.)

No heat passes in to or out of the air to effect this change. It is solely an effect of the changing pressure. (If you really want to know, the compression does ‘work’ on the gas, which increases its internal energy. It doesn’t come from any flow of heat or radiation.)

This temperature gradient is called the adiabatic lapse rate, and is an absolutely standard bit of physics.

Is that all clear? Good. Now, let's move onto the second part...

When we look at the Earth in infrared wavelengths, we see it merrily glowing away, like a coal ember, radiating all the heat it has absorbed from the sun. But unlike the view in visible light, where we can clearly see the surface, in infrared the atmosphere is fuzzy and opaque. It is full of water vapour, and a few other trace gases, that fog our view of the surface. And so when we ask what temperature the surface of the Earth should radiate at, the surface we see isn’t solid ground, but this fuzzy layer high up in the air. And therefore, it is this surface that settles down to –24 C, to radiate exactly the right amount of heat away.

It is about 4 km up, and held at –24 C by the heat rising from below balancing radiation directly to space. Below it, compression increases the temperature. Above it, decompression lowers it. The actual mechanism and explanation for the Greenhouse Effect is in fact pressure. To be specific, it is the pressure difference between the surface and the average altitude from which heat radiates to outer space. Moreover, it is the exact same mechanism by which the upper atmosphere is cooled to –54 C, and there is no way you can explain a massive cooling by heat being in any sense “trapped”.

Heat is not trapped by absorption by CO2. That is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! Such trapping does go on, but it has no long-term effect on the temperature because the adiabatic lapse rate has overriding control. You can even theoretically get a greenhouse effect with no greenhouse gases at all! All you need is some high altitude cloud to radiate heat to space.

So, given that the standard Greenhouse Effect model is... well... let's call it "simplified" rather than "a colossal pack of lies", why are people still banging on about CO₂ trapping warm the heat?

Well, because CO₂ does have some minor effects.

Now supposedly, according to rather more complicated calculations, doubling CO2 levels in Earth’s atmosphere will raise the average altitude of emission about 150 m, which will therefore raise the pressure difference and hence the surface temperature about 1.1 C. If we raise CO2 by only 40%, surface temperature will go up about half that. So we had half a degree last century (an amount too small to reliably measure). We’ll have half a degree next century. And that’s all the standard Greenhouse Effect can give you.

As PaAnnoyed points out, to get any more than that requires that you factor in a whole bunch of other, less well understood effects—as well as a bunch of Chaotic modelling (which are, by their very nature, not closely understood or predicted).

And no, as PaAnnoyed also explains, Venus is not an example of "runaway global warming"—anyone who tells you that "Venus is what will happen to Earth" is either ignorant or lying. Or both.

As I said, you really need to go and read the whole post, but I do think that we can put to bed the whole concept of CO₂ "trapping" heat. Further, I think that we really ought to stop talking about the "Greenhouse Effect" because, having come to mean what it does, it is entirely misleading.

In the meantime, Kerry McCarthy has put an inflammatory title to a post by Next Left that—quite reasonably—points out that many Tory bloggers (and some non-Tories, such as your humble Devil) are somewhat at odds with the stated policy of the Conservative front bench on the issue of climate change.

But the simple fact is that the Tory front bench is extraordinarily short of anyone with any kind of scientific credentials whatsoever. In fact, like the LibDim and NuLabour benches, the Tories' representatives are only really experts in how to steal money off the taxpayers of Britain.

The anthropogenic climate change hoax gives our irredeemably corrupt politicos ample excuse to do precisely that—are you surprised that they have wholeheartedly embraced this massive fraud?


UPDATE: Timmy has commented on this piece and what he says about the IPCC is quite correct: his error lies in ascribing certain motives to your humble Devil.

The result of which is that this explanation of atmospheric physics is not some great “gotcha” showing that the whole climate change set of prognostications is wrong.

Indeed. As I have said over there, I was not intending this as yet another proof that anthropogenic climate change is a colossal hoax—surely I have published enough of those by now.

No, what I intended to do was merely to educate: to show people that the Greenhouse Effect has nothing to do with greenhouses, and that CO₂ does not affect the Earth's temperature in the way that most people think it does.

The desire to do so was inspired by reading a number of posts in which bloggers or MSM reporters stated something like "the Greenhouse Effect is not in dispute" or "everyone agrees that CO₂ is a Greenhouse Gas" or "no one denies that CO₂ traps heat in the atmosphere", and then proceeded to show that they didn't understand how the Greenhouse Effect actually operates.

So, as I said, this article was not supposed to be a "gotcha"—merely educational. After all, I doubt that they teach the truth in schools anymore...

Technical hitch

At some point this morning, The Kitchen seemed to go off the air. The issue seems to be around the fact that Blogger does not like hosting blogs on "naked domains" and requires, instead, that you host on a subdomain: that is to say, http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk is acceptable, but http://devilskitchen.me.uk is not (the www. bit is the sub-domain).

Obviously, when I originally set up my domain a few years ago, Blogger did not make this distinction: now, it seems, the policy has changed and thus the site went down.

This has pissed me off slightly—I am so frantically busy at present that I really did not need to be fucking about with this kind of thing—and I am going to re-examine WordPress as a possible alternative.

However, I hate writing templates for WP and I do like the simplicity of Blogger. Plus, of course, not only is Blogger free to use but also it isn't putting any strain on my server. In other words, I wouldn't expect a migration any time soon.

Anyway, we are (mostly) back now. It will take a little while for the domain changes to propagate throughout the web but, once they have, all previous links should still work.

In the meantime, work is taking me to Wales and back for most of tomorrow so blogging will be light.

Thanks for your patience—and all of the emails expressing concern.

Regards,

DK

Well, I know where £55 of my next pay cheque is going...

The new Apple Magic Mouse...

The Multi-Touch area covers the top surface of Magic Mouse, and the mouse itself is the button. Scroll in any direction with one finger, swipe through web pages and photos with two, and click and double-click anywhere. Inside Magic Mouse is a chip that tells it exactly what you want to do. Which means Magic Mouse won’t confuse a scroll with a swipe. It even knows when you’re just resting your hand on it.

Does anyone else think that it bears a certain resemblance to the spaceship in Flight of the Navigator...?

P.S. The newly updated iMacs are pretty gorgeous too—I want the one with the 27" screen. (Given these recent updates, Blue Eyes, I would say that there will be no other releases for a while.)

DISCLAIMER: your humble Devil holds an insignificant number of Apple shares, the price of which has, nevertheless, gone up quite nicely on the back of quite excellent Fourth Quarter Results (via Daring Fireball).

A quick note on fakecharities.org

The server running fakecharities.org has fallen over. Both the server chaps and I are trying to get the machine back up.

I am sure that it is entirely coincidental that the server did come under an attack a few weeks ago, and that a malicious script affecting Apache was found to be running on it last week.

I am working on migrating the database and am confident that we will be back up and running again within a few days.

UPDATE: fakecharities.org is back up, but I am working on a more secure fix.

Windows 7 Upgrade path

Your humble Devil would like to assure his readers that he would never dream of bashing Microsoft and their entirely brilliant operating system—after all, people who have been using pre-release copies tell me that Windows 7 is actually pretty good.

No, I am posting this merely as a public service to any of The Kitchen's readers who might be considering the upgrade to said version of Windows.

Via The Macalope, I see that Walt Mossberg asked Microsoft if they could provide him with an easy to understand chart showing which versions of Windows could be easily upgraded to Windows 7. As you will see from the chart that Microsoft sent to him, there are two main processes—Upgrade In Place and Custom Install.

I shall let Mossberg elaborate on what, precisely, Custom Install means.

All of the others, denoted by blue boxes, will require what Microsoft calls a “Custom Install,” also known as a “clean install” — a procedure Microsoft doesn’t even refer to as an “upgrade.” For most average, non-techie consumers whose PCs have a single hard disk, that will require a tedious, painful process with the following steps: temporarily relocating your personal files to an external drive or other computer, wiping your hard drive clean, then installing Windows 7, then moving your personal files back, then re-installing all of your programs from their original disks or download files, then reinstalling all of their updates and patches that may have been issued since the original installation files were released.

Great. Still, I imagine that it is only the older versions of Windows that will require this dramatic and tedious process to be undergone. Um...


Please note that this chart only shows the upgrade path for three of the most common versions of Windows 7—there will, in fact, be six versions (although one is only for sale in Developing Countries).

As I say, friends tell me that Windows 7 is actually a pretty good OS: your humble Devil would like to add that I hope that you all have lots of fun getting there.

P.S. Since I'm covering OS upgrades, I'll also briefly mention Apple's next version of Mac OS X. Snow Leopard will be released in September, priced at $29. It has been refined rather than added to: it adds a considerable number of new technologies and APIs in order to aid future development, but standard users will not see many new features (hence the low price).

Snow Leopard is designed to use fewer resources than its predecessor—it takes up half the hard drive space of the previous incarnation (about 6GB rather than 12GB). However, it will be Intel-only—which is how I imagine they have been able to cut down so much on the drive space required.

UPDATE: Via Techcrunch, it seems that someone has wittily produced a Mac OS X Upgrade Path Chart...


Most amusing (although, as I pointed out above, re: Intel processors, not entirely true)...

Microsoft's long, slow decline

There's a thoughtful article on Microsoft over at Daring Fireball today: John Gruber analyses the recent bad news from the software maker and comes to a rather obvious—to my mind—conclusion.

Back in April, when the new PC Hunter ad campaign started, David Webster, general manager for brand marketing at Microsoft, said the following in an interview with Newsweek’s Dan Lyons:

He says the idea was to turn Apple’s “I’m a Mac” campaign to Microsoft’s advantage. “We associate real people with being PCs, [but then Apple] ends up looking pretty mean-spirited, the way they go after customers,” he says. “It’s clear that’s who they are insulting.” At the same time he can’t resist taking a crack at the preciousness of some Mac users. “Not everyone wants a machine that’s been washed with unicorn tears,” he says.

Quoting the above, I wrote:

It seems clear that Microsoft’s stance on the Mac’s sales growth is that there’s nothing wrong with Windows or right with the Mac, but rather that there’s something wrong with Mac users.

Now, some of you might agree with Webster but—if you want to tempt people back to using your product rather than your competitor's—then insulting them is not a good strategy. But, as it happens, that is not really the meat of the matter.

Microsoft is no longer ignoring Apple’s market share gains and successful “Get a Mac” ad campaign. But the crux of these ads from Apple is that Macs are better; Microsoft’s response is a message that everyone already knows — that Windows PCs are cheaper. Their marketing and retail executives publicly espouse the opinion that, now that everyone sees Apple computers as cool, Microsoft has Apple right where they want them.

They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus—not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users—that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.

If I had a pound for every time that I have heard a friend or colleague say, "I really want a Mac, I just can't afford it" then I would be able to upgrade mine. But Apple just does not compete in the low-cost space.

First, there is an Apple tax—although it is not as much as everyone thinks—but this isn't just to do with brand: you are paying for the research and development that goes into developing novel machines and innovative software.

These costs have to be recouped and—since Apple is the only company that researches and manufactures Apple hardware and software—then, of course, it will be Apple consumers who pay the price for it.

The indication that Apple is right is the fact that so many people think that the price is worth it—and that so many people are fanatical about the company's products (some are not so keen on certain ways that the company operates, of course).

Fundamentally, Apple only competes in the high-end market because that is where the profits are. Research and development has a dollar cost attached to it (rather than a percentage cost): if you need to make, for the sake of argument, $350 on each machine to be profitable then you aren't going to be in the market for selling machines at $450, are you? No, you are going to compete at the high end where your 30% profit margin is going to make the dollar amount that you need.

And, given that Microsoft dominates the low-end market—ironically, since Jobs originally set up Apple with the dream of offering the first sub-$1,000 personal computer—why compete with them in that unprofitable space? What is the point?

Bigger market share? But why would Apple want a much bigger market share? The company is amazingly profitable as it is—a bigger market share can only bring trouble, in the form of viruses and the need to support more hardware.

And, yes, there is the cool factor. Mac-users tend to be creatives, but they also tend to be successful. If you aren't successful, then you won't be able to afford a Mac. Apple Macs are a status symbol—a sign that you are either a creative (and thus unique: every good designer has their own style) or unusually good at what you do. Or, of course, both.

One of the articles that Gruber refers to concerns an NPD analysis that shows that Apple captures 91% of all retail sales of computers over $1,000. 91%! Yes, this is retail only, but Apple has always been popular in educational and research establishments (in the US at least) and they are starting to make inroads into commercial companies too.

And where does this leave Microsoft? It leaves the company making the majority of its sales in the low-end market, with wafer-thin profit margins. It's not the space that I would like to be in, that's for sure.

I’m not arguing that Microsoft will collapse. They’re too big, too established for that to happen. I simply think that their results this quarter were not an aberration, but rather the first fiscal evidence of a long, slow decline that began several years ago.

We will see whether John is right—I suspect that he is.

P.S. Just as an aside, and via Stuart Sharpe (with whom I'm working on a small project), these quotes demonstrate just why I love the Apple ethos.

First up is Steve Jobs, on why Apple doesn't do market research:

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

Next up is Apple's chief designer, Jonathan Ive.

“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”

As the commenter says, Apple's ethos could be summed up as:

“Make the very best products. Business will follow.”

Now, one can argue whether or not Apple does make the very best products—obviously, I think that they do. Equally, however, my Chairman argues that "there is no such thing as a perfect product"—what is right for one person may not be right for the next one.

However, those of us who are most involved in new product development at my company share Apple's ethos: we genuinely want to make great products that make people's lives easier and more pleasant.

And, as the person who directs the User Interface (UI) in our new products, I can tell you that—although I don't (consciously) plagiarise their work—Apple is a big inspiration nonetheless: not least in the fact that, rather than it being almost an after-thought, the UI is now at the centre of our applications...

UPDATE: a couple of days ago, an exploit using SMS was found in the iPhone. Apple have released a fix for this: just plug in your iPhone and choose Check For Update in iTunes.

DISCLAIMER: I own an insignificant amount of Apple shares—which are most definitely on the up again: in fact, they've nearly doubled in price since February.

Nuclear Fusion update

A Polywell in operation: built as a summer project (cost: $3,000) by students at Pennisula College in the US.

As regular readers will know, your humble Devil has been following the Polywell Fusor project for some years now.

The last lot of testing was done on WB-7, but the results have been somewhat shrouded in secrecy, due to the involvement of the US Navy in funding the project.

However, IEC Fusion Technology finally has some news on this front: essentially, the WB-8 has been commissioned.

To gain the full significance, it is worth reading the whole post; however, the main conclusions are reasonably clear.

All in all the new contract has a lot of good news. To sum up:

• What it means about past work: it went well.


• What it means for the future: verifying engineering rules


• More: there is a plan to test the Hydrogen/Boron 11 fuel combination


• More: They must be confident of results since they are planning a WB-9

It is also worth reminding ourselves that the Fusor project is costing a few million dollars, whereas the so-far utterly unsuccessful tokamak ITER project—which involves such delightful regimes as China—is costing tens of billions and is already severely over-budget and behind schedule.

Guess which one our government is backing and funding...?

Photoshop's File Format (PSD)

N.B. I'll get back to politics in a bit: I'm just a bit busy and feeling a bit jaded with politics at present.

Via Daring Fireball, the gentleman who constructed Xee, an open source image editor for Mac OS X, wins the prize for one of the most acerbic source code notations ever.

// At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.

//PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

//If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.

//Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more. Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

//Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

//PSD is not my favourite file format.

No shit...

Incidentally, it seems that Adobe is coming in for a lot of stick, with the user interface in the latest version of its application bundle, Creative Suite 4, getting a sustained, comprehensive and continuing monstering over at Adobe UI Gripes.

Me moaning about shoddy UI inconsistencies and mistakes in Adobe products and how they get shittier with every release.

One of the earliest pieces posted at The Kitchen was on the theme of Adobe's purchase of its only significant competitor in the creative software industry, Macromedia, and why it was not a good move as far as users were concerned. Monopolies are never a good thing, and Adobe's subsequent progress has only served to underline this fact.

On the Mac platform, as I pointed out in a recent post, there are competitors coming through—Pixelmator and Acorn are both good and cheap—but nothing quite covers the whole Photoshop feature set. But then again, neither of those applications costs £500—more like £50.

Users—and Adobe itself—desperately need some competition, so more power to the small Mac developers: the end result will be better applications for us all.

UPDATE: Adobe's John Knack replies, and rebuts, some of the allegations about the file format, pointing out that it alows a considerable amount of backwards compatibility. He also points out, as did your humble Devil, that its growth has very much been organic.

I'm confused. Aren't you...?

Ever since the news of the McBride allegations broke, I have been seeing hundreds of hits at The Kitchen from people searching for such things as...

• "nadine dorries"


• "nadine dorries mp"


• "nadine dorries why my marriage is over"


• "nadine dorries age"


• "south africa nadine dorries"


• "dorries one night stand with fellow mp" and,


• "nadine dorries boyfriend"


• (although no "nadine dorries liar", which is unusual).

In fact, over 50% of all searches have included one of those terms.

I can't imagine what could have sparked the sudden interest in this rather minor MP, can you...?

MacHeist 3

I bought the MacHeist bundle last year, and many of the applications have been incredibly useful. This year's bundle is now out and I have bought it again because it is, once again, a stunner.

You get 14 really rather excellent Mac applications from small software developers—worth over $900 seperately—for $39. Acorn—an image editing app—and Espresso (code editing) are worth this price on their own. There are only six hours left in which to purchase and, seriously, this is a great deal.

MacHeist has caused controversy every year that it has been run, but your humble Devil doesn't really care about the ins and outs of how they put the whole thing together: what I do know is that you are getting a huge number of excellent applications for a fraction of the price.

It does encourage people to try small application developers' wares, which can only be a good thing. One of my irritations is that the big software houses—by which I mean Adobe, because they are the only one left, really—are writing hideous bloatware and, if I can find viable alternatives, then I will use them.

Competition is always good and—fuck me ragged—Adobe really needs some competition.

Anyway, if you are a Mac user, wander on over and have a look: even if you don't use all of the apps, it's still worth the price. And if you aren't a Mac user, why not wander on over and marvel at how incredibly brilliant Mac software development has become over the last few years...

The return of fakecharities.org

Many grateful thanks to Harry Haddock of Nation of Shopkeepers for, due to his hard work and diligence, your humble Devil finally has a functioning server again.

And that, of course, means that fakecharities.org is back!

I shall be ressurecting other sites as I go along; it may take a little while to pull everything back up but we'll get there...