I’ve been blogging with WordPress for around five years as of next month. That’s frightening. It makes me feel old.

WordPress is a superb bit of software, and it’s done me good service while I’ve used it. However, after five years of shunting it around various servers, fiddling with MySQL and arguing with TinyMCE, it’s time for a change.

From now on, I will be using OctoPress to generate my blog. It was a pig to set up, but, in the long run, I believe it will be more resilient and more convenient for me to write for. Support for linked lists, á la Gruber, Arment et. al has just been added, so I now consider it to be ready for me to use it. I did take a look at Marco Arment’s Second Crack, but couldn’t get it to work reliably–Marco’s warning that it’s unsuitable for almost everyone should be taken literally.

Hosting is still on the fabulous NearlyFreeSpeech.net and things will continue this way for the foreseeable future. The theme is a modified version of the OctoPress default theme, with the sidebar turned off because I like narrow columns. One technical advantage from the reader’s point of view is that the new theme should scale down a lot more nicely on smaller screens: if you read this on your phone, you should receive a much nicer drop-down menu for moving between pages, and columns that shrink themselves!

Finally, this blog also has a new address: rothwell.im. None of the old content has been moved over, but it will continue to remain at notroswell.com forever (or, for as long as I can be bothered to pay the anually-increasing VeriSign minimum registration fee.) If you’re using a feed reader, please re-point it to the new address.

Essentially, this is a fresh start. Five years ago, I was a secondary school student with a reasonable grasp of some aspects of technology, many ill-informed opinions and a pipe dream of writing for an audience. Now, I’m studying for a BSc in Computer Science in London, a city I fell in love with around eighteen months after those first, tentative posts using WordPress. Around this time last year, I wrote a bleak, depressing little short story for a competition at college about a man, dying from cancer, taken by the narrator on a one-way Grand Tour of the universe. It won.

This does speak to a lot of things: quite apart from any personal maturity I may fool myself into thinking I have attained, my writing has improved substantially. This is why I’m not particularly bothered about bringing most of the stuff over from the old blog: as I said, the old site will remain up indefinitely, but once I get round to it I’ll probably only bring the choiciest cuts over from the old site.

At this rate, by 2017 I’ll be Donald Knuth, J. K. Rowling and Stephen Fry all rolled into one. (Weirder things have happened.)

All that remains for me to do is to thank you, dear reader, for putting up with my drivel for the last five years–and I do hope that, when I come to write another self-congratulatory post in five years’ time, you’ll still be there to wallow in my continued mediocrity.

Children are naturally inquisitive. They do not need to be taught how to use Excel, since any child with an ounce of sense, after being told to use the “help” feature embedded into the application, can figure it out for themselves. (If not, to be quite frank, they should qualify as ‘special needs.’)

Teaching applications is a colossal waste of kilowatt-hours, and of man-hours. Children will be far better served by this new programme in computational science. Teaching them about the workings of a computer is a far better solution: it will give students an in-depth understanding of how and why their computer works in a certain way. This, quite aside from preparing a new generation of digital pioneers, will make it easier for them to overcome problems in everyday computer usage.

Computer science is, essentially, problem solving with bells on. True, finding an army of CompSci-qualified teachers in the next nine months will be a big task (and I doubt it will be possible, possibly not even within a year and a half.) This will be especially true when many teachers are incapable of teaching basic applications work. However, I genuinely believe that, approached from the right angle, CompSci is an easy subject.

For instance, in both my primary schools (the latter of which was judged to be ‘failing’ shortly before my departure) we were taught a crude form of turtle programming with LOGO. This included using a Bigtrak, and a sort-of in-class role playing adventure game played on PCs in year 6, in which we had to (for instance) guide a boat to its destination by entering instructions and trying to avoid hitting the banks.

This was totally absent in the “ICT” curriculum in my secondary school. It was dull, “project”-based bollocks in which we were told to “make a website and some matching pamphlets,” for instance. Regularly, our teacher (let’s call her “Mrs T.”) would advise us to “really show off” in Dreamweaver, by making text bright blue on a shocking pink background and using the (deprecated) <blink> tag to make it flash. She also once opened a JPEG image in Dreamweaver’s text editor, and declared the resulting gibberish to be ‘hex codes.’

The shocking thing was that Mrs T. was qualified as an ICT teacher, while my (wonderful) primary school teachers, who inspired me to continue with computers to this day, were not specialised in any particular subject at all. I will maintain, therefore, that anyone who is willing to give the subject their attention will find CompSci easy to learn, and easy to teach.

As someone who dislikes this Conservative-led government, I am pleasantly surprised to say that this will be, if anything, a positive legacy of the Coalition: our next generation will be a generation of problem-solvers, as opposed a generation of accountants, secretaries and bullshitters. If the government is to knock a hole in higher education, this move represents a shocking return to common sense—and a new-found respect, in this government, for our heritage as a knowledge economy.

Stock photograph of train cribbed from Wikipedia (credit: Chris McKenna (Thryduulf))

by CLIFFORD RAGBULLOCK

HARD-WORKING COMMUTERS on Northwind Trains took to Twitter to vent their fury at “astronomical” fare rises for the new year.

The rises, which came into effect yesterday, saw the price of some tickets rocket by TWELVE PER CENT. The rise comes just days after the government announced plans to abolish 15,000 jobs at the Derby factory of the historic Corporél train makers, having awarded the contract for the new Thamesrail trains to German multinational Lidl.

Passengers crammed aboard the 06:49 Northwind Trains service from Reading Common to London Nine Elms hit back at the service level. “It’s appalling,” Tweeted public relations specialist @ItsEdina using the ‘hash tag’ #northwindfailway. “I pay through the back teeth for a third-world service while the fat cat directors use us to line their pockets.”

Self-employed entrepreneur Clive Shitpeas, 43, pressed into a wheelchair space, said: “Northwind are terrible. They pile on the fare rises every years to pay for their shiny bonuses. The trains are ancient, falling apart, and the greedy drivers and conductors are always on strike demanding extra pay for the easiest jobs in the world.”

The additional burden on commuters, many of whom have slammed the train company on the Facebook and other social networking Internet web sites, during a year when the recession is expected to bite harder than ever, has been slammed by Labour MP for Aringsworth, Karl Untwich. “Northwind trains really are in a position where they have nowhere to hide,” Mr Untwich said exclusively to the Standpipe. “This monopolistic oligarchy has, yet again, failed to get our long-suffering commuters into work in conditions marginally less shambolic than those endured on African slave ships.”

A statement from the company said: “It is an unfortunate, but inevitable, fact of life that all train operating companies must increase their fares at the beginning of the year, in line with rising fuel and maintenance costs and to pay for track improvements. This year, North Wind Railway has increased its ticket prices by a maximum of six per cent, resulting in a median price increase of 20p per day for season ticket holders—less than the price of the shit in the toilets at Nine Elms that many passengers take once they get into London.”

YOUR SAY: Do you commute on Northwind trains? Are you struggling to make ends meet with these rocketing fares? A selection of your comments is published below.

My morning train is never on time, i have to pay 3300 every month just for the SHÍT SERVICE —alan, england NOT EU

New Trains B……s The Trains Are Fine And In Full Working Order… If It Ant Broke Dont Fix It! Faster Services, Yeah Right, My Train’s Always Held Up BehindAnother Late Train. Plus Theres Never Any Seat’s. Bring Back British Rail!!! —ExPat19119, Out of No Longer-Great Britain

Come the Olympics, North Wind Railway will be an international disgrace. Our pitiful four-trains-per-hour, eight-car electric air-conditioned service with an abysmal 94% punctuality rating will be the laughing stock of the world. It’s no wonder I drive into work. Liam Martin Edwards, Havant

This seems a prudent time to introduce an article I wrote a few days ago. If you go to a coffee shop and just want “a coffee,” the fact it may not be prominent at first glance on the menu display doesn’t indicate that they don’t sell it. Here’s how to order a plain coffee from Starbucks, Costa, et al.

I therefore support the motives of people on strike today in principle. I particularly support my own lecturers, who are having their pensions ransacked whilst wealth-creation numbnuts sugar-daddies rake in millions in the City. I also support, and would protect with my life, their right to strike.

However, I shall not be joining anyone on the picket line today. I shall be crossing it later (albeit having returned from a food shopping trip.) Critically, I shall not be supporting this set of strikes in principle.

Of course, I shall defend the UCU’s right to strike, but that doesn’t mean I don’t consider it pointless. I am no political expert, and I’m not gifted with visions of the future, but at a guess, I would expect the outcomes of today’s strikes to be:

• Minor inconvenience to users of the schools, libraries et cetera which have closed;
• A far-from-trivial cost to the economy from the lost man-hours that result from the strikes;
• A nominal increase in global temperature due to increased amounts hot air being pumped into the atmosphere;
• An increased resentment towards unions and strikers.

The last time direct action genuinely worked on such a large scale was in the 1974 miners’ strikes. Ten years later, the same striking miners were soundly thrashed into submission by the Iron Dominatrix herself, Mrs Thatcher.

How can the UCU, Unison and the TUC genuinely expect this set of strikes to achieve anything?

My relationship with churches is complicated, but suffice to say that these days I’m a fire-breathing none-of-your-business secularist who doesn’t believe in god. On the other hand, there are some convenient parallels with an institution I have never fallen out of love with: libraries.

Let me get this clear: I bloody love libraries. I use them all the time. This is despite making plenty of impulse purchases at brick-and-mortar bookshops, and also owning, and loving, a Kindle. I am, always have been, and always will be an unashamed library geek. Therefore, it was only fitting that within eight minutes of it opening, I found myself in the brand new Canada Water library yesterday morning.

An unusual building on the outside...

...leads to an equally unusual library on the inside.

The building itself is brilliant, dramatic yet understated in its architecture. The design is logical and has clearly been considered carefully. The staff are lovely. The views, out to the Canada Water basin and the surrounding areas, provide a pleasant backdrop.

Most importantly, though, this is a library. It’s a brand new library that the people of Canada Water and Surrey Quays can be proud of (with the probable exception of the wi-fi, which is awful.) Unlike certain other local authorities, Southwark Council has not seen fit to dress this library up as an “idea store” or similar: the signs on the door simply say “Canada Water Library.”

This new library is not ashamed to be a library, perhaps because Southwark Council’s busybodying blue-sky-thinkers are busy rebranding something else to seem less traditionally fusty, but probably because the council understands that libraries are probably the most important public services in operation today, bar the emergency services and the NHS.

The fact that anyone, regardless of any facet of their person, can walk into a library and have access to a mountain of books, videos, audio, games and Internet access, free of charge, is the thing that makes the very idea of a public library so brilliant. To go back to the analogy of churches, and at the risk of sounding like a trite and pretentious pillock, libraries are temples for information, education and entertainment.

So, Canada Water’s library is a lovely building that is, essentially, unashamedly, a library. Southwark Council’s safeguarding of all its libraries is a noble thing in these times of economic hardship. Other councils should bear that in mind when closing smaller community libraries, and withdrawing mobile libraries on wheels (both acts that, in my view, are tantamount to taking out a mortgage in the form of cultural vandalism.) Libraries are exceptionally important to our future, and it’s a real shame that most councils will look to them as a way to make cuts.

In the meantime, though, I shall be delighted to call Canada Water my new favourite library, for three main reasons:

1. As a library, it is superb. The building is lovely, the stock is wide-ranging and the library’s users really are spoiled for choice.
2. It’s within easy access of Queen Mary college, thanks to the East London line and London’s excellent bus network.
3. The café provides rather excellent coffee.

Mhm. Computer science fuel.

This is a mock-up of what could be displayed in the event of a fatal error, such as a kernel panic.

Good idea—debugging data can be dumped to a file anyway, so there’s no need to display it on the screen to intimidate users. The use of the sad face is a nice touch too. Hmm. I wonder where they got that idea from?

The idea of a sad face to represent a fatal error is nothing new. Apple used the Sad Mac symbol on pre-OS X Macintoshes. However, it seems overly convenient that this mock-up appeared a few months after the release of the Windows 8 developer preview.

Why am I bringing this up? Sure, copying is what drives the industry forward. The Mac OS began as a rip-off of Xerox PARC, and was then in turn ripped off by Windows and every GUI that followed it. Many ideas in Android’s early development came directly from the BlackBerry, until the iPhone came along and multi-touch became sexy, at which point a lot of the flows we see today were pilfered from the iOS. The phone and tablet space is effectively a massive cross-company orgy of idea-theft (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), which goes partway to explaining the tremendously frivolous patent battles currently taking place in the mobile devices industry (which is certainly a bad thing.)

Copying, and improving upon copied ideas, is also what makes GNOME what it is. The control panel in GNOME 3 bears more than a passing resemblance to OS X’s. The new Mission Control interface in OS X Lion appears to be an extremely well-executed copy of GNOME Shell’s exposé-dash-workspace overview mode.

This is essentially my problem. Copying is OK, but GNOME’s designers seem to be very bad at it. OS X’s System Preferences app, for instance, is a simple, well-considered, unified place for all the system configuration settings, and Spotlight is integrated properly throughout. GNOME’s settings panel is an over-spaced mess, with inconsistent behaviour, that treats its users like idiots.

This is evident in the kernel panic screen displayed above. Windows’s new BSOD retains the most important piece of information, the error code, and suggests that the user might like to search for it online. It also, helpfully, re-starts the computer for you after a time delay (not displayed on this screenshot.)

GNOME’s, on the other hand, provides no useful debugging information, no indication as to how to access the information to find out exactly what went wrong, and also tells the user to press the power button only once, which will only shut down the computer and not re-start it. If this is how GNOME designs for idiots, their idea of an idiot is extremely tame: anyone who has worked in the IT industry, especially in customer support, will know that at least one person won’t realise that they have to press the power button again to actually turn the computer back on.

Another case of treating users like idiots: the hiding of the “Power Off” menu item behind the Alt key. GNOME 3 is designed to run on desktop PCs, not on tablets or mobile devices: I may want to suspend my PC, yes, but I also want to be able to shut it down relatively easily, because, unlike a tablet, a PC is not designed to be left continuously in sleep/wake mode. That’s why hibernation exists. It’s why Mac OS X’s resume functionality was implemented. It’s why Microsoft invested a significant number of man-hours into decreasing Windows 8′s boot time.

This isn’t simplification: this is hiding of features to create the illusion of simplicity. Windows 8, for instance, can be shut down in a logical way: the power menu is grouped with the brightness and network controls. It’s clearly visible, but doesn’t get in your way unless you go looking for it. In GNOME’s case, I fail to see how anyone would find the “Power Off” menu item without having read about it, or stumbling upon it by accident.

I am no expert, but it seems to me that GNOME’s developers have become so blinded by their admiration for certain elements of other platforms, that they will blithely emulate them whilst failing to implement these ideas in a coherent way. By crudely copying the outward appearance of the best bits of other platforms, they have failed to understand the design principles behind them. The result is a sub-standard experience that feels cobbled together by magpies in search of the next shiny thing, with no basis in principled design.

GNOME Shell has the potential to be brilliant: its handling of workspaces, with a little tweaking, could be superb, and a genuine game-changer (albeit with a little bit of the “edge” taken off it by OS X’s Mission Control.) The out-of-the-box experience, however, as it stands, is junk.