Wickham's musings from Chalke

 
There's been a lot of fuss about MPs abusing their expenses. They have been claiming allowances for second homes while not using them, or claiming allowances for a relative's home that they hardly ever use, claiming allowances for one second home to improve it then claiming expenses on another second home after selling the previous one, avoiding capital gains tax on second homes when they sell them, claiming for furniture, TV sets, gardening, repairs to tennis courts, maintenance of swimming pools and so on.

The media and general public have criticised all parties and all party leaders have apologised and promised to change the auditing by having it done by an independent body.

However, it does seem that MPs have not broken any rules, they have just milked the system and had expenses approved despite the rules saying that expenses should be appropriate or something to that effect. Everyone thinks that they have broken the spirit of the rules.

In my view the most important issue is to stop MPs profiting from second homes. Sometimes the criticism has gone too far, it's not the expenses themselves that are out of order, but the fact that MPs use the expenses to enrich themselves.

Consider an MP living in one town with a constituency a hundred miles away and both towns being one hundred miles from London. The MP has to stay somewhere in the constituency and in London. A hotel room would not be convenient as the MP would need to store clothes and files, would need a computer and a TV to watch the news and political programmes, etc. A rented or purchased flat is obviously needed and the MP needs to maintain it and also a garden if it has one, have the home cleaned, pay Council Tax and services and so on, but at the end of the MP's tenure the property should be handed on to the next MP or sold for the profit of the State and all equipment handed to a State depot for issue to another MP.

The biggest abuse seems to be where an MP designates a relative's or partner's house or even one of his own properties as a second home and then uses expenses to improve it. The property may not be anywhere near his constituency and he may only use it very occasionally. In this case expenses should be restricted to items purely for House of Commons use.

 
Compared with IE8 beta 2 this browser works well. It does seem to load pages quicker than other browsers.

It operates JavaScript by default as it seems to be more totally integrated in the browser operation. I find that I often want JavaScript disabled as it causes irritating effects on some web pages and can make them slower to load. For instance, some forums use JavaScript to double underline and color green certain words and form them into links leading to adverts or other information. So the word "pension" in a post might lead to general inforation about pensions which is out of context with what the person writing the post intended. Some videos or Flash effects can be irritating and stopped when JavaScript is disabled.

Chrome's main feature is the "sandboxing" of windows so that if malware gets into one window and crashes the window or starts malware of some sort like sending data to another person or computer, it shouldn't affect the other windows and Chrome's basic operation. The problem should be stopped when the window is closed. I haven't seen any reports whether this works yet but it will be a very useful feature.

I've noticed that every time I open Google Chrome it makes my computer busy for at least five minutes, I can hear the hard drive working non-stop and the noise stops soon after I close Chrome.

Today I opened Task Manager and Netlimiter and opened only Chrome and watched.

Task Manager showed a steady 2% to 5% CPU with occasional bursts up to 26%.

Netlimiter showed nothing most of the time but at about one minute intervals Chrome was receiving and sending data for about one second.

It varied,
147KBps down and 1KBps up
600KBps down and 14KBps up
374KBps down and 5KBps up
2KBps down and 0.36KBps up

so it's sending data Home. I just hope it is only performance data and not my private data! Edit: it's just updating the program.

 
I think Microsoft have released this beta for public testing a little too soon. It doesn't work well in several respects and I'm surprised that their staff haven't been able to fix some simple things before allowing the public to use it.

Page anchors don't work. A common one is a link at the bottom of a page which says "top" so that after you have scrolled down a long page you can get back to the page top. Another which doesn't work is the link on one page to a set position on another page; this just takes you to the top of the new page at present.

Scrollbar colors (only possible to edit with CSS in a simple way in IE) do not work yet but it is intended that all Microsoft CSS Vendor Extensions like scrollbar colors will require a prefix -ms- in future like -ms-scrollbar-face-color.

The current staus is not shown, so it's not reached Editor's Draft or Working Draft yet. The IEBlog at the present time does say "However, in order to ease the transition, the non-prefixed versions of properties that existed in Internet Explorer 7, though considered deprecated, will continue to function in Internet Explorer 8."

So it seems that we will still need the non-prefixed scrollbar code for IE6 and IE7 and (optionally) the prefixed code to be correct in IE8.

"Please note that if Internet Explorer 8 users are viewing your site in Compatibility View, they will see your page exactly as it would have been rendered in Internet Explorer 7, and in that case the prefix is neither needed nor acknowledged by the parser" but this is irrelevant to how IE6 and IE7 operate.

I assume that other browsers will ignore the whole code with a -ms- prefix.

It gets more confusing with overflow-x and overflow-y which are deprecated at present but will be CSS3 properties. They are supported by other browsers, but when the -ms- prefix is added I'm not sure whether other browsers and previous versions of IE will operate the code, so it may be necessary to have overflow-x for other browsers and previous versions of IE which will be deprecated until CSS3 and also -ms-overflow-x for IE8 which will not be deprecated. The comments on the IEBlog are also confused about this.

Opacity doesn't work. This is acknowledged by Microsoft as they are trying to make IE8 the most standards compliant browser and opacity and filters are not in CSS2 standards although the future CSS3 is expected to include opacity. This wrecks pages for many people and Opacity does work in IE6, IE7 and the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari although you usually need two or more coding methods to get it to work in all of them. I hope that they bend the rules a bit to incorporate this before the final release.

Pure CSS dropdown menus (no javascript or ActiveX) work very well in all other browsers (although IE6 needs a behavior file which does need ActiveX) but not in IE8. The mouse shows the dropdown menu but loses contact when moving across to it and the sub-levels then disappear. This is sometimes a problem if margins, padding or borders on the boxes cause a space which the mouse will not span, but having got it all working in other browsers it should work in IE8; a lot of waving around of the mouse will usually find a way to connect eventually. I tried negative margins to place the dropdown level slightly over the top level boxes but that didn't work. There must be a fundamental change in the "engine" coding here. I also notice that sometimes the menu top level only partly shows until you refresh the page.

Edit 12/05/09 - IE8 RTM (final version Released To Market) has cured most of the problems I noted above but there are still problems with complicated websites like e-commerce sites, online banking, YouTube, Yahoo Mail and even Hotmail. The security coding is more strict and the Internet Settings like ActiveX need fine tuning sometimes when a page redirects you through various other urls and even through different domains during the course of your online purchase or online banking.

 
There was another TV programme last night about the Turin Shroud and investigations into its origins.

I saw a programme about ten or fifteen years ago which concentrated on the carbon 14 dating and the conclusion that it was a mediaeval fake after AD 1300. Then there were questions about this. The piece of cloth used for the test was taken from a corner which had been used many times by human hands for lifting the shroud and the piece was taken from an area of the shroud that was not a part of the original cloth so the sample was probably contaminated by mediaeval DNA or other substances as well as being of a different date. Then someone pointed out that the shroud was exactly the same type of cloth and weave used by Gallileans of the period and a mediaeval faker probably wouldn't have either known this or been able to recreate the correct cloth. Then the face cloth (napkin) was found to have the same blood group, a fairly rare AB, as the shroud and shroud and face cloth markings match up when placed together. How would a mediaeval faker have known this? Coincidence?

This face cloth, the Sudarium of Oviedo, is well attested to since the eighth century and in Spain since the seventh century, so the TV program last night was debating whether the shroud was a fake from this period, or even that both were fakes from the first century AD since documents from this early period show details of a shroud with holes in the same places, so a faker several centuries later would have had to make a careful survey to reproduce them but would he have had such an opportunity?

My preference is that the shroud and the face cloth were fakes from one of the first centuries AD when people would have known how crucifixions were carried out and the procedures for handling the body afterwards.

I have serious doubts that the items could be the real ones. Consider the sequence of events. First Jesus was killed by a Roman soldier piercing his side so that he was dead or dying when taken down from the cross. Lowering the cross to the ground would have taken a few minutes if it was well jammed into a hole. Removing the nails would have taken quite a long time. The TV program yesterday showed a piece of heel bone with a nail though it from a crucifixion in Jerusalem at about the same time. The nail was about six to eight inches long and very thick. Nails would have been hammered in hard so removing them would be difficult. No doubt someone would have to get a hammer and bang the nails sideways many times to loosen them, with possible damage to the body not apparent in the shroud image.

The body was then taken to a tomb and washed. Since Jesus was dead his body wouldn't be bleeding any more and blood would have been washed off. However, the shroud and face cloth both have stains from live and dead blood (there is a difference, apparently). I don't see how wrapping the body in a shroud can cause bleeding with "live" blood unless Jesus was still alive several hours after being stabbed by the soldier.

This raises the old question of whether Jesus was in fact dead. He spent a long time on the cross and would hardly have been fit enough to get up and walk about for the next forty days talking to people.

See wikipedia Shroud of Turin for further details.

 
Sixteen person versions

This link to Koowy (previously mebeam and before that WigiWigi) allows sixteen people to join in a video call. Select your own unique room name which will be hard for outsiders to guess and connect; when the window has refreshed with your room ready for calls, send the url which will be something like http://www.mebeam.com/your-room-name to friends by instant messenger (Skype or similar) which they click to join your call.

You all need to click "Allow" in the Adobe Flash Player Settings window and probably need to click the Mic setting to enable audio which will appear at the top left of the your video window when you move your mouse over it. Each person needs a webcam or the program will be disabled for them. It also disables after a short time if no movement is detected.

Type messages in the bottom box and Enter and they will appear with your avatar in the middle box.

Don't use an obvious room name like room-1 as rooms with names like this are public rooms sometimes infested with undesirable people doing distasteful things; usually you will see people already in these rooms and they are used like a public bar or club.

Unfortunately the version below has been superseded and the current version is as linked above.

Eighteen person version. (It works here in IE7, Opera, Safari for Windows and in Firefox.)



Note: the colors have gone wrong because the programmer is changing things.

Video conference rooms for eighteen people. This room is automatically preset to $ozwickham. Setting a preset enables callers to have their own room for regular use with contacts and friends and if desired the series of calls can be recorded for later playback. It will not work on a computer unless Flash software is already installed. This program is in early development and sometimes off-line. It needs a fast broadband connection with low latency.

If you wish to set up your own preset room name, look at the source code for this page and copy the object tag code from <object type= to </object> into your own web page code. Change $ozwickham to your own room name (minimum four characters, maximum sixteen, no spaces), with a $ prefix if you want the video calls to be recorded.

A playback of a call can be seen by using the url http://www.mebeam.com/playroom.php? and adding your room name with the $ prefix immediately after the ?. You need a connection with high speed/bandwidth and low latency or the video streams will not be synchronised. The playback facility is often offline as it is still in development and is not integrated in the main program yet.

If you talk by yourself you can leave a message for someone to view later. This program is still experimental and since I don't expect many messages I may not check it every day.

 

I haven't been so lucky yet when out over the hills on farm tracks and footpaths.

 
I checked my website statistics to find that overnight and this morning the following three organisations had downloaded pages from my online tutorial.

128.30.52.49
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
Room W92-190
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge
MA
PostalCode: 02139-4307
US

150.125.32.94
Space and Naval Warfare Command
5 Crystal Park
2451 Crystal Drive
Arlington
VA
PostalCode: 22245-5200
US

74.6.20.214
Inktomi Corporation
701 First Ave
Sunnyvale
CA
PostalCode: 94089
US

"Inktomi developed and marketed scalable software applications designed to enhance the performance and intelligence of large-scale networks."

I can't believe that any of the above large corporations would need help from my tutorial; perhaps it was just an employee wanting help for his own personal web page or some kind of snooping, though these corporations aren't known for trawling the net as far as I know.

 
The Videobox of May 2007 has now become a program which can be used for conference calls between eight people and also for playing back the calls or leaving messages if the room name chosen by the callers includes a $ prefix so that anyone who knows the room name can view the videos later as a continuous discussion involving all callers and it skips on to the next call if there are several calls using the same room name.

The program has an inbuilt facility for eighteen callers which may be activated later. At present the bandwidth is limited by showing the video images in different size windows depending on the number of callers; two videos are large, three slightly smaller, four half the size of the original two in one row across the top, another row across the bottom if there are eight callers. I presume eighteen callers would be three rows of six.

See MeBeam Multivideo and MeBeam - my recorded room

The original WigiWigi programs started about two years ago were P2P and callers needed to know the IP address of their contacts to call them. The MeBeam version is coded in Flash and server-based.

 
This is garnet stone's guess as to the cause:- his post at 18.39 on 17 August.

Skype's official reply:-
Skype's report look for "What happened on August 16" posted on August 20th.

Essentially there was a domino effect as supernode servers crashed, putting more load on other supernodes which then crashed, causing meltdown for the whole system.

Skype's official report differs from garnet stone's guess, but there may be some connection between them.

Skype said that Microsoft's automatic update caused millions of computers to restart at the same time. Millions of those (Skype usually has 300 million users online at any time) would have had Skype set to automatic login, so they tried to log in to Skype at the same time. This overloaded some supernodes which crashed.

The supernodes that crashed would have had other Skype users logged in besides those that were getting Microsoft automatic updates, so those extra Skype users like me and my neighbour also started trying to log in to Skype automatically.

The Skype login attempts were transferred to other supernodes, which also crashed until the whole peer to peer network was down and all Skype programs were continually trying to log in every few seconds.

The problem for Skype was then to start up a decentralised system when 300 million Skype programs were continually attempting to log in. Apparently Skype has some algorithms in the program on our computers which was designed to control this but a bug had lain hidden for years in all previous programs.

Skype say that this has been corrected in the version 3.5.0.214 issued after the crash but time will tell if it stops another similar situation.

Somehow Skype managed a gradual rebooting of supernodes and Skype programs started logging in after two days.

Supernodes aren't directly under the control of Skype; it seems that Skype identifies servers or computers using Skype which have large and continuously available bandwidth and uses them as supernodes (all users agree to being used but obviously personal computers without much bandwidth which are turned off quite often would never qualify). It seems that servers of major institutions are used, presumably with some kind of tacit agreement, as Skype is beneficial to them as it saves landline call charges.

 
A few weeks ago there were extensive floods in Sheffield, Hull and other areas in the north Midlands. Last Friday there was heavy rain over most of the south of England and it moved slowly over Hampshire into Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and then Wales. The rain over Wales has now come down the Rivers Avon and Severn and completely flooded Evesham and Tewkesbury several feet deep and cut off roads into the Towns.
 




Oxford and Pangbourne had flash floods from rainfall last Friday which have gone down but now the River Thames is rising due to the volume of water coming from Gloucestershire and more flooding is expected. The Severn and Avon are expected to reach their peak early tomorrow morning and it is still raining.

Reports often say that the flooding is "unprecedented" but other reports say that the River Severn and Avon, which meet at Tewkesbury, had floods about as bad in 1947. Since then there has been increased building on flood plains and we now have climate change. This has made the jet stream move south from Iceland over the last few months and we have inclement weather due to low pressure volatile storms which have moved over the land very slowly while southern Europe has a heat wave and drought.

 
It's interesting to look at my website statistics and see what viewers have done. In the list of key search phrases I noticed the following:-
brigitte Nielsen
mensa mensa mensam
january 1978 chinese snake
broken ladder pictures

The "broken ladder pictures" search would have shown one of me in Jakarta after I had cleared a roof outlet blockage and the old bamboo ladder collapsed under me, but what a strange thing to search for! I tried the same search phrase in Google but my website did not show on the first twenty pages of listings so someone must have searched many more pages to get to my site.

The Brigitte Nielsen search could be someone looking for pornographic pictures. I showed a photo of her in a shower at the Big Brother House with one of the male contestants, not a pornographic photo.

Mensa mensa mensam - another strange search phrase. I was describing my early schooldays.

In the listing files with at least 20 requests I noticed that some pages had been looked at only the day before but related to forum answers I had given months before and should have been long forgotten. Perhaps Google or some other robot was checking all my pages. Similarly there were many pages viewed the previous day including many of my early musings pages relating to 2003 and 2004, I can't believe that a person could be systematically reading all my pages the same day, so it must be some computer program. This gives a distorted view. I know that one of my stats programs excludes robots and spiders but the one I have just referred to obviously does not.

It's also interesting that between 1am and 6am the views are about 20% of the average for the rest of the day and I can't believe that robots account for all of them, but I suppose it would be possible if robots looked at every page.

The Analog stats show about 100 pages visited for each hour between midnight and 6am but 300 to 500 for each hour during the day. These are Analyzed requests from Tue, Jan 23 2007 at 7:02 AM to Fri, Jul 13 2007 at 8:11 AM (171.05 days).

Awstats shows 4, 0, 1, 7, 9, 6 and 1 pages for the hours midnight to 7am and varying numbers between 1 and 53 for the other hours, namely 13, 20, 8, 9, 53, 51, 2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 3, 16, 12, 7, 15 and 3 from 7am to midnight. This shows high viewing between 11am and 1pm. These are for the month (two weeks so far). They are very different on average from the Analog stats. During May and June the pages viewed were about six times as much, or three times as much on a full month basis.

 
A new beta video message program for my blog; see the video box below; wait a short time for one video to load, then use the rewind button (often required more than once) to see a video; please keep video messages short, say thirty seconds maximum. The rewind button is often slow to operate, or refuses. Always wait about five seconds for a video clip to be running properly before using the rewind button as it seems to work better if the video has downloaded a reasonable amount.

The video will probably start with the last one that you viewed. Adverts are added (not of my choice and not inserted by me), so don't be surprised; just use the rewind button to a previous video or the forward button, preferably the rewind button first as you may be seeing the last video, or use the pause button to stop the video.



After clicking "add comment" and "Allow" you can watch yourself without recording; then click on the round black icon to start recording.

Here are some recording recommendations:-

1. Click "add comment" to be able to add a video message.

2. Click "Allow" in the Flash window so that you see your local video image.

3. Right-click the spanner "Tools" icon and click settings to adjust and main settings.
Click the webcam icon to select the capturing device you want to use.
Click the microphone icon to set the recording device and recording level. Note the level gauge on the left. Speak and adjust the slider if needed. The best setting at normal speaking level is when the gauge is half green with a bit of yellow above. Avoid seeing red.
The file icon setting allows you to set the maximum file size for storage (which is only the latest video clip so that it is ready for the next viewing as all others are stored on the server.)
Close.

4. Left-click the spanner "Tools" icon to set the quality you want.
Change the resolution to 320x240 to get a decent video quality.
The fps should be sufficient to have a smooth and fast video recording, but note that this is depending on webcam and environmental lighting. Leave it at 10 at first.
Set bandwidth to about 60-75% of your maximum available upload (KB/s) ie 20 kiloBytes per second if your upload limit is normally 256kbps (32kBps) or 30 for 373kbps.
Set quality at first to 30 for your first recording but you may be able to increase this to 80 in later recordings.
Set the key rate at 25.
Click "set" and "back".

5. To record, click the black dot, when recording it will be flashing red.
To stop recording, click the red dot.

The initial recording settings for a computer with 256kbps upload might be might be:
320*240; 10; 20; 30; 25
and for a computer with 373kbps upload:
320*240; 10 or 15; 30; 80; 25 or 30
but you might have to raise or lower any of the above depending on the quality of the image or frame rate and lip synchronisation. Please use the recommended settings for your first message.

"Create new box" on the box window is for viewers to register to create their own video box for their own website or blog.

 
This is a beta program that will eventually enable a blogger to record a video and anyone will be able to record a reply. At the moment it plays my recording, but after others who recorded earlier, so I'm not sure how to start a new recording just for me and my viewers.
First test (general video with all comments):-

 
I was out cycling over the farm tracks south east of my home in glorious sunny weather and stopped in a remote valley to listen to the birds. I noticed that although the valley should have shielded me from outside noises of human activity, I could hear the motorbike racing at an event some miles to the north like the buzzing of a swarm of hornets.

Then I heard and saw a light aeroplane flying low overhead; obviously a weekend leisure flight. There is nowhere now in England that you can get entirely away from noise pollution. The noise of traffic from the A354 over the hill to the south could also be heard.

When I got home I heard a microlight with its noisy motor mower engine and some weekends there is a hill climb up farm tracks about one mile to the west of me for small racing cars. It's not too noisy for me but some people living closer have complained in the local magazine about the increasing frequency of these hill climbs. There are also go-cart races on or somewhere near Wilton racecourse about four miles away and I can hear them when I go outside my house.

 
On 23rd March ago fifteen British marines and sailors had just finished searching an Indian ship close to the boundary of Iranian territorial waters when two Iranian gunboats seized them. Our servicemen were there under the UN procedures for stopping illegal goods and arms getting into Iraq. Our escorting helicopter, assuming that the search was over and running out of fuel, had returned to HMS Cornwall twelve miles away. No help was possible and so our servicemen gave up without a fight as the Iranian vessels had heavy machine guns and our fourteen men and one woman were on two small RIBs (inflatable boats) with only small arms.

The Iranians claimed that the GPS equipment found on the RIBs showed that our people were inside Iranian waters. The boundary is disputed in that area and also varies because the boundary is supposed to be down the centre of the channel of the Shat Al Arab waterway and extended in the same line out into the open water, but the centre of the waterway shifts due to movement of the seabed, so the boundary theoretically moves.

Our Ministry of Defence spokesman said that he was sure our servicemen were inside the boundary by about 1.7 nautical miles. TV news showed a map with our position and the first position reported by the Iranians which was also outside their waters! The Iranians later gave a second position inside their waters.

The Iranian TV showed the captives in a carpeted room eating off plates on their laps. The woman looked extremely nervous and about to burst into tears but some of the others looked relaxed. The woman had a head scarf on.

After a week and a half of diplomatic statements from both sides, first stern then slightly softer in tone it appeared to be stalemate. The UN had been asked to help but our government had apparently abandoned the UN route and decided to send a special representative to Tehran. Perhaps the UN were deemed slow and ineffective as is often the case.

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is notoriously hard-line but in practice has little power which is in the hands of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who never appears on TV so we didn't know what his attitude was to our request for the servicemen to be released. The president was obviously told that nothing further could be gained by holding the hostages so he pinned medals on the revolutionary guards who took the hostages then told everyone that the hostages were free.

They were bought out of a nearby room dressed in shiny blue or grey suits, shaken by the hand by the president and given gift bags.

So the Iranians got some brownie points by appearing to be magnanimous. Iran had had the upper hand throughout and the British government was helpless. Military action was unthinkable. We didn't know where the hostages were and anyway a rescue attempt might have gone badly wrong as did the American rescue attempt when their planes crashed on a desert airstrip and they had to abandon the rescue of 52 of their embassy staff who were eventually released after 444 days in 1981.

At first I thought that the hostages had been well treated. It now appears that the sailors and marines were blindfolded, handcuffed at times, stripped, dressed in pyjamas and held in solitary confinement so I take back part of that. However, I still think they can count themselves relatively lucky compared with the usual standards of prisoner treatment in that part of the world.

Iraq dipped prisoners in acid baths; the Taliban in Afghanistan has recently gouged out eyes; Vietnam broke the bones of John McCain and let them set without treatment; Vietnam or Laos hooks people together with wire looped under their collar bones after they attempt to escape and are then returned by the Chinese.

Solitary confinement is stressful but the Iranians probably didn't want the detainees concocting a similar story; they would have wanted each to tell his/her own version. We now know that they were told that if they admitted straying into Iranian waters they would be returned in a few days but otherwise they could be locked up for up to seven years.

The woman was under the impression for about four days that the others had been sent home and that she had been kept alone in Iran. She was asked to write letters home expressing regret, etc. The two officers were shown on Iranian TV explaining what happened and pointing out their position on a map which showed the boundary on the water. Both used phrases like "apparently strayed" and said that the episode was a "mistake" without saying whose mistake in an effort to avoid giving an outright apology.

So what do people think about the near-apologies given on Iranian TV by the hostages? Most are sympathetic. We know that they were being encouraged or threatened to admit that they had strayed into Iranian waters and no one here has believed that their statements under duress were true.

Discussion boards have had a whole variety of opinions, one person said that his father and two uncles were prisoners of the Germans in the Second World War and if they had been asked to apologise on Nazi radio for their actions they would never have considered it; not only would their mates have considered them cowards but they would probably have been court-martialled later.

I believe that during the second world war all a prisoner had to state was his name, rank and number. I wonder what the current British rules are for those taken prisoner?

All in all, they were treated better than the Americans and British troops treat their prisoners. The Americans have made blindfolded men run into solid walls just for fun and the British have hoisted a trussed-up man on the prongs of a forklift truck, amongst other things.

Has Britain been humiliated by Iran? Undoubtedly. They called all the shots from Day One. Iran wants to be the most powerful state in the region - nothing wrong in that - but also wants to have nuclear weapons and destroy Israel and is currently funding terrorism in Iraq, sending arms including ammunition and detonators for roadside bombs for Shiite insurgents to use against our forces.

An informative account of the background to the arrests is this one by the Assyrian International News Agency.

 
There were two interesting media articles recently; one as a TV programme a week or two ago about the scientists who reject the notion that humans are causing an increase in the earth's average temperature; the other was a Sunday Times article on 11/03/07 showing the current and possible future effects of the global warming.

The sceptical scientists produced lots of data to support their case whilst saying that the current suggestion that the extra carbon dioxide currently being added to the atmosphere by human activities is causing the increase in global average temperature is just guesswork not supported by research data.

The scientists have produced data from several sources showing that over several hundred million years the earth's average temperature has risen several times by anything up to 6 degrees Celsius but the increase in carbon dioxide followed about eight hundred years later. In other words, the increase in temperature warmed the oceans which then released huge quantities of trapped carbon dioxide and methane and the increased areas of desert could not support vegetation so the greenhouse gases were not taken out of the atmosphere.

The principle cause of previous global warming has usually been the sun's increased activity and/or the earth's temporary position closer to the sun.

It is admitted that humans are now adding extra quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, but nothing like as much as volcanoes added millions of years ago and probably nothing like enough to cause the warming that appears to have started.

We have had higher global average temperatures just a few thousand years ago and a warm period two thousand years ago without adverse effects and the earth returned to a mini ice age in mediaeval times.

It still hasn't been clearly supported by fact or research that the current addition of greenhouse gases is adding to a natural warming effect or that the warming will get out of control, creating a runaway greenhouse effect.

However, my view is that human activities such as clearing forests and adding greenhouse gases are dangerous because they may be making a natural global warming effect much quicker than it would otherwise be. It's not a risk that I consider we should take.

Footnote 29/04/07

Yesterday's paper reported that photographs of Mars have shown less ice at the poles and a darkening of the surface generally compared with comparable photographs taken in the 1970s.

Although the ice does expand and retreat, the difference was still noticeable at similar times of the Martian year. This implies a warming of the Martian climate which could not be caused by human activity so it must be due to solar activity.

The darker surface is probably caused by increased dust storms which would have the effect of trapping more of the sun's heat, compounding the effect.

 
Saddam Hussein was hanged just after 6.00 am on Saturday morning 30/12/06 in an Iraqi army base in Kazimain, a neighbourhood of northeast Baghdad. There has been a lot of discussion on the internet, on TV and in newspapers.

The official video issued by the Iraqi goverment had no sound and the video stopped just before the trap door opened under Saddam. The video was taken from the top of the steel platform looking towards the access steps showing about five hooded executioners with Saddam. It looked fairly calm and dignified as one executioner explained what he had to do and Saddam was seen replying.

Yesterday the internet had lots of links to an unofficial version which one of the witnesses had taken on his mobile phone. This version was taken looking up from the bottom of the steps. It had sound and it was clear that a lot of taunting and insulting was happening.

The Independent reported that National security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told The New York Times that one of the guards shouted at Saddam:
"You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution."
"I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persians and Americans," Saddam responded.
"God damn you," the guard said.
"God damn you," came the reply.
Saddam: "Oh God."
The assembled witnesses to the execution, gathered below the gallows, can be heard ignoring appeals for propriety.
Voices: "May God's blessings be upon Mohamed and his household. And may God hasten their appearance and curse their enemies."
Voices: "Moqtada [al-Sadr] ... Moqtada ... Moqtada." That is a reference to the powerful young Shia militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, whose father, a revered Shia cleric, was executed by Saddam in 1999.
Saddam: "Do you consider this bravery?"
Voice: "Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr."
Voice: "To hell."
Voice: "Please do not. The man is being executed. Please no, I beg you to stop."
Then as the noose was ready around his neck Saddam recited a prayer:
"There is no God but Allah and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God," he intones. "There is no God but Allah and I testify that Muhammad..."

The trap door opened with a clang and Saddam fell very quickly. There was much shouting and the witnesses obviously rushed up the steps because the mobile phone video next showed Saddam's face swinging below in the noose.

The platform must have been about seven feet above the floor in a small badly lit room with concrete walls and ceiling. Occasionally the metal plate bolted to the ceiling was shown and there appeared to be two ropes hanging from it. I thought that someone said that the rope normally had about three feet of slack but Saddam seemed to fall right through the platform and the video next showed his face viewed from above.

The mobile phone video is currently accessible from www.vwho.net but I suppose it may be removed. There was an earlier video of a man being interviewed in a US police station. As the policeman turned away to look at some papers the man pulled a gun from his shorts and shot himself in the head, slumping slightly to one side. The policeman mumbled something like "Oh God, why didn't someone check him". The video was removed after a few days, presumably because most of these video sites ban sex and violence.

It's ironic that Saddam was reciting prayers and had taken a Koran with him as he was not religious until recently; even more ironic that his last word was Muhammad.

The prosecutor who was there said he nearly cancelled the execution because of all the insults. He also said that he saw two government officials with mobile phones, even though they had all been searched before entry. If so, why did he not delay the execution for a few minutes to confiscate the phones? It seems that he wasn't too bothered at the time but now there is a lot of fuss about it all and a government inquiry has been started into the matter.

There was a poll on The Motley Fool UK discussion board "Land of Serious Topics" and I voted against the question: "Is it right to have executed him?" The latest result is 44% Yes and 56% No. Idi Amin was also a dictator who allowed lots of people to be murdered but he lived quietly in exile for about thirty years. If he had any followers they obviously soon ignored him and I wonder whether the same might not have happened with Saddam.

Saddam has lots of followers at present and he is now considered a martyr because of his dignified bearing on the scaffold. Sectarian violence will continue for some time and I think his death will just make it worse for a while.

Two others, Saddam's half-brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, and a former judge, Awad al-Bander, convicted with Saddam last month, are to be executed after the week long Eid al-Adha holiday.

Edit: 08/01/07

Some people have said that taking and publishing a mobile phone video is criminal and ghoulish. However, we now know that the whole world was totally misled by the official Iraqi version which, having no sound, gave the impression of a dignified and well-organised execution. In the mobile phone version we heard shouting and Saddam was returning insults. If the mobile phone video had not been released the next executions would probably have been undignified too.

When someone criticises something a common question is "Have you seen it/read it?" If the answer is "No" then the next remark is "Well, if you haven't seen it/read it, how can you criticise?" I think this was an incident where the leak of the unofficial mobile phone video was very useful.

The world of politics has far too much spin; in the UK we have also had leaks which have exposed the spin by government as a very distorted version of the truth. In this information age the more information we have from both sides of an argument as well as unbiased reporting the better we can make a judgment for ourselves.

 
This is a longer version of my blog for the National Trust/History Matters special one-day historical record based on my life yesterday. (The blog had to be a maximum of 4000 characters so I had to cut out a lot of the descriptive comment and just leave the basic events).

Personal profile: male; age 63; retired; living in a UK country village in a chalke valley.

6am: BBC Radio 4 came on automatically beside my bed. News about Thames Water being sold by German owners to an Australian company.

More about Madonna, a very rich pop star, who has just had one of her bodyguards fly to Heathrow airport overnight from Johannesburg with an 13 month old child from Malawi that she wants to adopt. The father is too poor to look after the child and seems happy with the arrangement but various child action groups are objecting and although she has been given temporary custody the paperwork in Malawi and UK may take ages to straighten out.

6.45am: BBC1 TV news: more about North Korea which seems to be organising a second nuclear bomb test according to US satellite photos. North Korea is a very secretive old-style communist regime with millions of soldiers. The dictator is not trusted at all. No one knows how to stop regimes like his and Iran from developing nuclear weapons. They are anti-western in outlook and sanctions never seem to work. The people are extremely poor and just get more isolated with sanctions. Military action is unthinkable against North Korea and Iran because of their huge armed forces.

Breakfast of Tesco's fruit and fibre cereal with milk. Looked outside where it is gloomy, slightly foggy, but still warm for mid October.

7am: turned on my computer to check emails and my usual websites. The emails were the usual pornographic spam and one purporting to be from service@PayPal about my account. I haven't got a PayPal account and emails like this are "phishing" for my account details and passwords with a view to committing fraud. Another email was from Citywire which sends an almost daily financial newsletter which I never get round to reading.

I checked my usual websites - computer help sites, pension and investment advice sites, BirdForum website and the website where I help people with their webpage construction coding problems. Later I looked at LOST (Land of Serious Topics) on TMF (The Motley Fool website) which is a forum for people to air their views on anything, often in intense argument.

I also checked blogs (web logs) from Internet Explorer as Microsoft is expected to release the final version of its Internet Explorer 7 on 18 October 2006. Some people want more warning of the release date as they have not recoded websites to deal with IE7 peculiarities and yet still keep the special coding (hacks) that they have done for IE6 as the general public will be using both versions for some time. Others complain that IE7 still has bugs or has not fully complied with the current CSS2 (cascading stylesheet) standards, let alone the future CSS3 standards that are being made public. Others want it released as soon as possible.

8.30am: the post arrived. Two items were credit card application forms with brochures in flashy colours and colourful envelopes. The other item was a huge red envelope addressed to my mother at my address which I opened by mistake. It confirmed eligibility for a prize of up to £20,000. My mother enters a lot of free prize draws and gets a huge amount of offers now that she is on hundreds of lists. It seems my address has got mixed up with her name somehow. I keep telling her it's dangerous. Some are just free prize offers and she has had some items like cheap manual (no battery) cameras, but sometimes the lists get into the hands of fraudsters who get you to contribute large sums as administration costs for getting even larger sums which never materialise. She said once she had been asked to send £2,000 to Canada and I said she would never see it again, let alone the prize. Another problem is that some ask for all sorts of personal details which a fraudster can use to set up a false identity or use to take money out of you accounts. In one case she was asked for next of kin and had put in my name and address so I am now a target too.

I didn't get what I wanted in the post which is a rent cheque for £165 pa for a 3 acre field rented out to the multi-millionaire local farmer who never pays until I remind him and I did that over a week ago.

9am: I went outside to see if Attila (the Hun) had cleared up properly after cutting my hedge yesterday evening. There are three Huns here at the moment, Zoltan, his brother Attila and a friend of Zoltan's called George. Attila has been here about two years working at any job he can find, mainly gardening or at the watercress beds, but he is going back to Hungary at the end of this month. They obviously benefit from a higher income than they could get at home. I pay Attila £6 per hour. He once asked me for a bank note saying he would give me coins in change rather than me giving him coins as he wanted to take bank notes back to this parents while on holiday. Zoltan started a few years ago after joining his girlfriend who had got a job caring for a disabled person in the next village. They both used bikes at first, then he got an old car, then a relatively new one, so they must be earning and saving quite a lot. They all work hard, trying to get a full-time job during the day and working in evenings and weekends as well.

9.30am: I put out some crushed nuts and cut-up grapes on my birdboard. Recently I have only seen a quiet, insignificant dunnock and occasional blue tits. In the winter and spring robins and a pair of blackbirds came several times a day but since then have only come occasionally. The blackbirds have my neighbour's fallen apples now anyway. The blackbirds loved the grapes and hardly touched the nuts while the robins were the reverse.

10.30am: I had a mug of coffee and a piece of chocolate-covered shortcake. I don't like real coffee or tea, too much caffeine I suppose. I drink Camp coffee essence which is concentrated coffee and chicory with sugar. I mix it with two-thirds boiling water and one-third milk and it makes a sweet, sticky, warm, comforting drink.

Morning generally: There were only two questions on the web development forum that were within my capabilities to answer. Both questioners seemed to have pages showing alright and the sound on one was working so I think they were worried about something relatively unimportant. Certainly another viewer agreed with me. Sometimes I spend hours or even days trying to correct bad coding but today I found nothing that was actually causing a display problem although some of the code could be much improved.

12 noon: I watched Channel 4 TV News while having a banana, some watercress and a malted granary roll with margarine, ham and home-grown tomato.

1pm: I signed an application form from a broker to transfer a unit trust into an account with them. It was bought via them originally when it was a fund they started and managed, then they hived it off to a unit trust manager, now they have offered to take it back to add to my portfolio but it will still be managed by the unit trust. They have promised a 0.25% pa loyalty bonus.

2pm: I read a few articles in The Countryman March 2005 which shows how far behind I am in reading these monthly magazines. I used to read all the magazine within a month before the next one arrived. Computer work, learning about webpage construction, making my own, answering coding queries and recently producing my own online tutorial for XHTML and CSS (beginners level) has kept me very busy for several years.

Americans post questions in their evening while I am asleep so there are usually a few to be answered from 7am when I start. At about 10am or 11am I am tired so I try to get out on my bike in the summer. After lunch I usually have some query still not sorted out, or I improve my online tutorial based on answers I've given. Sometimes questions arrive from the Far East or Eastern Europe. In the evening the Brits start posting queries and just as I am about to go to bed the Americans start again so I occasionally work until after 11pm although I prefer to stop at 9.30pm.

2.30pm: I pruned rambler roses and clematis on the walls of the cottage. It was just dripping rain but soon stopped; still very gloomy and warm.

3.30pm: Tea of two slices of malt loaf, margarine and marmalade with a mug of water.

6pm: I watched the BBC1 news and had dinner of salad, sweet and sour chicken ready-meal and a bit of cold pre-cooked apple pie.

7pm: I've been working on one of this morning's coding queries most of the day in fits and starts. The page in internet Explorer 6 (IE6) seemed to create a bit of blank space and extra scrollbar to the right side while another browser, Firefox, did not. It didn't make the page display wrongly, it was just an oddity. It's taken me until now to find the cause in a row of menu links that had javascript drop down panels and one of these, although displaying inside the page container, must have had some padding or margin created by the javascript that was creating a hidden extra page width which caused the scrollbar under nothing. I've suggested moving the row of menu links a bit left where they still display alright.

7.30pm: A Microsoft IE blog confirms that IE7 will have its final release to the general public tomorrow for manual download. I hope they've set up enough server capacity! I will probably wait until Thursday morning when the internet is less busy.

8.30pm: I downloaded five Microsoft Office updates totalling nearly 31MB. Last month I downloaded seven totalling 38MB. They are nearly all security updates. Last week I downloaded five updates for the XP operating system. They come thick and fast. I wonder if the new operating system Vista will need fewer updates; it is due for release in November.

10pm: I went to bed and listened to BBC Radio 4 until the timer turned it off.

 
Scientists in Germany have created sperm from stem cells taken from live mouse tissue, grown the cells into live sperm, injected it into mouse eggs and produced live young.

This means that males will soon be redundant; science fiction will become reality.

The novels about alien races composed entirely of females were usually based on parthenogenesis where females identical to the mother were produced. Greenfly do this on Earth now. They can either produce identical females by parthenogenesis or mate with males to produce more males as well as females.

In the new science fiction it will mean that races of females will be able to produce females different from the mother; only females if they so wish, or a few males if they feel so inclined.

 
250 police stormed two small terrace houses in east London at 4 am about two weeks ago and arrested two young men who were suspected of building a chemical bomb. Some police were armed, some were in chemical protection suits and there was an air-exclusion zone overhead.

After eleven days in custody they were released without charge.

One of them was shot in the chest. Police are so lucky he was not killed. They have already killed one innocent man last year.

They have been describing the arrests. The one who was shot said he heard people crashing into the house and thought it was burglars as there was no shouting "Police" or similar warning. He went to the top of the stairs in the dark wearing boxer shorts and T-shirt. There were some torch flashes and he was shot without warning. A man got hold of his left leg and dragged him down the stairs so that he was bumping his head. His head was kicked and he was told with swear words to keep quiet. He was taken outside and just dropped on the pavement.

His mother, brother and sister were also roughly treated. Our special SO3 police seem to be copying American tactics of hit hard, shoot and ask questions later. One can understand such rough actions in a situation like the mountains of Afghanistan where there is a known nest of armed Taliban fighters and our troops are likely to be outnumbered, but why use the same tactics with 250 police against two sleeping men when there is only suspicion about them, not evidence?

It appears that MI5 and police had information about them and neighbours had seen men sitting in a car nearby 24 hours a day, obviously watching something.

After the arrests the houses (a pair linked by a pass-door) were covered with scaffolding and sheeting and completely stripped out and searched. I saw a TV video when the sheeting was being removed and there was a big pile of floorboards.

Now the police face a big bill for reinstating the damage and the men are likely to sue. £500,000 has been mentioned.

Here are two alternative scenarios:-
1. The men are completely innocent. Police had wrong information or the men were set up by terrorists.
2. They are terrorists but have completely fooled the police.

Certainly the demeanour of the men suggests that they are innocent. I don't think two terrorists would both have been able to withstand eleven days of police questioning without looking suspicious, but both these men obviously gave police nothing to go on.

Shami Chakrabarti, the head of Liberty, has been surprisingly calm but is calling for police tactics to be reviewed.

Most commentators from all walks of life have said that police have no option but to investigate terrorist activities, especially if dangerous bombs could be set off injuring thousands of people. They have agreed that police will make some mistakes. The tactics used must be questioned though. If police were watching the houses for some time, why didn't they arrest the men when they left the houses and enter the houses when they were not there? Police would have been in less danger of being shot, there would have been virtually no danger of a bomb being set off and no suspects, innocent or guilty, would be shot.