a convenient truth

I’ve bought a car. Very exciting. It’s a 2001 Ford Focus 1.6 Zetec, which seems like a hopefully safe choice for a family car. I’ve got to tax it yet, so I need my insurance cover note, and our post comes ludicrously late - so I might not get the car in my grubby paws till Thursday. This is irritating.

Two tiny screws are missing from my Tungsten T3 PDA. I just noticed last week that they were absent. I’ve not done anything weird with my PDA, so I have no idea how they could have fallen out.

I need to replace them, because otherwise eventually it will fall to pieces. Out of interest I google for “tiny screws palm” just to see if anyone is selling specific replacements. And what do I discover? This is a really Common Problem.

So I’ve spent $5 on some replacements. I feel a but dumb spending five bucks on four tiny screws but not as dumb as the guy I bought them from:

In order to make these screws available to you, I had to purchase a significant quantity - okay, I bought 5,000 of them. Really. I will need to sell at least a few hundred orders before I turn a net profit. Whatever you do, don’t let my wife find out.

I hope that all palmOne Tungsten T, T2, & T3 owners will continue to support my efforts to make these screws available at a time when palmOne was shrugging their collective shoulders and suggesting that you should pay a $125 repair or exchange fee as their only solution to the missing screw problem. Hopefully, I will eventually recover my costs and turn a small profit but I suspect that some time in the distant future when I am long gone, my as yet unborn grandchildren will be putzing around in my basement when one of them will yelp and say, “Wow, look at all of these tiny screws! What was grandpa going to do with them?”

Those of you close to me will know this already, but I’ve not publicised it particularly as yet. My company Isotoma is expanding. In fact, it is doubling in size.

An old colleague and good friend, Andy Theyers is joining the company. He brings a lot of experience in service delivery and management, lots of interest in Open Source and quite a bit of development experience.

I’ve had a rush job to do for an old friend, building a ticker to be used at an event for a major news organisation this weekend. The data for the ticker is sourced from SMS messages, and the ticker itself will be on a big screen at an event.

The interesting part has been using Twisted/Nevow, so I can use Livepage. This means the front-end has been written in Javascript, with the server controlling the UI directly. As messages arrive by SMS, they are sent to the ticker directly, without requiring a reload. Similarly, all the controls are client/server, so everyone watching the control panel sees the same rendition.

It works perfectly, although IE is slower to update than Firefox. It’s a whole new way of writing web applications for me, but having had such immediate success, I think I’ll be doing a lot more like this. It really is like writing traditional 2-tier apps. My hatred of javascript has been assuaged somewhat also. Everything I’ve done so far has worked fine in both browsers (except for a fade, which relied on an IE filter), without needing specialist knowledge.

It’s all been said already really. But just to highlight how much of a performance this has been, lets remind ourselves of what Glen McGrath thought at the start of the series. This wasn’t at the time seen as the foolish hubris it so obviously was:

“I think I was saying 3-0 or 4-0 about 12 months ago, thinking there might be a bit of rain around. But with the weather as it is at the moment, I have to say 5-0.”

I passed my driving test this morning, so I am finally allowed on the roads unsupervised. Watch out everyone. Huzzah!

The situation in New Orleans is obviously pretty terrible. The claims that the feeble response by the US state are because the people in NO are black misses the mark though I think. The reason the response is feeble is because they are poor.

This wouldn’t even have been considered worth commenting on until recently - “poor treated like crap. In other news, Caesar crosses the Rubicon”. It’s only worth mentioning now really because it is one of the large unresolved tensions in American (and therefore Western) thought.

In the US there is a strong belief that there is equality of opportunity, and that anyone, if they try hard enough, can achieve their potential. This is regarded by many as an ethical statement - that not only do you “achieve your potential” but that you get what you deserve.

The corrollary to this is obviously that the poor, having not tried hard, are also getting what they deserve. In a real sense, they are (as the Victorians put it) the undeserving poor. This concept is very deeply entrenched in US thinking. It’s a very old idea - it’s one that was so embedded in Western Christianity, that when the idea of the “deserving poor” was mooted, it was itself radical.

That observers have accused the US state of racism in failing to respond shows just how ingrained this is. Abandoning an entire city because the residents are poor is OK, but because they are black it is not.