It was my first time that I flew on an A380. It was a very pleasant experience, though the inner decor that Qantas chose – various shades of grey – was boring to say the least. Apart from being new, the biggest plus was probably that it’s a noticeably quieter plane than, say, a Boeing 747. Supposedly the cabin is also pressurized to a lower altitude than is typical, so one should feel less jet-lagged. Based on just two legs on it, I don’t feel I can comment on whether it really made a big difference or not. On a negative note, the in-flight entertainment system was a bit flaky, with some ground crew idiots performing a remote system upgrade while the plane was airborne, resulting in an hour of reboots and restarts before it started working again. Btw, it runs Red Hat Linux.

Oh, and the Rolls-Royce engines contained themselves well, thankfully.

On another note, I can’t believe how many people take long-haul flights in full business gear, i.e. suit and all. I felt very positively out of place in my ultra-casual flying attire. It’s not that hard to do a clothing switch at the airport, but it makes flying so much more comfortable.

Over my free weekend in Brussels, I toured some of the main sights. Brussels had a pretty good free aviation museum, that had some old planes, newer planes, small plans and bigger planes – a fairly extensive selection.

Then there’s the Atomium, originally built for the World Fair expo of 1958. Giant spheres, 18m in diameter, that house a science museum of sorts.

One of the more positive surprises was the Cantillon Brewery that turned out to be an educational experience on the nice tour they have there. Lots of interesting beer facts that managed to lift my respect for beer, particularly lambic, a little bit. No, I still don’t particularly like beer.

The Justice Palace was a pretty intimidating place. I could imagine it being an inspiration for, say, the game Doom (which is the most recent FPS that I can remember playing..)

All parks were, in the typical Central European fashion, very geometrical. They would’ve been a lot more pleasant had it not been freezing.

Probably the #1 attraction of Brussels, the peeing dude (aka Manneken Pis) was having a wardrobe crisis and was covered in strange clothes every day. Probably for the better, I mean it was cold..

Trains. Gotta love the high-speed rail in Europe. With 1h20min to Paris (with poorly functioning WiFi on board) it was a joy. However, not all logistics was quite up to scratch. On my way back, I had a horrible time getting to the airport in Brussels, with the train system messed up and the information – particularly in English – lacking badly. Frankfurt airport, on the other hand, was a disaster both ways – almost worse than Heathrow. The more I travel in Asia, the more I prefer Asia to Europe. For example, the Singapore airport was still perfectly functioning and a pleasant place as far as airports go; yet they were completely redoing the terminals. In Europe (as well as in the US) everything tends to get run down past their useful lifetime and only then do people start thinking whether something perhaps should be done to fix them. Airports are a prime example.

In Paris, I had a sunset view of the Eiffel tower. The most entertaining part of the tower was watching the guys who sell the metallic mini-Eiffel towers near the real one. They run back and forth, spreading their mini-towers for sale and then scooping them up and sprinting away the next second when the cops approach, only to return 30 seconds later. It’s like a real-life Tom&Jerry-show. The cops obviously didn’t care enough to actually sprint after them and the security forces didn’t care at all (nor did the salespeople care about them).

When departing Brussels, I saw the most contrails I’ve ever seen at once. It reminded me of their impact on global warming, which apparently is still being debated. There is a recent Nature-article on them, suggesting contrails have a significant impact.

Upon return to Melbourne, I was greeted with what was a truly warm morning and a nice sunrise. A welcome event after being in the cold for a couple of weeks. Also, Melbourne airport was a remarkably easy place to get out of early in the morning. With nobody around, it took me under 15mins to get from the aircraft door to the taxi with the luggage and everything. The taxi part, however, sucks. Seriously, Melbourne should get a rail line to the airport, no matter what the people with vested interests against it say (who seem to be the most vocal in this issue).

Drop-in biofuels for aviation

Out of all biofuels, drop-in biofuels are the best possible option from the consuming side – “drop-in” means they have properties that allow them to simply replace existing liquid fuels, with no changes required on the engines, distribution infrastructure or anything. That’s not the whole story, however, as there is the production side to consider as well: and biofuels tend to be quite evil on many accounts if they are produced from food crops. So algae-produced fuels, ones in no way competing with food production, are the holy grail here, which is why I was very interested in the fact that Qantas is teaming up with Solazyme to mass-produce drop-in aviation fuel from algae.

Solazyme claims their technology “allows algae to produce oil and biomaterials in standard fermentation facilities quickly, efficiently and at large scale” which, if true and if the fuel gets certified, would be awesome. It’d still be burning fuel and producing CO2 in the process, but with full lifecycle emissions 85 to 93 % lower than fossil fuels, it’s a pretty good transitional technology.

Here’s hoping they succeed. If they really can scale the production to the required massive quantities and do it relatively economically – say under $200 per barrel – it could save aviation from being a sunset industry.

One bad harvest away from chaos

Oil is back above $100 per barrel and food prices have risen to their highest level ever. Looks a lot like things did a few years ago. Among other developments, floods in Australia and drought in China are contributing to the precarious situation – Lester Brown points out that the world is one poor harvest away from chaos:

If the world has a poor harvest this year, food prices will rise to previously unimaginable levels. Food riots will multiply, political unrest will spread and governments will fall. The world is now one poor harvest away from chaos in world grain markets.

Time to ban biofuel production from food crops and shift some attention to basic priorities like food security. And rebuild some resilience back into societies.

Nokia switches strategies, everyone complains and nobody knows what they’re talking about

Exaggerating only slightly here. Nokia, my former employer, recently announced that they are going to decommission Symbian from smartphones in a couple of years’ time and use Windows Phone 7 as the primary smartphone platform. This sparked outrage from all over the tech industry and “expert” comments are all over the map. Taloussanomat has one of these experts calling operating systems “user interfaces” and how these “user interfaces don’t really matter”. Right. Kauppalehti, the second supposedly-respected-business-paper-turned-tabloid lambasted the strategy, only to actually use a WP7 handset a couple of days later and notice that hey, it’s actually pretty good.

Of course there were the mandatory walkout protests. And there’s the Facebook page calling for immediate firing of Mr Elop. Expert opinions abound, and surely Case Nokia is being written into a number of business and management books as we speak. But really, the extreme emotions (also for but mostly against) raised by this just go to highlight the myopic, besserwisser attitude that drove Nokia to the difficulties it now finds itself in.

How about using half of that energy to try & execute the new strategy instead of whinging about it? I’m not saying it’s necessarily the right one, but there’s one surefire way of ensuring it fails: not even try.

Somewhat unusually – but not exceptionally – cold and snowy weather has brought chaos to European traffic, particularly flights in the UK where snow has all but shut down the busiest international airport in the world, Heathrow, for days. Other airports in central Europe have suffered from similar closures, and the UK was left wondering how the Helsinki airport operates so well in snow. In a uniquely Finnish manner, news of this admiration from abroad probably got more coverage in Finnish media than elsewhere.

So how does the Helsinki airport manage to deal with snow? The answer is blindingly obvious: Finland has snow pretty much every winter, for much of the winter. They have to know how to deal with it, otherwise the airport would close down for months every year whereas events like this are relatively rare for Heathrow – thus the lack of preparation even though incidents like this are likely to increase in frequency as climate change advances. Much of this failure to prepare has to do with relentless drive towards cost-efficiency and optimization, leaving no room for any errors, unusual events or, as it seems, normal weather occurrences.

All this chaos from airport closures to crawling road traffic colliding with any moving or non-moving object, highlights the lack of resiliency in modern transportation. What’s worse, when it fails, it does not fail gracefully – so not only is it a fragile system, it’s a brittle system. Flights from Heathrow were not reduced by, say, 20% or 40% – they were all canceled.

On a much smaller scale but possibly even more bizarrely, the railroad company in Finland has warned that the trains around Christmastime are likely to be delayed. Not because of the weather, no – but because they are full. That’s right, the trains will be delayed because they are actually carrying passengers at capacity! What idiot designs a system so that it automatically fails when it’s operating near full capacity? Well, at least this failure is likely to lead “only” to delayed trains and possibly cascading delays, but to few if any outright cancellations. But still, sign of trying to optimize things to too narrow margins when you fail to achieve your targets even within entirely normal operating parameters.

The fact that we have next to no resiliency in the global transportation infrastructure is worrying enough, but that’s not all: it’s also the people.

How’s that, you may ask. While undoubtedly the traffic chaos causes countless of sad events, the following words, all used to describe the UK flight situation, seem quite out of proportion: “pure hell“, “miserable“, “desperate“, “panic“, “catastrophe” and so on. Those kinds of words should be used to describe actual catastrophes, not situations where, at worst, you won’t make it home for Christmas. To put it in the mildest possible way, I think that’s exaggerating the suffering just a bit.

Try, for example, telling the Haitians that your “hell” entails spending a night at the airport and he or she might help you put things into their proper perspective. So not only do the systems need to be designed with better resiliency, the people also need to suck it up and quit calling every minor event when the world doesn’t co-operate with your plans a “catastrophe”.

As if meetings weren’t destroying productivity badly enough these days, it’s amazing how basic meeting services can still continue to function so badly. For example, have you ever had a phone conference with more than two participants that wasn’t riddled with a bad connection, echos, interference, feedback noise or some other problem? Has any content sharing or collaboration software ever worked properly for all participants? Or, have you participated a meeting where all the projection equipment worked flawlessly and people never had a problem connecting to a projector?

Apart from the very high-end telepresence systems, the basic services continue to wreak havoc on most meetings. The Calvin & Hobbes comic below captures the feeling perfectly (click to enlarge):

And then we have the meeting etiquette, agenda definition, timeliness, processes and preparedness (or more often the lack of all five) problems on top of the basic technological problems and one can only imagine how many billions of dollars are being wasted in meetings.

100Mbps ought to be enough for everyone

Yes yes, that phrase is likely to come back and bite me. But a more pertinent question is what exactly is the benefit of having a 1Gbps connection (the ones Google is planning on trialing) as opposed to 100Mbps, which is the state-of-the-art consumer broadband connection available in select locations around the planet?

Video? No. HD video? No. 3D HD-video? Still no. In fact, some years ago Cisco estimated that an all-senses, indistinguishable-from-reality virtual reality system would require a bandwidth of around 70-100Mbps – call it the input bandwidth of the brain. With advanced video and other codecs, the requirement is likely to be less than that. So I think it’s a fair question to ask what do consumers need speeds over 100Mbps for? Especially with the rest of the Internet along with TCP limitations usually bogging down the speed much below that for non-P2P applications.

Dumb, dumber, government?

Mention NBN to anyone working in telecom in Australia and you’re bound to get an opinion. (NBN is a government initiative that, with some $40 billion in cash, is to build a nationwide broadband network, delivering 100Mbps to most households.) Nothing in the project, however, seems simple. But there’s one aspect in particular that is nothing short of mind-boggling; the government is taking and threatening to take a number of hostile actions against a single, publicly traded corporation – Telstra (disclaimer: I work for Telstra).

Now, I agree with the need for functional separation of access networks and services parts, part of a bill that is currently being debated and looks likely to fail. But what I have absolutely zero tolerance and understanding of are the threats made by the government that unless Telstra plays nice (again, only Telstra, a single publicly traded entity) and comes to an agreement with NBN Co. on a number of non-trivial things, it will be forced to divest its 50% ownership in a cable company, Foxtel, AND be forbidden from bidding on new 4G radio spectrum. WTF?

I’m all pro-competition and anti-monopoly, but come on! How can it possibly be constitutional for a government to start making laws that are custom-tailored against a single corporation?! That is hardly modern capitalism.

And on a lighter sidenote, how is Telstra identified in these wannabe-laws? By name? If so, Telstra could change its registered name every six months and dodge all the legal mandates ad infinitum ;P

Borrowing the post title from the great Calvin & Hobbes comic, that’s something I’ve been wondering the past day or so. The Economist delved at length on the topic in their end-of-the-year double issue with the theme “Progress and its perils”. It’s a good issue, so pick up a copy or read what you can online if you haven’t yet. While The Economist looked at some big issues, morals and all, I’ll leave those alone for now and focus a minute on some smaller ones where “progress” is actually a four-letter word.

Remember when flying used to be fun?

10 or 15 years ago, flying was a pleasant experience. But now? Now flying is a royal pain with all the added “security” hurdles and restrictions. The latest bombing attempt incident has already – again – caused even further tightened security measures, like the completely braindead approach of demanding passengers sit down for the last hour of the flight. That’s just mind-bogglingly dumb. All this even though everyone should know most of the so-called security procedures are futile. As Bruce Schneier has pointed out:

Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.

The rest, i.e. most of it, is just a nuisance that adds up. In essence, we the passengers have to put up with great inconveniences for the sake of security theater. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with all security theater, but do we have to pick the most annoying, counter-productive, useless, expensive and abusive theater practices? That sucks. Especially when we could do something useful.

Remember when e-commerce was actually convenient?

“Progress” is also creating problems in another walk of life: credit cards. Even though we all agree they should be more secure (I should know, my card details were compromised two weeks ago), the layers of added security are becoming a painful thing for the user. The Visa/Mastercard 3D-Secure protocol in particular is annoying as hell and has caused many a transaction to fail. It has, in fact, worsened the user experience so much that I have reduced my card usage because of that. Why? Because 3DS adds numerous steps to the payment process, the verifying bank’s systems often don’t work or the transaction just mysteriously fails. Who cares if it’s more secure if it doesn’t work?!

Remember when the Internet was actually global?

Back in the 1990′s the Internet was a rather nice place to hang out in. Of course we didn’t have all the cool services we have now, but the signal-to-noise ratio was vastly better than it is now. IRC was used for intelligent and/or interesting conversations. Usenet was actually useful. And so on.

Now, ironically enough, electronic national barriers seem to be popping up everywhere. You would think the region codes in DVDs were the last geographically limited media thing we’d see, but no. Try watching YouTube videos from anywhere but the United States and you’ll soon enough hit the “We’re sorry, … is not currently available in your country“-message. Ditto for Hulu. And for crying out loud, even the Daily Show’s official site bans visitors from Down Under. What’s more, if an item in Amazon is sold by another merchant, chances are they don’t ship abroad. What kind of globalization is that?

Of course there are ways to get around some of this stuff – like having a VPN tunnel to the USA or buying a redirecting service with a US address – but the point is one shouldn’t have to do that.

The really big picture

All that is, of course, peanuts compared to situations where real progress actually would’ve been needed. Back on the larger scale of things, economically the past 10 years have taken most of the developed world nowhere.

And don’t even get me started on the political ineptitude of dealing with climate change; the worst part is that it is only a political problem as technically and economically dealing with climate change is perfectly feasible, relatively simple and even relatively cheap. Just reminds me of the quote:

The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.”

Hence, globally, 2010′s better be better than the “naughties” or whatever you want to call this decade.

In the spirit of improving things – or at least not making them any worse – I shall now do the most economical and environmentally responsible thing I can imagine: hit the local beach. It just so happens it’s also one of the most fun things to do.

Lucky coincidence.

Can somebody please explain to me why the Australian media has such an affinity – an obsession, really – to playing with words? There seems to be an editorial requirement that articles need to appear witty or have some clever (or not) wordplay in the headline. Some examples from this week:

• Desal plant figures don’t hold water.
• A surgeon who draws bad blood
• Sun shines on solar plane’s flight
• A corner in Brighton you can bank on (A property leased by a bank auctioned for loads of money)
• So you think you can prance (A Ferrari review)
• Fear and loathing in Aspen
• Qantas acquisition fails to fly

Ha ha. Seriously, why? Sure some are funny and some even clever, but by no means all. Many are downright forced.

Why pay less when you can pay more?

Perhaps the ad agencies also need to spend more time proofreading the ads instead of coming up with clever quips.

Apple needs a better App Store

I’ve been an iPhone user for a couple of weeks now and am loving the device. It’s great. I’ll save the device comments to another post, but I have some issues with the App Store. As extolled as it is, it’s just not very usable as the number of available applications has passed 100,000. Specifically:
• The fact that all apps aren’t available globally sucks. It’s downright evil having applications limited geographically; reminds me of the DVD region code debacle – Australia at least had the sense to put a stop to that (by mandating that all DVD players sold here must be region-free), so what’s with Apple getting away with doing essentially the same thing?
• The App Store user interface is bad; for one, it doesn’t scale well to the iTunes window. Did someone forget to tell Apple that having a window that needs scrolling both sideways and up-down is lame?
• It’s unclear what the categorization is based on what; who decides what goes into “New and noteworthy”? Are they new, noteworthy or both? With 10,000 new app submissions every week, just having “new” apps area doesn’t help much.
• What are the Top charts based on? Downloads? Ratings? I want a way to clearly find the top-rated applications and I want them categorized; most apps are games and I want to browse the catalog without being bombarded by entertainment apps.
• Why can’t I sort the lists by rating? Why can’t I see Amazon-style “People who bought this, also bought ..” recommendations?

The App Store has been a runaway success by any measuring stick, but I foresee some serious scalability and usability problems as the apps keep on piling. Even currently the best method for application discovery is using external Internet sites that classify, review and list the best apps; then you just search & download what you need from the App Store.

Needing a 3rd party for basic app discovery is a clear sign of some trouble.

Anyhow, here are also some random thoughts of the day that I thought are good to write up about:

Ready for another recession? And gas prices of 2 euros per liter?

There is an important topic that has been sorely missing from mainstream media; once we get out of this recession and oil demand rises, so will the prices since supply cannot – and never again will – keep up. However, most of the world cannot afford prices of $150 or $200 per barrel, so the increasing energy costs will drag the world economy into another recession. And so it will continue until alternative energy supplies will be scaled up to make some meaningful impact; let’s say 20 years minimum.

As a consumer in Finland, this means gas prices (and the prices of everything else, too, for that matter) will rise soon enough. They may even hit 2 euros per liter or even higher, whereas in many other parts of the world the relative impact will be even greater “thanks” to our tax structure. Now would be a good time to start tracking and comparing prices at the pump with crude prices as the general feeling is that companies always hike prices when crude prices go up but “never” lower them. Might make for an interesting graph in a few years’ time.

Elsewhere, this and related topics have been covered nicely lately. I recommend at least:
• The Oil Drum: The trouble with energy
• Resource Insights: Which matters most? The size of the tap or the tank?
• Peak Oil News: Peak Oil Crisis: stifling a rebound

Swine flu making its rounds

So it seems swine flu is quickly becoming established pretty much everywhere. Even here in the remote Northern parts of the world, there has been the first confirmed “local” infection. The good news, of course, is that the strain is proving to be a very mild one indeed – reportedly even milder than “normal” influenza, which is great. But the worry remains that it might mutate into something significantly worse while it’s making its rounds.. so perhaps it’d be better to catch it now and be done with it? Maybe a swine flu infection now would offer immunity even against the potential new mutations? Or not.

Another thing I wondered was whether there have ever been studies on whether people using public transport get more (or less) influenza infections than people driving private cars? It might seem that people on a bus are in a greater risk, but they might also have better resistance to bugs in general due to broad exposure of all kinds of viruses. Anyone know of any studies to this regard?

I think stores should be allowed to stay open anytime they wish to; hence, I welcome the May-August period when stores in Finland can be open on Sundays. Last Sunday I went to our local grocery store to pick up some fresh bread – or so I thought. Here’s what they had on offer on Sunday evening:



Perhaps I didn’t want bread after all.. Kind of reminds me of the Soviet Union, doesn’t it?

Hmm, wonder what that is… Let’s call it scrambled eggs!

We were in Kuopio last week for a friend’s wedding which was a lot of fun. During our visit, we stayed at the Cumulus Hotel. Without going into unnecessary details – I do NOT recommend the hotel. One thing that we, prior to witnessing the actual fact, thought was positive was that the breakfast was included in the price. Now, hotel breakfasts can often be judged by their eggs – in better places they will make you a perfect omelette just the way you want it. In good places they will at least have decent scrambled eggs and crisp bacon.

In other places they have this:



On the left are the scrambled eggs from Day 1. On the right is the same scrambled eggs dish on Day 2. I didn’t dare look into it on Day 3.. I don’t know about you, but I doubt one can classify pieces of rubbery eggs floating in water or a huge block of cooked eggs as scrambled eggs. Eww!

Luckily it was possible to find good food in Kuopio – more about that in a later post.

So why don’t we put one like, I dunno, everywhere?

Another snippet of Kuopio. It is a common complaint that there are not enough trash cans in the downtown area of any given city. The Kuopio market square, however, hardly suffers from this problem:



That just might be a bit of an overkill, don’t you think?

One reliable indicator when a technology or service has gone mainstream is when it’s being advertised on bus stop billboards. This Elisa ad from this week in particular shows not one or two but three things that have recently gone mainstream: Facebook, minilaptops/netbooks and mobile broadband. In particular it’s interesting to note that netbooks (the cheap small laptops) have gone mainstream so soon – while they have also been blamed for destroying business models, for many consumers they’re the best thing sliced bread. I’ve yet to jump aboard myself, pondering the usefulness of one of these versus the smartphone which has so far proven to be sufficient for my mobile needs.

Of course, all three go hand in hand. A netbook is utterly useless without the ‘net, requiring mobile broadband. Luckily flat-rate plans with reasonable usage limits are becoming more and more available. And then you need something to while on the Internet, and what could be a better example of this than the runaway success of Facebook?

When doing the right thing twice means doing the wrong thing

When the leftmost sliding door is broken, it’s only natural to instruct people to use the door on the right. And when the door on the right breaks, the correct course of action is to tell people to use the door on the left.

Unless it’s already broken, that is. If it is and you do that, you end up with an endless loop. Luckily it’s very easy to spot such simple, straightforward errors in logic on the spot, right?

Right?

*sigh*

Don’t companies know anything about their customers? With customer relationship management, targeted & personalized advertisement etc increasingly important, I fail to understand how some basic stuff can be missing.

Like, for example, two months after ordering Helsingin Sanomat, why do they send me – me personally, named envelope and all – an ad and an offer to order Helsingin Sanomat? Uhh, hello, Earth calling the Customer Database?

Or why does Elisa send me an ad for faster broadband speeds when they know well I already have their fastest line?

Not only are they wasting money doing this, they’re giving off an amateurish image. It’s kinda like they don’t even know I’m their customer – except when it’s time to send the bill, of course. (Okay to be fair, they do deliver the service also – paper comes in every day, and bits go in and out.)

Payson enables online fraud

I’ve been fighting a payment to a Swedish merchant for non-delivery of goods, and learned the hard way that payment processors come in more than one variety. To make a long story short, I bought stuff from the merchant who used Payson as their credit card processor. I didn’t think too much (i.e. enough) about it, and made the payment. Never got the goods despite inquiries, so I called my credit card company. Alas, they cannot do anything as their customer (Payson) has transferred the money exactly as they should. It’s the merchant that sucked.

But no luck with Payson either – they also think they did everything right. While theoretically that is true, I consider Payson acting as an intermediary to be an enabler for online fraud, happily processing fraudulent payments. So what makes this loophole possible? Payson doesn’t store the credit card number as a part of their user account so VISA regulations don’t apply.

Idiots. I’ll know better next time. PayPal, the most popular intermediary, is better in this regard as the card is part of the account and normal regulations apply.

So avoid Payson. And any merchant that deals with them.

Would we be better off looking beyond the quarters?

Recession is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. With every newspaper touting every single decline as “huge”, companies are hitting the panic button everywhere. But just how bad have things gotten? Take retail in the US, where talk has been of a major collapse. Figures of double-digit sales declines from last year do indeed seem dramatic. But we can also take another view into the situation. Here’s a quote from today’s NY Times:


According to the Commerce Department, retail sales for 2008 fell 0.1 percent from 2007 [..] Much of December’s drop in retail sales came from falling gasoline prices, which have tumbled to a nationwide average of $1.79 a gallon from their peaks of $4.11 in July

0.1%? Oh yes, a fully valid reason to panic, is it not? Is it just me or does that suddenly not seem so dramatic at all? Seriously, are we forgetting that prices of lots of things went up absurdly in the past 24 months? Spiraling costs were considered bad news then. And now that they’re returning to more reasonable levels, that’s also bad news?