Easy does it

I just logged an incident at our facility management about the lights in our department. And because they have a nice system, I got a direct reply via the mail, stating that my call will be done around noon tomorrow. What made this automated reply a bit strange, was that the incident I logged states: "Many lights are broken.". And I suspect that this will still be the case by tomorrow afternoon.

So that's an easy way to close a call,

Zaaf

Emacs.app

Hi all,

Just a small note to inform you that I've compiled a new GNU Emacs for Mac OSX 10.5 for x86. You can find the .dmg here. It's a brand new version, freshly compiled from cvs sources, with version number 23.0.60.

Interesting bit about the Emacs version numbering is that Richard Stallman decided to do away with minor versioning and treat every version as a major version. This explains the high number 23, which according to RMS should be read as 1.23. However, it seems human nature to have major and minor version number, as can be seen from the current number.

Zaaf 2.0.1

There is a Moose Loose Aboot the Hoose

A few days ago our team went to a day long offsite meeting. And since no one at work has a laptop, I was charged to bring my trusty MacBook Pro. Every teammember had prepared a few slides about a topic that's near to his work heart. Each presentation consisted only of a few slides, but since they all sparked a discussion of dozens of minutes, the day was easily filled.
The most interesting experience, however, was not the discussion of the topics, but the way in which each of us did our presentation. Next to bringing my MacBook Pro, I had brought my wireless mighty mouse. And whenever someone was due to present, he would stay seated, receive the mouse and start his talk. At the end of the day, we were all yelling for the mouse in the same way someone would yell for the remote controle of the TV.

Sent from my iPod

What you can buy for $8.5 trillion

I just read the news that the US government bailout of banks has risen to $8.5 trillion. This seems like a very large number. So large in fact that it seems unreal.
So let's take another look at that number. In yesterdays news, it was announced that the French government started construction of a 106km long canal in the north of France. This will connect Paris with the harbour of Antwerp, and therefore Rotterdam. The proposed project costs are EUR 4.2 billion. Suppose that the real cost of making this canal will be more around EUR 8.5 billion and suppose dollar-euro parity, this means that for the price of the US Governement bailout you can create 1000 similar canals.
That's 106,000 kilometers, or two-and-a-half times around the earth.


Now that is what I call perspective,
Zaaf

Snow Leopard is hot

Apple made a good move by announcing that their upcoming version of Mac OS X will be named Snow Leopard. The snow leopard is already earning prices!

Zaaf

Who will become the next President of the USA?

Just a quick post to let you know my 2 cents.

Because of all the voting rigging that is going on, I think that John McCain will win the election.

Zaaf

Who is the scariest?

(Yet Another American Politic Post)

I don't trust Senator Barack Obama, somehow I think he's to glib. The way he seems to convince more than half of the American electorate by eloquently reiterating a message of hope and change, without any real substance to it, scarce me. And if he can do that, I'm sure that he can convince people of anything.

Just my two cents.

Zaaf

How many candidates do you know?

In the US presidential race, there are six primary candidates. However, somehow only two have access to the presidential debates on television. And since the US president is chosen based on the ammount of TV-airtime he or she has, this seems like censorship. The debates are organized by the Commision on Presidential Debates and somehow they ony let in democratic and republican candidates. To understand why, I did a little search and came up with the following; The Commision on Presidential Debates is bipartisan, meaning it is owned by the Democratic and Republican parties. None other is allowed in. So that's why almost everybody outside of the US thinks that the United States have only two political parties where in fact they have many.

This feels like censorship to me,

Zaaf

Slippery Oil Price (2)

Another reason for the drop in oil price could be that the powers that are in control want to punish the government of Iran. The first step was the hike in the oil price up to $147 a barrel. They also made it look that this high price was because of supply and demand and as a result they made it look that the price should remain high. This made Iran increase it spendings. The second step would then be to bring the oil price down to $60 a barrel. This will create economic havoc in Iran, as this article shows.

I do not believe that the oil price is a result of supply and demand. The supply side has dropped a bit in the past few months and the demand side is has dropped a bit as well, so the equilibrium between supply and demand is not affected. To me, it looks more and more as if the oil price is manipulated.

Zaaf

Slippery Oil Price

What in the world is going on with the price of oil? Just a few months ago, in June 2008, it was $140 a barrel and now it's less than $97. The high price was justified because of demand, but what justifies the drop? Surely, the demand has not dropped 40% in four months?

<tinfoil-hat>
Surely it has nothing to do with keeping Oil as the primary energy source? With a oil price above $130, it makes economical sense to develop alternative sources of energy. With the oil price dropping, this might not be the case anymore. So the investments in alternative energy sources will come to a halt. And oil remains the primary energy source.
</tinfoil-hat>

Zaaf

iPhone App Store exclusion policy

Apple's application store for the iPhone and iPod Touch has some nice things about it: One central point for the developer to promote his app, one central point where the billing and accounting is done. For me as a user it has some nice points as well in that it is the only place I need to look if I want to find an app or an app update.

However, since Apple is also the one allowing or disallowing applications based on their functionality, this single point of entry is not so shiny. In the past, Apple removed the I'm Rich app that cost $999,- because it did not have any functionality. The other thay, a genuine podcatcher application with more functionality than the iTunes / iPhone combination was rejected because it duplicated Apple functionality. Read about it here. Ultimately this will lead to the Worst Case Scenario Extrapolating From the iTunes App Store, Fully-Expressed in the Form of a Single Tweet by Steven Frank

(For those to lazy to click):

Scenario: Apple makes code-signing mandatory for desktop Mac applications. You can now only buy them through iTunes. Think it can't happen?

Scary isn't it? When that happens, the Mac-platform as we know and love it will be dead.

Zaaf

Reduce Mac Pricing?

In a recent article, ars technica suggests that Apple should reduce the prices of their products in order to gain market share. In my non-statistically sound experience of buying two high-end Apple-branded laptops I can definitely state that macs have become a lot cheaper.
My first ever Macintosh computer was an Apple Titanium Powerbook G4 667MHz with 30GBytes of hard drive and 512MBytes of RAM, which I bought for € 3229 (excluding 19% sales tax) on March 30th, 2002. I recently bought a MacBook Pro 2.5GHz core 2 duo with 250GBytes of hard drive and 4GBytes of RAM for € 1995 (excluding 19% sales tax). My TiBook had only half of its maximum RAM where the MacBook Pro has its full RAM allotment. So over the course of six and a half years, the high end Apple Macintosh laptop has become 38% cheaper.

I wouldn't mind if Apple dropped their prices even more, but I'm not complaining about their current prices.

Zaaf

Sloppy Brits spill data beans

The past year or so, I've heard plenty of reports on UK institutions losing data to the public. This latest article is of a bank selling an old PC on eBay without properly destroying the data on it. Somehow I find it difficult to believe that these type of accidents only happen in the UK. Why wouldn't it happen in other European countries?

So, the big question here is: "Are the Brits very sloppy with their data, or are they just not so good at covering it up?"

Zaaf

No iPhone for me

Lately, I've been looking more and more seriously at the iPhone. T-Mobile started carrying it on the 11th of July and its subscription fees are not so horrendous as to make it improbable for me to even consider it. Switching to the iPhone would make me pay roughly twice as much on a monthly basis as my current T-Mobile subscription, which is steep, but then again, I plan to use the data access a lot more with the iPhone than compared with my current phone.

However, a short trip to the T-Mobile store confirmed that I have to wait until my subscription ends before I'm allowed to pay T-Mobile more money on a monthly basis. And since my subscription ends somewhere in 2010 this means no iPhone for me. The bright side of this is of course that all the current 3G-issues plaguing the iPhone will be solved, presumably to be replaced by new issues for new features.

So no iPhone for me (for now),

Zaaf

Mac is Back

Last week, I bought a new MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, there were some issues with the keyboard and the multi touch trackpad. When typing heavily, sometimes the keyboard and trackpad would stop working. A bluetooth mouse however still worked and a reboot cleared the issue. The console.log file displayed things like:
Aug 4 14:18:21 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDebug: data length is 0 in enqueueData
Aug 4 14:22:37 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDriver::_deviceGetReport: DeviceRequest (interface 0, reportID 0x0) returned error 0xe00002ed
Aug 4 14:22:37 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDebug: _deviceGetReport returned an error in configureDataMode

After having had to reboot six times in two days because of this, I got tired of it and went back to the shop. Here they declared it DOA (Dead On Arrival) and could I please provide the box it came in? Unfortunately, the box had fallen victim to our belated spring cleaning activities and was already lost to mankind. This meant they had to replace the topcase, which took them until yesterday to fix.

I've been playing with my MacBook Pro for a few hours and I've not yet seen the issues I was plagued with. So I'm happy to see that my newest Mac is Back,

Zaaf

From Subject to Object

A few weeks ago Apple introduced MobileMe as a replacement for .Mac. As has been noted, Apple, with this change, went from a Subject based i approach, to a Object based me approach. As noted in the above linked article this means the following:

Signs do, however, point clearly to Apple steering away from consumer as creator of data and toward consumer as data itself. I no longer create the data I sync, the data is me and it syncs on its own.

For the past seven years, I've been heavily involved in defining relationship types with a Subject Type and Object Type. And therefor I feel that I can add my own two cents to it. The way I see it is that the subject attributes something to the object. That something is normally either described by a role or by a verb phrase. For example, the i in for example iPhoto attributes photos to iPhoto. Now for MobileMe. Here we have an Object Type: Me and a role description: Mobile. The trick is now to find out what is attributing to the mobile me. Is that the I from the apps in iCal, iTunes, iMovie et cetera? Or can it be Apple? Or the notorious Cloud?

In my opinion, it is I that is contributing to me. And to which me? I'm quite sure that I can have multiple Me's because I have multiple I's. For example, when asked at a party where my car is, I might answer I'm parked over there, at the end of the parking lot. And, since I can have multiple I's, I'm sure I can have multiple me's too. In this case it would be a Mobile Me. This leads me to the fact that I am contributing to the Me that is on the road, or at least away from my PC. In this light, MobileMe can be seen as part of the ongoing evolution that removes the ties to the home PC and enables mobility.
This evolution started with the need for remote access and dumb terminals via teletype. Then the home PC came cutting the ties with the work environment and the mainframe computers. After the home PC became the central server of all personal data, a further tie was cut with the increased popularity of notebook and laptop computers. As technology advanced, the PDA's and mobile phones became more and more popular. Now we have the combination of internet access via cloud computing and an able wireless infrastructure that allows true mobile access. It is exactly this that is enabled by the introduction of MobileMe. It fits both with the description on Apple's pages and with the naming of the service: MobileMe.

In short, the move from Subject to Object in the name is based upon the shift from home computing to wireless access everywhere with small personal devices like the iPhone.

Zaaf

Spring cleaning time

Everyone of us probably has that big box of cables and assorted electronic gear that's been gathering dust over the past years. In my case there were two boxes, plus some cables lying in the proximity of the boxes and the computer. Today I took the opportunity to go through all of my cables and stuff and decide what to throw away. For fun's sake I made a list:

1. Apple Powerbook G4 667MHz with power adapter, spare power cord and two spare batteries;
2. IOmega Zip Drive with parallel interface, including parallel cable and power adapter;
3. 40GByte iPod 3G, with the black and white interface and a broken hard drive;
4. Palm m505 with usb cradle and power adapter;
5. Belkin USB 2.0 riser card that was used in my PowerMac;
6. Sony battery charger for the 20th anniversary walkman;
7. 10/100 Mb Ethernet card;
8. ATA 100 raid card;
9. 3 parallel ATA 66 cables;
10. Creative Soundblaster microphone from 1995;
11. Broken Sony earbuds;
12. Sennheiser earbuds;
13. Sweex 128MB MP3 player with earbuds;
14. RF-plug male;
15. Palm 16MB SD Card;
16. Compaq two button ps/2 ball mouse;
17. Trust mouse to go with their touch pad;
18. Logitech 3 button ps/2 ball mouse;
19. Logitech 2 button ps/2 ball mouse;
20. Logitech scroll wheel usb optical mouse;
21. small 2 button usb optical mouse;
22. Parallel Cable;
23. RS 232C to Parallel adapter;
24. RF TV splitter;
25. 6.8GB Maxtor HDD;
26. USB charge stand;
27. 3 uk-style power cords, one with a 3A fuse;
28. 2 grounded power cords;
29. USB WIFI access point;
30. DV-in enabler for Sony handycams;
31. Bose holding etui for their horrible in-earbuds;
32. USB enclosure for hard drives, including 30 GB HDD and power adapter;
33. USB enclosure for hard drives, including 80 GB HDD and power adapter;
34. Two HDD enclosures with mounting brackets for swapping hard drives in a PC-Tower, including a 8GB and a 20GB hard drive
35. four-way USB hub with power adapter;
36. 15 meter of telephone wire;
37. telephone wire with ethernet-style plug and wall socket plug;
38. USB to PS/2 adapter;
39. 42 3 1/4" diskettes;
40. Wall mounting bracket for original "ufo" Airport;
41. Din 4-pin to Din 4-pin cable;

That's the lot. And when we go through other boxes and shelves, I'm sure that we'll find a lot more obsolete hardware. Still it feels weird to do the spring cleaning in the summer holidays.

Zaaf

Turned a new leaf

Yesterday, after finally receiving a nice bonus from my previous employer, I went to my local Apple dealer and got myself a shiny new machine. After my PowerBook died on me, I tried to use my iPod Touch as the web browser for the living room. However, due to some limitations of both the hardware and some web sites, I decided to treat myself to a new MacBook Pro.
And after receiving my final paycheck from my previous employer, I went ahead and bought the 2.5 GHz, 4GB Ram MacBook Pro, together with a time capsule for my backups and a new wireless mouse. I now can browse the web again while watching a movie.

This is so much more enjoyable than sitting in the attic with my Mac Pro and missing the ins and outs of the series my wife follows on TV.

Zaaf

Webpage junk

We're all familiar with the issue. Most of the time, when reading an article on a newspaper website, the information is in one column in the middle, flanked on the left with some navigational bits and on the right with some advertising pieces. We all know it and most of the time we don't look at it anymore. The web browser on the iPhone / iPod Touch however lets you zoom in on the text you want to read, thereby missing out on the junk surrounding it. This makes for a great uncluttered reading experience. So much so that when I switched back to reading news on a laptop instead of my iPod Touch, I immediately started to double tap on the column containing the article.

As a side note, some weeks ago I participated as a user in a usability test for a new website. The lady conducting the test noticed that I did not look at the information displayed at the left and right of the centre. Instead I just scrolled down to read that same information. So it would appear that my Mobile Safari webpage reading habits are already the dominant way of reading a web site.

So Web-developers, please stay in the centre and deliver us from junk,

Zaaf

New eye on the world

Just in time for the summer holidays, I bought a new, small and lightweight 1080p HD widescreen Sony video camera. It's a nice looking thing that records only to sony memory sticks. It's name is the Sony HDR TG3E. Now that's what I call a sexy name! I wish more companies would uses letter / number combinations for their product names. It just rolls of your tongue so easily doesn't it? HDR TG3E. It's great! It's so unlike those boring Apple names like "iPhone" and "MacBook". No, Sony gets it!

Anyway, this camera is so small, that they omitted the view finder, which makes it rather awkward to use in sunny spots. The other thing they did with it is move most of the controls to the touchscreen. And Sony is so confident that it's easy to use, that they don't even provide a booklet on how to get started. This lack of buttons and view finder makes it a very attractive looking camera, which of course, they had to undo a bit by plastering all kinds of stickers on them to advertise it greatness.

The good things about this camera are:

• It's very light and small, meaning that it easily fits in the pocket of your coat. However, since I bought it for the summer holidays, this is a moot point because I don't wear coats in summer.
• Because there is no view finder, you need the screen to film. Sony made it so, that the camera starts the moment you flip open the screen, thus saving another button.
• The fact that it uses memory sticks instead of tape means that it starts very fast. It even has an automatic stand-by mode that makes it even faster to stop and re-start filming.
• The memory card also gets rid of the fear that you tape over a previous scene.
• The zooming button is slowed down considerably compared to my previous camera, making it almost impossible to zoom too fast in a shot.
• Getting rid of the tape means that transferring your video from the camera can be done at much higher speeds, without the possibility of frames that are dropped. With a tape, there is always the possibility that the computer is too busy with other things to be able to capture al frames. With a memory card, this is no longer an issue because it has direct access.

Of course there are also some bad things about it:

• The battery has a small capacity. You can only shoot up to 40 minutes of video with it.
• The battery is placed inside the camera, making it look nice, but disallowing you to attach a bigger capacity battery.
• The Wide-angle on the lens is not very wide. Making some shots hard to capture. I've ran into this more times than I would like.

But overall, I'm quite pleased with this new camera. If you want, you can find some films at YouTube.

Zaaf

Television = Fake Reality

This morning, I showed my kids a few YouTube clips on my Apple-TV. They were discussing the various types of stunts that can be performed on a bicycle. The weird thing was that each time a great bike riding stunt was performed, they asked me of of was real or just some movie-trick. Apparently, they treat everything they see on TV as made- up and the only films on TV that are real are those that we shot ourselves.

Somehow I'm glad that they see things this way,

Zaaf

Turn to a new leaf in a new book

As I wrote before, my PowerBook decided to die. I did indeed manage to salvage my data by booting into FireWire Target mode after holding down the ‘T’ on startup. This allowed me to copy over my complete ~/. directory.
The harddisk seemed to be alright as /sbin/fsck -fy did not find any issues. Next step I took was zeroing out the harddisk drive and cleanly install Tiger on it. The format stage went fine, the install stage however ended half-way through in an official kernel panic. So something somewhere must be fried. And presumably it's on the logic board.

All in all this means I'm in the market for a new laptop. It is time to close the Book of Power for the last time and turn over a new leaf in a new book. Most likely it will be the Book of Mac. I had my eye cast towards the MacBook Air, but its lack of target FireWire mode made me reconsider this, especially after this recent mishap. So it's time to draw up my requirements for a new MacBook. And in my head they're already skewed towards the 15" MacBook Pro. In fact I already configured one in the Online Apple Store but I decided to wait until I can justify it for myself.

Time will tell,

Zaaf

Running out of Power (book)

Last night, my trusty PowerBook decided to kernel panic on me. And now every app I open results in a segmentation fault. This is not so good. It seems that after only 6.3 years it's already running out of power. Maybe I can resurrect it by installing Tiger afresh onto it. And maybe I can salvage my ~/Library by booting it in Target Firewire mode and connecting it to my Mac Pro, but that's not very likely. If only Apple showed new MacBook Pros during the Stevenote at WWDC. It would make the decision much easier.

On the other hand I get a Lenovo Vistaster laptop from my work to use everywhere, so maybe I can use that at home for surfing on the couch.

We'll see,

Zaaf

Double the oil

I just noticed something interesting in the ratio between the price of a barrel of crude oil and the gasoline price in The Netherlands.

In the year 2000, the average price of a barrel of crude oil was $ 33.40 and a liter of normal gasoline at the pump was 2.70 guilders, or € 1.22. Today, the 22nd of May 2008, oil peaked at $ 135 and a liter of normal gasoline at the pump is € 1.55.

This means that the price of oil quadrupled, but the price of gasoline only increased 37%. So why is the price of our gas so low?


To check the gasoline prices, check http://www.shell.com/home/nl-nl/html/iwgen/app_profile/nl-nl_hoeveelkost.html. The price in 2000 is from 21-06-2000. The price in 2008 is from 22-05-2008.

Now watch

Finally my 2007 bonus arrived. Last Christmas, I saw a nice watch at the local jeweler store. It's an Issey Miyake produced watch by the designer TO. And immediately I was captured by the stark simplicity of the design. I promised myself to buy it when my bonus arrived, so last Wednesday, I left work early to stop by the jeweler and now I'm the proud owner of this wonderful new watch.



Watch and see,

Zaaf

Olympic Choice

Currently there is a big call towards sportsmen not to go to the 2008 olympic games in China, mainly because of the way human rights are treated. There are a lot of issues clouding this issue and they all need consideration before I can state my opinion on it. However, one issue is bugging me and that is that the call is being made to those who had nothing to do with choosing China as the host of the 2008 games. I feels weird that the sportsmen have to suffer from someone else's decision.

Zaaf

3x4 makes 16

I just found out that my beloved Mac Pro had been swapping. This is not to be tolerated, so I went to the shop and treated my Mac Pro, and myself of course, to three packets of four gigabyte of ram. These packets contain two DIMMs of two gigabytes each. So now, together with the four gigabytes already installed, I've got a grand total of 16 GB of ram. And I'm still amazed at how easy it is to install it. Open up the side, pull out the two memory boards, insert the DIMMS and put the two boards back again. And because the memory riser boards are laying in front of you when you do this, there is now awkward positioning of hands and or readjustments of cables needed to perform this. Very convenient.

Zaaf

Do The Album Shuffle

It appears that I was wrong about one part of the iPod app on my new iPod Touch. The order of playlists is preserved. This means that, with great help of the intertubes, I was able to create an applescript that shuffles my albums in random order, but leaving the song order in tact. This applescript creates a playlist called Random, or if that exists, removes everything from it. It then takes the playlist "All Albums" and adds the albums for every song to a list. It skips the album if the album of the previous song had the same name. For this to work, the playlist has to be sorted on album of course. It then takes a random album and counts the number of songs on it and if there's more than one song in the album, it's added to the playlist.

If you're interested, you can find the script here.

Have fun,

Zaaf

Touch SDK outside the US?

Just a small blurb to complain to Apple about the availability of the iPhone developer program. Last week Apple released a mature set of tools to develop applications for their touch computers. It comes complete with a simulator and a remote debugger. The integration with Apples IDE XCode is seemless and within an hour after downloading the 2.1 GB package I had my own version of the obligatory Hello World program. Trying to run it on my iPod Touch however resulted in a compiler error stating that I do not have the required certificate.
It turns out that such a certificate will cost $99 and is only available to US residents after their application to enter the developer program is accepted by Apple. Hmmm, I really wanted to develop some silly apps like Memory and a Scientific Calculator, but now it seems that I have to wait seemingly indefinitely before running it outside the simulator.

Zaaf

Experience windows

I'm sitting in the train and sitting next to me is a man with a 17" widescreen HP laptop.He is currently reviewing a word document and as with almost all windows users word is opened full screen. However, the document is taking only half of the screen real estate leaving a lot unused. This makes me wonder why he bought such a widescreen laptop if he's using only half of it.

The default for macintosh and unix X11 apps is to opened in a windowed view. It always amazes me that Windows users feel obliged to use their apps fullscreen instead of having several windows open and semi overlapping. It is afterall called "Windows". Since it is somehow the default way of working, it must be something the way Windows is set-up that makes people work full screen.

So much for the Windows eXPerience,

Zaaf

Universal Touch

The iPhone sdk is out. This will make it possible for a whole host of developers to make Touch apps. These are all compiled for the arm6 architecture. Of course in the future everything will be better. Let's hope that the transition to a newer better processor like the intel atom will be only a push of a button in XCode. Hopefully, the way I would like Apple to implement it is by generating Universal (fat) binaries like we have on the Mac. Because of the space constraints on the touch devices however, it is unwanted to have the same program for multiple processor architectures on the devise. Here iTunes will have to step in and strip it to the native app before sending it the device.

We can always dream,

Zaaf

Hit me on my iPod!

Last Friday I bought myself an 32GB iPod Touch. My main plan is to use it as a calendar application which also can play video and audio. It's a great little gadget for almost everything and the more I use it, the more Iike it. Even the keyboard is not as bad as I was made to believe by keyboard junkies. case in point is this blog post which is typed entirely on the onscreen keyboard of the iPod. The only thing that I don't like is the iPod app. First off all it feels like a klunky app. And it doesn't shuffle albums. And it can only play songs in album order when the are started from an album. Even the order of playlists is changed to alphabetical. And lyrics are shown centred regardless of the formatting in iTunes. And podcast shownotes are not shown at all. And it is stupid that I have to unlock, select the audio app, select the "now playing" button and press "pause" before a song is paused. But apart from that, I really like it.

So for me the iPod Touch is a success except for the iPod part,

Zaaf

Bored

Who wouldn't be bored with such a car.

Yesterday, I took the family to the Muiderslot in Muiden and on the parking lot I noticed this car.

Looks like a very boring car indeed,

Zaaf

I need a bigger windscreen

(Or why the kilometer based road tax should be Europe wide)

Yesterday, there was an article in one of the free local newspapers about having variable road tax here in The Netherlands. The premise of the article was that only cars with a Dutch registration are taxable, foreign registrations seem to be exempt.

<pub-rant>...which is of course very unfair with all them stupid foreigners driving on our roads and causing traffic jams here. And they don't even pay road tax. And their probably going to work at the job I was supposed to be doing.</pub-rant>

The part of the article that caught my eye though, was about all the countries that require you to have a sticker on your windscreen:

• Austria
• Germany
• Switzerland
• Czech Republic
• Hungary
• Romania
• Slovakia

And now the Dutch government wants us to have a box behind our windscreen to tax the road usage itself. I think I'll write to my representative in the European parliament that I need a bigger windscreen on my car to accommodate all these stickers.

The article also states that The Netherlands, Belgium, Andorra, Cyprus, Malta, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg are the only countries left where you do not have to pay for the road usage. So when I'm writing to my EU representative, I'll suggest that they make variable road tax an EU based tax to be spent by the country it is collected. And the way to collect it would be via an extra tax on car petrol. This will have the effect that people who drive more kilometers, buy more petrol and therefor pay more tax. So the usage is taxed, not the possession. The more a road is used, the more maintenance is needed, making it right to tax the usage. A knock-on effect would be that people who buy cars would get an incentive to buy a more fuel-efficient car, reducing the carbon-dioxide emission.

Hmm, if this is the case, then it seems I don't need a bigger windscreen, we need a EU-wide road tax on fuel and do away with the fixed part of the road tax,

Zaaf

Credit Suisse Writes off 300 trucks with Pokemon cards

Today, Credit Suisse announced a write-off of 1.3 billion Swiss Franks. This is roughly € 812 million. In the light of the billions of euros write-off that other banks did, this seems to be a fairly limited amount of money.

However, let's make it more tangible, so we can get a feel for how much € 812 million really is. My son collects Pokémon Trading Cards and a small booster pack costs € 4,-, while containing 9 cards. So a card is approximately 44 cents. This means that the loss of Credit Suisse can be translated to 1.8 billion Pokémon cards.
Amazon lists the weight of a booster pack to be 19 grams. And if the wrapper takes up about 4 grams of that, then that leaves us with 1.67 gram per card, or 3 million kilograms for the cards you can buy with the € 812 million loss by Credit Suisse. And if we put 10,000 kilograms in a truck, then we would need exactly 300 trucks filled with Pokémon trading game card to match the loss of Credit Suisse.

That's a lot of Pokémon,

Zaaf

Northern Rock Bailout is not for the share holders

Recently I've heard all kinds of comments about the UK bank Northern Rock that's being helped by the British government. The gist of those comments is that it is a bloody waist of money by Gordon Brown to use taxpayers money to give it to the share holders. Here's my take on it:

First of all, the money is not handed over to Northern Rock, it's a loan, so the taxpayers will get it back, with interest. The real issue, however, is a settlement risk. All financial institutions loan money to each other all of the time in all kinds of currencies. They do this to either earn a few cents on money they have temporarily available, or to cover a temporary liquidity shortage they have. These periods can be very short. They can be as short as a few hours, but mostly they are a few days. And the money lent out can go around the world in a day. In fact it can go around the world several times in a day. This of course means that the whole financial sector is very much tied into each other. So what would happen if one party could not pay of one of its day-loans? The receiving end could well be defaulting as well to their creditors. This is what we in banking risk management would call a system wide failure. The most well know occurrence of this is the failure of a small German bank called Bankhaus Herstatt to settle their Deutsch Mark payments (see http://riskinstitute.ch/134710.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herstatt_Bank. The Swiss link is much better). In result a whole chain effect of defaults rippled through the financial world. This prompted the G10 to create the Basel I framework mentioned in my previous post.

So if Northern Rock would not have had that loan, it would not be able to settle their own outstandings and that would result in other financial institutions getting into trouble too. It has nothing to do with share holders, nothing to do with deposit-holders, but everything with the stability of the financial sector. And that is by the way exactly the remit of the FSA and the Government.


Zaaf

Subprime credit crunch disclosure

Currently the G7 is talking on how to deal with the subprime mortgage crisis. The problem with this is that they are a bit too fast in reacting. Of course, this is to be expected of politicians that want to deal with things immediately in order to get more votes, but there is already a new regulatory framework put in place that started the first of January 2008.

Let me explain what the problem is and how the underlying mechanisms work. When a bank, or any other financial institution for that matter, gives a mortgage to you, it gives you money to buy a house. This is a large amount of money for you, which you're expected to pay back over the next few decades. The chance on you defaulting on your payments is low, but the risk is there for the bank. So in order to mitigate that risk, the bank wants some credit protection in the form of a collateral. This is most likely you pledging to let the bank sell your house when you cannot afford your mortgage anymore.

For every loan a bank gives out, it needs, next to the credit protection, to keep a certain percentage of that loan stacked away to make sure that the bank won't get into trouble if they cannot get their money back of that loan. Currently this is regulated by the Basel Capital Adequacy Accord, or Basel I. This is an accord between banks that set all kinds of these percentages and it has been made into law by the local governments.

Now, in order to lend out more mortgages, a bank needs more money, but that might be hard to come by. Banks, however are generally very clever when it amounts to dealing with money. So what they do is create a special company for one specific purpose, this is generally known as a Special Purpose Entity, or SPE for short. Then the banks take a part of their mortgage portfolio and sell it to that SPE. However, the SPE has no money, so to be able to pay it they issue bonds which are guaranteed by these mortgages. And of course the interest payments on these bonds are covered by the income they get out of the mortgages (e.i. your interest payments to your bank). Typically, an SPE packages together the mortgages into ten or so different tranches, where the top tranche contains the mortgages that pose the least risk and the bottom tranche contains the mortgages that pose the most risk. The bonds from the top tranche have a low percentage payment and a low risk and the bottom tranche has a high interest payment and a high risk. The bottom tranche bonds are also known as junk-bonds. Together they are called Collateral Debt Obligations, or CDO's for short. When the mortgages are sold to an SPE, they no longer appear in the books of the bank, so banks do not have to keep money for them. And adding to that is that the sell of those mortgages gives money to the bank, so they can lend out even more.

The companies that buy these CDO's, or bonds, are mostly banks and other financial institutions. They invest in these bonds and assess how much risk is involved in it. To assess these risks, external rating agencies, such as Moody's and Standard & Poors are asked to provide a rating for a CDO. Based on the rating, the investing company know what the risk associated with that CDO is, and thus how much money they need to keep available for when their investment is lost.

What now happened is that in the lower tier of the bands, people started defaulting on their mortgage payments. But instead of the SPE forgoing on their interest payments themselves, they asked the originating bank to bail them out. And banks do this to save their face. Because if a bank lost the trust of people, they would withdraw their deposited money from it. And when that happens on a large scale, then, according to the fact that banks need a percentage of money for every loan (see above), the bank does not have enough money left to write off their bad loans and then the bank can go bust.

The rating agencies, it seems, did a poor job of rating the risks with the CDO's. Most of the time the rating was to high, meaning the risk associated with it was rated to low.

So that's what's happening now. Banks are bailing out their SPE's and don't have money left to give credit to companies, or to other banks for that matter. And those CDO's that are not bailed out, are defaulted and the investing companies, which most of the times are other banks, have to write them off completely. So they don't have money either to lend out. This is the credit crunch effect and it boils down to the fact that it has become much harder for a company to get credit from a bank.

Now for the fact why the G7 politicians are premature in their assessment that they need to do something about this.

Roughly ten years ago, the global banks realised that the current Basel I accord is too strict and also leads to the SPE situation sketch above. They, combined in the BIS - Bank of International Settlement - created a new Basel accord. The main driver was that the larger banks felt that they were much better at assessing the risk associated with a loan than the standards proposed by the Basel I accord allowed. Under the Basel I accord, if you lended money to BubbleBurst.com had the same associated risk as lending money to Shell. For both loans you had to set aside 8% of the main sum. Banks felt that for BubbleBurst.com they might need to set aside 12% and for Shell only 4%. And internally this is the amount of capital that they calculated with. These things have been set into the Basel II Capital Adequacy Accord, which came into effect per the first of January 2008. In this, banks are allowed to set aside as much, or little, money as they think fit, provided they disclose their risk assessment models upon which they calculate the amount of money set aside to the regulators. And a big part of this information has to be disclosed to the market as well. The idea behind this disclosure is that investors then can decide if banks are taking too much risk or not, which will be reflected in the stock price. The problem is that this disclosure will happen in the next quarterly statement so the effects are not yet visible. A big part of new areas in the accord is what the accord calls Asset Securitisation. An example of a Securitized Asset is a CDO. Banks, under the new Basel II rules must set aside much more money than under the Basel I accord.

So there you have it. There is currently a new regulatory system for assessing risks within banks, which will deal with the Subprime losses in a much more effective way. It also reduces investor uncertainties by ordering banks to disclose how they assess their risks. My personal fear is that, on top of Basel II, the G7 politicians feel they need to do something and come up with extra risk controls on top of the Basel II Capital Adequacy framework.

Zaaf

Why Practice not always make Perfect

I just read a blog post detailing why the same mistakes keep popping up, even after hours of study. It is written with classical guitar study in mind, but to me it's applicable to a much wider area of learning. The gist is that you should not be afraid to make mistakes, but take them in your stride and learn to carry on, instead of looking back and trying to learn from them.

So make mistakes and don't try to learn from them, try to live with them.

Zaaf

Washing Hands

Last year Sun, maker of dish washing soap tablets, introduced a soluble wrapper around their tablets. The idea behind this is that you don't need to wash your hands after you've tried to open the wrapper and placed the tablet in the dishwasher. This seems like a nice innovation, because who likes to wash their hands needlessly?

However, what happens in a normal dishwasher filling scenario is that you have a stack of dirty plates and cutlery and put them in the machine. This will get your hands dirty, at least that's what happens to me. Then, because you do not want to soil the cardboard container of the tablets, you wash and dry your hands. Now, unless you've found a way to dry your hands completely, there is bound to be some moisture left on your hands. This is where Sun's research is faulty, because the tablet wrapper immediately begins to dissolve, leaving you with a mucky feeling on you're hands. This results in an extra hand washing, so the intended effect of the special wrappers is undone by the fact that it's special.

This is a useless innovation,

Zaaf

Infuriating good headphones.

No, this is not another rant on my Windows eXPerience. This time I'll share you my thoughts on the iPod ear buds that came with the iPod 5.5G and what I did about them.

I've been an iPod user since March 2002. My first iPod had a 5GB hard-drive and a physical scroll-wheel. Sometimes when I feel nostalgic I long for the feel of control that was communicated by that wheel. This one I replaced because I had way more music on my PowerBook than would fit on my iPod. My second iPod I bought in August 2004. It was the 40GB that preceded the iPod Photo. I replaced that one in September 2006 because the hard-drive broke down. In its turn I got a 5.5G 80GB black iPod.

All my iPod-using time I've been using the standard issue ear buds that came with the iPods. I even managed to keep hold of that piece of foam to put over the speaker end that goes into your ear. I never got a knot in my cable and I never had ear phone wires break down on me. And before the iPod I had a variety of Discmen and Walkmen, whose standard issue ear buds or phones I used without problems over the past twenty-odd years.

And then, without warning, in the winter of 2007, the ear buds of my new iPod 5.5G failed me. There was a bad connection in one of the wires. So off I went to my local store to get me a nice new pair. Somehow the sales-guy convinced me to spend &eur; 100,- on a set of ear buds that I could not even test. I got the Bose In-Ear Headphones, and the first thing I did when I turned them on was to go to the equalizer settings and reach for the bass reducer setting. I've since then turned off all equalizer settings and now I enjoy my .mp3's in a clarity and nuance that I never could have imagined. This is way better an improvement than to encode all your CD's at twice the bitrate. There is so much detail exposed to me that was previously not presented to me with the default iPod head phones that the difference is almost unbelievably big. I've since then tried the Sennheiser CX300 but for me they didn't even come close to the music I get from my Bose headphones.

However, these headphones from Bose are also very awkward, infuriatingly so. First of all, the cord is very stiff, almost impossibly stiff when compared to the Sennheiser, Sony and Apple headphones I've used in the past. But more importantly, the in ear part of the ear bud is a silicon tip which separates much to easily from the ear bud. They get dislodge in the most awkward places, and they tend to blend-in with their surroundings much to well. And because I can't order a spare set, I have to search very well to be able to get my music in high quality with my Bose ear buds. I've lost them on the street while cycling, lost them under my desk three times at work, lost them in the car, lost them on the street while walking, lost them at the beach, lost them at home several times, lost them to the vacuum cleaner, and the list goes on and on. There is not a week going by where I do not have to search for my ear bud tips. And if the sound wasn't as good as it is I would have switched head phones a long time ago. In fact, the main reason for me to buy the Sennheiser CX300's was because of the dislodging issue.

So, until I stumble upon a good pair of headphones, I'll just search and listen to my good but infuriating headphones,

Zaaf

Why Won't Windows Do What It's Told?

My eight-year-old has a friend over for the weekend. He couldn't make it to my son's birthday so since he's here, he brought a gift. It is a PC-CDrom of a Harry Potter game. My son was very disappointed because it said PC and not Mac, so he was sure that it would not run.
Last night it was my task to make it work on my Mac Pro. And since I have Parallels Desktop I surmised that it wouldn't be a problem. However, the game ran so slow that it almost did not work at all. And it lacked sound. This was a big bummer, because it contains lots of spoken clues. So I finally broke down and installed Boot Camp and Windows XP Pro.

What a horrible eXPerience that install was. It reminded me of the MS-DOS 5.0 install. A blue, character-based user interface with a yellow progress bar telling me almost nothing. Then I had to choose the partition. All partitions, even those of my Time Machine RAID drive where presented as options. The only thing distinguishing them was their size, measured in mega bytes. And since all partitions are in gigabytes, it was hard to find. I picked the right one, but during the whole install-process I was haunted by that horrible feeling that I had wiped out my precious Mac partition.

When all was installed, I immediately removed all network access by disabling my active ethernet interface. This seems to work because IE could not connect to Microsoft's home-page. However, when installing the game and after several reboots, it came up with the announcement bubble that it had found new updates and if I would like to reboot now or later. Since I was busy trying out the game, I told it to not bother me and remind me later. When playing the game it went back to my desktop and bug me about the update. The bad thing about it was that I could not get back to the game afterwards. I had to restart the game every five minutes. Who at microsoft thought it to be a good idea that later is 5 minutes and not after I am ready with whatever it is I'm doing at the moment. And who thought that you could connect to the internet even when the ethernet to use is disabled. How safe am I from infection when I cannot disable my network?

Oh, and Apple provides drivers for everything and they work just fine. I have the Apple bluetooth mouse and after pairing it it worked. But after every reboot I have to pair it again. Why won't it remember that this is my mouse?

Let's hope that Vista is better, because Windows is bugging me on all kinds of levels.

Zaaf

MacBook Air, is it here to stay?

The MacBook Air by Apple is a nice piece of engineering. In the Macworld 2008 Keynote, Steve Jobs went into detail on what was needed to make it so thin. Leave out an optical drive, flatten the battery, use an iPod hard-drive and shrink the connector-board of the cpu. This last bit concerns me a bit. The CEO and Chairman of Intel, Paul Otellini came on stage telling that it was a big headache for them to make it so small, that it took them over half a year, but that they're pleased with the outcome. If it took them so long to make it, will they put in that same effort when the MacBook Air is due for a cpu upgrade? Or, given the worse than expected results of Intel in 2007, will Intel forgo on the needed R&D?

My prediction is that the MacBook Air will receive fewer cpu upgrades than the other Apple computers. And that it will be taken out of production within two years.

Zaaf

Let's a go!

Just arrived. Mario gokart

Strange Tracks

Just walked along the beach today and I came across these tracks. As Mr. Vimes would say: "it's probably a wading bird."

The Mob Stories (2)

Back in July 2007, I posted a short blurb on The Mob Stories. Now they've got a few new songs out, which rock. Although they don't, because they funk. Only that's not a real verb, so they rock funk. My favorite is Big Dick which is quite catchy and almost incomprehensible.

Give 'm a listen,

Zaaf

Another Proud Parenting Moment

I just had proud parenting moment, this time it was with my four year old girl. She was playing with k*nex when I decided to play some music. On a whim I selected Strawinsky's Firebird. After the first few bars she asked if that was that "red bird". Because she heard it before, but that was two months earlier. So she recognized the music and had the association to bird correct; "Fire" had become "Red", but still an impressive feat of recognition. She makes me so proud :-)

Zaaf