theTechnophile

There’s no doubt that humans differ significantly from other species in the scale at which we manipulate the environment around us. OK… other species do this too, but with our technological advantages we have a truly massive impact. But what happens when nature fights back?

We’re going down!

Large portions of Britain’s southern coastline is sinking into the sea! To be fair, it’s been sinking for quite a few thousand years, since the end of the last ice age. There’s nothing we can do to lift the land up, so building big dams and excepting life below sea-level seems the only option.

There appears to be an increased rate of flooding of river plains in Britain in the last few years. This may be in part due to Climate Change and sea level rising, but also to building on these existing flood plains. Britain is a relatively crowded Country by western standards, so we need all the space we can get, but walling up the rivers only causes water to accumulate upstream during periods of heavy rain.

Protect lives or property?

The traditional approach, adopted over the past millennia, was to move out of the way when nature dictated. This saved lives, but at a time when the economic value of property wasn’t the issue it clearly is today. To make matters worse, the type of property and assets therein are far more susceptible to water damage than once they were.

However, we have the technology to stop the land loss using everything from concrete blocks to flood barriers like those in London or Rotterdam. A recent Discovery channel programme clearly showed what an amazing piece of engineering technology the Dutch flood defences represent.

Yet the Dutch have come to the conclusion that the only way forward is to accept that, in exceptional circumstances, large portions of their Country will have to be allowed to flood.

The problem with trying to contain flood water is that sooner or later you’ll lose and once you do the result is catastrophic. A huge wall of water is often released that surges over the land destroying property, but critically trapping, injuring and killing large numbers of people. Remember the images of boats being crushed through bridges in Shrewsbury, UK, or what happened when the levees broke in 1993 in the US?

Allowing the land to flood more slowly, but regularly, gives people plenty of warning to get out of the way. Additionally, the energy released by flood water and the eventual depth is greatly reduced, so property damage is often less severe.

Where’s the habitat going?

Habit loss is in part due to our tenacious resistance to the forces of nature. Whilst we doggedly defend the land we occupy on the coast as the sea advances, the wildlife habitat in between disappears. In a natural system, as the sea advances the habitat would move inland, occupying the new coastline.

Ironically, this beautiful habitat is often the reason for the high value of the property being protected. So once it’s gone what is the effect on the property value? Who wants to pay a huge price for a house next to a massive concrete sea wall?

We need to be more flexible.

This is the part where a little well aimed technology comes in, combined with a generally more flexible approach to life. We need housing and a lifestyle that can adapt to the environment, because like it or not the environment has always changed.

Housing that is comfortable, practical and takes up less land must be one goal. But this isn’t a wholesale return to the concrete tower blocks of the 1970s.

Much of the land we use is taken up with utilities, some of which may be replace with more compact alternatives. Gardens can be allowed to flood, in fact that could become a feature. Once again, the innovative Dutch are using pontoon mounted housing, roads and infrastructure in flood areas. This is made safe by the slow water flow rate born from the acceptance of regular flooding.

The environmental challenges of the future are going to need a flexible social as well as technological approach. I’m sure science and technology are up to it, but society?

OK… I know that it’s been a very long time since my last post. I’ve been busy constructing a new website to host my thoughts on the software design and development front. If this is what you want to read, try www.jameswhinfrey.co.uk.

But where does this leave theTechnophile I hear you cry!! I’m going to use this website to host articles aimed at science and technology. Your still going to get some computing stuff, after all it’s everywhere these days. However, the focus is on the application of technology in fields such as energy, mesotechnology and communications. But, be warned, I’m still going to let the brief wander!

Like most people, I have always considered that Internet capacity would automatically expand to cope with any growth in use. But is this really the case? A recent post on Slashdot got me thinking.

Internet bandwidth

The problem is one of bandwidth, or the volume of data passing through the network at any one time. This appears in a couple of different forms:

1. A bandwidth usage cap, usually presented by ISPs as a monthly figure.
2. The data transfer rate given as the number of bits, packets of information, transferred each second.

Monthly allowances can easily be converted, by dividing the bandwidth cap figure by the number of seconds in a month, to give the average monthly data transfer rate. Figures for a few typical internet applications are shown below.

Table 1: Typical monthly average data transfer rates for internet applications

The transfer rates in Table 1 are very low when compared to a typically advertised broadband services at 1, 2 and even 8 Mbps and most corporate networks will capable of at least 100 Mbps.

What do you actually use?

Most users don’t carefully spread their use over the month and cause usage spikes when actually doing something like downloading a large file, watching video online or playing online games.

In response to new bandwidth heavy applications, check out the Web or magazines, you’ll find ISPs advertising new services with ever increasing transfer rates. This is great, but most connections aren’t capable of attaining the advertised rates.

Take my home broadband connection, I have no complaints over its reliability and it runs at a little under 1 Mbps. I find this to be adequate for my normal use and it can even cope with two of use surfing at the same time. BT think that they can squeeze 3 Mbps out of my line, but in this case the upgrading to the new 8 Mbps service on offer is pointless.

Is the limiting factor the copper wires to my house, at the exchange or at another point in the network entirely? I don’t know, but I’d be prepared to bet it isn’t the Internet backbone and online TV isn’t going to catch on in this household until it’s sorted out.

Being in contention

When using an internet connection you find that you are sharing its bandwidth with a number of other users. This is the contention ratio for that connection. Often you won’t all be using the connection at the same time and intensity, so you’ll be relatively unaware of each other.

Consequently the actions of individual users isn’t the prime concern, but rather their usage pattern on mass. For example, the mass adoption of telecommuting mooted as an emergency response in the wake of a flu pandemic is likely to result in a synchronised spike in network load. Many, I suspect rightly, expect that much of the Internet may grind to a halt, but not that it will collapse completely.

In contention terms, we’re all going to hit the connection bandwidth hard at the same time and the chances are we’ll each only come out with a small piece. Still it may be better than nothing, but as someone who has recently being using dial-up again I’m not so sure!

In the case of such emergencies, QoS features in routers already prioritise network traffic to maintain bandwidth access to more critical applications. It is possible to see that this can be applied to the Internet as a whole and may well be already.

It’s not just about the wires

The most vulnerable part of the system is likely to be the servers expected to deal with this huge increase in traffic.

Unless massive over capacity has been specified, faced with this situation the best outcome would be that most users would simply be unable to establish a connection with their destination server. The worst would be the same as a DoS attack, causing the server to crash.

Is the rapid mass adoption of remote working practices a viable response to pandemic scale infections even if you ignore the network limitations? For the majority I expect not.

Focus on the steady-state

So when pondering the strangulation of the Internet these emergency scenarios are a side-show. The main point is whether the regular adoption of higher bandwidth services can be supported by its infrastructure. In the case of streaming TV via the Internet, Google thinks not. The Internet wasn’t designed to stream this type of information in real time.

But that’s only video streaming, what about all the other web applications for which the Internet is better suited?

The term of the moment is Web 2.0; basically the adoption of a more social approach to building web content. Much of this is text, relatively compact images and the occasional audio file thrown in. None of this should cause significant trouble to the established networks as long as they keep pace with any growth in Internet uptake.

But will it do that? Who is responsible for the investment? It may be that bandwidth becomes more valuable in the future, like carbon dioxide perhaps, but there’s scope for greater efficiency in existing applications, such as:

• Cleaner, more standards compliant code.
• Image file formats with improved compression performance.
• Better use of data compression at the web server.
• More semantic code allowing machines to efficiently retrieve information.
• Reduce the volume of web crawling required to assembly search engine indexes.
• Get serious about reducing the amount of spam clogging the network. This includes junk email and comment spam on blogs and forums.

I suspect that these measures combined with others, identified by people much brighter than myself, would have a significant impact on our current bandwidth use. Could this issue be the Climate Change or tomorrow? We already have bandwidth trading after all.

I’m finding increasing interest in the possibilities raised by mobile communications and devices. A survey by Informa Telecoms and Media estimated that there would be over 3 billion mobile phone subscribers throughout the world by the end of 2007. The fastest growing markets are in India, China, Africa and Latin America where slightly older fashioned phones are extremely popular.

Old they may be, but being capable of accessing the Internet has been a basic feature of Western mobile phones for sometime, so these older phones should be able to manage it. Lets face it, when I first regularly started surfing the Web I was using a 75MHz Pentium. Almost any phone sports a far higher specification than that venerable machine. Indeed, if you ignore graphics, most modern phones have a performance close to that seen in desktops only a few years ago.

Even if most of that audience doesn’t subscribe to a package that provides data transfer, and I don’t yet, that’s still a very large potential audience. It started me wondering whether the mobile phone, handheld, smartphone or whatever you want to call the device could become the principle way of accessing the Web in the future.

The personal computer.

As I said above, these devices already have the performance edge on what I considered to be my PC a relatively short time ago… albeit in real everyday world terms. They are capable of running a wide range of applications up to and including Microsoft Windows and Office. Combined with some data services available today rivalling the speed provided by mainstream boardband, let alone dial-up networking, and you’ve got a powerful computing tool.

So why aren’t I using one?

Because there are a few hurdles to jump first.

1. The price for data transfer and internet access charged by major networks is far too high, but the indications are that it’s going to fall soon.
2. User interaction is limited by a couple of features:
   • User input is difficult with a phone keyboard, especially if your old like me.
   • Small screens limit the amount of data that can usefully be displayed.

Navigation and user interaction can be simplified and using web standards for website design, improving accessibility on a small screen and useless keyboard.

The download size of mobile websites can be minimised to reduce use of your expensive bandwidth and improve speed. Is this just like the old days of the Web or what?

Ultimately, I think that the mobile Web will be built on web applications customised for mobile devices. The functionality and presentation of these applications could be optimised for mobile users, but more importantly they will be designed to specific jobs for a mobile audience.

For example: Ever used Google Maps to get directions before going on a trip? In the future I bet it will integrate with your phone’s GPS function to guide you there whilst finding you the phone number to let them know your on your way.

I’ve been reading about the future of the fuel cell car and this got me thinking about the whole topic of energy for mobile devices, including large ones like cars.

I started by ignoring the energy cost associated with manufacturing the different devices. This is clearly insane if your trying to properly assess the environmental merits of a particular technology. The whole life cycle cost must be included for a full environmental impact analysis, but since I’m mainly interested in the local effects of energy consumption I feel justified in letting myself off this time.

How’s the energy stored?

Not too may options here at the current time, if you want a reliable source of energy.

1. Electrically using a battery or similar device.
2. Chemically in some sort of fuel, probably liquid or gaseous.

Now right here we have the first problem: The electrical energy stored in the battery had to be generated somehow, with the original source probably a chemical fuel as well. Wind, solar and tidal power are also possible sources.

But what about turning it into electricity?

Each of these technologies has it’s own particular impact on the environment; the old adage of there being no free lunches certainly holds true here! Power stations, whether traditional and alternative, will fall a long way short of 100% conversion efficiency. However, generation on a large scale is often more efficient than that on the scale required by individual devices. This is the basis of the idea of centralisation which gave the UK, and other countries, a national power grid.

The grid is a big problem.

Unfortunately, most of the efficiency gained by centralised generation is promptly lost during the transmission of this electricity to where it is needed. Some estimates put the UK grid losses at 10% of total power generated and the more remote the power station, the bigger the problem; bad news for the off-shore wind-farm!

We could convert the energy into liquid or gaseous chemicals for transportation, negating the grid losses, but this action is also very inefficient. This is essentially where the hydrogen or methanol for fuel cells would have to be produced, converting fossil or nuclear fuels into another type of chemical fuel source.

So it’s just a question of where we burn the fuel.

Do we burn it remotely and move the energy, in either electrical or chemical form, or just move the original fuel and burn it locally?

If your generating power from nuclear fuels it’s a bit of a no brainer. Currently the only safe way to use this fuel is remotely, but the energy released could be used to bring the hydrogen economy to life. Manufacturing hydrogen from water requires a great deal of energy and few other sources would make this economically or environmentally viable. The alternative of creating hydrogen from fossil fuels lacks credibility: Why waste energy doing it?

The answer is to provide a fuel that when burnt releases less harmful pollution locally, but without fully addressing environmental issues on a global scale. This brings me to the numb of the problem regarding the conversion of any hydrocarbon fuel. Most of the alternative systems today are simply less efficient than the best available combustion plant. So if your deriving your energy from fossil sources in the first place, and most of what we use is, this is probably still the way to go.

But it’s a matter of scale and use. Not everyone wants a two-stroke engine attached to their laptop or mobile phone, and in this case batteries have the edge on small fuel cells for me; the main problem being the fuel storage.

Batteries also start to win out is when coupled with local alternative generation technologies. This could be solar panels on your roof or pocket calculator; or a small wind turbine in the garden. This type of distributed power generation has promise, especially in locations without a grid supply and suitable environmental conditions. Batteries also provide the technology behind hybrid vehicles that can charge from electricity generated locally by combustion of fuel. This combines the advantages of both approaches. But, these types of application are where the environmental impact of manufacture raises it’s ugly head. A topic for another day.

Last night I found myself in a bad mood, a very bad mood. It was the kind of mood reserved for server administrators just when it dawns on them that the last action they committed after a long day was a big mistake!

I inadvertently upgraded mysql-server when I’d been carefully trying not to for weeks. I’d read that the upgrade version wasn’t too stable when used on my platform and since the current version worked just fine why fix it? But fixing it was exactly what I did whilst installing another software package, and suffice it to say the rumours were quite correct.

Looking on the bright side, not something for which I’m noted, it gave me the chance to test the effectiveness of the backup scripts and strategy I’d implemented. This type of thing is essential for a systems admin to get right as downtime and the loss of data can be far more disastrous than broken software. I’m glad to say that they appear to have worked well, although this momentary lapse has cost be about six hours of work.

Note to self: Remember to think before hitting the enter key!

I’m having a crisis. Maybe I’m losing my will to technophile?? No that can’t be it, I’m probably just feeling more guilty about it as I get older. That happens, doesn’t it? As you get older life has given you both wisdom to think about what you’ve done and an ever increasing collection of things consider. Anyway, this particular crisis is environmental in nature.

We use too much.

I’ve always been aware of our global environment and the fact that we all share responsibility for its well being. It’s also been evident to me from an early age that we’ve not done the best job of it so far.

The official targets are full of promises to halt or even reduce the overall emission of CO₂, thereby putting a stop to climate change. This supposes that climate change is entirely dependent on CO₂, an assertion that is far from bullet-proof. Attaining these targets must require the global economy, population and… dear God I can hardly think it… even the supporting technology to substantially reduce its rate of growth. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the world is confidently waiting for this same technology to solve all its problems: like the fat guy, I’m not slim so I can say this, expecting the next pseudo-science diet to shed that excess weight when he really just needs to eat less and exercise more. The same basic principle applies to our environment: if we want reduce our impact we need to use less stuff!

Is my life environmentally friendly?

Now this is the focus of the crisis in question. Can being a technophile, or just working and living, ever be reconciled with this principle. I’d love to say yes; but, I just don’t know. Clare and I gave up commuting for personal reasons, one of which was its clear environmental impact. Doing this just about halved our household income and not everyone can afford that type of compromise: However, doing the majority of my work from home using broadband should be possible, especially in IT. The question is does it help?

Some maths.

My equipment uses a lot of electricity and there’s no doubt that our domestic utility bills have generally gone up whilst I’ve been around the house. But it has to be offset against the effect of using my car: assuming Petrol/Gasoline has an energy density of 9.5 kWh per litre, I used to commute 15,000 miles each year at a good average fuel consumption of 40 miles to the UK gallon; or about 8.8 miles per litre, it’s a small car. I made that an annual energy consumption of around 16,190 kWh. I’ve measured, remember I’m a technophile, an average increase in electricity use of 280 Watts whilst I’ve been at home. I make that an increased energy usage of about 2,500 kWh each year, nowhere near that used for commuting. Doubtless I’m using more of the other utilities but, looking from an environmental perspective, I used at least the same whilst at my employers premises. So, at a relatively superficial level I’m obviously doing the right thing.

Think of the toys!

What concerns me is that this lifestyle is supported by the use of lots of high-tech gadgets. These become redundant much too quickly to be sustainable, despite the claims of some manufacturer to be producing what they call ‘Carbon Neutral’ hardware. These usually consider only the energy used in running the equipment and not that consumed in design, manufacture and disposal: if they did I doubt any hardware could be carbon neutral without either generating excess energy from nothing whilst in use or planting a major forest for each chip! Don’t get me wrong, I think that any green initiative is to be supported, but don’t let the marketing men get too close.

Getting fewer toys.

Applying my principle to this issue, it follows that equipment, or any physical possession, should be designed to be as reusable and long-lived as possible. This means choosing your toys in the expectation that nothing particularly new is going to come along for sometime, and if it does you can’t buy it until your old one is well and truly broken. This isn’t a good thing if you hold stock in the companies producing this stuff. The problem is that I probably do and I like getting new toys, hence the crisis.

Using less power.

One upside is the fact that the focus of the computing industry appears to have shifted from ever increasing processor speed to maximising processing speed to power consumption ratio. I suspect this is mainly due to the temperature problems the waste heat was causing the old processors rather than to a green conscience, but the final effect is much the same: it fits nicely with the ‘use less’ principle. Less waste heat improves processor efficiency and reduced the power demands for cooling, both in the machine and often building air conditioning.

Change is possible.

The real problem is that society and the environment share a common trait: inertial. Changes implemented today won’t have quantifiable effects on either for decades. Basing policy on the belief that consumption and population are going to fall in the next few years is clearly crazy. But climate change is only one facet of the threat to the environment. There are a range of other ethical issues that need to be addressed and some of these could see change in a shorter time-scale. In the end, it’s mostly a state of mind. Forcing people to comply with a set of hastily implemented rules rarely results is real change. People actually do things that they personally believe in and at best pay lip service to rules. I guess I just need to make the effort to figure out in what I truly believe. I hope others choose to do the same.

OK… I changed my mind about the layout. Once I started redesigning the theme I found that I couldn’t stop. You see, I’ve never really had a flair for what I would call graphic design. I’m more of a nuts and bolts type of a guy, but my browser did it to me again! Whilst surfing I accidentally, and I don’t know what possessed me, typed ‘typography’ into Google. The result was the start of a journey through a series of online articles about the importance of the visual elements of web design.

Here are a couple of the most interesting sources.

• Articles by Mark Boulton
• A practical guide to web typography

Putting it into practice.

… so this is the result. I’ve tried to follow the advice on text formatting including a logical hierarchy in titles and optimising line spacing and column width for legibility. This is all done with CSS of course and I’ve used the max-width property to limit the size of the content column in inline with the legibility guidelines in these articles.

I’ve tried to maintain the liquid or elastic layout, still not sure which is which. I still believe that this provides a better use of the screen space and smoother control when the text is scaled. However, I’ve changed to a three column layout to accommodate the generally narrower central column with the left menu containing blog specific links and my new right-hand column for all those extra links and comments.

No guarantees.

Whilst I’m much happier with the look and feel of the site, now I’m gaining an ever increasing interest in graphic design. Therefore, I’m not guaranteeing there won’t be more changes.

The web and printed material I used whilst researching this topic has made it evident how important these elements of design are in everyday life and how much I’ve tended to take it for granted. In the past I’ve just wondered why my sites don’t feel as good as others without really considering the obvious. I’ve still a long way to go, but hopefully the quality of my output is on the up. Incidentally, that same web research showed me that I’m not the only one who needs to take the time to think about graphic design!

Guess what I’ve been doing lately.

That’s right, it’s the new theme!

I think the title says it all really. I’ve completed the first phase of the new look for theTechnophile, I say the first phase because when is a website ever really finished. It is now very loosely based on the Wordpress default, hence some of the element names remain the same, but I’ve changed the whole structure to what I believe is known as a liquid layout.

The basic idea was to be able to maintain the look and feel of the site whilst using all of the available screen real estate. This is accomplished through the use of positioning in the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). My two main element blocks, the header and mainbody, are positioned relative to each other. The column elements, sidebar and content, within the mainbody block maintain an absolute position from their respective sides. It took a bit of getting my head round since my CSS turned out to be quite rusty and I found HTML Dog to be a useful reference.

Another key feature of liquid layout is that it copes much more smoothly with changes in the default browser font size, thus improving accessibility. Finally, it allows you to put the important content elements much nearer the top of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents than in conventional designs. This way the content appears at the top of your screen if CSS are turned off or not supported.

Why does Internet Explorer have to be different?

I’d forgotten just what a pain Internet Explorer (IE) can be. You see I use Mozilla Firefox, Safari and occasionally Opera browsers and even when I kept all of these happy IE had to object. I found this fantastic new graphics application called Inkscape and used it to generate the logo for the site as a semi-transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file. Seriously, if you like playing with graphics you should give Inkscape a go, especially since it’s open source. The other browsers are fine with this, but IE was not interested. The positioning worked fine on the others, but IE? The text size rendering looked great, but on IE… yes, you guessed it! Still I think I managed to find a solution that keeps all these browsers relatively content with a little help from Position is Everything, identifying a number of interesting bugs.

Still I did have to concede that the lack of transparent PNG support on IE was a solid boundary. So, a little PHP script to introduce extra CSS code allowed me to take advantage of their cascading nature. The result? A more IE friendly, if not so pretty, presentation without transparent graphics. If your using IE to read this, I’m really sorry but it looks genuinely better in other browsers, try it.

What’s next?

First I need to let the new look settle in for a while. Then I would like to introduce a bit of script to allow the user to choose which side they want the menu sidebar. This shouldn’t be too difficult due to the layout technique being used, but then again it could be a case of famous last words.

I may try writing an article to spell out what I did in much more detail. I’d like to be sure I understand it before that though! I have another website which needs a lot more work doing on it and which could be the appropriate place for the above article once completed. This is going to task my Java skills… gulp!

I’ve recently finished an Open University course entitled “Object-Oriented Programming with Java”. It culminated in an exam, my first for about twelve years, and now it’s over I want to actually use some of this knowledge in all that spare time.

Browsing the Internet it is apparent that there are a lot of programming languages out there from which to choose! Each has its strengths and weaknesses, so here are a few that I either use or want to waste some time on.

PHP.

I know… this is not the best OOP language. I’ve heard it said and having taken the OU course understand why, but it is also the language used by two of my favourite web applications, Wordpress and Drupal.

As you can plainly see this blog is powered by Wordpress running on my web server. Wordpress is as easy to install as it claims and the theme templating system is relatively straight forward. Oh yes, I know you wouldn’t know it to look at this standard looking blog, but I intend to do something about that with the extra time I mentioned earlier. Maybe more about this in a later post.

It is most definitely not OOP, sticking firmly to the procedural approach to which PHP is probably best suited. A fact that is also true of Drupal.

In my opinion Drupal is one of the best CMS applications for relative beginners anticipating something more than a weblog. I’ve found the installation relatively simple and the coding is reasonably clear… for a procedural application. What appeals the most is that it’s a very compact and tidy installation. The file structure is well thought out and things easy to find. But despite a good templating system it doesn’t really satisfy my craving for true separation between content and presentation.

Java.

Java is object-oriented and the basis for my course. I intend to take the follow-on courses too, so may be I should stick to what I know, but where’s the fun in that?

Well the “fun” starts with developing another web application based on Apache Cocoon or Lenya. Both of these applications are developed in Java and I suspect are capable of providing much more flexible and powerful web services than basic CMS.

I hope to couple Cocoon with XML to provide content in a range of presentation formats and for exchange with other web applications. It’s the closest you can get to handling content and presentation independently. Don’t know how well it will work, but it should be interesting.

Ruby on Rails.

Ruby is definitely an OOP language. In fact it couldn’t get much more object-oriented, there are two other things to think about here. First Ruby is an interpreted scripting language on its own and second, putting it on Rails provides a new web development framework. Add all this together and despite not knowing what I want to do with it I still have to try it out for myself.