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• Wall-E: One giant beep for mankind - "Pixar's films have always outstripped those of Dreamworks – maker of the Shrek series, among others – because they contain universal truths rather than a series of swiftly dated cultural in-jokes."
• How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand - Is evolution not the natural way forward? An alternate take would be: how do the French think that they can mandate changes in language?
• Big Oil's Iraq deals are the greatest stick-up in history - "Iraq is being forced to sell 75% of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation."

• An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush's lost e-mails - "The administration has chafed at external oversight and shown a tendency to come up with dubious legal justifications for ignoring laws it doesn't agree with." Just what is Mr Bush trying to hide?
• WordPress 2.5.1 - I just upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress. Looks good as far as I can see but let me know if you spot anything untoward.
• Madonna, Hard Candy - "It's about grooves rather than memorable songs, and Madonna just doesn't make for a convincing soul diva [as she] sings them with the emotional engagement of a sat-nav suggesting a right turn onto the A23."

This evening I went along to this years Turing Lecture, an annual presentation hosted by the British Computer Society (of which I’m a professional member) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. This years lecture was given by Grady Booch, someone that most people in IT will either have heard of or, at the very least, been influenced by. He started his early career working on object oriented design and is currently passionately working on a project to collect the architectures of a hundred computer systems.

It’s difficult to pick out highlights, partially as there were quite a few but mainly because I wasn’t taking notes and can’t remember half of the parts that I pledged to write about. I do remember that he gave a one line summary of every decade from the 1920’s, culminating in the 2030’s being described as “The Rise of the Machines.” Hopefully not in the same way as in the Terminator movies. And on a smaller scale he talked about his front door bell crashing and why, as an IBM Fellow, he was using a PowerBook and mocking some less reliable operating systems.

The lecture was broadcast live on the Internet and, they tell me, will be available to watch probably by the time you’re reading this on the IET website. It’s well worth a watch.

The problem is this. To get ADSL you need to have a BT phone line. Yet, except for calling my parents, I don’t really use a land-line phone. This has made using ADSL broadband more expensive than I’d have liked as I had to pay £11 a month for a phone line I don’t make calls with¹. Fast forward to last month, when I find that I can get cable broadband without phone or digital TV service.

Bingo! Bye-bye BT!

Except… my folks don’t have broadband and would kill me if they had to call me on my mobile. So we needed some way to allow them to call us, especially when we didn’t have a computer switched on.

I toyed with the idea of a SIP phone or a SIP adapter. This seemed a good solution as it’s a “standards compliant” VoIP system and, my thinking went, more likely to be future proof. I even got as far as ordering one on eBay but a dodgy seller put an end to that. Eventually I realised that I had never really had much success with SIP² but had never had problems with Skype. I decided to give the Belkin WiFi phone a try.

The pictures look good. If you think of a modern, “candy bar” style mobile phone you’re along the right lines. First impressions of the real thing are positive too. The slightly rubberised plastic case feels solid — robust but not heavy — and nice to the touch. It’s simple to slide off the back cover and insert the battery.

It takes a little effort to push back the flap that covers the power socket but that’s probably a good thing. I charge it for four hours before realising that the “half full” battery icon on the display probably really means “charging.”

Powering the device on I find that the buttons, while looking the part, are slightly wobbly and let the rest of the phone down. The second slight disappointment is the screen, which is actually smaller than you first think it will be. Sure, it’s big enough but there’s plenty of space for a bigger one.

It’s necessary to pick your language (there was only one) and accept the Skype T’s and C’s before it tries to connect to a network. It’s pretty quick and immediately finds and tries to connect to an unsecured network. Not mine, of course, as I use “WPA Personal” security on mine.

It looks like it gets a connection but reports that it’s unable to connect to the Internet. I use the menus to try to select my local network. The interface should be familiar to anyone with a mobile phone. The little joy-stick and two menu buttons along with on-screen prompts are simple to follow, partly because it’s much less sophisticated than most contemporary phones. I find the network section, select my network and enter the password and we’re in. Pretty easy.

Next it says that my Skype password is wrong. Odd. I’ve not even entered a username yet! The “sign in” button just tries again and, despite looking, I don’t see anywhere to enter a new name.

I give up and decide to look in the manual.

It suggest that it should just be there under the sign-up menu and, strangely, it is now. Oh well, I enter my username and password. And that’s it. It quickly connects and downloads my contacts list. I see myself online using another account on my MacBook.

I fiddle about with the menus, playing with some of the ring tones. There are only a few but I find a half-decent “ringing” sound and confirm that the vibrate option is on.

Next I make a Skype-to-Skype call which sounds great at my end and is, reportedly, just like the user is on a PC from the other side.

Feeling emboldend I try a landline number. Again, from the handset it sounds pretty much as good as any other phone. It’s not quite so good for the recpient of the call, who complains of an annoying echo. Nevertheless it’s clear enough to be useable and we happily talk for fifteen minutes without any glitches.

In fact, once connected, the only glitch I’ve come across is not directly related to calls but is, potentially, a bit of a show-stopper. After the call I put the phone down and, like most mobile phones, after a short time the display goes into “screen saver” mode. Unlike my Sony Ericsson T630, which displays the time, the Belkin’s screen goes completely blank, leaving no indication that the phone is switched on at all.

That’s not the show-stopper, that’s just annoying.

But after ten minutes or so the phone appears off-line and making a call to it diverts straight to voice-mail. This makes it completely unsuitable as a home phone as any time someone calls we’re likely to be offline! The story so far is that I have sent an email to their technical support people and am waiting for a response.

Overall it has good hardware but disappointing software. I have no problems with “basic” — I hardly use any of the complex stuff on my mobile — but it’s difficult to unreservedly recommend a product that takes itself off the network all by itself. If, however, Belkin have a solution then I’d be pretty happy with it. It’s not cheap (but then none of its competitors are) but making free calls without switching on a PC is a compelling prospect.

1. To put this into context, our bill for calls last quarter was 38p.↩
2. I’m thinking that maybe I’m cursed. I bought a Bluetooth headset that refused to work with the dongle I had for my iBook. At home I needed to open lots of ports but always got mediocre sound quality and, when trying to buy credit, I could never get an authorisation code. Clearly it was never meant to be.↩

It slightly bugs me that the first thing a lot of people ask about my photography is what camera I use. I tend to think that it’s the photographer that counts rather than which particular machine you use, but, still, it’s a popular question and so here is the answer.

EOS300D

FEATURES: Reasonably compact (by SLR standards!), simple and quick to use, intelligent feature-set

After my positive experience with the EOS300, this was the obvious choice for my first digital camera. And the first thing to say is that there’s nothing wrong with the 300D, it’s just that…

It took me over a year to figure out what all the buttons on the 300 were for. It didn’t take me that long to find the limitations in the 300D, which is odd as it’s a better camera in almost every respect. The worst is the start-up time. Five seconds doesn’t sound much, but it’s enough to miss some once-in-a-lifetime snaps.

The rest are really irritations and, perhaps, an indication that I should have gone for the next model up. Things such as the flash sync only being 1/125, and the auto-exposure settings being lost when you switch the camera off but the frame-advance mode being remembered…

So really the 300D is a fine camera and it’s my demands that have risen more quickly than my ability to pay for them!

EOS300

FEATURES: Small, light and with a surprising number of features given the price.

This was my first SLR camera. I didn’t really know what I was looking for in a camera, so I went into a camera shop and had a quick play with all the machines in my price range and the EOS300 was what I came away with. I still think that it was a good choice.

It’s small and light, the buttons seem to fall in places where my fingers expect them. It’s quick and easy to use, partly because of its limited feature-set compared with modern digital cameras but mainly because of an intelligent design.

EF-S 17-85mm IS

This is my most expensive lens and it shows. It’s the heaviest, the most solidly built and handles better than the others.

Functionality-wise it has the full-time manual focus that I’d read about but never understood what it meant (you can tweak the focus without switching into MF mode). Of course the Image Stabaliser is the main feature and all I can say is that it works as advertised, even if it does make you a little queasy using it. Non-motion sickness or something.

And the image quality is better than anything other than my poor, underused prime lens. It is expensive for what it is and only works on EF-S bodies, but if you want a more useful focal range than the 17-40L and the image stabiliser is useful it should be on your short-list.

EF 28-90 USM

This is the standard lens for my EOS300. I’ve also used it as a “portrait” lens on my EOS300D. It’s light, covers a good focal range and has managed to remain intact despite being carelessly treated in all conditions from -10C to 40C.

The image quality puts it firmly in the “good for the price” category.

EF-S 18-55mm

In absolute terms this isn’t a great lens, but it represents great value for money. Glass that gets as wide as 18mm is normally hugely expensive and that’s what you’d ordinarily be looking at if you the equivalent of 28mm on a digital body.

It’s reasonably fast to focus, is quiet and durable. Undoubtably worth the money.

70-300mm APO

I always thought that a lens this long would come in useful but in practice I find that I go for more wide-angle shots than telephoto. So when I say that this is probably my least-used lens it’s not a reflection on Sigma.

In fact it’s a nice lens. It feels more solid than anything of Canons save the 17-85mm and optics are sound. Even the macro mode has been useful on occasion.

Its shortcomings are common to all lenses of this focal-length and price-point: the widest apperure isn’t very big meaning that it’s only usable in very bright conditions or with fast film.

I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last night, a film about Al Gore’s global warming lecture tour.

It’s very well done. Gore delivers the talks with humour — he introduces himself link this, “I’m Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States” — confidence and passion. (If he’d had this passion in the presidential campaign things could have been very different!) Even for someone that agrees with the message there are some scary statistics. Perhaps even more scary is the lengths that some politicians go to to avoid acknowledging the problem, much less doing something about it.

Quite possibly a case of preaching to the choir, but I still think it’s well worth seeing.

As a counterpoint, you might want to look at these videos from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Talking about CO2, “they call is pollution, we call it life.” Based on the fact that we breath out carbon dioxide they conclude that the volumes found in the air currently are perfectly natural.

These people should be forced to watch “An Inconvenient Truth.”