Mark Fussell's WebLog : Life

Greatest people voted for by their nation

mfussell — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:08:00 GMT

Four lists to compare of the greatest people voted for by their nation. I will let you interpret the national differences based upon these choices.

Top 10 greatest Britons

1. Churchill
2. Brunel
3. Diana
4. Darwin
5. Shakespeare
6. Newton
7. Lennon
8. Elizabeth I
9. Nelson
10. Cromwell

Top 10 greatest Americans

1 Ronald Reagan

2 Abraham Lincoln

3 Martin Luther King

4 George Washington

5 Benjamin Franklin

6 George W Bush

7 Bill Clinton

8 Elvis Presley

9 Oprah Winfrey

10 Franklin D Roosevelt

Top 10 greatest French

Military and political leader Charles de Gaulle

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Marie Curie

Chemist and microbiology pioneer Louis Pasteur

Comedian Coluche

Prolific comic actor and singer Bourvil

Poet and novelist Victor Hugo

17th century playwright Molière

Singer Edith Piaf

Undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau

Jesuit priest Abbé Pierre, a poverty activist who also helped Jews escape from the Nazis

Top 10 Greatest Canadians
1 Tommy Douglas
2 Terry Fox
3 Pierre Elliott Trudeau
4 Sir Frederick Banting
5 David Suzuki
6 Lester B. Pearson
7 Don Cherry
8 Sir John A. Macdonald
9 Alexander Graham Bell
10 Wayne Gretzky

Re-living my youth

mfussell — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 11:03:00 GMT

Back in the heady days of 1977 I caught a train down to Brighton on the south coast of England and went to see Star Wars at the Odeon cinema on the sea front. As did many, I came out transfixed by the effects, story and characterisation and proceeded to buy tons of the 3.5'' action figures that came out a year or so later. Of course my mother subsequently "donated" them all to my younger cousin when we move house a few years later, thereby in a flash destroying my future retirement investment portfolio.

Now 28 years later I have two sons aged 7 and 9 who are fanatical Star Wars fans, which just goes to show it must be genetic. This last weekend was the release of the Hasbro EIII action figures in time for the Revenge of the Sith and I found myself in Target once again buying Darth Vader, Storm (well Clone) troopers and Yoda action figures. This time however, they could do a variety of athletic kicks rather than having rigid legs, shoot missiles and detach their lightsabres rather than having them unceremoniously pushed up inside their arm. I had more flashbacks to my youth than I can remember. For me though, the Darth Vader voice changer mask was the killer toy on sale - pity it was designed to fit a child's head otherwise I would have subjected my family to endless painful phrases. I will just have to wait until they are on sale.

VSLive SF and WSE

mfussell — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 08:36:00 GMT

I will be at VSLive in SF arriving on Sunday evening to give two short 30 minute talks on WSE 2.0. The first is on security and the other on the WSE messaging APIs that enable you to use TCP and alternative messaging patterns that are not simply HTTP request response. These are the times;

Monday, February 07, 2005 2:30 - 3:00 - An introduction to Web Services Security with WSE 2.0
Tuesday, February 08, 2005 2:30 - 3:00 - An introduction to Web Services Messaging with WSE 2.0

If you want to meet to discuss WSE, XML, life or anything else of profound interest over a coffee, send me a mail, it would be good to talk. Sunday and Tuesday evenings are both good opportunities.

Smart Watch Frustration - A Christmas tale of woe

mfussell — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 00:06:00 GMT

I must by cursed to never have a working Smart watch. I seem to part of an insanity experiment. Here is the history of my experience for your enjoyment at Christmas time. My sad tale of woe.

I wander into the company store and excitedly purchase a Fossil FX-3001 at the end of Dec 2003. I have to wait 4 weeks before I receive it, so it was a belated christmas present.
I receive watch one in Jan, the plastic/metal carton nearly kills me, but I activate it and procede to continuously show my work mates how great it is and how I know exaclty where to be for my next meeting.
End of Jan 2004 - watch one goes blank and stops working entirely. Not a hint of life. I send it to the Fossil repair center.
Feb 2004 - Get new watch two, register it, continue to enjoy it and proudly show it off again, especially to Arpan, who desparately wants one.
Feb 2004 - Watch two starts to reset on an hourly basis to 12pm 1/1/2001, rendering it useless. I send it to the Fossil repair center again.
March 2004 - Get new watch three, register it and enjoy it and tentively showing it off. By now everyone is uninterested in it.
May 2004 - Watch starts to reset on a 2-3 hourly basis. Worse still I start to tell people the wrong time and cause confusing including one old lady in the street who asked my the time and then argued that I was wrong. I should have agreed with her.
May 2004 - Nov 2004 - I suffer watch three.Whilst it is in a good reception area (i.e. around my home) it works Ok. If I go anywhere out of reception range (i.e. the steel buildings at work, 20 miles north of my house or the UK) the watch becomes immediately useless, resetting to 12pm 1/1/2001 continuously. i.e. it is not even a watch.
Nov 2004 - I give up. I send watch three to the Fossil repair center having spent 30 minutes on the phone with a technican trying to "fix" it.
Dec 2004 - Get new watch four which is a new design, the FX-3005. The clasp must have been invented by someone from the Spanish Inquisition and it takes me about 10 minutes to figure out how to open and close it. I take watch four out of its brand new box and set it onto the charger. There is no comforting "beep" to indicate that it is charging. I spend 1 hour trying every combination and position on the charger. The next day I speak to the Fossil technical help desk and they determine, as I did the night before, that watch four is a lifeless heap of metal and plastic. I sent it to the Fossil repair center.
Dec 22nd 2004 - I recieve watch five which is also a new FX-3005. Curiously this one is not in a new box and is simply wrapped in bubble wrap. I take it out and note that it is ready charged, but at least it is working, being careful not to slash my wrist with the dangerous metal clasp. I leave it to charge overnight and sync my personal settings.
Dec23rd - In the morning I note that it still has not synced my settings, so I go to register the watch ID on the MSD Direct site. Worringly it replies that this watch is already registered. No problem, I phone MSN Direct. To cut a 40 minute conversation short, I am told to 'reboot' the watch by continuously pressing three painful buttons (it takes 9 attempts) to generate a new 'dynamic' ID for the watch. It turns out that this is all in futility. And here is the crux. This watch was previously owned(by the ID) and the icing on the cake is that the ID cannot be reset and assigned to my account. I am told by the help desk that the only thing that I can do is send it back to the Fossil repair center. Aaaaargh.Aaaaargh.Aaaaargh How can it not be possible to cancel the previous account that has this ID and assign it to mine - This is simply madness. I say to the person that this is costing on postage and the Fossil repair center have claimed twice in the past that this can be credited to my account. She informs me that that is not the case and that Fossil has misinformed me i.e. lied through their teeth.
Dec23rd - I phone the Fossil repair center and am informed that they are closed until 27th Dec - Merry Christmas.

So here I sit at work with useless watch number five that I have to send back to Fossil again. My wife thinks them I am insane to continue with this. I will tell you what happens in this saga with watch six next year. Of course it has to be lucky number seven that will pull through for me.

Building my Christmas present.

mfussell — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 08:38:00 GMT

A couple of months ago my wife asked me whether she could listen to her favourite internet radio station on the HiFi stereo system that we have in our living room, rather than having to have the speakers on the PC in the office turned up to maximum volume. This is a UK radio station that only streams on the internet in Real Audio format. Easy I said, leave it to me. However as with all engineering problems there were several solutions. These are the ones that I came up with;

Drill a hole in the wall, run cables from the PC and provide an audio switch box to switch between the PC speakers and the stereo speakers. Pros: Cheap, good reception. Cons: Hole in the wall, house may collapse, only one stereo can be used.
Apple Airport Express. There is the gadget that I thought would easily solve the problem. I can use my existing wireless network attached to the PC. Great solution. Pros: Plugs directly into the mains power, easy setup, small in size. Cons: Unfortunately the airport express has one HUGE problem. You can only use it with iTunes software installed on your PC and guess what - you can only listen to the pre-selected stations chosen by Apple. It is not possible to add or configure your own! There was no chance of them having my insignificant UK station in a sea of US Rap stations. 10/10 for vision. 1/10 for exection.
I started getting hardcore. How about the SqueezeBox. Pros Great product, great reviews, like the blinking lights on the front. Cons: $279 seemed a lot of money just to get radio reception to a stereo15 feet away in another room and only on that one stereo. I could not imagine forking out $558 to listen upstairs also.
I went downmarket a bit and found this from Linksys, the WMLS11B. Pros: Cheaper Cons: Did not seem to be able to stream Real Audio, which was what the station broadcast in. I already have a very decent Tivoli stereo which has beautiful sound. The last thing I wanted was some tinny, ugly stereo.
Knowing that I needed to stream Real Audio I finally started to set up a Shoutcast server/broadcaster. Then you can then relay any kind of audio output you like to a wireless device. My plan was to use an old laptop that I have at home with a wireless card, put this under the stereo and use it as a wireless receiver. Pros: Cheap, since I had all the hardware. Cons: To many bits. I had to run two PCs, set up the Shoutcast, get a copy of WindowsXP from the store etc. Seemed too painful.

I was getting more and more frustrated. Surely it must be easier than this. Finally the most obvious and simple solution dawned on me and I kicked myself for not having thought of this earlier...

The stereo already has a built in receiver. Build an FM transmitter! So I did. I bought one of these beauties which was on offer at the time for $110, took out my trusty soldering iron, multimeter and pointed nose pliars and built this in a day when my wife was out. Needless to say I double checked the solder joints, configured the jumpers to be at the lower end of the FM frequency spectrum, plugged it in and it worked first time. I bought an audio switch box, wired this up to the back of my PC and now enjoy glorious synthesized FM stereo throughout my house on anything that I play on the PC, including mouse clicks. The quote that I love from the manual that comes with this FM transmitter is this.

"many Caribbean folks use a single FM25B to cover the whole island! "

Now I have my wife's Christmas present done, the only problem being that, like software, it is not that tangible so I am going to have to supplement it with something else. Also like software it shows that we can create complex solutions to many problems that often have simpler solutions and without having to convert between numerous different data types and formats.

Disclaimer: If you have not built many electronic things before consider a flashing LED first as a Christmas gift to your loved one and then work your way up.

First Solo Sail

mfussell — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 21:25:00 GMT

I did my first solo sail on the waters of lake Union in Seattle yesterday. It reminder me of the time when I took my dad's car out for the first time after having passed my driving test eons ago. All you concentrated on was not slamming into anyone else and mentally shifting gears, or tacking in the case of sailing. Saying that, my dad's car at the time was a Lada Riva which was more like driving a tank than a car. My most vivid memory was pushing up the indicator switch only to have it break off at the stem inside the console and permanently leave the left indicator blinking without any way to turn it off. Driving was suddenly not that fun anymore. Luckily yesterday was a fair day here in Seattle, with light winds and since the majority of the boats have been harboured for the winter, the lake was relatively quite. It was a very pleasing experience given that you are in the middle of a large city with sky scrapers around you and sea planes landing next to you on the water. If you are ever in Seattle and want to do something different than the usual sightseeing tours, head down to the Center for Wooden Boats and hire yourself a sailing boat, or if you do not want to sail, they also have a good collection row boats to laze the day away.

Life now as the WSE Program Manager

mfussell — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 06:38:00 GMT

With much of the work done for version 2.0 of System.Xml and with Dare’s departure from the XML team to MSN, I decided that it was also time for me to look for new adventures. I have taken the job as the WSE Program Manager left vacant by Keith Ballinger’s departure. Having spent 4.5 years on the XML APIs in .NET it is an ideal move to enable me to get back to more systems level development rather than just at the component level, whilst building on my XML knowledge. Before joining MS I built a variety of distributed systems using everything from Tuxedo to DCOM, designed some early mobile data systems with private mobile radio networks, before cellular radio took hold of the market, and always enjoyed seeing the installed systems that we built in operation. My most vivid memories were standing in police control centers listening to 911 calls.

This last week has been great with a chance to sit down and play with the WSE product, trawl the newsgroups and start planning the WSE 3.0 feature set. If you have feature requests for System.Xml these now need to be sent to Arpan Desai. If you have issues, feature desires, pain or praise for WSE then I would love to hear them.

The end comes swift

mfussell — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 07:11:00 GMT

Our bearded dragon lizard died suddenly on Saturday. We had been caring for him plenty over the last month, taking him to the vet for tests (he was pronounced healthy which was odd really), changing his environment, enticing him with as many delicious foods as possible and all the time giving him water to drink on the side of his mouth. But to no avail. At the around 4pm he decided that life was not that easy, curled up onto his basking log and just stopped breathing. It was all very sudden. One moment alive, next moment dead.

Needless to say we held a ceremony fit for a king today and my four children filed past his cardboard box coffin and said a few words about him. A bit like when Leonid Brezhnev died before as was buried at the Kremlin with throngs of people flowing past his coffin to pay their respects. It is interesting how different people cope with death in different ways. My daughters were upset, my eldest son had the giggles and my youngest son, who's pet he was, wanted to understand in detail how he had died, which got more and more complicated as we tried to provide some plausible reasons. Then he broke down in tears. Now when I write a top ten count down list of the best features in a product, I will have to turn to the tortoise for inspiration.

Samurai Jack Episodes 49-52

mfussell — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 05:26:00 GMT

For those connoisseurs of the greatest cartoon of all time living in the USA, the next four episodes of Samurai Jack are being broadcast this Saturday, the 25th September on Cartoon Network. Episode 50 looks particulary enthralling. This list is taken from http://epguides.com/SamuraiJack/

Original
Episode # Prod # Air Date Episode Title
_____ ______ ____________ ___________

49.   3- 9                 25 Sep 04   XLIX (Seasons of Death)
50.   3-10                25 Sep 04   L (Tale of X9)
51.   3-11                25 Sep 04   LI (Young Jack in Africa)
52.   3-12                25 Sep 04   LII (Jack and the Baby)

Watch these to give life its true meaning.

Samurai Jack Heaven

mfussell — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 06:20:00 GMT

I have just ordered Samurai Jack Season 1 DVD from the great virtual shop and seeing that this has a sales rank of 74, with every review at five stars reviews you can see why. A cult classic that I will inflict on everyone to the point of tears. Now I just have to somehow design this into System.Xml sublimily for added entertainment. Maybe XmlSamuraiNavigator designed for stealth and speed with unreal querying capabilites and the XmlScotsmanReader for shear brute force parsing of absolutely anything into XML. In fact these two classes are all you will ever need in the next release.

DCOM to .NET Phase Transistion

mfussell — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 09:02:00 GMT

Looks like William and I have had the same thoughts over the weeknend about clearing out books. I decide to tackle the final bastillion of chaos in my house and sort my home office and especially my bookshelves. Since writing my book on System.Xml v2, Addison Wesley decided that I needed a copy of everything that they had published recently on .NET which meant that I had been inundated with new books. So I drew the line and said “No more COM in my life!”. Out went ATL Internals, ATL Developer's Guide, Designing and Using ActiveX Controls, Mr. Bunny's Guide to Activex, Visual C++ 4 How-To: The Definitive Mfc Problem Solver and a dozen other books on MFC, DCOM and C++ programming. Each one had fond memories of CCI, IDL and <T> . Luckily each time my wife snatched it from my hand and threw it into the bin. I hestitated over Essential COM and decided to confine this to the “old classics” box in the attic, which means that you can look back and reminisce when you go to get the Christmas decorations down once a year. Here is was somewhat out of place being amongst Maths for Engineers, The Design of Digital Signal Processing Systems and other electronics engineering books. At least it is only a few boxes away from the ZX Spectrum and QL for computing comfort. This obviously happens every 10 years as that is when most of my power engineering, design of microwave circuits and analogue circuits books re-entered the carbon cycle and left my brain. Now I feel refreshed and free. I no longer have pretend to remember ATL and COM as the knowledge has gone from my house. In 10 years time when we are all designing and programming against WinFS version 5.0 I will then be able to throw my .NET books away.

Smart Watch Version 2

Much to my relief my smart watch turned up in the mail yesterday. No, I did not get so excited that I needed a second to wear on my other arm; the first one just broke. It was kind of bizarre. I took it off to play soccer, put it in my kit bag and when I returned it was totally dead. My only conclusion was that it was near some packets of hot hands (which consist of a very fine iron powder that reacts with oxygen to create heat) and due to some strange induction loop it fried itself. Looks like Fossil should have done some more realistic field testing and that others are having similar issues. The return letter from Fossil was very polite saying that we have no idea what happen to your watch, so here is a new one to have a go with and that you have 90 days for it to self destruct for us to have to repair it again. So now I can return to my gadget dependent life, know lots of useless news trivia and thrust it happily under Dare's nose whilst reminding him that he has only few days left before the battery dies on his iPod.

Not an iPod Sheep

mfussell — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 09:46:00 GMT

Today I picked up my rash and purely impulsive Christmas buy, a Fossil Wrist.NET Smart watch. It was probably sub-consciously induced by the new kid who came to our school (around 1977) with a calculator on his watch. No matter that it was impossible to press any of the buttons to do even the most simple sums and that this was tremendously useless, the fact that it was on a watch with a calculator built in made it ultra cool and an instant friend maker.

Now that I have my smart watch up and running (I had to leave the building and drive halfway home before it picked up a signal) I will say that it has some value. The #1 killer feature has to be the syncing with your Outlook calender appointments. As a program manager I spend much of my day in meetings, usually going between buildings and having a list of who I am meeting next with the building and room number instantly available is reasonable useful. Yes, I also carry a PC with me everywhere, but booting it up and starting Outlook can be a weary task, especially when you are waiting for a wireless connection. Of course having a wireless PC to look at the news and weather pretty much makes the other features on Smart watch useless, but “hey” I've just been told that George Bush wants to build a moon base by my watch - Wow! Now I can tell everyone all sorts of useless information. The #2 killer feature has to be the atomic clock accuracy, not that this is that necessary, but timing between meetings is everything. The #3 feature is the ability to send short (15 word?) instance messages to it. Now my daugthers can send me all sort of cryptic messages like “dad, u r king. l8r. sock monkey” which translates into some form of street spiel. That makes you feel wanted by friends and family. Of course you have no ability to reply without whipping out the PC again, but I am sure, just like sticking a camera onto a cell phone that one day it will find a use in my life.

I have one huge complaint about this Smart watch and that is the packaging that it came in. A cylindical hard perspex container sealed at both ends with a metal disk that fits perfectly and tightly over the perspex. The desire was to create a lovable buying and opening experience, of dense metal with a solid feel. However unlike unpacking an iPod, which is a thrill ride, this Fossil watch was hellish. Here I am, a full blooded male struggling to get either end off the container to get at my prized watch. I felt like one of those animal experiments where you have to get the peanut out of the box for a reward. In the end my wife got fed up watching me struggle and proceeded to punch her fist through the thinner plastic covering one end. Holding back from saying to her “One day that will be a collector's item” I was then able to wrestle the metal disk from one end in order to get at my prize. The usability packing tests could only have been done my Herculean men with no representative from the <18 or >60 age groups.

And the OS? Go to Settings->Software and the first listed item is mscorlib (87.49.59.D2). So there is a reason why it is called Wrist.NET. There are also listed Data, Native, Shell, Protocol, Channels, TimeChannel and Fossil as other software modules.

Still, I see this Smart watch as a long term investment, much like the infamous Sinclair C5, which now sells for two to three times their original sales value. A classic gadget for the early adopter male, knowing that Christmas is about buying yourself something, since only you can say what you really didn't need, just like an iPod. I already cannot live without it.

The joy is undescribable as England beat Australia in Australia in the Rugby World Cup Final

mfussell — Mon, 24 Nov 2003 10:50:00 GMT

ENGLAND WINS RUGBY WORLD CUP 2003

A Jonny Wilkinson drop-goal in the final minute of extra time secured the first ever Rugby World Cup win for England 20-17 over the Wallabies, in a pulsating Final at Telstra Stadium in Sydney last night. After being the focus of attention for practically the entire tournament, Wilkinson – under extreme pressure -- slotted the decider to secure the Webb-Ellis Cup for the Martin Johnson-led English. It followed a titanic fight-back from the Wallabies who went close to becoming the first team to defend a Rugby World Cup title and the first to come back after trailing at the half in a Final. England led 14-5 at the break after tries to Lote Tuquiri for Australia and Jason Robinson for England. The scores had been locked at 14-14 at full-time, after Elton Flatley kicked a dramatic last-minute penalty to draw Australia level. Flatley had earlier kicked two second-half penalties to close gap to three points. England led 17-14 after Wilkinson's fourth penalty early in the first period of extra time. But Flatley replied with another last-gasp penalty to level the scores again at 17-17 before Wilkinson clinched the decider in the last minute of extra-time. It was only the second time a RWC Final had gone to extra-time, securing England's first ever championship, and the first for northern hemisphere teams in Rugby World Cups. Australia's epic performance was also widely acknowledged, despite being the Wallabies' first ever loss in a Final.

Samurai Jack makes me want to fight

mfussell — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 12:17:00 GMT

If you need some inspiration then how about listening to the theme tune to Samuari Jack.

Samurai Jack season continues

mfussell — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 11:29:00 GMT

Cartoon Network are still rolling new episodes of Samurai Jack at 7:30 PT.