Kapitano

Godwin was Wrong

Today I saw some nazis.

Some of them were boys in their late teens running away from anti-nazi protesters. The others were boys in their late teens being led away by police. Not so much brown shirts as brown trousers.

The EDL (English Defence League) had been planning for months to bus 15,000 into my home town, and march through it intimidating all the non-white people.

They kept changing their mind about the date and venue, but today managed 150, meeting in a park to listen to speeches about how muslims caused the recession, then march out of the park, around the corner and back into the park by the other entrance.

Meanwhile I was among 300 local anti-nazi protesters, in the pouring rain, holding a counter-rally in the town square the EDL had planned to march through.

It was a wide range of ages, nationalities and political persuasions, and I didn't know most of them. But we did have a clutch of hip young things who'd brought their own chants. I'm used to chants like:

Caller: Whose street?
Response: Our street!
Caller: Whose world?
Response: Our world!
etc.

...and...

Caller: Auschwitz?
Response: Never again!
Caller: Belsen?
Response: Never again!
Caller: Treblinka?
Response: Never again!
etc.

But they had a slew of new lyrics to old songs, like:

(To She'll be Coming Round the Mountain)
We are black, white and asian.
And we're jews.
(And we're gay)
We are black, white and asian.
And we're jews.
(And we're gay)
We are black, white and asian.
Black, white and asian.
Black, white and asian.
And we're jews.
(And we're gay)

There are many more of us than
There are you.
(Nazi scum) etc.

I got to practice this and some more vitriolic numbers whenever small knots of EDLers appeared and tried to charge into us. Some tried to swagger, most looked a bit lost and didn't resist as the police guided them back to the flock. One or two tried to fight the police - never a good idea.

We did this from midday for three hours - after which the EDL disappeared to watch a football match. There's a long tradition linking far right politics and soccer, and they'd obviously thought they could get higher attendance if the day trip included a soccer match. Perhaps they did.

I turned for home, passing an officer. Our eyes met briefly.

"That was relatively painless."
"Yeah, more or less."

Not the Next Generation

I has done a hip hop. Let me show you it.

Kapitano - Generation eXit

I did it for SongFight under the title "Ruthless Lately", though I think my title is better, so there. This is an alternative version I decided not to submit - which means dear readers, this is an exclusive mix just for you :-).

Here's the lyrics. Spot the Leonard Cohen reference.

Intro
The words mean nothing, just a
Way to fill the empty space, a
Way of marking time, like it
Needed marking anyway.

Fashion's what you do when you
Don't know what you want to be
Style's what they promise when you
Give them all your money.

Verse 1
The words mean nothing, just a
Way to fill an empty song, the
Space between the bass and the
Air with nothing going on.

Fashion's a disguise when you
Don't know who you want to seem
Style's what you buy that's why it's
Called the music industry

They can package everything
Anything you throw at them
Everything you hate about them
Sell it back to you again, your

Childhood in mp3, your
paranoid conspiracy, you
own sexuality, your
personal reality

Chorus
This is Generation eXit
Calling home
That was Generation eXit
Calling home

Verse 2
They used to tell me I was living truthless
I turn around and start to make it ruthless

Ideas mean nothing just a
Way to fill an empty head
Faker man is cooking books 'cos
Baker man is baking bread.

First we take Manhattan
Then we take a spin, used to
Love me as a loser now you're
Looking for a hotter sin

Any clever man won't understand
What's what if their
Happiness depends upon them
Not.

It doesn't matter what the answers are if
They can make the questions wrong, the
Lyrics mean nothing just a
Noise to fill an empty song

Gone Soft

I haven't been a computer programmer since the early 90s. But I still dabble occasionally, and now I've written an amazingly useful program - which you can download and use as much as you want.

My program...waggles the mouse pointer every few minutes. Possibly not the most called-for bit of software, but it solves a problem I've been having with Windows 7 - it goes into standby mode after a few hours, even when I've told it not to.

I've set it to make me a few hundred audiobooks with a text-to-speech reader, which means leaving it to run unattended for a few days while it ploughs through them. Sometimes it's really useful to have a spare laptop for doing things like that.

Anyway, when you run my little program it asks how many minutes to leave between wagglings, then proceeds to waggle forever - or until you press the 'Break' key to stop it. Hibernation, sleep mode, standby and screensavers are avoided, and the laptop does its work uninterrupted.

You can get my program here. Unfortunately you'll have to rename it from "MouseNudge.txt" to "MouseNudge.exe", because GoogleSites won't let me store .exe files.

There's also KeyNudge, which does exactly the same thing, but presses the entirely unused Right-Win key instead.

Happy waggling.

On Speed

Most people speak at 100-150 words per minute. And they read at 150-250wpm. If you're an experienced or professional reader, you can probably manage 400-500.

With a month's practice, you can get up to 1000 - the problem being that although you can comprehend text that fast, retaining it for more than a few seconds is difficult. It's as though your short term memory is a small shelf, and pushing a rapid stream of new things on one end pushes other things off the other end - before you have a chance to move them to the bigger shelf of longer term memory.

I can get my reading speed comfortably up to 800, with high comprehension and low retention, and I use it for proof-reading and finding specific information that skip-reading would likely miss.

There are techniques for going faster than 1000, and retaining what you've read by chunking it up into gestalts. But they're very difficult and I never had the patience to learn them.

All of which means...people speak painfully slowly. Really, talking is a terrible way to make spoken words. The geek who uploads a video CV communicates less in five minutes than his written CV does in thirty seconds - and it's annoying to 're-read'. The half-hour radio documentary gives you a handful of facts delivered at a snail's pace, padded with waffle and repetition.

So why not...listen to your radio at double the speed? Record the show, put it through some time-compression freeware - so the 'tempo' doubles but the pitch doesn't - and double your listening ability.

And that's what I'm doing. Today I listened to a biography of Joesph Grimaldi and the letters of Arthur Conan Doyle at double speed - coming to around twenty five minutes each. Seeing as the average human attention span is 20-30 minutes, I think that's a plus.

There are people who download a dozen podcasts a week, and by slightly hacking their iPods, get through them all with time to spare.

Next thing to try: Putting an ebook through a text-to-speech reader, doubling the speed and have my phone read to me at a speed that's comfortable to listen, but physically impossible to speak.

The above article, read by a not-quite-perfect mechanical voice, in one minute sixteen seconds:

On Speed.

(Sometimes the subtitle is a lie.)

I Wander....

Places I've stumbled upon recently:

Sometimes you'd like to leave a message - to yourself, the world, or a group who have the password. A message that'll last a week, a month, or however long you need. And available pretty much anywhere - online, in other words.

TinyPaste.com - halfway between blogging and email.

Wikipedia is sometimes wrong. Conservapedia is always wrong, about everything - including its own reason for existence. Uncyclopedia is deliberately wrong about everything, and wikiality sounds right...but only to morons.

The Less-Wrong Wiki knows how to be right.

If you like XKCD...you'll probably already read Abstruse Goose.

Daily Science Fiction short stories, to your inbox.

Good books are good. Bad books are everywhere. But only OddBooks are fun.

Auto

It's an automatic world.

A few months ago I set up a spare laptop to automatically record random frames of TV shows. I came up with some captions, which I used a keyboard scripting program to automatically resize and frame the pictures, and automatically put the captions underneath.

Now I'm going to use another script to automatically schedule each picture in turn, for blogger to, erm, automatically publish.

Sometimes there's nothing to do except spend hours figuring out how to give yourself slightly less to do. Some things at least you can't yet have your computer do for you....

Dumb, Da Dumb Dumb

Why are people such fuckwits?

Or, a better question: Why are people who really shouldn't be fuckwits...still fuckwits?

Last week I went to a job interview. The business owner is a self-made multi-millionaire who's spent a million of his own pounds in setting up a small college.

You might think a successful businessman would know better than to trust the first self-proclaimed management consultant who walks through the door and tells him he needs to employ several extra layers of management...before employing any staff who do the actual work.

Or that he'd think twice before rushing out to buy a hundred obsolete laptops on the word of a family member.

You might think he'd check that there are already dozens of places locally that offer courses in accountancy, IT and Business English - cheaper and with more resources than he can offer.

But no. If being in touch with reality helps you make a success in business, then being a success in business insulates you from reality.

I only hope the college runs long enough to pay me - before selling off all the expensive new equipment bought for its enormous empty classrooms.

I was one of six interviewees - one of two without PhDs, and the only one not applying for a managerial position.

Can you explain how a room of men with doctorates, who want to work for a place that plans to teach arabs and asians, can spout the same racist bullshit as the gutter press?

Apparently there are too many (whatever that means) foreigners (meaning non-caucasians) coming into "our" country to "steal" "our" jobs.

And they dilute (whatever that means) the true british culture (whatever that is) with their strange foreign ways (which is a Bad Thing for some reason).

How can someone spend years in other countries, learn the languages, and stay in education long enough to get a PhD...and come out of it spouting xenophobic isolationist horsecrap?

When I catch myself being stupid, I do something about it. I've no idea who I could have picked that habit up from, because no one else seems to do it.

Foreward Planning

The university are doing a music festival - a week after half the students have gone home for the summer.

It seems the organisers forgot to arrange bands to play. This is normal. So today - two days before the gig - I got a slightly begging circular email asking if anyone was in a band and could play Friday.

Well, I was in a band a few months back - we formed to play fundraising gig which also had a performer related scarcity problem. But I've still got the backing tracks, and my musical better half (the talented one who sings and plays guitar) still has his chord notes...somewhere.

We've got seven songs - half an hour's worth of material to ruthlessly squeeze into a 45 minute slot. We just don't know which slot.

And no time to rehearse. Or indication so far whether there's any other bands playing.

Oh, and the singer/guitarist has a stinking cold - but wants to play anyway. I have a dental appointment on the same day, so hopefully I'll be able to feel my mouth again by the time I have to, erm, use it.

Oh, and they've arrange the gig for the afternoon when a lot of the punters can't come because they're working.

UPDATE: Okay.

My musical better half has a really bad cold, so has dropped out. This leaves me with three songs I can do on my own - call it a twelve minute set.

And most of the bands either still haven't confirmed, or word of their confirmation hasn't filtered through to all the groups sharing/competing in the organisation. As I write, the 'festival' is due to start in six hours.

And I've been politely discouraged from performing on the, um, considerate grounds that I'm under-rehearsed so might make a mistake and get upset about it.

So I'm going to be a rat...and leave this particular sinking ship.

UPDATE 2: One final (?) cockup.

I've played a gig where the orgainisers didn't know how many bands were playing. I've played one where they didn't decide on the running order till the night. I've played several where bands didn't turn up - including one where it was the headlining band.

Now there's been one where they didn't know what week they've booked the room. Because it's not this week - it's next week. Gah!

UPDATE 3: Next week, my talented colleague...isn't in the country.

Three Stories (Part 3)

Blogger seems to be working again, and I have a phone.

Actually that's not quite true - I have a pocket sized device that plays mp3s, tunes to FM radio, works as a dictaphone, personal pager, organiser, alarm clock, text viewer, stills camera, video camera, miniature cinema and tetris-player, which also occasionally takes phone calls.

Actually that's not quite true either, because I've got two of them - one never used. The other one lives in it's box on the shelf, with charger, earphones and (because it's a Motorola) a vast array of socket-converters because (being Motorola) most of the connections are non-standard. But it was cheap and not as non-standard as the Samsung.

And that's the flipside of organising your life around a small, inexpensive, convenient, multipurpose device. If you want your life to stay organised when it dies, you need to defeat the point of a cheap all-in-one device by doubling the cost and halving the convenience - and get two of them.

These ruminations were triggered by Blogger going down for several days. I wrote them on the assumption that I'd be able to post them when it came back up.

Not if, when. Because I may be a cynic about technology and a pessimist about how humans live with it, but I still have faith that it's a good thing, that it will in general work properly, and that when it doesn't, I won't have to wait long for technicians like me to make it go again.

And like all faith, it doesn't make much sense when you think about it, but even when you realise that, you still have it.

Three Stories (Part 2)

I've been given a laptop, and Blogger has now been down for 36 hours.

I have a friend who bought a laptop two years ago. It's an AMD dual-core 2.11 GHz with a 230GB SATA drive and an x48 DVD-/+R DVD writer. All of which is prominently displayed as a selling point, aimed at customers who don't know what any of it means.

It has a design which could be called 'horrible' if you're an artist, 'impractical' if you have to use it, and 'retro' if you're a journalist. 'Retro' used to mean '20-50 years ago' - now it's 'the cutting edge of two years ago'.

It has AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface), which depending on how you look at it, means either it's optimised to run Windows 7 (whatever that means), or you need to switch the AHCI off to install any other operating system.

It also has a sticker marked "Windows 7 Compatible", Windows 7 pre-installed...and absolutely no way to fix Windows 7 when it goes wrong. Which it did.

That's Windows 7 all over. It's great at diagnosing and fixing its own problems, until it reaches the limit of its self-repair ability, at which point you're royally screwed. A disc for reinstalling Windows would be the easy and obvious solution - but none is provided, the assumption being that Windows 7 will never need any user maintenance.

Which is why my friend couldn't reinstall Windows, which is why they spent two weeks wages on a new laptop (with near-identical specifications but a non-retro design), which is why the old one is, in their words "scrap - it's yours if you want it". Which is why I have it. It's now working perfectly.

I once knew a man who sold his car because he couldn't get 'the smell of sex' out of the seats. I'm not sure how I should feel about that, being a contributor to the smell, but it did seem odd to spend a month changing cars instead of an afternoon washing (or even replacing) the seat coverings.

You don't throw away your coat because there's a hole in the pocket - you either mend it or use the other pocket. You might throw away your mattress if it starts leaking its stuffing - though mine is patched up with gradually increasing amounts of duct tape, and fulfills its function just fine.

Televisions are difficult and expensive to repair, so it actually does make sense to replace them when they stop working. But it's pretty simple to upgrade your laptop's hard drive or memory, plug in a USB keyboard when the onboard one gets unreliable, and reinstall the operating system when it falls over.

They're just not presented that way to the public. Personal computer development has slowed to a crawl, which means your new laptop won't be much different to your old one - but you get the new one because you're under the impression that you can only upgrade (or indeed repair) by replacing. And that small upgrades are really big ones.

A decade ago you could expect speed to double every year, now every few years you get the number of processors doubling, running in parallel at the same speed as the old ones - which is useful if you have the minority of software that can take advantage of it.

You may have 500GB of drive space instead of the 250 of five years ago, but it still accesses at 7200rpm. USB 3 may be available, but most of the devices in the shops still use USB 2.

I'm always happy to have an extra laptop. The one from my friend spent last night sitting in one corner making data backups, while this one rendered text-to-speech mp3s and ran a script to downloaded every episode of Monty Python from youtube in sequence, while I dozed on the taped-up mattress.

My old laptop is set up for general purpose email, browsing and wordprocessing. I lend it out to people whose laptops have gone wrong, to use while they're shopping for new ones.

Three Stories (Part 1)

As I write this, Blogger has been down for 48 hours.

You wake up in the morning, blearily stagger downstairs for some breakfast, flick on the kettle...and instead of a cup of morning coffee you get a loud crack, the smell of burning, and resolutely unheated water.

It's annoying, it's inconvenient, it probably means a trip to the electrical shop to get a new kettle, but you don't sink to the floor, wailing and ripping out your hair.

Instead, you grumpily punch the TV remote - because you've got a television in your kitchen that you only use for watching the morning news and the evening news while waiting for the microwave to go ping and the kettle to boil.

On the news is a story about how the local roads you drive down most days are blocked with snow. Again, it's annoying and inconvenient. Your plans for the day - maybe the week - could just have been scuppered, but once again you don't have a nervous breakdown and you don't join a doomsday cult.

Then while drinking coffee made with water boiled in a saucepan and listening to the radio news, you check your email. Or you try to, but you keep getting a cryptic numbered message about 'connection timed out' or 'unable to connect with server'.

So what do you do? Shrug and go do something else? Make a mental note to try again later? No, you keep pressing the button, trying to download the overnight spam and facebook chatter.

You realise you feel...lost without your virtual connections. Cut off, alone, disconnected and trapped in a suddenly claustrophobic world. You keep clicking the mouse, thinking the failed connection must be some silly mistake about to be immediately rectified. For the next ten minutes you're stuck in a circuit of the same actions, like a robot stuck in a logic loop.

And besides the lost feeling, there's a kind of blustering anger. Because this kind of thing is just not good enough. You pay your ISP to keep you connected at all times, and obviously the technicians in the big shiny computer centre aren't doing their jobs because it's been, like, half an hour and they still haven't fixed whatever the problem is.

Yes, it's that combination of existential panic and ranting outrage. That mixture of emotions that doesn't come from the weather re-arranging your timetable, or a cheaply manufactured household implement breaking. It's the attitude reserved for some personal technology, and in particular personal computers.

It's 0800 13/05/11 as I type, and Blogger's messageboards are overflowing with threads like 'When will Blogger be back up & running?', 'Why has Blogger been disabled for 7+ hours today (5/12/2011)? This is unacceptably sh*tty service!' and 'WOW this LONG down time! Will Blogger be discontinued?'.

Shouting, threats, namecalling, and not a little paranoia. Some are posting to say if the outage lasts one more hour they'll never use Blogger's services ever again. Others are ranting that Blogger's technicians haven't posted an estimate of how long it'll take them to find and correct the problem - because everyone knows techies have precognitive superpowers.

* 'Why no further updates as to when service will be restored?'
* 'Is this all problem with Friday 13?'
* 'We Should Have Been Warned'
* 'Why do you refuse to give an ETA for restoration of Blogger service?'
* 'Being terrorist attacked? I'm losing my readers!'

This is the modern attitude to the internet and home computers, or rather to their failure. A combination of existential horror that something fundamental and unquestionable - our virtual selves - has suddenly been cut off, and outrage the situation hasn't been immediately remedied by the authorities. Panic, and affront that the universe has dared to do this to us.

If we can't make a phone call because our mobile phone is out of range, it's an irritation and maybe a serious practical problem, but it's not like a crisis of faith. If we can't post to twitter from the same device and for the same reason, it is a little like you're a young child with a normally dependable parent, suddenly left alone and without explanation in a big empty field.

We don't even expect our gods to be on call 24/7/365 - and we meekly accept when they don't answer our prayers. But even though we know intellectually that our technology is far from omniscient, omnipresent, reliable and obedient, we still expect more from little black boxes than the creator of the universe.

...in the woods?

I've been busy. But not the kind of busy that goes on blogs.

Even highly technical blogs don't give you detailed accounts of the several ways the writer failed to solve a problem - which in a way is a shame, because others reading it might like to know what approaches to avoid.

But if there's one thing less interesting than someone else's success, it's someone else's failure.

I eventually did solve all my problems, which were:
* How to set up a computer to automatically record a series of movies.
* How to turn a series of ebooks into a series of talking books, using a text-to-speech synthesiser that doesn't produce totally unlistenable output.
* How to generate nonsense lyrics and chord structures semi-randomly as a way to spark creative songwriting. I'll write about that one when I've got the strength.

There was also a little short story about family values.

So, I now have a growing set of subtitled classic/sci-fi/action movies with subtitles that I can show to my students (when I finally have some) instead of getting them to play stupid games all the time that supposedly help them practice their English.

I also have a set of mechanically produced talking books on my mp3 player, broken up into half hour chapters, to be played when I'm doing nothing but walking from part of town to another.

Ah, but what are the books? Harry Potter? American Psycho? How to Win Friends and Influence People?

Not quite. The acknowledged classics of marxist philosophy! Not marxist economics, not marxist history, not even marxist politics - rather, the works of Engels, Lenin, Plekhanov etc, which (so I've been assured) founded the uniquely marxist view of the universe.

I thought, seeing as I'd been calling myself a marxist for over a decade, and originally got interested in it for the philosophical aspects, which have proven elusive and baffling, I ought to read the great books. Or at least have my phone read them to me in the voice of a BBC newsreader.

And I have to say, the more I hear, the less impressed I get. Today, Frederich Engels told me that absolute zero temperature is a contradiction in terms. Yesterday it was how calculus and the irrational value of Pi can't exist - and all those silly experts who disagree just don't understand.

Don't worry, I won't be boring you with my metaphysical deconstructions of German political activists from 150 years ago. Though I have been writing essays about it, and they'll probably get a blog of their own.

But here's a non-philosophical essay which dropped out of my head a few days ago. If you've had involvement with any kind of political group, it may describe something familiar.

Is the Pope Catholic?

How many socialists believe in socialism?

Put it another way: How many committed socialists are committed to the cause of socialism (however they conceive it), and how many are committed instead to their particular party? Or to their role within that party? Or to their career within that party? Or to the party's leadership, the support network offered by likeminded comrades, or the sense of struggle?

How many would know what to do if the struggle succeeded? Indeed, how many care more for being the scrappy underdog than the vanguard of a new world?

It might seem a self-evident contradiction to say that most catholics believe in god - surely belief in god is the absolute desideratum of being a catholic?

The average practicing catholic believes in the teachings of the church and the word of the scriptures - even though they're rather vague on what the church actually teaches, and their bible probably sits unopened but prominent on their bookshelf.

The priest will have been through seminary, learning exactly how vacuous the theology is - and how to cover up that vacuity with platitudes and impressive-sounding nonsense. By the time they graduate, what faith they have remaining tends to be so rarefied and abstract it serves only to give them the assurance that they still have a faith.

Around half those who qualify for the priesthood don't enter it. Those who do, in honest moments confide to discreet friends that they believe more in the social good the church can do, than in the reasons it gives for doing it. That, and they don't have many other career options.

Professional theologins are often more able to be open about their faithlessness, while the deacons, bishops and arch-bishops are obliged to keep it firmly closeted.

It's a Kafkaesque world where those who believe don't know what they believe, and those who lead do so on the condition they never admit what they don't believe.

Socialism isn't a religion, but it is a church - complete with sects, schizms, heretics, plaster saints, holy songs, failed prophecies and a host of false popes.

There are also the lavishly published but largely unopened founding texts, and the few professional interpreters who can justify any action, any theory and any reversal by quoting them.

When we see our leaders making impassioned speeches for courses of action we later learn they oppose in private, when we see petty personal feuds disguised as serious theoretical debates, I think we can be forgiven for suspecting the higher you get in the organisation, the less you care about its alleged cause.

When we see apparatchiks barefacedly flipping policies (and lying that they've ever changed) to gain favour in the hierarchy and climb another rung - before opportunistically defecting to another party, effortlessly swapping loyalty after sometimes decades of work...I think we're justified in asking how they so easily rearrange their principles - and if they have any left.

So, is the pope catholic? Perhaps he can't afford to be.

The Big Day

There's a familiar pattern, which cognitive psychologists know all about.

1) Decide to do something.
2) Make some preparations.
3) Realise it's a terrible idea.
4) Feel compelled to go through with it anyway.
5) Convince yourself it's a good idea, somehow.
6) Do the thing.
7) Realise again it really was a terrible idea.
8) Convince yourself it was a success after all, or if you can't do that,
8a) Blame someone.

It works on an individual level, but also with families, workplaces, and entire nations. The royal wedding gave us lots of examples.

Nationally, it looked like this:

1) The world's in recession, our mid-eastern allies are all being topped, and everyone hates the government - what we need is a big state occasion. Something sentimental, nationalistic and happy - something shiny to distract the little people. How about a royal marriage? It worked last time.

2) Find a royal with a girlfriend, and persuade them to get hitched. Announce it, and wait for the nation to rejoice.

3) Realise the public don't much care. They're not even using it as an excuse for a street party.

4) Hide your annoyance at the plebs.

5) Get the independent, objective media to push the wedding hard. Solid coverage for a month. Hopefully, a few weeks of being told everyone's ecstatic about the wedding will persuade everyone they are ecstatic. Waive the rules on organising street parties, hoping it'll motivate people to have them.

6) Have the wedding. Make it look really plush and don't mention the cost - or that anything else is happening in the world. Find a dozen crazy people who camped out in London to see the procession, and interview them incessantly as vox pops.

7) Grit your teeth to make the best of a bad deal.

8) Continue the blanket coverage, now in retrospect. And/or,

8a) Blame the politically correct student radical types for spoiling it for everyone else.

Here's how it affected my life:

1) My street has an annual party - with barbecue, raffle, and a few dozen people trying to remember each other's names from the previous party. The organising committee - chaired by my esteemed father - were thinking of not bothering this year. But seeing as there was an excuse this time, they decided to go ahead.

2) Put invitations through all the letterboxes. Dig out the home made wine.

3) Note the growing list of names who had other things to do on that day - including two who'd been asked to unblock a relative's drains that day.

4) Decide it's more trouble to cancel than to press on. Don't explain how.

5) Get some cheap plastic flags and patriotically decorated paper cups - just to make it royal themed.

6) On the day, turn up, eat too much, drink too much, and make light conversation with virtual strangers.

7) Take home most of the food and have it for your evening meal.

8) Say things like "That went as well as could be expected" and "At least it didn't rain".

And so, on the occasion of whatshisface marrying whatshername, here's a picture summarising everything it meant to me:

Review: Jitbit Macro Recorder

Computers are good at repetitive, mindless tasks. The kind that require great precision and patience but no imagination or choices. Exactly the kind which humans are no good at, and make working life unbearable.

Half the point of technology is to do away with that kind of drudgery. The other half is to help us do the things we did beforehand, but faster, better, or just more.

All of which is a bit odd really, because most of the things we do sitting at a computer are repetitive, mindless tasks that require great precision and patience but no imagination or choices.

The tedium of adding up a column of figures with a pencil has been replaced with the tedium of typing in a much longer column of figures, which are magically totted up by the spreadsheet.

If only there were some program which could watch you do some thankless task on another program, once, then do the same thing, much quicker and without errors for a thousand iterations, while you go and do something interesting. Probably on another computer.

Well, there are such programs. And while they can't transcribe your handwritten notes or turn them into the polished prose of the novel you're trying to write¹, they can record your keyboard and mouse actions, help you fine tune them, and play them back in a loop.

The one I use at the moment is called Axife Mouse Recorder, and it's free demo. I can't register it to get the full version because...the company I'd register with is long bankrupt. But it's still one of the most popular programs of its kind because, frankly, it's very good and most of the competition² is rubbish.

There are a few good alternatives though. vTask is much more configurable, and its free little brother TinyTask (also in portable version) is great for quick-and-dirty task automation³.

I'm going to be looking at the Jitbit Macro Recorder, to see if its longer feature list and user friendliness are enough to make me switch from my trusty but crippled Axife demo.

Jitbit, incidentally, have an innovative marketing strategy, whereby if someone with a blog reviews their program, the blogger gets a free personal-use licence for it. Good idea isn't it?

Now, I'm working on a project at the moment where I've got 466 text files containing numbers describing the shape of different sound waves. Each wave has 1778 points, and I need to open each file in turn, transcribe every point into another program, then save the result, and move onto the next file.

I've recorded a script in the Axife program, and the first screenful looks like this:

Now here's the same series of operations, recorded in JitBit Macro Recorder:

Both programs can record mouse movements, mouse clicks and keyboard activity, but for both I've recorded only the latter two. In effect, the mouse pointer will jump instantly to wherever it's needed, and any actions like selecting text, copying and pasting are done with the keyboard.

I've also edited the scripts so the delays between keypresses are much shorter than humanly possible - though I need to introduce delays occasionally for things like filesaving, so the computer can keep up.

Removing (or not recording) mouse movements and minimising delays means one wave takes about six minutes to transcribe - and all 466 should take about 40 hours.

At a rough calculation, it would take me about 1000 hours, working nonstop to do the same thing the old fashioned way. That's not just a bigger task - without automation I wouldn't even consider trying.

The other thing to notice is: I've put loops in the scripts. The most important one is a single copy-and-paste from a line in Windows Notepad to a corresponding point in Propellerhead Reason, looped 1778 times⁴.

So, what are the things I prefer about Axife, what do I think is better in Jitbit...and what's missing (so far) from both?

The Axife display is neater, more compact, better thought out. The delays don't take up a whole line, and the mouse click details easier to interpret as a gestalt.

The basic script editing facilities are the same between the two - move, cut, copy, paste, change event type and change co-ordinates. But Jitbit has a load of extra things you can do.

You can open and copy files directly, switch between windows and wait for them to close before moving to the next event - though unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with DOS windows, so you can't run a series of batch files in a row.

You can launch websites, play macros within macros, pause to ask for user input and perform various clipboard operations. All things I wouldn't use often, but it's good to have them.

But here's the big one. Your macro is no longer limited to doing the same thing over and over again - it can branch. It can make decisions - if a file exists, if the clipboard contains certain text, if a process exists or a window's in focus, if the user inputs this string but not that string....

You've actually got a simple programming language, which means you've got the option of a complex, context sensitive macro. With some ingenuity, you can even make it pick up on whether something's gone wrong - so it'll exit instead of trying to copy from the same non-existent window until you stop it.

There's other things too. If the button you want to click has moved, there's a 'Smart-Rec' feature to find it. You can put labels and comments in your script - useful because all but the simplest get very confusing.

Which leads me to thoughts of what could be better. When you look at a raw, newly recorded script, it can be baffling - even though you've just done the operations which it shows. Does this mouseclick refer to this window or that one? Is that click a window focus or a data selection? Is that copy operation the one for the third block of data, or the filename? Is this where the loop should end?

It would be much easier if I could press a hotkey while recording, type in a label to describe what I'm about to do, then press the key again, and continue⁵. A kind of writing notes in the margin to yourself, for when you come to the editing.

Some macro recorders have little to recommend them except the ability to do arithmetical operations on data before pasting it. Strangely, Jitbit can't do that, so I'm left pasting data into Windows Calculator or Excel, then copying the result. On this point the similar vTask pulls ahead in the race.

Finally, it would be a lot neater to have the option to display common keypress sequences as operations. Instead of four lines showing 'Hold CTRL', 'Hold X', 'Release X' and 'Release CTRL', just have a line showing "Cut". Even reducing 'Hold Enter' + 'Release Enter' as 'Enter' would help readability and reduce clutter.

In principle, you could make your own shortcuts like these with the 'Goto' or 'Play Macro' commands, but I'm looking to make macros quickly, not spend hours on workarounds to make them tidier.

So, have I been persuaded by Jitbit's Macro Recorder? I think I will use it, but not exclusively. TinyTask is still good for taking a few seconds to make basic macros, Axife occupies the middle ground, and if I'm working on a complicated procedure involving several different programs in sequence (my personal record, by the way, is seven) then Jitbit's Macro Recorder will be invaluable.

¹ At least, not until laptops come fitted with robot arms for turning pages and moving webcams around. If they ever do, your computer will be able to read you bedtime stories from a real book.

² It's a crowded market. A quick google search gives the high end products like Ranorax Recorder and WinAutomation, plus dozens of basic free or shareware ones like Mouse Recorder, Advanced Key And Mouse Recorder, and Mouse Recorder Pro, and autoclickerextreme - which probably wins the prize of Most Ambiguously Suggestive Name.

³ I've got an old tower PC with an even older video capture card, plugged into Film 4 on an old Freeview box - recording...old films. I tried for a week to get the PVR software to work properly - now I've got ShutDownExpert running two EXE mouse control scripts - one to activate VirtualDub to start recording, the other to stop it. It's clunky, but unlike the software designed for the task, it works.

⁴ The screenshots for this review were converted to JPG using photoshop...automated in Jitbit's program. While I poured another cup of tea.

⁵ I don't know of any programs which do this, but it would seriously help the editing process.

Nox

I don't believe dreams mean anything - except in the general way they reflect your attitudes and life experiences. They're just a grab bag of half formed ideas and feelings floating around in your memory, loosely tied into a sequence of events.

A kind of screensaver for when your operating system is in standby mode. Put it another way. Dreams can have significance, but not signification.

In the dream I was in some sort of institution, with Dickensian architecture but modern (though underfunded) facilities - it provided care for children who'd been abandoned or abused. I didn't work there and I wasn't a child but everyone who worked there knew me.

There were two young children, both boys, age about 9 to 11. I somehow took to caring for them - essentially babysitting. But it was night time, and the rooms, stairs and corridors of the institution were dark, so I couldn't seem them very well.

And because I couldn't see them, I couldn't be sure they really were human children. I spoke with them and we conversed, I did what I could to make them safe and comfortable. I carried them around from room to room, even carrying one to the top floor for a medical checkup. The doctors there knew me and greeted me as they went about their rounds, appreciating that I'd taken the trouble.

But in the dim light and silhouette, one of the boys looked like...it looked like I was carrying around a stack of old, heavily bound books. And the other...looked like he might be a small hairy animal, possibly a dog, or a chimpanzee.

They both spoke like children, and that's how I treated them. I loved them, and cried when I thought we might be separated and maybe they come to harm. I was always carrying one in one arm, and holding the hand of the other as we walked - sometimes swapping. We hugged closely as we moved around the rooms and stairs.

I'm not sure whether they had names, but the emotional connection was intense - full of concern and, well, love.

Then daylight came, and I could see clearly. Both were what I'd thought and hoped - normal, healthy, happy children. The 'dog' boy was absorbed playing alone on a pile of beanbags. The 'books' boy was chatting and relaxed with three friends his own age. I spoke with him, but it was now awkward, because the night had passed and he didn't need my help anymore.

They didn't want to hug, or be carried around, or even talk. They had no trouble letting go of their dependence on me, and though I was relieved that I could now see they really were what I wasn't sure I'd been taking care of...I didn't want to let go of them.

And that's when I woke up.

No, dreams don't mean anything. And to prove it, when I went back to sleep, trying to continue the dream, I was now an invisible observer, watching a frustrated investigation into some kind of bureaucratic coverup which involved 'losing' the boy's records.

Oh, and the investigator was...Captain Jean Luc Picard. Bald, starfleet suited, and with a nice line in righteous speeches. The bureaucracy offices were all futuristic rounded white cubes and the data storage computer looked like a giant metal cactus.

I'm quite sure none of that meant anything.

Less than 100

Some films are more praised than enjoyed - think Citizen Kane, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, and probably everything by Charlie Chaplin.

Others are more referenced than watched - The Thomas Crown Affair, Tron, possibly Dr No...and The Human Centipede.

Full title The Human Centipede: The First Sequence, it's the first in a projected trilogy of escalatingly gory films united around one idea: Mad scientists kidnap young innocents to surgically attach them mouth-to-anus in series. In other words, it's about being forced to shit in each other's mouths.

Now I've finally watched it...and I'm not sure what to make of it.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Two American valley-girls (Lindsay and Jenny) are touring Europe when their car breaks down in the middle of a creepy forest in the rain at midnight. So as is traditional, they go searching for an isolated house with a telephone.

The house is owned by a wealthy retired surgeon (Josef Heiter) who specialised in separating conjoined twins - but now has the opposite surgery in mind. He rohypnols the girls, euthanises a previously kidnapped trucker because his 'tissue is incompatible' with theirs, and goes out to kidnap another tourist (Katsuro).

Lindsay makes a failed escape attempt, prompting Heiter to decide she should be the middle section. The youngsters wake to find the surgery completed, and a leering Heiter.

The good doctor tries to housetrain his new pet, which he obviously intends to replace and upgrade his previous experiment - his beloved deceased 'three dog' - but he's constantly frustrated.

Katsuro the front section is furious and violent, the two girls keep Heiter awake all night with their crying, and Jenny at the back starts to die from blood poisoning. Then the police arrive asking questions, and after he tries and fails to rohypnol them, they return with warrant and guns.

As if Heiter's plans couldn't fall apart anymore, the centipede escapes and incapacitates him. There's a standoff, but Katsuro decides this is his punishment for the dishonourable way he's treated his family, and he cuts his own throat. Then Jenny dies, leaving Lindsay trapped in the middle between two corpses.

The police return, and Heiter kills them but not before one of them fatally shoots him. The End. Lindsay will presumably be found by more police later.

So what kind of film is this? A low budget horror flick that trades on a squicky premise and suggestion much more than gore - certainly. A wannabe cult classic - probably. A dark comedy - given the way Heiter is constantly frustrated by his creation and events, arguably.

Director Tom Six says it's a comment on fascism and the second world war - with the nationalities, language barrier, and of course pointless Nazi experiments. That makes sense, but it's not terribly deep.

The Human Centipede is actually a very silly film. The touted '100% medical accuracy' is bunk, the plot isn't nearly as much as a breakaway from tired horror cliches as the director likes to claim, as satire I think it's shallow and as horror it's neither disgusting nor disquieting.

David Cronenberg created much more unease in Shivers with a less obviously revolting premise, and if you like politics with your horror, Clive Barker probably does it better.

There were a few ideas I found interesting about the movie, though.

Most mad scientists in movies have some psychological reason for their actions, even if it's just curiosity. But Heiter has no motive that adds up. If he just wants a new three-dog, why doesn't he get more dogs? If he's just a sadist, why is he indifferent to death and irritated by signs of suffering? If the centipede is a proof-of-concept project, what does he hope to develop it into - besides the equally pointless twelve-person centipede promised in the (now completed) second film?

It's been called torture porn, but there's a difference. 24 was torture porn, as were the Saw movies, but in these cases we're supposed to root for the torturer - which is one reason they're so worthless. Here the sympathy is all with the victims, and their fightback.

The film's effective lead is Katsuro - he's the only main character to consistently fight against Heiter, and he's the only one to get a big speech. But he's introduced late and dies early. Plus, he speaks only Japanese - while the girls speak only English and Heiter English and German.

When the centipede escapes, Katsuro stabs Heiter in the leg with a scalpel, meaning Heiter is rendered unable to walk, only crawl - just like his creation. He's now a monopede.

The girl's only shows of affection come when they're holding hands in tearful comfort after the joining.

Katsuro may have the mouth (in the sense of both shouting defiance and eating) but Lindsay has the brain of the composite creature. In the escape, it's mostly her who has the ideas, which she communicates by pointing. There's an obvious parable about communication and co-operation there if you want it.

So that's what I think is the kind of movie this is. A loose collection of interesting ideas and nice filmic touches, held together by nothing more than...being stitched together in a row.

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