Author: Manek

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I’m in love with my laptop

Yes, sad, isn’t it?

About a year ago, I bought an LG Gram 17 laptop. As you’ll see elsewhere in this blog, I was very pleased with it at the time, describing it after three months’ use as “the first laptop I’ve bought and used in at least 10 years that I’m entirely happy with.” So what’s it like after a year of use?

It had the latest CPU at the time of its launch, together with a 17-inch display, a 1TB solid state storage device and 16GB of memory. This specification seemed like enough at the time and – spoiler alert – it still does. The most stress it gets is some light gaming, when the fans will emit a noticeable but not overwhelming amount of white noise. And it can get a little bit hot. Again, not so much that it becomes difficult to handle. The rest of the time, it handles my demands easily.

It’s generally silent, cool and sips at the battery. The LG utility (hello bloatware!) keeps the battery from charging to 100 percent to avoid excessive wear and it still lasts for hours: I’ve not exhausted it, ever. It’s been a couple of hours since the last charge to 80 percent and, as I type this review, 60 percent and a reported four hours’ of life remain. Never thought I’d say nice things about bloatware…

I still welcome the way that the machine is utterly reliable, with no need to go poking around in the innards of Windows to keep it that way. It sleeps and hibernates as and when expected and returns from those states quickly and reliably. Reliable: there’s that word again. The in-built camera recognises my face and logs me in automatically and, again, quickly, except in conditions of low light when it struggles a bit.

Though it took me a little while, I’m now accustomed to the keyboard: the main keys are offset to the left of the large trackpad to make room for the number pad which felt a bit weird at first. But the space that the large format of the machine gives the keyboard means that I don’t have to use the Fn key to access keys such as Home, PgUp, PgDn and Del, each of which are separate. The keys themselves are a reasonable size with space between them. There’s a clicky feel to each keypress.

I’m a huge fan of the 17-inch display which means it almost – but not quite – becomes as good to use as my widescreen desktop displays. This was one of the main reasons I bought this machine. In bright sunshine, it does though struggle to compete.

One issue that it seems no laptop maker has resolved is physical wear and tear. Not that the LG has had a hard life: it travels rarely. But daily handling means the edges of the case where I pick it up have started to look a little worn. A wipe with some isopropyl alcohol tidies up most but not all of it. The keyboard and display in contrast still look brand new.

Other than that, there’s nothing to complain about so I stand by my original conclusion: this is the best laptop I’ve ever bought and, though LG won’t want to hear this, I plan to keep it until it gives up the ghost. And that’s something I’ve never said about any laptop.

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The price of HS2: is it still worth £100 billion?

The price of HS2 is more than you think – but we’re not talking just about money. Blame the sunk costs fallacy.

According to the UK government, the cost of the high-speed rail link from somewhere in London – more on this issue later – has rocketed to over £100 billion. To be clear, that’s a thousand million pounds, times 100.

10 Sunk Costs Examples (The Fallacy Explained) (2023)

For this sort of money, you could open a lot of closed rail links, and electrify all of the UK’s rail network where it makes sense – in other words, every mile except little-trafficked branch lines. The carbon emission savings just from eliminating diesel traction would be immense. Also, electric trains are lighter, faster and quieter, and more attractive to travel in, resulting in greater passenger take-up and higher revenues. The rail industry calls it the ‘ the sparks effect’. Wear and tear on the track would be less too, resulting in lower maintenance costs. It’s a virtuous circle.

View of the Euston Approaches worksite.

Yet there’s a lot of momentum behind HS2. Euston station (above) has been torn open to create platforms and other infrastructure that will needed for the new trains. The countryside has had tunnels and embankments built, along with track beds. Viaducts are starting to be built. There’s a lot of jobs at stake here.

The benefits are said to be greater capacity on the west coast main line (WCML). It will all be worth it, we’re told.

HS2: a great idea?

As a rail enthusiast, HS2 seemed like a great idea to me when first mooted in 2009. At last the UK was to get its proper high speed rail system, something to equal the many found in the rest of Europe, France especially. It would relieve the WCML of slower traffic, such as local and freight trains, allowing more express and semi-fast trains to run.

However, high-speed rail will never be as useful in the UK because it’s a smaller, more densely populated country than, say, France or Spain: the centres of population are close together, making time savings fairly small. For example, just 20 minutes will in theory be shaved off the trip from London to Birmingham.

And here’s one of the problems: since HS2 first emerged as a concept, the world has changed. Traffic patterns are no longer what they were. Commuting traffic, which happens in peaks and demands greater train density, is not returning to pre-pandemic levels. Instead, leisure traffic is back to previous levels, and in some cases is even higher. People are using the trains in a less concentrated way, more spread out over the week and during the day. So fewer trains need to be run, making the capacity issue less urgent.

The UK government’s finances, creaking at the seams, are being stretched to cover the full costs now.

Work on the Euston end of the system has been paused. There’s talk of terminating the HS2 line at Old Oak Common, just outside Paddington, from where passengers will be expected to change onto the capital’s Crossrail. The top end of the line has been truncated: the Y shape has been lopped so that the HS2 trains will only go to Birmingham, not on to York and possibly Manchester. It won’t even link up with HS1, which goes through the Channel Tunnel.

And worst of all, the London-centric line is an insult to those living in the north. Denied the sorts of investment in trains and infrastructure that London and its environs have enjoyed for decades, they’re struggling on with old trains, cancellations and patchy timetables.

Not worth the candle

In other words, it’s becoming clear that this project now not worth pursuing for the supposed benefits it will confer. Not for £100 billion.

Yet the problem — the core problem – is the sunk costs fallacy. The unspoken argument is that we’ve spent so much already and are spending £120 million weekly with the total cost rising by £100 million every month as a result of inflation, according to rail expert Christian Wolmar, that it would be foolish to stop now. But a big chunk of money has yet to be spent. Trains, signalling and other rail infrastructure has yet to be purchased. These and operational costs seem unlikely to be recovered for decades.

Savings can be had. If we stop now, a lot of money has been spent. But if instead we spent a fraction – a tiny fraction – of what’s projected to be spent on HS2 rebuilding Euston into an attractive place to join the railway, rather than the dismal corridor it now is, and a portion of the rest on electrification and rail reopening projects, especially in the north, we’d all be better off.

The rail industry behind the scenes would be more than happy to see this happen, according to Wolmar. He says: “There are very few true believers in the project across the railway sector. The rail managers I meet either refuse to discuss HS2 or acknowledge privately that radical action is needed.”

Projects like this acquire their own life, floating above mere reality and rational thinking. We need to stop it now. What are the odds of this happening?

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Is this the perfect laptop?

LG Gram 17

It’s not often that I encounter a piece of technology that invokes a need to write about it. Especially in the consumer space, as most technology is a bit more of this or a bit less of that, but otherwise, you find the same technologies perhaps cobbled together in a slightly different way. Too often to ensure that an advertiser gets a better cut.

But the LG Gram 17 laptop, the 2022 edition, is a step forward, in my view.

Backdrop

For the last 25 years or so, I’ve clung to the notion that IBM/Lenovo* laptops, spearheaded by the ThinkPad brand, were the best, and that it was not worth the effort of exploring elsewhere. A habit bolstered by lab tests in my old stamping ground, PC Magazine. And because researching a new laptop is not the work of an hour’s googling: it can take me weeks.

But the last three Lenovo laptops I’ve bought have been disappointments in different ways. My previous machine was a Yoga 730. Its battery life was miserably short, no matter how I configured it. Given that my need to schlep a laptop around the world on soul-crushing long-haul flights has diminished to zero, you might not imagine that short battery life was a problem. But it does still need to be mobile, even within the house, and the 730 couldn’t manage more than an hour or so before it started to demand power. And that’s because it was very noisy and ran hot. Where all that energy was going was inexplicable because even light web browsing could trigger a bout of 747-style roaring and a very hot lap.

Before that was another Yoga which essentially fell apart, the back coming off the screen. Then the display itself started coming loose while the keyboard was thin and unpleasant. It ended up with gaffer tape around its edges in a bid to keep it in one piece. After less than three years use, it was dumped.

And the one before that? I can hardly remember it but it didn’t inspire.

No more Lenovo

I was glad to see the backs of them. Unless you actually need the reversible laptop feature, it’s an unnecessary expense and complication, in my experience; I found I didn’t use it to anything like the extent I expected to.

Of course, my 10-year-old ThinkPad – a bog-standard laptop – is still going strong but looks and feels its age: the screen is low-res by comparison to today’s machines, and modern software near brings it to its knees. So I upgraded it to Linux Mint and don’t let modern software near it, apart my Firefox browser. And it works fine in that limited role (despite the glitchy graphics chip for which I should have returned it inside its warranty period all those years ago). It wasn’t cheap when I bought it but then neither were the Yogas: both cost four-figure sums.

So I’ve finally learnt the lesson of clinging too long to a brand that I trusted but no longer do. When specifying a replacement, I wanted a bigger screen than the standard 15-inch diagonal to allow me to work with a pair of browser windows, or a browser and something else. And I wanted a bit of style and light weight because, even using it mainly within the home, weight is an issue. Have you sat with a laptop actually on your lap for any length of time? A 4Kg behemoth gets heavy quickly. I also didn’t want to pay the earth.

Looking for laptops

So on researching the 17-inch laptop market, because that’s about as big as laptop displays get, I found that there are two distinct segments. Most are gaming laptops: they are big, heavy and expensive, and include a hefty dollop of ugliness for free. I do a little light gaming but most modern laptops can handle that. So no thanks.

Then there are premium 17-inch laptops made by the likes of Dell. Very nice but very expensive: well over £2,000. Fine if the company is paying the bill but I’m not in that fortunate position.

LG Gram impressions

Then I stumbled across the LG Gram, which seemed a bit too good to be true. In most walks of life, anything that seems so usually is. But after weeks of prevarication and more research, I realised it was in a class of its own. I took the plunge.

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. You can easily find technical specifications elsewhere so here I just want to focus on the user experience.

It’s slim and light, feeling far lighter at around 1.3Kg than a machine this size ought to do, and certainly significantly lighter than the 15-inch Yoga 730. The keyboard is large with full-sized keys and sufficient depth to type comfortably; I’m a heavy typist. The display is bright and reproduces colours well, making photo editing a joy.

Audio is pretty good – for a laptop. My expectations were not high as you can’t assume that flat speakers crammed into a thin plastic box will sound anything hifi, and of course they don’t, but it’s not bad, considering.

It connects with everything I need it to connect to as well so there’s no shortfall there, and the camera is HD so Zoom calls look good. Or rather, I look as good as I ever will (no laughing at the back, please!).

And it handles my gaming needs with aplomb: the fans deliver a bit of white noise but nothing like the Yoga 730’s racket. And it not only does it not get hot, battery life, which is plenty long enough, seems hardly affected.

Perfect?

In summary, it’s the first laptop I’ve bought and used in at least 10 years that I’m entirely happy with. After three months of ownership and use, I’m still finding it a joy to use. It wasn’t the cheapest machine out there but if you can stretch to the £1,300 I paid for it (deals do come up from time to time), you’re unlikely to be disappointed unless you have heavy-duty requirements. Recommended.

* IBM sold its hardware division to Lenovo in 2005

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Is powerlessness increasing violence?

Without question, the recent murder of David Amess MP is a tragedy, both for politics – no matter what your political persuasion – and for his friends and family. It’s wrong to use violence to express frustration and anger on anyone, MP or not.

However, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t an important lesson to be learnt. Few would argue against the notion that UK politics today is deeply polarised.

The old tribal loyalties have evaporated. People tend to vote more on individual issues today and there are many, such as climate change, that cut across the old political divides. Instead, there’s a myriad of sub-groups through which anger and frustration can be vented, echo chambers that reinforce world views that reflect to a greater or – often – lesser extent the reality on the ground. These aim to change things through a variety of means from gentle persuasion to direct action.

So it would appear that the outlet for many people’s frustration is not through their MP, the ballot box, or a special interest group such as the RSPCA, routes seen as the traditional ways of changing things.

Though mostly completely legitimate, the growth of echo chamber sub-groups implies that traditional political routes are perceived as pointless and irrelevant. My point is to argue that this phenomenon may in part at least be driven by a sense that Westminster politics does not reflect the pluralistic world in which we live today.

Yet in Parliament, it remains a binary world: you’re either Conservative or Labour. Both these parties support a voting system – first past the post (FPTP) – that allows only one of those two parties to form a government. Anyone in a constituency where the MP isn’t of their political persuasion is automatically excluded from having their views represented, even if they are among a cohort of greater than 50 percent of those who voted. Consequently, many live their entire adult lives without representation.

In such a situation, it may not be seen as surprising that some people’s rage at such powerlessness, perhaps exacerbated by the growth in inequality in the UK, causes a small minority to issue death threats to their MPs – the numbers of which have gone through the roof in recent times. Yes, they are a small minority, but they are likely to be expressing feelings that many also feel but who choose not to express them through violence, whether physical or verbal.

Let me be clear: this is not to excuse, but to offer one possible explanation for the situation in which we now find ourselves.

What’s the alternative? Most countries have adopted some form of proportional representation (PR). It’s not perfect, but I’m not going into the pros and cons here. What I can say is that you’re more likely to get at least some of your views represented in the form of legislation or regulation with a PR electoral system than FPTP.

So I’d argue that if people didn’t feel as powerless, as disconnected from parliamentary politics as they do, if they felt that they had some form of leverage over their government – which right now is clearly governing for the few not the many – and if they felt that they could vote with their hearts rather then having to resort to tactical voting as millions do, then maybe, just maybe, the extremes to which a small minority have resorted may not have had to be manifested in violence, whether actual or potential, but through the ballot box.

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Letter to my MP re NHS pay rise

Dear Maria

I’m compelled to write to you in protest at the appallingly paltry pay rise of just 1% to NHS staff.

After all the hard work they’ve been asked to do during the pandemic – which let us note, is not yet over – after all the rhetoric the government has deployed to praise their efforts, and after all the lives they have saved often at the expense of their own health, this is a grotesque insult.

The Government called on us to clap for them and reminded us frequently how critical their work is. But when it comes to practical help, even a one-off thank-you payment, they get a pay rise which is close to invisible. As one nurse commented, it wouldn’t even pay for her car parking charges.

The defence of this decision is that this is all we can afford. Yet we have spent billions – and mis-spent millions on systems that don’t work, with Track and Trace being only the most prominent example, and with much of this money having gone to Tory party donors.

Rather, those who could afford to shoulder the burden of the cost to the economy of the pandemic seem to get away scot-free. And the ultra-rich, with wealth beyond the imagination of ordinary people, pay no more. Their personal tax allowances will even go up. The banks, which could withstand a small Robin Hood tax on each transaction, pay no more. And rather than close tax loopholes such as offshore tax havens, the Government is setting up freeports, designed, astonishly, to be onshore tax havens.

So the public purse can afford to give this money away to the rich, but not to those who have worked their fingers to the bone saving our lives. To say I’m disgusted hardly describes it.

You are, I understand, a Government Whip. You also say you were a nurse. You therefore are in a good position to make my feelings and, I have no doubt, those of thousands of others, known in the highest of circles.

Please do so. I’d be glad to hear what reception you get.

Regards

Manek Dubash

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Pandemic lessons

This story is of its time. In a year, maybe less, events may have passed it by. But it’s important for all our futures, nonetheless.

A few days ago, UK prime minister Boris Johnson announced that by mid-June, most restrictions on personal behaviour, imposed to help stem the global pandemic, would be lifted. For people who have endured a year of staying at home (most of the time), avoiding meeting friends and family, this was gold dust. I get it, really.

The immediate result was, according to newspaper headlines, that airlines and travel companies experienced uplifts in bookings of well over 300%, in some cases. In other words, a rush for normality. Again, I get it.

But what I don’t get is the idea that suddenly life can resume as if the pandemic had never happened. That we can resume life as it was. Because we must not.

The roots of the pandemic are in human behaviour today. The wealthy of the world, those in the so-called developed countries, jet around the globe as if it were their personal paradise. And why not? They have the time, the money and air fares are cheap. Astonishingly cheap.

Part of the reason they are cheap is that there is no tax on aviation fuel, which is by far the industry’s biggest single expense. The lack of tax emanates from an international agreement in 1944 that the nascent commercial aviation industry needed a kick start, and the best action was not to tax fuel. This policy has been adhered to ever since. Part of the reason can be found in the encapsulating statement by Bill Hemmings, of Brussels-based campaign group Transport and Environment, that “there aren’t any votes in making trips to Malaga more expensive”.

Yet as he points out, people who drive to France or Spain pay tax on their fuel so why shouldn’t those who fly. And people who don’t fly effectively subsidise those who do. Even if there were tax on aviation fuel at the same rate as road vehicle fuel, it would probably add about €15 per flight. Not onerous – and possibly not onerous enough.

The point? The global pandemic was spread worldwide amazingly quickly by casual aviation. The ability to jump on a plane without considering the real cost. Because aviation contributes 3% of human carbon dioxide emissions, and there is no greater danger facing us right now than the climate emergency.

And this is where it ties into the pandemic. Within the hegemony of ever-expanding growth, seemingly ad infinitum, together with the rocketing human population, there are almost no areas of the planet that humans have not touched in our insatiable demand for food and resources.

We plunder the seas as if they were infinite, we chop down tropical rainforests at a growing rate. Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 1.3 million square kilometres of forest, according to the World Bank – an area larger than South Africa. Farming, grazing of livestock, mining, and drilling combined account for more than half of all deforestation.

With the disappearing rainforests and the growth of CO2 emissions comes an acidification of the oceans and a huge and a devastating effect on marine life. And a reduction in the rainforests’ uniquely huge ability to soak up CO2.

And as we destroy the rainforests and other habitats around the world to grow food and wrench raw materials from the earth, we destroy the habitats of the plants and creatures that live there.

Evolution has equipped those lifeforms with unique adaptations tailored to their environments. When their world is desecrated, they have to go somewhere. And as human populations grow, the demand for food, products and land grows commensurately. This brings us increasingly into contact with creatures who previously lived in their ecological niches – niches that are being destroyed by human activity.

Those creatures, be they bats, pangolins or whatever, may carry bacteria and viruses that evolution has equipped them to survive with – otherwise they wouldn’t still exist. You can see where I’m going with this: greater contact with humans means a greater opportunity for a virus to jump to another species.

Most of the time it probably won’t. But occasionally, it will, and this is one theory for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) in homo sapiens.

Once established in one or more humans, pandemics used to stay where they were. Yes, the Black Death in the Middle Ages spread across Europe by ship but it was a slow spread, and had there been modern communications and modern understanding of disease transmission, it could have been stopped very quickly.

The modern pandemic on the other hand spreads around the world before vaccine makers have got their boots on. Thanks largely to global and overly cheap aviation.

So before we all jump for joy at the lifting of pandemic restrictions, my suggestion is that first we think about the impact on the planet that our lifestyles are having. That we think more than twice before jumping on a plane. And most of all, that refuse to vote for politicians who promise growth at all costs – because the planet that has sustained us so far, cannot do so for much longer.

Growth has to stop – or at the very least, the true costs of raw materials, including water, the air, and land, known as externalities and deemed to be free, need to be added to the balance book.

Imagine the age of the Earth as a year’s calendar. Humans arrived sometime in the last 30 seconds or so. We have done all this damage in the last 0.2 seconds. Let’s just stop.

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The UK is becoming a failed state

It’s becoming clearer that the United Kingdom is heading towards failure – if it’s not already there. So it’s time to install institutions that work for most other states with which the UK likes to compare itself, namely, an elected head of state and a written constitution. Were these accompanied by a proportional method of electing the government, that would drag Britain out of its obsession with medieval methods of governance and procedure that are increasingly irrelevant if not damaging in the modern world, into the 21st century.

The question is, will the money allow anything like this to happen? Because it is very much in the interests of the big money in Britain – and especially in England – for things to remain exactly as they are. Let’s keep tax breaks for owners of huge chunks of the British land and forests, let’s ensure that people remain obsessed with minutiae and let’s not talk about the big issues.

Pyramid of power

Which big issues? Governance and citizenship, key questions with which most democratic states have grappled before installing institutions that work, some better, some worse than others, to enact the wishes of citizens. These are not questions that Britons are ever asked to seriously consider, either by the educational system or the media.

For example, despite clear evidence that the British monarchy is an anachronism, parked at the pinnacle of a pyramid of power that starts there and includes all the lords, viscounts, marquises, dukes and princes, and the entitled nabobs in the House of Lords – mostly unelected of course – who make laws on behalf of less worthy folk, support for the institution remains undimmed, supported by the controllers of public debate who own most of the media.

When polled, the British return a healthy majority in favour of a monarchy. Yet the British monarchy spearheads the patrimony and privileges of an aristocracy that owns a third of all the land and 50% of rural land. It is keen to perpetuate a landed elite and the cultural circle associated with that continuation of aristo-oligarchy, as well as a social sphere with the wealth to remain both independent of the state and to lobby for its own self-interests, thus propping up an ancient class system antagonistic to submission to liberal democratic governance.

Were the monarchy to divest itself of its inherited private wealth and economic interests, and to behave more as a figurehead institution wholly funded by the public, it might be perceived as modernised. However, it clearly has zero interest – either financially or intellectually – in pursuing that course.

Banana republic

Rather, we recently learnt that the monarch interferes with the wishes of the democratically elected government when it’s in her interests to do so. The British state, addicted to secrecy, was forced to admit this. And where there is one such admission, there may well be others.

This alone, had it happened in another continent, would be enough for learned observers to sagely aver that an unelected monarch behaving in this way is contrary to the many definitions of democracy to which the self-appointed upholders of political probity propound.

But here in the UK? Well, we’re different, special…

With no written constitution, in which the UK is alone among the states with which it likes to compare itself, there is no legal redress. The monarch can do what she likes. Instead, quiet words in the right ears, in private, will undoubtedly be deemed enough – the unwashed masses may be informed in due time – to put matters right.

So why do people continue to support the monarchy? The first reason one hears is that the monarchy does no harm because it has no real power. We can put that one to bed with the revelations about interference with legislation.

The second one is that the monarchy brings people together. It’s hard to gather evidence about this one way or the other, but evidence as to what divides the nation is freely available, and it’s powerful stuff. Specifically, the arguments over Brexit strongly suggest there is no universal vision for Britain – or rather, England. Rather, it’s crystal clear that half the country has one vision of the country, namely inward-looking and xenophobic, while the other half sees it as international and outward-looking. If the monarchy brings people together, it’s not working.

One also hears that the monarchy attracts tourism money, although the amounts, in normal, non-pandemic times, are paltry compared both to the cost of public services, such as the hard-pressed and politically emasculated NHS, or compared to the tax breaks for, and avoidance and evasion practised by the afore-mentioned rich and powerful.

The other argument is to point to the elected head of another state – Donald Trump is the obvious if only the most recent example – and say that ‘we’ don’t want that to happen, so let’s keep the Queen. This clearly misses the point: Trump has gone, voted out. We can’t vote out the Queen, whatever she or her successor does. They’re there for life, because of who their parents were.

Failed state

Yet none of these arguments gains purchase in the minds of the British. There’s little support for a constitution from the two main parties, nor for proportional representation, and none for a republic. The electorate continues to vote for the Tory party, an organisation whose interests are orthogonal to their own, working instead in the interests of those who fund it: large corporations and rich individuals who were recently calculated to gain a return on their investment of 100:1 in the form of contracts and tax breaks.

Continued support for an unelected monarchy is also hard to disentangle from the notion of English exceptionalism which permeates the body politic and the media. It resonates with the Brexit debate and the tone in which it was conducted, and the clear evidence that only England voted – very narrowly – for leaving the EU, thereby becoming worse off by any measure.

It seems to my mind that current circumstances make it very difficult to turn this tanker around, if not impossible. The UK is run by the unelected who govern in the interests of the rich and powerful, and who promulgate mythology about the state we are in, making it hard to move outside that hegemony. As a consequence, it’s very difficult not to conclude that the UK is heading towards becoming a failed state.

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When ‘can do’ becomes can’t do

A lesson for modern management

Buffer stopAfter several decades of interaction with the IT industry in all its many forms, in addition to my role as magazine editor when I could see how the publishing industry works from the inside, I can safely say that one over-arching characteristic of modern management is a ‘can do’ attitude.

And this is all very well, and helpful to achieve project goals by instilling a sense of momentum and enthusiasm among those tasked with carrying them out. It’s built into modern managers that they must be positive: to be anything else, especially in front of your peers, is frowned upon; being negative is not a career-enhancing move.

But there are times when that attitude is positively and absolutely counter-productive. Most of the time, we on the outside don’t see this: internal corporate mistakes are usually covered up, no-one admits that an commercial organisation could possibly have done anything incorrectly – or as journalists like to say, fucked up – for fear of damaging reputations, share prices, product sales and so on.

There’s a prime example of how ‘can do’ became ‘can’t do’ that came to light because it affected tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. And the dirty laundry had to be washed in public because – hey – public money was involved. I’m talking about the railways, and how a timetabling process that should have worked didn’t, in part because of various forces majeures, but mainly because of the inability of a group of managers to accept that a project could fail if they carried on with it.

A new British railway timetable was introduced in May 2018, and it didn’t work. The consequence was that hundreds of trains had to be cancelled, more were hugely late and the days of many, many travellers were ruined. Only by removing hundreds of services from the timetable was a semblance of order restored. It was a mess, and it cast the railway industry in a poor light.

There was a variety of reasons for this. There weren’t enough drivers in the south and, in the north, track work that was planned to have finished hadn’t been because of unanticipated ground conditions, for example. But mostly it was because those in charge didn’t galloped ahead with a timetable they weren’t sure was going to work.

What went wrong?
Railway timetables are fiendishly complicated things. Not only do enough track paths have to be found for the services that train operating companies (TOCs) want to run, they have to fit in around a range of other factors such as engineering and maintenance possessions, driver rosters and availability, different train acceleration and braking characteristics, freight trains, gradients, and variables known and unknown such as weather, station dwell times and so on.

Normally the planning for a railway timetable in the UK starts about 65 weeks before implementation, known in the trade as T-65. A variety of iterations then ensues as TOCs bid for track space to run their services, and Network Rail (NR), the organisation tasked with drawing up the timetable, examines the bids and either accepts them, or rejects them if it believes they are unworkable. If the latter, the TOC has to think again and re-present its bids. By T-12, the timetable is supposed to be cast in stone, as that’s the date that advance tickets – which are tied to specific timetabled trains – go on sale to the public.

Most timetable changes, which happen in May and December each year, are fairly minor. But the May 2018 timetable was different.

One of the big differences was the fact that Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) had a huge number of changes to the timetable to submit as a result of new Thameslink services that were planned to run through London Bridge, under central London, and onto the East Coast main line. Initially up to 20 new trains per hour (tph) were planned, though this was eventually reduced to 18 tph to allow for bedding in. But its initial bids for the hundreds of new train paths were rejected by NR, resulting in the iteration process going back and forth for weeks.

Long story short, GTR’s new services overwhelmed the process, which had never in recent memory had to cope with that volume of changes. It took a long time and only at T-3 was the timetable finally declared ready. But it wasn’t, and it was only the week before the new timetable was due to go live that GTR realised it had a problem: when the TOC overlaid its driver rosters onto the new timetable, they didn’t match, as the company didn’t have enough drivers with appropriate route knowledge to run the new services.

The post-mortem
There was an Industry Readiness Board set up specifically to manage implementation of the new GTR services, on which were represented all stakeholders, including NR and GTR. It had the final say on whether the new timetable should go ahead. But, as Modern Railways magazine reported in its September 2018 issue, when the chair of the committee Chris Gibb, an experienced railwayman, asked if the changes should go ahead, no-one put their hand up to say they should not.

An NR manager on the board, John Halsall, said that at the point where it could have been stopped, T-26 in November 2017, everyone believed the new timetable could be delivered. He said: “That ‘can do and get on with it’ approach, which was so helpful up to a point, was actually the problem when we got to the split second when we could have put our foot on the ball: ‘everybody said, no, we can do this, and we must push on’.”

NR’s systems operations manager Jo Kaye identified the problem: “Everyone was in a spirit of hugely positive forward momentum to make [the timetable] happen. Perhaps because of the culture, of being so keen to deliver, blinded us in some way to the risks.”

So basically, collective lemmingness happened: no-one dared challenge the prevailing ‘can do’ culture for fear of being declared a negative ninny. There’s a lesson there for us all.

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Cloud transfers made easy

transfer
Transfers made easy

A while back, I wrote about the problem of consumer trust in the cloud – in particular, the problem of what happens when your cloud provider decides to change the T&Cs to your detriment, and how this can erode the trust that consumers, already alert to the technology industry’s much-publicised failures, are in danger of losing.

The issue that prompted this was the massive capacity reduction by Amazon for its cloud storage service – Cloud Drive – from unlimited to a maximum of 5GB. The original price was just £55 a year but Amazon’s new price for 15TB, for example, is £1,500.

So at this point, unless you’re happy to pay that amount, two solutions suggest themselves. The first is to invest in a pile of very large hard disks – twice as many as you need because, you know, backups, and then become your own storage manager. Some excellent NAS devices and software packages such as FreeNAS make this process much easier than it used to be, but you’ll still need to manage the systems and/or buy the supporting hardware, and pay the power bill.

The alternative is to retain some trust in the cloud – while remaining wary. But this is only half the solution; I’ll get back to that later.

This individual has found another cloud provider, Google G Suite, which offers unlimited storage and a whole heap of business services for a reasonable £6 per month. Google requires you to own your domain and to be hosting your own website but if you can satisfy those requirements, you’re in. Other cloud providers have deals too but this was the best deal I could find.

Cloud-to-cloud transfer
So the problem then is how to transfer a large volume of data to the new cloud service. One way is to re-upload it but this is very long-winded: using a 20Mbps fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connection it will take months, it can clog up your connection if you have other uses for that bandwidth, and for anyone on a metered broadband connection it will be expensive too. And if you don’t run a dedicated server, you’ll need a machine left on during this time.

Cloud-to-cloud transfer services exist to solve this problem, – and after some research, I found cloudHQ. For a reasonable fee – or for free if you blog about it (yes, this what I’m doing here) – cloudHQ will transfer data between a range of cloud services, including Google, Amazon (S3 and Cloud Drive), Gmail, Box, Basecamp, Office 365, Evernote and many more.

CloudHQ does more: it will backup and sync in real time too, forward emails, save them as PDFs, act as a repository for large attachments, and a range of other email- and scheduling related services for Google and other cloud providers.

The basic service is free but this is limited to 20GB and a maximum file size of 150MB – but the next tier up – Premium – costs £19.80 a month and offers pretty much everything the power user could want.

Hybrid clouds and backup
So is cloudHQ the solution to the problem of cloud-to-cloud transfers? Yes, but putting your data in the cloud still leaves you with a single copy without a backup (I said I’d get back to this). So either you need another cloud service, in which case cloudHQ will keep them in sync, or you create a hybrid solution, where the primary data lives under your direct control and management, but the off-site backup lives in the cloud.

This hybrid setup is the one that businesses are increasingly opting for, and for good reason. And frankly, since your irreplaceable personal data – think photos and the like – is at risk unless you keep at least two copies, preferably three, then using both local and cloud storage make huge sense.

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How Firefox just blew it

firefox_current_logo-150x150As a journalist, my Firefox browser – which I’ve been using since almost the day it arrived – is my primary research tool. It’s the place I call home. And it’s just been upgraded. It’s a big upgrade that for me will change the way it works, massively. I’m saying no.

Upgraded

The web is full of articles praising its developer, Mozilla, for updating it so it’s twice as fast. One article lauds “Mozilla’s mission is to keep the web open and competitive, and Firefox is how Mozilla works to endow the web with new technology like easier payments, virtual reality and fast WebAssembly-powered games.” This is endorsed by a Gartner analyst; Gartner is the biggest, and therefore the go-to analyst house in the technology industry for those needing a quote.

If you’re waiting for a ‘but’, here it is. Frankly, I don’t care how much faster it is if means I that half the functionality I’m used to is stripped away. Because that’s what allowing my browser to upgrade to the latest, greatest version would mean.

Extensions

It’s all because Firefox made the clever move to open up its browser very early on to third parties, who wrote extensions to add features and functionality. I loved that idea, embraced it wholeheartedly, and now run about 20 extensions.

The new Firefox – which despite its apocalyptic upgrade moves only from version 56.02 to 57.0 – will no longer run those extensions which for me have been the most useful.

Software developers love adding new stuff and making things look new using the latest software tools. Mozilla has been no slouch in this department. Fine for developers perhaps, but as a user, this constant change is a pain in the arse, as it means I need to re-learn each time how to use the software.

So Classic Theme Restorer (CTR) is particularly precious to me, as it enables Firefox to look and feel pretty much as it did when I first started using it.

CTR puts things, such as toolbars and menus – back where they were, so they work they have always worked – and for that matter, the way that most of my software works. But after the upgrade, CTR cannot work, as the hooks provided by the browser for it to do its stuff don’t exist in the new version.

Two other extensions are key from my point of view. One gives me tree-style tab navigation to the left of the browser window, not along the top where multiple tabs pretty soon get lost. And tab grouping, a feature that disappeared a few generations of browser ago but was replaced by a couple of extensions, means you can keep hundreds of tabs open, arranged neatly by topic or project. Who wouldn’t want this if they work in the browser all day?

Meanwhile, the developers of some other extensions have given up, due to the effort involved in completely re-writing their code, while others will no doubt get there in some form or other, eventually.

Messing with look and feel

This is a serious issue. Back in the day, one of the much-touted advantages of a graphical user interface was that all software worked the same, reducing training time: if you could use one piece of software, you could use them all. No more. Where did that idea go?

Mozilla clearly thinks performance – which can instead be boosted by adding a faster CPU – is paramount. Yes, it’s important but a browser is now a key tool, and removing huge chunks of functionality is poor decision-making.

I feel like my home is being dismantled around me. The walls have shifted so that the bedroom is now where the living room used to be, the front door is at the back, and I’ve no idea where the toilet is.

Some might argue that I should suck it up and move with the times. But I don’t use a browser to interact with the technology but rather to capture information. Muscle memory does the job without having to think about the browser’s controls or their placement. If the tool gets in the way and forces me to think about how it works, it’s a failure.

So version 57 is not happening here. Not yet, anyway.