Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Metropolitan Line, 1863

The first underground railway in London, the Metropolitan Railway, opened on January 10 1863. It ran from Paddington (Bishop's Road) to Farringdon St (now just Farringdon), calling at Edgware Road, Baker Street, Portland Road (now Great Portland St), Gower St (now Euston Square) and King's Cross.

According to the February 1863 edition of Bradshaw's Railway Guide, end to end journey time was 18 minutes. It's now 12-13 minutes, which doesn't seem like a massive improvement until you realise that there were at most six trains an hour in each direction on the line compared to, well, a whole lot more today.

Fares were fairly simple - single fares for short journeys were 4d, 3d or 2d for third, second and first class respectively (yes, it had three-class service) and 6d, 4d or 3d for longer trips. The first train was at 0600, the last one was at midnight, and there were even occasional expresses - non-stop from Paddington to Farringdon or vice-versa calling only at Edgware Road.

And of course, it was steam-hauled...

Marathons, plan B

I've been massively lax as far as running is concerned for the past few months. My theory is that due to my taking a ridiculously long time to recover at all after the Dublin marathon last October I didn't have the momentum to keep running through the winter. When you're not feeling all that fit the dark evenings and cold aren't all that appealing. I guess I can also say something about the lack of objectives - I haven't raced (okay, run in a race) since Dublin that I can remember, and losing out in the London lottery didn't help either. What this all adds up to is that at the time of writing I haven't run at all since late February, and my waistline is beginning to reflect this rather embarrassingly.

This means that obviously my desire to do Comrades this year definitely ain't happening, which is just as well given that I'll be in the middle of getting into a new job around that time anyway. But I still want to do at least one big race this year to kick myself into getting back into condition. It's too late for a spring marathon, but this autumn's a different matter. Should it be a classic landmark race, like Athens? A fast, flat PB-certainty of a course like Amsterdam?

Nope. I've got unfinished business with Dublin after the unremitting undulation of the course, which, if I remember, the organisers have the cheek to describe as "largely flat". I suppose it is largely flat on average as the course is a loop, but other than that... well. The unremitting undulation and my own lack of training eventually forced me to intermittently walk over the last few miles, and this time I want to get it right. I'm chasing last year's time (also a PB) of 3:40, which I'm pretty sure I can beat quite handsomely if I prepare properly this time. It's getting on for 1:40 slower than the world record, so there's obviously room for improvement.

History of Computing

Having been born in 1973, I sometimes find myself thinking that as far as computing is concerned I missed the true pioneer days. The late 1970s and early 80s, when intrepid hobbyists burnt their fingers soldering stuff together in their garages (or on their kitchen tables if they were in the UK, where the garage is generally too small or too cold for such things) and accidentally started major computer companies, were times when I was just too young to appreciate the significance of what computers were going to do in the future. They were neat toys to play games on, or maybe type in the occasional listing from PCW or Acorn User (which probably didn't work), or attempt to write programs of my own (which probably didn't work either). I'd even try the occasional hardware experiment (which usually didn't work either, except for causing damage). Ultimately, though, I just didn't have the patience to be a computer programmer.

Programmer or not I've been using computers ever since, and making my living from them more or less since I started working. One of the things which has always interested me is the history of computing. The story of how computers developed from the earliest piles of semi-mechanical metal through valves, transistors and succeeding generations of integrated circuits is a fascinating one not only because of the pace at which technology has progressed but because of the personalities involved. Apart from the pace of technical development and the human drama surrounding the breakneck pace at which the industry has moved, there are also the shifts in public attitudes in technology to consider, from the anything-goes attitudes of the early years of widespread computing to the privacy activism and, sometimes, downright mistrust of today as people start to wonder just what the outcome of the computer revolution will be.

It all makes for a fascinating story, and I'm rather surprised that other than within the rather restricted scope of series like Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds nobody seems to have filmed a definitive history of computing yet. Now would be a very good time for this to be done while memories are still fresh.

Hey, BBC - I've got a splendid idea for an epic 13-part documentary series! Can I present it? I'm good-looking, presentable, just the thing you're looking for, and hell, I know a little bit about computers...

More software updates..

After casually noticing that it was now possible to get my dedicated servers reimaged with Debian instead of the generally painful Fedora Core I casually decided to upgrade igor, the web server. As with most casual upgrade decisions it actually turned out to be a bit of a pain - mostly down to 1and1's update server being unavailable yesterday - but now not only is the machine back up and running sarge, I've also taken the opportunity of upgrading MT to version 3.2 and migrating the web service itself to the lovely lighttpd.

Very little of this will be visible to anybody reading stuff here, but hey, it makes me feel better...

Reorganized

I grew up in the 1980s, the decade of the yuppie. Mention the 1980s to a random sample of people today and a significant number will mention two things - mobile phones and Filofaxes, the two iconic objects which no self-respecting red-braces-wearing yuppie would have been seen without. I even have to admit that I had a Filofax myself for a while in my late teens - the cheapest one available from WH Smith, with a plastic cover that soon started to peel away to reveal the cardboard underneath. But it was useful for keeping addresses and notes in.

Time moved on, and in the early 1990s the hunk of paper was superseded in both the yuppies' and my eyes by the developing market for Personal Digital Assistants. The PDA was a revelation, models like the Psion 3 and, later, the Psion 5 providing nifty handheld computing power and storage for addresses and appointments. The Psions even had a built-in programming language so you could code for them without needing an external development platform. I had one, and a lot of people I knew had them as well. Most of these were upgraded in time with the stylus-based Palm machines that swept all before them towards the end of the decade, and today Windows-based and Palm-based PDAs rule the universe, with the more recent additions of the Blackberry and the Treo combining cellphones and PDAs to make what should be the ultimate life-management tool. All the information you need stashed away in a nifty slab of electronics you can fit in your pocket, which synchronises with your desk machine to keep everything up to date. Perfect!

But here's the problem - the PDA isn't perfect. In many cases they're hardly usable, mostly because the much-vaunted synchronisation between PDAs and the desk just doesn't happen. Software is flaky, Bluetooth often just, well, just plain doesn't work if you look at it the wrong way, and the upshot of this, in my experience, is that unless you have a very, very simple setup with one piece of software managing your contacts and such on your desktop with one PDA syncing to it then you might as well not bother as the whole setup will be flaky and unreliable at best.

I've gone through so many PDAs over the years - the Psions, my Palm V, and sundry later Palms and Clies leading finally to my Treo 650 - always thinking that maybe this latest gadget would be the one to iron out the bugs and actually become the life-organisation tool that their proponents claimed it would be. But it's never happened - every one's just ended up being a fun and expensive toy.

It doesn't have to be this way. It shouldn't be rocket science to come up with open and robust protocols for exchanging things like appointment data and address books among computers and PDAs (after all, a PDA's just another computer). There are already standards such as Vcard (for address data) and iCalendar (a widely supported standard for appointment data) but nothing to glue it together. As far as I know, the interfaces and USB protocols for connecting PDAs to host machines aren't standardised either, so everything's reliant on either proprietary vendor-specific software or reverse-engineered third party implementations. I might be wrong and there are actually are standards for these things - in which case, well, it's maybe time to improve the quality of the implementations, eh? The whole area today is basically a dog's breakfast, and doesn't show much sign of getting any better in the immediate future.

So now things are going full circle. A growing number of people are losing patience with trying to get their whizzbang PDAs to do what they promised to do and going back to paper. A co-worker told me a while ago that she'd had a PDA for a while, but it eventually just turned into an expensive thing for sticking Post-it notes to so she gave in and went back to her Filofax. I laughed at the time.

You can guess what happened next. A couple of weeks back I went out and bought a Filofax. The one I bought wasn't the cheapest available at £35, but that's still a lot cheaper than the cheapest PDA and a lot more functional. If I want to make notes, I can just scribble on the notepad in the back and insert the page somewhere convenient (as it were). I can maintain a To-do list and tick things off when they're done, and see my appointments for the next few weeks at a glance. If I want to annotate something I can write in the margin, or stick a Post-it note to the page or use a Jot Pad sheet (they cost a lot less here than in the US, mercifully - £1.75 for 3) and slip it onto the rings.

I can look up streets in London or the Tube map, or find someone's address, and it'll never run out of battery power. If I don't have it with me I can make notes on an index card or whatever else comes to hand and keep them reasonably organised as well, as my Filofax has a little pocket to keep things like that in (or you can just poke holes in them and put'em on the filing rings). It's flexible, intuitive and expandable. There are even cheaper options out there as well, of course, but I'm not nearly Web 2.0 enough to carry a Hipster PDA.

The only thing I can't use it for is checking my email on the train, looking up train times or playing Solitaire, for which I'll be keeping the Treo around at least for the time being until I lose patience with its habit of rebooting itself or turning the phone bit off for no reason and replace it with a smaller, lighter cellphone with better battery life.