Posts filed under 'Technology'
I recently travelled through Manchester airport, which apparently was awarded ‘UK airport of the year 2010′, as touted by numerous posters at said airport (see also their awards page). In the bag drop queue, I had to wait quite a while for the couple in front who had a number of issues getting the whole family, including kids and prams, checked in. While passengers were getting slightly annoyed – I will admit to being part of that group – such things happen, of course.
However, when I got to the security line, I started to get the feeling something was different here. Big posters sporting full-body scanners were put up, saying something to the effect that at this particular airport, enhanced security measures were in effect.
Being slightly concerned about the radiation effect of said full-body scanners, I thought to myself that I can always opt out, as is possible in the states, believing this to be an option in the UK too. Sure, an enhanced search is not altogether pleasant, but better than receiving an unnecessary dose of radiation.
However, while I was in the queue – a long queue – I looked up some info on my phone. It turns out that if you refuse a full-body scan in a UK airport, travel will be declined. And that, while the airport maintains that the scanners are completely safe (stating that the amount of radiation received is equivalent to that of 5 minutes of background radiation), highly competent researchers have posed serious questions with regards to the potentially cancer-inducing effects of these scans.
As I walked through the queue, I considered my options, should I be selected for a body-scan. Having some time to reflect, I came to the conclusion I had none. If I resisted the body-scan, I would not be allowed to travel. £100 out the window, and no way to get back to Denmark. If I went through the scanner, potential long-term health-effects. I looked with envy on the business-class travellers, and the aforementioned couple with the kids and the pram, who somehow got onto the fast-track security line, which, besides providing a vastly more expeditious security process, was completely devoid of these scanners.
I was not selected for the body-scan. Unlike many of my fellow travellers. The worst thing about the experience was that I did not have a choice. Had I been been selected, I would have been compelled to go through with the scan.
On reflection, this is probably the first time government agencies have resorted to imposing potentially health-damaging security checks on its population, let alone the vastly upgraded privacy intrusions. Sure, the liquid restrictions were annoying, but they did not impose any harm on me, other than having to throw out the occasional face-wash that I forgot to take out of the hand luggage 
Nor are the metal-detectors or the x-ray machines harmful to us in any way. Enter the body-scanners. Radiation-exposure is now mandatory in order to fly.
The reality is that there is some debate on the health effects of the scanners. In addition to the mentioned expert comments, there is a recent case of scanners in the US having emitted much higher radiation than they should, or at the very least being measured incorrectly. And there are the comments of scientists in this wired article, not exactly inspiring calm. As the icing on the cake, Bruce Schneier, a well-renowned security expert and cryptographer, makes some interesting comments on the effectiveness of these new security measures (though he admittedly elsewhere believes them to be safe health-wise).
Bottom-line, I am sceptical towards new technology that is being rushed in, proclaimed safe, and put to mass-use in the name of security. Mass x-ray scans of vast amounts of people is certainly not something to be undertaken lightly.
marts 17th, 2011
So I haven’t been blogging for a while. Funny I should start again with a rather technical post. However, after having spent a couple of months with low- and recently high-level Microsoft support engineers on the matter, finally to find a satisfactory solution, I feel I should share with the world.
So:
Symptoms of the problem: Outlook 2010 starts with the message “verifying data integrity” (and some small turning wheels in the lower right corner of the status bar). In this particular case, emails will potentially be lost. On a deeper level, it seems that for whatever reason, any changes made to the PST-file by Outlook within the last 10-15 seconds before you shut it down remain unsaved to the file. This will cause for instance newly received mails to be gone, deleted emails to be present, and so on. Depending on the speed you shut down Outlook with after changes are made, corruption may or may not be present. (if Outlook is shut down so fast it can’t save anything, no ‘corruption’ at the technical level will occur, it only appears it’s if Outlook is working on writing it while shutting down). The issue will only be present in Outlook 2010.
Potential solutions: The standard solutions is to deactivate all add-ins, and/or run the scanpst.exe tool to fix the PST-file. This should be tried first. Details of this can be found using google, and is rather trivial. This is not the case I am describing.
The solution I have not found anywhere else: If you have PGP 10 installed on your system, it can cause issues due to its incompatibility with Outlook 2010. Even if (as in my case) you have not enabled the messaging components, it will still cause issues. The solution is to uninstall PGP and then reinstall it without the MAPI and LSP components. This is obviously a problem if you are using the messaging feature, but if you are not and just want the basic PGP features, this is quite handy.
Details: Uninstall PGP and reboot. Locate the PGPDesktop.MSI install-file located in your temp-directory (%temp% in an explorer-window) under a folder called something like PGP[...]. If it’s not there, you need to run the proper installer and exit it when it has extracted the files (before the actual install). Run the following command in the command prompt, in the folder containing the msi-file:
msiexec /I PGPDesktop.msi PGP_INSTALL_MAPI=0 PGP_INSTALL_LSP=0
(see also documentation at pgp.com)
Let the installer finish, and it should install PGP without the MAPI or LSP components, and fix this problem if you have both Outlook 2010 and PGP 10.x installed (while I am writing this, the PGP version is 10.0.3, and as far as I can tell from the PGP support engineers, Outlook 2010 support is not coming out for a while).
It is interesting that after spending a couple of months with Microsoft engineers, I was the one to note the link with PGP (though I must admit the last Microsoft-guy was rather helpful). The case has been escalated to the Microsoft development team now, so I hope they are able to put some pressure on PGP to actually make a product that is compatible with the new version of Office. I must say I am happy with the quick response of the PGP people though.
On a more overall note, this highlights the problem with multiple companies developing software, none inclined to take responsibility for incompatibilities. Microsoft can hide behind ’3rd party software’ causing issues, though one may question whether it’s the architecture of their application that is really the problem, if 3rd party software can cause such glitches in their file-saving operations – in their own brand new OS, that is. PGP can hide behind ‘this version is not compatible with Outlook 2010′. I am sorry to admit that Mac-people do have a strong point on this. Of course, they pay a high price for a monopoly in multiple ways as well
november 30th, 2010
So today, having a fever, I took a bath. Having recently seen the movie Pi, where Sol paraphrases the story, and possible as a result of my feverish condition, I began to ponder the Archimedes principle of displacement. The quote from Pi goes:
“The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he’s received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks – insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife – she’s forced to share a bed with this genius – convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he’s entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that’s a way to determine density – weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams ‘Eureka’ and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king’s palace to report his discovery.” (Sol’s point is that Max needs to ‘take a bath’ to solve his problem, but this quote spurred my interest, apparently)
Not remembering the quote exactly, I seemed to remember something about weight, and claims being made that the amount of water displaced were somehow related to the weight of the object, but I couldn’t get it to make sense that anything but the volume of the object would determine how much water it would displace. Enter google: Search archimedes gold displacement.
It seems reasonable to go from the top, and this site is on a .gov domain, carries the emblem of the US department of energy, so it seams at a 10-second glance to have some reliability. While, when reading it again, the scientists answering do not appear to give any outright wrong information, they don’t at all seem to convey the essence of the story. And when initially reading it, I strongly got the sense that some of them were arguing for a heavier object displacing more water than a lighter object (of the same volume).
Right, let’s try link 2: Now, suddenly, the crown under inspection could be partly silver instead of iron (as claimed by the first site), and this site is more or less about posing a critique against the method anyways, ending up suggesting a setup with scales, reminding me of the epic scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Sir Bevedere goes ‘we shall use my largest scales’.
Browsing through the google-list once again, my eye caught (after having discarded link three as relatively unuseful for my purposes) a debate at ‘Science forums’. This debate again reminded me of the debate preceding the use of Sir Bedevere’s largest scales in the forementioned movie. A guy called Vexer seems determined not to get it, and during a full 2-page discussion seems to hold that the water displaced has to do with weight and not volume.
While scrolling down the list further, my eyes catch something most welcome: What looks like an authoritative source indeed – the Encyclopædia Britannica in it’s very person (the linked page was followed through a couple of additional links). However, my rejoicing is short, since you can read about 5 seconds off that page, before a nag screen pops up asking you to register. So I took a screenshot of the info and read it at my leasure. It seems that indeed, the volume of water (or any fluid for that matter) displaced by a fully immersed object is – dam dam dam – the volume of that object; irrespectable of its weight I might add (while it is of course true that the upward force has to do with the weight of the object, and so becomes relevant for determining to what degree the object will be immersed). Which incidently is the same conclusion found (albeit in even more understandable terms) at Wikipedia. Which adds another point to the trustworthiness of Wikipedia.
So I’m happy; I got confirmed what I initially thought to be true (which raises again another set of questions on the biasedness of my inquiry). However, what’s the point of writing it here, or, as one of my lecturers like to reiterate, ‘so what?’
I had a chat with my dad yesterday evening about postmodernism and the pluralistic society in which we live. He thought much of it had come from technology (perhaps somewhat like Lyotard). And I was reluctant to accept that (there must be more). However, as this little exercise confirms, on any given topic – even the ones we consider to be very established and universally true – we can find a host of both confusing, opposing, and confirming information, since anyone with a keyboard and Internet access can contribute even further to the confusion (you and me both).
I think my dad said something about how it used to be simpler. I agree. Maybe I’m missing a bit of that simplicity, even though I’ve never experienced it, or rather, I’ve probably experienced it growing up, since as a child, you tend to trust your authorities much more. I don’t think I’d like to go back though.
And even further, within especially religious communities, there tend to be those groups who view everything as being very simple. I am envious. However, I find it difficult to go back. And yet I agree. It is very simple. But perhaps simplicity is about choice, and that choice starts out with examination. And entails inspection. And then perhaps in the process, we learn which voices to ignore and which to include.
februar 1st, 2009
Returning from Denmark last Monday, I had a short stop at London Waterloo, where I had the pleasure of paying 30p to use the bathroom, and there have an encounter with the so-called Dyson Airblade.
As I was drying my hands in it, I read something like ‘The Dyson Airblade uses up to 83% less energy than conventional warm air hand dryers…’ Smart. Apparently, it also burns your hands; or at least, that’s how it felt. Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit, but I could feel the evening and the next day that part of my hand had been exposed to a too high temperature.
This is how it works: Air flows horizontally like a ‘blade’ (hence the name), and beneath is a hollow space, so effectively, you dry your hands by moving them up and down, allowing the ‘air-blade’ to dry them. This worked fine. Until I thought ‘let’s try this again’, and suddenly my hand got pulled to the side of the ‘blade’ (where the air is coming out). A piece of advice when using the air-blade: Keep your hands firmly in the middle 
oktober 25th, 2008
Last night, as I was blogging about 10,000 BC, my website decided to stop responding.
So I wrote the support of my current host. First, they asked politely if they might move my webhotel now to a newer server, since they already were looking at a support request from me.
Later, it turned out that the server I had my blog on crashed, leaving me with a week-old blog.
Thanks to Andreas and his feedreader, I managed to reconstruct it though. Thanks! (but if anyone feels something is missing, please let me know )
marts 17th, 2008
A couple of days ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine.
It so happened that I called while she and her boyfriend were playing chess.
I thought this sounded nice – a cosy environment, a chess board, maybe a couple of coffee-cups alongside.
But alas, they were sitting in the same room, and on each of their computer playing online Skype-chess against each other.
The marvels of technology
marts 17th, 2008