Webs Wonder Design

I’m fortunate in being represented in Parliament by Adam Price, who not only is pincipled and articulate, but also has a well developed sense of humour and irony. He certainly needs it when dealing with some of the blinkered crazyness which passes for policy in Westminster.

Continue reading Mountain Criticism

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Late in 2006 I met a young Zimbabwean student here in Wales. He was on masters degreee course in creative writing. As well as studying hard, he worked in the college library and sent the money home to support his parents, brother and sister, who, like most Zimbabweans, despite being qualified and willing, had no jobs, becasue the Zimbabwean economy is in ruins.

Despite being a talented and published writer, completing his masters degree and getting accepted for a PhD at more than one British University, he was unable to get the funding to do the course and stay in the UK legally. When his 12 month visa ran out in October 2007, he chose the least worst option of returning to Zimbabwe.

With daily reports of the violence and intimidation of opposition supporters in the days leading up to the re-run of the Presidential election, and with communication becoming increasingly difficult (1 minute on the Internet costs Z$30 million), I’m publishing this account of his homecoming to Zimbabwe airport.

October 2007

I dreaded coming back home, ekhaya. There were only two choices available to me – to overstay my visa and disappear in London’s underbelly or come dance to Robert Mugabe’s paranoia. I chose the latter, not because I am a brave hero, but that was the only choice plausible at the time. No organization was prepared to slice their budget for my PhD studies. Even personal referrals to former Labour leader, Lord Neil Kinnock and his office staff, yielded nothing. A year in Wales had fizzled into a blur. So I came back.

The Harare International Airport is now a big white elephant. A bird’s eye view of the airport is of a grand architectural design, but once inside you realize how underutilized the place is. It is a big empty space, understaffed, though milling security operatives’ swarm around when a plane touches down. As you walk towards the Returning Residents desk, you’re faced with the Hitlerite grin of Robert Mugabe’s image pasted in every government complex.

What is surprising is that I never told anyone of my imminent arrival in Zimbabwe except my immediate family members; because

1) I had premonitions of harassment because of my contributions to The Zimbabwean

2) I had already been forewarned to expect an extra welcoming party in the form of Mugabe’s henchmen. Zimbabwe is mine as much as it is Mugabe’s. Though I checked in without incidence it was only the calm before the storm. We had to wait half an hour for bags. There was no electricity in the airport building to power the conveyer belt.

Just as I walked out to my father’s waiting embrace, a coal Black Hand tapped on my right shoulder as I pushed my luggage trolley out and demanded I reproduce my passport. I was asked to walk back into the airport building and led to a room, misleadingly labeled ‘BUGGAGE ENQUIRIES’. It was a small toilet, possibly the same toilet/room, in which opposition MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa was bashed by ‘unknown assailants’ earlier in the year. The faces were not friendly. The other face belonging to a woman took my passport and disappeared for a few too many minutes while the other face, the guy, did the macho thing – grill me. He asked questions and I had to answer all of them.

He insisted on taking my laptop, notebooks and diary. ‘For what?’ I asked. Macho face said, ‘iwe hauzivi here kuti uri security matter.’ Why do you pretend as if you don’t know you’re not a security matter? They wanted to know if in my possession I was carrying any British sterling, what kinds of investments I had made in Zimbabwe, why I was coming back to Zimbabwe, if ‘my bosses’ had sent me. They even wanted to know why I was carrying in my possession books like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Ngugi’s Wizard of Crow, which incidentally is a scathing attack on dictatorship in twentieth century Africa. After more than two hours of questions, of being passed from one nameless superior to another, I was left to go. When my father asked why they had taken me for this long, he was told it was just ‘another random security check.’

My father does not own a car so the only alternative to get into town was to bargain for a taxi but after being told the frightening figure of $10,000 000 we decided to hitch-hike into Harare’s CBD. We lugged my heavy bags and flagged down a battered kombi from Manyame to Fourth Street Bus Terminus but just a few meters from the airport, the kombi was parked on the roadside as it had run out of fuel. Commuters shouted, ‘asi mota haichina network.’ The bus has no network as if it were a phone, this is commuter talk, this is Harare talk, people trying to make light the challenges they’re facing. The long airport road is bordered by an untidy tangle of grass and shrubs and, further down still, by dusty buildings that look exhausted

Harare does not look the same anymore. The buildings have a sickening off-colour look. Harare is now dull and tired. The people truly zonked. Most Harare faces show stunned smiles. There are some who do not smile at all, who seem indeed, as if they will never smile again. They are goners. No, it’s not the hunger and poverty that has sapped the life in them. Something essential is gone. The stuffing has been knocked out of the people.

But there’s still hope too. I saw people carrying, on their shoulders, packets of maize seed in anticipation for the sowing season. Though the blazing sun may suggest we may have to wait for Charles Mungoshi’s rain for a long while to come.

The panoramic drive to Gweru from Harare was enough overview of Zimbabwe in a day. The three hour drive left me in tears. Our country is now like a big concentration camp, people being asphyxiated by a thuggish political regime but striding on with ounces of sheer will power in their hearts and minds. Along the long stretch of the Bulawayo Road, stranded commuters jostled for the little transport there was. Talk in the bus was that there was no fuel and hence few buses on the highway. We arrived in Gweru after 10pm. There was a blackout in the city, another of the daily power cuts.

I am convinced Zimbabwe will not remain this hell. When something is permanent you learn to live with it, to accept its ominous presence. This is not a permanent condition. This is a human orchestrated famine of the flesh and spirit. The spirit of humanity will triumph, and Mugabe’s reign will lead him into eternal banishment.

Comments

13 June 2008 - Emile de Ravin, Johannesburg.

As a South African, I am stunned by the attitude of my government, in particular Robert Mugabe’s foreign minister Thabo Mbeki’s attitude toward the vampire regime to our north. Walking hand in hand with one of the greatest tyrants of the modern age is indeed not cool, contrary to what the South African president may think.

Down here, our feeling is that Mbeki’s quite diplomacy toward Zim has been a dismal failure, as have his policies regarding AIDS and the power crisis of late. We all fear a full out war after June 27 if Tsvangirai wins the election - but even if he doesn’t Zimbabwe will go down in flames in much the same way as Nazi Germany did, and this entire region will suffer.

And in much the same way as the conflict ended in Europe with the death of the Fuhrer, the ONLY way to avoid conflict and “rivers of blood”, as Tendai Bhiti put it, is the death of the Vampire of Harare. But that’s all wishful thinking. Other than that, we can only hold our breath and wait for Mbeki’s buddy to bury the rest of his people alive for even thinking of voting for the MDC.

But when Bob finally goes to meet his maker Satan, I will personally fly to Harare and piss on his grave!

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Well, fun anyway…

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Often explained as “seeing more like the human eye”, HDR imaging combines several shots of a single subject (usually static ones for obvious reasons) in order to overcome the exposure range limitations of traditional single-shot photography. The resulting images have much more detail from shadows to highlights, and everywhere in between.

Take the second shot below - Sycamore Street, Newcastle Emlyn. When standing in the street, with the sun from the left casting a shadow across the street, My “high dynamic range” eyes could see into the shadow while also seeing the sun-drenched right-hand side, however every attempt at a single shot of the scene was either too dark in the shadow or too light in the sunshine. So I set my Lumix L1 to autobracket two shots “under exposed”, two shots “over exposed” and one in the middle. I put the camera on a tripod and risked life and limb standing in the road.

Back at my computer I would normally import my RAW images into Adobe Lightroom, choose the best one or two then adjust the exposure, fill light etc etc in an attempt to create an image as close as possible to what I had seen. To create my HDR image, I imported the RAW files directly into Photomatix HDR, which automatically aligns them and combines the multiple shots (some people take as many as 12 of single scene) into a single HDR file or “HDR negative”.

This file looks aweful on your monitor and would print badly too, because nether can deal with the huge 32 bit colour depth (a JPG file is 8 bit) of the HDR image. Enter the “tone mapping” tool in Photomatix. Remember our HDR negative contains all the information from 5 shots at different exposures. Each shot will contain optimal infomation about a particular part of the subject. The tone mapping tool allows me to adjust how that information is combined and get the best Low Dynamic Range (LDR) image for screen or print.

Whan I’ve finished moving the 20 or so sliders and controls and over-worked my computer’s cooling system (processing 32 bit images takes a lot of oomph!), I click the button for Photomatix to produce the finished image which I can then save in PSD, TIFF or JPG format.

My aim with HDR is to create an image as close as possible to what I saw when taking the photo. Many people create “super realistic” photos with grossly exaggerated colours and effects. I personally don’t like them, but then I don’t like figs, beef or margarine, but somebody must….

The images below are 1,500 pixels wide. Too see them full size, click on them thumbnail, then click “full size” at the bottom. Your browser might then shrink the pic to fit your screen, so you may need to do another click to overcome this.

I’ll be adding more to this collection as I create them, so come back again!

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I get increasingly dissatisfied with the mainstream TV and Radio in the UK. So much of the coverage now is personality driven rather than issue driven, and there is so little in depth coverage of foreign news stories. Repressive regimes such as Burma’s get scant coverage until a humanitarian disaster such as the Myanmar cyclone forces the country into the media spotlight.

• The BBC constantly runs scared of sticking its neck out in case it gets chopped off as it did over the Iraq “Dodgy Dossier” - even though all the facts it reported subsequently turned out to be true. Even News 24 is parochial and has at least one eye on entertainment rather than information.
• All TV paid for by advertising is constantly looking over its shoulder to check that the advertisers approve and is concerned primarily with audience figures. Keep it light and happy seems to be the guiding principle here.
• American stations like ABC, CNN and Fox - the “mainstream media” in the States - are under the thumbs of the advertisers and the the Government. Witness the uncritical acceptance of US Government Propaganda on WMD in the run up to the attack on Iraq. They have failed again to cover real issues in the Presidential race, focussing instead on out of context quotes from controversial associates of Democratic candidates, rather than substantive issues such poverty, healthcare and foreign policy.

How refreshing it has been to find the Real News Network run by “Independent World Television”. Funded entirely by donations it has informative items running for up to 10 minutes. Articles can either be streamed or downloaded as podcasts. I download the podcasts onto my laptop as they become available from the afternoon onwards GMT and watch them in Miro later in the day when the soaps take over the nation.

Here’s a an interview with Paul Jay, the founder of The Real News about what e is trying to achieve.

Break free of the mainstream media and get informed!

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I grew up in Leicestershire and still visit friends and relatives there. Here are a few photos of the village of Queniborough, to the north east of Leicester city on the road to Melton Mowbray.

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Like many other HSBC bank customers, I get phoned periodically from 0800 7838422 and sweet-talked by someone in HSBC telesales. Of course they won’t come straight out with it and say “I’m from telesales and I’m phoning to try and flog you an HSBC financial product”. No, they say they are phoning to see if you are happy with the HSBC service - just a courtesy call - very chatty and friendly, but you know the way it’s going. They are going to offer you something. Personal loan, insurance, the usual “financial products” stuff. I imagine they have your bank account details on one side of their screen and a list of HSBC products and services on the other. The job of this friendly caller is to find an opportunity, close a sale and secure a bonus.

Well I can be very chatty and friendly too if you catch me at the right phase of the moon. I got into a very interesting conversation a few months ago with a Scottish lad who was about to go on holiday to some exotic Island in the Caribbean. What he didn’t realize was that I was up for some sport, so the tasty bonus he was expecting to take with him as a result of his half hour endeavours selling me a short term personal loan to cover my overdraft was never going to materialize. I had no intention of signing the paper documents to confirm the deal a couple of days later. I just wanted to see what the real rate of interest would be after they added an arrangement fee plus loan protection insurance, and compare it with the interest I was already paying on my overdraft. When the contract arrived I did the sums. The real rate of interest (including the extras) on the personal loan I was being offered was 50% higher than on the overdraft it was meant to replace.

HSBC like other banks are probably not allowed to “cold call” non-customers, so they call their own customers and pretend to be customer services. Sell the suckers another product, no matter how inappropriate and expensive it might be. Providing the new product has one identifiable advantage, the three disadvantages are ignored.

I have no intention of moving to another bank as a result of my annoyance as I have a fantastic branch manager and I love HSBC’s Internet Banking. Also HSBC aren’t unique in this practice, so I’d probably be simply changing one call centre for another. I just wish they would stop wasting their time on me, because nowadays I never answer when the 0800 7838422 number appears on caller display, and when the answer phone cuts in, they never leave a message.

ABC - Always Be Closing …

I can only speculate on how these telesales operatives are trained and motivated. David Mamet had some experience and wrote it into his play “Glengarry Glen Ross” later made into a brilliant film. Here’s a little pep-talk from super real-estate salesman Alec Baldwin to the struggling sales staff - Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin and Ed Harris - with Kevin Spacey the office manager hanging around in the background. For “real-estate” simply substitute “financial product” and kiss your money goodbye.

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1. The Shires Shopping Mall doesn’t allow cameras. Well that’s what the security guard told me after I was spotted trying to photograph the interior of the building.

No cameras allowed? Weren’t we standing in a shopping mall bristling with CCTV cameras, surrounded by shoppers with mobile phone cameras? I could only conclude this was a vain attempt by their marketing department to prevent the wider world from viewing the stark awfulness of this cloistered hanger. Almost as a act of desperation, a large banner outside the building shouts “Welcome to the Shires“, as if we need to be reminded that they are pleased to see us.

The sterile interior of the Shires

A few yards across the road from the Shires, and a pleasant contrast in every respect, is Leicester Market, the largest covered market in Europe. Full of colour and life. So that’s my second interesting fact…

2. Leicester Market is fantastic - 300 stalls selling vegetables, fish, meat, clothing and cloth. The quality is excellent and the prices reasonable. Three mangoes for £1 - amazing! Apparently the market has been on the same site for 700 years.

My third interesting fact continues this vegetable theme…

3. The best vegetarian Indian food in Leicester can be found at Bobby’s at 154-156 Belgrave Road. Bobby’s had been recommended by my cousin. We arrived for a take-away at 6pm on a Saturday evening when it was very busy. I needed some help ordering so asked the guy behind the counter for advice. He left his post and ushered us to a seating area where he explained the family history of the business, the issue of ‘hotness’ and how Bobby’s focusses on bringing out the natural flavours of the vegetables rather than masking them with fried onion and garlic. He was right. The food was delicious and very reasonably priced. We’ll be back! - www.eatatbobbys.com

4. There is a great Big Issue seller in Market Street. This gentleman allowed me to photograph him. “A good face” one of my family commented when I got home. I thank him and wish him well.

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Yesterday we went on an 11km walk on the Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire just west of Newport. The weather was glorious and I got some nice photos, particularly at the end of the walk at around 5.00pm when the sea mist rolled in to engulf Newport. It moved up the hillside towards the rocky backdrop of Mynydd Carningli, before receding like a slow-motion Tsunami.

The walk began at the Bedd Morris car park 1,000 feet above sea level and descended to the sea at Aberrhigian Bay through a network of ancient drovers tracks called green lanes. Some are sunken and flanked by dry stone walls. Many are gloriously muddy and contain streams! From the pebble beach of Aberrhigian Bay the route went along the cliffs half a mile to Aberfforest and then inland for the long climb back to the car

This 4 hour walk was taken from the book Bluestone Country - the Carningli Walks edited by Brian John [ISBN: 0 9524071 0 8].

Photos © Webs Wonder Design. For usage terms please contact me.

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Update February 14th 2008: The TVCatchup website is offline. For those who never got a chance to try it, bad luck. It was excellent. Clear and simple controls - Easy to understand and use - worked on any platform or browser - didn’t gobble up your bandwidth. So now we simply sit back and wait for the BBC/Microsoft iPlayer to hit the DRM buffers then watch the emergence of something uncannily similar to TVCatchup. It’ll probably be called ‘BBCFinallyCaughtUp.com”

February 9th 2008. As I wrote my item on the shortcomings and annoyances of the BBC iPlayer back in September 2007, already a new service was launching, allowing people to view programmes after they have been broadcast. The difference between TVCatchup.com and the BBC iPlayer is that TVCatchup is cross platform, DRM free, and covers all ‘free to view’ channels, not just the BBC.

TVCatchup.com is a free, TV programme recording website which is exploits a legal provision (The TV companies would say a loophole) in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allowing the recording for private or domestic use of programmes for later viewing.

“The making for private and domestic use of a recording of a broadcast or cable programme solely for the purpose of enabling it to be viewed or listened to at a more convenient time does not infringe any copyright in the broadcast or cable programme or in any work included in it.”

TVCatchup will record programmes on your behalf and allow you to watch them later. You cannot watch them as they are being broadcast.

The site has a clear programme guide and a one click selection of programmes. Users are given 10Gb of storage. Programmes can be watched any number of times and are stored for a maximum of 60 days. The interface and usage are intuitive, the videos of good quality at 640 pixels wide. You will need a 1Mb broadband connection to view programmes without pausing for buffering, but that shouldn’t be a problem for most people. I haven’t found a way of saving the programmes yet, but I’m sure there are some. Maybe someone will let me know of how to do it.

Like Napster, which was closed down by a short sighted music industry which then spent years trying to reproduce the concept, TVCatchup will probably be closed down by the BBC and others, but re-emerge under the control of the TV industry big hitters in the future.

TVCatchup Player Screen

TVCatchup Programme Guide and Selector Screen

TVCatchup Saved Recordings Screen

Other articles on TVCatchup.com

• TVCatchup faces legal battle - Guardian
• Discussion on DigitalSpy.com

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Update 9th March 2008: Truecrypt 5 was released last month. It can now carry out whole disc encryption amongst a host of other enhancements. The BBC reported this week on research from Princetown University showing that the contents of RAM memory (including encryption keys) can be recovered for up to several minutes after the power to a computer is turned off, thus enabling a disc to be decrypted. The implications of this are explained on the Truecrypt website. The important point to note is that in everyday practice, (as opposed to controlled laboratory conditions) this is a very very small risk given that the RAM only retains the information for minutes after the power is off, and providing (on Windows) that Sleep, Hibernation and System Restore are disabled on your laptop, so it cannot be rebooted with data in RAM. A thorough discussion on this topic with the Princetown researchers is also available.

This data retention in RAM memory has been known about for several years, and some commentators claim that the presentation of phenomenon is being over dramatized in order to attract further funding. For example:

“Also, it is slanderous to call this a “flaw in encryption software”. This has nothing to do with disk encryption software in specific, and telling people to “check with the maker of your disk encryption software to find out how to protect yourself” as is done at the end of the video, is sort of like telling people to call Toyota to complain about potholes. It smells like someone needed to prove they’re worthy of their grant, or is fishing for new ones.”

Original Post: Oh dear, another shed load of personal data has been lost by a UK Government institution. First of all in October 2007 it was Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs copying a database with 25 million peoples details onto a CD and sending it by snail-mail from HMRC offices in Gateshead to the National Audit Office in London. It never arrived. The £25,000 reward is peanuts compared to what criminals would pay for the information. Then last week the Royal Navy had a laptop stolen from a car. The laptop contained a database with details of 600,00 forces personnel including passport numbers, National Insurance numbers and bank details. It has now been revealed that two similar laptop thefts have taken place since 2005. The head of the Civil Service has today told Whitehall staff not to remove laptops with sensitive data from their offices. What a shambles!

Continue reading How to have better data security than the UK Government - use TrueCrypt

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