I only realised some time later that I had used different names for the data partition before and after setting up the RAID array. So the iTunes library was full of little grey exclamation marks, indicating the track can no longer be found. If you double click on the track, iTunes will allow you to navigate to the new location of the music and will re-link the meta data in iTunes to the file containing the track. But with over 1000 albums and a lot of podcasts, that was not practicable:

The easiest way to fix the problem, that I am aware of, is to export the complete library as it is to your desktop.

How to export your library

How to import the edited XML library file

I started a headless installation from a second Mac. To do this, install the Server Admin application from the Admin Tools disk on the Mac you will be using to control the server from, and insert the OS X Server disk in the DVD drive of the server-to-be. The Server Admin tool will find your other Mac and ask for a serial number. Apple’s documentation says to enter the first eight characters of the server hardware serial number, which on an Apple X-Serve is on a label on the server body.

In the case of the Mac mini, there is no label, but if you can display the serial number using the “About This Mac/More Info” menu point under the Apple logo in the main menu. See the screen shot below.

Showing the serial number of the Mac mini

If you use the same password for multiple sites, you have a problem if one of the sites is compromised – your ID these days is often your email address and if the password is also the same, there is a real chance that the bad guys could use the compromised information to impersonate you on other sites.

The suggestion is quite neat and worth thinking about if you don’t currently use different passwords on each site.

It’s all down to the logic of economics, according to Tim Harford, or as he calls it The Logic of Life. I discovered Tim Harford when I picked up his first book (The Undercover Economist), in Spain a couple of years ago – it looked interesting, and I started reading it in Spanish, but I got frustrated at the number of words I had to look up, and bought it again and finished it in English.

He is an economist who believes much seemingly irrational behaviour is actually completely logical if you think about it. Which is what both his books illustrate.

He’s got a knack if explaining complex ideas with clear, simple examples, and both books are great fun to read and pick up an understanding of how economic pressures affect everyday life. Both books are a good read, the first one explains the basics of economic theory; the second one looks at why seemingly irrational behaviour is to be expected, and explains some common phenomena in terms of economic logic. You don’t need to read them in the order he wrote them, and you don’t need any maths either.

1. Packstation

If you work during the week, which let’s face it many of us have to, it can be quite a pain getting goods that you have bought on the internet delivered at a time when you are in.

You might end up having to wait until the weekend to pick up a parcel, after the postman or courier tried to deliver during the day, and then left a note saying the parcel is at the depot. DHL (a subsidiary of the German Post) offers a free service called Packstation which allows you to have your parcels sent to an automated unit from which you can collect parcels and also send parcels – 24×7. You get an electronic card like a credit card, and a secret number and use these to collect or send your post. Sending parcels via a Packstation is cheaper then if you take it to the Post Office.

It’s a win-win service. Customers can collect and send parcels when they want, and because only DHL and the Post can put deliveries into the Packstation, it means these customers favour vendors who deliver by DHL / Post, thus securing them more business. And it saves them delivering to each customer individually, so saves money too. Strange, that most (all?) other countries don’t have similar services.

2. Printing you own stamps and address labels

I know that some other postal systems also offer a similar service, but in Germany it has been available for several years. Here it is called Internetmarke (“Internet Stamp”) and again it is offered by DHL and the Post.

This service allows customers to print stamps (they can choose a logo or image to be printed on the stamp) and package labels on-line on their own labels. They pay using several different systems, including PayPal. It means you always have a stamp with the right value at home, even if you are sending something to an unusual destination or at a non-standard tariff.

3. Postident

Postident is a service which allows you to have your identity validated at a post office.

Suppose you want to open an internet bank account. The usual process in Germany is to send of the application via the internet. A few days later, you will receive a postident form from the bank with a request to take it to the post office to have your ID verified. You take your passport or ID card, and the form and they check your documentation, fill in the details on the form and return it at the bank’s cost. This is a lot more convenient than getting copies of your passport certified by a notary or sending off recent copies of several utility bills to prove who you are (which is the usual system in the UK, for instance).

As far as I know, this service hasn’t been copied anywhere else.

Both blogs use Wordpress, which makes changing the template that defines the appearance of the blog very easy, while maintaining a very high level of flexibility to make individual changes.

One template which has become quite widely used is the thematic template, developed by Ian Stewart. This can either be used directly, which is what I did for this blog (developing some visual ideas from the Bible Scholar theme), or you can use templates which build on the thematic template itself. I used the Atahualpa theme from BytesForAll as the starting point. This theme is so customisable that you can change the appearance extensively without having to know hardly any CSS. If you compare Ruth’s blogs with the standard appearance of Atahualpa, you can see how much the appearance can be changed.

1. The UK is likely to run out of soil in the next 60 years. Other countries are similarly affected:

An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land “moderately or severely eroded”…

2. The world production of phosphorous probably peaked in the late 1980’s (phosphorous is used to make fertiliser):

According to a study by Patrick Dery peak phosphorus occurred in the US in 1988 and the rest of the world in 1989. Others think we’re still 30 years away from the peak, but it doesn’t matter who’s right. Either way, unless we change what we’re doing now, we will have depleted our supply of the central building block of life within a few hundred years of discovering it, and we do not know how to make more.

Both articles are interesting reading and are quite short. Better not to think about oil or water either.

From our own recent experience:

• A subsidiary of a British bank – one of the national brands – can’t cope with a German address – the postcode always gets printed on a separate line before the town (it should be on the same line as the town, preceding the town name). Very strange, as in the UK it would be printed after the town on it’s own line.
• A large Spanish bank has even larger problems, they insist on prefixing the street name with a choice of Spanish words meaning “street”, “avenue” etc. Their IT systems don’t give either their own staff or online-banking customers the possibility of setting the value to blank; they also insist on inserting a comma before the house number. So you end up getting mail addressed to Calle Hauptstrasse, 14 or what ever. They also put the postcode in the wrong line and insist on inserting a decimal point between characters 2 and 3 of the code. The result in Germany is that the post gets returned to the bank without being delivered.

It’s enough to make you tear your hair out. We’re used to American companies not being able to cope with foreign addresses, but Europe is full of little nations, so you’d think that European companies would have had plenty of practice with different address formats.

The meeting went very well – we liked his ideas (we had previously sent him an 8-page document listing the main requirements for the house) and his price was in line with the local guidelines for architect’s fees.

The only “problem” we have, is that he is convinced that we are going to need bars on all the windows. For terrace doors etc. we can use folding arrangements, where they fold against the wall on each side of the doors when we are at home, but he wants to put fixed bars on all the smaller windows.

He’s undoubtedly correct, as most Spanish houses do have bars, and if you are the only one without, it is a bit of an invitation to the local thieves. And you can’t be running around closing bars on every window before you go out each time. On the other hand, we don’t really want to look out into the garden through iron bars. We did suggest getting bars fitted which retract into a cavity in the wall on each side of the window, but he didn’t seem at all convinced that it was a good idea!

Fortunately, Ruth’s brother-in-law is an architect, and we were talking to him about it last night. He suggested using brise soleil. If you search on the internet, you can find some pretty neat images of what you could do: here, here, here or here.

The possibilities for producing something visually attractive but also burglar-proof are huge, and I think we could definitely live with brise soleil in front of the windows! Of course it also has the advantage that it will keep the house cooler in summer too.

View from our lounge this morning

And the same view from upstairs

Since I took these pictures, it has continued to snow, and snow is forecast to continue until at least next Wednesday. One of the neighbours set off in his car at lunch time. Despite having snow tyres, he needed digging out three times before he got to the entrance to our common drive; and he had to turn around 100 meters after that because he couldn’t get up the hill to the main road. I think it could be impossible to get to work next week if the weather forecast is right.

Sudoku for economists shows that countries cannot pursue for long incompatible economic policy frameworks.

The reason why continuing large deficits are not sustainable indefinitely is that for every current account deficit there is an equal net capital flow in the opposite direction. Even if those flows remain constant in size, they imply an ever increasing stock of international asset and liability positions. Today China alone has reserves of over two trillion dollars, and Japan another trillion dollars…

The problem being, as Keynes said at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944:

The process of adjustment is compulsory for the debtor and voluntary for the creditor. If the creditor does not choose to make, or allow, his share of the adjustment, he suffers no inconvenience. For whilst a country’s reserve cannot fall below zero, there is no ceiling which sets an upper limit.

King proposes that the G20 countries, who between them produce 90% of the global GDP, should work closely together to coordinate the reduction of global trade imbalances.

However, looking at the level of trust and support the member states in the EU are currently prepared to give each other, I think that is a non-starter. You have Portugal, Ireland, Italy Greece and Spain (the PIIGS), who need to reduce government debt on the one hand and the comparatively strong economies, in particular Germany, on the other. The citizens of the PIIGS are likely to erupt in civil unrest as the pain of even partially addressing their need to reduce government spending is felt (there has already been unrest in Greece), and the German finance minister has reacted strongly against suggestions that Germany should help these countries. Germany is in a better position, but that is only a relative position. Germany also needs to balance its books and the government sees looming difficulties maintaining the standard of living that its citizens expect. Politicians’ main goal is to get re-elected every 4-5 years, so they have no motivation to upset their voters with tough government saving or giving financial help to other nations.

If close neighbours can’t pull together, the chance that the USA, China, Britain, India, Germany, Turkey and Japan (to name some of the G20 members) will agree to pull together to correct economic imbalance seems remote.

We have just seen how little common ground could be found to deal with the potentially catastrophic changes looming as a result of climate change.

The speech is quite short, worth reading, and contains some thought-provoking comments. But I don’t feel optimistic that his suggestion will be followed. Unfortunately he rates other alternatives that have already been mooted as even less likely to succeed. Not encouraging.

There are 2300 Spanish air traffic controllers. 28 of them earn more than 700,000 Euro per year, 135 earn more than 600,000 Euro and 713 have wages that range between 360,000 and 540,000 Euro. A few make more than 900,000 Euro. According to AENA, the average is 350,000 Euro per year, almost triple the amount that a British controller and twice that of a Frenchman, German or Italian.

I thought working in IT (information technology) was pretty reasonably paid, but there are very few employees in IT earning over 350,000 Euro a year. I would say there are not many salaried IT employees in Germany earning a third of that.

(By the way I am using the European separators for thousand (“,”). It is always a problem knowing which to use, the comma comes automatically to me after 30 years in Germany, and it is also what you see in Google’s automated translation above).