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By John, on January 27th, 2009
It has taken German politicians three years to agree how cars should be taxed such that the tax reflects – at least partially – the amount of damage that their emissions do to the environment. US politicians spent most of the last eight years in denial that the climate could be influenced by humans. And there has been almost no progress on climate change since the Kyoto conference 11 years ago. Apart from a large amount of hot air produced by politicians.
It just isn’t good enough. When you read the interview in this week’s New Scientist with James Lovelock (the person who invented the Gaia theory, that the Earth is a self-regulating system), you’ll see why. Lovelock thinks we haven’t got a hope in hell of checking the damage done to the planet by carbon emissions; with the consequence, that up to 90% of the human population on the Earth will be wiped out by the end of this century. In other words, it is likely the population will drop from the current figure of just under 7 billion, to less than a billion.
By John, on January 11th, 2009
Naomi Klein in yesterday’s Guardian:
It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.
I agree and I have been boycotting Israeli fruit and other products for some time now.
The hypocrisy of a country which has turned the Gaza strip into a massive concentration camp – not my quote, but something Cardinal Martino, the president of the Council for Justice and Peace at the Vatican, said a couple of days ago – but expects sympathy for suffering during the holocaust is stunning. It is time to ignore the sympathy card, that Israel so often plays, and treat them like every other nation: unacceptable behaviour needs castigation.
By John, on January 10th, 2009
I have changed the template used for this site over the last week. And I have decided that I have spent enough of my life fiddling around with all sorts of hacks to fix the appearance of sites I have produced so that they appear correctly in Microsoft’s web browser.
All versions of Internet Explorer prior to version 8 are extraordinarily poorly programmed. They wrongly calculate border widths of elements that make up a typical website and put background images in the wrong place. Web site development is a hobby for me, not a full time job, and because I don’t work every day with tricks needed to make MS IE behave, I end up spending at least half of the total time I need to develop a site fiddling around making Internet Explorer display it correctly:
 Messed up by MS IE
 As things should look
Not any more.
If you use MS IE 6.0 or earlier to view this site, the site header is not displayed correctly, and you will see a message telling you that you are using a older browser and suggesting you install one of a number of browsers that work correctly.
Continue reading Microsoft Internet Explorer
By John, on January 6th, 2009
I must admit I hate exercise. Apart from cycling, perhaps. We have cycled from Munich to the Czech border and back in two weeks a few years ago. But where we live now is at the top of a 12 km long uphill climb of about 500 meters and when we first moved here, we soon realized that a bike ride that ends with a long haul up a steep hill just isn’t fun, so we don’t actually go for many rides these days either.
However, this article in today’s Independent makes me think I should follow my sister’s example (she joined a sports club and works out pretty well every day, with a personal trainer). Here a sample from the article:
“Challenging exercise is the closest thing to an anti-ageing pill for everyone, not just for athletes and health nuts,” say the celebrity trainers Tim Bean and Anne Lang, authors of Turn Back Your Age Clock (Hamlyn, £12.99), to be published this month.
The emphasis here is on “challenging” – a stroll in the park won’t do. You have to work your muscles to the limit, exercising harder and faster to make your body perspire and your heart race, within an aerobic training zone that’s between 60 and 80 per cent of your maximum heart rate (your age subtracted from 220)…
Aggh… sounds quite unpleasant. But unfortunately most things that are good for you are.
They suggest four ways to exercise – jogging, power walking, skipping and bicycling. The first two are definitely out as long as the temperature here remains at -10°C and lower. This morning we had between -11° and -13° depending on which thermometer you chose to believe. But skipping might be a way to get started and at a comfortable temperature, indoors.
By John, on December 31st, 2008
Today I finally got around to correcting the programming for our outside lights, which I screwed up when we switched from summer time several weeks ago. The programming for the lights and for the outside blinds is performed by complicated sequences of button-pushes on the above controllers. The sequences are so complicated, and the handbooks so poorly written, that we usually manage to screw up the programming for at least one of the units each year. They drive me mad.
So the next time we move, there is one “must”. We are going to have lights and blinds controlled by a home automation (HA) unit which can be programmed using a personal computer using either a USB interface, or better, via a WLAN connection. At least, I hope so.
Continue reading Ideas around the home
By John, on December 15th, 2008
 Unsuccessful print using Adobe Acrobat Reader
The German Post and their parcel service, DHL, have a great internet service – you can print your own stamps online ( Just don’t try to use the internet address printed on the stamps – it doesn’t exist! It seems to have been a temporary glitch – the address is online now) or print out pre-paid address labels for packages. Both services produce PDF documents which you can print out at home.
Unfortunately, neither service works properly with Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Reader on the Mac. Which is strange, given that Adobe is the mother of the PDF format. The stamps get printed with a red background – see the example on the left in the photo above. How it should look is shown on the right of the same picture.
The results of printing an address label are even worse- the whole label is printed in mirror writing. The first time that happened, I scanned the unfortunate label and flipped it in Photoshop to get it the right way round. I didn’t want to waste the postage.
I have found in the mean time, that only Adobe’s products have these problems. If I open the files with, for example, Skim (freeware), everything works just fine!
By John, on December 3rd, 2008
An interesting article in the New York Times last week, about the complete and on-going irresponsibility of retail banks and credit card companies in the USA. If you’ve been reading the financial press for the last month or two, you’ll have read that after the mortgage crisis, we are going to have the credit card crisis. Credit card debt has been bundled and sold on in much the same way as mortgages were.
The article explains what is still going wrong, here’s a sample:
I recently had a client apply for a credit card. She is a homemaker, with no personal income. The house she lives in is in her husband’s name. She would have asked for a $3,000 credit line, just to pay miscellaneous expenses and to establish some credit on her own. So the computer is told that her household income is $150,000; her mortgage/rent payment is zero. The fact is that her husband’s mortgage payment is $7,000 a month (which he got with a no income verification loan). She had a good credit score, but limited credit since she has only lived in this country for the last three years.
The system gave her an approval for a $26,000 line of credit!
By John, on November 27th, 2008
Getty Images was the company which cost us over 870 Euro, despite our engaging an intellectual property lawyer to defend ourselves, for using a 180 x 90 pixel image on another of our web sites.
I can confirm that our experience with Getty was in line with the cases described in today’s Guardian, which cites several cases where thousands of pounds were demanded for images Getty claimed were theirs. They give examples of Getty sending in debt collectors to enforce their demands and Getty making completely unrealistic valuations in the first place. In our case the original demand was for over 1770 Euro – for an image 180 x 90 pixels used on a web site which gets a few tens or hundreds of hits per month!
Getty Images is not an easy company to deal with. In our case, the correspondence was in German, written from a London address, posted in the USA and the bank account we were supposed to send the money to was in Ireland. Why they chose to write in German when the web site was completely in English? I imagine they hoped that we wouldn’t fully understand the letter, which was full of legal terms, and that that would increase the anxiety level for us.
According to the Guardian, the company to contact, if Getty Images hassle you is LimeOne – something we didn’t know at the time.
By John, on November 22nd, 2008
The US National Intelligence Council (NIC) published a report this week assessing how the relationship between the USA and other parts of the World will probably develop by 2025. The report is written every four years for the incoming government and is thus relatively easy non-technical reading.
It predicts that US influence will wane and that India and China will exert more influence on world politics.
The EU is likely to remain hobbled by the conflicting power politics played out between the various member nations. I find this rather sad. Having lived about 28 years in Britain and the same number in Germany, I can’t say I feel either “British” or “German” and we don’t plan to retire to either country when the time comes; but I do feel “European” and we certainly plan to retire within Europe.
I would like to see the European national governments work towards a federal European government which takes political and military decisions on behalf of all member nations. But that clearly won’t happen any time soon. Just look at how Germany has tried to push purely national policies for supporting the financial institutions in the last few weeks. Clearly, other than in the USA, where it is acceptable to provide federal support to specific states, there is no willingness to let German money be used to support Italian or French banks. I don’t see the mindset changing as long as the popular press – papers like the Sun or the Daily Mail in the UK, Bild in Germany – regularly whip up jingoism as a way of increasing their circulation.
If you would like to read the whole (120 page) NIC report, and look in more detail at how our world is likely to develop, the BBC provides a link to the report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (pdf, 33 MB).
Remember, however, the US intelligence services have in the past made some pretty spectacular blunders – things may develop completely differently!
By John, on November 22nd, 2008
I haven’t posted for more than a couple of weeks. That’s mainly because there’s been a lot going on.
Not that that that is actually positive: I’ve had a kidney stone which has been painful enough to keep me in off work for a few days; I also had a tooth root treatment several weeks ago, which has chosen to flare up again over the last couple of days and has also been painful. And (all “good” things come in threes, don’t they?) my mother died unexpectedly on 10th November.
Tomorrow we are making a flying visit to the UK for her funeral on Monday and then I expect normal service might resume again if my kidney and tooth behave themselves  . I am, however, thinking that I might shift the focus of the blog a little then. Less linking to trivia that you can find for yourselves and more focus on the things that interest me – photography, Mac OS X, and world affairs. We shall see.
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