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I have had a suspiciously good run with bureaucracy recently.

• First there was my passport. I needed a passport that didn't have Israeli stamps, and the British consulate told me I had to mail it to Paris and wait four weeks. The local (Italian) police station handed me a new passport in two hours.

• Then there was American Express. I have an Alitalia Gold AmEx, but it costs money each year, and since I'm not allowed to put business expenses on it any more, the miles aren't enough attraction. I called AmEx up to cancel the card, but they asked whether I would consider keeping it if they waived the fee for a year.

• Then there was the Kenyan embassy. Information on the internet was confusing me as to whether I needed a visa beforehand or whether I could buy one in the airport upon arrival, like in Turkey. Unable to fathom the embassy's voicemail tree, I sent them an e-mail, in the full assumption that this would be the last I would hear of them. Instead, not two hours later a very nice lady called me on my mobile (the number's in my sigblock) to confirm that I could buy a visa in the airport and to wish me a very pleasant trip.

• Finally, needing various vaccinations for my Kenya trip, I called up on Friday afternoon and got an appointment on Saturday morning. Okay, I did get to hang out for an hour in the waiting room, an hour that I spent playing Grand Theft Auto and reading ARC on my iPhone, but then I got my three jabs and was sent on my way.

Now I'm scared. Something bad is sure to happen to balance out my bureaucracy karma.

Eels - The other shoe

I love my Beemer. Sure, it's only a 320d, so given the choice (and funds) I'd far prefer something with an M in the name. For instance I don't understand why my wife rolls her eyes when I point out the many ways in which the E60 M5 Touring is the perfect family car.

See? Perfect.

However, this is a company car, so I'm pretty lucky that it's not a misery-spec Fiat Stilo or some other sin against driving. It has sat-nav, Bluetooth, steering wheel controls, and so on. Being an E90 means it's starting to be a little bit dated in the details, e.g. the Bluetooth is not 2.1, so no music streaming. On the other hand there's an aux-in jack in the arm-rest, so it's not as if I have wires trailing everywhere.

The great advantage of a company car is of course that anything that goes wrong with it is Somebody Else's Problem. Even my accident, annoying though it was, didn't cost me a penny. However, the disadvantage is that the user doesn't get much input; in my case, the options were saloon or wagon, in any of three or four colours. Mine is a shark-skin grey which I think looks great, especially when a little dust gives it a matte look.

When I received the car I was therefore surprised to find that it was an automatic, as that was most definitely not a standard option. After checking the VIN, my fleet manager and I ascertained that it was the right car, just with the wrong spec, but BMW said I could keep it anyway. I was skeptical of the automatic, never having had good experiences with slush-boxes in the past, but off I trundled.

Misery on a stick

Once I had avoided killing myself or causing an accident by forgetting that an automatic transmission in D will go as soon as the driver takes his foot off the brake, without needing active application of the throttle, I got quite used to it, especially trickling through traffic on the Milan ring-road. The auto-box also made a good fist of snow on the roads in Milan, even on summer tyres (I hadn't yet had time to change them). Just roll s l o w l y off the brakes, don't touch the throttle, and it goes just fine.

The one thing that still really annoys me is the way it steadfastly fails to select the right gear. Left to its own devices, it tries to keep revs as low as it possibly can, which on a diesel is very low indeed. This is not ideal going into roundabouts or sharp corners, as it feels very lumbering and understeery without some revs to keep things under control. In frustration, you might be tempted to switch the transmission to DS, a sportier mode that holds gears for longer and down-shifts more readily. This does OK into the roundabout, but unless you're in a boy-racer mood, the way it then proceeds to hold second gear all the way to the next traffic light can get annoying.

So in the end you resort to swapping gears yourself, but then what's the point of an automatic transmission - apart from giving your left foot a break, that is? You still have to think about which gear you want to be in, and you still have to take your hand off the steering wheel to get into that gear, but now there's also an annoying... pause... before the gear actually engages, not to mention those fun times when you switch from D to DS and then into manual, resulting in all your passengers kangarooing into the air and swearing at you because you got three downshifts when you only wanted one.

Surprise!

This is a violation of the principle of least astonishment. This is a notion of UX (User eXperience) that basically states that the results of an action should match the user's reasonable expectations. It came to my attention as part of the iPhone mute switch brouhaha, but it makes a lot of instinctive sense. If I flub a gearshift in my manual car, because I didn't rev-match or misjudged the clutch's bite point, I have only myself to blame, except in particularly egregious cases. If on the other hand the auto transmission does something "helpful" resulting in an unexpected outcome, I become very annoyed with the automation.

To cut a long story short, my next car will have a proper manual again, unless there's a very good reason why - for instance, that I have finally talked SWMBO into letting me get an RS6 Avant or an M5 Touring…

Siccome non mi riesce di commentare sul sito originale, riporto qui un post interessante con i miei commenti.

Uno dei trend visti nell’ultimo anno (ma in realtà iniziato qualche anno fa) è la crescita dell’ecosistema legato alla virtualizzazione (ossia tutti quei prodotti e vendor complementari ai prodotti di virtualizzazione veri e propri) al di fuori dei confini nei quali sono storiacamente nati: molti dei partner storici di VMware ora hanno esteso le loro soluzioni anche ad altri hypervisor, e nuovi prodotti sono nati specifici per gestire ambienti virtuali complessi o quanto meno eterogeni. Una bella definizione a questo fenomeno è stata data da VKernel nel suo post: "Hypervisor Agnosticism
".

Bisogna però specificare che non stiamo parlando di ottenre l’interoperabilità tra i vari tool di virtualizzazione, ma semplicemente l’utilizzo di tool comuni per alcuni particolari compiti, tipicamente la gestione, il monitoraggio e la protezione dei dati.

Esattamente d'accordo: il supporto multi-hypervisor non significa necessariamente piena interoperabilità, ma semplicemente un livello di astrazione che permette di portare a termine un compito senza dover scendere nel dettaglio di ciascuna tecnologia.

L'interoperabilità peraltro richiederebbe accordi fra concorrenti in un mercato che è ancora in rapida evoluzione, e rischierebbe così di rallentare o limitare la sana concorrenza.

Ci si potrebbe chiedere se ha senso e se può portare qualche beneficio? Probabilmente per il singolo cliente no… che motivo potrebbe avere per introdurre nuovi costi legati all’ambiente eterogeneo (benché alcuni strumenti possono essere comuni, il formato delle VM, la loro mobilità, le competenze richieste, buona parte delle attività di amministrazione, … saranno diverse per ogni prodotto di virtualizzazione), costo per realtà medio-piccole non sarebbe facilmente giustificabile.

Su quest'altro punto però sono meno d'accordo: mentre per le piccole aziende è vero che ha senso concentrare le energie su un'unica piattaforma, già per le medie può succedere ad esempio che partano due progetti di virtualizzazione in parallelo, uno nel team Windows ed uno nel team Linux o Unix. Invece di obbligare tutti a convergere su un'unica piattaforma, può invece aver senso continuare ad usare ciascuna piattaforma per i propri punti di forza ed implementare un livello di astrazione che permetta la gestione e la visibilità unificata su tutte le diverse piattaforme.

C'è poi la dimensione dell'evoluzione da considerare. Se io oggi decido di concentrare tutte le mie energie sulla piattaforma A, ma domani mi fondo con, compro, o vengo comprato da una società che invece ha scelto la piattaforma B, potrei trovarmi in difficoltà. La fusione di sistemi e processi IT in questi casi è già abbastanza complessa senza mettere in campo anche una migrazione di piattaforma, per cui sarebbe utile avere a disposizione una piattaforma di astrazione che mi permetta di gestire nell'immediato le mie esigenze business e prendere con calma la decisione di migrare o meno le piattaforme di virtualizzazione.

Esiste infine anche la dimensione economica: se mi sono focalizzato su una sola piattaforma, ed improvvisamente il fornitore raddoppia i prezzi, non ho molte alternative. Se invece ho già in casa il materiale e le competenze su un'altra piattaforma, la migrazione è, se non indolore, comunque molto più semplice.

Yay, I finally got my car back!

If you haven't heard the story already: On the 13th of Dec I was driving home on the Milan ring road. It was rush hour, so stop&go traffic. At a certain point traffic stopped again, I stopped, and so did the cars behind me. Then I saw a car in my rear-view mirror, skidding along between the lanes of traffic and not managing to stop. Somehow he missed several cars, but hit me hard enough to bounce me into the car in front. Nothing serious – no airbags – but all the crumple zones, well, crumpled.

This is where it gets weird: I checked on the car I had hit first, made sure they were OK, then while I was talking to the driver we saw the driver of the car that hit me with his two passengers walking towards us. We turned back to his wife, turned back again, and they were gone, leaving their running car abandoned in the middle of the Milan ring-road!

We naturally assumed the car was stolen and called the police, but when they arrived and ran the numbers it turned out to belong to a gypsy. These guys register hundreds of cars – quite literally; the policeman told me they found one guy with four hundred cars in his name! - and then anyone in the tribe can drive them. The guy who hit me may have been illegal, under age, without a licence, wanted for something else, drunk, high, or any or all of the above, so he ran off, but the car itself was legal and even insured.

It just meant a cold couple of hours going through police formalities at the roadside, then getting the car towed and picking up a rental (company car FTW!). What I was not expecting was for the repair process to drag out so long. While waiting for my own car, and driving various rentals, I have developed a Borat-esque attitude to gypsies…

As I said on Twitter:

After six weeks of rentals, my BMW 320d is going to feel like a Bugatti Zonda FFX Sport. Biturbo. Will miss the constant shift-up light tho!

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) January 24, 2012

That was actually a false alarm, as it turned out to be close to seven weeks. However, the rest of that prediction was spot-on. I got in my Beemer, adjusted the seat how I like it (as low as it goes) and already it felt like being in a Formula 1 car. I pootled along icy back-streets to the ring-road, and half-throttle in the merge lane felt like Mach 1. I have to admit I was grinning ear to ear with the joy of getting my own car back!

Fortunately I was keeping an eye on my speed, as the garage appeared to have reset some of the electronics, including my audible speed warning which goes off at 110% of the motorway limit (about right, given the Beemer's "optimistic" tach). I didn't really exercise the suspension or tyres, as I was on calls for most of the drive back, but that's going to be a job for the next time I'm driving back from a customer visit with no particular place to be in a hurry.

The weeks of rentals do give me an opportunity to review the two cars I had as successive replacements. Here are reviews of the Ford Fiestaand the Hyundai ix20.

Spoiler: neither of them can hold a candle to the BMW 320d.

The Hyundai ix20. Wow. Where to begin?

This was my supposed "upgrade" once it became clear that the repairs to my Beemer would be taking longer than anticipated. Actually, I'd have preferred to keep the Fiesta since while the Hyundai was from a higher rental category and with a larger engine capacity, being a diesel engine in a much heavier car meant that the difference was if anything in the Fiesta's favour.

The looks were another defeat for the Korean newcomer, as they were initially generic but inoffensive, but rapidly revealed the touch of the bean-counters. Views were obstructed and dirt gathered disproportionately in door handles. Inside it was the same story: the buckle for the middle rear seat belt hung from the ceiling right in the middle of the rear-view mirror's field of view. All the surfaces were nasty to the touch, and despite this car having only twenty-five thousand kilometers on it, the steering-wheel coating had rubbed off in several places. Even superficially nice touches turned sour; for instance, I was pleasantly surprised to see a Volkswagen-esque blue glow from the instruments, but upon looking closer, found the blue to be simply painted on…

I compared this car to an Aiwa stereo, as while most of the functions were there, including Bluetooth and voice controls, they were all slap-dash, low-quality and annoying. NVH was abysmal, power was non-existent, and the radio did this weird thing where tuning into a pre-programmed station would give a few seconds of static which gradually faded into the actual radio station.

The worst aspect of this car was the handling. It takes a lot to scare me behind the wheel, but the first time I took a corner at speed in this car I was terrified. I had absolutely no idea what the front wheels were doing. This wasn't just Fiat-style lightness, this was lightness combined with a total absence of feel. More time with the car did not lead me to tune in to its handling, more the opposite. Driving in the snow was the worst, as I could only tell when the car had lost traction or was under-steering by looking out the window.

Verdict: it's better than no car at all, and if you don't care at all about cars, it's reasonably comfortable and well-equipped. However, if you care even a little, this is one to avoid. If it's given to you as a rental, haggle, bribe, seduce, or if all else fails, pay for an upgrade.

The Fiesta was the car I picked up on the day of my accident. Edging into my adrenaline hangover, I was glad to have any car, even a small and under-powered one, to replace my poor Beemer. However I have to admit that I warmed to the little Fiesta pretty quickly. Even in rental-spec it had nice features like steering-wheel-mounted controls for the radio, the engine was zippy and loved to rev, and with wheels at the four corners it cornered like a go-cart. Up at motorway speed the engine revved pretty high, but was never obtrusive, unlike the Fiat Punto I got last time I had a loaner. It did lack a sixth gear, which would have helped a lot with the motorway cruise.

In town the steering was precise, and while it could have given more feedback, I was never in any doubt about what the front wheels were doing. This is another area where the Fiesta was unlike the Punto, or indeed any recent Fiat. The clutch was light and responsive, and as long as I kept the revs above 2500 rpm there was plenty of torque available to take advantage of short-lived gaps in traffic. The engine really did like to rev, but somebody at Ford had decided to fit a "shift-up" light and program it to come on just shy of 2000rpm, or about 500rpm before the power band starts. I, of course, took this as a challenge to drive absolutely everywhere with the light blazing, including while parking. Yes, I am actually twelve years old.

The cabin was basic but well laid out, with plenty of storage, all the controls within easy reach, and radio controls right on the steering wheel. This last is something I believe should be standard, as these are some of the most frequently used controls in a typical drive. For many drivers in fact the radio controls are used more often than indicators (a pet peeve of mine).

I even succeeded in getting the tail to step out while late-braking on a wet roundabout, and the slide just felt so right. In true Troy Queef style, I simply catch it with a dab of oppo and I’m away.

The Ford Fiesta: approved.

I finally ditched my BlackBerry in December, so this is the one-month-in review.

Since it's only a month in, it may well be the case that I've missed something. I just read an article about 40 iPhone features, and I found several I did not know, despite having owned both an iPod Touch and an iPad since before they came out in Europe.

Things I miss from the BlackBerry

• E-mail tagging. iOS has a flag which you can set, but that's not really granular enough. I end up just using "mark as unread" and then tagging things with Outlook.

• Reply to calendar events. If some dolt has left off the non-US access number for his conference call, e-mailing him to ask is made that much more frustrating.

• That red LED. Well, if I'm honest I only miss it some of the time, but I do wish the lock screen had a count of unread e-mails.

Things I don’t miss from the BlackBerry

• The memory leaks. I had to do a full reboot about once a week as the whole thing would just grind to a halt. This was with careful management of running applications, too.

• The random freezes and reboots. I thought I just had a lemon, but no - almost all my colleagues with recent BlackBerries have similar stories. It wasn't a problem with several previous models of BlackBerry handsets, but now it's anecdotally widespread.

• The battery life, or lack thereof. Ok, this was due to age, but that's definitely one of the good things about getting a new device.

• The physical keyboard. iOS predictive text is uncanny, although it does occasionally get distracted. Putting the iPhone in landscape mode makes the keys plenty big enough for short messages, which is all I ever wrote with the BlackBerry as well if I could possibly arrange it. If it's anything long, I get out the iPad or the MacBook. Most of the use cases that people come up with for the physical keyboard are idiotic, like writing e-mails one-handed while driving. That last is obsolete anyway: iOS dictation is amazing, even without considering Siri. It even works in other languages; I tried French, and it worked perfectly first time. For some reason it doesn't support Italian, but this may be pending release of a gesture API for iOS. The only time I curse the soft keyboard is when I'm unlocking the phone. Corporate IT mandates a secure password, which means 8+chars with a mix of case and alphanumerics. This is annoying to type in a hurry, and I wish there were a fingerprint, iris, voiceprint, or anything recognition option instead.

So that's it. I love my iPhone to bits, while I hated the BlackBerry by the end of our time together. It's also perfectly acceptable as a work device, with filtering and folders just like the BB has. All my complaints are minor, and the one supposedly killer feature the BlackBerry had left - the physical keyboard - turns out to be a non-issue.

This is a post that has been festering for a while, but no matter how long I let it simmer, it refused to boil down to 140 chars so I could tweet it. The whole reason for this blog is to post thoughts which are too long for Twitter and too not-job-related and/or controversial for my work blog, so here goes.

I get the outrage about SOPA and ACTA and all their little friends. They are enormously big sticks to wave around, and the risk is that when all you have is a big stick, you use it every time, and end up squishing everything in the general vicinity of what you were aiming at.

However.

I was talking to a colleague today, and while I don't know exactly what he makes, it's surely into low six figures (in Euros). We were discussing smart TVs and the relative merits of serving content via DLNA directly to the TV versus using something like an AppleTV. I was making the case for the latter, and his counter-argument was that all the films he downloads can be read directly by his TV as soon as the download completes, while most would require transcoding to work with the AppleTV. I was a bit non-plussed and probed deeper, only to discover that this colleague downloads several movies per week completely illegally.

Now, I'm the first to complain about the ridiculous anti-piracy warnings on DVDs, the region coding, the unskippable trailers and ads, and so on - on content I already paid for, let’s not forget. However, my answer is to rip the DVD first thing and watch it via the AppleTV. The actual disc gets played once or twice to get the special content, and then it goes on the shelf as back-up or to be loaned out to friends.

This seems to me the honest approach, and I'm not saying that (just) because I make my living off for-pay software.

I do the same sort of thing with audio CDs, but there it's pure self-interest. Let's take an example from my wish list. The CD of "Bloody Kisses" by Type O Negative is currently GBP3.99, versus GBP6.99 for the MP3 download of the album. Plus this way I get a backup copy, the cover art and liner notes, and it adds to the wall of CDs which share responsibility with books for hiding the walls in my house. MP3s and e-books aren't good for furnishing.

When I mentioned this approach to my colleague he, and others in the room, called me a chump. Why would I spend money on something I can get so easily for free?

Er, because it's stealing
?

If this is the attitude among people who cannot make even a pretence of not being able to afford the content, it makes me sympathize with the MPAA and their ilk. If I were suddenly to sprout musical ability, get signed and release an album, I would expect to be paid for it, and consider people downloading it to be stealing food from my table.

We can have the argument about the percentage of profits that goes to record companies as opposed to artists another time.

Also the argument about the value-for-money of most mainstream artists.

Also about obsolete business models - buggy-whips and gas lanterns.

The point remains: these works were created for pay, they were put on sale for money, and yet large swathes of the population, even among people affluent enough to be easily able to pay, consider it perfectly acceptable and unexceptional to pay nothing.

If we as a society are OK with this, we should not be surprised that the owners of that content get a bit hysterical and take a "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude, even when the questions are quite reasonable ones from people who would love to pay for content if only it were re-released. Or available in their region. Or available in a convenient format. Or not encumbered with restrictions on personal and other fair use.

The time to argue about right-to-roam is not when the game-keeper catches you with a haunch of venison in one hand and a leg of swan in the other.