"Thanks Mr Betts". I spent some time putting together an email to my local MP, Clive Betts, a couple of weeks ago. It was prompted by the climate talks in Copenhagen next month. I wanted to voice my concerns that we where going to ignore the future and continue to set vague and distant targets that we can generally ignore. I also suggested that if we spent a little less on building roads and airports or propping up the car industry then we could invest more in real solutions for the worlds growing problems. Suggesting that Britain could once again lead in technology and this time to correct some of the problems we have caused with out previous technologies.

The letter that Mr Betts sent was well considered and seemed to respond to each of my points in turn it. It was not just a circular but a well thought out reply even to the point that he was suggesting local companies that where already doing research into alternative fuels. It is nice to see that he is thinking along the same lines as me and I hope that by adding one more voice he will continue to put the pressure on the government to make the right decisions.

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ is a great service that really allows you to dig into what your MP is doing for you in government. You can track the questions that they are asking and how they have voted on issues. Looking at Mr Betts' record of voting it looks like this ties in with the words in his letter which is nice to see.

I have been having some really good experiences with Bluetooth and my laptop recently. Fist off I connected my phone by just clicking "Add new Device" from the Bluetooth icon and then selected the "Use this as an Internet Connection" option and it was all setup. Clicked on the network Icon and told it it connect using my phone, it asked me for my network and then connected. No fuss. No driver disk and clunky software. Just connected.

Today I paired up my ?SonyEricsson Bluetooth headphones and again just connect the device from the Bluetooth icon. Clicked on my sound preferences and select the headset for my output and then pressed play in my music player and again it "Just Worked" (TM).

I think that this shows that all the hard work is paying off. All those people who have logged bugs and then those that have fixed them all working to create the correct solution to work across the board. Not just one manufacture bashing things with a hammer until their one piece of hardware works. All the hard work getting drivers fixed to work correctly with pulseaudio is really starting to pay off.

Every morning I travel on autopilot from the tram stop to the train on platform two. I make no check but just get on, find a seat, and boot up my laptop. One day they will park the wrong train there and I will take a small trip to Bristol, Reading or Birmingham. Might be a nice day out.

I propose two simple changes to the patent laws that I think are more than justified. The first is that if a company goes bankrupt then all the patents that it holds fall into the public domain. Why should we loose the ability to improve our lives just because of your bad business planning. The second is that if you are not selling a product that uses your patent within five years then it goes into the public domain. If you can't make something of it in five years then let somebody else try.

That's all.

I brought at efergy energy meter from Oxfam and have had it running for a couple of days and it is already starting to annoy Sarah. Next up is to try and grab some of that data and graph it.

I sent an email to efergy asking if they could let me have some more information about the specs of the signal. I got a really good reply from them saying that they could not really give me any more detail than is on the box which is what I expected but the guy there did seem interested in what I was doing and took the time to write out quite a detailed reply so I like the company already.

The spec says that every six seconds the transmitter spits out a signal on the 433Mhz band so my next step is to try to capture that. If I had more than a multimeter then this may be a lot simpler but hey lets give this a go. I am going to get a 433Mhz reciver for a garage remote so that I can get the baseband signal. Assuming they are sending very little data then the bandwidth should be pretty low so I think that if I can get the arduino to capture the output at say 20kb/s then I should be able to examine the signal if it is less than 10Kb/s. It may be simpler to just try and grab this direct from a parallel port.

I have been reading up about BTRFS, or butter-fs as it is pronounced, and having a little play with it on my laptop. It's looking good but is still a little new.

It has been touted as the Linux answer to ZFS which is probably true, it does share a lot of the same features but the implementation is quite different as far as I understand it. It is going to be the filesystem in Linux in a couple of years time and Linus is already using as root on one of his laptops. ( That Linus quote does not really mean that much, only that he wants to try it just like the rest of us and it's only one laptop not the box he develops the kernel on).

At a low level it uses b-trees and copy on write (COW) to store both the metadata about a file and the data in the files. It treats both types of data the same storing them both using the same functions and by doing so allows them to keep the code simpler and the data less fragmented. Reading large files with a lot of metadata on ext3 can be quite a disk seek intensive process but with btrfs this is reduced greatly.

Feature wise it is very interesting. Due to the different way it allocates metadata and file data on the disk it allows them to do some clever things. It supports Raid 0,1 and 10 for both the metatdata and the file data it checksums the data as it is written to disk allowing checks for corruption as data is read a written. Sub sectioning and snapshots. You can snapshot at the directory level allowing you to do things like take a quick snapshot before an upgrade or big set of changes and then roll back if things are not working the way you expect.

You can defrag a file or directory on the fly to keep important parts of the system ticking on nicely although if you have plenty of disk space then fragmentation should not be a problem.

There is a really neat function that allows you to convert a current ext3 filesystem to btrfs in place. It just converts all the metadata to the btrfs format on disk and makes it point to the file data that is already in place. Then it takes a snapshot so that you can go back at any time to the disk as it was before you converted. As this is just a normal snapshot you can also mount it up and examine it online just like any others.

BTRFS has only been in development for a few years so it is still taking shape and I am sure that the functionality will grow and stability improve as time goes on. Currently the website warns not to use it for any data that you want to keep and that is probably good advice.

The only other thing I found is that with 2.6.31-rc5 kernel the btrfs module dies when you try to suspend so it's not for me yet.

I have a SMIME certificate at work to digitally sign my mails. I don't use it all the time as it confuses a lot of people. ( Perhaps I should it should really be a more commonly used tool). I need to use it for an automated services but have forgot a couple of times so I have just added some mutt, my current mail client of choice, setup to do this for me. If you want to setup mutt to autosign mail only for a select group of people but make sure that it is done all the time. Then you can use a send-hook to do it:

send-hook . "set crypt_autosign = no"
send-hook '~t fred@blogs.net |~t jim@jam.com' "set crypt_autosign = yes"

The first hook sets the default to no auto sign, the second search the to address, (~t), for fred or ( "|" ) or jim and sets it to auto sign on that mail.

Send hooks are really cool you can change any setting that you like in the second part and search for any part of the email before setting it.

Most of the solutions offered for reducing our carbon footprint are based on making our current travel more efficient. Why do we not focus more on reducing the need to travel and transport.

There is a movement to reduce the food miles that we use. Trying to source potatoes from the farm round the corner and not Spain just makes sense but our daily commute and trips across counties to see friends seem necessary. Could we concentrate more on the reduction of the need for transport and less on the reduction of the cost?

The daily commute to work is a necessary evil. I have to go to work to be at my desk so that people can see that I am there and come and talk to me. Some work needs to be done on location, if you are building widgets then you have to do it at the factory in the most part although there is a large network of home workers doing piece work. For office work then the main reasons for attending the physical office are to meet up with the people that you work with and so that those casual conversations, that make so much of the office work, can take place. How can we recreate this if people are not in the central office but are at home or in local rented office space? If a village where to have an office space for rent that you could use then the meeting other people and getting out of the home factors could be dealt with and you would not need to commute to work but you would be missing out on the casual contact with your work colleges and not just the people that you share the office with.

Instant messaging, chatrooms, blogs, microblogs and collaborative editing tools could all be employed to make sure that the information is flowing but the problems are larger than just the tools. Getting people to work together over a distance is hard. If you could make a video call to anybody in your office with just two clicks of the mouse and it was a decent quality with no straining to hear or see what is going on could this make it simpler? I am talking about a separate monitor with a full sized face on it and really good quality sound with little or no background noise or delay. Then being able to share a document instantly with the person on the other end and both edit it at the same time.

The virtual tea-break could be a concept. With proper video conference facilities or even over Instant messaging at a push, could there be a dedicated time that is just for banter. It may seem odd at first but if people have an official time put aside for it then it may make things tick over. I like the idea of separate screens for communications, allowing you to have chat's and videos open while still getting on with your day job.

These ideas are not for everybody but if they where offered more how many more people would take them up? What could you and I do to make them happen?

?CrossCountry trains have been in a process of ripping out the cafés from their trains and replacing them with a trolley service. I have tried both the tea and coffee from this new format and can say that they are starting to return to the fine standards of British Rail. I shall not be buying any more cups of brown from them. I have to say that I very rarely see any of the regulars buying any more now either.

I have never liked the idea that cutting costs as a way to improve a business. Companies have a duty to make a profit for their shareholders and assuming that the government subsidy is not going to cover the dividend then customers are seen as a "revenue stream" rather than an asset to be looked after. Spending money on improving the service will mean people are more likely to take the train and so profits will go up. Don't cut services till you have made too unpleasent to attract anybody but fix the problems that you already have. Provide trains with enough seats for everybody and some room to fit your legs in. Fix doors so that they don't close on people as they try to go through. Fix your seat reservation system so that is not always crashing and people don't have to wait at each seat. Make your high speed trains run at high speeds.

Competition should take care of this and send bad companies to the wall and let the good ones thrive but we don't have competition on the railways. With only one company covering many of the routes and the government covering any losses a bad company is making then the only competition comes from stretching out the timetables to make sure all the trains run on time, if a little slow, and make sure that you meet your targets.

Sorry for another boring train rant.

With some relief, I have just reached the last page of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I would love to say that I have finished but there is still a lot I think that I did not take in. Some of the relief comes from the fact that it has taken me quite some time to read this. This slowness is partly due to my reading speed and partly due to the content (There was also a small break of a year or so from reading it) There where pages in the book that I had to read two or three times over and then spend a while digesting while other chapters seemed to be more of a build up to a single point. I will not try to describe the book or review it as I don't think that I am quite up to that. All I will say is that you should read it and ask your own questions about the quality in your life.

The second reason for the relief is to finally get to find out about the three people involved in the book, the narrator and his son. For most of the book I was drawn in wanting to know more about them but only in the final few chapters did it all really start to fit into place. It has been a challenge at times to keep going but I did get very attached to the people and so reading about his philosophical ideas, while quite hard work, gave a very interesting insight.

I am going to ponder on this book for some time. Thanks Martin for lending me this fine read.