Make your own low-fat curds and ricotta

I got this from a recipe for "low fat ricotta" at minimins.com — but this is actually just what my ancestors would have called "curds" masquerading under a posh name.

The recipe is very quick and cheap to make, but as there are no preservatives it will only keep a day or two in fridge.

You need:

• 4 pints 2% milk;
• 2-4 tablespoons lemon juice or white vinegar.

Bring the milk to just to below boiling point, so that little bubbles are around all the edge but not a rolling boil.

Add the lemon juice or vinegar. Wait until curds form — this will happen quite quickly. Strain the curds through cheesecloth. When finished draining, squeeze the curds and wrap the cheesecloth fairly tightly around them. Put it in the fridge with a plate on top and a tin on top of that, to weigh it down. After about an hour it will be ready to use. You may now add salt if you wish.

Note that the liquid that you drained off is actually "whey", and had many uses in traditional British cooking. It is nutritious drunk as-is, and has been found to stimulate production of insulin in type-2 diabetics. Interestingly, whey is the actual start point for making real ricotta!

"Ricotta", you see, simply means "re-cooked", referring to the fact that the milk is cooked once to separate the curds (mostly casein) from the whey, and then again to separate out the ricotta (mostly albumin and globulin) from the remaining liquid. Without further ado, here's how to do it.

Allow the whey to become more acidic by fermentation, by letting it sit for 12–24 hours at room temperature. Now heat the acidified whey to near boiling point. The combination of low pH and high temperature denatures the remaining protein and causes it to precipitate out, forming a fine curd. Once cooled, separate the curd by passing it through a fine cloth — your cheesecloth will probably do, but a piece of muslin might be better. I don't have times or quantities for this part of the process, so experimentation is the order of the day!

The benefits of Pinot Noir

According to this article, Pinot Noir is "the grape of choice for the calorie-restricted set, rich in anti-aging resveratrol".

HP open-sources webOS

I have to confess I didn't see this one coming!

I was fairly sure that the most likely outcome of HP's strategic review of webOS under Meg Whitman would be to keep it for their "other" products — printers, basically. Second most likely was, I thought, a trade sale to someone who might want their own OS and had the resources — of talent, money and time — to really make something of it; Amazon perhaps (although that boat has likely sailed), Barnes and Noble maybe if they really had the cash (as it might provide a way out of their patent spat with Microsoft), or one of the Chinese telecom companies or tablet manufacturers.

But it was not to be. Presumably HP explored the possibility of a trade sale, and either found that there were no realistic buyers, or decided that there was a better option.

One fascinating possibility is that open sourcing webOS really is the best option. Certainly, this way HP can continue to use it for their non-personal equipment, so it's at least as good as the first possibility raised above. Second, if HP really do continue to invest time and energy developing it, as they apparently are promising to do then I'd be surprised if the likes of Barnes and Noble, Amazon, yes and even Samsung, HTC and (whisper it!) Nokia don't at least take a very careful look at what's suddenly become available. There's a whole class of Android manufacturers who are chafing at being beholden to Google, at having to take Google cloud apps and Google search services, at taking their turns to be picked for the year's Google phone — and it's the big boys who feel this most keenly, not the also rans.

One has to feel that maybe HP have found a revenue stream here. Not from the OS itself, because they've just open sourced it, and not from any associated cloud services or app store because HP don't have them, but from something that's becoming of looming importance now: patents. Dangle an open source webOS as bait, and then sell the patent protection necessary to actually use it to the manufacturers who pick it up. There's a distinct possibility of cramping Android's style with that strategy.

A lot depends of course, on the details. On the open source community's acceptance of webOS as a living platform for one thing: it has to be a project with lots of vitality, like the Linux kernel; it mustn't fall into navel-gazing and obscurantism, like Mozilla. On the specifics of what HP contributes and what it doesn't, for another: an OS kit that can't actually run on anything without substantial and undocumented porting effort would be of benefit to few.

Update
Reading around the web, most pundits seem to favour the cynical interpretation: HP are just using the fig-leaf of open-source to dump webOS without actually having to admit that they are doing so. Comments (to these sorts of article) are a different matter though, with many people making the point that, irrespective of HP's own motivations, the future of webOS (or parts of it) may still be somewhat bright.

If only the Germans...

More and more I'm coming across articles, or comments to articles, that essentially say, "in the short term, everything would be fine if only the Germans would backstop all the peripheral European debt", as though that were some kind of rational thing for the Germans to do. Usually such people are either hopeless lefties / Keynesians (essentially indistinguishable in this case), which goes some way to explaining why I see them more in comments to articles rather than in the articles themselves, or they are academics and no one really expects what they say to make very much sense in the real world (one is reminded of that Baudelaire poem about seagulls: Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher).

Now the short term, like the poor, will always be with you — but eventually the medium and long terms really do arrive! (Incidentally, why do Keynesians always love to justify their position by making that quote, you know the one: "In the long run, we are all dead"? Have none of them realised that KEYNES HAS BEEN DEAD FOR SIXTY-ODD YEARS?) It does no one any good, when the long run is hammering at your door with every sign of breaking it down, to continue to bleat that it would be more convenient to do something else in the short term.

The real reason that the Germans aren't going to guarantee peripheral European debt (unless Angela Merkel goes criminally irresponsible on them) is because they can think past the next sentence. Let's see how that thought process might go shall we? 1) the markets are going crazy because they think that the peripheral countries are likely to default, therefore 2) we should guarantee their debt ... and ... ? At this point, it's obvious that the commenter thinks that the peripheral countries will eventually pay the Germans back, at least that's the most charitable interpretation I can come up with. But if that were the case, the markets wouldn't be worried about it, at least not to the same degree. So what these people are really saying is that the Germans should guarantee the debt, so that it's Germany who'll be left shouldering the costs of the default and not the markets.

Because, and let's be clear about this, what would Germany get from the peripheral countries in return for their backstopping the debt? Promises of reform? Promises to do better in future? Well these countries are all still running current account deficits, they are already broke in fact if not in law, and they are only getting more broke. And they have already made promises, lots of them: that's what their bonds are, promises. And if they default, their promises literally aren't worth the paper they are written on.

As the calls for Germany to guarantee peripheral debt grow, so does my gut rumble that it may be Germany, not the peripheral countries, that exits the Euro.

The Eurozone: seventeen countries divided by a single currency

Reading an interesting article on VoxEU.org which reveals that, inside the Eurozone, "national supervisors require banks not to transfer cash out of their country so as not to be exposed in the event that the crisis degenerates".

I had no idea that that was happening. Though of course I had heard, along with everybody else, that European banks are entirely unwilling to extend credit to peripheral-country banks generally and selected weaker banks in core countries, I had assumed that that was simply every-man-for-himself prudentialism. Though that news is stunning enough, it's the conclusion the author draws from it that had me admiring its neatness:

We have arrived at the paradox of having a single currency with 17 bank and public debt markets segmented by national borders, charging their customers different interest rates. Such a situation cannot last long.

An unsettling day

First the dustbins went missing, now they are back, all without any explanation.

Thursday night I had remembered to put out the main bin and the recycling bin, just as well as I'd forgotten the recycling bin two weeks previously (it's on a two week cycle) and it was full. Friday I forgot to bring them in, so this morning (Saturday) I went out to get them and they were gone.

As soon as I got back in the house I fired off an email to the local council, asking if they'd taken them away for any reason, and asking what I should do if they'd been stolen. I saw mention of a £35 charge for lost or missing bins, presumably per bin, so that didn't put me in a very good mood.

Then just now, about 00:40 Sunday morning, I heard the rumbling noise of bin wheels in my drive. I rushed to the door, put the hall light and the outside light on, and unlocked the door. Two locks, the second one a little difficult to get the key in properly, it must have taken me about 30 seconds to get out the door. Predictably, by the time I got out the bins were back in their accustomed places, and there was no one to be seen. I even went to the end of the drive and looked up and down the avenue: nothing, no one, just the wind in the trees and the yellow sodium lights; it was like some mid-western ghost town so I hurried back in.

Worse, I'd been watching a rather creepy horror story on TV, so I had to check every room in the house before I could settle down. I texted one of my friends, and he said I should look in the bins for evidence: what if they'd been used to transport a body or something? Thank you George, that's just what I need right now! Still, I'll be out there in the morning, looking; as of tonight though, I'm not going out there again for love nor money.

Leaving the Euro

I remember when they were first elaborating what eventually became the Euro. There was a competition to name the new currency. My own thoughts tended towards some kind of derivative of "Mark". Not only was that the name of Europe's strongest currency, there were also antecedents in British history — indeed, much of Europe employed "marks" of one kind or another as units of value.

Another of my favourites was "ecu": there was of course an ECU (European Currency Unit) at that very time, in a kind of virtual foreshadowing of the common currency. There had also been several écu coins in French history, the first one as long ago as 1266. The word is related to Portuguese escudo, ultimately from Latin "scutum" (a shield) and has a long history in the realm of currency.

"Just as long as they don't call it the 'Euro'," I thought, cringing at the very idea (I did, I swear it, I was that psychic person), "that would be so horribly self-important and bureaucratic." Perhaps I meant "beurocratic". But when I thought of how those sophisticated European elites would sneer if the Americans ever decided to rename the Dollar the 'Americo', I realised that our clever EC politicians would never do anything so hopelessly gauche.

---

There's much speculation at the moment as to whether one or more nations might leave the Euro in the near future, and if they did, how exactly that might happen. The modalities, as the French say. A few clarifying considerations might be in order.

Firstly, what is a Euro? Unfortunately I don't have one in front of me, but I do have twenty pounds, and we shall have to be content with that. If you look at the top of the front of a twenty pound note you will see the words "I promise to pay the bearer the sum of twenty pounds". The same idea is true of all our modern currencies, they are promises to pay. To pay what? For that, we need to remember a little history.

Nowadays when we think of currency we tend to think of coins and notes as being more or less the same thing, one perhaps a bit heavier and bulkier than the other. Historically though, they were very different things. Coins were essentially lumps of valuable metal: gold, silver, and for the cheap seats, copper, bashed flat and stamped with the mark (there it is again) of a reputable treasury to guarantee its weight and purity. Notes on the other hand were originally bankers' receipts, handed out when traders deposited their bags of coins with them. They were promises to (re)pay the coins. It was the coins that were valuable. The notes, insofar as they had value, had it because they guaranteed that you could convert them into coins.

Notes of course were a lot more convenient for trading with than coins, especially for large transactions. So despite the fact that there was what we nowadays call "credit risk" associated with them (if the banker went bust and couldn't give you the coins, the notes would then be worthless) they caught on. They were also freely tradeable: if I gave a twenty pound note to my butcher, he could take it to the bank and receive his twenty gold coins without having to prove either his identity or mine. That makes them bearer instruments and further increases their fungibility with coinage.

It's sometimes surprising to remember that this system remained essentially intact up until the early 1970s, when Nixon unilaterally revoked the convertibility of the dollar into gold. What was especially clever about this was that he did it in the context of the then prevailing Bretton Woods System, which defined the dollar as the currency that other currencies were valued against, thus more or less legally obliging everyone else to go along with it, much to the fury of some of the European contingents.

That's really the point when everything changed. Instead of having to redeem their notes in precious metals, central bankers were now able to take your twenty pound note off you and replace it with ... another twenty pound note! Since they were no longer bound by the necessity of converting their essentially worthless paper back into gold, they could print as much of it as they wished, and this, in very large part, they promptly did (neatly illustrating the tension between a currency's dual functions as a unit of exchange and a store of value).

It's no accident that at the very same time as this happened, nations all over the world quietly retired their silver and copper coins and replaced them with almost-worthless substitutes. After all, you can't have twenty shillings being worth more than a pound note can you? You can't have arbitrage between the various components of one currency, can you? If you look at the Royal Mint today you'll see that they are selling a coin with a two pound face value for nine hundred and ninety five of the paper equivalents. That's the scale of the arbitrage that would now be available!

The point
Yes, now to the point of this post. Which is that even today, even inside the Eurozone, there is something that is remarkably similar to the old, national currency note. It's a government-backed promise to pay, that's freely tradeable between third parties. They are issued by country governments sovereignly, and the worth of each government's issue floats freely against all the others. I'm referring, of course, to the currency note's "big brothers", the T-bills and government bonds.

It's remarkable indeed, that in the context of the various European governments' eagerness to remove the ability of financial markets to arbitrage between them, of their eagerness to hide the effective international wealth transfers that were so cruelly exposed in the bad old days of fixed exchange rates, when the richer European countries had to repeatedly intervene in markets to prop up the currencies of their poorer neighbours, that they neglected to remove the one class of instrument that allowed markets to see exactly that, and to do exactly that.

So, in a sense, there still are independent national pseudo-"currencies" within Europe, and I wonder if more could be made of them, in order to relieve the pressure that a common currency creates? For example, Governments could legislate that their bonds could be used to pay taxes. Ok, that's not really a winner: of all parties to a transaction, governments are the most likely not to want to be paid in something as worthless as their own paper. But as a means of retiring their issuance, possibly at a discount, it might be considered. Or how about legislating to make a government's bonds legal tender for the settlement of all transactions in its territory that are over, say, 100,000 Euros? And of course, once you can force people to take your worthless bonds, you may as well make them irredeemable — "consols" as they are called.

In just such a way, by just such a series of steps (and more), European governments could surreptitiously introduce something that was more and more like a freely-floating, national currency, without ever quite leaving the Euro. A way of effectively letting off some steam, without losing face.

The other thing they could do of course, is to say to international bond markets what they said to their own populations in 1971: that the only thing they will redeem their notes for is more of the same. That's effectively what they've been doing for decades anyway, by consistently rolling their debt over from one year to the next — a sure sign, for any student of history, that the next step would be bankruptcy. That would be much more likely to provoke an outcry from the markets than the creeping speciation of bonds, but maybe people really are that stupid.

Relocate the Chrome address bar? Get a life!

According to an aggrieved poster on Slashdot, users are overwhelmingly asking Google to move the Chrome tab collection underneath the address / URL edit box. As far as I am concerned, all that that proves is that those users are stupid, and Google is right to ignore them. The URL is a property of the page that the user is on, and as such, the control that surfaces it should be inside the page. If you consider that tabs are a part of the page metaphor, then what is below the tab is part of the page, while what is above the tab is not.

All these supposed users are doing then, is asking Google to move away from a placement that makes sense in the context of the page metaphor to one that doesn't. Instead of being part of the page, the address bar would become some kind of shared area updated whenever the user changes tabs. I don't see that as an improvement.

[And note that since we are talking about consistency with a metaphor, it's actually irrelevant whether the tab bar is in fact implemented as a shared resource or not, i.e. whether there is only one of them or one per tab.]

Cornbread Surprise

The surprise being that it came out rather well!

I had a big bag of coarse-ground cornmeal and some plain flour hanging around, so during the week I made an effort to buy some baking powder and some bicarbonate of soda (which I *think* is the same as what Americans call baking soda), as well as some eggs and some yoghurt.

I took 1.5 cups cornmeal, 1 cup plain flour, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 3 teaspoons baking powder, half a teaspoon bicarb and half a teaspoon of salt, and mixed all the dry ingredients together in a bowl.

I took a cup of plain yoghurt and three eggs and mixed them in a measuring bowl. Decided that that wasn't going to be enough liquid to wet all the dry ingredients, so added a big splash of milk, say half a cup. The original recipe had called for two tablespoonsful of honey (yes, this seems to have been a very *northern* US recipe) but I didn't have any, so I added a few drops of vanilla essence for the taste and smell, and hoped for the best on the moistness side.

Then baked at 200 degrees centigrade for 30 minutes. One is supposed to use a cast iron skillet, but I made do with a ceramic oven dish, which would have taken about twice as much ingredients as I actually had. As a result, the bread was fairly thin in the dish, say just over an inch in depth.

I was prepared for the ceramic dish not to be conductive enough of the heat, but in fact it ended up baked perfectly (it's an old fan-oven). The bread rose to about two inches in depth, and moved in a remarkably spongy/foamy way when cutting. Despite this however, it was somewhat dry — a single cup of yoghurt was about two thirds of the largish pot that I had bought, perhaps I should have used it all. Three eggs had seemed like rather a lot to me, since most of the recipes I'd seen had called for two, and some for only one, and indeed, the result was rather eggy/cakey-tasting; despite this however, and perhaps because of the dryness, it was prone to breaking up when handled. The vanilla made it smell and taste excellent.

All in all a qualified success: it will definitely all get eaten, and it should keep for three days or so in the fridge. Next time I'll try with more yoghurt and only two eggs. I think that should taste better and be more moist, but whether it will make the crumbliness better or worse is an open question.

I'm also leaning to want to experiment making potato bread like this, by including mashed-potato powder in the mix. But should it be the flour or the cornmeal that I replace? I'll probably try both. Potato bread, being naturally savoury rather than sweet, will probably also require a more southern-US oriented approach: no sugar, buttermilk rather than yoghurt, maybe only a single egg. On the other hand, I could add fried-onions, and would wet the baking tin with bacon fat rather than butter :)

HP, Apotheker, Whitman — the saga continues

The latest news from HP, that the board is supposedly going to fire Leo Apotheker after only eleven months in the job, and install Meg Whitman as the new CEO, is making me very nervous about my Autonomy shares.

I was flummoxed to receive a letter from my dealers stating that the first deadline for acceptances had passed with only 46% of holders accepting, since I had assumed that UK institutional investors, long famed on the boards for their apathy towards AU, would have cashed out at the first opportunity, especially since the offer is widely seen as being an overpayment. I guess the art of brinkmanship is not lost. We'll see, the next deadline is 3rd October, and I think there's another, final one on the 17th or thereabouts.

Gossip on the boards is frenzied right now, with some even speculating on an HP/SAP merger: the rationale being that if HP are indeed moving to be an enterprise software company, they would still lack a big-hitter product even after the AU purchase. SAP would, of course, fit that bill.

I think Larry Ellison would relish the role of Wicked Fairy at that particular wedding. I have no doubt that the M&A specialists at Oracle are even now casting their eyes over HP and running the numbers. A further fall in its share price (already down 47% since Leo came aboard), as might well accompany a bid for SAP, would only make it more vulnerable.

There are other attractions for Larry, besides the pure pleasure of sacking the HP board en masse and putting his mate Mark Hurd back in the CEO's seat. He bought Sun for Java, not for its hardware business, but the addition of HP's Unix server business (and the re-introduction of the Oracle database on those servers) would please HP's midrange customers and add to the critical mass of Oracle's Unix business. If the worst came to the worst, he could perhaps simply shift some proportion of HP customers over to Sun kit the hard way, by simply (over time) raising HP prices faster (even) than Sun's, but there's no need at all to be so cavalier. He could kill Itanium after the next two, contracted-for, revisions by simply failing to extend HP's contracts with Intel, and have HP engineers in the meantime scurry to port HP-UX to SPARC, while scheduling new Superdome SPARC cells for some time around 2015. Any remaining HP IP in Itanium might be a useful addition to SPARC, and increased volume couldn't hurt. If he's as neutral on Sun's x86 business as he says he is, he could complete the spinoff of HP's PC division while throwing in Sun's x86 business as a sweetener. What he'd do with WebOS is anyone's guess.

Well that's enough wild imaginings and uninformed speculation for one night.

Native Client — Google lets a hunded flowers blossom

There are already about a hundred schools of thought contending over the worth of Google's new Native Client ("NaCl") technology.

NaCl (inevitably punned by the Googlegentsia) is a way of allowing native-code (raw machine instructions, instead of an interpreted language such as the currently-standard JavaScript) to execute in your browser. As such it is painfully reminiscent of Microsoft's ill-fated attempt to add ActiveX controls to the browser, a move resulting in so many security breaches that it contributed significantly to the mass developer move away from Internet Explorer.

Some critics contend that NaCl will is merely a rerun of ActiveX and will suffer the same fate. However, unlike ActiveX, Native Client is not restricted to a single operating system, and although currently implemented only in one browser, Google's own rapidly-growing Chrome, it is open source and available for incorporation by other browsers if their developers so desire. As such, Native Client would run on whatever operating systems a given browser does.

A more serious criticism is that NaCl is currently restricted to a single chip architecture, x86-class code, meaning that it won't run on your mobile phone or tablet's browser, as those machines are currently almost all powered by ARM cpus. Google already have an answer to this in the works, based on compiling your C or C++ source down, not to native instructions, but intermediate-level LLVM bitcode. This is where the story starts to get hazy. Will the bitcode get further compiled, and if so when? In the browser? By the web server? It has even been suggested that Google may end up writing a virtual machine to execute LLVM bitcode directly. Shades of Java, why not just use that? — Indeed, your humble blogger remembers writing a post on the Mozilla developers mailing list about a decade ago, advocating exposing Mozilla internals to Java, so that people could write internal-level stuff using Java (which almost everybody could do) instead of C++ (which relatively few people could do), an idea which sank immediately and without trace; but that's another story.

The security angle seems much better thought out. Google are determined to sandbox the native code inside the browser, and seem to have invented a clever way to check and enforce that sandboxing. Said clever way relies on features of the x86 chip family though, and again, the concern must be that similar ways may not be so readily found for other chip families.

The least convincing criticism, I find, is that Google should have spent this effort on implementing the complainer's favourite interpreted language instead, because it's allegedly so much better than JavaScript. Candidates include the usual suspects: Python, Ruby and Lua (though I actually don't remember anyone proposing Perl). The people who make this criticism seem to me not to be one hundred percent awake: the goal of NaCl is to make browser capabilities that are available to JavaScript also be available to C and C++ programs (initially, with other compiled languages later, perhaps). Now if your NaCl program were to be ... a Python interpreter ... a Ruby interpreter? See how that might work? By doing the larger job, Google have automatically provided for the smaller job. Now, all we have to do is get responsible people in the Python, Ruby, Lua and whatever else camps to hook their interpreters up to the Native Client APIs, and a hundred browser languages will blossom,

HP, PCs, WebOS and Autonomy

The most amazing feeling, yesterday evening, of having fallen through the mirror into a bizzaro world where America is Europe, Apotheker is Elop and HP is Nokia. It's as though the Americans, unwilling to countenance a strong European player in the mobile phone industry, sent in Elop to administer the coup de grâce to Nokia, and now the Europeans have done the same to one of their industry giants in retaliation.

The feeling only intensified as I read through the details, noting the similarity of the arguments advanced for the decision, and the strange way that they both actually seem to be doing the very opposite of what they are saying. Let me explain.

With regards to Nokia, I was struck by Elop's statement that he wanted to move to a software platform that had a large "ecosystem" — shorthand I suppose for a large developer base *and* a large user base. Struck, because he promptly ignored the platform that had the largest ecosystem, Android (iOS not being an option for him, naturally), and chose the one that had if anything the smallest ecosystem, Winpho 7. Similarly, he said he wanted the platform that would best allow Nokia to distinguish its offerings from the herd — by which he undoubtedly meant the host of manufacturers offering Android based phones — but he ignored the fact that one of the reasons that those manufacturers love Android is precisely because it is so customisable, being open-source (think MotoBlur, HTC Sense, TouchWiz, ...), whereas Microsoft puts stringent compatibility and design requirements on manufacturers who want to use Winpho 7.

I still think that Nokia might have done better to dump Maemo/MeeGo while retaining its Qt-based presentation layer (the GUI, Touch UI, whatever you want to call it, and the user-facing apps), and to graft that onto Android, completely replacing Android's current, Java/Dalvik-based presentation layer and apps. That way Nokia would be absolved from any responsibility for developing the lower layers of the stack, which clearly Google are making a very good job of, and could concentrate their efforts on the UI layers and on tying the apps to Nokia's services. Indeed, given their current woes with Oracle, Google also might one day have been better off if Nokia had done that, since they would presumably have open sourced the code as they were doing with MeeGo. But I digress.

With respect to HP, Apotheker says he wants to move away from hardware and towards software as an engine for growth. So ... he dumps their biggest software asset, the proprietary WebOS...??? He blames the slowdown in the PC market on what he calls the "tablet effect", but clearly it's not just any old tablets, otherwise HP's own offerings would be doing much better: it's just *Apple's* tablets that are doing so well, and Apple's tablets run ... the proprietary iOS! And what was it, Leo, that has made Apple's operating system such a big deal? Why, it's the number of phones and tablets they've sold that run it! HP's PCs represented an excellent vector for insinuating WebOS into the market — as a quick-boot solution for those wanting just to browse the web and do emails for example — and WebOS represented HP's best bet for locking users into its software and services, as well as its hardware.

It's very odd. In the past decades, HP has steadily moved away from anything that required unique or original abilities in its labour force. It makes standard Windows PCs, and it's outsourced their manufacturing to the Far East. In recent years even the proportion of HP-specific design in its products has gone down — Asus design HP's PC motherboards for example. Apple on the other hand has gone in just the opposite direction. After the debacles of the old Mac OS and the Power Macs, Apple had to violently alter course and jump onto a bog standard Unix-like OS and bog standard Intel chips. Since then they've added customisation after customisation to their OS, moving it ever further away from its open source roots, and now they are designing their own ARM-based processors which it looks very likely they will soon be using in desktops and laptops. Every move they make is designed to increase user lock-in to their platform, while reducing the likelihood that their suppliers will be able to reverse engineer and mimic their offerings.

At least I have something to thank HP for. No one has less confidence in Autonomy than the UK stock market's institutional players, and my 125 shares were showing a rather large net loss at close of business last night, after the general market landslide during the day, and on top of accumulated slippage over the past few months. Now that's all transformed and my investment is showing a lovely 55% gain. Thank you so much HP, may your every endeavour be crowned with success!

That AA+ rating

So one of the big credit rating agencies, Standard & Poor's, has downgraded the United States' rating from AAA to AA+ — basically, from so called "prime" debt to "high grade" debt. Still a long way from junk then.

Good, even so. Sovereign states, especially big ones that feel utterly omnipotent within their own territory, are prone to a kind of ego inflation in their governmental elites that lead them to believe that they can make just about anything happen so long as they can get agreement from "stakeholder" parties. They are so used to making, and on occasion bending, the legal laws in other words, that they fall into the trap of thinking that the laws of nature can be chivvied in the same way.

Big mistake. I see that the administration still hasn't really learned this lesson: the article linked to above notes that "unnamed officials in Washington had told US media that S&P's analysis of the American economic situation was deeply flawed". Shoot the messenger then!

In part of course, the agencies are simply making up for their failings pre-2008, when their routine granting of prime and high grade ratings to what turned out to be toxic and unrecoverable debt made them look like complete patsies — and complicit patsies at that, given that companies pay them to rate them. In an echo of "quis custodiet", who will believe the agencies' credit ratings, if they have no credibility themselves? So it's only natural that, now they are finally and completely awake, they are rushing around and barking like mad, in an effort to convince their subscribers that they are worth the money.

For all the briefing and spinning in Washington, and in chancelleries around the world in what are pleased to call themselves the "advanced" economies, you have to remember one thing: these countries are all running primary deficits; they are all still getting further into debt. For all the sound and fury in Washington last week, the nub of the agreement they reached was that they would allow themselves to take on extra debt now, while cutting back a little bit on the expenditure in two years' time. That's all you need to know to figure out that in a national emergency, US politicians' time horizon shrank to just under two years.

Imagine a rich man who, when told by his bankers that his extravagant spending has outpaced even his magnificent income by some 20% per annum, decides that he can, with great difficulty and with a lot of noble self sacrifice and tears, perhaps cut that 20% deficit to 18%, and really, the bankers should be grateful that he could manage even that. There were many such men in 18th century Europe, noblemen who knew how to spend but not how to save, and without fail they left their families ruined and their estates in the hands of other, more sensible individuals.

Indeed, it all reminds me rather horribly of one of my favourite bits of Jane Austen:

But now, another occupation and solicitude of mind was beginning to be added to these. Her father was growing distressed for money. She knew, that when he now took up the Baronetage, it was to drive the heavy bills of his tradespeople, and the unwelcome hints of Mr Shepherd, his agent, from his thoughts. The Kellynch property was good, but not equal to Sir Walter's apprehension of the state required in its possessor. While Lady Elliot lived, there had been method, moderation, and economy, which had just kept him within his income; but with her had died all such right-mindedness, and from that period he had been constantly exceeding it. It had not been possible for him to spend less; he had done nothing but what Sir Walter Elliot was imperiously called on to do; but blameless as he was, he was not only growing dreadfully in debt, but was hearing of it so often, that it became vain to attempt concealing it longer, even partially, from his daughter. He had given her some hints of it the last spring in town; he had gone so far even as to say, "Can we retrench? Does it occur to you that there is any one article in which we can retrench?" and Elizabeth, to do her justice, had, in the first ardour of female alarm, set seriously to think what could be done, and had finally proposed these two branches of economy, to cut off some unnecessary charities, and to refrain from new furnishing the drawing-room; to which expedients she afterwards added the happy thought of their taking no present down to Anne, as had been the usual yearly custom. But these measures, however good in themselves, were insufficient for the real extent of the evil, the whole of which Sir Walter found himself obliged to confess to her soon afterwards. Elizabeth had nothing to propose of deeper efficacy. She felt herself ill-used and unfortunate, as did her father; and they were neither of them able to devise any means of lessening their expenses without compromising their dignity, or relinquishing their comforts in a way not to be borne.

A run on the bank?

Just read "Greece Deputy PM Warns Of Tanks In The Streets, Mass Suicides, If Second Bailout Voted Down By Greek Parliament" on Zero Hedge [yes, I am indeed about a month behind — those people post far too often], which quotes one Theodoros Pangalos as saying that "Returning to the drachma would mean that on the following day banks would be surrounded by terrified people trying to withdraw their money, the army would have to protect them with tanks because there would not be enough police".

I can't see that there's any excuse in a "modern", fiat currency system, for a run on the banks. Perhaps Mr Pangalos doesn't get it, but here's Gerard's Patented Method For Dumping The Euro And Going Back To The Drachma Without Having A Run On The Banks™ — no honestly, thank me later.

First of all, coin and print drachma equivalents for the amount of euro-denominated cash currently in circulation. Just for fun, assume that you are going to announce a drachma that's worth ten euros. (Trust me, that's going to increase the amount of fun almost exponentially once you've got an exchange rate.) "But," you will say, "that's only a minute fraction of the amount of money in bank accounts! How will we avoid people queueing up at the banks for cash that isn't there?"

Simples! As well as the 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 1,000 drachma notes that you were expecting, you will also get your central bank to print 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, 10,000,000 and 100,000,000 drachma notes. Remember you are going to be swapping euros for new drachmas at 10 to 1, so a 100,000,000 new drachma note will be "worth" ONE BILLION EUROS! And you really can't have too many of them, so print a few more to be on the safe side.

Now, when multi-billionaire shipping-line owners queue up outside the banks for their cash, they can leave with just a few notes tucked discreetly into their slimline wallets! No need to spoil the hang of their suits with over-stuffed wallets or money belts! No need for a firm of private security guards to accompany dozens of boxes as they shuttle between the Bank of Greece and the nearest Citibank!

And the best bit will be the psychological effect on the masses. Once people see the rich entering the banks and leaving, only moments later, their valuable 1,000,000 new drachma bills tucked safely away, they will realise that there's absolutely no point taking need to take any money out themselves. Such is the power of the fiat money system when handled wisely.

What's that you say, Mr Pangalos? Inflation? Not a bit of it! You laid the groundwork for inflation when you allowed your banks to create credit out of thin air. That's the nature of a fractional reserve banking system. After that it's a balancing act. People mustn't take their cash out of the banks and hide it under their beds, or the economy will implode with massive deflation. Likewise, the velocity of circulation and the amount of credit mustn't rise too fast otherwise you'll get inflation. The beauty of my plan is that you won't have a deflationary scenario because there will always be enough cash circulating, while should only get a modest boost to inflation because most of the people taking money out of the banks will be stashing it away abroad.

What's that? What will it do to the exchange rate? Well isn't that the whole point of leaving the euro in the first place?

Another brilliant BBC article

I tend to think of the BBC as the Pravda of the British left: they tell us, not so much what is actually going on, as what the important issues of the day are, and what we should think about them to ensure that we are on the right side (which is of course, the left side). Although there have to be a few facts, naturally, much as a kind of stodgy bread on which to smear the marvellous bounty of their super-correct views.

All the more amusing then, when those naughty facts just won't do what they're told and support Aunty's version of what's what. Take for example, Bolivia moves to end dependence on foreign seed firms. The words, the style, the thoughts, all paint a background of local (good), actually indegenous (even better) farmers and foodstuffs battling against evil globalism (bad), actually Big Agro (shudder!), led on by heroic indigenous president Evo Morales (wild cheering!).

So what's the problem then? And what's his solution? Well the problem is encapsulated in one truly astonishing sentence, where we get the full force of the writer's desire to present one way some facts which all, unfortunately for him or her, point exactly the other way:

The recent rise in global food prices forced many Bolivians to abandon their indigenous staples, such as quinoa, in favour of cheaper, imported products.

Oh Noes! It's those rotten Big Agricompanies, cunningly producing rice and wheat and such cheaply, so that our poor people will be able to buy it when, erm, they can't afford the locally-produced foodstuffs. Erm...

So let's see. Cheap imports = BAD because it means Bolivians won't starve, check. Foreigners paying for locally produced grains = BAD because it means we have the money to buy what they are selling, check. Really, it's such a pity that people 5,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent ever learned about that division of labour stuff. Ugh!

Hmm, you know, one way around this would be to let people make some money by exporting quinoa, which is a premium product for which there is increasing demand at high prices. Then, following the price signal, they could, oh let's think -- ah yes! -- grow more of it next year, making even more money and helping the price come down a little. Why, if you did that for long enough, you might even have a financially independent middle class. So is that Presient Morales' favoured solution then?

No, the favoured solution is state seed companies apparently. Because of course, that has worked so well every other time it's been tried [ask yourself: just why is the locally produced quinoa so expensive that local people can't afford it?]. Oh, and "generous" credits to indigenous farmers. Which, I am 100 percent sure, will mean that either the farmers will soon be bankrupt or the state credit-granting entities will be. Or both, of course, like Fannie and Freddy and a few million homeowners in the US when they tried something similar in their housing market recently.

There's one other gem of a sentence in the same article. In contrast with evil agribusinesses that might want to produce either Frankenplants or varieties that won't self-seed, we learn that:

The Morales government wants to improve genetic stock through natural selection.

Does the writer even know what natural selection is? Or is the BBC just cutting and pasting a press report written by someone in the Morales government who, themself, doesn't know what natural selection is? Because taken literally this sentence means that the Morales government is willing to wait several million years for quinoa to evolve to produce more seeds, if it ever does. Or for Bolivians to evolve not to need so much in the way of food (a rather more plausible scenario, given the likely state of their food supply in the near future).

Annother NetBeans annoyance

NetBeans' search and replace dialog allows you to use regex capturing groups in the find string and regex back references in the replace string. But a naive user, who expected to be able to use something like "\1" and "\2" for his back references, would be sorely annoyed when they didn't work.

Instead, NetBeans uses $1, $2, etc. for its back references. As this person found out after perusing the source code for the search and replace dialog.

The reason, apparently, is because that's what Java regexes do (and Java regexes do what they do because that's what perl regexes do, and always have done). And because NetBeans is primarily a Java-oriented IDE, the Javaness wins out over the regexness, or something.

All of which would be but a minor annoyance, were it not for the information that you're offered when you click the help button in the search and replace dialog, which eventually leads you to a page in the official Java regex documentation that says this:

Back references
\n Whatever the nth capturing group matched

Sigh...

The new Wii

Reading about the new Wii U, I can't understand how they resisted calling it the Wii ii.

I've discovered Ian Fletcher !

A beautifully clear exposition of the theories of absolute and comparitive advantage, and his own observations on the limitations and likely consequences of naively using the latter as a guide to economic policy: The Theory of Comparative Advantage and Why It’s Wrong.

Advertising's unintended side effects

Targetted advertising must surely be responsible for a lot of unintended guffaws nowadays. As I avidly read a CS Monitor article about mass sackings of Shiites by the Sunni minority government in Bahrain, in the context of the continuing unrest there, I notice that the right hand side of the page is full of adverts for ... cheap holidays in Bahrain! Special offers, apparently. I bet they've got a lot of those.

More BBC doublethink

A link in the BBC's newsfeed catches my eye: Free book scheme handed 50% cut, with the teaser "A charity that gives free books to children is told of a 50% cut in funding, two months after fears over its future sparked a political 'U-turn' row". (Note that the actual headline, when you get there, is somewhat less informative.)

It's hard to fault it as an example of systematic double thinking: a charity (nice people, good) has its funding cut (less to spend, bad). So simple! And yet so wrong.

Charities collect voluntary donations and then disburse them. To the extent that this 'charity' is funded by government, to that extent it is acting not as a charity, but as a spending agency of the government. It's now "giving" away not money that has been freely given, but money that has been extracted by force, or the threat of force, and that's not good.

Even worse than the moral point though, is the way government funding, even when it's done as "matching", exerts a chronically corrupting influence on the charities that receive it. Their managements start to work closely with the Home Office, they produce position papers to illustrate how their intentions align with government objectives, people go on secondment in both directions; instead of writing their budget to match their expected income, they start to produce "requirements" budgets that, naturally, show enormous deficits... Eventually, the lure of money results in the charity becoming an extension of whatever department funds them: instead of government funds supplementing private charity, private funds end up supplementing government spending.

Government already allows tax breaks for private charitable contributions. If it wants to encourage charities even more, it could simply allow tax breaks at more than 100% of the tax payable. The curernt system of co-opting favoured charities for subsidy and control is deceitful and corrupt, and should be discontinued.

Libya

Quite apart from what one thinks of Gaddaffi and his regime, it's interesting to see how his elite are breaking away from him by ones and twos and little groups. There's clearly some signalling going on (in perhaps a rather more general sense than discussed in the link). As each person signs off and makes a public announcement, they signal to others that it's alright to do the same. At some point this will reach a critical mass, and then it will all be over.

Requiescat in pace

Marek Rybinski, priest and martyr.