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I felt sorry for Gary Sinnott, the computer enthusiast from Suffolk who set up a website to promote his local town of Mildenhall. Unfortunately his domain name of mildenhall.com was similar to that of the US Air Force base just down the road – mildenhall.af.mil; not that similar really, but Gary found himself the unwitting recipient of an increasing number of emails meant for personnel at the base.

As webmaster for mildenhall.com, he received all the emails addressed to that domain. It wasn’t just junk and spam… his inbox was cluttered by some classified information, including the flight plans for George W. Bush on a visit to the region.

When the incoming emails reached 30,000 a day (according to the newspapers) Gary had to admit defeat in the face of US firepower. He closed down his website; Apparently the US authorities were unable to persuade their employees and correspondents to check the email addresses on their correspondence before clicking send. Personally I was quite surprised that the person sending the President’s flight plan didn’t pay a bit of attention to the address field.The thing is, familiarity breeds contempt and it’s all too easy to let your fingers do the thinking as they fly across the keys…

The suffix .com flows so smoothly from your fingertips compared to .af.mil (try it!).I felt sorry for Gary because I sometimes get the wrong emails. Many of you would have already experienced the problems of having a name that is shared by at least two other people in the organisation. It is very easy to type half the address and to let the automated address book fill in the rest… I sometimes get emails about claims that need settling and I’m sure that poor  Sud in claims gets fed up with IT related matters.

For the last couple of months I have been in the trainee actuaries mailing list for some reason as well. I don’t know if I share a name or part of a name with one of our actuarial team. I’ve been quite interested to read about the varied topics, meetings and presentations that our actuaries attend… Although I would have been more interested in military secrets.

Making the write noises

My handwriting is dreadful. It was never good, but it’s definitely getting worse with age. Originally I didn’t think that this would matter, because according to technology experts a few years ago, we would all be speaking to our computers by now and text would appear on the screen… no one would need to write anything by hand.

This has not happened. The current generation of voice to text software is pretty good, but not infallible. So you have to check carefully what has been dictated. In fact technology has advanced enough to allow us to use handwriting on screen instead. Which wasn’t what I expected. Most of the time the computer can not read my handwriting either unless I write slowly and carefully in primary school characters.

So one has to make illegible notes for himself in his notebook,to type legible notes for other people on his keyboard and to use his voice when interacting with people, animals and parking ticket payment machines.

I think it is about time that technology moved on.

Matchboxes and our Thalaivar

Last week sometime, I read that advances in computer modelling of nanotechnology wires (very, very small wires) mean that within ten years we are likely to have supercomputers the size of matchboxes.Part of me immediately wanted to know what size of matchbox.

Do they mean those small ones branded as “Rettai kiLi”(the proprietor might be a benami for Madam J) or the big boxes manufactured by “WITCO” exclusively for making the flower vases(with the help of tips from Mangaiyar malar,aval vikatan and so on and so forth) or those wax based ones, or those smaller, squarer boxes?…

…But it doesn’t matter. If supercomputers get that small, we are bound to put them down somewhere and lose them.A matchbox is smaller than a mobile phone… and people are always losing those.

I found one down the back of the seat in a taxi last week (a mobile phone, not a supercomputer… or a matchbox). The taxi driver tried to pretend it was his “spare” one which he had lent to the last passenger “because he wanted to make a call and asked me if I had a spare phone”… As if… (when was the last time you thought of asking a taxi driver if he had a spare phone for passengers to use on the off chance). Really the driver was worried that I was going to be a good samaritan and return it to the owner, when he just wanted to sell it for a few pounds.

So imagine what would happen if we had pockets full of teeny, weeny supercomputers. The back of your sofa would be like a data centre and you would be forever looking for somewhere to recharge your processing power. But actually, that is what will happen. Computers keep getting smaller and more powerful. The manufacturers will keep finding ways to make them appealing as lifestyle accessories. And suckers like me will keep wanting them.

I already carry around in my pocket at least 1,000 times more processing power than was used in the lunar module that carried astronauts to the surface of the moon. In fact, at home we have an unremarkable washing machine which has more computing power than a lunar module.

The important thing is that science keeps finding the solution to the next problem. In this case the ability to predict the way in which miniscule wires will fold when twisted, which allows accurate modelling of the tiniest of molecular scale microchips… It is the ingenuity of scientists which deserves respect, not the size of the computer.

Now that our thalaivar donning the role of a scientist in the so called epic of this decade, what would his character be called?? Any takers for Asok?? (the recently reincarnated intern)