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Earlier this week, on a chance comment from one of Tave‘s myspace buddies, I decided to have a look at some of the news coverage of the weather in Blighty. In my home town of Worcester, it’s a fairly common occurrence to see a sponsored swim across the cricket ground at Easter, and a few years back some of the staff from Motex Harley Davidson took their surfboards down to New Road as a publicity stunt…

So, leafing through the viewers’ pictures on the Beeb’s flood coverage pages, I saw a photo of what could easily have been my car being swept down the river Severn and smashing apart as it hit the bridge between North and South Worcester. The worst of the flooding has hopefully passed, but the sewage and water contamination will certainly take time to clear up, and the impact on the economy may very well push the rocketing prices in England even higher.

The weather (and, as a Brit I get to obsess about the weather) has been truly awful this year, claiming several lives, and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without water, electricity and or their entire home. Ian posted mind boggling rainfall statistics yesterday at his blog.

The photo above is a still from Tony Mitchell’s prescient movie, Flood. Doesn’t bear thinking about :-(

Due in stores in September is the new 2008 Harley FXDF Dyna Fat Bob, which aside from looking like the mutant offspring of my Fat Boy and Tave’s Street Bob (and all the better for it!) brings some cool new features to the table, with its mean looking twin headlamps and V-Rod style fat pipes. Although the back tyre is only 180mm, the front tyre is a whopping 130mm — almost as fat as the 17″ 140mm front tyre on my Fat Boy, and nearly a third wider than the measly 100mm front tyre on the Street Bob. Nice to see that the solid wheels have been slotted to avoid the sail effect in cross winds that almost blew me off the road to my death in the mountain pass at Yuma last year. It also does away with the annoying ignition on the side of the frame that forces you to leave the key flapping in the ignition on the Street Bob, for the nicer Fat Boy style locking ignition switch below the speedo.

The other totally new model for 2008 is the FXCW Softail Rocker, with an immense 240mm rear tyre that you won’t see the like of on any other factory bike, what looks almost like a free floating rear fender, and with 36.5 degrees of rake on the front forks ending with the sexy curved riser that gave the VROD such a distinctive line. There is also a Rocker C variation that has a trick fold out pillion seat that stows away under the saddle for an extra $2200(!!).

Before I put my petrol head on for a completely unscientific comparison, a quick primer on biking:

• less weight => faster acceleration => more fun
• more torque => faster acceleration => more fun
• peak torque at higher revs => longer acceleration between gear changes => more fun
• fatter rear tyre => more rubber on the road => better traction => more fun
• shorter wheelbase => smaller turning radius => faster cornering => more fun

So, with that out of the way: Both new Harley’s have the same 96 cubic inch lump and 6 speed gear box that give Tave the ability to give her Street Bob a fist full, and leave my 88 cubic inch Fat Boy in her dust. Although the Rocker comes in a little heavier at 690lbs versus the Street Bob’s 666lbs, it still packs an extra 6 ft-lbs of torque compared to my 720lb Fat Boy (85 ft-lbs for the Fat Boy’s 88 cu, versus 91 ft-lbs for the Street Bob’s 96 cu) so it should be a lot more fun to ride. As a friend pointed out last year when I complained about the Fat Boy being under powered when I collected my Yamaha MT-01 (110 ft-lbs of torque and 528lbs in weight) from storage, anything is going to feel underpowered afterwards!

So, on paper it looks like the Rocker will be a terrible ride… except that it looks soooo very cool. Damn you Harley Davidson!

The second part of my Linux security article is the top featured artice at IBM developerWorks Linux Zone today. If you’re at all interested on how to push machine lockdown to its absolute limits, then please do check the article out (registration required, sorry).

Where the first part laid the ground work by explaining physical security, and how to remove bash (and other shells) from your Linux installation to take away the easiest way for infiltrators to execute non-validated code on your network; this part of the tutorial is where things get really interesting, and shows you how to build and administer a binary signing system that prevents the kernel from executing any library code or applications that were not signed by you.

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This is the second part of a short series of articles about implementing Phomnemonal, my experimental typing shorthand. The other parts are listed at the end of the article.

What’s in a Name?

Already, I’m tired of calling this thing my experimental typing shorthand, but luckily I had a flash of inspiration yesterday and decided to christen the system Phomnemonal — a contraction of phoneme, and mnemonics, that looks a bit like phenomenal at first glance. Man, I should have been in marketing! :-D

A Phoneme Based Shorthand

I figured that part of the reason that there are so many letters in English spelling is that the language is crazy about retaining the etymology of words. But they are variously descended from the dozens of different languages of all the countries that invaded us over the last few thousand years, kicked our ass and influenced the words we use, so that now there is no consistency in the sounds made by different letter combinations: What is the point of the letter ‘c‘? Sometimes it sounds like ‘k‘ as in curtain, and sometimes like ‘s‘ as in certain. The ‘f‘ in often makes a different sound to the ‘f‘ in of, but the same sound as the ‘ph‘ in phoneme. And then there’s rough, cough and though… the list goes on.

As a first step towards shortening the number of letters typed for a given word, I’ve analysed the sounds we need to make to speak the most commonly written 4000 or so words of English. There 21 distinct consonants plus 12 basic vowel sounds. Here they all are, shown as an example of a word that uses that sound (apologies for leaning towards my own accent here, please point out any problems in the comments):

IANAL (I am not a linguist!), so these sounds probably aren’t grouped correctly and/or have high-falutin’ names that I’m not aware of. I think group 4 are the nasal consonants for instance. Feel free to educate me in the comments.

Short vowel number 6 is the indistinct neutral vowel sound when pronouncing say the, often called a schwa by linguists.

Orthography

In order to make typing as efficient as possible, having one letter represent each sound would be ideal. Unfortunately, there are already 33 sounds in the tables above, so in the first instance, I need to combine any similar sounds or find shortcuts to writing them. The easiest one to eliminate is the schwa, since we often don’t write it anyway, as in peop{}le. Since the aim here is to produce a typing shorthand, there’s no need to distinguish between thy and thigh…

Also, with the Dvorak keyboard layout I have easy access to some extra symbols which can be made good use of, so I have 30 unshifted symbols at my disposal. Anyway, after much shuffling and deliberation this is what I came up with:

This table is in asciibetical order, where most (21) of the roman letters correspond to the sounds we already use them for in long-hand English. Here are all the rules needed to respell words phonetically using the Orthography in table 3:

1. 16 consonants (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, z) represent the sounds you would expect from normal English.
2. The traditional vowel letters (a, e, i, o & u) represent the short vowel sounds from table 2.
3. Each of the corresponding long vowel sounds is represented by a remaining letter or symbol (c, q, y, ‘, w).
4. The remaining burn vowel is represented by `.
5. Any schwa sound between consonants is not written at all. A schwa at the end of a word is written with a `.
6. The thy and thigh sounds are both written with the \ grapheme.
7. The not grapheme is used to write words like didn’t (did- in shorthand).
8. The letter j is also used for the chew sound in addition to jew, since they are difficult sounds to tell apart anyway.
9. The letter x is used for the shoe sound, like some romanisations of Chinese.
10. Since we’ve totally run out of letters, the wing sound is still represented by the digraph ng.
11. Uppercase versions of each letter are written by pressing shift before typing the key for the letter itself. That is, uppercase `, ‘ and \, are ~, “ and | respectively.

An Egzampl

From Wednesday’s Gatorland post:

C apctmnt iz les \n an au` from Kaip Knavrl, and wy w` houping tu visit \ Kenudy Speis Sent` tudei, but wail wy w` at \ Fl’id` M’l on Sundei wy ekspyryunsd \ most inkredibl \und` st’m I hav ev` syn. Az wy pckd c baikz autsaid, \ q araund uz akxly krakld f’ a frakxn ov a seknd in antisipaixn ov \ laudist pyl ov \und` I hav ev` h`d. Les \an a minit lait`, az wy daxed f’ kuv` in \ M’l itself \ hevnz oupnd f’ xytz ov draiving rein pep`d wi\ krakz ov laitning ‘lmoust dairektly ouv`hed. I had nou intenxn ov trying tu akxly raid in \at kaind ov we\`, so Mundei m’ningz svia we\` w’ning woz ynuf tu disweid uz from jansing \ raund trip tu \ Speis Sent`.

Compared to the original long-hand, this is already 104 characters (or almost 15%) shorter. That’s despite the fact that a few of the phonetically spelled words are actually slightly longer than their long-hand counterparts. And we haven’t even started working out the abbreviations yet!

In the Next Installment

Now that we have a complete alphabet along with the sounds made by each letter, in the next part I’ll tackle Diphthongs (the example above shows several of these already if you can’t wait), and the first 30 abbreviations in Phomnemonal (pronounced founemonl). Those abbreviations will be 30 words chosen from the 50 most commonly used in written English to be represented by a single grapheme from the orthography in table 3 above. Even if you only learn only those 30 abbreviations and nothing else, you will gain more than 10% in your typing speed.

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Our apartment is less than an hour from Cape Canaveral, and we were hoping to visit the Kennedy Space Center today, but while we were at the Florida Mall on Sunday we experienced the most incredible thunder storm I have ever seen. As we parked our bikes outside, the air around us actually crackled for a fraction of a second in anticipation of the loudest peel of thunder I have ever heard. Less than a minute later, as we dashed for cover in the Mall itself the heavens opened for sheets of driving rain peppered with cracks of lightning almost directly overhead. I had no intention of trying to actually ride in that kind of weather, so Monday morning’s severe weather warning was enough to disuade us from chancing the round trip to the Space Center.

Our apartment is also less that 5 minutes from Gator Land, “Alligator Capital of the World”. Determined to go out and enjoy the 92 degrees heat, we rode over to Gator Land and had a fabulous day. Thanks to The Entertainment Book for Orlando I ordered a couple of weeks back, we had a coupon for two tickets at half price, so including drinks, rides, a professional photo of Octavia wrapped in a giant python and a snack each at lunch the whole day cost less than $60!

Although they sell themselves as a half day of entertainment, we easily spent the whole day looking around, and didn’t leave until 4pm. The highlight was seeing the Gator Jumperoo at feeding time, pictured above. Some of the largest 15 foot gators cleared 6 feet out of the water to get at plucked chickens on a hook… All in all a fabulous day out if you get the opportunity!