Low-Cost Airlines Price-Cheating

Low-cost airlines are a nice thing: they give us cheap and no-frills travel, compared to traditional airlines. But recently, they are resorting to unfair practices in their pricing, showing false low base prices, then add on additional costs which cannot be avoided. This is plain cheating, and the European Union is already considering action against this and will outlaw this practise, as seen on 13.May in the Telegraph newspaper.

But this practise is still going on, as my recent purchase of a Jet2.com plane ticket shows: base price is £15.96. Then comes a taxes and charges fee of £109.00. Steep. Sure, the other regular airlines also do this, and their price also often is more than 50% tax and "charges". But then there is an additional charge for the baggage of £49.96. Then a £20 fee for checking-in online. So what if I would not check in? I would not be allowed to fly. So why is this fee put separately, instead of being included in the mandatory base price? That base price is pure fiction, is just there in order to look good (low) and to attract customers. And it is illegal, to lie to customers about the price of a product, as blatantly as Jet2.com does this here. There are still more fees: £7.00 for fuel supplement. Why is this not in the "taxes and charges" included? Payment card fee for £7.53. Maybe they want me to pay with cash? And then the final insult: a booking fee of £7.27. This fee is for the convenience of booking the flight. Maybe the next fee would be a luggage drop fee, for allowing to bring your baggage to the flight check-in desk. Or a gate-transfer fee, for the convenience of being brought by bus from the gate to the plane. Or...

Here is the screenshot of the fees from my web booking, in case anyone thinks I made this up:

Refreshing the Design of this Blog

It has been a while since I have posted on my blog. In the past 6 months I have posted more on Facebook, and also have tried out Google+. This led to a decline of my blog and Twitter activities.

Now I have chosen a new design for this blog. Also properly equipped with all the social networking buttons under each post. The people at Blogger have done a good job in the last year and have added many new features, such as these buttons, and also making new designs. Also there is now a feature in the template which allows to automatically format this blog content for mobile phones - this is very useful.

The app "BlogSpace"

This is my first post to this blog using a little app on the iPhone called BlogSpace. It gives me an overview of my various blogs on Blogger.com, and let's me post to each one. Seems to work fine so far. One slight negative issue is that the title field is difficult to click on - it is very close to the top, and one can easily hit the cancel button instead, when trying to enter a blog title.

The Movie "BRAZIL" - My Review

This film came out in 1985. At that time I watched a review of it in one of our German TV culture programs, but I did not pay much attention and did not watch it in the cinema.

I did not see the film until sometime in the 1990s, I think it was on German TV, in a dubbed version. And I was immediately fascinated by this movie’s emotional approach to the very important topic of life in a totalitarian society. Since then I had the opportunity to see the film a few times on the big screen, and everytime I see it I discover new details. The most recent viewing was on Saturday, 26.March, here in Leeds at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, and it compelled me to write a review about it which I want to share with you.

You may find info about this film at the IMDB site of BRAZIL, where there is an outline of the plot and many other reviews (I also submitted a short version of this review). So I will not go into details but rather give my own impression and my interpretation of some of its content.

The movie is absolutely hilarious, pointing out with the means of irony, satire, and parody the flaws of totalitarian societies. But these flaws are actually also the flaws of our own society, and this movie reveals this brilliantly. Besides the overall theme of a fictional retro-future all-encompassing dictatorship, the movie has several layers of topics that are very relevant to our current society. I would like to list these topics here:


Work environment

The satire with regards to the aspects of working life is so heartwarming because we all have most likely encountered in our own work life some of the pathetic specimens that are depicted in this movie.

There is the incompetent and cowardly boss Mr Kurtzman, who is unable to take responsibility for anything and delegates everything to his smart subordinate Sam Lowry. He even makes him falsify his own signature, which is one of the items for which Sam will later be held responsible.

There is the false sense of actionism and energetic work ethics in the Ministry of Information Retrieval, when the supervisor runs through the halls, followed by a crowd of subservient subordinates who are requesting decisions which are swiftly given by the superior.

Hilarious are the dire working conditions (dark narrow office) in the Ministry of Information Retrieval which are in much contrast to this energetic positive work attitude.

Very funny is the petty competition of fellow coworkers. For example when the neighbour of Sam Lowry pulls the shared desk towards his own side. Or when he tries to show off with his (non-existent) computer skills.

Then there is the way how office workers find a way around the rules and regulations to make their work life more bearable, in this case by watching a classic movie channel. In our own world this is replaced by web browsing.


Totalitarian Government

"We in the West" live in democracies, but much of the double speak that is shown in the film has slowly penetrated our own political life, by our own corrupted political classes, and we are often not anymore aware of it.

The cruel and impartial attitude of the security forces who make prisoners and put them into these sacks - which evoke the images of hooded prisoners in Abu Ghraib. These security forces are "normal" people, chat about the misery of work such as headache from helmets, but then treat their subjects that they took into custody with uncompassionate harshness, and all is done strictly according to procedures and regulations.

The government’s pursuit of suspected terrorists and the efforts in uncovering the hidden connections between them, which lead to paranoia and to suspicion of connections where there are none. The example is the pursuit of the freelancer Archibald Tuttle, who just wants to work as a heating engineer, because he enjoys it, but who does not want to comply with the tight rules and regulations of that trade. We see currently the same by linking every terrorist act to the omnipresent "Al Quaida" network, even if the links are unproven (the war in Iraq comes to mind ...). Also the phrase "9/11 changed everything" shows how much of this movie has already become reality.

The emptiness of the slogans, expressed in public announcements and also in the posters that are hanging everywhere, shows the paranoia, feeds the public fear of terrorists and justifies the state actions. (I wish there would be somewhere a collection of these posters that are in the movie in the background in so many scenes ...)

The refusal of state authority to admit that an error has been made, is so true also in our current "system". The heartlessness and lack of compassion by the same authority when they realise that an error has been made. The overall long winded process of appeal when such a mistake it tried to be rectified by a citizen. And the labelling of such a citizen then as a potential terrorist.


General society

The obsession with youth and cosmetic surgery, represented by Sam Lowry’s mother’s plastic surgery and her desire to look young. The parody of cosmetic surgery peaks twice: in once instance the person with whom the cosmetic surgery went terribly wrong, dies. In the other instance, in the end Sam’s mother looks like the love interest of the protagonist in an Oedipean twist, although only in the mind of Sam.

The emphasis on cleanliness in the streets, where passers-by are upset when a few papers are dropped on the streets, but where nobody appears to protest against the dirty war against the presumed terrorist thread.

The celebration of Christmas which has lost all its inner spiritual meaning and is hollowed into simple formality of giving thoughtless interchangeable arbitrary thoughtless presents, all done in the same packaging.

The consumer society which has eaten up all that was once in spiritual meaning ("Consumers for Christ") and which encompasses all the life of people. Shopping, expensive goods, and even when a bombing occurs, the show must go on (in the restaurant). But the true essence of enjoyment is lost: food is just a pile of coloured mash and can only be identified by a picture that comes with it.

There are two types of overall attitude which make a totalitarian system function and keep the protagonists alive: one attitude is represented by the silence and under-the-radar-screen-operating main character, Sam Lowry, whose main concern is that he might accidentally get noticed, which he tries to avoid by all means. The other attitude is represented by the ambition and suppression of the conscience by Jack Lint, who is actively supporting the system and is one of its representatives, in executing torture.

This society appears to show a blind faith in technology and in its believe that it works and solves everything – demonstrated to be not the case, as a simple bug can cause a terrible deadly error, and as the technological gadgets appear to malfunction at any opportunity.

The complex technology of climate control for individual housing which is difficult to handle. Overall there are many hoses and wires, in the houses, in the restaurant, during the cleaning process of the administration building. Everything is wired, is connected, and hoses go everywhere.

The annoying dealing with the monopolised services of Central Services. Everybody in our own world and time has had to deal with such non-responsive entities (BT comes to my mind). Free and independent enterprise (as personified by Tuttle) is illegal.

The overabundance of bureaucracy as it stifles all functioning of a society. The overall formalisation of all transactions with receipts and receipts for receipts, the rules and regulations that govern everything. (Reminds me somehow of "health and safety", and of the quality assurance formalisms that have in recent years stifled much of the creativity in UK.) The strict adherence to these rules appear to give even the cruellest government action a coat of legitimacy, because it is all done exactly according to the rules.

The loss of natural environment, as a consequence of providing energy and power and of overpopulation in densely urban cities. There appears to be no park, no trees, no green area. People live in dense highriser blocks without any daylight. Roads outside of the city lead to power plants, through deserted polluted landscapes, which the driver cannot see, because big billboards show advertisement and government slogans, depicting among other things landscape and blue sky, which is no longer in existence in the real world.

The desensitation and cruelisation of children: they grow up in dire housing complexes, mirroring the worst of "council estates", and they play war games with weapons. For Christmas they get guns as presents, and they play out security force and prisoners, with realistically hooding their prisoners as the adult world is doing it. This desensitation is also a reality in our real world, by the proliferation of ego-shooter computer games.


Filmographic

This movie also pays homage to classic movies, as they appear to be the only thing that brings real joy to people, but also that they act as an escapism for the unbearable reality of the present life. Very funny the reference to Eisenstein’s "Battleship Potemkin" in the scene where the security forces walk down the stairs, and a lonely cleaning equipment cart rolls down these stairs (instead of a stroller like in the original). Also at one point there is a parallel in the action of the movie to the film that the office workers are watching ("Casablanca"), when Jonathan Price says to his boss "here is looking at you".




Overall this movie is addressing all the above topics not on a rational level, but on a deeply emotional one. The main protagonist has his dreams, and in a very illogical way these dreams meddle with the reality, as he suddenly sees and meets the woman of his dreams.

This film is an emotional appeal for humanity, to do everything to prevent such a society from becoming a reality. Because once it is established, there is nothing that can bring it down – as the very pessimistic ending of the film implies (evil always wins).



Some of my favorite quotes from this movie:

"My complication got a little complication."
"Do you have a form 27 6-B?"
"This phone call is not being recorded."

Trying to update Windows Phone 7 (HTC HD7)

A few weeks ago I read that Microsoft is now sending out the first update of the Windows Phone 7. And together with it came the news that a few phones were already "bricked", that is turned into functionless bricks. See also this article Ars Technica.

A few days ago I got the notification on my HTC HD7 phone that an update is available, and that I would need to connect it to the computer and run ZUNE to install the update. This is actually a pre-update, which corrects some bugs in the general update process.

First I had to update ZUNE itself. Then I connected the phone, went into "settings > update". The "searching for update" took quite long... then I got prompted not to disconnect the phone, and then I waited patiently with this screen:


The phone rebooted, then showed a different screen, with a black/white graphic of a mobile connected to a laptop computer. It appears that this symbol indicated I should connect the phone to the computer - which it already was... After a while the phone rebooted again, this time with the regular screen. Then ZUNE showed "Your device wasn't updated". Error code: 801812C1

I googled this error code and found several entries in various forums. One recommended to stop the device recognition process after the first reboot. I was only able to do that by stopping the process "update.exe" through the Windows Task Manager. But that did not help... the error still remained, no update happened.

Another forum advice was to unplug the USB cable for 2 seconds, then plug it back in. Well, the message on the screen says that exactly this must not be done. However, I gave it a try - but it did not help.

There is another "update" announced to be available shortly: The "No-Donuts" update, with copy-and-past. But first I have to manage getting this first update onto the phone...

During my update trials, the phone so far has always booted properly the 2nd time, when it returned to its regular state. I keep trying - maybe I will get lucky, and the phone will finally "brick"; then I will bring it back to the O2 store and swap it for an HTC Desire with Android.

RIP, Jane Russell

On 28.February 2011 one of the last great Hollywood icons died: Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell. I knew her films already as a child, and I especially liked the movie "The Paleface" with Bob Hope, where she plays a woman who once in a while hits him on the head with a pan. For me as an 8 year old, this film - especially the hitting on the head - has shaped my image of women for many years.

In 2003 I once had the pleasure to meet her personally, at an afternoon event at the TCM store in Los Angeles, where Robert Osborne hosted an afternoon with her as a special guest. We chatted about movies and classic movie channels. Also about Germany, where some of her ancestors were from. A very friendly woman, and a great actress.

She will be greatly missed by every fan of the Classic Hollywood. Rest in peace, Jane.

Windows Phone 7 - a second look

For a few weeks I had now the HTC HD7 with Windows Phone 7, the new mobile OS by Microsoft. In my first brief note about the initial user experience, I noted many shortcomings, both compared with the previous version of Windows Mobile 6.5 and with the current other smartphones competition. So what remains of this negative first impression after a few weeks of use?

The overall resume of these first few weeks using Windows Phone 7 is that the update is urgently needed. This version of Windows Phone fall short on so many expectations. These are often quite little things, but sometimes also major issues. It makes you think if the engineers/developers have ever tested their product in a real life situation. Probably not.

Here are some of these issues:

- After making a phone call, any respectable phone shows the call duration. Not so Windows Phone 7. No display about the length of the call, neither in the call history.
- When a text message is received, many phones show a button to make a call to this number. Not so Windows Phone 7. The only option it to reply. No "call this number", no "store to contacts". This is absolutely inadequate. One clicks onto the sender, then one can make a call or store the number in the address book.
- the phone does only display battery status and signal strength on the start screen when switching on the phone. Afterwards only the clock is displayed in the top right corner. There would be space for a heading info line, but it is just plain empty. Would be very useful to have this info, especially when doing longer online sessions.
- the tap on the display sometimes does not work, especially when it is on a text link with small fonts. One almost needs to use a stylus to click the link then, as it would not react to the pressure of a finger. Has probably a technical reason: because the overall "click strength" is taken from the absolute number of active pixels being pressed; and since a small text has only few active pixels, this number is small. Would be better to have a relative measure. But this is just a speculation...
- the finger sliding is often interpreted as a side swipe instead of a vertical swipe, and then the page changes. This has been reported by many other people in a variety of apps. It could have several reasons: a driver problem of the display, a bug in the gesture API of Windows Phone 7, or an incorrect use of this API for detecting swipe direction by the app developers.
- Why is the battery strength only shown graphically and not as a numeric percentage?
- The Marketplace search returns too many wrong things. When I search for an app by a name, for example "Twitter" in the apps category, a lot of songs and albums also appear with the name "Twitter" in their name... this should be filtered.
- Many apps offered for Windows Phone 7 are inferior to their counterparts on other smart phones. This can have several reasons: Windows Phone 7 is new, so many apps are just in their first version, with updates (hopefully) to come. Or the Windows Phone 7 market is so small (3%?) compared to iPhone or Android, that the developers neglect it and put not much effort in. There are a few notable exceptions though.
- There is no synchronising of data/files with such files on a PC. When connecting the phone by cable to a computer, there is not much that can be done. I was hoping that I could drag some files over, or have some files automatically synced as it was great on the old Windows Mobile OS where Office files (for Excel, Word) could be automatically be stored, edited, and synchronised on both devices. This capability has now been lost and can only be sort of emulated via a much more complicated method through cloud computing. The Zune software synchronises music and video, but that I use almost never.
- No copy-and-paste. This makes it very difficult to edit Excel files, modify entries in the contacts list, etc. I cannot believe why it is so difficult to implement this feature? Also the first iPhone generation did not have this...
- The title headings of pages in apps use a very stylish, elegant, large font, but these titles stretch over several pages, therefore cannot be read fully on one page. This is especially annoying when the app only has one page, because the rest of the heading is just cut off. Here a bit more "function over form" would have been better.

There is something positive to be said about Windows Phone 7: it looks quite nice. The big tiles are more attractive than the icons/buttons of other phones, easier to touch. The also can show live content, although most apps still stick with a static image.

There is good potential: if all these little bugs/annoyances that I mentioned above are being fixed, and if there would be more options for users to create additional pages instead of just having one title page and one app page, then this may actually take off. Installing and updating apps works as smooth as with the iPhone.

So, Microsoft engineers, keep working and please produce an update soon (and without "bricking" it...) !

SCORM in XSTREAM

The first semester in this academic year has been concluded in January. My major work had been in the the Mobile Wireless Comms (MWC) MSc module: I have experimented with SCORM-compliant Sharable Content Objects (SCO), integrated in our Learning Management System (LMS) XSTREAM and accessible remotely through a web interface. SCORM enables such SCOs to provide feedback about the learning progress of the student, by having small assignments in the SCO which automatically are being fed back into the LMS. In principle this works fine, but there are a few issues:
- the connection between the SCO and the LMS times out, and then some error messages appear at the user's end. This is quite annoying, and it also may interrupt the data flow: sometimes the results from the SCORM quizzes were not reported back correctly to the LMS.
- new versions of an existing SCO will create a new column in XSTREAM gradebook. This makes the handling of the overall marking quite cumbersome, as all different versions of the SCO grades will have to be considered.
- in principle it is possible to have several questions/quizzes within one SCO. But this proves somewhat more prone to failures in reporting back the quiz results, which leads to missing and wrong grade entries on XSTREAM.

Overall, the concept of having these interactive learning objects in the form of SCOs was quite popular with students: they were engaging very well, and the assignments were designed in such a way that students could try out examples. At the core was here some additional JavaScript code, which allowed these SCOs to give each student a different set of problems to solve: the basic formulas and equations were the same, but the individual numbers and parameters were different for each student. This allowed the student to repeatedly try a particular problem, everytime with a different set of numbers.

The downside of using this SCORM-based approach is that it is very time-consuming for the teacher: the preparation of these SCORM-compatible SCOs takes longer than the traditional lecture/tutorial preparations, and fixing the technical issues regarding the incorrect grade feedback added an additional hassle. As a consequence, I am now preparing a set of "good practise" recommendations on how to best use SCORM in this context of XSTREAM.

Also, I will present this work at the CAL 2011 conference in Manchester, April 13-15.

Windows Phone HTC HD 7 - First Impression

Two weeks ago, right after the arrival at Manchester Airport and while waiting in the baggage claim area, my mobile phone stopped working: the touch screen was no longer operable. I noticed one spec on the screen at one location, as if the layers of the touch screen surface have collapsed at that point. While the screen still showed data and the buttons of the phone worked fine, the touch screen no longer responded to any touch.

Fortunately a few days later my contract allowed me to get a free upgrade. Which phone should I get? I am already using an Apple iPhone for project-related work, so I would look for other alternatives. Android looked good, but in order to get the HTC Desire HD I would have to switch to Three, and I would prefer to remain with O2. O2 only offers the lower-end version HTC Desire as an Android phone. Since around 1998 I had quite good experiences with Windows CE devices: first the PDAs, then PDA phones. I liked the backward compatibility and the ability to edit Word and Excel docs on the mobile device, so also my most recent phone had been a Windows Mobile (6.1). Since October the new Windows Mobile Phone 7 devices were out - breaking completely the backward compatibility and actually offering less functionality (I wonder why it is so hard to implement copy/cut-and-paste; Apple had the same initial problem). There is still one phone out there with Windows Mobile 6.5.3, which still offered the old well-proven functions, such as synchronising with Outlook (even without Exchange) and backward compatibility, so I could run some of the software that I still was using (for example CodeWallet was a very nice utility for storing passwords; they are working on an iPhone app). But then I got lured by the latest Windows Phone: the HTC HD7.

The upgrade was free, and so I got my phone on last Friday. And here are some first experiences:

The overall look of the interface is very slick. Nice fonts, although the overall stylishness and coolness sometimes leads to text being shown too large and going beyond the screen.

There appear not many customisable settings, especially in comparison with the iPhone. There is only one main screen with those tiles (which can be arranged and configured), then there is one other screen which sorts all "application" icons in an alphabetical column. I have not yet found out if one can actually define more screens, which I would prefer.

Similar to the Apple Appstore one can also here directly download apps. The selection appears much smaller than for the iPhone; also the prices for many apps are somewhat high; but there are also free apps. These apps appear somewhat of a lesser quality as the ones for the iPhone: for example the Twitter app for Windows Mobile does only support one account, whereas the same app for iPhone supports multiple accounts - although both apps come directly from Twitter. Similarly the Facebook app, which works fine, but seems to have only few configurable options on the Windows Phone side. It also shows less information on Windows Phone, for example you cannot even see which people are behind a "like".

In some other cases there is stylishness over function: for example on the "people" tile, the faces of contacts pop up in a random manner. While this looks interesting, it has no meaning at all, as these face popups appear only to be random. It would have been great if these would be linked to actual activity online, for example when a contact post something on Facebook, or when an email arrives. But the faces fade in and out even when there is no network; when I see those faces and then check for the actual activity of that person, there is no correlation whatsoever to the tile display and the actual activity.

One positive thing: all contacts are now accessible under one tile, providing one access point for contacts from Outlook (Exchange), Facebook, and all other email accounts. This is really useful.

On the other hand, there is no common joint inbox, as it is on the iPhone: instead each email account has its own tile on the main screen.

One big advantage of the old Windows Mobile phones had been the capability of synchronising data and files with a PC, although the synchronisation suffered from terrible programming of ActiveSync, which often resulted in duplicate items and updating of the wrong file. The new Windows Phone has replaced this by using the Zune software. First one has to download a 120 MB big file for the Zune installation, then one has to wait for another 30 minutes until all the updates for this have been downloaded and installed, then Zune is ready. Supposedly the synchronisation of the Windows Phone with the PC would work from there. But I had connected the phone per USB to the computer already before I installed the software, assuming (hoping) that there would be some kind of self-installing driver there, as it is with many USB devices. Unfortunately that was a wrong hope - the device did not install itself, and when I tried then to use Zune for installing the drivers, the phone did not show up there in the "device" settings. That had worked better with the iPhone on the Apple Mac... no surprise about this.

So it appears to be a big problem that I had connected the phone to the PC before I had installed Zune... fortunately I found the solution in a forum, and I was finally able to have the HD7 installed as a "portable device". But then it did still did not show up in Zune... until I realised that I had to click an "ok" somewhere in order to move on. Strange GUI...

Unfortunately this Zune software only synchronises media files, but no other files such as Excel, Word etc. There is some mention on synchronising "One Note" files, but I will have to explore this further.

The camera takes excellent sharp pictures, and the 4.3" display (800x480) is very nice: bright and crisp.

Overall the experience with this phone so far is mixed. I still am looking for a proper way of getting the synchronisation going. On the windowsphone.live.com website, it says I can sync notes from my phone by tapping on "Office>All>Sync". But that does not exist... instead there is mention of a "Sharepoint", which I found out costs something... so it looks pretty bad, and I may not be able to get my car petrol statistics or the list of all my flights (all in Excel files) over to this mobile phone, which really is a pity.

A year ago Microsoft had about 7% market share of smart phones. This has now dropped to 3%... and if they do not soon provide an update to their new Windows Phone OS with all the features one would expect (cut-and-paste, synchronisation of Office files with PC), then soon there will be the well deserved end of their attempts in the mobile market. Windows Phone does have potential - the look-and-feel is good, but it needs more substance.

Final Departure from India

A short breakfast in the hotel at 7am, then leaving with the free Shuttle to the nearby airport. Have to show the passport at many occasions before we can board the plane. Everything is on time and runs smooth.

There are rain clouds over Dubai, and there is a little drizzle on the ground. In the terminal I cannot resist going to McDonalds and ordering a juicy burger - the first meat after 13 days. I guess I am not made for vegetarian life...

The connecting flight is on time. The route goes actually over Iraq, and when we are over Baghdad, I just am eating lunch, listening to Gustav Mahler's 9th Symphony through the fabulous Emirates entertainment system. A somehow surreal combination...

I do not feel very well, the throat hurts, and I feel feverish and warm. Take two more Lemsip cups and try to rest.

Arrival in Manchester without problems. Luggage is there, and then our group parts: Gina and Deborah have a taxi waiting, and Brian and myself take a train to Leeds.