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April 26, 2006
How to determine and recover from Winsock2 corruption
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811259
Posted by daen at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2006
Back to business
Easter holidays over, so I'm back to work. We went to a part of Denmark called Skagen, at the very northernmost tip of mainland Jutland. I'll post about it later on.
Posted by daen at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2006
Keyboard salad
"Keyboard salad" is one of those phrases you think you've heard a lot, but which is actually not that common. I understand it to mean the random/accidental/spurious characters that, for example, a clog-wearing rat dancing on your keyboard might produce (unless it's Ratbert - cf rat dance). An example of Danish keyboard salad might be:
ÆLøl'på'lpsaåfvpdåpåf'40u8ikkjsoiv97'f907u2r89ø
YMMV.
Posted by daen at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2006
Now that's coffee
Stef: I get the sense you want plain black coffee
Sid: Oh no. Not just black. Black hole black. When the coffee has a ring of Cerenkov blue around it you'll have gotten it right.
From User Friendly 28 March 2006 (by Illiad)
Posted by daen at 01:38 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2006
Martin Newell on the redtops on Jeremy Clarkson on holiday
Martin Newell: could he get any funnier? The shocking answer is: apparently. Like a fine wine (or some sort of French cheese) his blog has ripened with time. It's gone from a simple humourous and absurd (and thinly-veiled) commentary on life in Wivenhoe into a deeper and more philosophical humour, the kind that openly quotes Jeremy Clarkson and makes little mention of Gary the Elephant.
Update 7/4-2006: "Martin's uncanny satire sense tingled. Something was wrong with that blog entry. Very, very wrong. A mere mortal might not see it, but the usual subtle interplay of words was so clearly missing. Perhaps it was the illness. Or maybe something else. Whatever. With one nicotine-stained finger, made corpselike by the pale flickering light of his Red, Green and Blue Rizla monitor, he pressed the Delete button. An irrational sense of relief flooded through him, although he instinctively knew there would be hell to pay from the denizens of the lower blogosphere. Such is satire's midnight bargain with the Devil, he thought to himself, as the banshee wail began, almost inaudibly at first, then rapidly rising to a painful keening shriek like a tightening circle of winter timberwolves. There are always victims, one way or another."
Posted by daen at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)
Denmark : economic miracle?
My prescience amazes even my good self sometimes. Just 3 days ago I blogged about the Economist Intelligence Unit ranking Denmark as the foremost business climate in the World. Now it seems that Denmark's wise approach to fiscal responsibility has paid off in another way : the National Bank reports that the country is free of foreign debt for the first time in over 50 years.
The low point was in 1988, when foreign debt reached nearly 50% of GDP. Since then, an insistence on balancing the budget has seen that debt turned into a surplus. There are no plans to hand out surpluses as tax cuts though : instead interest from the surplus will be used for public-sector projects.
The other thing I presciently mentioned was strikes : bus drivers on 16 lines were on strike today over a spitting incident: a passenger spat at a driver, who then was not allowed to go home to shower and change clothes. Ugly stuff, and my sympathies are with the bus drivers (especially as my line probably won't be affected when/if they strike again tomorrow).
Posted by daen at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)
New Asger Jorn record
In September 2003 I blogged that a new record had been set for an Asger Jorn painting, "Titania I", at 4,619,000 Danish kroner. Auctioneers Bruun Rasmussen tonight beat that by 1,781,000 Danish kroner tonight when they sold "Tristesse Blanche" ("White Sadness") for 6,400,000 Danish kroner (the link is probably time limited) at an auction of 100 works by CoBrA artists, raising 30,000,000 DKK in total.
Politiken story here (in Danish).
Posted by daen at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)
April 01, 2006
Copenhagen buses
The last few days have been a bit exciting on the Copenhagen buses.
Wednesday and Thursday saw the Dannebrog (the Danish flag) flying in tandem from the buses because of a "Bulgarian state visit", apparently. The Dannebrog is also flown on Royal occasions - birthdays, weddings etc.
On Friday, one of the Dannebrog flags was replaced with one of a number of international flags to celebrate Dialogday, a celebration of the diversity of Coepnhageners' ethnic backgrounds - one in five has foreign roots. The flags chosen were representative of those backgrounds - Iceland, Italy and Iran among them.
Today, we took a trip into town on the number 19. Usually, the 19 is one of the older yellow buses (like this but without the red stripes).
But today's trip was on a new lightweight bus made by VDL Berkhof of Belgium (wikipedia entry here). It's a model SB200, HUR number 1000 (you can read more technical info here). It appears to be a bit wider inside, and has a single exit. It seems HUR (the Copenhagen city area travel authority) has been running them for a while according to this forum thread on myldretid.dk (in Danish).
Posted by daen at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)
Le employment
Much has been written about what's happening in France. If I was a recent graduate about to enter the workforce, I'd be pretty pissed off that the rules had been changed under me. To recap, the CPE law says that employers would have the right to fire staff under 26 without explanation over an employee's two year trial period. After the first months, they must give two weeks' notice, and after six months the notice period is one month. President Chirac has declared the law constitutional, but suggested that the period be reduced to one year.
Derek Lowe has picked up on this. It's a funny thing, but when American commentators hear about labour issues in Europe, they nod sagely and say, "Ahh. Old Europe. Socialism. Doesn't work, does it?". He hasn't actually gotten the point that the students in France aren't pissed off about the fact that employers can fire staff in the first two years of their jobs (they always could), but that they can fire them without reason and on reduced notice. This is not good. I'm all in favour of labour flexibility, but under CPE if your boss simply doesn't like you (or makes a pass at you which you turn down) then you're out on your ear with one month's notice, thank you very much, goodbye with no recourse to a labour tribunal. Except that might have been the job you wanted to start your career. Doesn't look good on a CV, does it?
Several commentators have posted the usual anti-French/anti-Europe garbage too, which as usual flies in the face of actuality. The US economy is not in a good state. The fact is that the enormous and massive engine of commerce in the US has been running without sufficient lube for about 20 years, and it's simply momentum keeping it running. One day, the system is going to jam solid, and the whole thing is going jump off of its mountings and land in the laps of the smug US economists and politicians who abdicated responsibility and put the bankers in charge of the economy (which is like putting an alcoholic in charge of a brewery - they'll impress you by increasing beer production, but you're left wondering where all that extra product went).
The problems in France and Germany are simply that their economies are different to the US. France actually embodies some fairly basic capitalist principles which are no stranger to US companies : globalization (Toyota built its latest manufacturing plant there), foreign investment (40% of French quoted companies are foreign owned) and recent decoupling of private enterprise from the state. But France also has a progressive social agenda which the US lacks, and this is a source of some of France's woes. Its primary and secondary healthcare system is enormous and much-abused, and labour security has been a deeply engrained ethic.
Villepin's government is trying to reduce long-term unemployment. Unfortunately, the CPE law will simply create further uncertainty among an already uncertain graduate labour market, shift power into the hands of unscrupulous employers and make it harder for the best students to find the best jobs.
The situation is Denmark is interesting, and one which 99.99% of US commentators neglect completely. Socialism in Denmark is a reality, perhaps more so than in France. Healthcare, education and public transport are funded by the hefty taxes levied, and it has been that way for a long time. As in France, there is considerable resistance to changing the system. Even under perhaps the most rightwing government ever to take office, there is little stomach for deregulating any of it. There have, admittedly, been reforms in healthcare, education, employment and taxation, but compared to, say, Thatcher in the 80's, these are as nought.
And I hope it stays that way. I share that wish with the Economist Intelligence Unit who have recently ranked Denmark as having the number one business climate in the World between 2006 and 2011.
I love things like this - it completely confuses libertarian economists who cast around for mitigating factors - maybe Denmark is too small, too special, too strange. The fact is, it's a good political and economic model, carefully cultivated over a hundred years of democratic debate (with a small interruption between 1939 and 1945). The Danish political system is based on proportional representation, so anyone who has a view can find a voice in parliament. Union/employer relations are stunningly cordial. That's not to say that there aren't disagreements or strikes (and sometimes the strikes are annoylingly unplanned) but broad employment conditions and salary levels are discussed. This is because Danish students are encouraged from an early level to participate in decision making. High school kids here are often highly socially engaged, and this engagement follows them through to university and into the workforce. It's hard to feel dispossessed by society when you've been taking an active part in it virtually since birth. Danish businesses do fairly well here - Novo Nordisk, Mærsk, LEGO (OK, they have problems), Arla, B&O. And the biotech/biomedical sector here employs 40,000 people. Not bad for a small country.
Of course, there are exceptions and problems and things that don't work. But the impression one gets is that the Danes have spent a long time trying to get a holistic system together and have for the large part succeeded.
It makes me nervous when politicians start talking about making wholesale changes, and it makes me depressed when US commentators start talking about things they know nothing about. I hope the French government goes back to the drawing board on this - and that Dansk Folkeparti don't start getting ideas.
Posted by daen at 12:00 PM