The Linux Extremist

I read an item in the newspaper yesterday which made me raise an eyebrow. Apparently, Al Gore is on his way to Oslo, Norway to accept his Nobel Prize for his work in “raising awareness” about climate change. From there, he will be going on to Bali for the present international conference on protecting the environment.

I really hope I’m not the only one who has spotted some disturbing things: air travel is supposed to be bad. It is supposedly a major contributor to the carbon emissions problem. Yet Al Gore and all the Bali delegates aren’t canoeing to their destination.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. These international conferences tend not to happen in crap, nasty places; rather, they meet in Bali, which is supposed to be beautiful, warm and have sandy beaches, and Rio which is beautiful, warm and has sandy beaches, and…you get the idea. Neither conference location is close or convenient for most of the delegates from countries that are supposedly the root of the problem, namely Europe and North America. In fact, Bali and Rio aren’t particularly close for the “new era polluters” like India and China. Indeed, if one wanted to pick places on the map that would require the most carbon burned in order to reach them, only the Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica would have been better.

Meanwhile, these same politicians and “experts” are drawing up a blueprint to tell the rest of us how to live. I can imagine Al Gore, puffed up with pride and pomposity, sitting down to a lobster dinner with these people, basking in the glow of their mutual self-righteousness. To someone who has to stand in a queue on a cold December day in West Sussex in order fill up their car with increasingly expensive fuel, this is an irritation. If they continue to fail to lead by example, these officials are bound to provoke a backlash.

I don’t think they get it. For someone who goes to Tesco on Saturday mornings and watches every penny, picking store own brand when possible and feeling like getting “Tesco Finest” is something of an indulgence, being told that one’s life has to change is fairly ridiculous. I’m not poor, Britain is not a poor country (clue: poverty doesn’t generally involve owning satellite dishes), but the grand assumption that I and others can afford more green taxes is ridiculous.

Forget the punishment element of it too. Public transport in this country is expensive and its coverage is too poor to get me to my work directly. At least in Britain I have some idea of the relationship of these costs to what I pay to drive myself; driving is cheaper. This cost in Continental Europe is masked through paying higher taxes. Meanwhile the governments of the world are expecting people like myself, and the Pierres, Hanses and Luigis to keep the economy going through spending and borrowing.

My father once told me, “it’s easy to be socialist when you’re rich”. The same applies to Green; these officials think about people like myself as an abstraction, part of a faceless mass that has to take on their prescriptions of less consumption, more taxation, and greater inconvenience. This elite feels they have done their duty by “raising awareness”; their lifestyles which span across the globe do not change.

They should be warned: the other day, I did give up my car because I was tired from spending hours on the road, due to the fact that planning for roads was simply inadequate for the demand. I had to take a cab from a train station to cover the deficiency in public transport. En route, the driver told me that he was sick of the taxes on fuel, sick of how the local authority had rejigged the traffic lights in favour of buses, and anyway, those buses were due to disappear given their subsidy had been cut off, and said that “no one trusts this government”. Unless the same people who tell us that our lives have to change, show some sign they can change their lives too (I know for a fact they could meet online rather than go cavorting with Balinese bikini girls), they will be met with this skepticism, and rightly so.

Just to show I’m not totally an old grouch, here’s a video of what is arguably the best theme song to the holiday season:

And here is a video of the absolute worst:

The Bank of England cut its base rates yesterday from 5.75 to 5.5 percent. Stock markets rose. The “alleluia” chorus in the newspapers was near universal. Additionally, President Bush just announced a deal by which mortgage lenders would “voluntarily” keep rates down for subprime borrowers. Those panicky, nervous herd animals we call investors moved in a positive direction.

I, however, am not overjoyed. This is not just because I’m a professional curmudgeon, who sees a dark cloud in every silver lining. Working in technology does give one a dim view of humanity, and one of the things I’ve discovered is that it’s very bad to let stupidity go unpunished.

The subprime crisis is stupid. Stupid is a harsh word, not one to be bandied about lightly; it doesn’t just indicate a lack of intelligence, there is a hint of willful lack of understanding too: “I’m going to do what I want to do even when the facts are against me”. But the subprime crisis is a product of just that: banks loaned money to people who hadn’t a hope in hell of paying it back. Now they’re screaming because, ta-da, they woke up and found out that they were never going to be repaid. They spread the poison through the financial system by selling it bundled with other assets; now there is a lot of pain in trying to figure out who is going to pay the cheque.

In steps the Bank of England and Uncle Sam - don’t worry, you fools, we will cut interest rates and thus ease the hurt and make it more likely that you will get something. The bankers heave a sigh of relief, they won’t have to forego all of their bonuses this year, all they have to do is buy a Ferrari instead of an Aston Martin, and get a suit off the rack at Gieves and Hawkes rather than have one custom made. All is well.

Until the next time; as someone in the internet industry, I remember when a mistake at this level of idiocy was last committed, namely at the time of the dot com boom.

Let’s put into context how asinine that was. Boo.com was a leading example; those who have read the book (”Boo Hoo”) written by its sublimely ridiculous founder Ernst Malmsten, will recall how they met with investors and were asked, “What does your market research say?” Malmsten thought that was a daft question, because market research was something one did when one “wanted to market a new brand of toothpaste”. The internet, in his view, relied more on “instinct”. Giving this man money was the financial equivalent of having a vasectomy performed by a lunatic with hedge clippers, but he got $130 million to waste.

I was part of a lesser failure. I worked for a dot com in the Netherlands and was promised $1 million in share options. Unfortunately, the company had a burn rate of $250,000 per month. The directors lived like oriental satraps with lovely offices on the top floor. They had secretaries obviously hired from the finest modelling agencies in Amsterdam. However, the product that was produced was simply not viable. Funding dried up, and the company died.

The Bank of England and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates around 2001 to stave off some of this pain; fortunately, however, it was not an injury they could eliminate altogether. Venture capital for this nonsense disappeared. The foolish companies that had business plans based on hot air have largely been consumed. Internet based businesses are increasingly subject to the same rigours and disciplines as bricks and mortar ones. Stupidity was punished, and we were all better off for it.

The invoice for subprime lending has come due. The chickens have come home to roost, cackle and excrete all over the yard. The worst message that could be sent to the lenders is that they will always have a sugar daddy to count on.

The sugar daddy may indeed do more harm than good; after the stock market crash of 1929, Herbert Hoover was advised to let the pain cycle through, because market forces, and the creative destruction they entail, would ensure that the economy would be more efficient as a result. Hoover chose to intervene and stop the pain; the result, broadly speaking, was the Great Depression.

President Bush and the Bank of England will hopefully take heed . As Herbert Spencer said, “The consequence of shielding men from the results of their folly is to create a world full of fools.” With wisdom can come much grief, and with much grief can come wisdom. Hopefully the inevitable pain can be front loaded, the necessary lessons will be learned, and we can all carry on.

Note: It’s been a while since I published a blog entry - however, I’ve updated the software and now it’s fully up and running again.

I’ll re-open this blog with my experiences with a new laptop.

My HP laptop was - at long last - about to die. All hardware manufacturers put in a lifespan on their equipment, mine was no exception. I replaced the battery and the hard drive, but the computer was taking longer to boot, hard drive failures were starting to crop up, and even the power on button was starting to not respond as it used to: it took enough pressure to crush a golf ball just to switch on the thing.

So for my sins, I got a new Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop - with Windows Vista Ultimate.

I experimented with Vista for a couple of weeks; while it was pretty, it annoyed me nearly instantly. This is a new laptop with a dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM. Why was it taking a solid 10 minutes to boot? Granted, some of the blame lies with Lenovo insisting on stuffing the laptop full of their own bloatware, but even with that removed, its boot time was considerably slower than the laptop that I just left behind.

The experiment was further compounded by purchasing Office 2007. This too was slow to boot on a machine of this power; much has been made about its revamped navigation, but the icon and menus motif leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, it nearly choked on the novel I’m writing.

I waited for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to be released; its arrival was a godsend. As soon as it came out, I turned the Lenovo into a dual boot machine.

The performance differential is huge. What once was a slow clunker turned into a graceful, fast and elegant machine. I asked someone to time me while I booted the same machine up using Ubuntu as opposed to Vista - Ubuntu was eight minutes faster.

This is not to say that Ubuntu didn’t need tweaking; unfortunately there were two problems to be addressed at the outset - the audio didn’t work, and there was an annoying screen flicker associated with the Nvidia driver.

The screen flicker issue has a simple resolution:

1. Goto: System>Preferences>Advanced desktop settings (The compiz config settings manager)
2. Click on General options>display settings
3. Untick Detect Output
4. Manually input your screen’s resolution (1680×1050+0+0 for this model)

Fixing the sound was more complicated, however, I found some useful instructions here.

Thanks to using the Moomex themes for both Compiz and Gnome, I haven’t lost any eye candy either; its appearance is just as high tech and elegant as that of Vista. The other new installation I’ve made was to put on the Swiftweasel Browser. This has proven to be incredibly fast - far outstripping Firefox on Vista.

So why don’t I get rid of Vista entirely? Were it not for Rome: Total War, I probably would. But having to dip into the Windows world every so often is a cogent reminder of why one is a Linux person: greater speed, efficiency, performance, and apart from the gaming aspect, a lot more fun.

I am headed off on vacation soon, amidst increasing signs that I need one badly. I’m developing a strange case of paranoia because of my company’s website; I compulsively, constantly check if our website is still performing well on Google.

Getting this right has been very difficult; a project that was initiated prior to my joining the company left the website on two separate servers, using two different technologies and a completely different domain. The redirects didn’t help; the site sank without a trace on search engines. Chaos ensued, and it’s only now, after 6 months, that I’ve been able to initiate a programme of web marketing and search engine optimisation.
The optimisation updates have primarily focused on using the mod_rewrite module to change database driven links (with parameters, such as www.whatever.com/index.php?parameter=1&otherparameter=2) into something much easier for Google to index (i.e., rational links like www.whatever.com/parameter1/otherparamter2/). This is a fairly standard procedure; what was truly bizarre was that this suggestion took a long time to be accepted by management. Since these changes were put in place, I’ve been watching, waiting, and mostly, been relieved that the changes are helping.

Still, I think it’s the fate of any internet centric person to use Google extensively. In the process, I’ve learned all sorts of little tricks; if I know the site in question that has a particular bit of information, I can ask Google to “site:whatever.com” and then search within the results. I know when to wrap quotes around a phrase and when not to do so. I know how to avoid expressions that are too general. All in all, it has replaced going to the library or buying a newspaper. However, all of this benefit does come at a cost for a webmaster; the workings of Google are maddeningly opaque. One day the site will be fully indexed, and the next, it will be shot down. One day a site will be top of the rankings, the next, it will be at the bottom.

Fortunately, the dips are disappearing in my case; the site is achieving a level of stability, albeit this may be an illusion. Someone may alter an algorithm and my site may plummet into obscurity once more. My approach is simple, do absolutely everything to prevent giving a Google an excuse to not index pages. For example, in addition to the activities I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve tried using Google Sitemaps.

I first tested these sitemaps on my private websites; I heartily recommend the Wordpress plugin for Google sitemaps, and also a tool called XML Sitemaps, which is obtainable for $15. The only problem with the latter tool is that when I used it to index my Sietch and Sith Order sites, it attempted to index the entire product catalogue of Amazon.com, which was accessible through the sites’ online stores.

That said, sitemaps are not only useful for Google, they also come in handy for Yahoo’s new Site Explorer tool, which accepts the Google sitemap protocol; I submitted both my sitemap and RSS feeds to Site Explorer and found that Yahoo’s “Splut” search engine came onto the site with a vengeance. Overall traffic has improved as a result. A sitemap for my company’s site has had similar benefits.

It is, however, a struggle to remain found rather than lost. It’s not just Google that one has to contend with, but all the other sites that are working just as hard as mine to edge ahead in the Search Engine Optimisation game. Paranoia will have to be a state of being; but fortunately, there will be a brief respite as afforded by my vacation beginning next week. I just have to force myself not to check, and if I worry, to have another cup of egg nog.

3 out of 4 of my computers run Ubuntu Linux. Breezy was all right, Dapper was great; when Edgy was released, I wondered, “Could it get any better?”

The press on the latest release, Ubuntu “Edgy Eft” 6.10, suggested that it was going to contain a lot of new approaches to the operating system, a radical departure rather than maintaining continuity. This made me nervous; everything worked well in Dapper, sometimes, in the words of Edmund Burke, “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

However, curiousity got the better of me. I first took the plunge using my old HP Compaq nx7000 laptop. Rather than do a clean install, I opted to do an upgrade. In order to do this, I went to Applications >> Accessories >> Terminal and typed -

gksu “update-manager -c”

This then made the upgrade available.

The upgrade process itself was fairly painless. After it completed, the laptop rebooted; the speed improvement in loading was noticeable. To my relief, none of my settings had been undone. With the latest version of Swiftfox as my browser and Edgy, this 4 year old laptop was running faster than ever. Fonts were also cleaner and easier on the eyes.

I tried this upgrade next on my Savrow Katana K-90. Again, the download and upgrade process was fairly painless; however, I had to re-install ndiswrapper in order for it to work with its wireless card. Apart from this, no other changes to settings were required. However, 3D acceleration using ATI’s proprietary fglrx driver was lost in the upgrade; I am waiting for an update to the driver or the OS in order to rectify this problem. This, however, is a minor inconvenience; otherwise, the PC functions as well as it has ever done and again, boots faster.

The most problematic upgrade was for my desktop computer, which I’ve nicknamed “Beige Lightning”. While there were no issues with drivers, Edgy has problems detecting a USB keyboard. With Dapper, detection was instantaneous. However with Edgy, I’ve had to wait at the login screen while the Function button on my Microsoft Internet Keyboard flashes; when it turns a steady green, then it’s ready, but sometimes that can take up to 5 minutes. I have tried various settings in the BIOS in order to fix this issue; none have been successful.

Overall, however, the upgrade has been about as problem-free as can be expected - in the case of the Savrow Katana and the desktop computer, there is a definite roughness around the edges; in the case of the HP Compaq nx7000, it’s been an enhancement. Life with Edgy is nearly as sweet as it was with Dapper; depending on the machine, it’s even sweeter.

Today, September 17th, two gunmen shot and killed an elderly Italian nun who was working in a hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia. Apparently, she and her bodyguard were shot several times in the back by her assailants, who then ran off.

This follows several days of violent outbursts from the Islamic world to an academic lecture given by the Pope in his native Germany; he was stating that violence and religion should never go hand in hand. In the course of that lecture, he quoted a Byzantine emperor who had some very strong criticisms of Islam because of its adherence to violence.

Let’s re-examine this situation for a moment. The Pope says that violence and religion should never go hand in hand; as part of this lecture, he quotes an emperor who in his critique of Islam, states the same. The reaction of the Islamic world can be largely encapsulated by the statement of Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Mali, a Somali imam, who told his congregation: “Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim.”

The word “irony” springs to mind. It is obvious to anyone who anyone with reason and logic that the reaction of the Islamic world proved the statement of the Byzantine Emperor correct. The irony deficiency in parts of the Muslim world is staggering.

Let’s spell it out, since they obviously have problems understanding this: if they wanted to prove that Islam is a non-violent religion and thus the Emperor wrong (remember, the Pope’s lecture was not a critique of Islam in particular, he was criticising religions that endorse violence), they should have protested with calm, tranquility, and dignity. Rather, the public is assaulted with images of burning effigies of Pope Benedict, the raised fists, the angry shouts of crowds in Jakarta, Karachi and elsewhere. Islam looks extremely poor in this light; it also makes Islam look like a faith for the thin skinned.

The Pope did try to do a service by raising interfaith discussions to an academic level; he wanted to talk about de-linking violence from religion; he said such a link goes against the “nature of God”. Quite so; the good shepherd seeks to guide his flock away from the wolves. The Islamic world missed an opportunity to prove that the rhetoric about their faith being a “religion of peace” was not so much marketing; rather, this episode has diminished Islam in the eyes of the West. A Sky News poll of the British public on the morning of September 17th asking if the Pope should apologise further had a resounding 91% No result. This is all the more astonishing because the poll was taken before the Pope made his additional apology during his Sunday blessing.

The death of the Italian nun will only add more fuel to the flames. It is one thing to burn an effigy; killing a harmless nun, whose primary concern in life was tending to the ill and injured, is an entirely new category of depravity. Islamic leaders should step up and condemn this brutal act, quickly. So far, however, there has been silence on this subject.

This is a pity, because the Pope’s good intentions and high hopes can only now appear to be misplaced. If we are to achieve his noble aim of delinking religious faith and violence, there has to be an understanding of the rightness of this concept. However, it is quite clear that those who gunned down the nun, burned the effigies and raised their fists in anger do not agree. The sad result is that only more violence is likely to follow.

This has been a fairly humourless week, full of pressure at work and the sombre anniversary of September 11th. On a brighter note, there was a good joke to finish it off from an unexpected source, namely, the British Conservative Party.

Apparently the Conservatives hired a design agency to give them a new logo, the goal of which was to portray growth and renewal, yet reliability. The result of this exercise was a tree. Supposedly it’s an oak tree, but it looks more like a few random brushstrokes. Lord Tebbit, a Conservative peer, said it looked like a sprig of broccoli. To me, it’s hilarious: it’s another example of rebranding gone mad.

Let’s consider the tree as a symbol: perhaps you too have been walking through a park on a summer’s day, with blue skies and soft breezes, and the grass almost glows in the afternoon sunlight. As you stroll along, thinking how lovely England is at this time of year, your eyes happen upon a tree swaying gently in the breeze. Your pleasant reverie is then broken when a mongrel dog belonging to a tattooed gentleman drinking a can of Carling Black Label stops for a moment and marks its territory on its trunk.

I am not alone, to be sure, in making this mental connection. Nor am I alone, I am certain, in thinking this amateur piece of pop culture frou frou more belongs to London sophisticates who appreciate modern art than to the country as a whole.

The whole travesty goes to prove a particular point, which my father taught me long ago. It was a lesson learned from his work: his job involved going to various international organisations, meeting with businessmen, technologists and bankers. Out of this experience, he said, that he had discovered that beyond the wall that separates the powerful and famous from the rest of us, one finds that those on the other side aren’t any smarter than we are. In fact, they’re often more ignorant because they’re removed from what real life is like.

The new Conservative logo is a prime example. Does anyone really think that picking what can generously be described as a “soft focus tree” for a symbol actually means that the Conservatives are more electable? People on the other side of the wall think it does; people on this side believe that it’s much more important to have clear, beneficial policies which help the nation prosper. But then again, those on the other side of the wall think that it was Labour rebranding itself as “New Labour” and adopting a more modern appearance and outlook that won it power; in reality, it was policies that promised not to return us to the days when the unions went on strike every five minutes and left the dead unburied, plus a chance for a change that were the actual reasons why they won the day.

As in politics, the pattern holds true in business and technology. The walls that companies build between themselves and the public blind them from what it is that people actually want and need. A good example is the new Microsoft Zune music player. Because it looks like an iPod, functions like an iPod, Microsoft’s management thinks they’re on to a winner; all they need to do is somehow make it “cooler”. However, Microsoft has missed a trick, as Apple has been thinking beyond the wall and about the future: for example, this week Apple revealed their “iTV” device, which is going to speed up convergence between computer and digital television technology.

Of course, the emergence of Linux and BSD variants is also due to this wall. When one can’t get what they want or need from the marketplace, there is a tendency to go make your own. Many users have done just that.

Still, the wall does serve a purpose; it provides entertainment, certainly. Watching the Conservatives and Microsoft scurry about trying to figure out what it is that we want and being clueless in what they deliver is highly amusing. In the case of Microsoft, it gives something to which aspire against. But it should also be empowering for the individual; it’s clear that politicians are neither smarter nor more logical than the average citizen, perhaps with that being abundantly clear, more “average citizens” will take the plunge into politics and restore representative government.

Furthermore, as it’s clear that Microsoft is not led by great geniuses; perhaps as a result, more developers from atypical backgrounds will want to get involved in Open Source; this is already happening. The author bios for the O’Reilly book, “Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason” indicated this: Dave Rolsky, for example, “has worked as a paperboy, supermarket bagger, temporary secretary, ear-training and music theory teaching assistant, and every so often a computer programmer, specializing in Perl.” And yes, the Perl / Mason combination is an excellent solution.

Perhaps it would seem peculiar to think about the last Pope when one is discussing stupidity and potential responses to it. However, I can’t help but think of Pope John Paul II. He once said, “Stupidity is also a gift from God, but one mustn’t misuse it.” By challenging the foibles of those on the other side of the wall, stupidity is used as an impetus for improvement, whether in politics, technology or society. The presence of leaders in any sphere that are not that smart, should compel us to strive towards greater intelligence. Perhaps that is what the Pope meant; if so, as seems certain, he has been one of the few on the other side of that wall to whom “not that smart” would be an terribly inappropriate description.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a set of desktop computers in a more wretched state than those I saw this morning. They had been sitting in an unventilated storage unit that had no climate control whatsoever; it’s important to note that this has been one of the hottest summers I can recall as well. My colleague and I bundled them into the back of a Volkswagen Golf for a rather bumpy ride back to the office; at that point, the damage had been done by the conditions, it was difficult to see how it could be much worse.

The machines were all the same model: the Packard Bell iMedia 1307. For those who aren’t familiar with this model, it comes with a Celeron D processor, 256 MB of RAM, SiS graphics, and strangely, these had a 160 GB Hard Drive.

It was going to be something of a miracle if they started up; however they did. Still, the result was not particularly pleasing: the machines come with Windows XP Home as standard. It was clear from the outset, however, that it was not running happily. There was a definite grind and churn. Once booted, Internet Explorer was sluggish.

I would have been tempted to leave it alone; it might have been sufficient to say that these were “functional”, more or less, and let it be. However, these PCs were going to be used in a demonstration to customers. The idea of the customers thinking my company was as sluggish as these machines was as unpleasant as it was untrue.

Among the assets I had was an old Nvidia GeForce 4 graphics card. Fortunately the iMedia 1307 has a spare AGP slot. Also, the case construction makes it inot difficult to open and install additional components. As a test, I installed the card in one of them and then put Ubuntu Dapper Drake in the CD ROM drive. The Live CD worked well: all the hardware worked straight out of the box. I decided to install it, and see if Linux could bring something as wretched as this back to life.

Installation was peculiar; just a note of warning, the CD ROM drive scratched the first Ubuntu CD I put into it. A second CD and attempt resulted in the installer crashing. Another attempt with the same CD worked. After about an hour of installation and then downloading the latest upgrades, the PC was virtually reborn. It booted in approximately half the time that it took to boot Windows XP.

To put icing on the cake, I installed the nvidia-glx drivers; these are obtainable by going into System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and searching for “nvidia”. Once installed, it’s worth going into Applications > Accesories > Terminal and typing the following:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

After typing in your password, and Gedit opens, search for the following text - “nv”. You’ll be led to a section where the video driver is named. Replace “nv” with “nvidia”. Save, and then reboot; you’ll know if it was successful if a large Nvidia logo appears for a moment while the computer is booting.

The computer was by now amongst the living; to add some final sparkle to its performance, I put Swiftfox on as its main browser. In the case of Ubuntu, it’s relatively simple; I got the appropriate package from www.getswiftfox.com, and installed it using the GDebi installer that offers itself up as a default option. The only difficult portion was changing all the Firefox links to Swiftfox - this can be done by right clicking on “Applications”, selecting “Edit Menus”, drilling down to the Firefox item, then right click and selecting “Properties” on Firefox. Replace all instances of “Firefox” with “Swiftfox”.

With the added graphics card, Ubuntu and Swiftfox, the iMedia 1307, in spite of being roasted, was turned into something decent; it is definitely not an embarassment. It would indeed be an ideal computer for someone who just wants to do web browsing and basic office tasks. In this case, however, it’s a relief that it merely works well.

I remember with perfect clarity where I was exactly five years ago today. It was a gray day in Welwyn, Hertfordshire; I was working as a project manager for a small consultancy there. This was my first job after returning from a stint in Belgium and the Netherlands, and it had been a comfort to come home.

As I was typing away, a colleague poked his head through the doorway and said to me:

“Hey, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Centre!”

My initial thought was that it was a terrible accident; it would not have been the first time that a plane went awry and crashed into a New York skyscraper. In 1945, a bomber got lost in some mist and crashed into the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building, unlike the World Trade Centre, was built to last; the incident was rather like a toddler running flat into the Great Wall of China. The bomber crew was killed, there was a small fire, but the tower withstood the impact without much difficulty.

My boss brought me back to the present when he suggested that we all convene in the meeting room to watch the news, since the radio was not particularly forthcoming with information. We went downstairs and switched on the BBC. They were replaying the footage of the first plane striking; the angle of the footage was deceptive, it looked as if a Cessna or other light aircraft had hit the tower.

“Awful.” I said. I thought of my mother, who was in the New York area that day, and I wondered if she was watching this.

Just as I said that, the second plane hit. This made it obvious that it was no accident, rather, it was a co-ordinated attack.

The rest of the day is something of a blur; I was very worried because my mother sometimes went into the City for language lessons. I first spoke to my father, and both he and I tried to reach her; the phones were overloaded and we had no success. Fortunately, she sent us both an e-mail letting us know that she was alive and well.

While that was a relief, work after that point was impossible; I went home and watched the news all through the night as the pieces of the puzzle came together. It was a moment, I believe, when the entire world was dumbfounded, sad, and angry all at once. Estimates of the dead ranged up to 10,000; fortunately, the real total was less than a third of that.

It was immediately obvious that we were at war. Britain was not going to let America go it alone in this struggle, and it was pleasing that the Prime Minister went to the United States as quickly as he could. It became clear, rapidly, who had done this, namely, Al Qaeda, and where they were hiding, Afghanistan. The sounds of war shifting into gear, the rumble of the tank on television, the sonic boom of a fighter jet in the distance, became part of the grim symphony of the days that followed.

I don’t think anyone would argue that going into Afghanistan wasn’t the right thing to do; no one who has any sense of decency whatsoever would say the events of September 11th were justified. My boss at the time said, “Well, America got this for backing Israel. I hope they’ve learned a lesson.” He backed down after I forcefully told him to shove it up his rectal cavity and explained that my mother was in the firing line. I stopped working for him not too long afterwards.

Let me reiterate: there can be no justification for acts of this nature. It does not matter what cause it is. Airliners full of innocent people were taken over by extremist hijackers to turn them into flying bombs; they were intended to kill as many civilians as possible. In the West, whenever we hit civilians in a military strike, we consider it a mistake, express regret, and work ever harder to be more precise in what we hit. Al Qaeda’s targeting of civilians was not incidental, it was on purpose. Nothing could be more diabolical.

The strange thing is, five years after the event, many people have forgotten the initial outrage and indeed, how united the world was by this event. Just as a reminder, the only government which did not express sympathy in some form was Iraq. Because September 11th has gone down the byways of memory, people have lost sight of the brutality of Al Qaeda, and the need to keep pursuing them.

To be fair, much of the singularity of purpose may have been lost by the war in Iraq. This is not to suggest that this is what President Bush or Prime Minister Blair intended; far from it. They saw Saddam Hussein as yet another avatar of brutality and terror in the Middle East; Saddam was also incredibly stupid in not revealing his lack of weapons of mass destruction in a forthright manner. The aftermath has consumed the Western world’s attention span. It has led to a delusion (rather like what my former boss had) that somehow terrorists can be appeased or dissuaded; this mistaken view is comforting because it’s easier than fighting.

However, it’s not true. We have no basis upon which to speak with Al Qaeda, no common ground upon which to meet, no halfway point which we can arrive at. Al Qaeda wishes those of us dead who refuse to live under Islamic hegemony. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of the matter. We are either going to have to destroy them or they will destroy us.

This statement of fact should not be interpreted as a wholesale endorsement of the United States. One of the nastier trends to have emerged in the past five years is the rise of Anglophobia in America. This is in spite of the help and support Britain has given from the beginning; Prime Minister Blair told the Americans, “With you at the first, with you to the last”. He meant it, in spite of the heavy cost in both money and blood. However, my experience has indicated that this sacrifice is not appreciated by the Americans; rather, there is a tendency, particularly among conservative Americans, to berate Britain for tolerating Muslims in our midst (though they represent only 1.6 million out of a population of 60 million; also it’s worth noting America has a substantial Muslim population as well) and criticising us for being “weak” and “socialist” whenever the opportunity presents itself. At best, Britain can expect a pat on the head from this segment of American opinion for being a loyal “poodle” of the United States, rather than to be seen as a brother nation, a fighting ally, and a comrade in arms. Obviously, not all Americans feel that way; however those who don’t make no effort to silence those who do. One hopes that Britain’s policy makers are realistic to enough to realise that in essence, we have to join in this struggle with the Americans, but in the end, we matter very little to them. Indeed, we are on our own.

So here we are after five years. Terror still rages, the fires of memory do not burn as brightly as they should, there are even tensions between nations that should be the best of friends, given that their bonds have been reforged by war. In ten years, fifteen, twenty, I wonder what we will have to say. Certainly, the world has not become a happier place in the past five years; it has become more fractious and violent, we are living in a period of war and tension, a time of testing perhaps, which will challenge our resilience as a civilisation. Will the test have been passed in the next five years? Will we move on to the “broad, sunlit uplands” that Churchill spoke of during the Second World War? One can only hope so; for the moment, however, it remains to carry on with life as best as possible, carrying the flame of rememberance, and the grim determination to see the present struggle to a successful end.