Last night we revisited a restaurant some friends had introduced us to a while back, this time with my Mom and Lucas. If you live in the west part of London and are into Turkish food, I highly recommend this place. Most of the good Turkish places are to the north and east, in the Turkish neighborhoods, so we're always a bit deprived. This place is called Best Mangal, and doesn't look like much from the outside. The front is basically a kebap shop, with rotating doner meat and people getting their takeaway kebaps, but if you look you'll see a few tables crammed in the back. The mangal - a barbecue in the middle of the shop with skewers of meat and veggies roasting over coals is the first sign that this place is the real deal. Go in, sit down, and check out the menu, and you'll see this is something different, and the food and service confirm it. The guys working there are friendly and fun, and the food is great.

Our friends took us there in a car, so we didn't know how to get there - we took a bus to Fulham Broadway, and walked for half an hour through a dodgy neighborhood. When we left the place, we realized you can see West Kensington tube station from the doorway of the restaurant, so next time it will be easier. From the tube station, just cross North End Road and go left a short way.

It sounds like someone has tried to follow up on the attacks of two weeks ago, with least 3 attempted bombings. Apparently they've bungled it, the bombs didn't go off properly (all three?? how could they f*ck it up so badly?). Most of the details are rumor at this point; one bomber's backpack had a minor explosion, enough to blow it open, leaving the would-be suicide bomber with an "extremely dismayed expression" on his face. Another one dropped his bag on the train and ran off - people tried to grab him but he got away. Something has happened on at least one bus, a small pop upstairs that blew out windows. One of the incidents was at Oval station, so this may be intended to coincide with the opening of the Ashes cricket tournament.

All in all, a weak effort compared to last time. Piss on you, terrorists. The mood here is much closer to annoyance than terror - one weblog commentor says "The tube better be up and running at home time - I haven't got my walking shoes on!"

These people don't deserve to be called terrorists, I hereby dub them annoyists.

(Assuming it turns out nobody was killed, of course)

So in the past few days some more bits have emerged. A notable fact is that the bombs are now reckoned to have actually gone off at very close to the same time, 9:50, which suggests timed bombs rather than suicide. It's interesting to note the distances the bombs travelled from King's Cross (I'm still convinced they were all put on there), the Circle line bombs both got a pretty good distance from the station, whereas the Picadilly line bomb went off before reaching the next station. Walking between the platforms for the Circle line in each direction would not take too long, but walking to the Picadilly line takes a while. So when I heard they went off at the same time, I wondered whether a single person could have done it, and then got on the bus. The Wikipedia article now has a similar speculation, with timings. I still wonder how someone could (if they did) put a bag onto a train and then immediately get off without anyone saying something. (Update: And I also wonder how someone carrying 4 bags could drop 3 of them onto different trains. A lone bomber seems pretty unlikely at second thought, but the timing is still interesting. Maybe they moved as a group?)

I also thought more about my own timing that morning. It's boring and self-absorbed to go on about this, considering how many people came much closer, and in many cases too close, but it's obviously interesting to me. Anyway, it's now clear that I was between the explosions, the Edgeware Road bomb passed by me in the opposite direction, it probably passed within 10 feet of me on the opposite track as I sat reading a biography of Ataturk.

So have these attacks changed anything? I don't think so. Most commentary seems to be people proclaiming that this proves whatever view they held before the attacks, i.e. that the war on terror is right/wrong, and Britain must stay the course/withdraw its troops, Islam is an evil religion, anti-globalization protestors are assholes.

But the fact is, this wasn't really a surprise. Londoners have been expecting this for a while, although it's still a shock when it finally happens. As for me, I still think the Iraq war was a stupid and irresponsible decision, but although there are many reasons to oppose it, saying troops should be withdrawn now so terrorists won't attack us again is one of the worst reasons I can think of. I support making things right in Iraq. We (Americans and British) have destroyed thousands of lives in that country, we have an obligation to at least try to fix things up. I don't know how we can do it, and I have no confidence that the Bush administration is remotely capable of doing it, but to throw in the towel now would be the depth of irresponsibility.

Maybe I lied, there is one change in Londoners since last week, judging from blogs, comments, etc., English self-deprecation has been suspended, at least for a while, and it's OK to say: London rocks.

A phrasebook for American tourists - many of them are worth running through a translator if you don't understand the other languages.

I decided to walk through central London yesterday to get a bus from somewhere south of the chaos, rather than trying to get a bus here at Camden Town. This turned out to be a good idea - a workmate left the office 15 minutes ahead of me and got a bus here, I walked 30-45 minutes to Trafalgar Square and boarded the same bus she was on. This morning I could have used the underground to get in without any problem, but decided to take the Silverlink train from Richmond, which skirts around the center of town and doesn't go underground or through any major stations.

What the hell happened yesterday? I'm curious what we will learn about the terrorists who actually carried out the attacks. Looking at the timeline, all 3 of the trains that had bombs were coming from King's Cross. It seems likely to me, although I haven't yet seen any real discussion of this, that the terrorists must have all boarded trains at King's Cross.

I apparently passed right between the bomb attacks yesterday morning. I took the Circle line through Edgeware road, certainly before the bomb there went off. I don't usually go that way, but ended up on a wrong District Line branch and so switched to the Circle Line to King's Cross. When I got off the train at King's Cross and headed for the Northern Line, they evacuated the station, so the first bomb, on a Circle Line train ahead of the one I had gotten off, had already gone off.

I wonder whether the third bomb, 5 minutes after the first, had already gone off on the Picadilly Line between King's Cross and Russell Square? Certainly there was no indication, other than the evacuation, that it had. There was no smoke, injured people, or anybody at all panicky. But it probably took me at least 5 minutes to get away from the station, including the time I wandered around the street in front trying to figure out the best way to get to work. I'm guessing the bomb went off far enough from the station that the reaction didn't reach street level for a while.

I walked by King's Cross again on the way home, the area I had wandered around in front of the station was cordoned off, and a firetruck and other emergency vehicles were in front. The police were allowing people in at the rear of the station, they had at least a few platforms of overground trains running. There was quite a stream of foot traffic throughout the areas I walked. I also walked by Tavistock Place, it was heavily cordoned off as well. Police were on the streets everywhere, especially at train stations. Went I got on the bus at Trafalgar Square it was packed, people were crammed shoulder to shoulder even at the front door, where you're normally not supposed to stand, and the bus driver was letting people on at the side door which is normally just for exiting. He didn't seem bothered about whether people paid.

Were these guys suicide bombers, or did they use timed bombs? They couldn't have used bombs detonated remotely by mobile phones, like they did in Madrid, because there is no signal on the underground, at least not where the Picadilly Line bomb went off. I read one report in the Guardian which mentioned a timer bomb, but eyewitnesses claim to have seen a suspiciously behaving character on the Tavistock Place bus rumaging through his backpack before that explosion.

I'm not so sure how they could have gotten a timed bomb onto the Picadilly train. The others I can see - they could board the train at King's Cross with a suitcase, putting it by the door and then sitting down. A few stops later they could get off, and have a reasonable chance that nobody who noticed them carry the suitcase on before will notice them get off without it and raise the alarm. An unattended suitcase by the door may cause some nervousness, but it's not unusual since someone going to the airport or to another mainline train station may not want to have to stand up for the whole trip. I'm sure people will be more alert to these in the future, of course.

So this could have worked for the first and third bombs, although the terrorists would be running a couple of risks; one, that someone who happened to notice and remember them bringing the suitcase on also notices them get off without it, which would certainly cause alarm. The second risk is that the train would stop and wait between stations (a common occurance) long enough that the timer would trigger the bomb with them still on the train.

But it's very unlikely they could have done this with the Picadilly line bomb, since it went off before the train even got to the first stop from King's Cross. So assuming this was the planned location for the explosion, and that they did indeed put it on at King's Cross, they would have had to put a bag on the train and immediately get off, and even in the relative complacence of the pre-attack time, it would have been very difficult to get away with this without someone raising the alarm.

If it was a timed bomb, then chances are the bomber was still on the train - maybe the scenario I described above where the train stopped and the bomb went off before the terrorist could get off is what happened there.

The bus bomb is more puzzling, I've seen two different reports of what bus route it was, and I'm not sure whether it would have come from King's Cross. Was it planned, or was it a cockup?

In any case, it's a sure bet people will be highly sensitive to unattended bags for a while, so any future bombers will probably be suicide attacks.

Update: I've read in some places that unexploded devices with timers were found by police. I'm not sure about this though, there were a number of reports of controlled explosions of suspicious objects, but the most reliable reports I've read of that say they've all turned out to be harmless. I've also read that although the Madrid bombers used mobile phones to trigger the bombs, they used the alarm clock function rather than using them as remote triggers, although apparently some IED's in Iraq are triggered remotely using phones. Flit, my favorite military blogger, has some informative points in this area.

The currently under-informed consensus seems to favor timers rather than suicide bombers.

My guess is still that the Picadilly Line bomb went off before it was planned, probably taking the bomber with it (burn in hell, asshole). My theory of King's Cross as the starting point holds up with the bus bomb as well - I've looked up the bus maps, and the number 30 bus stops at King's Cross.

There is wide suspicion that the bus bombing wasn't planned, but that he was on his way to another station to hit. If so, it had to have been an improvised plan, because it was so much later than the other attacks that they had to know the tubes would all be closed. Plus, the 30 bus doesn't go by any tube stations that would make good targets, it goes by Warren Street, Great Portland Street, Regent's Park, and Baker Street, then on to Oxford Street (well down from Oxford Circus, which would have made a good target). Most of those stations are on the Circle Line, and his buddy's bomb had already passed through them on the way to Edgeware Road. The best he could have done was taken out some shoppers or tourists on the street.

So if hitting the bus itself wasn't the original plan, then the fact that the guy was on the bus at all meant something went wrong. Maybe he just jumped on the first bus he could get when things went wrong for him. I would bet he was meant to have planted his bomb on the Victoria or Northern line, both of which pass through King's Cross, and both of which are busy and key, i.e. good targets for disrupting the transportation in central London.

Blowing up the bus, whether intended or not, was more effective than anything else he could have done if he missed his chance to get on a train at King's Cross, since it raised paranoia about the bus system. Until yesterday most Londoners thought taking the bus was the safe way to go if they were worried about a terrorist attack, and it was certainly the best alternative for most people when the tubes were closed, so getting those shut down increased the difficulty of getting around yesterday.

This is the lesson I learned watching the new Star Wars movie last night. "You're either with me, or you're my enemy." "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes." George's Sith Lord Master must be Darth Cheney.

I agree with those who've said this last movie was better than the previous two. It finally gives us what we've been expecting all along from these three prequels - it shows how and why Anakin turns to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader, it shows where Luke and Leia come from and how they end up where they are at the start of the original Star Wars (part IV), and it shows the origin of the Empire. Mostly what made this one more enjoyable than the previous two was that throughout it you are reminded of events and situations from the original trilogy.

The previous two movies only laid the groundwork for this movie, and probably could have been compressed into 30 minutes of this one.

Of course the dialogue and romantic chemistry is poor, as usual.

As for Anakin's conversion, I get the feeling we're supposed to buy this a logical thing. He's basically got three reasons for going Dark, one being his arrogant, impatient petulance, the second being a personal fear that he hopes to defeat, the third being a desire to do what's best for the galaxy.

The third one is hard to swallow. The logic the bad guy gives to convince Anakin that going against the Jedi is a good thing doesn't really work. I'm trying not to spoil the plot, but basically Anakin is led to believe the Jedi are doing something bad, to convince him to help the bad guy do the exact same bad thing. Maybe his annoyance with the Jedi is what leads him to it, but once it was all over, most of his reasons for going with the bad guy are pretty obviously invalid. I guess the Dark Force actively corrupts someone's mind once they give in, and makes them stupid.

The site ToryScum has some great photos of billboards for the UK Conservative Party that have been, uh, "modified". These billboards are just begging to be hacked. They feature a large handwritten message that emphasizes some fear-mongering aspect of the Conservative platform, for example "It's not racist to limit immigration", with the tagline "Are you thinking what we're thinking?", and plenty of whitespace.

There are some amusing modifications on that site, but what I'd like to see is thought bubbles coming out of the "Are you thinking what we're thinking", with suggestions of what Conservatives might be trying to imply without coming right out and saying it. The Economist has a good article on this "dog whistle politics", and a long piece which (for subscribers only, unfortunately) explores the facts of the immigration issue.

Of course, as a "bloody foreigner" I can't vote - not that I'm complaining, in spite of the substantial chunk of my paycheck that Tony and Gordon swallow every month. The "Who you should vote for" survey suggests the Lib Dems or the Greens match my views most closely (although I really don't give a toss about fox hunting, and the survey doesn't ask any questions about the environment). For those outside the UK, the Liberal Democrats are the official centrist party, but the political pigeonholes are a bit out of whack these days. Thanks to Tony Blair, the most business-friendly party in national politics is the one called "Labour" (which is a classic example of dry British "humour").

I would be sorely tempted to vote Lib Dem if I could, but they haven't got much of a shot, although they do much better than all of the third parties in the US combined. So I would be afraid the Tories would get in, and I learned my lesson about refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils on principle in 2000. In any case, Blair is supposed to step down in favor of Brown sometime in the next term, so in theory a vote for Labour is a vote for Brown, maybe, eventually, if they ever really do pry Tony's fingers off the controls.

I hate, hate, hate commuting in London. But even so, Underground maps are still cool.

The tube map is a classic icon, although it's well known to have no relationship to the aboveground geography of London. As Bill Bryson said,

An out-of-town visitor using Mr.Beck's map to get from, say, Bank Station to Mansion House would quite understandably board a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, transfer to the Circle Line and continue for another five stops to Mansion House and emerge 200 yards down the street from where he started.

Owen Massey has put together a thorough listing of Tube maps. I like this geographically accurate one, which morphs the existing map to position the stations and trains in the right places, but even coolor is this one which overlays that same geographically accurate map onto a satellite photo.

Also cool is this interactive, 3-D map that morphs between the standard, current tube map, a geographically accurate version, and the original 1933 map.

I was turned on to these by an article in Londonist.

You are the 1926 Stingemore Map! This small and compact map is fairly geographically accurate, but unfortunately there are no places of interest, although the river makes its first appearence. Fishing anyone?

Which London Underground Map Are You?

Brought to you by Quizilla

This week Cebit Eurasia
was in Istanbul, the oriental offshoot of the world's biggest trade
show of any kind, and my pal Ercan and I went Friday to check it out,
particularly the Linux track. We caught 3 seminars, of which
Donald Karl
Rosenberg's talk about the economics of Open Source had the most
international angle.

Rosenberg reviewed a lot of what's going on with various national
governments and open source, including China, Peru, Venezuela, and
others who are trying to encourage open source as an alternative
to foreign-produced black box software. He listed a number of reasons,
including the FUDish implication that nobody knows what Microsoft
might have hidden inside Windows at the CIA's behest, although not
in so many words. Open source is also seen as a way to foster local
IT industry and keep government spending at home rather than pumping
it abroad.

One of Rosenberg's assertions that I disagree with is that companies
outside the US are less concerned with brand names and more interested
in engineering quality. My experience in Turkey is the opposite, the
"nobody got fired for buying [IBM/Microsoft/Oracle/HP]" mentality
dominates. He seems to have based this idea on Germany, whose culture
of engineering excellence is at the opposite end of the scale from
Turkey's, exceeding the USA by a good bit. (My favorite example
of this train platforms, where you can see a dozen clocks whose
second hands are in lock step). Developing countries are much more
prone to buying big name brands just for the prestige factor than those
in rich, self-confident nations like Germany.

Even Linux distributions suffer this, most Turkish geeks I know run
Redhat, and are only vaguely aware
of Debian. But the later seminar
by Debian project leader Bdale Garbee impressed Ercan enough that
he wants to give it a shot, so we're going to download and burn some
CD's and give it a go. I've used Debian before, but Bdale's talk
impressed me with the sheer quantity and quality of the work that goes
into Debian and its packages.

The other talk we attended was Don Marti from
Linux Journal talking
about good security habits. The title of the talk was "Linux security in one
hour a week", the idea being that practicing a few good habits in configuring
and monitoring your systems is enough to counter 99% of security threats.
Sound, basic advice like monitoring security announcement lists and keeping
your system patched, and disabling or removing unnecessary services. He shared
plenty of practical little tips; for instance, if you remove an unneeded app
by hand, your package manager might replace it later when an upgrade comes
out, so use the package manager to remove it instead.

I also heard that a certain major hardware maker who will be producing
a Windows tablet has got Debian Linux running on it, which answered something
I had wondered about before.

Another thing we did was check
out the new Nokia 7650
camera phone. This thing is advertised all over the place here in
Turkey, and I assume everywhere else too. Here's a picture of Ercan and
me at the show taken with the phone. I'm the one with the stupid look on
my face.

The quality is not as good as a full digital camera, just 640x380, but
if the camera feature is cheap enough (I don't know how much the 7650 costs)
it could be useful for spur of the moment shots - if you own one, you'll
always have a camera handy for a quick snap. The interesting feature for
me was being able to email the picture to myself, since it avoids the
hassle of local storage. Digital camera storage is getting better, but
it would still be handy to have a quality camera with the option to dump
its memory onto the Net.

A proper digital camera with bluetooth would be just the ticket, so you
could link with your phone to upload pictures, or link with a PC or laptop,
without having to remember to bring cables and connectors and such.

I didn't post yesterday because I was sorting out my work situation. For the past year or so I've been working with a Turkish IT consultancy which has gotten me pretty decent jobs, and which spun off a new group that I've been working with. The money has been decent by Turkish standards, which in my rule-of-thumb guestimates means someone in the IT industry in Istanbul can expect to make roughly 1/3 what they would in a non-NYC/Valley market in the US, assuming you get in with the corporate market. (For non IT jobs it seems to be about 1/5). This isn't as bad as it sounds, since the cost of living is quite low - you can live very well on $30k/year in Istanbul, certainly better than you could on $90k in NYC.

But I've been bored as hell. It's hard to find the kind of work that I'm into - Internet technology stuff, in particular back-end, database-driven web stuff. While I've been able to find jobs, they haven't been particularly interesting, and it's getting to me. There are a number of reasons why this is the case.

The economy here is of course not great, which limits the kinds of jobs to be found for an IT professional. There are a handful of corporate megaliths, each of which has banks, TV channels, newspapers, insurance companies, and, these days, a mobile phone network, and everything revolves around these. 95% of the money in this country belongs to these groups, so if you don't get a job in that sphere, my guess is you're working for peanuts (a few hundred dollars a month) in a place like an internet cafe.

The technology these companies use tends strongly towards the "enterprise" school. IBM is here in force, but focusing more on big old back ends (mainframes, etc.), with some EJB, and one time I saw a Linux box from IBM being used to monitor processes on other Unices.

I wouldn't describe the technical environment here backwards, exactly - I see more people using mobile phones in Istanbul than I do in New York. But the IT industry has got that big-company gravitational thing going on, it's like working on the surface of Jupiter, the only stuff that you can get going is big, bulky, and slow.

Internet technologies offer potential for Turkish business, and the fact that they're a bit behind the curve makes an opportunity for a battle-scarred veteran of the dot-com bubble. We can avoid the missteps and red herrings, skipping the whole "push" and "vortal" crazes, for example, focusing on things that can actually cut costs and extend the marketing reach of local companies to the rest of the world.

But refighting the battles with ignorant clients is a drag, explaining that giving $100 to a kid with a copy of FrontPage to build your corporate site isn't going to get the same results as hiring us for five figures. When I left London 2 years ago the companies there had mostly gotten past the online brochure phase, in Turkey they're just entering it.

I was up for all of that, and some of the people I was working for are hip to the possibilities, but the situation around me has deteriorated lately. The spinoff company I joined has imploded for completely non-business related reasons, and I've been left adrift. This has a lot to do with language and communication.

Lack of language skills, while not crippling since most people in the industry speak reasonable English, makes life hard. The only things you know are what someone specifically decides to communicate to you, or what you can directly extract through questioning. The casual chatter and gossip that clues you in to what projects are coming up, what's on the boss's mind, who's thinking about leaving, etc. are hard to connect with.

Rather than picking up on hints of major changes ahead, you often learn about things after they happen, when you realize the guy you were working with last week isn't coming back from his vacation and start asking questions. It's probably worse for someone with an introverted bent, but this kind of thing didn't happen to me in English-speaking offices.

Ah, well, live and learn. I'm now officially between jobs, working from home, "free-lancing", yeah that's it! I have some good prospects back in London, so it's all for the better, I'm able to take this time to work on various projects that have been simmering rather than panicking.

It will be a drag to leave Turkey, I really enjoy living here, aside from not having interesting work. The weather, the food, and the people are things I'll miss if I return to London - at least I have plenty of good friends there. Returning to an English-speaking environment will be nice - the day I get back will be a very good day for Foyles' Book store, and I will probably never make it through the stack of magazines I'm going to buy!

But I fully expect to return to Turkey to work at some point in the future. In the meantime I need to work on my Turkish.