Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 10 2012

The commute

Sample British crossword grid

Sample British crossword grid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Alfred was a precise man and a regular commuter. As he walked up the platform that morning, his head moved with sudden, angular movements not unlike a pigeon. As if to mock him, one of those very creatures had taken the opportunity to defecate on the collar of his otherwise pristine waxed jacket. He arrived at the exact same spot on which he always stood and glanced at his watch. He noted with inward satisfaction as the second hand ticked over at the usual time.

He was of an age whereby his chin had begun its slow retreat inwards and his jowls had loosened their grip on the sides of his face. His wire rimed silver spectacles looped around oversized ears and on his crown was a thick mop of pure white hair. He glanced at the boards showing the status of the next train and gave an almost imperceptible smile as he saw that it was on time. His broadsheet newspaper was folded into quarters and tucked beneath his arm.

After precisely three minutes, the train loomed into view and slowly came to a halt. Unusually, the doors did not line up exactly with Alfred’s position and to his annoyance, he had to shuffle half a step to bring himself level with the door. The doors swished open and because few commuters made the journey this early, he easily found a seat inside the carriage. He reached inside his pocket and pulled out an expensive looking pen and turned the newspaper over to show the cryptic crossword.

He prided himself on completion of the crossword every morning before the end of his half hour train ride. Before long, he had filled out a quarter of the answers. As he looked up in deep thought about his next clue, he noted the young lady who boarded behind him was sat nearby. Coincidentally, she was attempting the very same puzzle. At first, he was pleased to see that the hobby was being taken up by the younger generation and was not about to die out. Then he noticed with unintentional annoyance that the young lady had completed half of the crossword already.

He managed to crack the next few clues and before too long, he had caught up with the young lady. He couldn’t help but glance across again. She had completed nearly three quarters of the puzzle now. She caught his gaze and smiled. He awkwardly flashed an embarrassed  smile back to her before returning his attention to the crossword.

With five minutes to go before they arrived at his stop, Alfred had completed every answer except one. As he sucked on his pen in deep thought – he saw that the young lady had completely filled her crossword in and was gazing out of the window. Even as the train arrived at the terminus, Alfred had still not cracked the final clue. He could not remember the last time he had failed to finish the crossword before the end of his journey.

Once again, his gaze caught the completed crossword on the chair opposite, abandoned now as the girl was gathering her things in preparation to leave the train. She turned towards him and as their eyes locked, she gave him another smile and a cheeky wink. Alfred’s face flushed and he immediately looked away.

He waited for her to step down on to the platform before gathering his things. He almost walked past the completed crossword before curiosity got the better of him. He simply had to know what that last answer was. With a furtive look around him to make sure no-one was looking, he picked up the newspaper. Within moments, he rolled his eyes as he realised that the girl had simply filled in random words rather than working out the answers. He smiled as he stepped from the train shaking his head.

May 9 2012

Heavy weather

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have found Steve Jobs biography to be tough going. It’s not the writing, it’s the subject. Before I started reading the book, I had no real image of Steve Jobs in my head other than his public persona. The more I read of his life story, the less I find myself liking him. I try to persevere – but it’s hard work.

So I was interested to see Walter Isaacson, the author presenting at IBM’s Impact conference last week. I didn’t really know much about him either, but it turns out that Steve Jobs is not the only subject of his biographies. He has also written the life stories of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Apparently, Steve Jobs approached him and asked why not do his biography next. Walter joked about Jobs thinking his name being the next name in the sequence after Einstein & Franklin showing a distinct lack of humility.

He argued that smart people are relatively common, but what set his subjects apart was imagination. He told the story about Steve Jobs painting a fence with his father. Confounded by his suggestion to apply as much care and attention to the back of the fence as to the front, Steve Jobs asked why – who will know? His father told Jobs that he would know. That notion of caring obsessively about every facet of his products extended throughout his career.

Walter went on to say that innovation requires passion and curiosity. Einstein’s father gave him a childhood gift of a compass. He became fascinated with the idea of magnetic fields and Maxwell’s equations They state that the speed of the magnetic field remains constant regardless of your speed or direction. Einstein couldn’t understand why this would be the case until he fathomed out the theory of relativity.

As a young man, Benjamin Franklin spent a lot of time on ships going to and fro across the Atlantic Ocean. He couldn’t understand why the journey was shorter going one way than the other. So he began experimenting by pulling buckets behind the ship and sampling the water as the ship travelled. Through experimentation, he discovered that the water in one direction was warmer than the other which accounted for the ease of passage.

Benjamin Franklin was also very open and collaborative, which Walter argued was also important to innovation. He told a story about the declaration of independence which because of my lack of familiarity with the document didn’t mean that much to me, but I assume it illustrated his point. Paradoxically – Apple is not what you would describe as an open and collaborative company but there you go.

The slogan from Apple’s famous Orwellian advertising campaign was “Think Different” which all of Isaacson’s subjects live up to.

So, will my Steve Jobs biography become easier having seen the author himself. Unfortunately – probably not. But I am tempted to try another of Walter’s books. He is currently working on a history of computing which sounds like it would be right up my street.

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May 8 2012

Shrinking the world

Long-journey

Long-journey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I used to think that the world was absolutely enormous. As a child, whenever we went anywhere as a family, it was usually by bus or car. Buses are not the fastest mode of transport on Earth and neither of my parents were speed freaks, so even when travelling by car, every journey took an absolute age. It didn’t help that cars back then were particularly unreliable and that dad used to buy cars from that twilight zone between bangerdom and scrapyard. Inevitably, on any lengthy journey, the chances were that we would break down extending the journey even further.

Like most children, I was given a globe for Christmas one year. As I looked at the tiny pink specks that made up the British Isles, I used to find it incredible that it took us such a long time just to traverse our tiny island. I used to look at other places on the globe and wonder how long it would take to get there.

Easyjet and Ryanair had yet to turn the airline industry upside down, so air travel remained the pursuit of the wealthy or business travellers. Our regular trips to Ireland involved getting to Holyhead, which meant an extremely long train journey or an even longer car journey. Once you got to the ferry terminal, you had another six hour trip across the sea. It didn’t stop there – we had to then get from the port to where we were supposed to be. It felt to me like an epic voyage every time.

Back in those days, if you wanted to get a message to someone, you had two choices – by telephone (a landline naturally) or by post. I was amazed when I visited a friend at Durham University when I saw email for the first time. My friend asked me to hang on for a moment because he was in the middle of a conversation with someone in Japan. Intrigued – I watched him as he typed away on his keyboard and sent a message. Moments later – he got a response – from Japan! I was astonished.

Things have sped up so so much. How far do you think that Amazon would have come if they quoted “please allow 28 days for delivery”. Everything is pretty much instantaneous. With the power of the Internet and Google, the instant after you ask yourself a question – you can find the answer to almost anything. I can’t help thinking that all this near instant gratification comes at a price. We have ever shorter attention spans. Will people actually manage to finish reading books in the future ?

Once upon a time, when you were at a loss for things to do, you would tend to daydream. Nowadays, most people reach for the smartphone and log into Facebook.

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May 5 2012

Do you speak my language?

basic coding

basic coding (Photo credit: Terry Freedman)

When I started programming computers in the 1980s, life was really simple. Networking was in its infancy and the Internet was just a twinkle in Tim Berners Lee‘s eye. So you didn’t have to worry about communicating with other machines. There was no windowing concept, so the screen was only two dimensional. Computers tended to just be running your program so you were in complete control. All you had to worry about was lighting up the right bits of the screen and dealing with what the user did to the keyboard.

As time went on and computers became more advanced, the complexity increased. Computers started to talk to each other through something called a database. People will always argue about who invented the idea, but windows arrived along with icons and a mouse. Suddenly, the user could do exactly what they wanted and you had to share everything with other computer programs.

The Internet changed the way we think about computing completely. Suddenly computers talked to each other. No longer could you be prescriptive about what was on the other end of the conversation. Smartphones changed the game yet again. Suddenly, there were a multiplicity of devices all with different operating systems and different limitations.

Having been in IT for a quarter of a century, as you would imagine, I have worked with a large number of different software development technologies and computer languages during my time. My first exposure to programming was at home using BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). As the name suggests, it is a great starting point for anyone. The language reads almost like plain English. Contrast that with the other computer language I used at home which was Z80 assembler which is akin to programming in hieroglyphics or runes.

When I first started programming for a living, I used something called ADABAS Natural from Software AG. This was not programming per se, but more like writing down what you wanted to happen and then handing it to your butler who took it away to some real programmers who turned it into a program. You never felt close enough to the machine to really feel like you were programming.

At college, I learned Pascal, which I took to like a duck to water. Pascal is like an extremely fastidious bachelor who lives alone in a penthouse apartment. Everything has a place. Don’t even think about trying to use something before you have told me exactly what it is or where it lives. The nice thing about Pascal was that you ended up with a very nicely structured (albeit wordy) program. It was also nice to use Turbo Pascal from Borland. In their heyday, Borland provided some of the most excellent programming environments around.

Later, I started to use DBASE from Ashton-Tate which was my first exposure to database based programming. As a language, DBASE was powerful but interpreted one instruction at a time, which meant it was tediously slow. It was a natural progression to use Clipper which retained the power, but it was compiled and so comfortably faster.

I never really liked C which was like a simpleton backstreet bruiser with extremely poor hygiene. You had to be really careful what you asked him to do, because he would take it completely literally. It was very easy to machine gun yourself in the foot.

My favourite language was Visual Basic which was like a man with a van – pretty handy for just about anything. You could knock up a program in no time and copy it to another machine using a floppy disk. Because of progress, Visual Basic became more like a man with a fleet of articulated trucks all filled to the brim with specialist tools for just about any task. You could do a lot more – but the simplicity had disappeared.

I would like to teach my nephew and niece about the joys of programming, but the barriers to entry are high. I was delighted when I heard about the Raspberry Pi. This Cambridge based initiative is all about providing a simple computer at an affordable entry point. I registered my interest straight away, but unfortunately I was not alone and stocks are hard to come by.

So I settled on the Cubox instead which is a similar concept, but a bit more expensive and a bit more polished. It includes things like a case and a power supply. Maybe my nephew or niece will grow up to develop the next great leap forward to make programming even more complicated!

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May 4 2012

The big day

 

Wedding cake

Wedding cake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As she looked in the mirror, she realised with a deep sigh that it was still not good enough. Reaching for a wipe to remove the make up from her face, Alison tutted under her breath and told herself that today of all days – it had to be perfect. She glanced at the clock and gasped as the lateness of the hour dawned on her.

She tossed the used wipe into the bin where it joined several others and she reached for another. She stared disbelieving as she realised that it was her last one. This was her last chance in more ways than one. It would help if she wasn’t so damned nervous. There was a definite tremor in her hands and her stomach felt like a washing machine.

Removing the last of her make up, her thoughts drifted to the night before. Over and over, people had asked her if she was sure she was doing the right thing. It was a big step after all. As if she didn’t know. As if she hadn’t been through it in her head a thousand times before. Why were they trying to put doubts in her mind?

As she started applying her foundation, tendrils of uncertainty crept up on her. What if she was making a mistake. Was this the real thing? Were they going to be together forever? What if it all went wrong? She had felt so certain before, but sitting in her bridal lingerie with her make up half applied had made it all so terrifyingly real.

She looked at the clock again and nervousness started maturing into panic. She reached for her blusher and fumbled sending cosmetics flying in every direction. There was a knock at the door. “Are you OK in there?”. It was Sarah, her bridesmaid. “I’m fine – just clumsy”. She heard a giggle from the other side of the door and with a deep breath, Alison composed herself.

The rest of her make-up went on without incident and she surveyed the finished product in the mirror. It certainly wasn’t perfection but it would have to do. She had no more wipes and no more time. She pulled on her bridal gown as best she could, and called out for Sarah to come and zip her up. As she walked in, Sarah gasped and told her she looked beautiful.

Alison blushed, but she was so happy to hear the compliment and it helped to dispel a few of the butterflies in her stomach. As Sarah struggled with the zip, Alison looked in the mirror once more. Maybe she did look OK. From outside there was the sound of a car horn. “That’ll be the driver” Sarah said.

“Could we just have a quick drink Sarah? You know – to settle my nerves.” Disappearing with a wink, Sarah returned in an instant with a mini bottle of champagne and two glasses. The champagne was quickly poured and bride and bridesmaid chinked glasses before sinking a long mouthful.

The car horn sounded again, more urgently this time. “We’d better go!” Sarah said as she gave Alison’s arm a reassuring squeeze. Alison nodded and they headed out to the car. Alison didn’t know much about cars, but this one was very impressive – paid for by her father. As the doors shut behind them, they settled into the luxurious seats.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” Sarah asked. Alison nodded and stuttered that she was nervous. Sarah grabbed her hand and held it tightly. “It’s only natural – you’ll be fine”.

All too soon, they pulled up outside the registry office. Once out on the pavement, Sarah pulled Alison’s veil down into place and gave her a reassuring smile. “Let’s get you hitched!” she said. Alison moved robotically as she was led by the hand into the building. As she walked through the office towards the front, she glanced around her at all her guests furtively through the protection of her veil.

Although she had jelly legs, she managed to reach the front of the room without incident. She turned to face her partner for the first time that day as per the bridal tradition. Rebecca was resplendent in an identical gown to Alison and as they exchanged smiles through their veils, the last hints of nervousness melted away. Everything was going to be just perfect.

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May 3 2012

The games people play

 

Game designer and author Jane McGonigal at Mee...

Game designer and author Jane McGonigal at Meet the Media Guru in Milan, Italy, May 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Picture the scene. You see 3 children sat on a sofa. Each of them is playing on some sort of electronic device. What thoughts come into your head? The chances are that the words “waste of time” are uppermost in your mind. Up until 24 hours ago, I would have agreed with you, but I was lucky enough to see Jane McGonigal’s presentation at IBM Impact in Las Vegas.

Jane is a self professed future forecaster and author of Reality is Broken. She has a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. An enthralling speaker, she rattles off facts and figures about gaming and the effect on society in convincing fashion. According to her figures, there are a billion gamers in the world today. Angry Birds alone is played for a total of 300 million minutes a day by the human race.

Wikipedia has become an exhaustive knowledge source for just about everything. At the time of writing, the site consists of approximately 4 million articles. Encyclopaedia Britannica contains about 85,000. If all the gamers playing Angry Birds stopped, and turned their attention to recreating Wikipedia (assuming they had the knowledge), it would take them just three weeks.

Interesting – but why does that make gaming anything more than a frivolous waste of time? Apparently, gamers regularly experience 10 distinct positive emotions ranging from curiosity to joy. They are more innovative. More creative. They are more resilient (chiefly because they spend 80% of the time during games failing). Gamers are also more likely to help other people.

There are medical benefits too. According to a Nature Reviews study, gamers with ADHD find that their symptoms are massively diminished or even disappear whilst playing games. Gamers with autism show increased social intelligence. In clinical trials, games give more positive results than pharmaceuticals in patients with depression.

She gave the example of a game called Remission. The hero in the game fights against the agents that cause cancer. Patients suffering from the disease who play the game have better outcomes than patients who just watch the game being played. Observation or brain activity whilst playing the game shows increased activity in the Thalamus (responsible for not giving up) and the Hippocampus (responsible for long term memory and habits). If you play the game, you are less likely to give up  and much more likely to continue treatment.

During her presentation, she told us that we were going to play Massively Multiplayer thumb wrestling. As I was surrounded by 9,000 other people, I decided in an instant that I was far too British to take part in any such nonsense. When the time came, I became wrapped up in the moment and I was thumb wrestling with the best of them and I won with one thumb, which apparently makes me a grand champion of thumb wrestling! Jane asserted that we would all feel a number of positive emotions afterwards, and I did, once I had composed myself and straightened my tie.

I can’t wait to read the book.

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May 1 2012

We have no time to stand and stare…

 

Rainbow in the Fountains of the Bellagio Hotel...

Rainbow in the Fountains of the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is nothing quite like a good view. You can almost feel your batteries being recharged as you take in the sheer magnificence of the spectacle before you. Unfortunately, the reverse can also be true. It can be draining when you take in a view that is not quite so pleasing. Unfortunately, I find myself in just such a place right now. I am in Las Vegas for a conference and whilst I can understand why the location appeals to some – I am not amongst them.

I am impressed by the technological achievement of some of the developments here. The synchronized fountains outside the Bellagio are undoubtedly a sight to see. I can appreciate the design work that must have gone into the intense choreography as the individual jets shoot carefully controlled pulses into the sky. The architecture behind some of the buildings is astonishing in the sheer scale of these monolithic cathedrals to hedonistic consumerism.

But to me, these buildings have one essential ingredient missing – they lack a soul. Somehow when you walk around the buildings in an old part of London or York, the history around you almost seeps out into the street as you walk through. Of course, they are nowhere near as opulent as the structures of Las Vegas but they are genuine.

Aside from the old town, Hemel Hempstead, my home, will never be renowned as a site of beauty. Despite the fact that we have the tallest building in Hertfordshire in the form of Kodak House, the skyline is never going to rank amongst the most impressive in the world. One day though, I did manage to see it from a different perspective. I was working for BP at the time. Whilst waiting for a job to finish on my machine, my gaze happened to wander over to a field outside the building where there was a team busily preparing to launch a hot air balloon. The balloon was festooned with BP logos, and in that moment – it occurred to me that there might be a way to hitch a ride.

I pleaded with my team leader to let me go outside to the balloon until she let me go. I ran downstairs, climbed over the prickly hedge and ran over the muddy field. As I neared the balloon, puffed out from my exertions, I caught sight of the man leading the crew. For an instant, he gave me a look that told me my travails had been in vain and then his face softened into a broad smile and he lifted me into the basket.

At that moment, they gave a blast with the burners. It sounded like a primeval, unearthly roar and the searing heat washed over us. Little by little, the balloon started to rise and the basket floated beneath. Before too long, my office was disappearing below us. The higher we ascended, the more amazing the view became. As I saw Hemel Hempstead stretched out below, I realised how verdant and green everything looked. The rivers and canal  framed the town, and it looked quite stunning from up above. Fortunately, there was not much else to do in the balloon other than drink in the view.

Aerial views show a completely different perspective on the familiar. There is an approach to Heathrow where the pilot makes his final approach low over the Thames. I never tire of roaring along the river from East to West taking in all the famous London landmarks. Nowadays, with Google Earth, you can see the same view from the comfort of your own home, but somehow, it’s not quite the same as feeling the experience of flight at the same time.

One view I will never forget was from high up in the World Trade Centre in New York. I was there early one morning to give a training course. Because it was in December, sunrise was fairly late. The streets in Manhattan are laid out in a lattice so that all the buildings share the same orientation. As the sun came up, the skyscrapers that make up the famous New York skyline lit up in unison. It seemed almost as if the city was made of huge gold bars standing to attention in the morning light.

If you ever find yourself with a spectacular site before you, take my advice. Take the time to stand and stare, unless you find yourself in Las Vegas.

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