Oct 28 2013

The cleanliness or otherwise of boots

English: Excel Cross Country Runner

English: Excel Cross Country Runner (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Everyone had a bogey subject at school. The subject that made them reluctant to get out of bed of a morning. Mine was Physical Education. I don’t know why they called it that because in the whole of my school career, I don’t think I learned anything. Unless you can count such valuable lessons in life such as not going outside in shorts and a T-shirt if there’s snow on the ground. Or maybe the fact that if someone twice your size tackles you, it’s going to hurt. A lot.

Childline wasn’t around back then otherwise the first thing on my to-do list of a Tuesday morning would be to ring them. It all seemed so illogical to me. Why do we play outside when it’s cold and inside when it’s warm? Why did the school swimming pool have no roof? Either masochism or economics. They swore blind it was a heated pool. I chose my sports day event based on brevity rather than talent.

It didn’t help that I was the youngest in the year, and therefore the smallest by some considerable margin. It also didn’t help that school rules said no spectacles on the sports field. It’s kind of hard to concentrate when someone’s throwing a rock hard cricket ball at you when you can’t see a thing.

But my nemesis of nemeses was the cross-country run.

I don’t like playing football or rugby, but I at least understand why people do. But why oh why would you want to pick a particularly cold day, especially if it’s raining to go and run 5 miles in a big circle. To add insult to injury, our cross-country route passed through a pig farm. For those who have never had the opportunity to visit one, they stink. Not only do they stink, but they collect mud. Sometimes it came up to our knees.

After 5 freezing cold, rain-sodden miles of traipsing through mud dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, you are cold, wet, tired and most of all miserable. And they had a special punishment for the ungifted cross-country runner. Muddy boots were not allowed in the changing room, so they were left outside for the bloke who came last to clean. And I always came last.

One day I refused. The sports master couldn’t believe his ears. I was a well-behaved, compliant student by reputation.

“If you don’t clean them – you’ll have to go and see Mr Foskett”

Mr Foskett couldn’t believe it either. Neither could the deputy head and nor could the headmaster. I stood in his office still in my muddy sports kit. He threatened to call my parents and when I still refused to clean the boots, he summoned my mother to the school.

She duly arrived and they explained my heinous crime to her. She looked at me somewhat incredulously before turning to the headmaster and saying;

“Clean your own *&£$ing boots!” and she took me home.

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Oct 27 2013

Arthur C. Clarke

Book cover for The City and the Stars by Arthu...

Book cover for The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. This was published by Harcourt in June 1956 and was the first release of this novel. The image is used to illustrate the article The City and the Stars. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Up until relatively recently, the only way I knew of Arthur C. Clarke was as the host of some interesting documentaries about cool stuff that no-one could explain.

He was a bald guy who lived in Sri Lanka who posed questions about crystal skulls and markings in ancient Peru that only made sense when viewed from altitude. I knew he wrote 2001, A Space Odyssey and the follow-up 2010, but it never occurred to me just how prolific he was as a science fiction author.

It was only when I came across his books in the science fiction masterworks series that I realised just how many books he penned. Unlike many great science fiction authors, Arthur C. Clarke has the distinction of having two books released under the banner; Rendezvous With Rama and The City and the Stars. From reading the back covers, Rendezvous sounded more interesting, so that’s the one I read first.

Arthur C. Clarke has a great way of describing technical and physical things in a way that they make sense to the reader. He can bring them to life in the space of a few short sentences. In Rendezvous with Rama, the story revolves around a gigantic spaceship that visits our future Solar System so he has plenty of opportunity to exercise his craft.

Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, I couldn’t help feeling cheated when I reached the end. If I were unkind, I might summarise the plot as: a huge alien spaceship turns up; humans explore it; it buggers off taking all its secrets with it. At the end of the book, he explained little or nothing about the culture that built the spacecraft. Were they alive or dead? Were they benevolent or malicious? All we know is that they build cool spaceships populated with robots.

In all my disappointment about the first book, I felt reluctant to read the second. It was only when a friend recommended The City and the Stars that I picked up the book. I have to say – what a difference. If not much happens in the first book, the whole universe changes in the second book.

The action starts off in the sterile city of Diaspar. Everything is safe within the city’s dome. People are reproduced as necessary from within  the central computer’s memory banks and have to live according to preset conditioning. The central character, Alvin, is born with something no-one else seems to have; curiosity. He wants to know what’s out there and boy does he find out and changes the city, the world and the universe in the process. It’s a great novel and I was staggered to find out that he wrote it in the 50s. I was doubly staggered to find out that it was a rewrite of the first story he ever penned.

It’s hard to believe that Arthur C. Clarke wrote both books. The second is a masterpiece. The only criticism I have is that I don’t find his descriptions of people to be particularly evocative. But who am I to judge?

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Oct 16 2013

Scunthorpe – where else would you find a naked man running down the high street wielding a machete?

English: A car park from above.

English: A car park from above. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I wouldn’t park there if I were you” said the shifty looking youth in the hooded top.

We looked at each other puzzled; “But it’s a car park.”

“Fridges.” he replied in his thick Northern accent.

Must be something in the water round here; “Sorry – what do you mean?”

“Off top” he said, gesturing to the large tower block overlooking the car park.

“They like using cars for target practise – wit’ fridges.”

Blimey – we could see why this was the home of our shiny new software. It was a town centre monitoring system, hooking up CCTV cameras with alarms, door locks and radio systems across the town centre. After swiftly moving the car to a safer looking parking spot, we headed towards the control centre which looked like a hardened bunker at the nexus of the three tower blocks. Security was very tight and neither of us thought to bring any photo ID.

“We wrote your software. We’re here to see it.”

“Righto sunshine, pull the other one.” said a disembodied voice behind a grille.

We were eager to see the software in action. Although we carried out extensive testing in the lab’, we could only run the system at a small-scale because there were only so many cameras and monitors we could fit on the premises. Eventually, we managed to persuade our vigilant friend that we weren’t fully paid up members of the hooded fridge throwers club and he let us in.

This was back in the late nineties, and the system was advanced for the time. Each operator had a touch screen with which they could navigate over a map of the city. All of the cameras were shown together with their fields of view.

By tapping on a camera, the operator could move it around using a touch screen joypad. Each camera could be made to appear either picture in picture on the operator’s monitor or on a wall of monitors. We even had multiplexer support so that the operator could have many camera pictures showing up in a grid on his monitor.

Built into the system were alarms. When anything triggered an alarm, cameras would go to predetermined positions and appear on predetermined monitors to bring whatever triggered the alarm to the operator’s attention. Right in front of us, an alarm went off and the system sprang into action. It was a real thrill to see the software we created working in anger.

We didn’t have long to admire our handiwork as our vigilant friend ushered us out of the room.

Eventually, the police turned up and we overheard the source of all the excitement. A naked man rampaged down Scunthorpe high street wielding a machete.

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Oct 13 2013

Unconscious probability manipulation

English: London Midland Desiro EMU 350125 call...

English: London Midland Desiro EMU 350125 calls at Watford Junction with a service to London Euston. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who has received any kind of instruction in writing will tell you that the most heinous crime you can commit is to open your piece with something as clichéd as “It was a dark and stormy night“.

So I won’t.

But it was.

I was on the way home from work. One day a week, I trek down to our London office. Partly because some of my team work there, but also because it’s good to catch up with the other people who work there. The office in which I’m based is solely a development shop. The London office houses sales, marketing, HR among other things. It’s a trek because it involves planes, trains and automobiles.

A slight exaggeration – it doesn’t involve planes, but it does involve a walk, a taxi, a train, a walk, a tube and a final walk. It’s exhausting, and it adds roughly half a day to my normal work regime.

I was on the tube home. I normally get off close to the London terminus where I can catch a train to my home town. It occurred to me that the final destination of this tube was half way home and I wondered whether going all the way might be an option for when the trains home are stuffed. Every once in a while, signals fail, drivers strike or someone chooses the day I go into London to end it all by inconveniently jumping in front of a train.

The notion was fresh in my mind even as I alighted the train. At street level, the aforementioned dark and stormy night rendered everything wet. Me, my clothes, the pavement, everything. I hurried towards the terminus to catch my train. As I approached the station, I noticed the newly painted thick white lines in a perimeter around the station. Painted in the centre of each line was a no smoking sign. A notion crossed my mind that with all the rain, they might be slippery.

In the split second that the thought crossed my mind, I felt my feet slip out from under me. I saw the sky and the tall buildings around me spin as I went through a dramatic unintended backflip. Through some miracle, I landed unharmed. My pirouette through the sky softened through the willing compliance of my thick coat and my backpack. Several people rushed to my aid, proving the milk of human kindness has not yet gone off.

I’m not a superstitious man, but I thought about the trains being stuffed and verily, they were so. I thought that the new white lines, slick with rain, might be slippery and verily I was upon my posterior. I’m getting paranoid. I think I may have unconscious probability manipulation.

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Oct 7 2013

Why are babies so rubbish?

Inglesina 3-in-1 stroller without the chassis

Inglesina 3-in-1 stroller without the chassis (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s not like babies are new. They’ve been around for a very long time. It seems to me that whilst other creatures were busy evolving the ability to be born walking or swimming, we hardly evolved at all. Slightly less hairy perhaps with a larger brain cavity, but still utterly unable to communicate or move under our own power at birth.

We’re not even very good at producing them in the first place. If childbirth gets a bit difficult, we reach for a vacuüm as if we’re trying to remove a stubborn bit of fluff from the carpet. Or we reach for a pair of tongs that look like something Herr Flick would use at weekends. Failing that, we slice the unfortunate mother from stem to stern to deliver the baby through the sunroof.

But childbirth looks like the pinnacle of human achievement compared to the progress we’ve made on baby accessories. We don’t have children ourselves, but we spend enough time with young relatives to know our way round a car seat or a pushchair. Why are they so poorly designed?

The wheels on supermarket trolleys are universally derided for being unpredictable at the best of times, so who on earth came up with the idea of basing the front wheels of pushchairs on the same design? Who thought it would be a good idea to have a separate brake for each of the rear wheels? The whole point of having brakes is that you want the thing to stay in one place; not in fact to slowly pivot around the locked wheel.

If the people who made my car can design seats that fold in a zillion different utterly intuitive ways, why do manufacturers come up with such unfathomably enigmatic ways to fold pushchairs? Whoever designs pushchairs should have to test them themselves under simulated real life conditions. First of all, they should have to fold and unfold them in the rain. Then they should have to do it one-handed whilst holding something loud, heavy and wriggling, like a bag of cats maybe. Then they need to repeat the test laden with shopping.

There are many hostile environments in the world, but few can compare to the rigours a baby seat has to go through. Even the nicest design will look disgusting after exposure to a child. You will want to clean it, which means removing the cover. This will prove impossible without putting your fingers into every single nook and cranny. Pray that you put your fingers into something hard and dry. Unfortunately, you are likely to put your fingers into something soft, wet and gooey and pray that it’s undigested.

The ideal baby accessory should be easy to get out, easy to put down and completely jet washable, not unlike the perfect baby.

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Sep 30 2013

My mate Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison on stage.

Larry Ellison on stage. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Each year I say I’m not going to go this time and each year I end up going. It’s not that I don’t enjoy Oracle Openworld. San Francisco is a fantastic place to visit and the conference, with over 60,000 attendees, is impressive in scale and ambition. But it’s another long haul flight; another weekend up in smoke; another week away from home. Once the novelty wears off, it loses its lustre.

The fact that this year’s conference coincided with the Americas Cup finals in San Francisco bay added more pizzazz and I looked forward to grabbing an opportunity to see the boats. The bay makes an impressive backdrop, with Alcatraz sandwiched between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge (arguably the prettier of the two). The boats make an impressive spectacle, but the race itself is impossible to fathom from ground level. Where it really comes into its own is on a big screen with overlaid graphics showing speeds and the distance between the two boats.

Probably more impressive still is Larry Ellison, the gregarious founder and CEO of Oracle. Just like Steve Jobs, he was both adopted and a University drop out. Today he is the world’s 5th richest man and a self-declared legend. One of the most often hear jokes about Larry; “What’s the difference between God and Larry Ellison?  God doesn’t believe he’s Larry Ellison.”

His keynote speeches are something to behold. Full of superlatives about how amazing his new software, hardware or combination thereof happen to be. These claims are typically outlandish and difficult to disprove. If Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field, he bought it from Larry.

One thing that tickles me is his inconsistency. I remember watching him one year denouncing cloud as a ridiculous fad. The very next year, Oracle were more cloudy than a cumulonimbus! One year, he was on stage with his counterpart from HP telling the world what strong partners they were. Shortly afterwards, Oracle announced that support for HP’s Itanium machine would soon cease. Shortly afterwards they ran a highly publicised cash for clunkers campaign persuading people to trade in HP hardware for shiny new Oracle machines.

There is no doubt who’s in charge. He reportedly cancelled one of his keynotes because it clashed with an Americas Cup race! But my favourite Larry story came from one of my fellow delegates. Apparently he once spoke to Larry and asked him what his favourite exercise was.

“Basketball.” said Larry. “I like to play it on my yacht.”

“But doesn’t the ball keep flying off the side?”

“That’s OK, I have a guy in a speedboat who zips around collecting the balls!”

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Sep 19 2013

What’s the hardest short word to say in the English language?

A moving GIF showing a basic 3 ball-cascade ju...

A moving GIF showing a basic 3 ball-cascade juggling pattern: good for juggling explanation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a short-term success strategy, going round saying yes to everything is hard to beat. Not only that, but it’s infectious as the more you get a reputation for saying yes, the more things come your way to say yes to. The guy asking you to do something walks away happy because he has someone to do his thing. You feel happy because you feel respected and liked.

But the worse thing you can do is to say yes to things and then not follow through. If you have too many balls in the air, then that’s what tends to happen. You’ve said yes to so much stuff that you can’t give any of them the attention they deserve. You end up half doing everything.

A better success strategy is to focus on the important things that you should be doing in your role and succeed at those so that the company prospers.

The first thing to ask when someone asks you to do something is should someone else be doing this. I’m not suggesting getting all slopey shouldered, but if you have a help desk, why is this person coming to you for help. If you have a sales force, why are they coming to you asking you to go out and sell something. In a small company it’s different, because everyone does anything. Any kind of scalable endeavour cannot rely on a hero culture.

They must be asking you because they know you can do it. But if someone else should be doing it, the crucial question is why. It could be because they lack confidence. It could be because they don’t know how to do the thing in question. It could be because they are lazy. Whatever the reason, the person in front of you wants help. Of course you can help him, but that doesn’t fix the problem. And guess where he’ll come next time.

The next question to ask is what needs to happen for the right person to do the job next time? And plan to put steps in place to make it happen.

How many times has someone come up to you late in the day because they have a demo / meeting / Powerpoint to get done / document they need (delete as appropriate). If someone does this to me, I try to establish whether this is something that has really come out of the blue or whether they knew about it some time ago. If it’s the former, I’ll help, assuming I don’t have my own personal emergency to take care of, but point out that I might be busy / on holiday / in a meeting next time and they really need to let me know as soon as possible so that together we can plan when it will happen.

If they make a habit of it, then it’s obvious which short word to use next; NO!

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Sep 16 2013

Asimov

Cover of "The Complete Robot (Robot Serie...

Cover of The Complete Robot (Robot Series)

I don’t know why I never got round to reading it. I picked it up in a charity shop eons ago. The cover showed its age and the title didn’t seem that exciting. Even the blurb on the back of the book failed to motivate any kind of desire to read it. How wrong I was.

I tend to find books where politics form the central thread of the story tedious. There are some notable exceptions; The Song of Ice and Fire trilogy by George Martin the main one that springs to mind. I also have low tolerance for books that don’t grab me early in the story. So I didn’t have high expectations. Despite all that, Foundation is the best science fiction novel I’ve ever read.

The central premise of the story is interesting. The behaviour of any sufficiently large society can be mapped and predicted using mathematical models. Professor Hari Sheldon, as a Psychohistorian predicts the downfall of the empire using such mathematical models. There is no way to avoid it, but the effects are mitigated by forming the Foundation.

The story rattles along at a cracking pace as the epochs unfold. Each epoch requires a different set of skills and a different set of people to come to the fore. The scale of the story is sometimes staggering, but as a writer, I can appreciate the crispness of Isaac Asimov‘s prose. The end of every era is marked by a crisis as the new epoch is born. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I was genuinely disappointed when the book finished. 

I went to the local bookshop to pick up the sequels, only to find that they were out of stock. Impatient to get another dose of Asimov, I picked up the Complete Robot anthology. All of the 31 stories revolve around the robots of the US Robotics and Mechanical Men corporation and the nuances of the 3 laws of robotics. Some might think that such a subject would be severely limiting, but there is huge variety in the stories. My personal favourite is Reason where the robots decide that the best way to obey first law is to start locking the humans up.

By a sheer stroke of coincidence the day after I finished the series I, Robot came on the TV. I have yet to read the story, but I couldn’t turn down the chance of some visual Asimov goodness. The character names and the terminology used are reminiscent of the world I’ve come to know and love, but it’s almost as if they put together all the ingredients of a good Asimov robot story and threw half of them away. Not a bad film, but somehow a wasted opportunity.

I can’t wait for someone to create a film version of Foundation. In the meantime, I’m patiently waiting for the next books in the series.

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Sep 11 2013

Performance

English: An example of the newly-designed Guin...

English: An example of the newly-designed Guinness glass, put into use in April 2010. It was designed to gradually replace the older tulip-shaped glasses. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An excited member of my team once came up to me and told me he’d sped up a subsystem by a factor of 700 times. Once he ran some full system tests, we found that the optimisation had absolutely zero performance impact on any observable aspect of the system. The online requests still took the same amount of time. There was an overnight batch that took almost exactly the same time as before we applied the optimisation. The guy was crestfallen.

How many times have you been on the phone to your bank and the operator says something like “Sorry for the delay Sir, the computer’s really slow today”? Performance problems are an annoyance. Unless things are really bad, you can typically use the system, but it’s slow. We human beings are an impatient lot, so the annoyance level of a system taking 5 seconds to respond instead of 1 is higher than you might expect.

There is some mystique about the performance of a system. With good reason. To really understand performance, you need to understand a hell of a lot about the 1s and 0s that are flying around at the lower level. You need an understanding of what’s happening at the hardware level to make sure there are no bottlenecks there. Sometimes it might be the operating system running out of resources or perhaps the database. It might even be the application code itself. A good performance expert will have many years of experience and an intuitive grasp of what’s going on at every level.

It usually boils down to three different types of problem. Either the tasks in the system are taking too long, or there are too many tasks going on or there is contention.

Suppose you have a bar. Suppose that each time the barman serves a customer, he has to go next door and buy a glass. Each customer interaction is going to take a long time. Adding more barmen is the wrong approach. To fix the performance problem, you need to have a shelf full of glasses that the barman can use whenever a customer places an order. You also need to make sure the shelf gets restocked.

Suppose 20 thirsty people turn up. Now, there is contention for the barman. Cutting the amount of time the barman takes to serve each customer will help, but adding more barmen would probably help more.

Suppose 14 coach loads of thirsty Irishmen turn up on the way back from a rugby match. Now you’ve got a real problem. Not only have you got too many customers to serve, and you have contention on the bar staff, the chances are that a good proportion of them are going to order Guinness (the drink that takes the longest time to serve). To add insult to injury, they’ve probably spent all their money at the match so many of them will also be paying by credit card.

In this example, you’ve got multiple examples of all 3 types of problem at once, which is typically how it goes when you are looking at a complex application. So the next time you’re on the phone to the call centre and the system’s slow, cut them some slack. And spare a thought for the poor sod in the back room who’s trying to work out why.

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Sep 5 2013

Time

Pocket watch

Pocket watch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The snap of his briefcase clasps shattered the silence like a gunshot. Wordlessly, Nickleback (of Nickleback, Orchard and Furrow) retrieved a sheaf of papers before closing the briefcase. The disorder of the papers was in stark contrast to Nickleback’s meticulous appearance. His jet black hair, parted exactly at the corner of his squarish forehead. He pulled off his frameless spectacles and cleaned them using his handkerchief.

“Mr… Albert Muller?”

The old man sat across the other side of table grunted his acknowledgement. Most of Albert Muller’s hair was no longer there and what remained was an atoll of wispy white strands. A bushy white beard framed his face. Like his lawyer, he wore a suit but his seemed to accentuate Albert’s dishevelled appearance.

“Charged with Criminal Damage?”

Albert swallowed audibly before bridging his fingers in front of his face. As if unhappy with the pose, he immediately folded his arms across his barrel-shaped chest.

Nickleback looked up. “Is that correct?”

Albert didn’t trust his voice in responding. He nodded, once.

“How will you plead, guilty or not guilty?”

Alberts chair flew backwards as he stood and pounded his fist upon the table scattering papers from the pile.

“It is they who are criminals. They stole my whole life from me. Everything I ever worked for, they took from me. They should be locked up!”

Nickleback removed his glasses and sucked on the earpiece, weighing up what Albert said before gathering the scattered papers. He replaced his glasses and read on.

“The errr… subject of the criminal damage was some sort of machine. A machine that they bought from you for £10,000.”

Albert sat down again. “A compulsory purchase is no purchase. It is robbery by the government. They should be sat here as your clients”

“But there’s an accounting here for every single nut, every single screw, every piece of wire, every panel. They paid you a very fair price.”

“Who’s to say that’s a fair price? Every nut, every bolt… What about every bead of sweat, every sleepless night, my painstaking research and experiments, the very essence of my being. What price do you put on that?”

“But they paid you an additional £5,000 for estimated labour costs.”

Albert leaned forward, before lowering his voice. “Five thousand pounds? How much of your labour would I get for five thousand pounds Mr Nickleback?”

“What was the machine Mr Muller?”

“It was a time machine.”

Nickleback leaned forward, curious. “Did it work?”

“Yes, of course it worked. That is why the bastards stole it from me.”

“How did it work?”

“You know nothing of the base principles of temporal science, so it is very difficult to explain. Let’s just say the machine helps to locate the strands of time and follow them backwards into the past and in limited circumstances forwards into the future.”

“Why did you destroy the machine?”

“Because they could not be trusted. They wanted to go back and remove Hitler. They wanted to steer the Titanic round the iceberg. They wanted to stop the terrorists from crashing into the world trade centre. They even wanted to use the machine for financial gain to pay off the deficit – fools. They do not understand the dangers. It is all too easy to blunder into significant changes to the present. If they cause feedback by tying the present to the past, they can cause a temporal causality loop. And then there are paradoxes. Fools as well as criminals!”

Albert sat back in the chair. “Besides, I did not destroy the machine.”

“It says here that all that was left was a pile of twisted metal and wires.”

Albert spoke slowly. “I tell you, I did not destroy the machine.”

“Who did then?”

“I simply moved the machine and left in its place the detritus you describe.”

“Where is it now?”

Albert smiled. “To a man with a time machine, hiding places are limitless.”

Nickleback shook his head, opened his briefcase and cast in the sheaf of papers. “If found guilty, you are looking at a significant custodial sentence.”

Albert’s smile broadened into a wide grin. He began to laugh, slowly at first, but before long, his shoulders shook with exultant laughter.

Catching his breath Albert said “My dear Mr Nickleback, to punish me, a temporal scientist, they intend to give me…”

He descended into hoots of laughter again before gasping out the word “Time!”

Nickleback left the room shaking his head. He could hear Albert’s laughter a long way down the corridor. At the reception desk, he located his name in the ledger to sign out and frowned. He looked at his watch and then looked back at the ledger.

The reception clerk looked up “Everything OK?”

Nickleback stared into space. “Yes – it’s just… I could have sworn today was Friday.”

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