Marketing

When did "Excel" become a synomym for "spreadsheet"?

Walking away

We've all read the books about how you must go into a negotiation knowing your walk away position. However, I find that it is rare to fail to reach an agreement, so you never really need your walk away position.

Today I discovered that there is something satisfying about walking away from a negotiation.

I was looking for a new pair of shoes. In the first shoe shop I found (Clarks), I found a nice pair of shoes at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, they don't have the right size for my foot. (This is no great surprise, I don't have a large sock.)

They do however have my size in this very similar pair at £70. They were indeed comfortable. I had aimed to get something under £50. In the current economic climate I decided to see if they would be tempted to reduce the price to get the sale.

You aren't meant to reveal your walk away position, but the salesman's generous offer of (shocked face) "we don't do discounts" didn't quite do it for me.

So I walked away, wearing my old, worn out shoes and a smug smile on my face. I'm sure there's some irony here.

The shop round the corner had an almost identical shoe for £20 less, which did me fine.

Grumpy Science

Are bus drivers grumpy? After a spate of particularly grumpy drivers a few weeks ago, I decided to do some science.

Hypothesis: most bus drivers are grumpy.

We'll need to know what grumpy means though.

Definition of Grumpy

Exhibits one or more of:

Facial expression is one of general displeasure

Makes a negative comment

Emits grunting sounds in a negative manner

Does not acknowledge the passenger except for dealing with ticket

Eye contact limited to glaring or frowning

Complains about something

Definition of Cheerful

Exhibits one or more of:

Smiles or has generally positive facial expression

Makes smalltalk, excluding where it consists mainly of grumbles or complaints

Emits a positive comment

Eye contact, excluding glaring or frowning at passenger

On each bus journey I take, I'll record whether the bus driver is grumpy or cheerful when I board the bus.

The results will appear in another post.

Powerless

Today we (most of the east side of York apparently) had a power cut for about 2 seconds.

What mayhem this caused!

At work, most office computers and a server rebooted, some work was lost, a quite important file was corrupted. And we all had to stop for 10 minutes to discuss technical reasons why the building's forced ventilation fans didn't restart immediately after the power cut.

At home, I've only got to reset the time on nearly all the clocks in our house (binary clock, cooker etc.) and turn on a few things that have soft power switches.

We are far too reliant on a stable 240V AC supply. Can you imagine what would happen if we had to go without electricity for any serious amount of time? We probably wouldn't be rubbing sticks together for energy, we'd be working out the details of installing a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to keep the PCs running.

Office Move

We moved to a bigger, shinier office today. The move went smoothly (and I didn't have to organize this one). The new office is really rather nice and spacious. And still tidy.

We now have more than twice as much window, which is really nice. There's a nice leafy view, but unfortunately one more obstacle to really feeling like we are playing in the green fields: none of this vast expanse of daylight actually opens to allow the scent of spring into the office. Doh!

Plumbing sanity

If there is one thing that is essential when designing something intended to hold water (like a sink or a toilet cistern), it is that the holes in it (plug hole, and where the flush comes out) must be able to be sealed...right?

Typically, a seal is made by squashing a bit of rubber tight against a flat surface. 

So, why is it that:

 1. My new sink's hole for the drain does not have the top and the bottom of the hole parallel? That is, you put the drain in but and the nut + washer at the back are at an angle to the surface they are meant to make a seal with!

 2. My new toilet cistern does not have the base of the cistern at right angles to the back of the cistern....so that the flush mechanism fits wonky. If you make a good seal, the flush mechanism cannot align with the button on the lid of the cistern, or if you want the flush to align with the buttons, then you cannot have a good seal.

If these simple design details were right, then the fitting the appliances would have taken a fraction of the time it's taking me now. Surely, everyone who buys these items will have the same problem.

After a couple of false starts, the sink was not too bad: plenty of silicone instead of relying the rubber washer did the trick...but the WC is still a work-in-progress. I suspect that since I prefer the fail-safe (no leaks) over functionality (being able to flush),  I'll end up with something can can only do single-flush, not dual flush.

Do real plumbers have these issues...come on, what's the trick?

Gremlins

Watch out! The gremlins are about..

They've already beheaded our compiler (by making it eat its own stack), caused the simple software update that was meant to fix the compiler to break network file handling, and made my web browser crash.

Otherwise, it's an ordinary day.

Gushing Water and Another Mystery Solved

I woke up this morning at 2:30am to the sound of a header tank in the loft quietly refilling. I don't know how that woke me up, but it did.

Part 1 - the gushing water

Coming to my senses, I realised that no header tank has any business to be refilling in the middle of the night when no one is using any water. Earlier that evening, I had removed the toilet, radiator and other water-related things from the WC, so I thought it prudent to take a look downstairs.

During the night, one of the (disconnected) thermostatic radiator valves had started to leak water; which was now gushing all over the place where the floor would have been, if I had not removed the floor earlier that evening too. So now it was just gushing fairly harmlessly onto the concrete sub-floor.

I checked that the thermostatic radiator was set to "0" (off) and then managed to tighten the thermostat a bit tighter onto the valve which stopped the water. So, I let the water system fill up again, ran the pump for a bit and bled the radiators, before checking that there was no further leaking and returning to bed.

Just as I was falling asleep again, could I hear a header tank filling up...?

Part 2 - A mystery solved

Some time ago, I fitted thermostatic radiator valves to our radiators. They are easy to fit and apparently save you money. However, they came with an extra bit. You can choose whether to screw the thermostat onto the valve, or you can choose a normal non-thermostatic "tap", like the old valve that I was removing.

At the time I didn't understand why I would want this extra bit - the whole point of the product was that it was thermostatic. I kept the bits anyway (I'm like that).

Perhaps it was the fact that I was now shivering in my dressing gown and slippers, standing on a soaking sub-floor that was at outside temperature in January that made everything finally fall into place.

What is that  extra bit for? It's for when you don't want the thermostatic radiator valve to be thermostatic, of course! For example if there is no radiator connected to it and it's freezing cold because there's neither floor nor heating. On a thermostatic valve, "0" does not mean "off", it just means "very cold". So when the temperature really gets very cold, it turns the valve on.

So, I grabbed the non-thermostatic extra bit, stopped the water with my thumb while I switched it over, and of course it turned the valve off properly. I  let the water system fill up again again, ran the pump for a bit again and bled the radiators again, before checking that there was no further leaking and returning to bed again.

And the moral of the story?

You can bleed radiators in the middle of the night without waking up the household.

Moist Maker

If you ever saw the friends episode with Ross' sandwich and thought it sounded nice, I can confirm that it is in fact excellent, especially if warmed slightly in the microwave. Yum.

Christmas Presents

Great Christmas presents for the geek who has everything.

• Meccano 
• Lego
• Binary clock (for the living room!)
• Domino race
• Big garden loppers

I had a great Christmas! :)

(OK, the Lego wasn't actually for me.)

Rates

Today:

Savings rate on my ISA (4.75%) > my tracker mortgate rate (3.75%)

So I guess that answers the question.

Inflation is 4.1%, which is higher than the mortgage...what does that mean for the building society?

Mortgage vs inflation

From time to time, you hear of little celebrations: "I finished paying my mortgage this month!" On enquiry, you find that they won't really be much better off; their mortgage payments being £25 per month, or some incredibly low figure compared to a typical mortgage payment when you buy a house today.

This repayment amount presumably was a considerable burden on the monthly outgoings when the mortgage was taken out. The repayment schedule is not affected through the years, but due to general inflation, the amount becomes a less significant fraction of the income towards the end of the term.

While it is clear that over-paying the mortgage in the early years will drastically reduce the interest paid, is it worth bothering when the actual "cost" of the mortgage will probably decrease to such an extend that in 30 years you won't even notice the payments?

I'd get out a spreadsheet and play with some numbers...if I ever have enough spare cash to have to decide whether to pay back early or not.

The best website for babies

Instructions:

1. Open web browser
2. Follow link
3. Adjust volume
4. Ahh, peace at last

It's not Tetris

For the complainers that thought that the last entry was too techy, try this...

It's not Tetris, but what a great idea that anyone with children and building blocks can relate to!

99-bricks

Linux on Dell XPS

I remember the days when installing an operating system like Linux on a computer required: building a custom kernel, getting that kernel to boot, hacking device drivers, building another kernel, messing with settings and if you were lucky you might get X to run....

Today, I cannot believe just how easy it was to get Ubuntu to install on my (finally repaired) Dell XPS M1330. For future reference, here's what I did.

I used a Ubuntu CD, version 8.10 (October 2008).

1. Test that the Ubuntu Live CD boots and recognises enough devices (it does).
2. Use Vista's partition manager to shrink the Vista partition to about half of the disk. Note that this is primary partition 3.
3. Boot the Ubuntu Live CD.
4. Partition the disk. The Ubuntu partitioner didn't seem to get it right, so I used gparted. Delete sda4 (this is media direct). Add extended partition to fill the disk (there is a small 2MB unallocated bit left). Add logical partitions inside sda4: 4GB for swap and the rest for ext3.
5. Start installer. Select manual partitioning and configure the partitions as / and swap as above.
6. The rest is automatic. Grub was successfully installed; Vista and Ubuntu are detected and boot correctly. Vista did some automatic reinstalling device drivers, but all seemed ok after that.

The only remaining thing to do is disable the media direct button. Apparently if you press this to turn on the computer, it trashes the partition table.

5 boards for worse

As an incremental update to the fourth motherboard for my laptop, this fix seemed to have a loose connection to the speaker (or something), so I'm now on number 5.

The status when the engineer arrived was that the computer worked (except for the speakers). The status when the engineer left was that the BIOS self-tests pass (but nothing else works). The engineer made a hasty exit, citing vista problems. Apparently they will call me back yesterday.

After some fiddling of my own, I can now boot in vista safe mode, but I'm out of my depth diagnosing vista boot issues.

Ironically, I intended to install linux on this machine when I first got it, but I never quite found the time. It would have been a lot easier to work with, but I am aware that according to Dell, changing the OS on a computer invalidates the warranty...

4 boards for worse

My laptop has just received its fourth motherboard, in the 11th month of its waranty. While the reliability of this particular machine could be down to bad luck or other factors, you can barely fault the tech support.

Anyway, an engineer is coming again tomorrow to fix it. This time the speakers have broken apparently.

Express Morning Delivery

It all happened fast, relatively speaking anyway. In a blur of NHS organisation, I very nearly delivered the package myself.

Despite us being in the hospital for four hours, a midwife could not be persuaded that we were reaching the end of labour (or take the time to check). Still, a head appearing pretty much made the point and then Daniel was born, 2.87kg (6lb5 in old money). All are doing well, and the hard bit begins (for me anyway).

Speaking of NHS organisation, you'd think that there would be a procedure (or at least a checklist, even a well-oiled routine) for something as important and as frequent as childbirth. Either the procedure has radically changed in the last three years, or everyone just makes it up as they go along and somehow things seem to turn out generally OK.

I am determined that this site does not become yet another series of rants, so I'll end by saying that most of the midwives that we encountered were great!

We don't have any plans to come back though.

Go-faster resistors

I've always known that there is some magic required to get high frequency signals to go down a wire and actually appear at the other end, but for 31 years I have managed to get by by simply knowing that "there is some magic required to get high frequency signals to go down a wire and actually appear at the other end". Usually, a resistor here and there makes it work good enough (I am a software engineer afterall, we do not concern ourselves with such low-level issues...)

Finally, necessity dictated that I needed to actually understand what that magic is.

My thanks to the guys who wrote this site and taught me some transmission line theory.

It seems that what I wanted to do is quite impossible.

Perhaps I'll just stick a go-faster resistor across the terminals and see what happens anyway.

Outdoor activities

We spent today panting: boobs and pants.

Apparently.

It's about time Jonathan learned to pronounce the letter L.

ShamPoo

We near the end of potty training, so I have shampooed the carpet for the last time, again.

Nothing to add

I have just returned from a business trip to Sweden and yes of course I ended up in the emergency exit seats again.

Despite cutting the end off my finger, having the motherboard in my laptop die the middle of a presentation, I'm relieved that my family has not yet received a new addition.

Outwit

My two-year old can memorise the location of every card turned over in the "memory" game, flawlessly. He's far better than me!

... Fortunately, his attention span is still a lot shorter than mine, he loses interest before he wins, so I'm still in with a chance.

Boundary Conditions

Tesco is to change the wording at it's checkouts.

"10 items or less" becomes "Up to 10 items".

The reason is that one should say "10 items or fewer", but some people are not sure.

The nice thing about the old wording, from a software engineer's point of view, is that it provies a clear specification. It uses wording that (despite the English faux pas) has a well defined mathematical meaning.

Unfortunately, they are going from the frying pan into the fire with the ambiguous specification of "Up to 10". Does that mean the the maximum number of items is 9 or 10? Up to 10, or up to and including 10?

I don't think I've ever bought fewer than 11 items in a supermarket, and I don't foresee me generating test cases for the boundary condition.

What a waste

I overhead someone grumbling that they were 'fed up' with the two-weekly rubbish collection from the council; their bin, it seems, is always overflowing after one week, let alone two weeks (...)

Last week, being bank holiday, I completely forgot to put out our bin, so the chances are that after four weeks, it might almost be ready for collection.

With the recycling collections, how can anyone possibly fill a wheelie bin every week (or even every two)? What can they possibly find to throw away on that scale?

On a related note, now that Tesco have stopped giving out carrier bags, please will the recycling collection men stop taking our precious carrier bags that we put our recycling in for collection?

Discontinuities

I happened to notice the google maps view of the Humber Bridge, one part seems to have been photographed in the morning, the other in the evening: google maps.

At least they made a better job than Microsoft/Multimap where it looks like the bridge builders made a bit of a miscalculation.

More Rainwater

The Internet is rich with ideas for harvesting rainwater. How can I use the 100 litres of water that I seem to be catching daily?

Short of an expensive plumbing project, connecting water butts to toilet cisterns, I'm out of ideas.

On a scale of Green to not Green

Keen to reduce our water usage (during that hot, dry week a few weeks ago) I ordered a water butt to use for watering the garden. It seems a good idea to use rain, instead of tap water in the watering can.

I fitted it yesterday and within 24 hours of unspectacular British summer, I had 100 litres of fresh rainwater. It's all very exciting.

But what have I actually saved? It cost quite a lot (£70) including a downpipe so that I could put the water butt where I wanted.

I use about 5 watering cans (of 5 litres) to water the garden, that's 25 litres. If I do that 30 times per year (assuming that there is sufficient water in the butt) then 750 litres per year. It doesn't seem an awful lot.

To put things in perspective,

• Apparently, having a shower uses 35 litres, flushing the toilet uses 8 litres, so that puts me on about 22,000 litres per year, just from the bathroom.


• The average water consumption per person is about 140 litres per day, so 51,100 litres per year.


• A few weeks ago I reported to Yorkshire water that there was a water leak on a busy road in York. It had been leaking for about 6 months. Judging from the amount of water that was going upwards to the road this leak might have been far wetter than our dining room roof during drizzle. So guessing at 200 litres per day, that is 73,000 litres per year.
  

Ironically, I got stuck in the traffic jam on Sunday caused by the water company fixing the leak.

Pure Brilliant White

The problem with painting skirting boards is that when you finish one, there is always another one, or a door frame, or a stair rail. The job is never done.

After painting all evening, I'm worried that the probability of accidentally leaning/kicking touching one of them before they are dry is rapidly approaching 1.

I'm Swimming in the Rain

When it rains, the attendants at the outdoor swimming pool (that we can see from our office) call the people indoors.

We've joked about it being to stop them getting wet, but we now wonder if it's because the life-guards don't want to get wet (presumably not getting wet is not in the job-spec of a lifeguard!)

Jobs

I was once in the routine of doing one "DIY" job every day, perhaps only something small each day, but something. It was a good routine because it got things done and I didn't spend the whole evening in front of a laptop writing reports.

I don't know how I got out of the routine, perhaps one day there were no jobs to do(!)

There certainly are jobs now, however. I am hoping that by writing this down I'll stick to it this time.

Sunday: garage door frame undercoat.
Monday: garage door frame topcoat.
Tuesday: err. TBA

In case I "can't" think of anything one night, here are a few things to keep me going:

• fix that annoying bit of skirting board that keeps coming off


• paint the gloss in the dining room


• water butt


• paint that bit of polyfilla by the dining room window


• put some trellis by the compost


• floor of downstairs loo


• gloss paint in downstairs loo


• put up coving in living room


• paint coving


• fix loft hatch


• paint loft hatch


• move header tanks in loft (probably several evenings...)


• knock down the wall in our garden


• check the sealant around the sink


• write a new list

Buzz off!

There has been a great increase in flies in the last few days. Presumably due to the warmer weather. Living next to a cow field, you expect a fly or two. However, the number at the moment is just, just...just buzz off!

Gadget Shopping List

1. MoGo Mouse


2. Suitcase for handluggage: less than 56cm x 45cm x 25cm. Any suggestions?


3. Garden Shredder
   
   Why don't these seem very gadgety any more? Am I getting old...?

RSS

Like most new technologies, it took me a little while to discover RSS, but I've been using RSS for a couple of years now. It's such a useful little thing that I am always surprised other people don't.

In case you also don't know what RSS is...it's a way of getting automatic updates about websites, news, blogs, etc.

Most web browsers, email clients etc can read RSS; just click on the little icon in your browser that looks like this: .

However, one of the most useful ways to read RSS is using google. You can setup a web page with lots of RSS feeds on it so you can keep up to date when people post blog entries, with news updates etc.



I can really recommend this technology. If you have not tried it...why not have a go now?

The first computer

According to the Easyjet inflight magazine (which I happened to be reading today during a particularly boring flight to Madrid):

Manchester boasts that "The world’s first computer was built in Manchester in 1948. A working replica is housed in the city's Museum of Science and Industry."

A few pages later, Sofia, Bulgaria has a similar claim to fame: "The inventor of the first electronic computer John Vincent Atanasoff is of Bulgarian origin. He and Clifford Berry tackled this task at Iowa State University, between 1939 and 1942."

So which one is right? (And why didn't the same person proof-read the whole magazine?)

I'm sure that I remember something about the Z1 in 1936.

And exams aren't getting easier...

1 mark for spelling and 1 for an inspirational insight.

Planes, trains and spaghetti

I have travelled quite a lot, in Europe at least, but never have I had such a stressful nor disastrous trip as my most recent to Venice, Italy.

I don't know whether I am lucky to be finally waiting in the airport lounge for the return trip, or unlucky that I had such a hard time to get here. My glass is generally half-full so I'll go for the first option.

It should have been a nice week at Ada Europe, a small conference for people who care that software works correctly, in a beautiful city and lots of good food.

Instead, this trip involved manning a booth without a booth (at first at least), flooding (in Venice!), a projector that broke just before I gave a technical presentation (yes, I dictated source code and waved graphs with my arms), missing the last train of the day, being stranded on a motorway (on foot) three miles from the hotel at 1am and carrying a 30kg box from Venice to Mestre on a 30'C day.

However, the food was indeed good and apparently the presentation was actually quite memorable, there's certainly a novelty about an oral code review.

This trip also broke the jinx of the emergency exit...on Easyjet you get to choose your own seat.

The best pizza

Despite what the Italians say, the best pizza I have ever eaten was a Hoi-sin Duck pizza.

This pizza is basically your typical Chinese restaurant aromatic crispy duck (with hoi-sin sauce, spring onion on cucumber) on a pizza base (instead of the pancakes) with coriander and a light touch of cheese.

I had it at Felicini's Bakewell and thoroughly recommend it!

Bindweed

I didn't recognise this pretty flower quickly enough last year....now we have an infection of this invasive nuisance weed! Every 24 hours I am pulling up handfuls of new shoots.

Apparently, at best, I will be doing this for at least two more years (more drastic method such as digging out the soil to at least 5 metres deep might reduce this to one year).

On the other hand,  I might just introduce it to the back garden, see if I can kill of that horrible conifer hedge...

Emergency Exit

On an aeroplane I usually sit at the emergency exit seat. I really don't know why I do, it just seems to be that way. Today makes the 6th consecutive plane journey in the emergency exit seat.

I'm not tall, I don't need the leg room, and I much prefer to be able to keep my bag under the seat in front of me (which you can't do in the exit seat).

This trip, I double-checked at check-in that I wasn't in the exit seat. "No problem sir, you're in 9, the exit is 11". It turns out that 9 is the exit.

The last trip, they allocated me the exit seat, but I changed it at check-in. However, on boarding the plane the staff take me aside and ask if I will swap tickets with someone...so that I can operate the exit in an emergency.

Bovinophobia

When we moved in, at the bottom of our garden was:

1. 2 metre high wooden fence
2. Barbed wire
3. 2.5 metre high hawthorn hedge, about 1 metre deep
4. Holly hedge

What was this high security perimeter for? I can only assume that it was to stop the cows in the field behind us looking in the garden for greener pastures.

What were the previous occupants thinking? Should the cows manage to scale the fence (without getting caught on the barbed wire) and survive the vicious spikes in the hawthorn then the holly would put them off...

I have now removed most of the fetures from the bottom of the garden, reclaiming a good 8 square metres of garden and a pleasant view of a few friendly cows.

Railway Sleeper

When my neighbour offered to take one of the railway sleepers we happened to inherit when we bought our house, I did not imagine quite what he would be doing with it.

He did mention that it would be a nice training tool for his Tai Chi training, but while I was imagining him doing "Karate Chops" or perhaps wax-on/wax-off for a nice bench...

These things are heavy, especially the water-logged ones I had. I can barely move them.

Apparently the Tai Chi exercise he had in mind (and then demonstrated) was effectively letting it fall from the vertical onto one of his forearms and pushing it back up again.

Suddenly feeling rather insignificant, I silently vowed to do some weight-lifting.

Like a diamond in the sky

While playing "Super Shape Challenge" game (for two year olds):

Mummy: "What shape is this?"
Child: "Errr.."
Mummy: "T....."
Mummy: "Tr...."
Mummy: "Tri..."
Child: "Triangle!"
Child: "Look! I've found a Rhombus over here!"

I can just imagine in a year or so "unlearning" the name for an equilateral parallelogram at nursery or infant school:

Teacher: "What shape is this?"
Child: "A Rhombus"
Teacher: "It's diamond!"

Venetian Blind

I had always, naively, assumed that there was some technical logic in the sizes of ready-made blinds. I now believe that there is absolutely no forethought or design, whatsoever, in choosing the range of sizes for blinds.

For example...

We have a window that is 126.5cm wide and we decided that we would fit a Venetian blind. The range of Venetian blinds that we choose includes 120cm and 150cm wide blinds.

We tried the 120cm blind, it being almost right. However, with a 3(.25)cm gap at each side, it did look a bit silly. So I exchanged it for the next size up, 150cm, so that we could shorten it to exactly the right size, just as I had done quite easily for another window (just clamp, hacksaw and then file the corners).

It turns out that due to the placement of the cords, the cord catch and the twiddly thing that adjusts the blind, that the minimum width that this 150cm blind can ever (without serious modification) be adjusted to is 131cm.

I have spent almost three hours fitting this blind tonight. And it's still not finished. Further modification, requiring a tower drill or drill stand, is still needed before it will adequately fit my simple 126.5cm window.

The conclusions?
1. There is no sane logic to the sizes of ready-made Venetian blinds
2. Buy made to measure next time.

Administrator Woes

Well, our new employee seems to be everything we hoped for. All is going really great and I've had a few days of actual software-related work to do.

I'd forgotten how good it is to get your teeth into a real technical problem. In this case: making every byte in every file identical across all platforms including different big-endian and little-endian architectures. (Actually it's quite painful, but a welcome change.)

So the woes? The problem is that when I was doing every little odd-job that needed doing, my day was full of standing up, sitting down, reaching, answering phones, lifting, walking, fetching and carrying. This week, I've sat still in my chair, working hard on the computer.

I've got slight eye-strain and a back ache.

How can I force myself to take breaks and move around when my job has suddenly got so exciting?

Administrator

We take on a new member of staff next week, a professional at handling much of the company's administrative work that I seem to end up doing.

Now, what was that software stuff about? that thing that I learned about when I was young?

Sewing is not woodwork

I have always managed to get by with a needle and thread, mending clothes from time to time, but faced with shortening two pairs of curtain by hand, I decided to buy a sewing machine.

Sewing with a machine is fantastic! You can get intricate, accurate stitches (in a straight line), quickly and easily.

My new curtains are the perfect length, and an old pair of trousers are also mended (because I can...).

How did people ever make any non-trivial items of clothing/linen/curtains before the computer-controlled sewing machine was invented?

I liken the experience to the first time that you use a circular saw - perfect straight cuts with no effort.

However, there are two important differences compared to cutting wood.

1. Fabric stretches. Draw a straight line on a piece of wood and you know what you have. Draw a straight line on a piece of fabric and depending on how you happened to place the curtains on the bench/floor, you could have drawn any piece of modern art.

2. You can un-pick stitches a lot easier than you can undo any kind of woodwork.

Babysitting relief

We went out last, intending to leave Jonathan in the capable hands of two terrified friends who kindly offered to babysit, even though they knew that they would have to put him to bed.

As it happens, he was so tired (aka grumpy) that we put him to bed before we left. I'm not sure whether our babysitters were quietly relieved or disappointed at having missed the opportunity.

Personally I'm just shocked at how (after having a child) I'd forgotten how refreshing the Guzzler is.

Early Riser

A couple of days ago, for the first time in months, it was almost dawn when I got up for work. In fact, apparently the sunrise tomorrow is at 6:46am. On the 9th March, I will be getting up exactly at sunrise and then after that, it will already be light when I wake up!

When we lived in York, I had the luxury of getting up at whatever time I liked. It was a short cycle to work, and flexible working hours. This was a luxury that I took full advantage of!

At that time, I was around some very respected and influential people who were early risers. They were people who seemed to be in the office and full of energy before everyone else in (my) world were awake. They were generally knocking off, having done a full day's work, about the same time that I was just getting my brain warmed up.

At one point, I began to wonder what was wrong with me! I really wanted to get up earlier. I could see all the practical reasons why I should! However, despite trying to convince myself that I was going to get early, when the alarm goes off I always re-convinced myself that going back to sleep was always more sensible.

When we moved further away from work, I did it with the full knowledge, slight excitement and a very real fear that the bus timetable is little lean, the only practical bus to work leaving at 7:30am. Would I be able to do it?

Looking back, the change was remarkably easy. When you don't have a choice (get up now, or don't go to work at all), you get up. And you soon get into a rhythm. It all seems similar to this approach to becoming an early riser. I am not sure that I would have had the motivation to do it without an external influence, but the principle is the same.

I am now an early riser and I wish I had done it years ago.

Good night.

Olive Ice

After protestations from Spanish people around the world when I planted an olive tree in our garden last year ("It won't grow in your cold English weather") I can confirm that not only did it survive the winter, but that it even produced a crop of olives in the autumn.

I admit that the olives were only the size of peas, but I didn't really expect to harvest any once I realised that you can't eat them off the tree - they take lots of preparation.

Insurance refund

It is a pity that I didn't take a photograph of our car. I can describe it however. It has two windows (off-side), a V-shaped roof and a rather odd-shaped front. Oh and apparently it was upside down.

The insurance company were very nice and gave us some money to buy a new car.

So, we bought a nice new car and updated the insurance policy so we could drive it.

The insurance premium actually went down. What a nice surprise.

Spoilt for Choice

"Deux biers, s'il vous plait."

"Oui, d'accord. You prefer the Heineken?"

"Or? ... Ou?"

"Just Heineken."

Public Transport:

If I hear one more comment that begins "Oh my God, you know how many people she slept with..." then I will never use public transport again.

Cordially yours

Grumpy old man.

P.S. For the first time (ever) I have arrived in a foreign country and their trains (á Paris) had longer delays than ours.

P.P.S Google, please note: the fact that I am currently in France does not change the fact that I am writing in English. You know this already because I gave my details as UK, and everything I have ever done is in English! Merci.

Pixel Mania

This week I have received by email (from two different customers):
- a printed and scanned version (as PDF) of a quotation that I produced (as PDF)
- a printed and scanned version (as PDF) of a purchase order generated from a spreadsheet
I wonder if I should print the purchase order out so that I can scan it and reference it from the invoice...

Background noise

With another RapiRun under my belt today, and arriving in the office 20 minutes earlier than usual (7:30am), I felt ready for anything today.

I even replaced a CPU fan in a server that had been getting noisier every day for the last two years.

You eventually get used to background noise, but it really couldn't wait any longer. It was so loud that I had turned it off earlier this week because it was keeping me awake at night.

Consequently a couple of websites are now up again...

I wonder if I'll be able to sleep without the "hum" coming from the server room in the loft.

Gaseous Emissions

According to the BBC, Abu Dhabi is going green, with a 50,000 person city having zero-emissions of carbon dioxide.

How is this achieved? By using Hydrogen as a fuel.

And how do the make the hydrogen you ask? Using solar power? Renewable energy?

"Hydrogen will be manufactured from natural gas by reactions involving steam, producing a mixture of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. "

But it gets worse!

"President Bush's administration is also pumping money into hydrogen. The CO2 can be pumped underground, either simply to store it away permanently or as a way of extracting more oil from existing wells, using the high-pressure gas to force more of the black gold to the surface."

1. Storing your waste gases is not a viable way of reducing long-term emissions.
   
2. How can they justify using the waste CO2 to extract more oil?!
3. Moving the problem somewhere else does not solve it.
4. Do they think that natural gas is in infinite supply?
   

I cannot believe that this was reported in a positive light by the BBC.

In search of buried treasure

Yesterday we we went on a geocache hunt. It was quite a fun day out!

The idea is basically:

• there is a big database showing the coordinates of hidden "treasure" all over the world (treasure means a sandwich box with bits and bobs in it)
  
• you go and find one, using your GPS unit, and have a nice day out walking with a bit of fun
• you exchange a bit for a bob and put the treasure box back again for someone else

It all sounded like a nice excuse for some fresh air so we set off with our cool new TomTom One, 3rd edition GPS through the woods.

We knew that we were looking for a small sandwich box hidden in Wheldrake woods under a pine tree. I had programmed the coordinates in and the TomTom said that it was right next to a track through the woods. It is rated as "difficult level 1 of 5" (very easy). It didn't quite match up to where it looked like it should be according to the OS grid reference, but I figured that the GPS must be more accurate then a 1:50 000 landranger map.

After a short walk, we knew we must be close. On the screen was "us" right on top of the "goal post" icon. The hint said look under a pine tree. As helpful as this was when walking through a pine wood(!) at least we knew had to look down, not up.

We looked and we looked and looked some more. We got caught on brambles, we approached the spot from the other side, we went up and down the road, we searched every pine tree in the area.

We walked home having had a nice day out, but disappointed to have not found buried treasure.

Back at home, after cross-referencing the location on other maps, it turns out that our GPS doesn't really like walking off-road. It "corrects" every destination to the nearest road or track that it can find. So in fact the real treasure (allegedly) was something like 300 metres from where the TomTom had decided to take us.

According to everything I can find on the Internet, this "feature" cannot be turned off. Although someone has developed some (free) off-road walking software for TomTom hardware, the TomTom ONE v3 is not compatible with it.

I wonder if TomTom would like to do a software upgrade. Until they do, it's firmly "Not recommended" unless you want to drive everywhere.

Gone in 10 seconds...for good?

As a followup to Gone in 10 seconds, see you next week, my favourite female recruitment agency rep. called today.

Perhaps I imagined it, but I'm sure I heard the office cheer when I firmly informed her of our lack of interest, was (ever so slightly) less than polite and put the phone down on her mid-sentence.

Sorry babe, but we honestly do not need your services.

The Price of Power

In Monopoly, the probability of paying anything to the the electric company (by virtue of landing on it) is about 0.026040 per turn (assuming that you don't own the electric company). If you do have to pay anything then you have to pay 10 times the value of a roll of two dice (assuming that both utilities are owned by the same owner, which nowadays seems pretty likely). The expected value a single payment is £70 and therefore expected value of payments to the electric company is £1.82 per turn.

Not in Monopoly, things are a tad more expensive (£600) and a lot more likely (1).

When we moved into our house, some 18 months ago, we arranged to take over all the utilities (gas/electric/water/phone). However for electricity, we got a nice letter back saying that they were not able to setup our account because the current supplier had objected and that we should find out who the current supplier is using a look-up service and contact them for an explanation.

We discovered that it was British Gas, so I phoned the customer helpline and listened to lots of music dubbed with "Your call is important to us". After 30 minutes, I had to attend to other things (my time not free!). Thoroughly frustrated I tried again another time. After 10 minutes, I gave up.

(I did notice several letters from the supplier addressed to the previous occupant over the next months, these were returned to the sender since we do not have a forwarding address.)

And that was where I left it. We did not receive a single bill for electricity.

Today, someone arrived to disconnect our electricity supply (according to the note through the door). As it happens, the meter is indoors and we were all out.

The caller had left his mobile telephone number, and it turned out that he was a nice man called Ray who helpfully worked out that the arrears was just under £600 and that I could pay half of it now and the rest by direct debit over the next 12 months.

This seemed like a very good option to me. We'd had 18 months of free credit but mostly I was pleased to have an instant fix without wasting any time in a telephone queue.

Next time I have a problem with a service I might just be tempted to stop paying and wait for them to contact me.

Gone in 10 seconds, see you next week

We have all had had telesales/telemarketing calls to our home number. In recent years, my experience has been quite good, with only a few calls getting through. I am of course registered on telephone preference service, which stops all reputable callers. Therefore any telesales calls at home are immediately classified as disreputable and won't get very far.
I have used the famous EGBG counterscript before, it's great.

However, at work a whole new set of rules exist.

It all started a year ago when we advertised a job opening on the Internet and in a relevant publication. We had very specific requirements for the job and had expecting some recruitment agencies to pick up on it, we had written "Strictly no recruitment agencies" on the advert.

Within minutes of the job advert going live, we had a telephone call from a recruitment agency. We politely explained that we didn't want to use a recruitment agency. Minutes later another, and another and another and another. By the end of the day our responses were getting more and more curt. We were getting better at handling them.

In fact, we have something of a standing joke in the office about who could get rid of a recruitment agency the quickest.

Some of them are quite clever at hiding who they are from the outset. "I'm calling about the position advertised on the Internet, could you explain a little more...." before you realised that it was not a genuine applicant. These phone calls could take a minute or so.

Gradually, we got used to the routine and recognised the names of the agencies. The standard response is now only a few seconds. "We have no need for any recruitment agency, thank you for calling. Good bye. (click)"

To the ones that try to prolong the conversation further, I get quite rude.

Unfortunately, there is one agency in particular that I still struggle with. For starters, the sales rep is a woman. I find being overtly rude quite difficult, especially to women, so that puts us on the wrong foot to start with.

I think that I am quite clear when I say to her "We do not, and never will, have any need for any recruitment agency. Please do not call again." But she also has clever questions that you cannot say "no" to. You somehow find yourself being tricked into having agreed to a callback in a month.

She might have won the battle, but she will never win the war. Even if we did need a recruitment agency (which we don't!) the last one on earth that we would ever turn to is one that contrives, tricks and wastes your time every 4 weeks on the phone.

New lamps for old

I had a lovely day yesterday taking Jonathan to York's National Railway Museum. It's free entry and quite a good day out for a toddler! The £7 car park fee is expensive of course, but if you pretend that you're paying for the museum then you don't feel quite so duped!

I realise that I have a some misconceptions about technology when I look at the amazing engineering that was in use 50, 100, 200 years ago. In the days before the transistor, I sometimes imagine that engineering was crude and simple.

In reality, the designs are amazingly complex, the mechanics beyond what I could invent, the mathematics is well thought through, the hand-engineering skills of truly high quality.

Today, we are not better than the engineers of yore, in fact I think we lack the patience and attention to detail that is clear on the older trains. There is always pressure to create something quickly, and there are tools to make this possible!

But if you know that it will take days to construct a simple iron component by hand, then you first must be really sure what that component should be.

On another topic, I have been writing this blog for a little while now, but I have no idea who might actually be reading it though. According to the web counter, some people are!

So here is a little test.

If you read this then next time you see me, make a sentence using the word "raillery". If you don't see me, then leave a comment instead.

If enough people do this then I will be inspired to continue writing this blog.

Wellington boots

Following the recent wet weather, Elvington main road was flooded again this morning under about 6" of water in places.

I noticed this Evening Press news article: Elvington celebrates as flood defences are finally completed, 3rd January 2008.

I suppose it's a slightly misleading headline. The key part of the flood defenses is a pump to move water from the beck in the village into the river Derwent, which presumably can have a higher water level than the beck. According to the article, the pump will be connected to the electricity supply tomorrow.

As a software engineer, I am used to working with the assumption that connecting something to the electricity is somewhere near the start a project, not the completion! There then follows significant testing, bug-fixing, adjusting, tinkering and redesign.

Back to Elvington: apparently, there is a temporary pump working though. I wonder what's gone wrong.

Today's worry is that last time the road was flooded, the bus home took a detour, turning off the road before the flood. No problem, except that I would normally get off the bus the other side of the flood.

I wasn't awake enough to think about wellies when I left the house at 7:15am.

Out of breath

Our CEO completed the Great North Run last October. Returning full of enthusiam, two days later the company's RapiRun running club began. The aim is so that the whole company could compete in the Great North Run next year.

It was greeted with the sort of universal enthusiasm you might expect. It would not be out of place in a Dilbert cartoon.

Nevertheless, about one third of the staff, including myself, are now regular participants. Although I doubt that I will run the Great North Run next year, I have certainly seized the opportunity to actually do some good, regular exercise.

With two runs before Christmas (10th and 30th October) we didn't exactly get off to a good start though!

Nevertheless, with lots of Christmas pudding inside us and at least one new year's resolution behind us we have done two runs this week. Both of which have proved that I am thoroughly unfit and desperately in need of the club!

The smallest room in the house.

After putting off dealing with the broken tiles and generally bad decor in our bathroom for 2 years since we moved in....it's time to "do" the bathroom.

In our small bathroom, we simply want "bath with shower, toilet, basin, tiles". Nothing elaborate, designer or expensive. We also decided to get someone else to install it, time is in short supply at the moment.

According to the bathroom shop, this will cost "£5,000 to £10,000".

Now, this is a little more than we were hoping to spend. I think we are going to change our plans...it's about time I learned to fit a bathroom. It cannot be that hard, can it?

I suppose the first thing would be to make a shopping list.

Bath £300
Toilet, cistern £180
Sink & vanity unit £250
Shower head £300
Mixer tap 2*£150 = £300
Heated Towel Rail £150
Floor Tiles 3sqm*£30 = £90
Wall Tiles 12sqm*£25= £300
Grout/adhesive £80
Misc (wood/boxing etc) <£100
Pipes. drains etc £200
Furniture (toilet roll holder etc) <£100
New light £150
Shower rail, curtain £80

Total £2580. Hmm, still expensive. That's more than we spent on our kitchen, which is definitely not the smallest room in the house!

I wonder if we can re-use anything already in the bathroom, perhaps we can just fix the cracked bath panel and put some new grout on the tiles.

Snowball on ice

At 7:20am this morning queuing for the bus, the whole world was covered with beautiful white snow. Untouched by mankind.

I felt a youthful flush as I remembered the days of snowmen and snowball fights in the playground. Hardly without a thought, I eagerly scooped a handful of crisp white snow and packed it into a perfect sphere. It was just the right sort of snow.

Looking round for an easy target, I saw another person waiting for the bus glance quickly away. I raised my arm slowly and carefully...

Suddenly glowing hot with embarrassment, I lightly dropped the ball harmlessly into the ground, my body language screaming "I meant to do it".

Double Top

Some time ago we inherited quite a nice pub dartboard and cabinet. After the endless petitions about good aim, I finally agreed to put it up in the house. In the dining room as it happens.

Two "legs" and one hour (!) later, we have a door covered in holes and all proclamations of good aim are thoroughly disputed.

Will we improve our aim or decorate first?

The end of the turkey

We bought a small turkey crown to cook for Christmas dinner, so I just don't understand how it lasted until today.

I am rather paranoid about cooking meet thoroughly, so as usual the meat was overcooked: dry and chewy. I did discover that you can bring it back to life by simmering it in some chicken stock for a few minutes.

The last of the turkey became a turkey curry; and Jonathan (age 2) agreed that it was rather nice by eating two bowls of it immediately after he had finished his real dinner.

Shelves

With no biscuit jointer in my Christmas stocking, tonight I put up some shelves joined with rather tidy routed lap-joints, which fit together perfectly.

But in 15mm laminated chip board, the joints are quite frankly not strong enough to hold up much. So there is a large piece of skirting board screwed across the joint. Still, once I get them loaded up with junk in the garage, I have a feeling that the joints will suddenly become invisible.

A Christmas Message

We didn't see the Queen's Christmas message: we were half asleep and half hoping that an excited two-year old would have an afternoon nap (a vain hope).

I was rather pleased to receive one of those "whistle to find your keys" key fobs for Christmas; to save me asking Karen "every" day if she has seen my keys. Unfortunately, it responds to many other things as well as a whistle, for example: a two-year old's voice, bangs, other Christmas toys, keys jangling...

I might have to keep it in a different pocket to my keys so that it doesn't keep beeping when I am walking.

I'll watch the Queen's Christmas message on YouTube, just as soon as I get Linux working on this new laptop.

Lethal Weapon

There are so many things out there waiting to be discovered.

Here's a neat little Ada trick: pragma shared_passive that I never knew existed.

Also, I never realised how many scenes were missing from the TV version of Lethal Weapon until I watched the DVD version last night.

Spring Clean

With my head thick with cold, on the first day of my relaxing Christmas holiday, "we" decided that today was the day to spring clean the house in anticpation of Christmas visitors. Bah, humbug!

On the positive side, I did find an assortment of lost screwdriver bits and we're having curry for dinner tonight.

Why 1469

Someone asked me why "1469". Is there some deep and meaningful, personal connection with this number? Does it have some incredible/interesting mathematical properties? It it your birthday? Is it your bank card PIN?

I am sorry to disappoint. As it happens, the number 1469 is rather uninteresting (at least to me).

The answer is that it happened to be the numerical UNIX user ID of my computer science account at university.

Why does anyone know their numeric ID? Surely, even back in the age of transistors and 32K RAM expansion cards we had textual IDs...yes of course we did. The only reason to know it is that NFS uses numeric IDs (rather than text); so the numeric ID for your user name has to be the same on all the machines.

As I was frequently setting up or using new machines, if I had not created a non-root account with the right numeric ID on a computer then all my files would be listed as owned by the unknown user 1469.

It's also the 13th Octahedral number (being the sum of the 12th and 13th square pyramidal numbers), and has two prime factors of 13 and 133. Amazing... .

It's a useful number though, mostly because of it's uniqueness - whenever I create an account on the Internet somewhere, I usually add 1469 to the user name, no one else seems to choose it. It also seems that there is no other blog with the same name.

And Happy Christmas to all those who didn't finish work today.

Browser compatibility

It would be nice if this very fancy WYSYWIG AJAX XML HTML blogging site worked properly with Opera. It seems to insert non-breaking spaces instead of spaces. Hmm.

Still, it's a lot easier to load Mozilla than it is to write in HTML.

And it's quite amazing what you can do on the browser nowadays: email, word processing, spreadsheets, video, software programming, calendars, spell-check your blog postings.

It makes you wonder why you need user interface to the operating system at all - are we going to run a web-browser "full screen" instead of a window manager?

Think of the opportunities! Rather than execute "native" software on your own machine, you can execute software in the browser using interpreted languages that you can't prove properties of, on a virtual machine to emulate a computer, based on a widely-misinterpreted and varying system specification, relying on a fast and reliable network connection, executing in a secure environment that restricts what the software can actually do.

Still, it's all rather convenient.

I am an accountant

My work at the moment is mainly admin, accounts, management, customer contact, sales.

I would normally call myself a software engineer; that is certainly what I trained as, enjoy doing. I am actually not too bad at it, when I get the opportunity.

I find admin work boring, management stressful, customer contact and sales are hard work.

Once I have done all that, there is about -30% of my time available for software (that's minus 30%...remember the stressful?)

It is a good job that I actually quite enjoy doing the accounts, otherwise I'd wonder what I was doing.

Still, it's Christmas soon - the company office will be closed for a whole week. Time off.

It sounds like a perfect time to sneak into the office, pour a large cup of coffee, fire up that compiler and pretend it's 2003 again; a day before I first read the HMRC VAT 700 guide.

Ada

Ada is a programming language. Not many people seem to have heard of it. It's original use was high-integrity avionics systems. We use it as our core development language for desktop software.

Using Ada (instead of a more conventional C or Java) has undoubtedly saved our tiny company many tens of thousands of pounds in software development costs.

How do I know this figure? (We didn't develop all our software twice in two languages just to see which one takes longer/gives higher quality). Of course I don't have any hard evidence for this figure, but I know that we made the right choice when starting with Ada. A conversation in the office, a few months ago reminded me of this. It was something like:

Experienced engineer: Ian, our compiler works with GDB doesn't it? Do you know how to use the debugger?

Ian: Yes - it's quite straightforward.

Experienced engineer: Can you show me? I have a bug that the compiler hasn't spotted, I think it might be useful to look at the variables at run-time.


I remember learning Ada, as a first year undergraduate at York. My colleagues around me were swearing at the screen...."Why won't my program compile.....I hate Ada". For myself (rather used to interpreted BASIC) I was just pleased that the compiler wouldn't even provide a program until it was pretty sure that you had actually written what you meant to write.

It might take a minute longer to write a program in Ada that prints "Hello World", but you are totally sure that it won't print "ello Worldáááááá\p" then crash with a segfault, requiring painstaking single-stepping through your code to fix. When you apply this kind of engineering to a large application, the overall development time is incredibly low because your time spent testing and debugging is much lower. In particular, those annoying sort of bugs that cause data corruption, strange crashes, core dumps, general unreliability etc. just don't seem to occur using Ada.

Who's who? I am apparently...

Who's who?

Today I received a letter (paper letter)...very professional looking.

We are in the process of compiling the current edition of Who's Who of Britain's Business Elite, due to be published in February 2008.

...

You have been selected for inclusion in this year's edition on the basis of your business achievements. Your entry is in recognition of your contribution to the business community and serves as an important reference for others. Entry into any of our publications is by nomination and selection only, according to strictly determined criteria, and is not conditional whatsoever of any payment to, or purchase from our organisation.

...

Presumably, it's a scam, right? A vanity publishing scam...the "strictly determined" criteria is presumably "whoever replies to the letter". It feels all too like this one