Finding the chase and cutting to it

We expect our roads to be bad during snow fall.  England is a temperate country and it’s not very easy to provision enough snow gear during spells of bad weather.

Schools and offices often close and this really does help to protect life.

So why do the schools web-sites say “Service unavailable” and “Server too busy”?  There was plenty of warning about this, even if the snow fall was during a Sunday.  Did no-one think reprovisioning bandwidth or balancing the server was necessary?

Not a great photo, but us enjoying ourselves

I always felt a little sorry for Ron Livingston as Jack Berger telling Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) during an episode of Sex and the City that the man she was waiting for a call from just wasn’t that into her.

As someone who’s been married nearly 10 years (crikey) it seems like a blatantly obvious thing for someone to say, but Miranda’s character hadn’t figured that out yet.  Which got me thinking: when do you figure this one out?

I was largely single for a good 10 years before I met my husband and there were many relationships where there were quandaries about should I move to be with them or stay rather than move away, live with them, get more serious, is this worth the effort.  My partner was in similar situations, but he was the one it wasn’t a question.  The mechanics became the interesting part and things just happen.

Some friends seem to be having issues with their relationships and I always think, does it have to be difficult?  If it is, are they the right person?  But then, is it just luck that I’ve ended up with the right person for me (80% of the time 😉 ).

Which is weird, right?

Hope you’ve had a Merry Christmas.

Mine was spent with my family, which was ace but meant that recovering from a security hack on my server took a little longer to resolve than normal.

Thankfully though, I keep a regular backup.  I also make sure my web user has limited access to the rest of my work.

So, system is re-hardened and normal service has been resumed.

Happy new year everyone! 😉

courstesy of wikipedia

Trust is vital in any open source community, although it is through absolute strangers.

This is an interesting concept though: can you trust someone you’ve never met and can you trust someone you know well if they’ve let you down?

It is often a lot easier to trust someone you’ve never met.  This is how friendships are established after all – you trust until someone lets you down.

Yet, you do trust yourself even though you, well should, know yourself really well.  You know when you’ve let yourself down.  But you should have trust in yourself.  You will screw up, everyone makes mistakes, but without that ability to forgive, you can’t move on.

Various things have happened today that have made me feel very angry and sad.

I have had an email conversation with a friend from a large company.  He inherited this company just before the credit crunch hit and as a result he has had a real battle.  I guess some one in the company has felt that either my friend has not done a good job or they could do better.

I say this because that person has taken privy information and leaked it to the press and this has made things very awkward for my friend.

I do not feel this is what the founder of the company intended and it makes me feel awful and reported this to another friend who said I shouldn’t be surprised – that’s business!

I’m sorry, but truth, trust and honesty are what defines a person and makes them last.  If we are defined by what we do, then the person who has behaved in this way is horrible.

I’m glad I don’t work in my friend’s company, although I think he could do with all the help he can get,IMHO…

This is nothing more than the thought that Maslow’s hierarchy badly outdated.

Love and belonging at top, then self-actualisation and esteem.

Base layers are the same: we all need to eat and have shelter and feel safe. Self-actualisation is fairly easy now however the rest is a complete bonus and only truly achievable if you are happy!

Why do I say this when half the world is starving and suffering?

It’s a fair question.  May I say that in the developed world many, especially those with access to the internet, can create with relatively little cost.  They have self esteem, self respect and as materials are already provided and things happen relatively quickly and cheaply now.

Yet, these same people are often personally unhappy including being separated from their loved ones or even being isolated.  More people than ever live alone.  This is what they wish for – indeed I think this may be why social networking sites have had such a great uptake of users.

So I think the pyramid needs to be changed to reflect this change.  Of course, I am happy to be wrong 🙂

or how cheap and easy tools make life easy

sounds good doesn’t it: write it, get it authorised and publish it.

toothpastefordinner.com

This is the whole basis of blogs – they do this job superbly.  Yet most businesses are still outsourcing this job through expensive packages and complicated processes.

But life really doesn’t have to be that hard.  Or does it?

Along with my interests in getting computers to do the boring bits for us, I am interested in how information is managed.  Information that sits on one person’s hard drive could be talking about the most exciting thoughts in world peace and solve world hunger but it’s doing nothing sitting on that machine.

This is where publishing comes in: you don’t have to run a major business or have a degree in journalism to put fingers to keyboards and say your piece, spout how good your product or service is or what you’re doing to change the scene if not.

So come on; the world is waiting with baited breadth!

Surgeos in action

an interesting article on Radio 4’s this morning got me thinking.  Would I be happy letting a robot operate on me?

I have to say, I don’t know.  If the operation is a success then it’s obviously a no-brainer.  However, is the robot likely to make that operation more successful?  That’s the real question…

People do screw up, surgeons doing routine surgeries are no more like to remember an uneventful surgery than an experienced driver is likely to remember his/her journey into work along the normal route.

Does that mean the robot would be better?  More consistent?  Less likely to make an obvious mistake?  I don’t know, but I do think that the simple operations are the means for training up coming surgeons and the means for relaxing when you have lots of experience.  So maybe they should be saved for the humans…

I love the two Ronnies but the best encounter with them has to be “I know my place” which was written by Marty Feldman/John Law.

I know my place

I first saw it when I was 12, back in 1985, and really wasn’t sure what it was taking about.  The industrial action of the late 70’s really passed me by and the recession of that time also seemed to be wanning.  But I was reminded of the sketch while overhearing a conversation as I walked through a market today.

It also made me think that it doesn’t really apply anymore.  Many articles have abounded the past year about the traditional upper classes not being able to afford to send their off-spring to public school while people on modest incomes seem to think this is the only way to guarantee their off-spring a decent chance in life!

I believe that this is changing.  Long after the grammar schools were abolished and were a guarantee, if you took the advantages, of achieving a better life than your parents, the ability to achieve what you can has been granted by the internet.  Information is there for the taking – if you are interested in the “Social structure of Britain” you can go and find it: perhaps not the latest figures and facts but definitely ones two years old.

Information is there for the taking and that is making a difference. Times are going to be hard for everyone over the next two years but I think the world has the chance of making itself better at the end of this recession and hopefully, very peacefully.

OK, this is a little trip down memory lane and one I am more than happy to share. It is not meant to be a “follow this and reap the rewards” more a comparison of how things used to be…

Basics

My first programme was

10 print “Sam”
20 goto 10

it produced a screen full of Sam’s in a mix of lower and upper case – not rocket science but needed a little thought with a Commodore 64.

My second programme built on that – taking somone’s input and writing it across the screen. Trivial and instant, and understandable. I branched on to a translation programme for my first French homework and by the time I’d coded up the third really appreciated why that approach wasn’t going to work. I started playing with maths instead… but that’s a different story.

I got magazines and books talking about how to achieve movable sprites, moving things by joystick instead of mouse and got into interesting things like learning how to switch off the basic interpreter. My mum, dad and I worked out how to achieve what we wanted with the machine and thought about what more we could do. It was relatively easy, frustrating, time consuming and fun.

We learnt how to manipulate the graphics and the sound chips (SID and VIC to you and me).

My folks spent the best part of a day making a birthday card which would draw your name across a birthday cake drawn across the page and play happy birthday to you in the background. They spent the morning working out the tune on a recorder and encoded the tune they’d worked out. My uncle visited us that day just as it was all coming together and told them they’d got the wrong key – I’ve never seen my parents shoot such a dirty look at someone.

I was begining to work out just what could be done and played with computer programming as a career and that’s really the end of the story.

Only it isn’t – I learnt everything I could about how people responded to programmes and how they worked within operating systems. I learnt how operating systems worked by trying new things and still find the exploration fun.

But I don’t envy the people coming into the profession now. Learning is not as easy, everything is covered up, black boxed and intensely complicated.

How do you learn to programme now?