Finding the chase and cutting to it

This is for the hard core coders out there. This is unlikely to appeal if you are not a java developer or designer.
I thought I would share this as it has taken me a few days of work to find this method. Hopefully it will save someone some time somewhere in the world 🙂
I have inherited a project which was working beautifully but as the team migrated from Java 1.6 to 1.8 (some call this migration from Java 6 to Java 8), I found we needed to rebuild (and re-link) some of the classes.
The project was originally built on a Windows 2000 machine, running Borland’s JBuilder.
To say everything else has moved on is putting it mildly.
So the choices were:

1. Try to get JBuilder updated on a later machine and linked to a Java 1.8 JRE
2. Bite the bullet and move everything to Eclipse

Obviously, choice 2 makes sense on so many levels!
But Eclipse and JBuilder are two completely different approaches in terms of how their IDE’s (integrated development environments) deal with the whole concept of a class and a project and I don’t mean in terms of just layout on the screen.

What’s all the fuss, don’t you just read the design document or read the build files?

Modern coding practices (Martin Fowler et al. thank you for your contribution to this profession) dictate that most coders don’t have to deal with this kind of low level detail very often.  We make concious decisions on standards and methodologies and paradigms early in a project and stick to them for the life of the project.

Only 3 things ever interrupt the smooth running of a successful: changes to your company or structure means you have completely contradictory approaches to the factoring of your software, your team needs to start saving money sooner rather than later, Microsoft (or the producer of your IDE) have stop supporting the build of the OS you have either designed for or build against.

In the 15 years or so since Microsoft Windows 2000 was first marketed much has changed.  No least the adoption of Eclipse, produced by IBM, as a free and reasonably competent IDE.

I have to be honest at this point and mention that Eclipse was one of the last IDEs I ever used, in fact, deployment issues when using Eclipse in 2006 meant I took up hand building all my java :>

Not a fan?

That was 9 years ago.

Back to JBuilder.  JBuilder uses the idea of nodes to allow the dependencies between Java classes and the build/sub-project structure to coexist in relatively complex projects.

The situation I found myself in was a build script which launched JBuilder and it used a project file with more than 13 outputs and 250 odd classes.  Time for a stiff upper lip and some serious consideration.

Normally, as I use Linux to build my Java output, I make use of the fact that any .jar file is in fact a tarball or a group of files concatenated together into a continuous file.  As such, I can go and list the contents: if my jar binary is not up the job, I can fall back on to tar.  Job done.

Guessing not that straight forward, huh?

No.  Windows does offer a few useful tools though.  Directory and file compression was included by default in Windows 2008.  By taking x.jar and renaming it x.zip, I could at least examine what the successful build looked like.

So, I did this with the original.jar -> original.zip and unzipped into a directory called original.

I made a complete build new.jar -> new.zip and unzipped into a directory called new.

Now, original was a subset of new by definition: remember 13 jars were produced from 250 classes.  How do I identify what I didn’t need?

In Unix, I could use sdiff to compare each directory.  So that was my search on a search engine of your choice (thanks Google).

$one = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -path C:\original\$args[0]
$two = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -path C:\new\$args[0]

Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $one -DifferenceObject $two

This tells me which files exist in my new directory that I don’t want.  I use that to format a jar build script including exactly what I need for each output jar in question.

Most importantly, I have a means of not only repeatedly building the Java 1.x library but also of checking against previous builds.

Job done ✓.

If there is one truth in my life it is that I love to learn.

Yesterday, I got to share some of my learning about Insulin Kinetics with a group of gifted and talented students at Ipswich School.

And thanks to Wikipedia I could reuse with modification the insulin structure image to help share what I have learnt about insulin kinetics.

I have submitted material that has been published/presented in some of the top universities studying endocrinology but this was my first time doing it myself.

Insulin what???

Kinetics: the study of insulin in a living organism.  In this case, a human being.

Through much of my training in the past, I knew pictures and diagrams would help describe what was happening.  For this presentation I had little opportunity to make my own so I used Google images with a filter to find ones which I could reuse and alter like the image from Wikipedia above :).

Comparing that image to the explanation I was given as a four year old that insulin attached itself to Glucose in the blood and pulled it apart is tangible when you compare the two objects.  Glucose is extremely simple and looks really small.  Insulin is this hugely complex monster which looks like it could grab hold of insulin.

This understanding of insulin came from a Nobel laureate, Dorothy Hogkin forty years after insulin was first used to help type 1 diabetics to live beyond initial diagnosis.  Which led to better understanding between the differences between porcine and bovine insulin compared to human insulin.  Which enabled the first human insulins to be developed using bacteria to alter porcine insulin.

While doing my talk, I learnt yesterday that modern human analogue insulins are bred purely from bacteria.

I didn’t know that.

The past few weeks have seemed really busy.  End of financial quarter, new aspects to my job and a lot of travelling.

I am currently racking up around 1,000 miles a month in the diesel which feels terrible.  It’s all the best kind of travelling for the beast but still, averaging 40mpg in a 275bhp car is only being offset by the fact the other 750miles I do a month is in an electric car.

It feels dirty 😮

Whoa, that’s a big change

Mmm.  It being late in the year, my manager was almost insistent that I did the miles in an ICE but after doing the majority of miles in the Leaf the past two years, it is really odd.

Let’s start with the whole getting the car started.  It’s noisy, really noisy.  It is slow, it’s a good 10 secs before I am allowed to put the car in to gear.  Yes, gears, there are 6 of them.

The car still opens without the key and there is a start button.  But it makes the weird, low level shaking once the start button has been pressed and there’s this weird, smelly liquid you have to put in.  I filled up the car yesterday and that’s definitely a procedure that is no longer a habit.

When I am stopped at lights, there is this noise coming from the front and underneath of the car, which you do get used to after 10 or so miles.

I am not convinced it will catch on.

The title is ICE’d?

I am off on my ICE’d (internal combustion engine) travels tomorrow.  I appreciated the Leaf today.

Monday afternoon, post piano lesson, is when I typically charge the Leaf.

I approached the chargers outside of work to find a VW and Nissan taking the two spaces in front of the Evalu8 charges.

Thankfully, there are other chargers on site and I drove over to my favourite only to find a beautiful Ampera charging up.  Or not, as it seemed to be finished.

The dilemma: to see if it would surrender the polar charge cable from the pod or not.  I was pretty sure it would not let me unplug if it wasn’t charged.  So did the deed and closed the Ampera’s charge port door.

Which set off the alarm! 😮

At this point, despite not causing any damage, I felt as guilty as hell and was probably the same colour red as the Leaf.  I froze only to see some colleagues walking across the way looking with interest my way.  Or possibly towards the screaming Ampera!

I waved, left handed as the charge cable was in my right hand – what else do you do?

Deciding that either the owner would come or not, be happy and cool or not, I tried to plug my car in only to find my considerate park meant that the cable just wasn’t long enough.

I carefully place the cable on the ground and repositioned my car.  It was a pretty good park, shame I didn’t have a camera to hand.  Both the Leaf and the Ampera could have their driver’s doors opened but a paper back could not have been slid between the narrowest gap.  Think of a V with the Ampera facing forwards with the Leaf lined up frontwards in against it.

Not for the first time did I thank the person in Nissan who said an all round camera would be useful on the Leaf.

Plugged in and started the charge.  I left the cable unlocked, just in case the Ampera did need a top up.

I returned to get the car early – today was never going to be a long stay in the office.  The Leaf still had the cable and a charge of 80%.   I returned the plug and cable to the pod and manoeuvred out to start the journey homewards.

Much has been in the news lately about the removal of subsidies for home owners who are deciding to move to micro generation of electricity through the use of solar panels.

We were in the 2nd wave of adopters and missed out on the 17p per unit feed in tariff or FIT.  To be honest though, that isn’t why I am writing.

We moved in to a house without solar cells.  It did however have a south facing roof which made it a logical move.

FIT is great, do not get me wrong.  We’re getting around £400 annually from this.  Solar generation though is providing move than the income from FIT: the graph to the left shows (in dark blue) our electricity consumption per quarter.

Solar cells mean we’re using less electricity from the grid.  Full stop, that’s something no-one can take away from us.

We’re benefiting most during the summer months, as we live in the northern hemisphere and there are less day light hours providing good energy levels during the winter.

That’s really the point: if the feed in tariff disappears, everyone with solar cells will have no incentive to feed in.  That disappears.  We generate around 4MWh a year.  We use around 4.5MWh a year, currently (1.2MWh of that is for transport, with the Leaf).  At the moment, much of what we’re generating, we’re not directly using.

So?

So we’ll get a battery, which will reduce further the amount of energy generation the UK will need.  Which would make it completely unprofitable to do electricity in a large scale if everyone did that.

In fact, we’d be tempted to go the whole hog, potentially, and get a combined hear and power boiler.  At £6K they cost around the same as photovoltaic cells generating electricity but the are a great complement as when you’re heating the house, it tends to be when the sun isn’t shining.

For the UK in general, that could mean the end of our reliance on fossil fuels for central electricity generation, but it wouldn’t be as efficient or as well maintained.

Has this been considered to the full?

What about the Leaf?  Is that making a huge difference?

Actually, no.  Since we installed the home charging point in June 2014, we’ve charged the car with 1.2MWh of electricity – about £168.

In total the car has had 2.4MWh of electricity since January 2014.  So we’re getting around a third from home, the rest while out and about (although we don’t know how long that will last).

If we didn’t have the electric car, the solar cells would be producing pretty much all our needs, albeit, not necessarily when we want to use the generated energy.

But that is very cheap driving.  £336 for 18 months worth of journeys or 3-4p a mile if we’d bought the electricity from the grid – much less if we generated it!

One of the best managers I ever had in BT was a gentleman called Jeff Patmore.  Jeff was a senior manager who had come in to BT as an apprentice.  He was clever, experience and very talented.  Who wouldn’t want to work for someone like that?
Prior to working for Jeff, I had considered leaving BT and working as a contractor: I was recognised as a good programmer and mostly could do the usual work load on a Monday.  I wanted to be working at the next level but was finding promotion difficult.

Jeff gave me some challenges and more importantly the experience I lacked in achieving more in a large company.  Jeff was also keen that I gave some of that back.  I’d spoken to Jeff about my early career (working through the Commodore 64 user manual then the next level programming manuals, then taking other people’s programmes as frameworks for achieving our families goals) and my college and university experiences.

I didn’t start coding at 10 with a view to being a professional coder.  I didn’t know what I was doing was anything special.  All the pi-jam equivalents and taster days at school did not inform me that this was what I should be considering as my life.  I am so glad I stuck with it.

I thought the ambassador programme with STEM would help me help the up and coming generations to work that out before they got on the wrong course at university.  (This really happens.  Please ensure you have something you are reasonably passionate about studying for 3-4 years.  If you don’t and you quit after 2 months, drop it from your CV and get a job fast.  These gaps do not make you a great employee on paper – strange but true).

How to develop a career

The subtext here is as a programmer, but it does translate.

Get experience: mine was on the playground and I never counted it.  Actually what that demonstrated was a will to sell and see how far my “product” would get me.  I made no money to speak of, but I enjoyed learning how to make my code work on other machine and I liked people saying wow to something I created.

I still like these things.  What I do now is way more impressive.

When someone is hiring they essentially look for three things: loyalty, honesty and ability.  Sometimes I swap ability for drive or ambition, but essentially your first job, as a programmer, you don’t have much ability.  So I am looking for something else and that’s determination to learn.

Most jobs have boring and difficult bits: without your willingness to learn, you are essentially a one trick pony.

We see from the image that you have a degree, yet you’re not talking about that?!

No, I’m not.  I saw my degree as giving me proof of ability and loyalty and honesty.  Some people who hire do not view degrees that way.

I understood from my early programmes, that computing was a huge and complex subject.  My degree opened up my mathematical and computer science experiences and developed them.  It also provided direction in what to study effectively.  Completing a degree shows you can make a decision effecting three years of your life and have the determination to stick with it.

If you are not (planning on) doing a degree, look for an employer who will give you that experience and framework to learn and apply.  My learning has never stopped.

My degree was undersigned by the British Computer Society and as such, we learnt a lot about successful software engineering.  For me, though it was not easy, it was the best course for me.  I use principles I learned in my degree every day.

The degree will help you get an interview, it will not necessarily get you a job.

Back to the career

For one of my recent jobs, I sent over access to some of my programmes.  I am passionate about using computers to help people succeed in the work lives and the role was pretty much asking for coding experience.

I wrote a brief on each one and let the CV reviewers make a decision.  I got the interview despite not having recent programming experience because they could see I care about my output.

If you are coding and looking for that first job, there is nothing wrong with doing this.  Many roles are being “assessed” to test you can do what you say you can do.  You are helping that conversation.

Practice outside of work: for goodness sake, do not just write for your clients.  I learnt imagemagick, barcode decoding, OCR, GPS manipulation, voice XML, hadoop, prolog (revisited), python, MS Powershell all for personal use first.

I do a test with my code.  I code to sleep late, wake around 2am and try to use my code.  If I can use it first time and achieve my goal, I judge it to be good code.

Since 1985, I have never had a call at 2am from a customer who can’t achieve a business critical function as a result 😉

The past six weeks have brought many changes with them, not least summer holidays.
As a dual parent working household, the summer was always a chance to enjoy “normal working hours” and my son was safely amused at the child minder’s.  He had company and care.  A real break from school, but also from home.

When he stopped going to the child minder’s as he left primary school, that disappeared.  The first couple of weeks, we try to take the time off but after that, he is effectively on his own.  My husband works from home, so he does have company for lunch.

At least, that’s the impression we get.  He is a gamer, so he has the world at his finger tips, certainly all his friends.  Skype (or other voice/video comms service) on one device, games on another.

At 14, he goes out to get some food for lunch (enforced break from games and, hopefully, some useful life lessons) and this year he has moved away from simple meals on to ones with either some vegetables or rice or pasta or potatoes which he cooks from scratch.

We discuss meal options in the evening for the next day.  We discuss measurements for the main starch (i.e. how much from the bag of rice or pasta makes a portion).

Of course, this was put to good use as number one son headed out on his trial Duke of Edinburgh award.  My son is aware that if you are putting peas with your rice, you don’t need a full 50g of rice, you can just have 40-45g and still be happy with your meal.  We had progressed as far as fresh carrots before school started again.

Useful tips for him once he leaves home.  May be next year, he can help with the preparation of tea in the evening one day a week or fortnight.  Spaghetti anyone?

I have to be honest: I want one!

I am sitting at home on a rainy Sunday morning, waiting for the oven to switch itself on to cook the Sunday roast.  We’re having it late today as the 45th Ipswich to Felixstowe vintage car run is due to go past our place in ninety minutes or so.  It’s a great event, and though the weather may dampen the grip, the enthusiasm will be high and all will enjoy the ride past!

Two years ago, this was our first weekend in our new house and watching the rally was a very welcome break from unpacking boxes. 🙂

That’s not what I would really want.  I saw the news of Tesla’s Powerwall and thought, finally, something to enable us, in Blighty, to make good use of the Sun’s energy which is freely deployed while we’re at work, school or out for the day.

Why do you care?

We got solar panels installed late August last year and despite it being winter, we’ve managed to collect 2.5MW of electricity, which is doing great things feeding it into the grid, but unless we’re totally organised and got the washing machine, dish washer and hot water running off timers the only item in the house when it’s sunny is my server.

It would be great to store the peak in batteries and run the cooker in the evening or even charge the Leaf.

Sounds good.  So when is it arriving?

Of course, it’s not. 🙁

Like the Roadster the release is initially in the USA.  But it is really competitively priced.  Like many, even with the grants and feed in tariffs, it wasn’t until the price came down that it made sense for us to get solar panels.   Given our life style (you know, out of the house during daylight hours) it seemed like a nice thing to have but not an essential.

A £2,000 Tesla Powerwall (read battery that charges up from the sun and releases when the solar panels are no longer providing the power directly) makes that useful and the return on the investment should be within two or three years.  Teamed with a Combined heat and power unit during the winter and the potential for going off grid looks good rather than an absurd pipe dream.

Tesla are well placed to do this.  They have access to battery technology: their chief research has focused on this for their electric cars.

Maybe other car manufacturers will follow suit and beat Tesla to it in Europe?

It’s been incredibly busy the past few months so this is a long time after the fact.  I thought you might like to know…

What?

Well, we had our first service of the Leaf (although to be honest, we have enjoyed owning it so much that it really didn’t feel like a year).

It was a bit cheaper than we were expecting which was good.

It also gave us a reasonably comprehensive set of results from the battery testing.

In an electric car, the battery is everything.  The longer you can keep it performing well, the longer the range of the vehicle and the more confidence you have in it.  It should also prolong the life of the car with its first battery.

The life of the battery, according to the Leaf’s manual, is dependent on many factors not least the way you look after it.  Being a lithium ion battery (Li-ion) it prefers being often and lightly used (i.e. not running the battery down) and not too many full charges.

Apparently, the way we are managing the battery is all good.  Which is a little surprising.

Surprising? Does that mean you been reckless?

No, I have just used the car as I would a car with an internal combustion engine.  I try to ensure it doesn’t go past 15% before charging and I don’t bother charging it if it is above 60% in my normal day to day running.

We have done the odd long run and too be honest, I’d like to take it a bit further this calendar year.  I just wasn’t expecting the way I run the car to give us five stars.

Over the winter, we have found we are using more of the battery for the basic runs to work, for example.  It will be interesting to see how it compares during the summer.

Nice to know…

The other piece of news the past six weeks has been the loss of the Source East and London cards.  These allow us to charge the car at work for example.  Instead, all of our charging has been performed at home.

Expensive! Would it be better to have a petrol car, especially given the fuel prices…

Actually, no.  I thought it would be, but as we have solar cells we charge for free during the weekend and only a few pence a couple of times a week.  This has had very little affect on our electrical consumption.  The other surprising thing is we’re not having to queue for fuel.  Time wise, I get back a good 30 minutes a month.

I cannot believe how cheap petrol is at the moment and filling up the motorbike is a good deal less than it was.  For convenience the electric car has it beat for the commute.  I don’t know if the car is better at its estimation levels or I accommodate it more, but a couple of evening charges a week is plenty with a top up on either Saturday or Sunday.  I now find I can get 90 odd miles from an 80% charge even with the heater on.

What has been strange is not being able to use the Waitrose charging points.  We haven’t lost the car yet, but nestled in with other cars in the shopper’s car park, it is very ordinary looking.

Having ordered replacement cards when the Source East one was lost and the Source London one stopped working as it snapped during use, it did feel a little restrictive.  But in reality, that didn’t appear to be the case.

But then the Source London one finally arrived yesterday.

The last 12 months seem to have flown by, and we are approaching the first anniversary and service for the Leaf. It has covered nearly 5,000 miles as I write this. That is around 500 journeys to work, which seems about right.  After all, this is why we bought the Leaf: to provide a clean, safe, easy journey to and from work.  This it has done with aplomb and has become a valid choice for any journey.

To celebrate, I took it for a bit of run this morning in the -2°C environment to provide that essential service to mankind – picking the kid and his friends up from last nights’ sleep over 🙂

I don’t know if you live with teenagers but the whole ease of 24 hour communication means nothing is properly arranged any more, so armed with a postcode and house number and a fully charged Leaf, I plunged into the January chilled Suffolk Countryside and really returned to my roots.  I was heading to roads I last travelled as a 17 year old in a newly covered (insurance wise) version of my mum’s car.

In those days, I was driving a four year old Carlton 2 litre CDXi where the D stood for Delux and not diesel.  My mum adored that motorcar and as I was then limited to an automatic gear box, this was real freedom and so much responsibility.  I was armed with a map – a Phillips/AA car drivers version with a great spiral spine which allowed easy book marking of the current pages and my favourite mixed tape.  At 10am on a Saturday on the A14, the roads were easy and relatively quiet.

January 2015, I had a similarly colour painted electric car (the Cartlon was maroon, the Leaf is burgundy) and the spiral spine map’s function was being covered by the Google connected Sat Nav, my mum’s car phone by a bluetooth connected 3G smart phone and I was heading over to act as taxi. Very little changes as time goes by.

The biggest shock I have had driving since November has been how difficult it has been to achieve the 12% of battery use getting to work and 14% on the return journey.  De-misting the windows has been the biggest draw although I have found the following tips really help get the most from the lithium ion batteries:

1. Turning off the LCD screen gets around 4 extra miles from an 80% charge.  This is achieved from Menu->Settings->Display and change the “on” to “off”.
   Hitting the moon/sun button turns this back on permanently and turning off needs the same lengthy procedure.  If you want to flash view the map or battery consumption that will come up for 30 secs and then the display will turn off again – really useful if you need the Sat Nav to show a junction or roundabout layout!
2. By turning off the “heat” and “auto”, the fan can be used to demist the front windscreen using only the lead acid battery (another 4 miles per 20 kW/h charge).
3. The lead acid battery goes in to recharge mode (the right blue flashing light on the charging indicator is activated) in the small hours of the morning.  It is worth activating the charge timer to cover this and get back the 2%.
4. The climate timer is really not happy if the battery charge is below 80%!
5. Turn back to D mode rather than B when climbing up hills and if you’re really brave, turn off the Eco mode too.  Remember to switch B Eco when going down hill to get the most regenerative charging.
6. Charging at home or in Waitrose for 30 minutes gives about 10% on the battery charge which works out at around 50p.  An hour gives you 20-25%.  So an hours’ charge covers most of the next day’s run to work.
7. A garage means you don’t have to waste time or battery defrosting the car.

Today was the first real experience driving on sub-zero roads and snow and the car was beautiful: predictable handling and easy visibility – I made the most of the auto-wipers.  The rear seats meant the passengers were comfortable and the 50 mile round trip was a breeze.  In the summer though, I would not expect that to use 80% of the battery (much closer to 55%), so I was glad I had set up the route before hand while still charging in the garage!

I did find I switched on the head lamps rather than wait for them to come on automatically but that’s not really an issue as they switch off when the Leaf is switched off.

All very nice and informative: what about the power consumption for the year?

In a year, up until 15^th Jan 2015, we have covered 4764.4 miles with 1160kW/h or 1.2 MW/h of electricity.  That’s around 4.1 kW/h per mile, which is around 4.3p per mile (at 16p per kW/h).

Even with the recent drop in petrol prices (we have motorcycles and a diesel car so we still notice that) the Leaf provides very cheap motoring and we are not paying for every piece of electricity used to power the car.  Some of it is now coming from our own Solar Panels (958 kW/h have been generated since 23^rd August).  That distance, if we’d charged at home and paid for it, the year’s electricity would have set us back £185 (that’s 1160kW/h at £0.16 per kW/h).

The longest single journey was back from London on a charge (est. 124 miles) and I have spent 3.5 hours charging the car at fast chargers provided either by Nissan or Ecotricity during the year.

I still wish there was a fast charger in Ipswich but we’re heading in to London at half term as a family and the Leaf will provide a means of driving that distance which is much cheaper than taking the three of us by train from our home town and comparable in terms of time.  Both forms of transport are powered by electricity, doesn’t the 25 year old train look a little dated, expensive and inconvenient?

I wonder where we’ll go next year with the Leaf.

It is Sunday, 14th December 2014.  13,516 days ago (that’s 37 calendar years to you and me) I received insulin to treat diabetic ketoacidosis as I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes mellitus.

The expectation at the time was not great: being a girl and before the introduction of home testing for blood glucose, it was hit or miss whether I’d make it to 20 in one piece.

In the early 1980’s, as blood glucose kits became widely adopted things began to change.  Yet, it wasn’t until the Diabetes_control_and_complications_trial was published in 1993 that it was proven that maintaining blood sugar levels as close to a non-diabetics levels would significantly affect the chances of developing complications from long term diabetes mellitus.

Before that, it was guess work.  I was reasonably lucky in that my mum was a pharmacologist and bought my first blood testing kit.  We’d made a decision to aim for normal blood glucose levels as much as possible but the data we’d previously got from urine tests was never particularly meaningful and difficult to make effective changes to my insulin levels.

The early sets of data led to guess work, careful testing, recording and analysing.  Even then it was assumed that women did have a more complicated regime as we had the menstrual cycle, but so little guidelines were provided as I hit puberty and there was so little the research  published in the journals we read.  That’s now changed, thanks to the internet.

As I “celebrated” my anniversary on Friday, I started a new job and was describing my pump and the display on the screen, presenting the readings from the sub-cutaneous blood glucose sensor.  The readings probably suggested my period was due in the next week.  I was greeted with shock that such a fundamental gearing of the human metabolism would affect my insulin requirements.

“I’ve known two insulin dependant diabetics in my career and they were both men.”