Month: June 2007

I had hoped, with the change of government here, we might finally have someone with half a brain in charge of the home office. Nope. Strong believer in ID cards.

This is an interesting one. They’ve already coughed to £5.4 billion, the LSE estimated £10 billion and the Daily Mail (not a comic I take much notice of, to be fair) recons it may top £20 billion. I am glad that we now use the US version of a billion in this country, in the UK it used to mean a million million, rather than a thousand million. So at least that’s all right.

For some reason, after 9/11 and 7/7, the politicians decided that we all needed an ID card to “fight terrorism”. How? All of the individuals that perpetrated these crimes had valid ID. In the case of the deluded boys on 7/7 most were British citizens. How does a piece of plastic with some much-vaunted biometric nonsense on it make the slightest bit of difference? I’ve never heard an answer to this question that has anything coherent to say.

The only way it makes sense is to have something like an internal passport, like they did in Soviet Russia. You can’t travel anywhere without first clearing it with an official and there are checks and legal sanctions everywhere to make sure that you don’t break the rules. This would indeed help to fight terror, because the individuals tagged as not white or really British but we can’t execute them yet could be kept together in one place and be allowed to starve to death with dignity. Of course, once you have done this it’s really easy if you want to introduce prison camps and hurry the process up a bit.

I doubt they’re that sophisticated. In reality it’s another government database in lieu of attempting to engage the disaffected and actually taking responsibility for anything. A complete waste of money and talent. The politicians have to be seen to be doing something, and throwing billions of pounds down the toilet on some technological pipe dream fits the bill admirably. I think I might see if I can go to my MP’s surgery and see if he understands this nonsense. I certainly did’t vote for it.

Have a look here for more info. The database state is on its way, and it’ll be really crap. Can you imagine what it’ll be like? Have you ever worked on a large implementation of say, SAP or Oracle? Can you imagine how useless the system will be? Shiny though, very shiny, and biiiig. Oh yes. Very expensive. And broken. People will be denied health care because it says they are’t real people, jobs, bank accounts, all sorts of vital things. These idiots can’t even put in a medium sized system to manage something as trivial as passports. It scares me. I’m thinking of converting my spare cash to betel nuts.

Sigh. 

By the way, have a look here for a common-sense take on the attacks in the UK (‘al-Qaeda’ puts on big shoes, red nose, takes custard pie) over the last few days. We were attacked by incompetents who thought setting themselves on fire might somehow make the rest of us really scared. But of course it serves the securocrats. These clowns would all have had valid ID as well. Ha.

I’ve recently got into the habit of having a Free Mind window open as well as my editor or whatever, it means I can jot things down in a mind map so I can go back to them later. It works with programming and development work too, obviously not the same mind map.

I also use two screens (but my new work laptop’s wide screen is pretty good on its own). The map in one screen and the document or editor in another. Pretty good. I use the Windows XP desktop manager power tool (look it up on Google). This means that I have 8 screens.

I general screen set 1 is email and stuff, 2 is Windows media player, 3 is development work and 4 is things like DOS windows running Apache or Mongrel. Works quite well for me.

MS Word is annoying me though. I want to split the screen vertically and have different parts of the document on display (particularly useful with a new wide screen – you could have 3 different parts of the document on display). But it only allows you to split vertically – sigh. It’s interesting but I think one of its antecedents was Emacs, and you can split that every which way from Thursday, even have different windows onto the same document.

I might see if there is a Word document editor that can do this. I have’t the energy to write my own… 

I got a cheap CD of The Hounds of Love. Which I’d only been trying to find the tape for a couple of days earlier. I’d forgotten how good she was/is. She can sing she has feelings that she’s not afraid to express. People used to mock her for this, but I love it. Talentless journalists, who cares what they think?

After hearing Kate again I realise why I find Beyonce and Anastacia (however the hell you spell it) hard to listen to. They have no softness in their voices at all. Anastacia , to me, just brays loudly and angrily like some kind of demented alto donkey with a deviated septum. Beyonce has a lovely voice but just shows off with it. There’s no depth there. Kate’s voice has range and softness, she can even scream in tune. Can you imagine the other two singing songs about serial killers (Mother stand for comfort)? About William Reich’s cloud bursting machine seen from the viewpoint of his young son (Cloudbusting)? Hey baby, thanks for the shag – erm, what was your name again, and, look at me, I’m beautiful are’t I? That’s about all they know, poor dears.

Just listen to Big Sky – the range, the sheer bravery. Wow.

I have a strange fondness for Running Up that Hill. I used to wish I could make the deal with God and change places with my poor father, so this song always makes me sad. Cloudbusting touches me in a similar way, too, just saying to could even make it happen – life is magical. I had’t heard all of the bonus tracks, the solo version of My Langan Love is superb.

I found a great quote form Dustin Hoffman the other day:

There’s a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don’t understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don’t understand boredom.

It’s interesting, be obviously never worked in my last job! The boredom, I think, comes from a lack of control. It’s really a kind of anger born of frustration. Most people don’t realise this and because they can’t express their anger directly it becomes a kind of cynical disassociation. Because it’s really anger – flight or fight – it makes you tired.

Pause for the jet …

For those of you who don’t know, this is my current novel. I finished the latest draft a couple of weeks ago but was’t happy with it at all. It did’t end properly and I used another character to narrate us past the boring bits (or at least the I-want-to-finish-this-quickly bits). The end is way too flat and boring now. Have spent some time mind mapping and thinking (see freemind , useful tool) and will start writing this section from scratch. I’ve chopped the old end off and will re-glue it when it fits. Probably in a few weeks’ time.

There’s also several thousand words from the earlier draft I took out that may now fit in the larger scheme. Work!!! Hey ho. I’m going to need to create some kind of catalogue of the parts and where they were used. It’s hard to do this properly because I’d rather just write it. 

I tend to work in fits and starts and sometimes the narrative breaks down because I re-introduce an idea later and don’t refer back properly. It will need to flow, which is why I need the catalogue. I wish now I had written the damn thing in some kind of markup language because it would be easier to manipulate than a huge Word document. Not sure I can face exporting it and reformatting everything. Not now, anyway.

I did once have an idea where I would chop it up into its fragments and write a program that put each strand in linear order (with some jumping about) and then intermingled them. Every time you gave it a different seed for the random number generator you’d get a different book, or turn of the linear ordering as well. This has appeal and might work if it’s ever published as an exercise on the web. Not right now though, I need to write or invent 20,000 words and replace the weak ending.

I’m enjoying it, which is the main (and probably only) important thing. 

I’ve been reading a lot about the Pragmatic Programmers using TextMate on Macs as their preferred environment. I wanted to see what this was like but could’t because I can’t afford a Mac at the moment.

Discovered the ‘E’ text editor , which is TextMate compatible and pretty good. It will run TextMate bundles and so on. One of the wrinkles is that it uses Cygwin to do its automation, which I always use. But, of course, it therefore wants to run Ruby in that environment and gets very confused when it finds the Windows version, which gets confused by the Cygwin paths.

So, you need to install the Ruby that comes with Cygwin. Fire up the setup program and you’ll find Ruby under interpreters.

Next you need Ruby Gems and Rails – have a look here for instructions. You essentially need to download the gems distro and run ruby setup.rb when you’ve unpacked it – this will put gems into your Cygwin area too.

I intend to run Rails native windows and use the Cygwin Ruby for ‘e’ automation.

By the way – if you see a message saying something like “ubyopt invalid optio” then you need to go into your system settings and get rid of the environment variable RUBYOPT. Cygwin ruby is confused by it because you have’t got gems installed yet.

Have fun. 

I’ve had a look at RadRails and one of the other Eclipse tools but don’t like them very much. Mainly because the code editors don’t do indent properly, which just gets on my nerves. They’re OK. 

Carrying on from previous entry: I’m still not well, on day 5 now. My ear infection decided to check out the other ear and then move down into my nose (gave me a stinking cold). Almost OK today but get a little dizzy when I move about. I’m having a lot of trouble writing this because my short term memory is fragmented and motor skills not what they should be.

Read Neal Stevenso’sCryptonomicon while I was ill. Enjoyed it, but not as much as his later stuff. I think he was still finding his voice a bit when he wrote it. Not sure but think it was the first book after Snow Crash, and in terms of ambition and writing several more levels of magnitude beyond it – he does carry it off brilliantly, just not as smoothly as in the later work. I also like it when a writer knows his grammar and words and uses them well, and he does. Starting to want to look at codes and keystreams now but keeping myself back. Recommend Snow Crash, if you are a computer type, rip roaring and very funny. Some of the reviewers on Amazon can’t get the joke though, which is a bit sad.

Archive Fragments

I need about another 20k words to make it work properly in terms of size. Have been reading up on submission sizes and e-submissions and at 48k it’s not quite long enough. Needs to be 60-100k. I have the material outline but have been too ill to do much about it.  Hey ho. I probably cut 10k (and wrote 5 or so new) from the 2006 draft because I thought it did’t carry the story, but not sure I will put it back in. New material is needed, and I probably need to do some research.

Java is NOT Object Oriented!

See http://www.archive.org/details/DanIngal1989 , way way back in 1989! Everything should be an object. Also note the way that, in the factorial example he gives the integer quietly changes from a small integer to a large one without any messing about, true polymorphism – Java does not do this. So Smalltalk, Python and Ruby meet his criteria, Java does not. Java kept that C++ nonsense about handling types differently. It’s also interesting (in the Q&A section of the talk) to note that he thinks that strongly typed variables are pointless – but you do need to be able to to typeof to ensure that the object will meet a predefined contract.

I found this from http://www.cryptonomicon.net/msh/.

Got head hunted by some people that I was interviewed by a while ago. Will involve yet another small pay cut, but I’ll be using half the petrol and I did some calculations that imply I might be slightly better off, in fact. Also the car will last a bit longer, which is’t a bad thing. They’re using Ruby on Rails as their technology base at the moment but are, in fact, technology agnostic. The main thing is delivery and keeping customers happy.

I’ve been reading Emotional Intelligence recently and was very taken with some of the ideas in it, got it in an omnibus edition with Working with Emotional Intelligence, and have just started into that one. It’s funny how you recognise at least some of your own faults when you read a book like that. A good friend gave me a pointer about how to succeed in business: when you meet with a customer remember that they’re talking to you because they have a problem, you need listen very hard to them and keep quiet until you know what it is. Two ears and one mouth; use them in that proportion.

Off work today with an ear infection – this looks bad because I had a day off last week with a recurring sinus problem and have handed my notice in. Both bouts of illness are valid. I’ve not been taking my supplements and it shows. It’s funny how you get so bored with stuff like that, even when you know that it helps your general health no end. Humans are creatures of habit but I do get so tired with things, even when it’s supposed to do me good. Exercise and so on. I can’t eat the same cereal every day: it drives me insane after a while. Sameness is a disease that makes you think you can draw some kind of comfort from it, but it’s a trap that will bind you to the same mistakes over and over again. I think this is why I like kayaking – the river and the wave are never the same twice, you always have to think a bit every time … and why I don’t like things like running.

Going back to my bed now. And take my supplements.